—
AISHA TOLD me—what did she tell me, actually? What does she ever tell me? She’s what people call an “up-and-coming” filmmaker; far more accustomed to showing than telling. So what did she show me? Plenty, but not everything. We live in the same building and met in the stairwell: I’d locked myself out and was waiting for my flatmate Pierre to come home. It was going to be a long time before he came home: You see, being a key part of the socialization process for Poppy Class is only Pierre’s daytime identity. At weekends he turns into the lead singer for a band, Hear It Not, Duncan, and their gigs go on forever. Of course I couldn’t get him on the phone, and it seemed every other friend who lived on our bus route was at the gig too, so I sat outside my front door going through all the business cards I’d ever been given and dialing the mobile numbers on them, getting voicemail each time since nobody likes surprise phone calls anymore.
Aisha walked past me as I was leaving somebody a rambling voicemail message about the time I was walking past a neighbor’s front door, stuck my hand through the letterbox on a whim only to have that hand grabbed and firmly held by some unseen person on the other side of the door—that really happened, and I’ve never been so frightened or run so fast since. Aisha walked past and heard me saying this, and she smiled. She smiled. I’m a simple lad, unfortunately the kind that Aisha can’t really smile at unless she wants a boyfriend. I told her I was locked out and did all I could to inspire pity; she asked me if I had a car and asked if we could go and pick up hitchhikers and take them to their destinations. She’d always wanted to do that, she said. “Yeah, me too!” I said. We drove up and down the A534 but couldn’t persuade anybody to get into the car with us: Maybe we seemed too keen. We got back at dawn and Pierre had come home; I wonder what would’ve happened if he hadn’t.
—
AISHA TOOK to knocking on my door as she went past, inviting me to screenings and more, but no matter what meeting time we agree on she arrives half an hour later than that, sometimes forty-five minutes late. I’d probably wait for an hour or longer but she mustn’t ever discover that. Perseverance doesn’t seem to move her: I only ever get to seduce her up to a very specific point. I’ve tried to think this through, but I only get as far with the thinking as I do with the seduction. When entwined, our bodies build the kind of blaze in which sensation overtakes sense—it becomes possible to taste sound—that half hiccup, half sigh that tells me she likes what my tongue is doing to her. And so we each take a little more of what we like and lust swells until, until she pulls away. No penetration permitted, no matter how naked we are or how good the stroking and sliding feels, no matter how delectably wet she is when I nudge her legs open with my knee. I look into her eyes and see craving there, but there’s also what seems to be abhorrence. Then she breaks contact.
Could it be that nobody likes a man without ambition and everything is withheld from him until he changes his ways? Is A saving herself for some fictional character, Willow Rosenberg or fucking floppy-haired Theodore Lawrence or someone like that? Is there somebody else, somebody nonfictional? Is she doing this to make me tell her in words that I want her? I don’t like saying that kind of thing. So for now, if she doesn’t want to then I can’t. This sounds completely obvious but I’ve heard stories, from men, from women, that demonstrate that that’s not how it is for others. Consent is a downward motion, I think—a leap or a fall—and whether they’ll admit it or not, even the most decisive people can find themselves unable to tell whether or not their consent was freely given. That inability to discover whether you jumped or were pushed brings about a deadened gaze and a downfall all its own.
—
PIERRE SAYS it sounds like Aisha “just doesn’t want dick.”
“So she prefers pussy?”
“Perhaps, but the only thing that concerns you in particular is that she doesn’t want dick. I just mean . . . OK, so there’s some guy, and he’s absolutely desperate to get inside you. Maybe it’s a bit off-putting?”
I can always count on Pierre to offer his honest opinion. Or to try to give me some sort of complex. Or both.
