Peaces

by Helen Oyeyemi

  He brushed the back of his hand against my cheek. Heady stuff, that overlapping of live patterns, the subtle chequering of his hand. Rough and smooth, flexible knuckles and leathered skin. His is the hand of a sea swimmer; in water it becomes a broad bladed oar. That same hand is a hardy aid to him as a once-a-week football goalie more enthusiastic than he is adept, and it’s the fine-fingered hand the needle glitters from as it sews all the buttons back onto our shirts. This is only the preface to the prologue of the dossier on Xavier Shin’s hands. For the rest, see Puccini’s “O dolci mani.”

  Do Yeon-ssi cleared her throat. “Hi, lovebirds,” she said. “Yes, it’s me again. Your aunt. I’m here too, remember? Why not take these train tickets and call it a honeymoon? It would’ve made me very happy if you’d done things properly and actually got married instead of this deed poll business. But there’s no need to suddenly start caring about my happiness now when you never did before …”

  Celebratory travel aside, there were also Árpád’s needs to consider. Do Yeon-ssi wanted to make a special point of reminding us that Árpád XXX was getting on for six years old, and that it was very important for mongooses to travel before they reach middle age: “Otherwise they get narrow-minded.”

  This discussion took place in Do Yeon-ssi’s study, where Árpád’s favourite sandbox was located. We took a look at him and at the various bits of carefully polished treasure he was in the process of hiding. Back when it’d just been me and Árpád in my studio flat, he hadn’t had many high-value items to look after. A bronze-coloured bottle top here and there, perhaps. But ever since Árpád XXX had become part of the Shin household, there were solid gold bracelets, diamond stud earrings, and jade rings. Árpád was clearly delighted with his hoard. I also saw signs of self-consciousness, which were fairly understandable, given that we’d all stopped talking and were now staring at him.

  Árpád Montague XXX: well worth staring at. Notable features include his coat of platinum fur and the exceptionally well-sculpted length of his paws and feet—the grace of those alone might convince you Nijinsky’s been reincarnated in mongoose form. Some snootiness of manner might be justified, and yet you could search the universe and fail to find a friendlier creature, or a fellow more willing to hear both sides of a story and disperse the benefit of the doubt in both directions if needed. During my more rational hours of the day—eleven in the morning, for instance, or three o’clock in the afternoon—I realise what I sound like when I talk about Árpád. I do realise it, and I know no one should listen to a word I say about him. The trouble is, I see all sorts of stories in that mongoose. He’s a friend of two hundred years and more. By which I mean that he is his very own self and also every fit of laughter his predecessors have induced in mine, every ounce of liability, bewilderment, solace, simple certainty … Árpád XXX, the pick of Árpád XXIX’s litter. And who was Árpád XXIX? Not only the most sardonic bosom friend of my teens and early twenties, but my mum’s favourite of Árpád XXVIII’s offspring. The twenty-eighth of our Árpáds would close his eyes and quiver ardently upon hearing certain lines of Ulysses. Tennyson’s biggest fan.

  Or was he?

  Lieselotte (my mum) pointed out that Árpád XXVIII may well have been trolling Martha (also my mum). Martha’s the Montague descendant, and she’s also one of those literature professors with a “postmodernism or goodbye” stance. She finds Victorian literature cloying at best, so all you have to do is recite a few lines of mid- to late-nineteenth-century poetry before her body language indicates she isn’t coping. It would’ve been the easiest thing in the world for Árpád XXVIII to pick up on that.

  I could write a book about the Árpáds, but I’ll keep it to a couple of paragraphs. Árpád the First appeared one night in my great-grandfather’s nursery when he was a very small boy in Kuching, Borneo. I’m sure almost no one deludes themselves that all their ancestors were decent. Pick a vein, any vein: mud mixed with lightning flows through, an unruly fusion of bad blood and good. It’s not easy to imagine what would make someone hate a little boy—or, more probably, the parents of that little boy—enough to place not one but two vipers in his cot. There we were, harmless government administrators, on perfectly good terms with everybody, and all of a sudden some wrong’un came after our only son doesn’t quite ring true to me. Many surmises could be made, and have been made, but when it came right down to it, you had this switchback fanged couple bearing down on a youngster too stunned to even make a sound. Two against one isn’t fair. But really it was even simpler than that. The mongoose is the enemy of the serpent. Árpád the First wasn’t interested in saving anyone’s life. Leaping into that writhing mass and slashing away until it fell still; that’s what she was interested in. End of. Or not quite. A third-floor nursery can’t really be described as a natural habitat for a mongoose. I almost want to say that someone must have brought her there, but having lived with Árpáds all my life, I know that Árpád the First could just have easily been out looking for trouble and found her own way into that nursery. Basically it’s like that song … if we don’t know by now, we will never, ever, ever, ever know.

