Peaces

by Helen Oyeyemi

  The woman’s gun hand held steady throughout, monitoring the girl beside her, whose inactivity she was probably wise to mistrust, before travelling around to Eddy and then back to the girl again. It seemed she thought of Xavier as a teammate now; no looking down the barrel of her pistol for him.

  The train stopped at a station. A silent station, and no one boarded.

  Eddy De Souza said (and Xavier translated): “Madame Hébert—that’s your name, isn’t it, Louise Hébert? I swear to you that I played to the best of my ability that day. And if we played now … fright aside, I would be at my worst. I don’t think about Go for thirty minutes out of every hour the way I used to. My moves are flabby; they’ve had no exercise in years. You’ve already won. You know that.”

  “Yes, yes—in front of an audience that didn’t move or make a sound when my win was confirmed. I remember looking around as the lights beyond the stage came up, expecting to see all the seats empty, since it was so quiet. But they were all there, glaring. There was a little motion here and there as some people shook their heads …”

  “I lost even though I had their support, Madame Hébert. And you won without it. What, then, do you need from those people? You say you came just to play me. Did you forget that I stood up and applauded you? With sincere respect …”

  “And when nobody joined you, it started to look like sarcasm. It was so strange, a few minutes later, struggling to hold up the trophy so a photograph could be taken. I’d gained nothing. In fact, I’d been depleted. It felt like my arms would shatter or something. But I was careful to follow the instructions I’d been given beforehand. In the event of a win, I had to hold the trophy up high so the T-shirt was clearly visible and anyone looking for some small way to partake in the glory would know which brand of soap they should wash their hands with before they Go. The photographer took one quick snap and left …”

  The woman was directing all her answers at Xavier, since all the replies she understood came from him. Light flared through the curtain, and the carriage clattered as it burst out into the sunshine again. The next stop was the last, and it felt as if the driver was picking up speed, intent on the final dash.

  “Madame Hébert—”

  “And then every account of the match added that you hadn’t been in top condition, do you remember that? Your hands had been trembling earlier on, or you had a cold, or something.”

  “I don’t know why anybody would think that. It wasn’t anything I said. If anybody had asked me, I’d have assured them that I wasn’t at any disadvantage. Madame Hébert, I think people were just …”

  Eddy thought for a moment, then asked Xavier for some paper and a pen. Upon receipt of both, he wrote a simple declaration to the effect that he, Duarte De Souza, had been defeated by Louise Hébert, superbly and in all fairness, on such and such a date in Mexico City, and that the title of North American Go Champion for that year was rightfully hers. He signed the note and handed it to her. But he had written it in English, and when Louise Hébert saw that, tears ran down her face. She said: “I don’t know what this says. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have scared you so badly.”

  Xavier indicated that he would read it to her. But she, Louise, the woman with the dove grey pistol, the person whose mind Xavier couldn’t read after all, said: “Time to take my medicine.” She took a small bottle out of her handbag, sprayed some of its contents down her throat, gargled for a second, then tipped her head back and began swallowing Baduk stones exactly as if they were pills.