Here’s the thing that keeps me from trying anything rash: Aisha’s other passions expose her. She loves cinema so well that I can find her there, hints and clues in each of her favorites. I know whose insolent lip curl she imitates when she hears an order she has no intention of following, and I know who she’s quoting when she drawls, Oh, honey, when I lose my temper you can’t find it anyplace! Full carnal knowledge of this woman eludes me, true—yet I know her. Aisha used to want to write poetry, since she liked reading it. But the muse spake not unto her. Then she’d wanted to write prose, but had stopped bothering when she realized she couldn’t bring herself to write about genitalia. “A real writer has to be able to write about the body. They have to. It’s where we live.”
So A’s foible could simply be this: She doesn’t want lust to be the one to lead me in. It may be that lust is a breathtaking traitor, the warden’s daughter seen in the walled city at all hours of the night singing softly and teasing the air with a starlit swan’s feather. Lust, the warden’s daughter; a little feckless, perhaps, but not one to cause injury until the day her telescope shows her that troops are marching on the walled city. When darkness falls she slips through the sleeping streets, meets the foe at the city gates, and throws those gates wide open: Take and use everything you want and burn the rest to the ground . . .
. . . When it’s all over no observer is able to settle on a motive for this brat’s betrayal, illogical or otherwise. Historians dissect her claims that she was sleepwalking. Such are the deeds of lust, a child of our walled cities. But say whatever you want about her, she will not be denied. Or will she???
—
I DRIFTED into unemployment without really noticing; I hung around in the lobby of the Glissando so much I didn’t have time to go to work. Somebody at the hotel might need some skill of mine and then I could rejoin the rest of my family and continue the Barrandov tradition of providing debatable necessities. But nobody had need of me. I watched my mother dashing to and fro muttering into a walkie-talkie and my dad and Odette striding about with their thumbs tucked into the vacant loops in their tool belts. Had I missed my chance? As I ran through my savings I decided to work on developing ambition at the same time as amusing myself. I stole expensive items and in the moment of acquisition found that I didn’t want to keep them and couldn’t be bothered to sell them. I returned them before anybody noticed they were gone. The trickiest and most pleasing endeavor (also the endeavor that required going up to London and applying the most detailed makeup and speaking with a Viennese accent that was perfect down to the pronunciation of the very last syllable) was the theft and fuss-free return of a diamond necklace from Tiffany’s on Old Bond Street. I almost didn’t put the necklace back, but Aisha didn’t like it and I couldn’t think of anybody else to give the thing to. The diamonds looked muddy. Upon stealing the necklace my first impulse was to give it a good wipe.
—
THERE’S A SHORT film of Aisha’s I watched more than a few times during this period. It’s called Deadly Beige, is set in Cold War–era St. Petersburg, and relates the dual destruction of the mental health of a middle-aged brother and sister. The siblings share a house and are both long-standing party members, employed as writers of propaganda. One night they receive notification from Moscow that it’s time for them to do their bit toward helping keep the party strong. They are to do this by raising subtle suspicion among their fellow party members that they, the brother and sister, are in fact spies and observing the investigation into their activities at the same time as doing their genuine best to thwart this investigation. Discussion of this “exploratory exercise” is prohibited, so the siblings are unable to discern whether their St. Petersburg colleagues are aware of this exercise. Neither do they have the faintest idea who to report back to in Moscow. The letter they received was stamped w
ith an authentic, and thus unrefusable, official seal, but was unsigned. This letter is delivered to them very late at night—the sister takes it from the trembling hand of a man who is then shot by a sniper as he walks away from their front door. The siblings then hear further shots at varying heights and distances that suggest the sniper has also been shot, followed by the sniper’s sniper. There can be no doubt that disobedience would be stupid. So would half-hearted obedience: If the brother and sister fail to perform their tasks satisfactorily they will receive “reprimands”—what does that mean, what is this suggestion of plural punishment per failed task? The first task is to tear the letter up and eat it. In order to receive their instructions they take turns visiting a derelict house on the outskirts of the city, where they find that week’s instructions written on a bedroom wall. They’re instructions for setting up various staged liaisons and the preparation of coded, nonsensical reports. Having read and memorized the instructions, they are to paint over them. The brother and sister are forbidden to enter the house together. So she enters alone, he enters alone, and it wasn’t so bad concocting slanders against each other as long as they took care not to look each other in the eye. Another concern: Some of the staged liaisons they set up feel all too genuine.
