Ched was the absurd-looking boy who suddenly grew into his features and became really good-looking overnight. That didn’t seem right, so he got picked on too. But Ched had been thinking, and the result of that was his going around offering assistance to the other boys who had the same name as me, arguing that if our little problem fought us individually he would easily beat us but if we stood up to him together none of us would have to change our name. The others feared duplicity more than anything else (this was wise, since duplicity was all we knew) and decided it was better to take their chances as individuals.
—
I BELIEVED Ched though. With the solemnity of a couple exchanging vows we slipped knuckle-dusters onto each other’s fingers, four for each hand. Then I walked over to the boy who didn’t think he should have to share his name with anybody and without saying a word I smacked the pot of chocolate pudding he was eating right out of his hand. He was so astounded he just stood there pointing at me as his friends came loping over like bloodthirsty gazelles. I didn’t even check whether this Chedorlaomer boy really had my back, but I trusted that he did, and he did. What a great day, a day that a modest plan worked. That guy changed his own name in the end. And it’s been like that ever since with Ched and me. He was lucky enough to be a year older than me and when he graduated from our school it was like I was the only sane one left in an asylum. There was more and more bullshit every day. But Ched waited for me at the school gates, and he had a lot of good pep talks.
That’s why it’s pretty odd that Chedorlaomer went back for mandatory military service. Only passport holders have to do that, and I thought he’d given up his passport, like I had.
“No, I never told you that,” Ched said.
“But why would you keep it? Haven’t you seen the stuff they write about you over there? You’ve sold out, you’re scum, blah blah blah. So what, now you’re trying to change people’s minds? Why those minds in particular? I thought we—”
“Yeah, I know what you thought,” Ched said. He laughed and ruffled my hair. All of his was gone; he’d just come back from the barber’s. Baldness made him look younger than I’d ever seen him, and toothier too. Like a stray, but a dangerous stray; you could take him home if you wanted to but he’d tear the walls down. “It’s time for me to be part of something impersonal,” he said. “Duty is as big as it gets. Do these people like me? Do I like them? Am I one of them? All irrelevant. I’ll be directing all of each day’s effort toward one priority: Defend the perimeter.”
Other things my best friend said to me: That two years was but a short span. And in the meantime he hoped his house of locks would become a kind of sanctuary for me. It would’ve been a really nice speech if Boudicca hadn’t been blinking balefully at me the whole time. You there . . . forget to feed me once, just one time, and you’re dead. I mumbled that I had a lot on at work but I’d see what I could do.
—
I DON’T TELL Ched how often the things he says come true. That’s for his own good of course, so that he stays humble. But here’s an example: This past couple of weeks alone I’ve come to the House of Locks seven times. Four times to feed Boudicca and walk the length of her tank—the first time she raced me to the farthest corner, and all the other times she’s turned her back. The rest of my visits have been for sanctuary, I suppose. Just like Ched said. All I’ve seen or heard of him since his departure are blurry photographs of his arrival at barracks, these posted on various fan sites. He hasn’t called or replied to e-mails, so I walk through the wing of the house that he favors, passing the windows with various views of his fountain. A girl of pewter stands knee-deep in the water, her hands cupped, collecting streams and letting them pour away. Her eyes are blissfully closed. In the room I’m watching her from the curtains hang so still that breathing isn’t quite enough to make me believe there’s air in here. The front door is the only one I lock behind me, so as I go through the house all the doors behind me are ajar. It’s still hair-raising, but it’s reassuring too. The house is wonderfully, blessedly empty—nobody else will appear in the gap between the doors—that gap is a safe passage across all those thresholds I crossed without thinking.
—
ABOUT WORK: I run a clinic for my Aunt Thomasina’s company. A “Swiss-Style Weight-Loss Clinic,” to quote the promotional materials. This basically means that people come here for three days of drug-induced and -maintained deep sleep, during which they’re fed vitamins through a drip. This is a job I jumped at when it was my non-Ched-dependent ticket out of Bezin. It’s not as peaceful as I expected; most of the sleeping done here is the troubled kind. A lot of sleep talking and plaintive bleating. None of the sleepers are OK, not really. On the bright side the results are visually impressive: Most clients drop a clothing size over those seventy-two hours. Aunt Thomasina experienced this herself before she ever tried it out on anybody else. Something awful happened to her when she was young—she’s never even hinted at what that might be—and she took what she thought was a lethal dose of valerian and went to bed, only to wake up gorgeously slender three days later. “This will be popular,” she said to herself. And she was right. Most days the waiting room is full of clients happily shopping on their tablet devices; the whole new wardrobe they just ordered will be waiting for them at home after their beauty sleep. Of course weight loss that drastic is unsustainable, which makes the clinic a great business model. We send our monthly customers Christmas and birthday cards; they’re part of the family.
