Peaces

by Helen Oyeyemi

  He dropped his feet onto the floor, raised his arms, rolled his neck around a few times to get the crick out of it, looked at the grandfatherly father and then at the girl. A stocky black man with a button nose and so many smile lines his entire mouth area looked crumpled. His daughter resembled him about the nose but had otherwise branched out on her own with a patron-saint-of-adventuresses look. Twinkly eyes, masses of frank forehead, and a halo of curls. They were playing Baduk. The girl’s hand hovered above the square she’d just chosen, and Xavier could see why she’d been cross in advance about her dad letting her win. She’d probably thought she was a Baduk genius, had never lost a game since birth … until she’d faced an opponent other than this man, who was mysteriously and embarrassingly bad at Baduk. Both father and daughter were older than he’d expected. The girl looked about sixteen, and the man about sixty. Xavier didn’t seem to look the way they’d thought he would either—he supposed he seemed younger. The surprise wasn’t unpleasant on either side, though the girl did raise her eyebrows and ask if Xavier was a runaway or what.

  Which led him to consider what exactly he was. He came to some conclusions he couldn’t share. His mouth couldn’t say that he’d been given one shell to inhabit, only one—the obedient son of the Paris parents. And now that he’d passed the station where the male Paris parent was waiting for him, that shell was in pieces, and he’d fallen out, neither solid nor liquid, but a wisp of air, easily dispersed. Doubtless they’d already begun—phone calls, messages, arrangements: “Yes, same as last time.” The Paris parents had had other sons, boys from other branches of his family they’d taken guardianship of with promises to turn them into cultured and highly educated men. Disappointments one and all. So now, again, the things in the son’s room would be given away, his withdrawal from school records would be made in absentia, and anybody who’d ever had anything to do with him would be made aware that he’d been sent abroad. To a better school, or for treatment, because his health had taken a very serious downturn. Even if he went back to them now, one or the other of them would be on the way to Switzerland or somewhere, passport in hand, more than capable of looking him quite calmly in the face and saying, “This is very sad, and I do hope you find your own parents, but my son is very sick, my partner is with him right now, I’m just on my way to visit them.” He had deliberately missed his stop, and that was how he’d become a secret, to be walled up in darkness along with all the other matters the Paris parents couldn’t let anybody know about. Xavier was so frightened he was sure his heart would implode, but he smiled at the girl and her father. He was thinking: Even if this is it for me, I’ll be smiling as I go. I want the Paris parents to find out about it and wonder what that crazy little bastard was smiling about as he died … and as they ask themselves about that I want them to feel like something’s coming for them …

  Xavier told them he was on a trip with his mother. And if you want to make a list of things that are scary, put words at the top. Because just as the girl and her father had begun to gently dismantle Xavier’s assertion—his mother had been gone for quite a while, hadn’t she, where were her things, and so on—a woman who could very easily pass as Xavier’s mother stepped into the compartment and sat down with them. Age, check; face just as Korean as his was, check; soft drink brought back from the restaurant car for her patiently waiting son, check. Two drinks, actually. One for him and one for the girl, whose name he still didn’t know.

  “Oof, such a queue …,” the woman said. Her soft, raspy accent was familiar to him—it was from Burgundy, just like his favourite French teacher, who always sounded as if he was talking through a mouthful of sugar cubes. But the accent was the only thing Xavier recognised. Everything else about the woman was like a warning not to lie, never, ever to lie unless you wanted what you said to come true. She was wearing an SNCF uniform, navy and red, but she whirled her loose hair up into a bun, pulled a gauzy white shawl out of a leather tote, and draped it around her shoulders as she took her seat beside the girl Xavier had imagined was his sibling. The newcomer proceeded to slap a can of Ricqlès down in front of each of the two youngest passengers, who now found themselves facing each other with identical wide-eyed stares, as if perhaps this being who’d gone from SNCF employee to archetype of chic maternity in two seconds flat could still be banished if only they didn’t make eye contact with her. They sought out the emergency cord instead. Xavier couldn’t see it, so he had to assume the girl had her eyes fixed on it. It was high up and to the right of his head, far from the window. Quite a scramble, even if you could count on not being tackled before you got there.

