Something had disconcerted him as he mentioned those two carriages. Or maybe it was an unconnected thought that crossed his mind; anyway, he let go of my hand. I took a seat opposite him, dumping my jeans, shirt, and Saturday underwear on the neighbouring seat and cautiously tilting backward until my head met the wall, which was unexpectedly plush. I tried to think “velvet cushion” and not “padded cell.” Sunlight lined the bottom of the compartment door and the base of the window blinds, but apart from that, the figures of Xavier and Árpád were mainly distinguishable by size and silhouette. One much shorter than me, one taller. One with a tail, one without. Everything mellowed once we sat still, feeling the train in our backs and necks and feet, that affable and determined rattle of the axle within the round, the wheels beneath us carrying us away. I listened intently for a while, for footsteps or some other commotion in the hallway, or the crackling that precedes a tannoy announcement. But there was only quiet. And Árpád’s sweet slumber was making me bitter—he could at least have made a show of looking for a power socket or a way to open the window blind. I said as much, and Xavier stretched out his leg and crossed his ankle over one of mine. “It’s not too bad like this,” he said. “We can talk.”
I wiggled my toes. “Can implies ought, Mr. Shin.”
“In that case, Mr. Shin, I’ll get it all off my chest. I’m thinking about being eleven and twelve,” he said.
“Nice and specific …”
Veronica Park, Xavier’s mum, has saved his first passport, the one he used from the ages of two to twelve. We’ve looked at it together. Each page is a wall of watermarked squares and rectangles of smudged ink with entry dates and times written in them. Xavier was born during strange times for the Shins of Sangju. This was how Veronica prefaced his childhood situation when I asked her about it. Strange times for the country in general: a towering cream puff of an economic miracle sombrely nibbled away at the edges by martial law. But in addition to that tense prosperity—only contentment is legal—there was a lot of pain for the Shins as a clan that just kept shrinking. Infertility, miscarriages, fatal paediatric illness, a terrible accident, cot death—Veronica ticked each vast sorrow off on her fingers and thumb as she told me what her husband’s sisters had endured over the course of nine months. And then Veronica gave birth to this sweet-natured little rosebud who bounced with health. He was baptised very quickly and named after the saint who’d converted one of his ancestors to Catholicism. Veronica tried not to like the rosebud too much. He’d hold on to her little finger and give her soulful looks, and she’d stare back, knowing, just knowing, there had to be a catch. By the time he was about four weeks old she was already panic plotting. She’d hide him somewhere. Yes, that’s what she’d do, that’s how she’d prolong the time they had together. Clownish notions, as if she was Death’s jester, thinking up ways to make her laugh by trying to escape her. Veronica and the rosebud stayed exactly where they were, attending all scheduled doctor’s appointments as faithfully as they did mass, and, to everyone’s surprise, the rosebud made it through his first year without major incident.
Then four of his aunts all but abducted him, squabbling between themselves as they passed him from country to country, each one instructing him to call her Mother, or Mamoune, or Omma. Nobody else in Xavier’s family could forget that these four sisters were mothers to children who had only almost been born, or had lived far too briefly. When you thought of that, you knew you didn’t have the right or ability to chastise. So Xavier and two of his cousins were dragged around between aunts for years. Do Yeon-ssi, the fifth sister, was the eldest of Xavier’s aunts. When she thought about what was going on, she felt weak with fear. It was all wholly ordinary and all utterly out of hand. She’d been keeping an eye on Xavier and surreptitiously comparing him to her friends’ twelve-year-old kids. He was all worn out from being given different names and not knowing what to call people or how much affection to show, or whether to bother saying anything at all to anyone since he didn’t know how long it would be before the next sister swooped in. Thinking about all this, Do Yeon-ssi had a talk with Veronica Park. She pointed out that her home was Xavier’s best chance of a stable environment. She’s a person whose sisters don’t love her but fear her, because of all the things she did to guarantee that when they were all growing up. This must be true, since the house of Shin Do Yeon turned out to be the only place Xavier’s other aunts didn’t dare try to take him from.
