They assembled a body, but didn’t join up the parts.
Look at your new body. You will go in, they said.
I said I would not, but it happened hour by hour; I would drowse a little and when I woke another part of me had been replaced. It began with my left hand and ended with my right foot. Think of it: looking down at your human foot out of a pair of brass eyes. And then I grew smaller, and all of a piece, as I am today. My name is Gepetta; long have I wanted to say this, but nobody would help me to say it . . .
—
SO THAT WAS how I met my friend Gepetta. And as you know, Myrna Semyonova, three days later I was called back to your school, our school, and I found Tyche Shaw waiting for me. And you were there, and so was Gustav Grimaldi. Then I knew I’d been chosen, and I went to you. You smiled and said, “Well done,” but it was Gustav who took my hand and said: “Welcome, Radha. We’ll do such things together!”
My ghost friend was right: I disobeyed you and so you didn’t choose me. But what were your reasons for choosing Tyche? I saw even then that you would try your best to break what she carries.
Why are you telling me all this again, you say impatiently, but a person doesn’t easily recover from the sadness of finding that it’s not always affinity that draws us together (not always, not only), that you can be called to undo the deeds of another. You make a lot of work for me—my blood runs cold to think of it all—but you see I take strength from remembering that you began with intentions that were pure.
II.
(YES)
RADHA AND GUSTAV had a shaky start. She brought me along to their first meeting and the three of us walked around Berkeley Square. “Hi, Gepetta,” Gustav said to me. He always says hello to me, even though I never reply. His good manners are his own affair. Radha threw breadcrumbs to pigeons. Gustav kept his sunglasses on the entire time and talked at length about the work of several mid-twentieth-century filmmakers Radha had never heard of. I could see Radha making up her mind that if she was going to learn anything from Gustav it would be by accident, and I saw her changing her mind when he introduced her to his puppets—“You’ve brought yours,” he said to Radha, nodding in my direction, “and I’ve brought mine.” Four of them had accompanied him to this meeting; two peeping out from each of his coat pockets. They were good-natured fatalists one and all, never in a rush, preferring to put off action until matters had resolved themselves without anyone in the troupe having had to lift a finger. The leader of the pack was a disheveled sophisticate named Hamlet. It was Hamlet who became Radha’s chief extracurricular guide, her lecturer, heckler, cheerleader, and coconspirator. At those times we all forgot whose voice and hands Hamlet and company were making use of, and the next day Radha would report mastery of some minor voice control trick to Gustav as if he hadn’t been there in the room with us. Initially it seemed that this type of forgetfulness seriously displeased Gustav, but as we grew more comfortable with him I began to see that when Radha told him something odd or amusing that Hamlet or one of his other puppets had said or done, what Gustav actually expressed was restrained interest. He was observing a process we were not yet privy to.
—
I CAUGHT ON LONG before Radha did. She spoke to Gustav’s troupe in a way that she would never have spoken to him directly. As this confidence flourished, so did a sympathy between Radha and Gustav’s puppets, who devoted themselves to making her laugh and would materialize en masse outside her classroom door and walk her to the bus stop at the end of the day, crying: “Make way for boss lady!” Gustav surrounded her with her especial favorites: Hamlet with his pudding bowl haircut, Chagatai, who was both assassin and merman (he kills sailors with his sexy falsetto!), Brunhild the shipbuilder, and an astronaut named Petrushka, who answered any question put to him in exhaustive detail. Also present was a toddler-sized jumping bean known as Loco Dempsey. Their master walked behind Radha, arms raised as he worked the controls high above her head. Under Gustav’s command all the strings stayed separate; Radha marveled at that and leaned into him so as not to be the body that tangled those clean lines. He nudged a few of the controls into her hands, lowered his arms so that he was holding her—not tightly, since there’s only so much you can do with your elbows. He whistled a brisk polonaise and her gestures led his as she set Brunhild and Loco to marching. Radha looked so happy that I thought some kind of admission was forthcoming later, but instead she turned to me and said: “That can’t be the same gang Myrna told me about.”
