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

Outside the landscape stuttered. Either we’d stopped and this was what happened when my attention jerked from the window to the hallway, or we were passing a row of identical willow trees one by one. The person holding the net began walking towards me. I wanted to run back into the compartment and build a barricade. But rationality continued to speak to me. It said: Otto, that string bag is Chela- or Árpád-sized, but you’re not. You’re significantly bigger and heavier than this person. And don’t you see, they’re gripping the handle of their net with both hands—since when was a dip net a deadly weapon? Besides, this person is wearing fuzzy slippers and peacock green pajamas, and if those intimidate you, I don’t know what else to tell you. If you’ve got even a millimetre of backbone in you, you’ll walk forward right this minute.

I went forward, all right, but those rational points only enlarged the sight problem. It wasn’t at all like looking at a person through a hazy filter. There wasn’t any kind of incongruity shock either: they were just there, quite at one with their surroundings, even smiling. In recognition, it seemed. I smiled too, though I didn’t think I knew anybody who’d run around in the middle of the night frightening mongooses by way of amusement.

It was as if this person was both behind my eyes and in front of them. I kept catching myself in the act of assembling the image at the very moment it appeared … That makes it all sound more voluntary than it felt. Someone was moving towards me. Someone visible; I couldn’t simply choose not to see them. Yet to see them I had to do more than just look. A lot more. Whatever it was I had to do, the attempt put every cell of my sight apparatus under such strain that I felt blood vessels bursting. I wobbled forward, putting out a hand a couple of times to touch the wall panels, which vibrated as my fingers crossed them. The train was still moving, then. The person stopped smiling once I got close enough to pull the dip net out of his hands and tell him we were trying to get some sleep.

“So was I,” he said. “Well, goodnight for now.”

Moving too quickly for me to stop him, he whipped the carriage door open. Not the one that would’ve led back into the carriage car, but the one that would’ve opened out onto a platform if we’d been stationary. We both staggered as the wind whirled in at around a hundred kilometres per hour to besport itself right merrily, roaring with laughter as it did all it could to rip the hair from our scalps and the skin from our faces—and then he jumped out of the train. He sprang out into thin air; I spun around to find and pull the nearest emergency cord so I didn’t see him fall. And mine was the second cord pull—behind me, Xavier had found one first.

“He jumped,” I said, but the train was screaming. I don’t think Xavier heard me over the bumping of the door hinge and the muddy baritone of the railway brake. “Did you see—He said he couldn’t sleep or something—and then he fucking jumped …”

We ground to a halt, and a chorus of shouts grew in volume, along with the rumble of heavy footfall as tens of people scrambled down from the train and ran along the side of it in unison. The maintenance team was still with us.

It was very early on Sunday morning, and I was standing in the middle of the carriageway wearing nothing but a pair of boxers with the Czech word for Saturday on them, shivering spasmodically and staring with bloodshot eyes as I waved an extra-large dip net and shouted about somebody jumping off the train while it was still moving. Laura’s voice came over the tannoy telling us to stay exactly where we were. Xavier did what any kind soul would have done and made me get dressed before the train operator inquisition began. We tried to get our story straight. “Tell me again,” he said. I told him again. Then a third time, and a fourth time. He was shaking too. But he kept asking, “But who, Otto? Who was chasing Chela with a net? Who opened the carriage door?”

He held my head between his hands and looked into my eyes; I watched him reviewing what he knew. I’d been standing over him when I woke up, with Chela already in our compartment. And he’d got out into the hallway in time to see me running at the carriage door, but that was all.

It could have been me, just messing about on my own. I could’ve frightened Chela in an effort to do Árpád a favour by driving a mating prospect right into his arms. As for wrenching the door open and attempting a flying leap—another neural blip, just like running into a burning house for no bloody reason.

“Wondering how long you can put up with somebody who keeps going in for completely unnecessary heroics?” I asked, jocularly but really not joking at all. When Xavier gets tired of me all he has to do is take his pick from the queue of suitors I pretend not to feel threatened by.

“I’ve actually got a lot of time for people like that,” he said. “And anyway, I’m … well, you’re the one who could do a lot better.”

I kissed him. “What are you talking about? Listen, I’m gonna go a bit Anne Brontë on you. Are you ready?”

“Will you let me off if I say I’m not ready?”

“No. A Brontean moment can never be averted. I prefer your faults to other people’s perfections, Xavier Shin. There. That wasn’t so bad, was it?”

He was meant to laugh, make a face, parse the sentence, kiss me back, any combination