  Even as a toddler that forebear of mine was the solid type. The mongoose had bolted, but someone had been reading the child potted biographies of wise warriors. One name had got stuck in his head, and he knew it must belong to the mongoose: he waited until he could be heard over the nursery maid’s hysterical screams, then he murmured, “Árpád,” over and over, with his pudgy little arms outstretched. And once Árpád the First had made herself presentable, she came to see him.

  Do Yeon-ssi hadn’t heard this legend. There was never the right time or the right sort of atmosphere in which to bring it up. When people ask about Árpád XXX, or about his mother, it’s always been simpler just to say, “Yeah, domestic mongooses are the new cats and dogs—it’ll catch on, you’ll see.” But Do Yeon-ssi’s lecture on mongoose psychology was far from brief, and I longed to lecture my lecturer, really set the scene for her, give her some idea of … I don’t know, the intertwining of two fates or something. That was all Montague stuff, though, and I’m a Shin now. I held my peace. Xavier knows all about the Árpáds, but he stayed quiet too. That was no surprise. I’ve never heard him talk back to his aunt. She’s been the parental authority in his life for decades, and he’s learned that contradicting her sets up the first link in a chain of counter-contradictions that drags you to the underworld.

  Better to immediately cooperate with Do Yeon-ssi … that’s what Xavier calls her: Miss Do Yeon. Her more old-fashioned friends are shocked that he puts things on a first-name basis like this, but what can Do Yeon-ssi do? She devoutly watched over this brat for so many years, and this is how he repays her … by depriving her of the honorifics that are due her. But she’s not going to cry over it, that’s just the way it goes, she didn’t do it for the honorifics anyway …

  That’s how Do Yeon-ssi spins it, with full awareness that Xavier calls her “Miss” in tribute to her heart-shaped petal of a face. Her ink-black hair is streaked with strands of white, and it mostly looks after itself, running semi-divine riot around her shoulders and down her back, making you think of aureoles and oceans. And then there’s the look in her eyes. The look of Eve in Eden … some amalgam of devotion and brutality that’s only really satisfied by encounters with the interior and therefore eviscerates everything in sight. It’s fitting for an optical lens magnate to be embodied the way she is, each eye a magnifying glass. I should’ve known better than to go along with her request to be placed under hypnosis. She asked if I could make it so she’d fall asleep whenever she wanted to. “Deep sleep … the kind that gets you really well rested, OK?” She did need more sleep of that kind. After one of her more acute bouts of insomnia, she looks so tired nobody realises she’s rich. Those bleary eyes with dark circles around them somehow make everything she’s wearing and holding look stolen.