  “Draw the curtains and drink up, kids,” the woman said, gesturing with something pearl grey that seemed to fold over and under the lines of her hand—a gauntlet? Xavier glanced at it: it was an exceedingly ladylike pistol. The girl’s father, who had actually been looking at the woman, had caught this development in real time. No wonder he’d kept his reaction minimal. The girl arranged the curtains from her side, and Xavier mirrored her actions. Xavier opened his can of minty fizz, and so did the girl. Now looking anywhere but at each other, they drank up, somehow managing not to choke. The woman turned the pistol on the girl’s father, who rubbed his face hard and in slow motion, trying to wake himself up. At the count of ten …

  “You’re going to shoot me? Why?”

  The man looked at the woman as he asked this, and the question was posed in English. The woman took a pair of handcuffs from her tote and threw them over to Xavier, who caught them reflexively, though he fumbled with the keys she threw half a second later. “Cuff his ankles,” she instructed in French, then tapped her gun against the tabletop. “Quickly. Now.”

  Kneeling on the carriage floor, flinching in expectation of kicks to the face administered either by the man or his daughter, Xavier mumbled apologies as he snapped the cuffs around silk-clad ankles. He rose, slid the keys across the table to this newly materialised mother of his, and she jangled them in the man’s direction and addressed him in French: “No running off, sir. We’re about to play Go.”

  Still in English, the man said, “The police will pass by soon. They’ll see this. Is that OK with you?”

  The woman looked down at the Baduk board and then swept the grid clean with one hand, sending stones shooting in every direction. The man put his hand on Xavier’s arm, asking in English: “Young man, do you understand me?”

  Xavier nodded.

  “But she doesn’t, right?”

  Xavier looked across the table at the woman who so urgently wanted to play Go that she was prepared to play it under these conditions, with an ankle-cuffed opponent and a pistol in one hand. She had liquid labyrinths for eyes, and the more the man spoke English to her and to Xavier, the more likely it began to seem that she was going to shoot them all. It was very, very difficult to tell if this was language-barrier frustration or a more general irritability. Xavier avoided taking linguistic sides by shrugging.

  “Can you tell her,” the man said. “Can you tell her that even though she would rather talk in French, I can’t right now. I was never fluent in the first place, and right now—it’s all gone. I’m pissing myself here. Because of my daughter … just ask her to let my daughter go first. Fuck. The girl never wanted to take this trip anyway. Who cares about that bar in Montmartre where the pianist has his newspaper set up in front of him in place of a music score and all the regulars know to leave the street door open so the breeze can turn the pages for him; you’d better just care about that sort of thing on your own, that’s what my daughter says. Let’s send Laura away first; then we can talk any way she wants.”

  Xavier could have squeaked, And what about me? But saved his breath. The girl didn’t say anything either, though it was clear that if she was going to pick a battle, it would be the one against any heroics her dad tried to pull.

  “He seems upset,” the woman said to Xavier. “What did he just say?”

  The boy hesitated. He wasn’t so sure that she did
n’t already understand. But he couldn’t think of a reason for her to test him like this. Then again, he couldn’t think of a reason for anything she’d done so far.

  He’d wavered too long: the man’s daughter answered for him. “He wants to know why you’re doing this,” the girl said, and then came the uncanny quiet of the minute or two that followed, the little coughing sounds she made as the woman pistol-whipped her, the flailing of her hands. She sank down into the corner of her seat, her face turned to the wall, her breathing shallow but regular.

  Having made her point, the woman turned to Xavier and asked again. “What did he say?”

  Xavier was quick with his answer this time: “Right now he’s saying please, please.”

  “And before?”

  Xavier told her, hoping panic hadn’t altered his memory. The woman took a sip of Xavier’s drink as she listened, and then she said: “Well, yes. That can happen to the best of us: going blank at moments when it’s really important to get things right. Good thing you’re here.”

