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

and gave me what she’d written: an untitled, spinning-top sort of sonata that slowed down into an arch, darting, aching minuet. I was a bit scared to play it in public and wondered if that was how Prince had felt about performing sometimes. It felt like people might get pregnant just from listening to this. Men, women, everybody …

The “raunchy spaceship” song went down well, and over the following weeks Allegra Yu wrote me two more songs. The second song was a boozy, bluesy piece that made my theremin sound as if it was looking back on a long life of crime, and the third song was a dance tune that had all these charming little trips and falls in it, just like a row of dizzy ducklings. After the third song, realising that we’d already danced together and slept together and aided and abetted each other, I asked her out. She said I’d had her kicking her blankets at night, wondering if she was no longer a genius. “Usually it only takes one song …”

I brought her aboard my train, “The Lucky Day,” for a picnic dinner; I’d prepared all the food myself so we ended up sticking with wine. We lit candles, and even though I’d dusted that particular carriage just hours before, I saw that the dust helixes were back, in enhanced definition, as if determined to stop us from romanticising this evening on a broken-down train that hadn’t gone anywhere for over forty years. She announced that a smugglers’ train is never what it seems to be, blew the candles out again, and lay her head on my lap.

“OK … where are we going? Announce the stations,” she said.

That was my moment to sound well-travelled, or an imaginative match for her, but I had a lapful of runway model and couldn’t think, couldn’t think … yet I had to say something … and at that moment the spirit of Agatha Christie took over and made me name stations from “the 4:50 from Paddington,” all haphazardly: “Waverton. Haling Broadway. Barwell Heath. Change here for Roxeter and Chadmouth …”

She stopped me there, at Barwell Heath. We dallied at that station for quite some time, and left with love bites as souvenirs.

Empty room gig or no empty room gig, Allegra Yu is the one I play for. I’ve come to know her better than anyone, I think, and she me.

But there’s one matter that divides us—that divides me and everybody else who’s contributed to this file: Allegra has seen and interacted with Přemysl Stojaspal—several times this has occurred in my presence—while I look where she is looking, and listen to the silence before and after the remarks she makes, and I see and hear nothing. This is not good for my relationship with Allegra, or with anybody, really … when Přem enters our conversation as a subject … or not even as a subject, if we talk about anything even vaguely linked to Přem, we begin to lie to each other. We tell ourselves we’re being tactful, but it is more desperate than that. We’re trying not to lose each other.

There must actually be a Přemysl Stojaspal. Everybody—and I mean everybody—behaves as if there is … so to me Přem exists in that sense, and sometimes also in a vaguer sense of a listener, some reaction that forms when certain notes are mixed into air. I have no personal knowledge of him otherwise.

I can state that it was Allegra who introduced me to him, or at least, to his father. Allegra was Karel’s personal assistant and was supposed to be organizing the logistics of life so he had more time for his own projects. But he was all, “Oh, Allegra, if I was thirty years younger,” and she was all, “Mate … if you were thirty years younger I’d still be gay.” I’m the one Karel’s (conditionally) made sole beneficiary of his will, but Allegra’s the one who’d get phone calls from him at all hours of the day. “Hang up and don’t answer: I want to leave you voicemail,” he’d say, and fill her voicemail inbox with musings only she could decipher and the occasional blast of music so she’d “see what he meant.”

Karel’s son was somewhere in his thirties and lived with his dad. I’m not flagging that up as unusual—I’d be one to talk, since I was still living with mine. I had love reasons and health reasons as well as economic reasons for that, but I did pick up some subtext that Karel’s son was living with him mainly for health reasons. The son’s, not Karel’s.

My understanding of Přem’s condition was that he couldn’t be alone at night. That’s what Karel told me, without going into what was meant by “couldn’t.” From a very early age Přemysl got bad at night. Agitated, wouldn’t sleep, would get violent, other things. Karel did once tell me that Přemysl took especial issue with him, Karel, sleeping. He simply wouldn’t stand for it. Karel Stojaspal told me that as a boy Přemysl conceived a notion that he’d disappear unless somebody kept thinking about him, and that Karel and his wife had indulged that fancy until it had grown to unmanageable proportions. Medication didn’t work, therapy had worked for a while, but he tended to run through therapists like a swarm of termites through floorboards … (Karel’s terms underlined. He was very tired when he made that termite comparison, but it sticks with me as I’ve never heard anyone talk about their own child like that.)

A few months into our acquaintance, Karel stopped discussing Přemysl with me, and only reluctantly mentioned him. That was partly my fault. I just didn’t know how to look at him while he talked about his invisible son. We went through the stage where I’d laugh or smile; then the stage where I tried to treat it all as a sort of philosophical riddle; the phase where I got angry with Karel; the fearful phase,