We have doctors who make sure that we’re not admitting anyone likely to suffer serious complications from our treatment, so my job is mainly monitoring and addressing complaints and unrealistic expectations. I can fake sympathy for days: Aunt Thomasina says I am a psychopath and that it’s a good thing I came under the right influences at a young age. I also do night shifts, since we can’t lock anybody into their rooms and I’m good with sleepwalkers. Last week we had two. One guy rose up pulling tubes out of his skin because he’s not used to sleeping indoors in summer. He grew up in an earthquake-prone region and his family hit upon the strategy of sleeping in a nearby field so as to avoid having their house fall down on them. My shift partner got him back into bed with warm assurances of safety, but when it was my turn I merely whispered: “You are interrupting the process, my friend. Do you want her to regret or not?” He sleep-ran back down the corridor and had to be restrained from re-attaching himself to the vitamin machine. That was what he’d written in his questionnaire beside “objective”: TO BE SEXY SO THAT SHE REGRETS.
Our other sleepwalker was just extremely hungry. You can’t coax someone out of that. This client got up and searched for food with such determination that she had to have her drug dose significantly elevated. For a couple of hours it seemed her hunger was stronger than the drugs. I sat out the third intervention and stayed in the monitor room watching the camera feed: It was fascinating to watch her returning to the surface of sleep crying, “Chips . . . chips . . . ,” but eventually she went down hard and stayed under. Ultimately she was happy with her results but apart from the usual disorientation she also looked really thoughtful, as if asking herself: Worth it? She probably won’t be back.
The sleepwalkers upset my shift partner Tyche. Her being upset helps her get through to them, I think. They can tell that she cares about them and isn’t judging them like I am. Tyche is someone that I think Ched should meet. She’s only a part-timer at the clinic; her business card states that the rest of the time she does ODD JOBS—INVOCATIONS. Invocations. Something she learned while trying to do something else, she says. So she can relate to Aunt Thomasina’s weight-loss discovery. Tyche’s beauty is interestingly kinetic; it comes and goes and comes back again. Or maybe it’s more that you observe it in the first second of seeing her and then she makes you shelve that exquisite first impression for a while so she can get on with things. Then in some moment when she’s not talking or when she suddenly turns her head it hits you all
over again. There’s a four-star constellation on her wrist that isn’t always there either. When it is, its appearance goes through various degrees of permanence, from drawn on with kohl to full tattoo. I mentioned this to her, but she laughed it off: “But don’t you stare at me too much? Everything OK with your boyfriend?” In my matchmaking capacity I’ve paid closer attention to her visuals than I would pay to anybody on my own behalf. On to inner qualities: She’s powerful. Not just in doing whatever she does to make people listen to her instead of watch her, but . . . I think she heals herself. She wears a wedding ring, so I made reference to her partner, but she held her hand up and said: “Oh, this? I found it.” Then she told me about it. A while ago she’d been in a relationship with someone who was adamant about keeping her a secret, to the extent that they didn’t acknowledge each other if there was even one other person in sight. Her superpower was picking emotionally unavailable partners and she doubted she’d get a better offer. She also assumed that the relationship would gradually get less secret. Nothing changed, and while she continued to profess her commitment to her secret boyfriend, her body disagreed and tried to get her out of it. She got sick. Her hair started falling out and her skin went scaly; she was cold all the time, and could only fall asleep by reciting words of summoning.
