What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

by Helen Oyeyemi

  —

  THE SEGMENT following Polixena the Snitch belonged to Tyche and Myrna, who were working on an idea of Tyche’s they called The shock of your life or a piece of cheese. We, the audience, received cards in advance: One version of the card read Shock, and beneath that word was an instruction to write a name (CANNOT BE YOUR OWN). The other version of the card read Piece of Cheese, and again there was space to write a name that was not your own. These cards provoked shudders of euphoric terror that only increased as the day and then the hour itself drew ever closer. The cards spoke to a suspicion that many whose work is play can never be free of: that you can only flaunt your triviality for so long before punishment is due. A date has been selected, and on that day there will be a great culling . . .

  —

  WE FILED into the school theater chattering with nerves. The volume increased when we were handed pens at the entrance and informed that choices made in pencil would not be accepted. When we sat down nobody removed their coats or bags; everybody was ready to evacuate immediately. Poor Radha and Gustav . . . their performance was merely something to sit through as we got ready for our shocks or our pieces of cheese.

  Gustav’s puppet troupe was already onstage, seated on chairs with their backs to us. Brunhild the shipbuilder was tallest of them, and I could see the top of her head. There was a strangeness in the way that head was positioned: I accept that this is an almost meaningless thing to say about the posture of a puppet, which is intrinsically all sorts of strange. But still. I began to mention this to Radha, but Tyche and Rowan sat down beside us and I thought better of it. Tyche asked Radha which card she’d got: shock or piece of cheese? Radha smiled very sweetly and said, “Wait and see,” and Gustav walked onstage to the sound of TLC’s “No Scrubs.” As he did the puppets’ chairs turned, and after that everything compressed into a split second; we saw that every single one of the puppets’ throats had been slashed wide open so that they erupted strings; they’d been hacked at so savagely that even those internal strings were cut. And when Gustav saw them he lost consciousness. He didn’t collapse, exactly—it was more as if he’d been dropped from a height. He fell plank straight, and without making a sound, and that fall of his was just as unreal to us as the glazed eyes with which the puppets onstage surveyed their own innards. Their expressions were the kind that couldn’t be altered unless physically dismantled, each smile, scowl, or beseeching look disappearing piece by piece. Laughter was the first response, perhaps the only natural response to such excess. It felt intended that we laugh. Puppets and puppeteer slain by an unknown hand; for about thirty seconds the scene was so complete that no one dared intrude upon it. Then Gustav’s friends began to call out to him, reminding him that they’d always known he was too serious for comedy, demanding the next scene, telling him that it was time to get up, that they needed to know if he was OK. From where we sat he seemed to be comfortably asleep, and “No Scrubs” played on and on until Radha ran onto the stage, lifted the boy into her arms, turned his head to the side, and we saw that his eyes were open. Then it became official that Gustav wasn’t sleeping. Those of us in the front row even saw his eyes; they were like a void made visible. Professor Semyonova himself climbed onto the stage, checked vital signs, and shouted for someone to call an ambulance. The professor called for his daughter too, and she arrived on the stage among a swarm of other students proffering bottles of water and Tiger Balm and scarves and asking: “Is he breathing? Is he breathing?”

  —

  TYCHE, ROWAN, and I were the only ones who stayed where we were. That probably made us look guilty of something, but moving closer to the stage would have broken our concentration. Myrna said something to Radha that caused her to release Gustav and turn her attention to the maimed puppets, gathering the bodies one by one, running her fingers through Hamlet’s hair, knocking on Petrushka’s helmet, closing eyes pair by pair. As she did so Myrna clasped Gustav to her (“Did you know she liked him that much?” I heard one boy ask another), all of her body against all of his body. He moved his head, seemed to return to himself, and pushed her away, his hand seeking only Radha’s. Myrna stepped back into the crowd with a look of shock. What caused it; that the dose she’d given was enough for him? Or the way Radha bent over him looking into those sad eyes that had grown even sadder from the day he’d chosen her? My guess: The biggest surprise was that by looking at each other in this way they were hurting Myrna. A little pain—just enough to quicken her breathing. Tyche was half out of her seat trying to decide whether to go to Myrna or not, and Rowan tried to give me a high five, which I ignored. “As expected,” he said, and looked about him with an air of fulfillment that made it plain he was referring to more than just my snub.