“Eleven and twelve,” Xavier said. “Those were the years when I was spending a lot of time in compartments like this. Only with people I didn’t know, or just me and a book. It mostly felt safe, but also, how do I put this …”
“Like some kind of incubator for intense encounters?”
“Yes! Even more than stations are. Is it that sticky mix of enclosure and exposure? The temporary privacy? You just get … involved with each other. Can’t avoid it.”
“And where was that? São Paulo?”
“Nope, São Paulo was the year before, I think. This was the route between Paris and Marseilles. By the way, are you completely naked underneath that dressing gown?”
“You’re too easily distracted. And you’re getting nothing from me until you tell all about this French train orgy.”
“Did you see that?” he asked.
“What?”
“I just rolled my eyes. Good, you didn’t see it. So if you do it too, I won’t know. This is perfect.”
When Xavier Shin was eleven years old, the Parisian couple he lived with at the time sent him to boarding school in Provence. They had driven him there and back at the beginning and end of the first few terms, but midway through his second year, partly because both of them liked a drink too much to volunteer as designated driver, they suggested taking the train instead. The journey by train was almost four hours long, and he travelled unaccompanied. That didn’t seem appropriate for a child as soft-spoken and baby-faced as he was, but all he really had to do was find the right platform at Gare de Lyon or at Gare de Marseille St. Charles, sit on the train, and be met on the other side by a responsible adult. Other passengers looked out for him, thinking him neglected or lost, but he was fine. He read comic books, began and completed homework assignments, or he listened to Handel’s water music on his Walkman, imagining that it had been composed for him to listen to aboard a flower-bedecked barge on the river Thames. All of this was more than preferable to the train ride Xavier had taken with a pair of inordinately squiffy parental bodies who’d lugged him from car to car inviting other passengers to quiz him on his weakest academic subjects … That will teach you, Francis Xavier Jae Kyung Shin … that will teach you to get a B in History. Oh, and just like a radioactive rainbow following acid rain, Mamoune’s star turn: accusing a frail old lady of stealing her pearl necklace, snatching the pearls off the lady’s neck, then realising, when she put it on and strand clinked against strand, that she was already wearing the necklace she’d been thinking of. After that Xavier took the train unaccompanied, or he didn’t go at all. That was the ultimatum he made, and they could tell he was serious.
One July afternoon, he was on his way back to those Paris people for the summer, body in his seat, mind hopping backward along the track, gaze holographically layering the chalky ridges that outlined miles and miles of storage crates over the bucolic picture-postcard scenes the windows had shown him just a few minutes ago. He was thinking, Six weeks, six whole weeks. He was at an age where six weeks made the difference between one shoe size and another. He was getting taller and broader and all the rest of it … by autumn he’d practically be somebody else. Bodywise, anyway. Yet he’d still be stuck with the same parental bodies, the ones who’d arranged a best friend and auxiliary friends for him. The best friend and the auxiliary friends were no more interested in Xavier than Xavier was in them, but none of them could escape the unfortunate fate of being the offspring of business associates. On summer afternoons they roamed the grounds of Disneyland Paris, the Palace of Versailles, or t
he Jardin du Luxembourg, each member of the group lost in silent and unsmiling thought, the ones who had real friends keeping an eye on their watches so they could dash off as soon as this chore was over. The group was international in appearance and dressed in varying shades of a colour that had been agreed upon the night before, so they looked like a meditative gang or the junior branch of a cult. Other children would approach in twos and threes and shyly ask if they could join. These were the pastimes that would eat up Xavier’s summer weeks, then a few days before he was due to go back to school, his “what I did over the summer” essay would be dictated to him, with the aid of exhibition catalogs from various galleries the Paris parents had visited by themselves. It had been explained that it wasn’t really lying for Xavier to say that he’d gone along to the galleries too, because that definitely would have happened, if not for the fact that mixed in with the masterworks there were many sights that would be detrimental to his moral and emotional development. Xavier guessed that this year he would write that he had been to the Uffizi, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and the Rijksmuseum, and that he would claim he saw paintings of bread, cheese, apples, vases of flowers, and holy families, just like the ones he said he’d seen at the Courtauld Gallery and Sternberg Palace. He’d write the essay without looking at the pages of the book proffered to him: “This one, see?” He didn’t care for paintings of bread, cheese, apples, vases of flowers, and holy families … they made him want to go out and join a crime syndicate. A much less refined gang than the one he was certain the Paris parents were part of. Yet Xavier Shin would take the dictation without changing a word, shaking his head as he did so. Xavier was the type of kid who scored highly in nonverbal reasoning tests. It was too soon for him to claim to know much about life, but he could tell this wasn’t it. Thinking about the six weeks ahead of him, the schoolboy got all jittery about the legs. He was alone in the compartment, so he didn’t have to make a pretence of composure; he could hunch up, hug his kneecaps, and say, Stop it, stop it. But it continued, bone bashing bone, as if his left leg was hell-bent on pulverising his right, and vice versa.