  “Yeah, no prob,” I said. I was cocky. After all, that was how I made my living at the time.
That and boosting diet willpower, deleting fear of public speaking, and some stuff with a few other phobias. My artist friend Spera loves to have a go at me for not putting my “powers” to more profound uses. According to Spera, Emily Dickinson would be disappointed in me. She quotes from Dickinson’s letters: Cherish Power—dear—remember that stands in the Bible between the Kingdom and the Glory, because it is wilder than either of them. This utterance brought forth the most thoughtful and mature response I could conceive of: sepulchral silence as I dropped a cashew nut down the front of Spera’s top. Let others do their bit towards revolutionising human consciousness: I’ve learned to treat an attention span as a pulse with a regularity observable right down to the millisecond. I make a few test runs, track a few signals, and then I weary my hypnotee into a light stupor with the most minuscule of small talk. With Do Yeon-ssi I picked the issue of daylight savings, listing times I’d been late for appointments because of it, or had been too early, decided to come back later, and then missed the appointment altogether. I also provided meticulous descriptions of the weather on each of the occasions I described, and invited her to share similar experiences. When she declined to do so, I invented daylight savings mix-ups for her, resoundingly minor scenarios I vowed she’d told me about herself. I was loving the way Do Yeon-ssi’s face changed as she observed my commitment to the strangely dreary lies I was telling. Her expression had been a mixture of confusion, wonder, and distaste, and it began to congeal into abject dismay. And she kept interjecting to ask when the hypnotism would begin. Ostensibly Do Yeon-ssi was free to tell me to get lost, but she didn’t because of the position I occupied. I knew that keeping her captive in that particular way wasn’t real power, but it felt close enough. This woman who might not have had the time of day for me under any other circumstances had promised her nephew I’d be just as precious to her as he was. Ha! Xavier would never have talked at her like that, on and on, bulldozing every attempt to change the subject to something that didn’t feel like the gory murder of her brain cells. On and on and on, lying in wait at the end of her attention span, stopwatch and tiny scissors in hand, ah, here’s my chance, the boredom has become physically unbearable, and then—a gormless chuckle here, a little pressure of the hand there, and had it all gone the way it was supposed to, it would soon have been done; I’d have trimmed the edge off Do Yeon-ssi’s sense of time so that she circled and circled the same instant, unable to conceive of any other until the next was presented to her. The energy of such a trance is elemental. At least, that’s what I was taught, that the subject is struggling with all their might to break through into the next moment, or to recall the preceding one. And break through they inevitably will, unless—Well, that would depend on the hypnotist’s own strength of mind. Us bog-standard Svengalis have about twenty seconds, thirty seconds max, to work with. So we work fast, and our brushstrokes are crude. Into the eerie calm of Do Yeon-ssi’s boredom I intended to embed a line of gibberish, a sound pattern she could repeat until it smoothed out into a silken slide that tumbled into a sea of self-undoing. I’ve overheard Do Yeon-ssi talking to her pillow. All about qualms and grudges and topics to consult Google about in the morning. She recites misremembered poetry stanzas and foreign language phrases she’d never been able to use in ordinary conversation, and then she scolds the pillow for only pretending to understand.

  Drifting far from the reach of these day thoughts and night thoughts, Do Yeon-ssi would bag herself a thousand and one nights’ worth of sleep over the course of a few hours, I’d prove I was more than just a purveyor of parlour tricks, and Xavier would no longer feel the need to keep track of Do Yeon-ssi’s ever-increasing sleeping pill dosage by counting the capsules. And there we’d be: three happy bunnies hopping along together.

  Like I said, that was the plan. But I couldn’t get a fix on Do Yeon-ssi’s attention span at all. I felt her lose interest in our discussion. That happened fairly quickly. But—and here’s the horror story—she lost interest without losing focus, continuing to respond to my inanities as if something was actually at stake. It’s like this: At a marionette show you find four types of engaged audience—four different philosophies of enjoying the performance. There are those whose attention is reserved solely for the actions of the marionette: that’s Árpád XXX, wishing to believe that the figure is alive in one way or another. Then there are the ones who can’t and won’t stop looking at the puppet master (or seeking signs of the puppet master, if that person is hidden): that’s how Xavier is. There are those who watch the faces of their fellow audience members: my preference, obviously, since I’m the one here talking about the other types. And there are those who follow the strings and the strings alone. Do Yeon-ssi is a string watcher. She may not much care about the order of the strings—if they tangle, they tangle. Still, they express something to her, something about the nature of the illusion before her. That’s enough of a reason for her to pursue the strings to their vanishing point.

