Peaces

by Helen Oyeyemi

  16.

  XAVIER SHIN

  Dear Ava,

  I never heard the name Přemysl Stojaspal until I came aboard this train. Having read the other contributions (apart from Otto’s—I don’t think we will consult each other’s recollections), I’m of the opinion that “Přem” refers to a person who will not be seen again. The fire that almost every other contributor to this file mentions: let’s just say that fire took him. But what I’m seeing is that there was something that “Přem” wanted. Wants? What if his longing outlasts him? What if this longing actually is him, and he was a living, breathing strategy for its fulfilment?

  I’m thinking of the ways your Přem bridged supply and demand. There he was as the son who was a credit to his father, the kidney donor who couldn’t have been a better match if he’d been tailor made. There he was as Allegra Yu’s social gatekeeper. There he was sending Mr. Lin to Laura at the exact moment she felt she needed to meet someone … well, someone just like Mr. Lin. And so on. And when I look at matters in those light … as arrangements rather than relationships, the primary mover starts to look … familiar.

  Four years ago, I met an acutely alluring man, and we got attached fast. There wasn’t really enough mutual support for me to call it a relationship, but there wasn’t anything illicit about it, so I can’t call it an affair either. Anyway, we were together for four months. And a matter of days after we broke up, I met another man—a cutely alluring one this time, and embarked on a similarly brief yet heavy fling that lasted four months. I’d never had a year like that and hopefully never will again … when Christmas came around, I was practically a nervous wreck and had to give myself the gift of a period of solitude and chastity.

  Ava, I believe the two men who left me in that state were the same person.

  I’m not talking about a personality type. I’m stating that the second man was the first man revisiting me with a different approach. Until convinced otherwise, that is what happened.

  I met the first man, Raúl Mateus, on the very first day of May 2015. This was at the wedding of two friends, one of whom I’d been in unrequited love with for years. Lovelier still: the friend who was not my unrequited love had asked me to help write his wedding speech … which had turned into me writing the whole thing. I watched that friend saying almost everything I wished I could say to the only man I would ever love, and the other guests laughed and went “awww” at the appropriate points. As for the fucker who should have been marrying me but was marrying a nice, nurturing boy who didn’t even know what to say to him on the first day of the rest of their lives together, only planned to be there and keep on being there, steady pom pi pi … I couldn’t even look at my stolen groom’s face. I was drunker than I’d ever been, and I remember quite openly patting myself on the shoulder and saying, “It’s OK, Xavier, you’re doing well, and it will all work out in your next life.” A bearded Mr. Short, Dark, and Handsome sat down next to me, handed me some mint tea, and kept his arm around the back of my chair while I sipped the tisane and started to sober up. He had very striking hazel eyes and had accentuated them with turquoise eyeliner and black mascara. When he looked at me birds, bees, butterflies, dragons, bats, every winged thing you can think of got together and threw a debutante ball in my thorax. I think I dribbled wine.

  Raúl asked me if I’d written the wedding speech, and I neither confirmed nor denied, but asked why he was asking. He said that during certain passages my mouth had moved in unison with the speaker’s. He said I was a good writer. I advised him not to say such things; I said if he kept it up, I might end up going home with him. His response: Did I say a good writer? I meant a very good writer. Back at his place a couple of hours later, he kept up the consoling assertions as I removed his three-piece suit. He was about ten years older than me and had this Buenos Aires accent that lent a tone of good-humoured irony to almost everything he said. But he wasn’t bullshitting me with that opinion that I could write. He ghostwrote biographies himself and put me in touch with a commissioning editor at the publishing house he most frequently published with. Krakamiche Press … the one founded by Karel Stojaspal. I sent in a portfolio of writing samples and was finally able to detach myself from the payroll of Do Yeon-ssi’s company, where I’d been drawing a salary for playing the half-secretarial, half-ambassadorial role of Decorative Nephew. I still work with that editor, and the classical-music-world names he pairs me with, even though Raúl doesn’t anymore.