Xavier told his knees that the people he was living with weren’t that bad. There was that last-minute summer trip he’d taken with the male Paris parent—Xavier had had to go with him because the female Paris parent was away and there was no time to arrange to leave him with anyone. The male Paris parent had received a phone call very early in the morning. He hadn’t said much, only held the phone away from his ear and grimaced as high-decibel howls of hysteria interspersed with heavily accented French ricocheted around the room. A couple of hours later, Xavier and the male Paris parent were on their way to Macao, where they’d taken gondola ride after gondola ride, drifting between the artfully begrimed pillars of a casino’s underground fantasy of Venice. The blue of their gondola was even brighter than the LED sky above, and there were these pastries … little clouds of flaky, butter-fattened flour crowned with silken custard. At some point during the course of these meetings—for it was meetings Xavier’s companion was conducting in these gondolas, the male Paris parent and some third passenger writing out figures on their respective notepads, then either nodding or reaching out to cross out a figure and replace it with a new one more to their liking—the male Paris parent said to Xavier: “This Venice is better than Venice Venice, you know. You have a better time when you’re not expecting anything real. That’s why seriously tacky people manage to enjoy themselves wherever they are.”
There was nothing about the view from their gondola that he didn’t like, so that was how Xavier Shin discovered he was a seriously tacky person. You could wander around Venice Venice during the day, and you could do the same thing at night, but you got more bang for your buck here, because in this cavernous basement it was both day and night. You could see it in the way they were acting, the lovers and the shoppers and the selfie takers and the cocktail-supping bon vivants strolling unhurriedly around this little campo; it was whatever time they wanted it to be. As for the houses that lined the square—they had twice as much personality as they would’ve had if they’d had to choose between a.m. and p.m. The daylight gave the stone facades a feathered glow, and crackles of light from the streetlamps painted thick zigzags of shade over and under the eaves. The combination made the houses look … loud. They seemed inhabited by spirits too high to be contained. You could even fancy that the barcarolles roving across the water originated with the houses, and not some discordant choir of invisible gondoliers (or speakers emitting a looped soundtrack). Xavier wouldn’t really have minded visiting more imitation cities. Disneyland wasn’t the same. There was no amazing aftertaste of citrus-sharp malice after trips to Disneyland, no sense of irreality pouncing upon the real and quite deliberately eating it for breakfast. But the day at the Venetian Macao was a one-off, and he wasn’t allowed to tell anyone about it. Not truthfully, anyway. The official story was that they’d been to Venice Venice. Par for the course, really.
