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

According to Yuri, Přemysl was far from the only person to have gone through this process, and that Ava was far from the only unseer.

“We’re trying to support each other,” Yuri said. “Trying to get back into the game. Together. So don’t ask me for my fucking surname. I’m here for Přem and Raúl and Tolay and the stories of their unseeing, which you will not be told now or ever. Because with people like you it goes in one ear and out the other until it actually happens to you. Then you’ll be googling for support groups and everything else.”

You’d think that afternoon we shared with Yuri was much more stressful in and of itself than the memory of it could ever be, but in fact I’ve had to abandon this account quite a few times already. I’ve had to drop my pen and hide from the page, only creeping back to it once Xavier sounds the all clear.

But at the time …

When Yuri had reached his “no more talking” phase, stopping in front of Laura and Allegra and fondling their scalps before clapping their skulls together. Neither woman screamed, but Allegra murmured something. I thought I heard “Ava.” “What did you say? What did you say, treacherous little bitch who saw what was happening to Přem and didn’t stick up for him even once?”

Allegra closed her eyes but didn’t shrink from Yuri. She said: “I don’t know what you mean.”

Her phrasing … she wasn’t telling him I don’t understand what you’re saying. The sense of it came through as I am unable to determine the meaning of you.

I can be this precise because I was looking on with a stomach flutter. A very low-level flutter, and that was it. I’ve mentioned my assumption that nothing is ever OK. Even on good days I renew my nothing-is-ever-OK subscription so the next day is covered. It’s a form of mithridatism. Once the poison is administered you still feel fear, but not as much as you might have, maybe. The other possibility is that the tension got so raucous that it blocked itself. Fear either gives you diarrhea or it really, horribly constipates you … something like that.

I remember hearing Xavier telling Yuri he was fucking trash, unrecyclable trash, and I remember Xavier toppling onto Laura’s lap in a failed attempt to throw himself in front of her, and Yuri bashed Laura’s and Allegra’s heads together a couple more times, seemingly to show that none of Xavier’s feedback bothered him.

I remember speaking, in a low and soothing voice. Not self-soothing; I was speaking to Xavier. I was saying, “Xavier, there’s this train that used to belong to some tea smugglers, and it’s called The Lucky Day. From the station platform it looks an outsized champagne sabre; a brass-and-silver curio with a snobbish tilt to its nose. Inside … well, there’s no one onboard. There never is. At each station the passengers always arrive too late for The Lucky Day. Now the train’s departing again … it’s already waited as long as it could, and nobody came.”

Xavier’s head had lolled onto my shoulder, and when I paused, he scraped his cheek against my collarbone and told me he didn’t understand a word, that at some point we were going to have to talk about my episodes of Czech speaking, but that for now I should go on. I might have, but if I did, I didn’t hear it. What I heard instead, a little while later, was my own name. Maybe the others had been saying and whispering it on and off for ages. Laura had put her teeth to work gnawing away at the knots that bound her wrists, so Allegra’s voice was the least garbled.

“Otto … Otto. What the fuck! Aren’t you a mesmerist! How did you let things get this far? Mesmerise him or something!”

“OK, no prob,” I said.

I looked up, down, to the left, and to the right, and didn’t see Yuri anywhere. For about two seconds, angels sang: Yuri is vanish’d, Yuri is vanquish’d, thou hast unseen Yuri, but then the man in the diving suit stepped back into the carriage with us. He was carrying a pirate sword, which revealed he’d been to the bazaar carriage. And he was fuming again. This time over Ava. He’d gone to the sauna car to check what was taking her so long and found that she’d moved on to the greenhouse car. So he’d hung around while she did a leisurely spot of greenhouse gardening, thinking she’d start worrying about her friends (“Wasn’t that a scream I heard?” etc.), but it looked like Ava was thoroughly fed up with us. Without even glancing behind her she’d proceeded into the library carriage, where she’d curled up with multiple books. At this rate she wasn’t going to come back this way for hours. But she had to. He didn’t have a single thing left to say to us …

Yuri’s diving mask was getting all steamed up. He slashed at the air with the blade of his pirate sword a couple of times.

Xavier blurted out a suggestion. “Send Árpád. Or Chela. Both. She may be wily enough to slip through the clutches of one mongoose, but she could never evade two.”

Yuri looked at the ceiling for a second, then shrugged and unlatched the cages. Árpád and our daughter-in-law were unsteady on their feet for a few heartbeats, but once they regained balance, it was all Yuri could do to lure them into the next carriage without a fatality (his own). Only the pirate sword saved him.

He stepped back into our carriage once more, the angel choir fell silent once more, and then, before he could pick up where he’d left off with the sword swishing, I said, “Why not let me mesmerise you while we wait?”

“Mesmerise me, then, Otto,” he said, and came over to deliver his stare. That nuanced stare that I’ve already told you about. The one that ended up