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

(“Aigoo,” Xavier said, kissing two fingers and touching them to my lips.) Next I glanced at Ava’s sleeping compartment, even though I knew she wasn’t there. Her theremin was all set up for playing. Chela opened and closed her eyes at us in rapid sequence; a greeting in affectionate amber-lit Morse code. And Árpád, never one for long reunion speeches, simply whisked his tail in our direction. Laura predicted they would give this world some “badass descendants,” and Allegra agreed: “Beginning with Chela Kapoor II.”

Huh. Well, the age of the Árpáds can’t last forever.

I’ve left the most incongruous feature of this train carriage scenario for last: a figure I might not have automatically viewed as Árpád and Chela’s quarry if not for their watchful stirring whenever he stirred. He was standing in the lounge area wearing a diving mask, yellow swim fins and a peacock green wetsuit. His oxygen cylinder was still strapped to his back, and in his left hand he held a white balloon on a string. “A peace offering,” he said.

So, this was Yuri. I reserved comment until I’d looked him over. He told me to take my time, and I did, slowly reconciling myself to the presence of this being who stoically dripped water all over the rug as his white balloon bobbed from side to side. The others had accepted the fact of him too; I could see it in their eyes.

Wondering aloud what was taking Ava so long, Laura drummed her fingers against the tabletop, drained her tea, then turned to Yuri.

“Well, Yuri. The mongooses have brought you to us because—”

We were all listening for the conclusion of this sentence with intense interest. We didn’t know the reason. Did Laura? What? How? But Yuri cut her off with his own declaration.

“I brought each one of you to this train, of course. And long after you realised you weren’t exactly brought together for a fucking Girl Scout badge ceremony, you’ve stayed on. Because I’ve kept you here. Well, really, you’ve kept each other here, with your eagerness to form a clique of people something out of the ordinary is happening to. Mundane jobs and Instagrammable honeymoons? Oh no, not for us. We’re the passengers of The Lucky Day … ahem … hello … excuse me?”

The four of us were muttering to each other, exchanging notes as to whether this Yuri sounded anything like the way we remembered him sounding … “him” being Přemysl, Honza, Raúl, Tolay. He was telling us he’d brought each one of us here, but I, for one, didn’t feel at all acquainted with this person. This was very much a meeting for the very first time. The others seemed to agree. The consensus was topped with a sprinkle of relief. Honza hadn’t come after me after all … now nobody else would know how bad I’d been at being with him. I got the feeling Allegra shared my relief (with her own variation on the theme), and Xavier didn’t. As for Laura, she gave confusion the middle finger and recommitted to some semblance of order.

“Pardon me, er—Mister,” Laura said. “What did you say your surname was?”

Yuri unzipped his wetsuit and ran his hand around his chest for a few seconds. It looked as if he was gloating over his sheer, hairy manliness, but then he winced. “Found it …” He pulled his necklace over his head—it was a needle with thread looped through its eye.

He took a deep breath, then popped the white balloon with the needle.

The air … atomised …

 … and then every particle of it twitched.

This was not the kind of situation consciousness is in any way equipped to cope with, so my “I” fled over the hills and far away, yodeling as it went.

It returned once it realised it had nowhere else to go. Why else would you return to a situation that’s only very marginally less stressful? Ridges of train carriage wall digging into your back, hands crossed over your chest like the dearly departed who is about to be lowered into the ground, Árpád and Chela snarling away in his ’n’ hers cages, Yuri crouching down in front of you for just long enough to unzip your jeans and leer as he points out that you’re not wearing your Czech day-of-the-week underwear. “Ha! I knew it … I knew Svoboda was fooling himself that you liked those boxers.”

Xavier was to my left, with Laura on the other side of him, and Allegra on the other side of Laura. Yuri paced before us as he told his cautionary tale. We could not envisage, he told us, the things that had happened to Přemysl Stojaspal, to the truth of that person’s life, from the moment Ava Kapoor had arrived at his father’s house and unseen him.

“All right, so Přem hadn’t yet learned stability. All right, so Přem was in essence a hitchhiker of sorts … actually, no, you know what, Přem was paying his way. We can compare him to an Uber rider … a slightly uncomfortable first-time Uber rider who was still getting used to the system. And then Ava Kapoor unsees him and his payment gets declined and his account deactivated. Of course he’s going to try again with a new account. Of course he’s going to look into other transport options! Of course he’s going to try everything he can until his dream comes true! What dream? The dream of a pedestrian existence, my friends. Stupendously pedestrian. Oh, and to appear in photographs. You can paint as many portraits as you please, but it’s photos that verify you people’s meetings. It’s photos that make your bonds irrefutable. Oh, are you laughing, Otto? Do it one more time … I dare you.”

Dare declined.

Each of us stuttered questions, but Yuri waved them away. He hadn’t come to engage with technical theories of Přem’s unseeing, nor the question of whether Ava had done it intentionally. He was here to force us to consider the effect of the unseeing.