  She told Xavier to pick up the Baduk stones and put the black stones on her side and the white stones on the man’s side. She talked as he did so, telling the man they were going to play until the last stop. The man nodded, his gaze flitting from his daughter to the window to the compartment door … How was he going to play Baduk with his pupils sliding in and out of focus like that …

  The man was saying: “Why isn’t anybody coming? Oh God, what has this woman done … Why isn’t anybody even passing by?” The man’s daughter stirred, and the man kept his eyes on her from then on, his tone softening as he spoke to her; Xavier didn’t understand what he was saying, but it sounded as if he was trying to keep her as alert as possible, asking her to keep her eyes open, something like that. “Laura … Laurinha …” Whatever it was the man had said, it served to rouse the girl somewhat; she answered him in French, muttering that he should clear his mind and just play. She told him to make sure to win and that she was cheering him on. “Proud of you, Dad …” She seemed to have decided that they were at a tournament. She agreed to keep her eyes open a little while longer.

  Xavier watched the woman with apprehension; she’d grown misty-eyed, and it couldn’t be the case that she was touched by her own handiwork. She sighed, leaned forward, and told Xavier he was sitting next to a brilliant man.

  OK, he was sitting next to a brilliant man, and she was sitting beside a barely conscious girl who was leaking blood from her left ear. As for why nobody had come … Xavier very clearly pictured every passenger in the carriages on either side slumped in their seats—it wouldn’t have been free goodies offered from the refreshment cart that would’ve sent them to dreamland. People can be so picky and you can’t always rely on them to accept free food or drink, so she’d probably secreted some kind of canister above the back wheels of the cart and trundled through those carriages with a heady haze in her wake, not thick enough to cause wheezing but conspicuous enough to cause complaints about not being able to open the windows before everybody nodded off. Xavier didn’t know what he and this woman really had to do with each other, but he felt like he’d been cursed with an ability to read only one mind: the one he least wished to.

  “A brilliant man,” the woman repeated. “Duarte De Souza.”

  The man mumbled, “Call me Eddy …”

  The woman paused to glare at him, then continued: “He was North American Go champion for seven years in a row. And, you know, eligibility is on a geographical basis, not a cultural one. So you’ve got the cream of America and Canada’s considerable crop, you’ve also got contestants from twenty-one other countries, and you’ve also got contenders from eleven independent territories and I can’t remember how many islands. But Monsieur De Souza sent them all packing for seven years! People started saying the things they’ve always said about virtuosity. They’d say he had a pact with the devil, or that he was a robot … Actually, some engineers started building a robot of their own, to see if it could learn enough about the game to beat him, but he retired before they could finish.”

  “Ah,” said Xavier. North American Go champion. Could such a person actually exist? She might as well have said the man sat beside him was Fantômas—that seemed more likely. Xavier looked at Eddy, to see if he’d understood the woman. He had, and he said: “That’s a very selective view. She neglects to mention that once a North American Go champion tries to compete internationally, forget about it. I was never able to clear the preliminary round for the LG Cup. She should pick on someone else.”

  The woman listened with knitted brow, then turned to Xavier with an enquiring expression.

  “He says …” Xavier took a deep breath, today was lies-come-true day, plus he thought he could guess what she wanted to hear. “He says he remembers you. You play to an international standard, not just regional, that’s what he said. You’re LG Cup standard.” Surely a little flattery couldn’t hurt?

  The woman reached for Xavier’s can of Ricqlès, then changed her mind mid-reach. There could be no toilet breaks, so she had to pace herself. She began to count the Baduk stones on her side of the board instead. Without looking up, she said: “Hmmm … he’s lying about remembering me. I don’t look like I did back then. The prison years show.”

  The bit about prison seemed to ring a bell and earned her a piercing glance from Eddy, then a much longer second look. He nudged Xavier. “This person … this person already beat me,” he said. “It was my second-to-last championship tournament, and she broke my eight-year winning streak. She was magnificent. I can’t believe it’s her …”

  What … they really had met before? Plus, Xavier had had to leave a bit out. Eddy’s words of awed approval included something along the lines of “this person wrecked my strategy like a quickly scattering pair of evil bitch demon pincers.” Which exceeded Xavier’s own French vocabulary limit. He says your strategy was … like a force of a nature? Nah. The part of him that would grow up to be a ghostwriter was already evaluating how convincingly he could pass his own voice off as someone else’s.