  drownings

  This happened and it didn’t happen:

  A man threw a key into a fire. Yes, there are people who do such things. This one was trying to cure a fever. He probably wouldn’t have done it if he’d had his head on straight, but it’s not easy to think clearly when rent is due and there isn’t enough money to pay it, and one who relies on you falls ill for want of nourishment but you have to leave him to walk around looking for work to do. Then even when you find some there still isn’t enough money for both food and shelter, and the worry never stops for a moment. Somehow it would be easier to go home to the one who relies on you if they greeted you with anger, or even disappointment. But returning to someone who has made their own feeble but noticeable attempts to make the place a little nicer while you were gone, someone who only says “Oh, never mind” and speaks of tomorrow as they turn their trusting gaze upon you . . . it was really too much, as if tomorrow was up to him, or any of us . . .

  —

  THERE’S THAT difficulty with delirium too: You see it raging in another person’s eyes and then it flickers out. That’s the most dangerous moment; it’s impossible to see something that’s so swiftly and suddenly swallowed you whole. Arkady’s debts were so numerous that when he found himself being beaten up by strangers he no longer bothered to ask who they were or why they were hitting him—he just assumed it was something to do with his repayments. Instead of putting up much of a fight he concentrated on limiting damage to his internal organs. A friend of a friend of his knew a woman who bought people’s organs in advance of their death. This woman bought your organs and then made your death relatively nice for you, an accident when you least expected it, a surprise release from life. Once that was taken care of she paid the agreed sum in full, cash in the hands of a person of your choice. Arkady felt his heart and lungs throughout the day—they felt hardy enough, so he had a Plan Z. Why go straight to Z, though?

  —

  THROWING THE KEY into the fire was the first step of this man’s fever-born plan. The second step involved the kidnapping of a girl he had seen around. He felt no ill will toward this girl, and this was in itself unusual, since his desperation had begun to direct him to linger on the street wishing misfortune upon everyone he saw. That lady’s maid hurrying out of the jeweler’s shop—he wished she would lose some item of great value to her mistress, so that he might find it and sell it. Yes, let the lady’s maid face every punishment for her carelessness, he wouldn’t spare a single thought for her. As he passed the grand café on his city’s main boulevard he wished a dapper waiter carrying a breakfast tray would slip and fall so that he could retrieve the trampled bread rolls. And how would it be if this time the waiter had slipped and fallen one time too many and was dismissed? Even better—then I can replace him.

  —

  THE GIRL he planned to kidnap happened to be a tyrant’s daughter. Hardly anybody disliked her; she was tall and vague . . . exceedingly vague. Her tendency toward the impersonal led to conversations that ended with both parties walking away thinking: “Well, that didn’t go very well.” If you mentioned that you weren’t having the best day she might tell you about certain trees that drank from clouds when they couldn’t find enough moisture
in the ground beneath them. She was known as Eirini the Second or Eirini the Fair, since she had a flair for the judicious distribution of cake, praise, blame, and other sources of strife. In terms of facial features she didn’t really look like anybody else in her family. In fact she resembled a man her mother had secretly loved for years, a man her mother had never so much as spoken to until the day the tyrant decided to have his wife Eirini the First stoned for adultery. He did give her a chance, one chance. He asked her to explain why his eyesight kept telling him that his daughter was in fact the child of another man, but the woman only answered that there was no explanation.