—
NOBODY CAME, but one evening at the pub down the road from her house she found a ring at the bottom of a pint of lager she was drinking. The ring was heavier than it looked, and she recognized it without remembering exactly where she’d seen it before. Since no one at the pub seemed to know anything about the ring, she took it to the police station, only to return there to collect it at the end of the month: There had been no inquiries related to the item, so it was hers. And when she wore it she felt that a love existed. For her . . . her, of all people. And it was on all the time. Of this love there would be no photographs, no handwritten declarations, no token at all save the ring. If this was the only way that what she’d called could come to her then it sufficed; she was content. The hand that wore the ring grew smooth, and she recouped her losses.
“Didn’t some nuns used to wear wedding rings?” I asked her.
She nodded and said that that was something she thought about a lot.
I’d best introduce her to Ched before the nuns get her. Ched’s voices are bullies: They won’t let him play unless it’s for keeps. Tyche might have an answer for them.
—
BUT WHY AM I treating Ched’s celibacy as something to be fixed? Maybe because I am so much in his debt for so many things and I can’t think of any other way to settle up. Maybe I’ve become evangelical ever since I got a little family of my own. The scene at the homestead is different every day. My boyfriend has joint custody of his two daughters with his ex-wife, whose schedule is ever-changing, so the girls might be at home or they might not.
—
DAYANG IS THE ELDER at sixteen; Aisha’s eighteen months behind her. Day is studious and earnest, a worrier like her father—she carries a full first aid kit around in her school bag and tells me off for calling her boyfriend by a different name every time I see him. In my defense the boy genuinely looks different every time he comes over, but Day’s concerned that he’ll think she has other boyfriends. This would be catastrophic because Mr. Face-Shifting Boyfriend is The One. And how can she tell he’s the one, I ask. Well how did I know that her dad is my One, she asks. Some things are just completely obvious, GOSH.
—
DAY IS GREAT, but Aisha is my darling and my meddlesome girl. She’s the one who gets the question “But why are you like this?” at least once a day from her father. If she isn’t growing something (she is the reason Noor finds toadstools in his shoes) or brewing something (she’s the reason it’s best not to leave any cup or drinking glass unattended when she’s at home) she’ll pass by singing and swishing her tail around (she put her sewing machine to work making a set of tails that she attaches to her dresses. A fox’s tail, a dragon’s tail, a tiger’s tail, a peacock’s. On a special occasion she’ll wear all of them at once). Last month Matyas Füst released a new album and Aisha hosted a listening party for five bosom friends. The bosom friends wore all their tails too . . .
—
THOSE WERE THE GOOD old days, when Aisha’s love for Matyas Füst was straightforward idol worship. Her wall was covered with posters of him; she sometimes got angry with him for being more attractive than she thought anyone was allowed to be and would punch a poster right in the face before whispering frantic apologies and covering it with kisses. She had Noor or me buy certain items because she’d read an interview in which he mentioned he loved this or that particular scent or color on a woman. All of Aisha’s online IDs were some variation of her official motto: “Matyas Füst Is Love, Matyas Füst Is Life.”
—
CHED HAD MET Füst a few times and said he wouldn’t want any daughter of his going anywhere near “that dickhead,” but the first time he said that I took it with more than a pinch of salt. For starters Aisha’s polite refusal to have a crush on her friendly neighborhood pop star was something of an ego bruiser. There were a few other small but influential factors: Füst’s being ten years younger than Ched, and its being well-known that Füst composes, arranges, and writes the lyrics for all his (mostly successful) songs himself . . . no voices. It just wasn’t really possible for Ched to like him. Füst was forever being photographed wearing dark gray turtlenecks, was engaged to be married to a soloist at the Bolshoi Ballet, didn’t seem to go to nightclubs, and reportedly enjoyed art-house film, the occasional dinner party, and the company of his cat Kleinzach. A clean-shaven man with a vocal tone reminiscent of post-coital whispers, that was Matyas Füst. The way he sings “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” is no joke.
—
CHED HAD been away for about a month when I got home to find “love to hatred turn’d.” Noor was making dinner, checking his recipe board after each step even though he knew it just as well as if he’d written it himself. The not-so-hidden charms of a man who takes his time over every detail . . . especially once you distract him for just long enough to turn all his attention onto you. It didn’t occur to me to ask about the kids until halfway through our very late dinner. Bad stepfather.
“Er . . . have the kids already eaten?”
Noor shook his head. “They promised they’d have something later.”
“Hmmm. Why?”
“Not sure. Heartbreak, I think.”
