What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

by Helen Oyeyemi

  Any friend of A’s is a friend of mine . . .

  Chedorlaomer Nachor had been famous for years. He’d grown accustomed to living well and to feting his playmates; if you said you liked anything of his he gave it to you, even if that meant taking the item off his own body and putting it on yours. He was deliriously happy too—that was part of it. He freely admitted that Tyche was his first love, admitted this to anyone who’d listen. Wherever he was, the delectable, ambrosial Tyche Shaw wasn’t far away. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. A blended scent rose from their skins—sulfurous, sticky, sweet. Wasn’t he rather old to be falling in love for the first time? And who was she? Since Jean-Claude wouldn’t tell me what he’d learned about her, I did some research of my own. She was a puppeteer, and very far from a well-known one, though she did associate with the likes of Radha Chaudhry and Gustav Grimaldi. Aisha added in an offhand manner that Tyche also did odd jobs and invocations. Odd jobs? Was Aisha hinting at prostitution?

  Chedorlaomer seemed like a nice person and so did Tyche; if either one was ill-natured they hid it very well. But it didn’t matter; I was there to end their romance. They were in love, and laughed at everything, and assaulted me with the odor of all the sex I was being denied. I know I said denied, as if I had a right to it. But those two filled my brain with the filthiest helium—I watched their wandering hands and I watched Aisha’s Deadly Beige and when I blinked diverse, divine contortions appeared to me, all wrapped up in satin sheets. The bodies I saw and felt combining were mine, Aisha’s, Chedorlaomer, Tyche’s . . . even the puppets got a look in. I propositioned Chedorlaomer, but the typical halfheartedness of my attempt aside, Jean-Claude’s son was immune to my charms. He talked about Aisha and explained that anybody who hurt her wasn’t going to find it easy to live with all the injuries he and Aisha’s stepdad would inflict upon them. He made these remarks in such dulcet tones that it took me a few minutes to realize he was warning me.

  After that I had to let Aisha in on my project, before Mr. Protective told her. Once I’d told her everything she looked at me with the most peculiar expression.

  “So you have a tendency not to want anything more than you already have?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  “And you think that’s a problem?”

  “Clearly it is: It’s a difference that’s slowly estranging me from my family!”

  “What if I told you that I know both Ched and Tyche well enough to be fairly sure there’s no need for you to break them up?”

  “I’ve still got to do it. My word’s my bond. I told Jean-Claude—”

  “As for Jean-Claude,” Aisha said, stirring her tea with sinister emphasis.

  “Oh, don’t.”

  “All right, forget Jean-Claude for now. Listen Freddy, you’re my guy, and together we can accomplish anything. Here’s how you break them up . . .”

  “Your guy . . . accomplish anything . . . anything, your guy,” I said, thinking I was talking to myself. But she heard me, and asked if I was OK.

  “Me? Yeah? I mean . . . yeah. Always. I— Sorry, I interrupted you, didn’t I? Go on.”

  Aisha knew a man who gave “relationship-ruining head.” She suggested getting together with this man and Tyche one evening, giving them both a lot of wine and letting nature run its course. So we did that; I pretended to find it funny when I discovered that this giver of relationship-ruining head was my flatmate Pierre.

  —

  TYCHE ARRIVED with Chedorlaomer, and left with him too. Such a companionable couple, enjoying each other and us, his energy so upbeat, she full of quips and observations, both kept revealing their visionary natures, all these hopes and plans, all a bit exhausting really. Meanwhile Pierre drank and drank without getting drunk. He also made meaningful eyes at Aisha. I drank water the whole night; gulped it actually, just trying to cool down. Avoiding inebriation helped me think fast and not write that entire evening off—there on the kitchen counter were the glasses Tyche and Chedorlaomer had drunk out of and then left on the kitchen counter. I swiped them for the next stage of the project.

