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

Laura detained Allegra in Clock Carriage, pushing at her tear-splashed fists until they lowered and Allegra herself could be held and hugged and whispered to.

And me? I went shopping. Somebody had to.

18.

The bazaar was a faraway land I walked aeons to reach. Through the pantry car and the shower car and the postal-sorting carriage and the picture gallery car. The self-portrait of Přem ignored me, and the ground seemed to lick at my feet until I let that conveyor-belt sensation propel me into the dormitory car, with its many rows of bunk beds, each mattress a lily-white altar to innocence or incarceration. Notions came to me; mostly to do with Honza Svoboda. I won’t put them into words, but some of those notions were so strong that they removed me from this sleeping carriage and placed me right in Honza’s arms. My blood bobbed and weaved within me until I had to sit down on one of the beds and close my hand around the thin jerking of the pulse in my neck. I tried to conceive of offerings I could make in order to finish this thing with Honza. I’m not claiming that I deserve to be able to go through life with stanzas from the poem that is Xavier Shin on my lips and in my heart. It’s not about merit … this miracle can happen because Xavier likes having me around as well. For all I know, this is his favourite hobby: colliding with somebody who had made their mind up, taking that person by the hand and casting such an abundance of moonlight that the one he’s with begins to perceive evidence they’d overlooked when preparing their estimation of this dingy world. Evidence that makes the verdict unjust.

“Honza,” I said, in case he could hear me. If he could, he might write me a mocking letter about it. “Leave us alone.”

All of the offerings that occurred to me involved the spilling of vital fluids. If there’d been a suitable object at hand, I would have made a cut. An interior voice—quite a nasty one, I think—asked about the depth of the intended cut and insisted that if I chose to make a blood offering I should do it properly and be sure to slit my throat from ear to ear. The harangue ended when I admitted that even if I had a knife in a hand, I wouldn’t have made a cut. But there was a backup offering, a sort of negotiation with the memory of our bodies together, mine and Honza’s. I closed my eyes and saw our combinations: I knelt before him, knelt above him, straddled him, stretched forward for him, swung from the bunk bed ladders. I was a one-person ritual masturbation tournament, and those rows of bunk beds had probably never seen anything quite like the rampage I went on among them. Or so I like to think. I painted the bed linen, white on white, just like Přem’s canvas, and I hid shivering under blankets every time I thought I heard one of the others heading in the direction of the dormitory car. I couldn’t let anybody catch me doing this. Even if Honza himself had arrived the offering would’ve been ruined.

In the fullness of time the ritual concluded, leaving yours truly physically spent. I took a nap on a top bunk, and some people may have passed through the carriage then—or there was hubbub from the picture gallery next door. I heard people, but nobody tried to wake me.

When I did wake, of my own accord, it was with the thought that vital fluids wouldn’t be the appeasers in this situation. The one offering Honza was after was an answer to his questions about what I tried to do for that old man’s son. If I told him that, he’d finally accept our breakup and get lost.

Why had I rushed into the flames for this person I saw, or thought I saw? (What was that? Was it love? Agape, philia, or a passion felt at first [or final] sight?)

But Honza’s question can’t actually be answered. It’s a trick question, and he knows it. Answering it invalidates everything. What do I mean by “everything”? Everything everything.

I climbed down from the top bunk, gathered various far-flung pieces of clothing, got dressed, and crossed over into the bazaar carriage, too fuzzy-brained to register shame. I was sure the maintenance team were going to talk about the stains I’d left in that dormitory. I’d be lucky if they didn’t report it to Ava. I tried to recall the name of the male maintenance team member I’d heard Allegra talking to via walkie-talkie. Edwin? Oliver? I wasn’t sure what he looked like (there were eight or nine possible candidates), but I was going to pin this on him anyway. “I’m afraid I don’t know anything about this, but why don’t you have a chat with Edwin or Oliver?” I’d say. “Maybe he saw something.”

The bazaar didn’t accept credit cards. I knew it before I was told. Some of the stallholders seemed to have resigned themselves to shopper no-show and were sitting on stools gossiping over cups of tea and shots of vodka. Those stallholders didn’t look my way, and neither did the ones who were painting each other’s nails and giving each other shoulder massages. Right beside the entrance, a black girl in her midteens was tending to a slate water wheel that stood in a stone bowl about the size of a Hula-Hoop. This girl, who’d been painted gold from head to toe, was the official beginning of the bazaar. She sent a very clear message to anyone who walked in wondering if their cards would be accepted here, this girl painted gold and dressed in a gold leotard and gold socks to match her Mary Janes. She’d set a cap of gold wire and pearls atop her cornrows, and the slate wheel