—
THE NIGHT a fortuneteller outside KFC seized Radha by both hands and told her that little by little she was falling for an invisible man, she was confounded and kept me awake until dawn asking who on earth it could possibly be . . .
I couldn’t decide whether the Grimaldi boy was to be pitied, congratulated, or scolded. Granted, this was one way to have a secret love affair, but there was no telling what his own feelings were, or whether this was just a routine seduction for him. Put yourself in his place: You’re descended from generations of people who speak and have spoken primarily through puppets . . . as such you’re a kind of champion at psychological limbo. And you happen to like girls with brilliant eyes that see hidden things and dark hair from which they occasionally retrieve forgotten notes to themselves. Then you meet a new one. Wouldn’t you try and see how close you could get without her noticing?
—
RADHA TOOK to checking her phone constantly but with no clear objective—most of her messages were from Tyche Shaw, who she felt both jealous and protective of and would have preferred not to have to deal with at all. Tyche was in the Orkney Isles with Myrna and her father, and in addition to relying on Radha to keep her updated on puppet school assignments, the girl insisted on being friendly and requesting personal news. Unaware that she had any, Radha settled for sending pictures of herself sitting on the curbstone outside her house drinking homemade smoothies with her brother. I was in the photo too, sat on Arjun’s shoulders. I never spoke to him and so he viewed me as a kind of fashion accessory of Radha’s. At that time I was getting some of my best fun from being alone with him and sporadically opening and closing my mouth whenever he blinked.
Me, Gepetta, and A.J. on the corner drinking heavy juice all day long. What about you and my wife?
That was all the invitation Tyche needed to flood Radha’s in-box with angst that Radha unintentionally increased by responding only with emoticons.
Where do I begin . . . well, everything I do pisses “your wife” off
I keep answering her rhetorical questions & then not daring to answer her non-rhetorical questions
Oh and her specialty seems to be saying insanely awful stuff out of nowhere
The kind of things you have to forget in order to be able to go on living, you know?
This one comment about my hands made me want to cut them off & just throw them away. Has anyone ever spoken to you like that
Never mind, I just avoid looking at my hands now, hahaha sob
Never been good at comebacks, so I just pick up rocks and pretend to clobber her when her back is turned.
How’s it going with Gustav anyway
Radha, what exactly do you like about this WENCH?
Her dad genuinely thinks she’s human . . .
—
FOR EVERY TEN MESSAGES from Tyche there were perhaps three or four from Myrna (all in praise of Tyche) and one from Gustav. One night, just as Radha had lain down on her bed, he sent a photo of his glove puppet Cheon Song Yi wielding a tube of lipstick like a sword. Accompanying text: Somebody stop her. As for Gustav, all that could be seen of him was a full, shapely lower lip stained orchid pink from Song Yi’s lipstick attack. He was positioned behind the puppet, but it was one of those photos where the background very gradually becomes the foreground. At first glance Radha snorted and rolled her eyes. Then she tilted her head, took another look, and slowly crossed and uncrossed
her legs. Still studying the photo, she absentmindedly traced the shape of her own mouth and sucked the tip of her index finger. The bedroom ghost and I looked at each other and silently agreed to vacate the room.
—
I MISSED DESIRE. And I was glad my friend’s heart had been given a puzzle to work on while it ached over Myrna Semyonova. Even if it became necessary to drop Gustav, Radha had other tutoring options. Her classmates were a friendly bunch, lacking in the competitive spirit their teachers would have liked to see. They worked on one another’s ideas. Their puppets swapped costumes, props, catchphrases, and sometimes even characters. This kind of camaraderie made the ostracization of Rowan Wayland all the more marked.
