Peaces, Helen Oyeyemi [best life changing books TXT] 📗

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