  Things got hazy for Xavier after that. He understood a bit more when he visited the first arrondissement commissariat that evening. One or the other of the Paris parents had called Do Yeon-ssi—they’d had no plans to let him disappear without a trace, had in fact been panic struck when he hadn’t appeared at Gare de Lyon—and Xavier sat hand in hand with his aunt as they watched some footage from the train. He hadn’t been able to see any of the onboard cameras, but they were of course right there recording, though the footage could only be viewed remotely and with a time delay. The security guard who had been watching had been quite tentative about raising the alarm at first. The sleeping passengers in the carriages on either side of the Go carriage hadn’t fallen asleep instantaneously, or even en masse. It had happened a couple of stops after the police had disembarked, and it had all looked natural enough. One passenger settling down to sleep, the sight of which reminded another passenger that they too could do with a nap. It happens. Just like with yawning … someone yawns and then you have to as well, you just have to, even if you’re not tired. The woman-with-a-gun-swallowing-stones situation was much less ambiguous, though nobody was quite sure how to proceed regarding the girl Hébert had assaulted. Laura De Souza. Laura, who’d snatched up the pistol, pressed it against Louise Hébert’s forehead, and eventually managed to pull the trigger after a lot of fumbling. The woman’s patience while the girl worked out how to fire should’ve clued her in … It was a broken, empty-chambered weapon anyway. So far so good, the girl isn’t a murderer even if she wanted to be. And there were aggravating circumstances for her fear and animosity … but as the guard reviewed the footage, he still felt that maybe they should do something about the girl. He didn’t know what, but something. Especially at the point where one of the Baduk stones Louise Hébert was taking medicinally finally went down the wrong way and the woman began to cough and clutch at her throat (Eddy De Souza could be seen falling across the table, seizing her by the shoulders, and pounding on her back—it’s probably too much to expect a North American Go Champion to be well acquainted with CPR). While Eddy was getting on with that, Xavier pulled the emergency cord and pounded on the train windows, but Laura … Laura De Souza was back for murder attempt number two, stuffing more stones into Madame Hébert’s trembling mouth. The officer paused the tape and asked Xavier: “What’s Mademoiselle De Souza shouting here?”

  Xavier cleared his throat. “He lost! He lost! How can a loser pick on another loser! Just die. Just—”

  “OK, I get the gist. This was in French?”

  “Yes.”

  The point at which Madame Hébert lost consciousness was far from clear; the limp figure of Hébert jerked between help and harm for another minute or two as the De Souzas’ tug-of-war continued. Then the transport police arrived on the scene. They did have to focus on Hébert; there was the false police tip-off, the intimidation and assault, and, of course, the sedation of her fellow passengers. But some note should probably be made about the girl as well …

  Do Yeon-ssi muttered in Korean: “What will you write in the note? That the girl has a competitive spirit?”

  Xavier was looked to for a translation, and when he didn’t provide one, the officer decided that Do Yeon-ssi was asking whether Louise Hébert was pressing charges against Laura De Souza. She wasn’t. Nor the De Souzas against her.

  *

  “Laura,” I said. “That was the girl’s name?”

  “Laura De Souza. I’ll never forget.”

  A Laura with a jolly demeanour, hints of a horrible temper, and a strong insistence on following behavioural codes …

  But it couldn’t be. What were the odds?

  Suddenly I absolutely had to see where we were, or at least get an inkling of where we were going. I stepped out of my shoes and walked across the long seat, stopping at the window and running my hands along the insides and outsides of the window casements. It really shouldn’t have been that hard to access a source of light.

  “Is this called Clock Carriage because the darkness is meant to reset your biorhythm?” Xavier asked. There was a smile in his voice.

  “No, it’s so you can take me back in time with you … and I was glad to go. But it’s great to be back. With you and Árpád, and without a Baduk board.”

  Just as Xavier told me not to try to make Baduk the villain of the piece, my fingertips struck a long oval button and the blinds rustled open. He came to stand beside me. We were crossing a long iron bridge that arched across a turquo
ise river. The window glass was so clean and clear that it felt as if we could dive straight from the train into the water below. The sun followed us for a while, and just as it sank beneath the mossy riverbank, Árpád slunk out of the compartment. Sunset sent up ribbons of gold that looped themselves around our clasped hands and, before too long, our entwined bodies.

  Sometime later the moon came up—I say “sometime” … it felt like only a minute, but it can’t have been that quick. By then Xavier and I had ventured into the other empty compartments and found our carriage’s equivalent of a restaurant car, a well-stocked pantry carriage. Fridge highlights included bottles of white wine and champagne and a bottle of vodka, and there was a dining table by the central window, also bearing gifts: a bottle of Kentucky bourbon and a tub filled to the brim with crispy pieces of salted egg fish skin. Our favourite drinking snack! Xavier lifted the tub and revealed a notecard: To Otto and Xavier—here’s to unseeing the world—Ava.

