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

Yeon-ssi had met, said: Tip: you do know me. The second one, which had arrived just in time to change Xavier’s “We don’t know Yuri” to “We don’t know what we’d do without Yuri” said: Really? After all I’ve done for you?

An imposter with an assumed name was in our home right at this very moment, cosying up to Do Yeon-ssi. And based on these two text messages, sent from a number that wasn’t even saved as a contact in his phone, Xavier had advocated a wait-and-see attitude towards the situation. He’d even mentioned the possibility that this “Yuri” meant well. I didn’t get it. While it’s possible to receive an unsigned message from an unknown number that’s so distinctive you immediately recognise the sender, these two were hardly that. Anybody could have sent them, but Xavier had identified the sender in that split-second middle-of-the-night-phone-call way. You know—your phone rings in the middle of the night. The screen tells you the number is withheld or unknown, and you don’t usually answer such calls, but it’s so late that the caller could have some spectacular news that will change everything—for better, or for worse. You answer the phone. You say, “Hello? Hello?” but nobody speaks. And then you say a name and add a question mark. It’s not about who you really think is calling, or even who you hope is calling. It’s got nothing to do with logical inferences that can be drawn from the events of the past few hours. It’s about what simply is. You say the name that’s been on your mind from waking to sleeping. The fact that I obviously wasn’t that person for Xavier didn’t bother me too much—he wasn’t that person for me either. The association is rarely positive. What’s notable is that it’s intense. I couldn’t ask about it; Xavier had to tell me of his own accord.

It came down to this: I dare not risk a jealous scene. Where would the underwhelming product of a loving home find the nerve to be anything other than meek in this scenario? Everything was in place both nature- and nurture-wise for me to show aptitude at something, somehow, somewhere. I don’t lose much sleep over not having done that (yet?), but the romantic attachment failures are a sore spot. That’s a field in which I really ought not underwhelm. When Martha and Lieselotte had me, Martha’s legal name was still Mark, and Lieselotte was a high court judge in Bern. They’re two of the freest people I know, and somehow that seems like a by-product of the rambling conversation they’ve been in ever since they met, an exchange that draws them down by-lanes of trivia and scholarship, pettiness and poetry. When some new pact clicks into place, they meet at its corner to kiss. My professor mum made her Martha-ness official, and my Bern high court judge mum stepped down and stripped her view of justice all the way down to grass roots, serving her god (and I really do think justice is a god for Lieselotte) as a police inspector who does her paperwork whilst sipping coffee out of a mug emblazoned with a picture of her wife and son. I hate that mug. The picture on it makes us look like Ikea models who might just get thrown in as freebies if you buy enough furniture. But catalog elements aside, it’s a photo in which Martha is full-on sultry professor, and I look like a cute baby Viking. So even if her current mug gets broken, or hidden, Lieselotte just pulls out another, identical one.

I wanted to be like that, and as I say, I should’ve been able to. But lasting six months with anyone was a miracle. Or so I’d thought, until Xavier. We’d worked out our key factor: absolute trust. That’s what Lieselotte and Martha have. I don’t think they’d have secretly looked at each other’s messages, though. Round and round I went, bursting the last few soap bubbles clustered along the outside of the shower stall as I tried to come up with a way to ask about this. To ask so Xavier would hear that I wanted to help him deal with whatever effect this “Yuri” was having on him. If he even wanted or needed help with that. Ugh. I looked in the mirror; my eyes were getting more bloodshot by the second. I closed them and pressed my knuckles down over my eyelids, trying to visualise that face one more time. The face of the man with the dip net. I saw something like a flame; a sizzling wave that melted matter. My lungs creaked, turning to cork again. My mouth filled with smoke; I coughed, still trying to look. He was there, I could find him, I just had to hold my breath a little longer, just—

My chin hit the basin and then the floor. I curled up, coughing and coughing. Xavier knocked on the door.

“Otto? You all right?”

I knew I had to open my eyes if I wanted to breathe. And I did want to breathe. Didn’t I? Xavier knocked again. Breathe, breathe. My eyes opened. “Yeah, I’ll be out in a sec. I’ve got your phone.”

When I stood up again my eyes looked even worse; redder than red. There was hardly any white left around the pupil. Xavier had left his sunglasses on the ledge above the sink, so I put those on too.

Out in the corridor, I gave his phone back to him, he checked the screen, then said he wanted me to see the postal-sorting car. He had the tub of salted egg fish skin from the pantry tucked in under his other arm. We ate as we went along, slowing so that Xavier could stop in a doorway with his arm stuck out, seeking a signal: “Just wondering if our friend Yuri happens to know what’s going on …”

Bringing Yuri up first … that was something.

“You do know who this Yuri