  Raúl … my relationship with him burned out fast. We were both stunned, Raúl and I, when I blurted out that I loved him. I did, I think. At least, I remember why I thought so. When we spent time with the newlywed banes of my life, I hardly felt a pang and was mostly focused on Raúl. I took that as a sign of something profound.

  Raúl told me he loved me too, and immediately proposed marriage … which was much too much. I told him I’d think about it and immersed myself in what I thought of as writerly life. Mostly holing myself up in my room working on my own (very bad) novel and hobnobbing with any literary types who happened to be around. I almost neglected the ghostwriting project I was actually under contract for, going through the motions with these lacklustre interviews with this ninety-something-year-old conductor whose life story I was supposed to be writing. We were quite fed up with each other, the conductor and I. She was frustrated at not being able to organise her thoughts well enough to write the book herself, and I had such an inflated view of my own abilities I felt they were wasted on trying to channel this conductor’s voice. Eventually, with deadlines breathing down my neck and the editor expressing grave reservations regarding the pages I’d sent in, Raúl listened to the interview tapes with me and gave all these sensitive and patient suggestions … Every time I came to him he thought of questions I should be asking and allusions I should be picking up on … The conductor and I started talking, really talking with each other … The project started to flow … and in among the e-mails from my new debut author friends and the e-mails from the editor at Krakamiche, one came in from Raúl, saying he couldn’t be with me anymore. He didn’t say why. I’d got around to telling him I couldn’t marry him, but I don’t think that was it. I replied to Raúl’s e-mail—several times, actually—apologizing for neglecting him, trying to explain myself, promising to improve, asking if we could meet in person to talk things over. He didn’t write back. It was only when friends asked me what had happened with my wedding date that I realised they all thought I had invited him to Tom and Thahan’s wedding. None of our friends knew Raúl, or had run into him before that day.

  Maybe Raúl—“Raúl,” I guess—had observed the desperation I was feeling over Thahan and thought to recycle it. Or upcycle it … alchemise it, even. He thought he could take the commonplace lead of that heartache I felt was killing me and turn it into …

  Well. There I hit my limit. Whatever it was he had in mind, he very quickly realised I’m a miracle-free zone, and he cut his losses just as quickly.

  If so, what was part two about? In September of that same year, 2015, I tried to turn my very bad novel into a goodish novel by subjecting it to a change of scene … I took it to my local library and worked on it there. That’s where I met a librarian named Tolay Gul. He was also short and dark—I suppose that was my type at the time, guys you could mistake for Thahan from behind—but Tolay was scruffier, goofier, with a classic jolie laide grin and a big, booming laugh. I couldn’t quite predict what would amuse him … sometimes I couldn’t even predict where in the house he’d be when I woke up in the morning. I went from a couple of months of sleeping and waking all entangled with Raúl to waking up in an empty bed and opening cupboard doors cautiously in case Tolay was hiding in there. The cupboard under the sink seemed to be his favourite—open the door and out Tolay would roll with an ear-splitting cry: Ciiiiiiiiaoooooooo bambini!

  Raúl only seemed to read newspapers, English and South American classic novels, and writing manuals … He was the guy who’d set me up with a ghostwriting gig
and enjoyed quietly discussing practicalities in some corner of a gastropub. Tolay, on the other hand, had read every avant-garde text going, made spot-on book recommendations, and was generally very circus circus and cocktail bars. His favourite one had the severed limbs of Barbie dolls dangling from the ceiling. We lounged about with drinks, showing each other YouTube clips on our phones. And in the heavens tiny fists slapped tiny knees and set thighs aquiver with yearning, distress, mirth …

  In spite of all the differences between Raúl and Tolay, from tastes and interests to manner to body language to expression of libido to way of speaking (could it have been that they were too different?) I found myself addressing Tolay as Raúl. I did that without wanting to or meaning to; it just happened. Tolay neither corrected me, nor seemed surprised or offended. A couple of times over at Tolay’s place, I started to explain who Raúl is, or who he had been to me, anyway, but each time Tolay put some music on, turned his speakers up extra loud, and started doing star jumps.