  Next we converted the carriage seats into a bed, with a zone prioritised for Árpád, who’d returned for supper and lay on his belly chewing worms, seemingly as transfixed by the graphic gleam of that night’s moon as I was. The absence of light switches and accessible power sockets was intentional—all charging of devices was to be done in the pantry carriage next door. There in Clock Carriage, Xavier’s phone aside, the sky was both lamp and blindfold. Cue the woo-woo perceptions: Maybe this is what it would be like to live inside a clock, or even to be a clock, I thought. Time would tell itself to you, bringing with it a whole host of physical memoranda, the flaring and dwindling of this orb and that. Time would crowd in close that you didn’t feel it passing. “Clocks don’t actually know the time,” I said to Árpád. “They only repeat what they’ve been told.”

  Árpád looked round at me. A You all right, mate? kind of look. Xavier anthropomorphises Árpád too: at that very moment he said, “You all right, mate?” in a voice that approximated the scratchy, whistling sound of Árpád’s call. Then, indicating the moon in the heavens, he added in his own voice: “I try not to look. I’d rather see it sketched or in paint. Otherwise all I can think about is the hundred and eighty something kilos of garbage we’ve already managed to leave up there. Ninety-six bags of piss and fecal matter …”

  “Mucky puppies, astronauts. But you’re absolutely confident, are you, that in their place you’d have managed to hold it all in until you got home?”

  “Ugh … I know it couldn’t be helped. And I don’t have any better space travel waste disposal ideas. But I’m just … I feel bad that this is what it is to be human, Otto. To journey that far on wings so painstakingly won, all those centuries of artistic dreams and scientific thought … only to arrive with bags and bags of waste. In the end, that’s what we produce the most of, isn’t it? And maybe it’s what we’re best at.”

  He balanced his e-reader atop the “V” of his crossed ankles, reached for the vodka bottle, and poured another two shots. He’s the only other person I know who can read, drink, and converse at the same time, and his drunken TED Talks take on a different character depending on what he’s reading. What I really want is to get him sloshed when he’s on a Wodehouse jag, to see whether he leans Jeeves-ward or Wooster-ward. But that evening it was The Brothers Karamazov. We were playing a drinking game within parameters he’d devised but hadn’t shared with me. I just took a shot whenever he did. Whatever it was we were drinking about, he seemed to find it in every page. As if that wasn’t enough, it felt like the speed of the train was accelerating the effects of the alcohol. I was leaving the pleasantly drunk phase and approaching nausea. Oh, to be like Xavier, Spera, or other friends who treat throwing up as a kind of debauchery tax that they can quickly pay before getting straight back to the merrymaking …

  I downed the shot Xavier held out to me, swallowed hard, then took both our empty glasses and stacked them over the lid of the vodka bottle. I put the bottle out of easy reach, did the same thing with Xavier’s e-reader, then rolled over, gathering him into my arms and nipping his earlobe when he grumbled that all I was going to do was nod off.

  “Let’s get out at the next station,” Xavier said.

  “Even if it’s the sort of station only freight trains stop at and we have to wait days ’til we can hitch a ride back?”

  “Even if by the time we get back Do Yeon-ssi’s signed the house and our lives over to our friend Yuri. Let’s get off this train.”

  “Huh. Mind telling me why?”

  “At the risk of sounding like a thirty-something-looking teenager on Dawson’s Creek, I just really need to know where we are.”

  “Well … you’re not asking too much there.”

  I thought, but didn’t say, that there was something vaguely compulsive about the way that when we were together we thought and talked about anything and everything except the train we were on. But that was probably our issue, not the train’s.

  Instead I told him: “You’re Joey, I think. Always had a soft spot for that girl.”

  “Say that again? Couldn’t understand you, since you’re already slurring …”

  “Shhhh … you’re slurring. I’m Pacey.”

  “You wish,” he said. “You’re Dawson. Don’t fight it.”

  “Hey, I’ve got a train story too …”

  “Is it from today?”