The siblings are so very unhappy. They can’t understand how this could be happening to them when they’ve never put a foot wrong. A colleague makes a jocular comment at lunch and introduces the possibility that someone in Moscow is pissed off with the wonder siblings, finds them insincere, has settled on this tortuous scheme to force them to dig their own graves. As you watch these siblings squabble over daily chores and exchange bland commentary on the doings of their neighbors there are unfortunate indications that every word of praise these two write actually is profoundly insincere, and has been from the outset. They have denied themselves all social bonds; everybody’s just an acquaintance. Now they search their souls, discern silhouettes of wild horses stampeding through the tea leaves at the bottom of their cups . . . What omens are these? “The horses are telling us to drink something stronger than tea.” This counsel is invaluable—the siblings dearly wish to be quiet, and it’s been their experience that alcohol ties their tongues for them. So they drink that at the kitchen table, facial expressions set to neutral, knees scraping together as each stares at the amply bugged wall behind the other’s head.
—
IT’S A SPECTRAL wisp of a film, film more in the sense of a substance coating your pupils than it is a stream of images that moves before you. It’s all felt more than seen; tension darkens each frame; by the end you can see neither into these siblings’ lives nor out. Neither, it seems, can they. The film seems to be a judgment upon the written word and the stranglehold it assumes. Woe to those who believe in what is written, and woe to those who don’t.
I put this to Aisha and she shook her head.
“It’s a puppet show,” she said. Yes, it’s that too. The film’s siblings are played by two feminine-looking puppets and voiced by a singer and a puppeteer, both friends of A’s stepfather. The sister towers over the brother; she’s wooden. The brother’s made of metal, and his face is one of the most arresting I’ve seen, composed entirely of jagged scales—scales for eyelids, a button-shaped scale for a nose. When he opens his mouth to speak, it’s as if the sea is speaking.
I’d decided to show the film to my own sister Odette, and as I waited in the lobby of Hotel Glissando I used the free Wi-Fi to watch it again in miniature, on my phone. A man tapped me on the shoulder and I looked up: He was a black man about my father’s age and half a head shorter than me. Those sideburns: I’d seen them (and him) before, but couldn’t think where. The man was talking. I pulled my earphones out.
“. . . looking well, Freddy. How have you been?”
“Yeah, really well, thanks. And yourself?” I hadn’t a clue who he was, but as long as one of us knew what was going on I didn’t mind chatting.
He nudged me with his elbow, winked. “You’re surprised to see me, eh? Thought I was dead, didn’t you?”
When he said that it all came back to me; this man really was supposed to be dead. He was my godfather, and I’d last seen him at my christening. I might have gone to his funeral but I’m not sure: I’ve been to so many they all blur together.
“Gosh, yes! So you’re alive after all? Excellent. How did you manage that? I mean, you went—”
“Sailing, yes,” he supplied, beaming.
“Right, sailing, you were circumnavigating the globe in your boat, and then there was that Cuban hurricane and bits of the boat washing up on various shores—”
“I ditched the boat pretty early on, Freddy,” my godfather said, serenely. “Sailing isn’t for me. I only came up with the idea to get away from the wife and kid, really, so once I got to Florida I just let the boat drift on without me.”
“So you let your family think you’re dead, er—Jean-Claude?”