—
HISTORY OF PUPPETRY was the hour of the week in which Radha and others played with paper, making puppets with pinned joints and hands and feet that spun like weather vanes. They were learning histories of Punchinello, a beak-nosed figure who stands for nothing. The place and century of his birth is the sort of thing learned people in tweed jackets argue about, but for a couple of centuries he’s been present in Austria, where he is Kasperle, setting his cunning aside to concentrate on brutality without pause, until every other puppet in his world is dead and then his master must see to it that he doesn’t go after his audience too. In Hungary he’s the terse and sardonic Vitéz László, in France the twinkle returns to his eyes and he becomes Polichinelle, a demon from the merriest of hells. In England Punch is a sensitive chap; any passerby who so much as looks at him the wrong way is promptly strangled with a string of sausages. When he takes up his Turkish residence Karagöz is too lazy to attempt very much murder, though he has a reservoir of verbal abuse to shower upon anyone who comes between him and his meals. Wherever you find him, he is careful not to discuss the past. Whatever it is you’re asking about, he didn’t do it and hasn’t the faintest idea who might be responsible, in fact he doesn’t know anything at all, he wasn’t “there,” see, he’s been “here” the whole time . . . which begs the question, where were you?
—
WHEN RADHA and I walked into the History of Puppetry classroom the first thing we noticed was the ocean of space that surrounded Rowan Wayland, and for caution’s sake we chose seats that maintained his solitude. We watched him but had difficulty finding out whether keeping our distance was weak or wise; nobody would talk about him. Wayland himself behaved as if his pariah status was perfectly natural, walking around the building looking straight ahead with his collar popped up around his ears. Radha remarked that he gave her the strange feeling of being an extra on a film set. It took two weeks for curiosity to change our seating vote. “Maybe he’s just misunderstood,” I said. Radha agreed to risk it.
He had a pair of red needles and a heap of wool on top of his books and was knitting while he waited for the teacher to arrive. There’s a gentle assurance many knitters have as they fix their patterns in place. Rowan’s knitting wasn’t like that. He stared at his sock-in-progress with an insistence that brooked no compromise, as if he’d learned that this was the only way to ensure that each stitch stayed where he’d put it. We took the seats alongside him, Radha said hello, and kept saying it until he acknowledged her with a sidelong glance.
“I’m Radha,” Radha said, before he could look away again.
“OK,” he said. “Why—I mean, what do you want?”
“Nothing,” Radha answered, with the guileless good cheer that makes her so dear to me. “Just saying hello. This is Gepetta.”
He smiled at me, and kept knitting. At first, second, or even third glance it was difficult to pin down what made him so much avoided. Rowan’s physical effect—godlike jawline, long-lashed eyes, umber skin, rakish quiff of hair—is that of a lightning strike. In full sunlight the true color of his hair is revealed to be navy blue, and when he scratches his head, as he sometimes does when he’s thinking, his hair parts so that the two tiny corkscrews of bone at the front of his skull are visible. Yes, horns. Not scary ones—I think these were intended as a playful touch. The problem with Wayland is that he’s a puppet built to human scale. Masterless and entirely alive. No matter how soft his skin appears to be he is entirely wooden, and it is not known exactly what animates him—no clock ticks in his chest. Rowan is male to me, since he moves and speaks with a grace that reminds me of the boys and men of my Venetian youth. He’s female to Myrna. For Radha and Gustav Rowan is both male and female. Perhaps we read him along the lines of our attractions; perhaps it really is as arbitrary as that. He just shrugs and says: “Take your pick. I’m mostly tree, though.” His fellow students already had all those confusing hormone surges to deal with. So most of them stayed away, though I’m sure they all dreamed of him, her, hir, zir, a body with a tantalizing abundance of contours, this Rowan who is everything but mostly tree. I’m sure Rowan Wayland was dreamed of nonstop.
—
AND HE’S AS EVASIVE as any Punchinello I’ve met. You ask him a question and he somehow makes you answer it for him. Rowan and Radha never really moved past what she called their “eye candy and eye candy appreciator” relationship. I was the one the eye candy befriended. That surprised me. I remember Radha introducing me to the ghost in her bedroom in anticipation of our knowing each other, at least wanting to know each other because we spoke the same language. But that ghost is a little too aloof for her own good.