  The results of the DNA test were disappointing. Bloodwise Tyche and Ched were as unrelated as could be, so I’d have to make some effort . . . I looked the results over carefully, consulted friends with some knowledge in the field, and went to work falsifying particulars. The end result only had to look legitimate to two dumbfounded laymen. I stress that this was not about Jean-Claude’s Tyche-phobia, or about money, or even about proving to my mother that as a true Barrandov I was equal to any task. I asked them to meet me in the bar at the Glissando.

  “What’s this about?” Chedorlaomer asked, and Tyche appeared to very briefly meditate on the two envelopes on the counter before me before asking what was in them.

  —

  MY MIND TICKED over as I stammered the words I’d prepared; some words about never really knowing our fathers, how we only think we know them, how our fathers’ undisclosed dalliances may well cause the world around us to teem with flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood, correspondences we may only recognize subconsciously.

  “Exactly what is he saying right now?” Tyche was talking to Ched and looking at me. The voice of reason piped up in my ear, beige through and through: Freddy’s lost his marbles. Lost them? What was this about loss? Ah well—I’d found something I really, really wanted. It was my dearest wish that Tyche and Chedorlaomer would believe my lie. If they believed me and shunned each other, then I had won. If they believed me and stayed together, then . . . well, that was another version also worth watching, even if it meant I’d lost. I still think I might not have gone as far as I did if they hadn’t arrived coated in that scent that drove me to frenzy.

  if a book is locked there’s probably a good reason for that don’t you think

  Every time someone comes out of the lift in the building where you work you wish lift doors were made of glass. That way you’d be able to see who’s arriving a little before they actually arrive and there’d be just enough time to prepare the correct facial expression. Your new colleague steps out of the lift dressed just a tad more casually than is really appropriate for the workplace and because you weren’t ready you say “Hi!” with altogether too much force. She has: a heart-shaped face with subtly rouged cheeks, short, straight, neatly cut hair, and eyes that are long rather than wide. She’s black, but not local, this new colleague who wears her boots and jeans and scarf with a bohemian aplomb that causes the others to ask her where she shops. “Oh, you know, thrift stores,” she says with a chuckle. George at the desk next to yours says, “Charity shops?” and the newcomer says, “Yeah, thrift stores . . .”

  Her accent is New York plus some other part of America, somewhere Midwest. And her name’s Eva. She’s not quite standoffish, not quite . . . but she doesn’t ask any questions that aren’t related to her work. Her own answers are brief and don’t invite further conversation. In the women’s toilets you find a row of your colleagues examining themselves critically in the mirror and then, one by one, they each apply a touch of rouge. Their makeup usually goes on at the end of the workday, but now your coworkers are demonstrating that Eva’s not the only one who can glow. When it’s your turn at the mirror you fiddle with your shirt. Sleeves rolled up so you’re nonchalantly showing skin, or is that too marked a change?

  —

  EVA TAKES no notice of any of this preening. She works through her lunch break, tapping away at the keyboard with her right hand, holding her sandwich with her left. You eat lunch at your desk too, just as you have ever since you started working here, and having watched her turn down her fourth invitation to lunch you say to her: “Just tell people you’re a loner. That’s what I did, anyway.”

  Eva doesn’t look away from her computer screen and for a moment it seems as if she’s going to ignore you but eventually she says: “Oh . . . I’m not a loner.”

  Fair enough. You
return to your own work, the interpretation of data. You make a few phone calls to chase up some missing paperwork. Your company exists to assist other companies with streamlining their workforce for optimum productivity; the part people like you and Eva play in this is attaching cold, hard monetary value to the efforts of individual employees and passing those figures on to someone higher up the chain so that person can decide who should be made redundant. Your senior’s evaluations are more nuanced. They often get to go into offices to observe the employees under consideration, and in their final recommendations they’re permitted to allow for some mysterious quality termed potential. You aim to be promoted to a more senior position soon, because ranking people based purely on yearly income fluctuations is starting to get to you. You’d like a bit more context to the numbers. What happened in employee QM76932’s life between February and May four years ago, why do the figures fall so drastically? The figures improve again and remain steady to date, but is QM76932 really a reliable employee? Whatever calamity befell them, it could recur on a five-year cycle, making them less of a safe bet than somebody else with moderate but more consistent results. But it’s like Susie says, the reason why so many bosses prefer to outsource these evaluations is because context and familiarity cultivate indecision. When Susie gets promoted she’s not going to bother talking about potential. “We hold more power than the consultants who go into the office,” she says. That sounds accurate to you: The portrait you hammer out at your desk is the one that either affirms or refutes profitability. But your seniors get to stretch their legs more and get asked for their opinion, and that’s why you and Susie work so diligently toward promotion.