“Ah, so the face shifter isn’t The One after all?”
“No, it’s not Day—well, it is Day, but only because she can’t let Aisha go through it all on her own.”
The sisters were huddled together on Aisha’s bed with a laptop between them. They closed the laptop when I came into the room, leaving me to look around at the bare walls and wonder what had happened. Both girls were red-eyed and strenuously denied being upset. When I left the room I clearly heard Day say: “You’ve got to stop watching it,” and Aisha answered: “I know, but I can’t.” Then she said, “Maybe it isn’t true, Day? It probably isn’t true,” and Day said, “Oh, Aisha.”
—
NOOR AND I WATCHED the video ourselves downstairs. It was called “A Question About Matyas Füst.” Noor found it hard to watch in one go; he kept pausing it. This cowardly pacing would normally have been grounds for a dispute; I agreed with him just that once, though. The video opened with a woman sitting on the floor in her underwear, showing us marks all over her body. A lot of the marks were needle track marks, but they were outnumbered by marks I hadn’t wanted Day and Aisha to ever become acquainted with: bruises left by fists and boots. I dreaded the end of the camera’s journey up to the woman’s face and didn’t know what to think when I saw that it was untouched, even a subdued kind of pretty. No makeup, clean, mousy-looking hair, age absolutely anywhere between twenty-five and forty-five. I’d seen girls who resembled her waitressing in
seedy bars across the Continent, removing customers’ hands from their backsides without turning to see who the hand belonged to, their gestures as automatic and unemotional as swatting midges.
She pulled a T-shirt on and looked at the camera for a little while before she started talking. You could tell from her eyes that she was out of her head on something and probably couldn’t have told you her own name if you’d asked her. Her English was far below fluency, but since she was in her happy place she didn’t bother struggling with pronunciation, just said what she had to say and left us to figure it out. She wanted us to know that “the entertainer” Matyas Füst had picked her up on a street corner a few hours after he’d played a sold-out concert in Greenwich. She’d spent the rest of the night with him and he hadn’t proved very entertaining at all. Tell us a bit more about yourself, the person holding the camera said—a woman, I think, trying to sound gentle, but her voice was thick with anger. The woman on camera obediently stated that she was often on street corners trying to get money, and that she didn’t often get lucky: The men she signaled to could usually tell just by looking at the backs of her hands that she’d gone too far into whatever she was doing. But Matyas Füst didn’t care about that: He’d had a fight with his controlling bitch of a girlfriend and it had taken all he had not to hit the girlfriend. Taking your fists to a prima ballerina with an adoring host of family and friends would be a very messy and expensive blunder. So he went looking for someone nobody cared about. And he found . . . me . . . the woman on-screen said, and giggled. Noor pressed pause again and left the room, went upstairs, and knocked on Aisha’s bedroom door. “Come and eat,” he said, and Aisha and Day said they’d come in a minute.
—
HOURS LATER they still hadn’t come downstairs. We’d watched the rest of the clip by then. The whole thing was only three minutes and thirty seconds long, but we kept trying to watch it through Aisha’s and Day’s eyes, this woman telling us that after they’d had sex Füst had insulted her so that she slapped him, and once he’d received the slap he’d smiled (her fingers plucked at the corners of her mouth until we could see just how he’d smiled), told her she’d “started it,” and proceeded to beat her until she couldn’t stand up. She’d hit back, she said, even from her place at his feet she’d hit back, but every time he hit harder. Then he stood over her in all his wealth and fame and arrogance and shrugged when she said she wasn’t going to keep quiet about this. Matyas Füst had shrugged and asked her if she thought anybody was going to give a shit that someone like her had got hurt. A nameless junkie with seriously crazy English. Look at you, he said. And look at me. He threw a handful of money at her and told her it was better for her to keep her mouth shut and spend that, or save it for a rainy day. Then he went back to his girlfriend. They must have made up, because she’d seen photos of them having a romantic dinner in a restaurant, and hints had been dropped about their wedding plans. I look him on Google. The woman on-camera seemed proud of her diligence. Then she asked us her question about Matyas Füst: Did anybody care that he’d hurt her, someone like her? She was just wondering. She laughed and gave us a perky little wave at the end. Thank you. Nice day to you.
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours Page 5