  —

  THE MAN EIRINI the First loved heard about the resemblance between himself and the child and came down to the palace to try to stop the execution. He swore to the tyrant that he and Eirini the First were as good as strangers, but the tyrant waved him away and signaled his executioners to prepare themselves, at which point the man Eirini the Fair resembled ran into the center of the amphitheatre where Eirini the First stood alone with her arms forming a meager shield for her face and chest. The man Eirini the Fair resembled stood before her with his back to the executioners and the tyrant and told her to look at him, just to keep looking only at him, and that it would be all right. It seemed he intended to protect her from the stones until he couldn’t anymore. This was intolerable to the tyrant; he could not allow these two to exit together. There was also a sense of having just witnessed the first words they’d ever said to each other. The tyrant feared a man who had no qualms about involving himself in a matter such as this, so instead of going ahead with the execution he had his wife returned to the palace.

  —

  AS FOR THE MAN Eirini resembled, he asked to see the child just once—he’d never been more curious about anybody in his life, he said—but his request was denied and the tyrant had him drowned, as had been the case with all other enemies of the tyrant’s state. All any citizen had to say was, “The last king was better,” and somehow or other Eirini’s father got to hear of it and then you were drowned in the gray marshlands deep in the heart of the country, far from even the most remote farmhouse. The air was noxious where the drowned were. The water took their bones and muscle tissue but bubbles of skin rose from the depths, none of them frail, some ready for flight, brazen leather balloons. Houses throughout the country stood empty because the tyrant had eliminated their inhabitants; the swamp of bone and weights and plasma also had house keys mixed into it, since many had been drowned fully clothed along with the contents of their pockets. Eirini the Fair was aware of the keys. She visited the marshlands as often as she dared, crossing narrow stone bridges with a lantern in her hand. She went there to thank the man she resembled for what he had done, but he couldn’t be separated from the rest of the drowned; Eirini the Fair swung her lantern around her in a circle and when her tears met the water they told their own meaning as they flowed from eye socket to eye socket.

  Among those the tyrant hadn’t had drowned yet there was a great eagerness to be rid of him, and Arkady knew that if he went through with his plan to kidnap the tyrant’s daughter he would not be without support. The tyrant had started off as an ordinary king, no better or worse than any other, until it had occurred to him to test the extent of his power. And once he found out how much power he really had, he took steps to maintain it. A ration system was in place, not because resources were scarce or because it was necessary to conserve them, but because the tyrant wished to covertly observe the black market and see what exchanges people were willing and able to make. Not just goods, but time . . . How much time could his subjects bear to spend queuing for butter? What about medicine? This was the sort of thing that made life for his subjects harder than life was for citizens of neighboring countries.

  —

  EIRINI THE FAIR was sure that her father was detested. He was a man who only laughed when he was about to give some command that was going to cause widespread panic. She didn’t doubt that if anybody saw a way to annoy her father by harming her, they might well do it. But she was well guarded, and it escaped her notice that she was being intensely observed by the kind of person who would melt a key.

  —

  THE TYRANT had orphaned him, had had Arkady’s mother and father drowned in the middle of the night, so that the boy woke up in an empty house wondering why nobody was there to give him breakfast. Young Arkady prepared his own breakfast that day and continued to do so until there was no more food, and then he went out onto the street and stayed there, leaving the front door open in case anybody else had a use for his family home.

  Two companions crossed his path—the first was Giacomo, the one who came to depend upon him. Arkady had happened to overhear a grocer trying to make Giacomo pay three times the going rate for a bar of soap. “I know this soap looks just like all the rest, but it’ll actually get you thrice as clean . . .” Giacomo was cheerfully scraping coins together when Arkady intervened, inquiring whether the grocer was enjoying his existence as a piece of garbage, whether it was a way of life the grocer felt he could recommend. Giacomo was not a person who knew what a lie was or why anybody would tell one; his mind worked at a different speed than usual. Not slower, exactly, but it did take him a long time to learn some things, especially practicalities regarding people. Light felt like levitation to Giacomo, and darkness was like damnation. How had he lived so long without being torn apart by one or the other? He was so troublesome, taking things that then had to be paid for, paying for things that shouldn’t have cost anything; he taught Arkady patience, looking at him with wonder and saying: “Arkady is good.” It was Giacomo who was good. His ability to give the benefit of the doubt never faltered. The swindlers didn’t mean it, the jeerers didn’t mean it, and those who would stamp on a child’s hand to make her let go of a banknote she had been given, those people didn’t mean it either.