Rowan Wayland, on the other hand, calls me “Gepetta, Empress of the Moon.” Since neither of us needs sleep we take night buses, sharing earphones and listening to knitting podcasts. If anyone else on the bus notices anything about us they assume it’s because they’re drunk. I’ve been trying to find a way to make him reveal how he came to be. In my own mind I’ve already compared my condition with his and have decided that his condition is preferable. He breathes; I do not. It’s not that I believe that I could ever have my body back again—the one I used to have, I mean. Those who drove me into this form did what they did and that’s all. I was on my way out and they thought they were helping me; instead they turned motion and intelligible speech into a currency with which personhood is earned.
This craving for consideration is the only real difference between my youthful self and the old, old Gepetta of today. The puppets who made me were shocked when I sold them. Shocked because puppets don’t need money, but also because of the care I took to separate them—they couldn’t understand that at all. No two to the same home, or even to neighboring cities. I consulted maps and made sure each of those puppets would be held apart by forests and deserts and the spans of rivers. The likelihood of any kind of reunion is almost impossible for them, us. I wonder if that broke their bond, but being able to find an answer to that question would mean my project failed. A shattering so absolute that no word can be picked up again—that’s my success.
—
AT THE END of the second week of Tyche and Myrna’s absence a personal essay was due. The title was something along the lines of “What Can a Puppet Do?” The students were required to state their current ambitions, and though the statement would receive a grade it would remain private. In an environment that relied so heavily on public demonstration of progress this was a rare opportunity to be earnest without simultaneously putting yourself at a severe disadvantage; for this reason the teachers imposed a word limit so things didn’t get out of hand. Rowan claimed that the title made his mind go blank, so I dictated his essay to him word for word. What can a puppet do? We didn’t have an uncynical answer between us, so I simply reassembled a few lines I remembered from lectures I’d heard Brambani give back when he was still in the process of writing War Between the Fingers and the Thumb. The role of the puppeteer is to preserve childlike wonder throughout our life spans, etc. Radha’s essay was so brief that it only met half the required number of words; she copy-pasted the paragraph she’d already written and added a line at the beginning explaining that she was making use of the technique of repetition for the sake of empha
sis. Hard copies were required, so Tyche e-mailed her essay to Radha, who handed it in without reading it and ran off hand in hand with the Grimaldi boy. Rowan Wayland intercepted Tyche’s essay before it reached Ms. Alfarsi’s desk, putting a finger to his lips when I began to ask him what he was doing. He read it twice, and then I read it, to see what he was looking for.
Last night was moonless, and we took a boat out onto Scapa Flow. There was broken light all across the sky, and columns of cloud twisting and turning through the pieces. Dust and dragon fire. Professor Semyonova said: “That’s the Milky Way. As much of it as we can see, anyway.”
It was so beautiful I kept my eyes on it in case it suddenly disappeared, or turned out to be some gigantic illusion. Maybe it was the rocking of the deck, or maybe I stared for too long, but after a while I felt it all moving against me, the light and the clouds and the darkness, countless stars and planets flying like arrows from a bow hidden farther back. Not that we three on the boat were the target; that was an accident of scale. We crush ants all the time just walking through a park. I thought the best plan was to leave before the sky arrived, just jump into the sea and drown directly. The second best plan was to close my eyes, but Myrna made me keep looking up. She said her own fear had been that those pinpricks of light were growing and that as they did, she shrank. She made me keep looking up until the panic was singed away. All I knew how to do with puppets, all I used to want to do, was play unsettling tricks. That’s not enough anymore. I want to put on stubborn little shows, find places here and there where we get to see what we’d be like if we were actually in control of anything. Cruel fantasies, maybe, but they can’t hurt any more than glimpsing a galaxy does.
Tyche Shaw
“Good grief, the puppeteers of today,” I said, at the same time as Rowan asked me how much I thought Tyche disliked Myrna on a scale of one to ten.
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours Page 9