The Paris parents overwhelmed him with their secrecy. Some of it was absolutely necessary in terms of avoiding prison, but there were too many non-illegal matters that they did their utmost to cover up. Things like having vulgar tastes, or not being happy, or being stressed out. He knew that sooner or later they would make him just like them, hiding things instead of dealing with them. Through the window he watched grass turn to water, water to concrete, concrete to scrawny trees, then hedgerows, leaf to stone, then back again, the landscape clothing itself in uninspired uniforms of grey, brown, black, and blue as it jogged alongside the train, no longer expanding the horizon but levelling it. It was as if a great rusty zip was closing in all his senses. Two pairs of police officers boarded the train at Avignon station, blue padded vests and all. A sight rare enough to make him consider not sitting like someone who was possibly hiding something. But they passed his compartment door without saying anything. Clearly they had much bigger fish to fry. Xavier was in the fifth of ten carriages, and he heard four pairs of feet part ways at the furthest door. Two pairs went onward, and two returned, went further back. He kept his head down and stayed as he was for maybe seven stops, legs gathered up against his chest, peering out from under his elbow as the station names changed. Pressing his fingers and thumbs to his patellas had a soothing effect, as if his fingerprints were unlocking the rest of him. Someone wheeling a refreshment cart down the corridor stopped to tell Xavier he seemed dehydrated, and was ignored. “Look, you don’t have to buy a drink, but why sit here alone?” said the vendor. “I don’t know if you saw, but there are police on board, looking for someone. Join the family next door, OK? Don’t give some escaped convict a chance to come in here and cause problems …”
Xavier said, “OK, thanks, I’ll move,” but he didn’t. A cold, slick veil fell between him and all the figures he saw, all the posters advertising films and foodstuffs. Everything swirled and then separated into droplets of oil and sweat. The train stopped and started up again, two passengers breezed into the compartment and took seats facing each other, but he didn’t look up or loosen his grip on his knees. The police officers were still on the train—at least that’s what these newcomers were saying, and he didn’t think escaped convicts could wonder aloud about les flics with quite as unconcerned an air as these two. One of them sounded like a girlish Québécois, and the other voice, much deeper, spoke with an accent that was harder to place. The conductor popped in to check their tickets, and when he’d left, the male voice addressed Xavier in a gruff and grandfatherly way: “Young man, are you in pain? Is there anything we can do for you?”
The directness of the question—“Are you in pain?” replacing more typical formulations like “Are you all right?” or “Hope nothing’s wrong?” almost led Xavier to confess, but after a beat the girlish voice piped up. He guessed she was a couple of years older than him, if that. “Let’s not bother him, Papa. He’s a thinker, thinking …”
“She’s right,” Xavier said into his trousers. “That’s what I’m doing.
But thank you for asking; please enjoy your journey.”
The girl’s delighted “Ha” sparked a haphazard wish for an older sister, someone at home who talked to and about him like this, mocking and affectionate in equal measure. She’d drive everyone completely mad with her cynically idealistic remarks as they grew up—friends, other family members, would be suitors, colleagues, everyone—and he, Xavier Shin, would be her most partisan associate. This sister of his would always be able to say, “Well, Xavier knows what I mean!” even if he didn’t. He listened as the other two arranged their board and discussed the order of play, the grandfatherly sounding father good humouredly fending off accusations of having plotted his own defeat in advance. Hearing them like each other aloud was almost as bad as the leg spasms. He drew such comfort from their company, from their existence, that he almost wished they’d leave. It had been better before they came. Before they’d swanned in, he had almost coaxed himself into thinking that this was what the train home was like for most people, and there was no good reason why things should be different for him. Most people feel themselves depart as they arrive at their station. We’d all like to keep the impressions we just gathered, keep the hope we had and the interest we took in our surroundings; we’d like to be like that all the time and every day, but by the time you get home, that’s all snuffed out. In you go, in you go, creature who dwells in the stationery box, in you go, clutching your withered posy …
Xavier had a hunch that these two were somehow exempt. How had they managed it? They played their board game, and against the backdrop of sound they made (muffled exclamations, drawn out “hmms,” pebbles knocking wood), Xavier heard the name of his station announced. He watched and listened as passengers boarded and disembarked. And as the train swept onward he also glimpsed the male Paris parent standing near the ticket barrier in animated conversation with a station guard, possibly being told a son wasn’t something you could ask about at the Lost Property counter. He emptied his lungs all the way out, then fully restocked. What did he do now that he’d missed his stop and his treacherous legs had very conveniently gone back to normal? Think, he had to think. There was every chance that his two carriage-mates would get off at the very next station, but he wished so much that they would stay awhile. Not for long. Just for, say, three more stops. Then he’d turn around and face the six weeks.
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