  Their other companion was a vizsla puppy, now a deep gold–colored dog, who began to follow Arkady and Giacomo one day and would not be shooed away, no matter how fierce an expression Arkady assumed. Since Giacomo’s alphabet and numerical coordination were unique to him, it was rare for him to be gainfully employed, so the dog merely represented an additional mouth for Arkady to feed. But the vizsla’s persistence and tail-wagging served him well, as did his way of behaving as if he had once been a gentleman and might yet regain that state. The vizsla waited for Giacomo and Arkady to help themselves to portions of whatever meals they were able to get before he took his own share, though sometimes Giacomo pressed the dog to begin, in which case he took the smallest portion and not a bite more. Giacomo named him Leporello. On occasions of his own choosing Leporello turned backflips and earned coins from passersby. And yet he couldn’t be persuaded to perform on demand; no, he would give looks that asked Arkady to perceive the distinction between artist and mere entertainer.

  —

  THE THREE of them settled in a building at the edge of the city. The view from the building’s windows was an unexpectedly nice one, covering miles and miles of marshland so that the mass of drowned flesh looked like water, just muddy water, if not wholly pure then becoming so as it teemed toward the ocean.

  —

  ONE DAY WHILE ARKADY was out working one of his three jobs Giacomo came home from a long walk, stopped on the wrong floor of their building, and accidentally opened the door to a flat that wasn’t the one he shared with Arkady and Leporello. The tenant wasn’t at home, so Giacomo could have seen or taken anything he wished. But what he sought was a view from a new window, and that was all he took. Ten minutes looking out to sea. And he soon discovered that the same key opened every door in the building; their landlord counted on it not occurring to any of the tenants to try opening doors other than their own. When Giacomo told Arkady of his discovery, Arkady was all for having their locks changed. They could be murdered in their beds! They could be robbed at any time! It was bad enough that they lived under the rule of a tyrant
who was slowly but surely squeezing the life out of everybody, but now their neighbors could get at them too . . .

  Giacomo just laughed and pulled Arkady into one of the flats that stood empty between tenants on a floor higher than theirs; Leporello came too, and barked at the moonlight as it washed over their faces. Their fellow tenants continued to identify their doorways with care, and were too busy and too tired to go anywhere but home.

  —

  HAVING SECURED Giacomo’s assurance that he’d be very, very careful with these trespasses of his, and Leporello’s assurance that he’d help Giacomo keep his word, Arkady’s worries were lessened for a time. One of his jobs was assisting the tyrant’s physician, who did not choose to be known by her true name—or perhaps was yet to discover it—and went by the nickname Lokum. Like the confection she left traces of herself about anybody she came into contact with—sweetness, fragrance. “Ah, so you have been with her . . .”

  Lokum kept the tyrant in perfect health, and perfectly lovesick too. Like the tyrant’s wife, Lokum had no lovers: Anybody who seemed likely to win her favor was immediately drowned. Arkady swept and mopped Lokum’s chambers, and he fetched and carried covered baskets for her, and he also acted as her test subject—this was his favorite job because all he was required to do was sit on a stool and eat different-colored pieces of lokum that the physician had treated with various concoctions. He was also required to describe in detail what he felt happening in his body a few minutes after the consumption of each cube, and some of the morsels broke his cells wide open and made it all but impossible to find words and say them, though for the most part accurate description was no great task for him, and it paid more than his other two decidedly more mundane jobs. “Open your mouth,” she’d say, and then she placed a scented cube on his tongue. He’d warned himself not to behave like everybody else who came within ten paces of her, but once as the lokum melted away he found himself murmuring to her: I remember a dawn when my heart / got tied in a lock of your hair. Her usual response was flat dismissal—she all but pointed to the door and said, “Please handle your feelings over there,” but this time she took one end of the scarf she wore and wrapped it around his neck, drawing him closer and closer until her face was just a blur. “Listen, listen,” she said. “People have been drowned for saying much less.”