  I scrapped the novel I’d been working on while I met him and started a new one—a narrative so far from my everyday thoughts and interests that it felt inspired—indeed, some nights I dreamt that Tolay dictated whole passages of it. In the morning I found those nighttime scenes saved in the same document as the other chapters. The tale concerned a priest who tries to build a new type of instrument. A silent harpsichord that assigns a shade of colour to each note on the musical scale and displays those colours when a piece of music is played. He experiments with rapidly whirling rainbow ribbons and with stained glass. But the people will not allow the instrument to exist. Not even as an idea. A squad of philosophers attack it on a theoretical level, and musicians and music lovers decry it as neither entertaining nor gratifying to the senses. Over the course of his lifetime, the priest has witnessed people defend and condone concepts ten times as wicked and twenty times as dull as his ocular harpsichord. He’s stunned by the resistance to the thought he’s attempting to finish, and he enters a crisis of faith that he’s never really able to leave.

  Zainab Rashid would instantly have recognized what I wrote as the novella Karel Stojaspal wrote. Not the same story in a different style, but the same story in the same style, word for word, except that I came up with an ending. I can’t even feel proud of that; it’s highly unlikely that the ending I thought I’d come up with was actually my own. I didn’t find any of this out until I’d engaged a literary agent and that literary agent had sold the book to a publisher … quite a prominent one. (I get into a cold sweat when I think what would have happened if I’d showed “my” harpsichord book to someone at Krakamiche Press.) Then Tolay Gul brought me a library copy of Karel’s book and asked, laughingly, if I’d read it. I hadn’t, but I’d plagiarised it all the same. To say I was humbled unto dust, to say that Tolay kept me on nervous-breakdown watch for about a month after that discovery, to say these things understate what was going on in my head. But eventually, after disentangling myself from contracts I’d signed for the harpsichord book, I was able to return to ghostwriting with absolutely no illusions about having any other path. And the second time I was the one who told Tolay I couldn’t see him anymore. I sent him an e-mail very similar to the one Raúl had sent me. Slightly more apologetic, but equally unexplanatory. I could hardly write that I didn’t even feel as if I deserved to drink water, let alone receive his affection. I would probably have sounded like I was accusing him of making it difficult to do anything other than receive—and that accusation was in fact lurking in me. But anyway. Tolay wrote back in just under sixty seconds, saying he understood. He had one last favour to ask.

  He wanted me to attend the opening of a photography exhibition at a gallery in Shoreditch. The artist, Esperanza Kendeffy, was known for never selling any of her work as a single unit. She’d stated in interviews that isolating a single image for display disrupted unities between her works. From a buyer’s perspective this basically meant paying for four or more images you didn’t want because the artist insisted that they were in some way part and parcel of the one image you did want. Tolay asked me to steal a photo from the exhibition. He said it was only a tiny one, and described it in detail.

  Don’t worry if you can’t manage it. I’m counting on you to make an effort, though.

  If I did get the photo, I was to drop it off at his flat in Dulwich. More intriguingly—and perhaps this was my real reason for doing as he said—he told me that I might run into someone named Otto Montague, and that I should steer clear of that person. “Because that person is mine.”

  I asked Tolay what made him say that. I suppose my real question was something along the lines of: How come you’ve never said I’m yours? It’s not that I wanted him to. But you’re always curious when you’re bypassed and someone else is chosen.

  Tolay’s answer: “He’s truthful. Not with words, mind. His abuse of linguistic function is almost demonic. But when I watch what he does … I’m not happy with all I’ve seen, but yeah, it’s truthful. You can’t really take that away from him.”

  I soon learned that Tolay has a point there. You’d be stupid to take anything Otto Shin says at face value. My life partner lies. A lot. I confront him over it as often as I can. Does he do it for fun? He shakes his head. Is he playing some sort of game of informational one-upmanship? Another shake of the head: “Look, it’s an unfortunate thing, the lying. A lot of the time it would be easier to just state the facts. But on the bright side, Xavier … lying is probably the most human gesture anyone can make.”