  No, Xavier doesn’t quarrel with Do Yeon-ssi, and neither do I. I tuned out as she spoke of Árpád’s best interests. I let my thoughts drift across the shabby scholastic heaven that was our aunt’s study. Parchment dust, tarnished gilt, faded brocade. Probably hell for an asthmatic, actually. I stuck to unassuming gestures, pouring tea for the three of us and stuffing down the sandwiches and fondant fancies she selected and placed on the edge of my plate. To be fair to Do Yeon-ssi, she made sure I got the most appealing ones every time, occasionally slapping Xavier’s hand away when he hindered her objective. She praised Árpád XXX to the skies, yet in the same breath asked us to acknowledge that the dark side of an exceptional mongoose is bound to be exceptionally dark. There was grim talk of overnight deterioration, there were documented cases … Do Yeon-ssi read to us from the mid-1960s account of a Bombay mongoose whose latter years were punctuated with inexplicable frenzies … this mongoose would completely lose it, for no reason at all, and the only thing that restored her to her right mind was copious Pepsi consumption. I tried not to let it show, but I was a bit shaken by the case of the Bombay mongoose. Not even Coke … Pepsi. The preferred beverage of souls damaged beyond repair. I found myself nodding in agreement as Do Yeon-ssi made her closing statements: We three must take a trip, Xavier, Árpád, and me. As soon as possible. We’d thank her for it later.

  Her first idea had been to buy the train for us. Its backstory struck her as romantic. She showed us an impossibly glossy historical overview one of her secretaries had prepared: centuries ago, when English tea lovers had faced a 119 percent tax on the price of their favourite drink, this train had been a logistical link in a chain forged by tea and emerald smugglers. But these days the train had a permanent resident who wouldn’t be parted from her charming home at any price. All Do Yeon-ssi could find out about her was that her name was Ava Kapoor, that the train had belonged to this Ava Kapoor’s family from the beginning, and that she was some sort of recluse. Though apparently not the sort who was averse to lovebirds. She seemed young, in spirit, if not in physiology. And she seemed kind. At least that’s what I decided after looking at the letter she’d written in response to Do Yeon-ssi’s near-harassment. The gist of Ms. Kapoor’s reply (puffy little crescent moons drawn above her lowercase I’s and J’s and all) was that Xavier, Árpád, and I were quite welcome to journey along one of her favourite scenic routes with her, and that she’d drop us off at any train station we wanted, within reason. She wrote of her regret that it might not be possible to meet in person and hoped we wouldn’t take that as a snub.

  The Lakes and Mountains Route, that’s what it said on our ticket, along with our names, the name of the train, and the name of our carriage. That was it. Just imprecise enough to stir my interest: I’d never been on a train that had named carriages instead of numbered ones. Would Ms. Kapoor be driving the train herself so that we four were the only ones on board? I wondered about the route too. Which lakes and mountains? And where? Switzerland? Italy? France? Just how far away could five days of track a
nd tunnel take us?

  Xavier said I’d do better to wonder why his nearly eighty-year-old aunt was so keen to get rid of us. The genuine motive was as different from those she’d stated as night is from day—he was very definite about that. Do Yeon-ssi didn’t give us a chance to do much pondering either: by the time we thought about digging our suitcases out of our storage room closet, a team of professional packers had already filled the cases with all the essentials, had zipped our gear into diaphanous packing cubes, even. There was Tupperware dotted with minuscule perforations and filled with earthworms, beetles, and just enough air to keep them alive for Árpád’s delectation. It felt like Do Yeon-ssi was taking care of everything in advance so she could forget all about us. Right up until then I’d thought she’d found us pleasant and helpful companions, what with all our fetching and carrying and solicitous enquiries. As I thought about it again, Do Yeon-ssi had lived alone on purpose for a long time before Xavier started having nightmares about her slipping in the bath and not being able to call anyone for help. When I tried to see things her way, the credible version went like this: frequent visits from Xavier would’ve been nice, but sharing her living space with the most attentive nephew ever (and now his partner, and his partner’s mongoose) was, perhaps, a bit much. I suppose carers can all too easily become captors, and with the best intentions in the world, we’d become just that.

  The train tickets were Do Yeon-ssi’s way of asking for a few days off: that’s how I put it to Xavier. He admitted that she did deserve at least that much, though he extracted additional promises from her: Yes, she’d take her vitamins every morning without fail. Yes, she’d limit herself to one soju milkshake per day. Yes, she’d immediately ask the nearest bystander for aid with items that would require an inadvisable degree of stooping or stretching to reach by herself. And yes, she’d phone if there was anything, absolutely anything, even very slightly wrong, in which case she could expect us back on her doorstep as soon as we could manage it.