“That’s right. I’ve been living here at the Glissando for years.” His hand moved in his pocket; I could guess what he was doing, having seen others perform the same ritual—he was running his finger around and around the outside of his room key card, doing what he should’ve done before he checked in and became subject to the rules. Before assuming ownership of a key you should look at it closely. Not only because you may need to identify it later but because to look at a key is to get an impression of the lock it was made for, and, by extension, the entire establishment surrounding the lock. Once you check into Hotel Glissando there’s no checking out again in your lifetime: I imagine this is a taste of what it is to be dead. In many tales people who’ve died don’t realize it until they try to travel to a place that’s new to them and find themselves prevented from arriving. These ghosts can only return to places where they’ve already been; that’s all that’s left for them. Depending on the person that can still be quite a broad existence. But whether its possessor is widely traveled or not, the key card for each room at Hotel Glissando is circular; if you took the key into your hand and really thought about it before signing the residency contract, this shape would inform you that wherever else you go, you must and will always return to your room.
“It’s nice and quiet here and every morning there are eggs done just the way I like them,” Jean-Claude said. “Jana divorced me in absentia and remarried anyway; she’s fine. And just look how well my boy’s doing!” My godfather opened a celebrity magazine and showed me a four-page spread of his son’s splendid home. Chedorlaomer Nachor’s House of Locks! Sumptuous! Mysterious!
“Chedorlaomer Nachor’s your son?” I waved my phone at Jean-Claude. “Did you know he’s in this film I’m watching?” The film had ended while we’d been talking; I played it again. Jean-Claude’s gaze flicked suspiciously between me and the screen of my phone. “All I see are puppets.”
“Yes, he’s the voice of the brother—” I waited until the silvery face was the only one on-screen and then turned up the volume. Jean-Claude listened for a moment and then nodded.
“What’s this film then?”
“Oh, it’s my . . . girlfriend’s. Well, she wrote and directed it . . .”
Jean-Claude gripped my arm. “You know my Chedorlaomer?”
“Well, not personally, but . . . why, do you want to be . . . you know, reunited?” I hadn’t missed my chance after all. Here was a service I could provide to Jean-Claude and his famous son. This would effect my own reunion with my mother, who would acknowledge my existence once more. But Jean-Claude had no wish for a reunion; his accountant advised very strongly against such sentiments. Instead he wanted me to rescue his son from the clutches of a dangerous character.
“Dangerous character?”
“Her name,” Jean-Claude said darkly, “is Tyche Shaw.”
“Really?”
“You’ve heard of her?”
I tapped my phone screen again. “She’s the voice of the sist
er!”
Jean-Claude flipped through another magazine until he found photos of Chedorlaomer stepping out hand in hand with a tall, buxom black woman. Her hair was gathered up to bare a neck that tempted me to B-movie vampirism. I wouldn’t have guessed she was a puppeteer, and neither would this magazine’s caption writer: Nachor’s mystery lady . . . Do you know her? Write in!
“Freddy,” Jean-Claude said. “I’ve been watching you for a few days now.”
“Watching me? From where?”
He pointed to a potted palm tree behind the farthest phone booth. “There’s a chair behind it. Yes, I’ve been watching you, and you look well, you do look well, but you also look as if you’re lacking direction . . .”
I didn’t dispute that.
“Would you like a bit of gainful employment, Freddy?”
“Well . . . yes.”
“Good! I’ll pay you this—” Jean-Claude wrote a number on the front cover of the topmost magazine. “If you break those two up as soon as you can.”
The figure was high; I had to ask why he was so invested in the breakup.
“I made some inquiries, and I found out some things about Tyche Shaw,” Jean-Claude said, his eyes turning to saucers for a moment. “Don’t ask me what they are, but let’s just say she’s not the sort of person my son should be seeing. Save him. If not for the money then at least out of human decency.”
“I’ll gladly do what I can. But have you tried asking the concierge or my mother about this?”
“Yes of course, but they say it’s only in their remit to handle requests that can be fulfilled on the premises.”
“I see . . . Well, don’t worry, Jean-Claude. I’ll deal with this.”
“Music to my ears, Freddy. That’s the Barrandov Way!”
—
I WAS GOING to have a lot of money soon, but the prospect didn’t excite me. Perhaps I’d get more excited as I went along. Aisha introduced me to Chedorlaomer without too much prompting: If anything she seemed amused that she’d discovered the fanboy in me.
What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours Page 20