Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi (best manga ereader .TXT) 📗

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 turquoise 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