Her Fearful Symmetry

“You know what I mean, Mouse. We need to study.”

“Okay.”

“Okay.” They shifted so that they lay side by side, shoulders touching, hands clasped. Valentina thought, Maybe in London we can have a bigger bed. Julia stared at the terrible Home Depot light fixture on the ceiling, mentally listing all the things they would need to find out about: exchange rates, vaccinations, soccer, the Royal Family…

Valentina lay in Julia’s bed thinking about the inside of Julia’s ear, how her own ear was the exact reverse, and if she pressed her ear against Julia’s and trapped a sound, would it oscillate back and forth endlessly, confused and forlorn? Would I hear it backwards? What if it was a London sound, like cars driving on the wrong side of the road; then maybe I would hear it forwards and it would be backwards for Julia. Maybe in London everything will be opposite from here…I’ll do what I want; no one will be the boss of me… Valentina listened to Julia breathing. She tried to imagine what she would do if it was just her, on her own. But she had never done anything on her own, so she struggled to formulate some kind of plan, and then gave up, exhausted.

Edie lay in bed waiting for Jack to fall asleep. Usually she tried to get to sleep first, because Jack snored, but tonight her mind was racing and she knew it was pointless to even try. Finally she turned onto her side and found Jack facing her with his eyes open.

“It’ll be all right,” said Jack. “They’ve been away before and it was all right.”

“This is different.”

“Because it’s Elspeth?”

“Maybe,” she said. “Or, just-it’s so far away. I don’t want them there.”

He put his arm around her waist and she burrowed into him. I’m safe. I’m safe here. Jack was her bomb shelter, her human shield. “Remember when they were at Cornell?” he said. “How great it was to have the house to ourselves?”

“Yeah…” It had been a revelation: married life without children was a blast. For a while, anyway.

“They’re twenty years old, Edie. They should have been long gone. We should have sent them to separate schools,” said Jack.

She sighed. You don’t understand. “It’s too late. Elspeth’s taken it out of our hands.”

“Maybe she’s done us a favour.”

Edie didn’t reply. Jack said, “When you were their age you were very eager to be on your own, as I recall.”

“That was different.”

He waited for her to continue. When she didn’t, he said, very quietly, “Why, Edie? Why was it different?” But she pressed her lips together and closed her eyes. He said, “You could tell me.”

She opened her eyes and smiled. “There’s nothing to tell, Jack.” She turned again, so she faced away from him. “We should try to sleep.”

That was close, he thought. He wasn’t sure if he was disappointed or relieved. “Okay,” Jack said. They lay together for a long time, listening to each other’s breathing, until Jack began to snore and Edie was alone with her thoughts.

Bleach

THE INVENTION of the Internet had allowed Martin to abandon the outside world. Or rather, the Internet had enabled him to relegate that world to the role of support system for his world, the one that flourished inside his flat.

Martin had not expected Marijke to leave him. She had acquiesced in his rituals, had aided and abetted his increasingly stringent compulsions, for almost twenty-five years. He couldn’t understand why she would leave now. “You are like a bad pet,” she’d told him. “You’re like a human squirrel that never goes out, that just sits in the flat all day and all night, licking the same spot. I want to be able to open the windows. I want to walk into my own flat without having to put bags on my feet.” They’d had this conversation in the kitchen. The windows were taped shut and papered over, and both of them were wearing plastic bags over their socks. Martin was empty-handed; he had nothing he could use to counter Marijke’s assertion. He was a human squirrel and he knew it. But who would take care of him if she left? “You’re a fifty-three-year-old PhD with a telephone and a computer. You’d be fine. Get Robert to take out the rubbish.” Two days later, Marijke was gone.

She left him with two weeks’ worth of frozen meals and a list of websites and telephone numbers. Sainsbury’s delivered groceries and cleaning products; Marks & Spencer sent pants and socks. Robert posted his letters and carried the rubbish down to the dustbin.

At the end of the day, it wasn’t a bad way to live. There was no one to please but himself. He missed Marijke terribly, but he did not miss her reproving glares, her loud sighing, the way she rolled her eyes when he asked her to leave a room and come in again because she’d entered with the wrong foot first. Marijke wasn’t there to frown when he ordered five thousand pairs of latex surgical gloves from a dodgy outfit on the Internet. While he was at it, he also bought a kit for measuring blood pressure, a gas mask and a desert camouflage army-surplus jumpsuit which the site claimed could withstand chemical weapons.

There were bargains to be had. From a different site he ordered four fifty-litre drums of bleach. This brought Robert to his door.