  It was from the year before, when Árpád and I had attended an international mesmerism convention in Springfield, Illinois. The conference had ended, and we were on our way to New York to visit a cousin of mine who’d adopted one of Árpád’s littermates. Ours was a pretty abstracted carriage. Everybody was reading or responding to written messages on phones and tablets, and Árpád was very still in the seat opposite me, wearing the special floppy-brimmed hat that slows him down while those members of the public unused to mongooses get comfortable with the idea of him. The brim of that hat is embroidered all around the inside: birds and frogs flying and hopping across a grassy vista. While Árpád was intently regarding all this, a couple boarded at Chicago’s Union Station and sat across the aisle from us, both of them fresh-faced, long-haired, extensively tattooed, and engrossed in a conversation they seemed to have begun hours before. The more talkative half of the couple was an actor I recognised at once but pretended not to. The show she was on was still somewhat under the radar. Season one had been streamable for three months or so, and the buzz around it was only just building among those who’d already binged all the big shows and were searching really hard for alternatives to reruns of Friends. The actor’s partner was a good listener, but aside from that, a mostly unknown element. The actor had hit a career speed bump, you see. She’d been the show’s co star but wouldn’t be returning for season two. Someone named Carla (the actor’s agent, presumably) had told her it was because she was too pretty. Viewers didn’t find her relatable. The actor knew there must be more to it than that; she just didn’t know what. She was also strangely content with the way she looked, so undergoing any kind of procedure was out of the question. I say “strangely content” because how often do you come across someone who doesn’t want to reduce this or increase that?

  At any rate, the actor was saying she’d just try to get as much voice work as she could. That way, even if it took a really long time to become relatable, even if it took so long that her looks expired, at least she’d have developed as an actor. Having made this statement of intent, she laid her head on her partner’s shoulder and submitted to her protective embrace. After a moment, the partner cleared her throat … Uh, I think you’re right, hun. It’s not the way Carla says it is. Maybe I should have said something earlier, maybe not, but … this could all be down to that online petition.

  What petition! Show me.

  The man in the seat next to mine had been eavesdropping as hard as I was, but he didn’t know the actor’s name or what show she appeared in. He googled season 2 + petition, couldn’t find anything, and wordlessly acquiesced as I took the phone from him and supplied the missing terms t
hat made the query fruitful. We studied the petition together. The number of signees correlated with the show’s just-shy-of-respectable viewing figures at the time. The signees demanded that the “too pretty” actor’s lines and scenarios be given to her co lead, who played an ugly version of her. The tremendous attractiveness of the ugly co lead was a topic for another time. Us normals are too grotesque to be seen in public, so we’d better just stay at home watching TV … Isn’t that what such casting choices tell us? The petition saved all that for season 3 and simply argued that the silliest thing about season 1 was the division of this particular role between two actors when one of them had sufficient range to play both an ugly and a pretty version of the same person without a single costume alteration. Ostensibly, someone somewhere in the decision-making chain had listened to the viewers and had left it to the too-pretty actor’s agent to let her down as gently as possible. Looking around the carriage at my fellow eavesdroppers, I could see which side each passenger was on. It was America, so people spoke up too, stopping on their way to or from the toilets or the restaurant car to express outrage at the turns mass entertainment was taking (“What’s next; will they want to decide what does and does not happen in the story? Those losers should just stick to Choose Your Own Adventure books!”), or to tell the pretty actor they would sign a counter-petition in her favour. The actor hadn’t realised how loudly she’d been talking, and she blushed all the way down to her ankles. I got her autograph to cover for my own frequent staring. It wasn’t the actor I’d grown interested in, but the woman she was with. This companion’s tactful and compassionate utterances indicated she was everything you could wish for in a life partner. Except that she was the very person who’d started the online petition. She must’ve brought it up because she couldn’t quite bear going altogether incognito; it’s very hard not to resist boasting about your accomplishments. I can’t prove anything, I’m going on micro-expressions alone … but don’t forget I’m hyperaware of those, having been trained to focus on them. So I stand by my observation. As we all filed off the train at Penn Station, I caught the actor’s eye, gave her a bearer-of-the-gladdest-tidings-type smile and predicted that everything was going to be all right. I did the same to her partner. Both paused as they briefly contemplated battle plans, then both smiled back at me. Affirmation bright and dark. “Yes, it will, won’t it?” the actor said, and her partner said: “Absolutely!”