  But lately . . . lately you’ve been tempted to influence the recommendations that get made. Lately you’ve chosen someone whose figures tell you they’ll almost certainly get sacked and you’ve decided to try to save them, manipulating figures with your heart in your mouth, terrified that the figures will be checked. And they are, but only cursorily; you have a reputation for thoroughness and besides, it would be hard for your boss to think of a reason why you’d do such a thing for a random string of letters and numbers that could signify anybody, anybody at all, probably somebody you’d clash with if you met them. You never find out what happens to the people you assess, so you’re all the more puzzled by what you’re doing. Why can’t you choose some other goal, a goal that at least includes the possibility of knowing whether you reached it or not? Face it; you’re a bit of a weirdo. But whenever you feel you’ve gone too far with your tampering you think of your grandmother and you press on. Grandma is your dark inspiration. Your mother’s mother made it out of a fallen communist state with an unseemly heap of valuables and a strangely blank slate of a memory when it comes to recalling those hair-raising years. But she has such a sharp memory for so many other things—price changes, for instance. Your grandmother is vehement on the topic of survival and skeptical of all claims that it’s possible to choose anything else when the chips are down. The official story is that it was Grandma’s dentistry skills that kept her in funds. But her personality makes it seem more likely that she was a backstabber of monumental proportions. You take great pains to keep your suspicions from her, and she seems to get a kick out of that.

  But how terrible you and your family are going to feel if, having thought of her as actively colluding with one of history’s most murderous regimes, some proof emerges that Grandma was an ordinary dentist just like she said. A dentist subject to the kind of windfall that has been known to materialize for honest, well-regarded folk, in this case a scared but determined woman who held on to that windfall with both hands, scared and determined and just a dentist, truly. But she won’t talk about any of it, that’s the thing. Cannot you could all understand, or at least have sincere reverence for. But will not?

  Your grandmother’s Catholicism seems rooted in her approval of two saints whose reticence shines through the ages: St. John of Nepomuk, who was famously executed for his insistence on keeping the secrets of the confessional, and St. John Ogilvie, who went to his death after refusing to name those of his acquaintance who shared his faith. In lieu of a crucifix your grandmother wears a locket around her neck, and in that locket is a miniature reproduction of a painting featuring St. John of Nepomuk, some tall-helmeted soldiers, a few horrified bystanders, four angels, and a horse. In the painting the soldiers are pushing St. J of N off the Charles Bridge, but St. J of N isn’t all that bothered, is looking up as if already hearing future confessions and interceding for his tormentors in advance. Boys will be boys, Father, St. J of N’s expression seems to say. The lone horse seems to agree. It’s the sixteenth century, and the angels are there to carry St. John of Nepomuk down to sleep on the riverbed, where his halo of five stars awaits him. This is a scene your grandmother doesn’t often reveal, but sometimes you see her fold a hand around the closed locket and it looks like she’s toying with the idea of tearing it off the chain.

  Suspect me if that’s what you want to do.

  What’s the point of me saying any more than I’ve said . . . is it eloquence that makes you people believe things?

  You are all morons.

  These are the declarations your grandmother makes, and then you and your siblings all say: “No, no, Grandma, what are you talking about, what do you mean, where did you get this idea?” without daring to so much as glance at each other.