“Martin, there’s a bloke downstairs with an enormous amount of bleach. He says you ordered it, and it has to be signed for. Do you think it’s safe to have that much bleach around the house? The containers have all sorts of scary pictographs of hands with smoke coming off them, and warnings galore. Are you sure this is a good idea?”

Martin thought it was a brilliant idea; he was always running out of bleach. To Robert he only said that he would be very careful, and to please put the bleach in the kitchen.

The more Martin delved into the cyber world, the more he realised that there was absolutely nothing he couldn’t have brought to his door, for a fee. Pizza, cigarettes, beer, free-range eggs, the Guardian, postage stamps, lightbulbs, milk: all this and more appeared when required. He ordered books by the dozen from Amazon, and soon the unopened boxes piled up in the hall. He missed browsing in Stanfords, the map shop on Long Acre, and was overjoyed when he discovered their website. Maps began arriving, along with guidebooks to places Martin had never visited. Inspired, he ordered everything Stanfords offered on Amsterdam, and covered his bedroom walls with maps of that city. He traced what he imagined might be Marijke’s routes. He guessed, correctly (though he did not know it), that she lived in the Jordaan district. He assigned her a routine and mentally accompanied her as she rode her bike along canals and shopped for all the odd vegetables she loved that he wouldn’t eat. Fennel, Jerusalem artichokes, rocket. He didn’t consider any of it to be food. Martin lived on tea, toast, eggs, chops, potatoes, beer, curry, rice and pizza. He had a weakness for pudding. But in his imagination Marijke lingered in Amsterdam’s outdoor markets, filling the basket of her bike with freesias and Brussels sprouts. He remembered walks he and Marijke had taken together there decades before, marvellous spring evenings when they were besotted with each other and Amsterdam seemed hushed and the sounds of boats and seagulls bounced off the seventeenth-century canal houses as though they were recordings being played back from the past. Martin would stand in his bedroom with the tip of his index finger pressed to the map over the location of the radio station where Marijke now worked. He would close his eyes, repeat her name silently, moving his lips, one hundred times. He did this to prevent himself from calling her. Often it sufficed. Other times he had to call. She never answered. He imagined her flipping open her mobile, frowning at his number, flipping it closed.

Martin’s desk was an island of normality in the wreck of his flat. He had succeeded in keeping his workspace compulsion-free; if an obsession began to trouble him at his desk he would get up and take it to some other part of the flat to deal with it. Aside from cleaning rituals at the beginning and end of each work session, Martin had maintained his desk as a peaceful oasis. His computer had been for work only; email had been for corresponding with editors and proofreaders. In addition to setting his crossword puzzles, Martin also translated various obscure and ancient languages into various modern ones. He belonged to one online forum that existed to allow scholars worldwide to debate the merits of various texts and to amuse each other by ridiculing the work of translators who didn’t belong to the forum.

But now the Internet began to interfere with his cherished desk-isle, and he found himself monitoring eBay auctions of aquarium filtering machines and checking Amazon every ten minutes or so to see how his crossword books were selling. They always had depressing numbers like 673,082 or 822,457. Once his latest had made it up to 9,326. It had given him a happy afternoon, until he logged on before going to bed and found it at 787,333.

Martin discovered that while he could find Young Girls Hot to Meet You!!!, Big Busted!?! S*xy Moms and a plethora of other opportunities to satisfy his lust and other people’s avarice, he could not find Marijke on the Web. He googled her repeatedly, but she was one of the rare, delicate creatures who managed to exist entirely in the actual world. She had never authored a paper or won a prize; she had kept her phone number unlisted and didn’t partake in any chat rooms or listservs. He thought she must have email at work, but she wasn’t listed in the radio station’s directory. As far as the Internet was concerned, Marijke didn’t exist.

As the days went by, Martin began to wonder if there had ever been a woman named Marijke who lived with him and kissed him and read him Dutch poems about the beginning of spring. Months disappeared, and Martin worked on his crosswords and translations, washed his hands until they bled, counted, checked, admonished himself for washing and counting and checking. He microwaved a monotonous array of frozen foods, ate at the kitchen table while reading. He did his laundry, and the clothes got thinner from too much bleach. He could hear the weather sometimes; rain and sleet, rare thunder, wind. He sometimes wondered what would happen if he stopped all the clocks. The cyber world ran outside of time, and Martin thought that he might cycle around the clock untethered. The idea made him depressed. Without Marijke he was only an email address.

Martin lay in their bed each night imagining Marijke in her bed. Over the years she had become a little plump, and he