Helen Oyeyemi - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

—

AND HE’S AS EVASIVE as any Punchinello I’ve met. You ask him a question and he somehow makes you answer it for him. Rowan and Radha never really moved past what she called their “eye candy and eye candy appreciator” relationship. I was the one the eye candy befriended. That surprised me. I remember Radha introducing me to the ghost in her bedroom in anticipation of our knowing each other, at least wanting to know each other because we spoke the same language. But that ghost is a little too aloof for her own good.

Rowan Wayland, on the other hand, calls me “Gepetta, Empress of the Moon.” Since neither of us needs sleep we take night buses, sharing earphones and listening to knitting podcasts. If anyone else on the bus notices anything about us they assume it’s because they’re drunk. I’ve been trying to find a way to make him reveal how he came to be. In my own mind I’ve already compared my condition with his and have decided that his condition is preferable. He breathes; I do not. It’s not that I believe that I could ever have my body back again — the one I used to have, I mean. Those who drove me into this form did what they did and that’s all. I was on my way out and they thought they were helping me; instead they turned motion and intelligible speech into a currency with which personhood is earned.

This craving for consideration is the only real difference between my youthful self and the old, old Gepetta of today. The puppets who made me were shocked when I sold them. Shocked because puppets don’t need money, but also because of the care I took to separate them — they couldn’t understand that at all. No two to the same home, or even to neighboring cities. I consulted maps and made sure each of those puppets would be held apart by forests and deserts and the spans of rivers. The likelihood of any kind of reunion is almost impossible for them, us. I wonder if that broke their bond, but being able to find an answer to that question would mean my project failed. A shattering so absolute that no word can be picked up again — that’s my success.

—

AT THE END of the second week of Tyche and Myrna’s absence a personal essay was due. The title was something along the lines of “What Can a Puppet Do?” The students were required to state their current ambitions, and though the statement would receive a grade it would remain private. In an environment that relied so heavily on public demonstration of progress this was a rare opportunity to be earnest without simultaneously putting yourself at a severe disadvantage; for this reason the teachers imposed a word limit so things didn’t get out of hand. Rowan claimed that the title made his mind go blank, so I dictated his essay to him word for word. What can a puppet do? We didn’t have an uncynical answer between us, so I simply reassembled a few lines I remembered from lectures I’d heard Brambani give back when he was still in the process of writing War Between the Fingers and the Thumb . The role of the puppeteer is to preserve childlike wonder throughout our life spans, etc. Radha’s essay was so brief that it only met half the required number of words; she copy-pasted the paragraph she’d already written and added a line at the beginning explaining that she was making use of the technique of repetition for the sake of emphasis. Hard copies were required, so Tyche e-mailed her essay to Radha, who handed it in without reading it and ran off hand in hand with the Grimaldi boy. Rowan Wayland intercepted Tyche’s essay before it reached Ms. Alfarsi’s desk, putting a finger to his lips when I began to ask him what he was doing. He read it twice, and then I read it, to see what he was looking for.

Last night was moonless, and we took a boat out onto Scapa Flow. There was broken light all across the sky, and columns of cloud twisting and turning through the pieces. Dust and dragon fire. Professor Semyonova said: “That’s the Milky Way. As much of it as we can see, anyway.”

It was so beautiful I kept my eyes on it in case it suddenly disappeared, or turned out to be some gigantic illusion. Maybe it was the rocking of the deck, or maybe I stared for too long, but after a while I felt it all moving against me, the light and the clouds and the darkness, countless stars and planets flying like arrows from a bow hidden farther back. Not that we three on the boat were the target; that was an accident of scale. We crush ants all the time just walking through a park. I thought the best plan was to leave before the sky arrived, just jump into the sea and drown directly. The second best plan was to close my eyes, but Myrna made me keep looking up. She said her own fear had been that those pinpricks of light were growing and that as they did, she shrank. She made me keep looking up until the panic was singed away. All I knew how to do with puppets, all I used to want to do, was play unsettling tricks. That’s not enough anymore. I want to put on stubborn little shows, find places here and there where we get to see what we’d be like if we were actually in control of anything. Cruel fantasies, maybe, but they can’t hurt any more than glimpsing a galaxy does.

Tyche Shaw

“Good grief, the puppeteers of today,” I said, at the same time as Rowan asked me how much I thought Tyche disliked Myrna on a scale of one to ten.

“Eight,” I said. “Maybe eight and a half. Though judging from the essay, she’s come round.”

“Judging from the essay, Gepetta, the dislike currently exceeds ten. Myrna knows how to make people do what she wants, but she doesn’t know how to alter their actual thoughts. Yet here’s Tyche suddenly claiming Myrna’s aims as her own. Can’t you just smell burning in the distance? In a way it would be entertaining to just sit back and watch Myrna get out-manipulated for once. But I can’t do that.”

“Why not? I would.”

—

ROWAN TOLD me about a girl who responded to all external stimuli except human touch. That, she did not feel at all, which was the reason why from an early age other people scared her and kept getting scarier and scarier until they became almost impossible to cope with. She could see and hear her fellow human beings but making physical contact was identical to grabbing at thin air. It was like living with hallucinations that would neither disappear nor become tangible. The worst part was having to pretend that this pack of ghouls was nothing to be concerned about. She quickly learned that getting upset was counterproductive because then there were attempts to comfort her with hugs and the like. She said whatever she had to say and did whatever she had to do to circumvent unnecessary physical contact, but her situation was further complicated by the effect that her touch had on others. She was walking pain relief. She didn’t cure or absorb the source of pain — it was more that she dismantled the sensation itself for a few hours, or up to half a day depending on the duration of skin contact. It didn’t matter what kind of affliction the other person suffered, if the girl held his or her hand pain departed and all other impressions expanded to fill the space it left.

—

THIS, MORE THAN her numbness, twisted her relationships beyond imagining. People in her immediate vicinity somehow sensed what she could do for them and reached for her without really thinking about it, then clung to her, friends, family, and strangers, making use of her without perceiving that they were doing so, clinging so tightly that her ribs all but cracked. It seemed everybody was in all kinds of pain all the time. Shaggy-haired young men camped on her doorstep with their guitar cases and the girl’s father resorted to spending a part of each evening standing backlit in the sitting room window with his arms folded so that the doorstep campers got a good view of his lumberjack biceps. The incongruous combination of white hair, beard, and powerful arms usually caused the boys to scatter with the muddled impression that Father Christmas was angry with them.