  “What? Explain.”

  “Well … they all say one thing and do another. Every one of them.”

  “‘They’?” I said. “‘Them’?”

  “Humans. Obviously.”

  “I see. So, just to be perfectly clear, in this context, you’re deliberately going with ‘they’ and ‘them’ rather than ‘we’ and ‘us’?”

  “Do those word choices bother you?” Otto asked.

  “Strangely, no.”

  “That’s a relief.”

  I’ve also noticed that lying to Otto, just a bit, at random intervals, tends to bring out the best in him. But that’s another story.

  Back to Tolay Gul.

  The photograph he wanted me to steal was a close-up of a bloodshot eye with a black pupil. A splintered black, like a fly holding still with its wings folded over its body. Everything that led up to the theft was difficult—this tall, slim blond guy kept following me around the gallery with a glass of wine in his hand and a coat over his arm. I checked him out a couple of times, and I probably would have said hi or something, but you’ve seen Otto, so you know he has that spiritual bard–like look about him, as if he’s more suited to doublet and hose than jeans and a shirt, and he’s about to start playing a lute and singing of a rose that no man may dare pluck. I thought he somehow knew that I’d come there to steal, and he was going to tell me not to live like that. I spent about twenty minutes standing near the photo Tolay wanted me to steal, mainly checking its attachment to the wall. And Otto approached me. He said, “For the past half hour I’ve been trying to think of a witty way to tell you I’m not the coat person, but I can’t think of anything. I’m just … not the coat person.”

  I said: “What?”

  “I’m not here to look after people’s coats.” He handed me the coat he’d been carrying around. It was my coat. Then I recalled handing him the coat as I entered the gallery. I’d been flustered by my secret mission, he was the nearest person to the door, and it’s possible he seemed slightly more officious than the other partygoers.

  Tolay had made a very simple request that I steer clear of this person, and the very first thing I did was draw his attention. Which made it even more necessary to prove that I wasn’t altogether incompetent. I had to steal this photo. I asked Otto all about his day … Oh, Esperanza Kendeffy was a close friend of his? And he was part of a gang of joyful minions who’d been spending the day making sure her launch went well? I thought (all right—hoped) he hadn’
t noticed when I held my coat close to the wall and pulled the painting in underneath the wool—he seemed unconcerned, and even moved away after a few minutes to welcome some newcomers. (“Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be art critics in disguise …”)

  But as I was leaving with my loot, a gallery representative approached me and took my phone number so as to arrange delivery of the other four photos the following day.

  I offered to put the photo back, but the representative laughed at me and pointed Otto out. He’d bought the batch for me. He says he got a substantial friendship discount, but … just in case he was lying, I’ve been buying him drinks ever since.

  I took that photograph around to Tolay’s in the morning, but his nearest neighbour told me he’d moved out. I e-mailed and called, but he never got back to me.

  Every few months or so I send a message to the e-mail addresses I have for Raúl and for Tolay. I say hello. I tell them I still think of them, and that I’m sorry. About everything, really. I tried hard to keep things on a platonic basis with Otto, frequently reminded myself that he was out of bounds, had been placed there by a person I’d already disappointed more than enough. Otto helped for a while by projecting the impression that he’s a good friend but a callous love interest or sexual partner. That showboat cynicism of his, the part of him that in some way disturbs me as much as a suppurating boil would—I can see how Tolay Gul would find that stimulating. Otto Shin is so much on the run—from conscience, from reflection, from admitting there’s any future he hopes for or anything he dreams of becoming—that when I realised what I felt for him, I tried my best to send him packing. It’s frustrating enough having ideals without somebody at your side routinely making a mockery of them.

  But, just as Tolay Gul says he did before me, I found myself watching what Otto Shin actually does. Otto does kindnesses whilst attempting meanness. He empathises whilst affecting apathy. He’s unable to extricate himself from hopeful undertakings. Deeds that probably won’t change anybody’s world for the better but just might. Otto Shin does all he can at the same time as firmly denying that he’s doing anything, or that there’s anything he can do.