  She wasn’t the type who slowed down for compliments anyway. “If you remember that much, sir, then you must remember all the letters I wrote to you afterwards,” she said.

  “Letters?” said Eddy (in English), and then Xavier (in French).

  “You never replied. Perhaps you never read past the part where I demanded a rematch. Mere formalities: I didn’t really have any hope that you’d agree to that of your own free will. But I do want to know—” The woman had finished counting the black stones and stretched a hand across the board to count the white stones. “Did you truly play your best that day?”

  Eddy and Xavier babbled in duet: Of course Eddy had been playing his best. The game became a matter of not losing, of not being humiliated in front of the crowd of spectators who’d come to see Eddy De Souza beat a young upstart nobody had even heard of before this tournament. He’d drawn on every resource he had in order to withstand her aggression. And he’d still lost.

  “A weed, your fans were calling me. And you were the mighty pesticide. Some people came up to you backstage wearing ‘Mighty Pesticide’ T-shirts—”

  “Do you think I liked any of that?” (Eddy’s English words were faithfully echoed in French, though Xavier took care to point at Eddy when he said “I” …)

  “You signed their T-shirts, Monsieur De Souza. So I don’t know what to think. But that doesn’t matter. I could hardly say anything about T-shirts when I was wearing my own floral-print monstrosity with the logo of a soap company and ‘WASH YOUR HANDS BEFORE YOU GO’ printed on the front and back. I’d had to talk a local manufacturer into sponsoring me; there was no other way I’d have been able to fly to Mexico City for the final. And I had to play you. There are more skilled technicians than you, but you’re the lyric poet of this game. You saved me without knowing it. I’d just lost my job at a stationery company in Gatineau. But things like that are hardly rare, are they. I’d been promised promotions and a pen
sion and all the rest of it, and then one of my superiors messed up some figures. Perhaps with criminal intent, but more probably out of laziness, I think, knowing that guy. I wasn’t quick enough to get out of the way when he turned around to point the finger. And I was clueless right up until the final meeting with Human Resources. I asked about my cardboard box. You always see it on TV and at the cinema—the employee walking away from their desk with the cardboard box full of personal effects. And the gentleman at HR said, ‘Look, if you want a box, we’ll sell you one for fourteen dollars, but don’t you already have some plastic bags somewhere, you could just use those.’ Oh yes, I could have taken the company to court, gone bankrupt, and probably still lost the case … Instead I took my severance pay and left with my plastic bags, completely demoralised. I didn’t even have the heart to try to change what was on record about my dismissal. That I was an untrustworthy employee and so on. I did temp work when I could get it, and I read the papers … There was an article about you. The photo of you was just a photo, the face of a winner, so what? But there was another picture, of the board at the end of the game you’d just won. You’d played white. Night had fallen all across the board, but you’d exploded stars all the way across it and even brought the moon crashing down right in the middle. Stars, moon, that’s not really what I mean, but … I saw it when I closed my eyes. I can still reproduce the pattern stone for stone right now. But seeing it all develop … that’s different, better. Watching your games made me feel as if I could begin again. Even as I placed the losing stones, I shared in the making of the art. So I was fine just playing until I won enough games for it to be clear that this wasn’t just love of the game—there was aptitude too. Then I got greedy. It was a three-year project, competing until I qualified for the tournament, then working my way up the ranking so I could play you. All I studied were the kingdoms you laid out on the board. Your orthodoxies, your breaks with convention, your gambits. And the funny thing is, knowing those inside and out were almost enough for me to beat my other opponents. I did have to tamper with the schedule a bit, eliminate a couple of people I knew I couldn’t beat so I’d be assigned new opponents with less intimidating game history. But it was all arranged so that I wouldn’t be found out until after the final, and I was willing to do the time. I don’t know that I even wanted to beat you, sir. I just wanted that game. Every fifth or sixth move a meteor flight … Ah, this moon-and-stars talk again. That’s what you lyric poets do to us. You reveal the indescribable, and then we go gaga.”