  —

  YOU WERE IN NURSERY school when your grandmother unexpectedly singled you out from your siblings and declared you her protégée. At first all that seemed to mean was that she paid for your education. That was good news for your parents, and for your siblings too, since there was more to go around. And your gratitude is real but so is your eternal obligation. Having paid for most of what’s gone into your head during your formative years there’s a sense in which Grandma now owns you. She phones you when entertainment is required and you have to put on formal wear, take your fiddle over to her house, and play peasant dances for her and her chess club friends. When you displease her she takes it out on your mother, and the assumption within the family is that if at any point it becomes impossible for Grandma to live on her own you’ll be her live-in companion. (Was your education really that great?) So when you think of her you think that you might as well do what you can while you can still do it.

  —

  EVA’S POPULARITY grows even as her speech becomes ever more monosyllabic. Susie, normally so focused on her work, spends a lot of time trying to get Eva to talk. Kathleen takes up shopping during her lunch break; she tries to keep her purchases concealed but occasionally you glimpse what she’s stashing away in her locker—expensive-looking replicas of Eva’s charity-shop chic. The interested singletons give Eva unprompted information about their private lives to see what she does with it but she just chuckles and doesn’t reciprocate. You want to ask her if she’s sure she isn’t a loner but you haven’t spoken to her since she rejected your advice. Then Eva’s office fortunes change. On a Monday morning Susie runs in breathless from having taken the stairs and says: “Eva, there’s someone here to see you! She’s coming up in the lift and she’s . . . crying?”

  Another instance in which glass lift doors would be beneficial. Not to Eva, who already seems to know who the visitor is and looks around for somewhere to hide, but glass doors would have come in handy for everybody else in the office, since nobody knows what to do or say or think when the lift doors open to reveal a woman in tears and a boy of about five or so, not yet in tears but rapidly approaching them—there’s that lip wobble, oh no. The woman looks quite a lot like Eva might look in a decade’s time, maybe a decade and a half. As soon as this woman sees Eva she starts saying things like, Please, please, I’m not even angry, I’m just saying please leave my husband alone, we’re a family, can’t you see?

  Eva backs away, knocking her handbag off her desk as she does so. Various items spill out but she doesn’t have time to gather them up—
the woman and child advance until they have her pinned up against the stationery cupboard door. The woman falls to her knees and the boy stands beside her, his face scrunched up; he’s crying so hard he can’t see. “You could so easily find someone else but I can’t, not now . . . do you think this won’t happen to you too one day? Please just stop seeing him, let him go . . .”

  Eva waves her hands and speaks, but whatever excuse or explanation she’s trying to make can’t be heard above the begging. You say that someone should call security and people say they agree but nobody does anything. You’re seeing a lot of folded arms and pursed lips. Kathleen mutters something about “letting the woman have her say.” You call security yourself and the woman and child are led away. You pick Eva’s things up from the floor and throw them into her bag. One item is notable: a leatherbound diary with a brass lock on it. A quiet woman with a locked book. Eva’s beginning to intrigue you. She returns to her desk and continues working. Everybody else returns to their desks to send each other e-mails about Eva . . . at least that’s what you presume is happening. You’re not copied into any of those e-mails but everybody except you and Eva seems to be receiving a higher volume of messages than normal. You look at Eva from time to time and the whites of her eyes have turned pink but she doesn’t look back at you or stop working. Fax, fax, photocopy. She answers a few phone calls and her tone is on the pleasant side of professional.

  —

  AN ANTI-EVA movement emerges. Its members are no longer fooled by her glamour; Eva’s a personification of all that’s put on earth solely to break bonds, scrap commitments, prevent the course of true love from running smooth. You wouldn’t call yourself Pro-Eva, but bringing a small and distressed child to the office to confront your husband’s mistress does strike you as more than a little manipulative. Maybe you’re the only person who thinks so: That side of things certainly isn’t discussed. Kathleen quickly distances herself from her attempts to imitate Eva. Those who still feel drawn to Eva become indignant when faced with her continued disinterest in making friends. Who does she think she is? Can’t she see how nice they are?