Helen Oyeyemi - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

—

THOUGH ARKADY BROKE down and confessed after being shown photographs of the five men and four women who’d died in the fire, his confession was never entirely satisfactory. He got the timing and exact location of the fire he’d set wrong, and his statement had to be supplemented with information from his former landlord, who identified him as the culprit before a jury, pointing at Arkady as he described the clothing the police had found him wearing the morning they arrested him. The inconsistencies in Arkady’s account troubled the authorities enough to imprison him in a cell reserved for “the craziest bastards,” the ones who had no inkling of what deeds they might be capable of doing until they suddenly did them.

—

ARKADY’S MEALS were brought to him, and his cell had an adjoining washroom that he kept clean himself. He no longer had to do long strings of mental arithmetic, shaving figures off the allowance for food as he went along — after a few days his mind cleared, he stopped imagining that Giacomo and Leporello were staring mournfully from the neighboring cell, and he could have been happy if he hadn’t been facing imprisonment for deaths he dearly wished he could be sure he hadn’t caused. His cell was impregnable, wound round with a complex system of triggers and alarms. Unless the main lock was opened with the key that had been made for it, he couldn’t come out of that cell alive.

—

THE TYRANT held the key to Arkady’s cell, and liked to visit him in there and taunt him with weather reports. He hadn’t been interested in the crimes of the other crazy bastards who’d once inhabited this cell, so they’d been drowned. But as somebody who had by his own admission dispatched people and then gone straight to sleep afterward, Arkady was the only other person within reach that the tyrant felt he had a meaningful connection with. Arkady barely acknowledged his questions, but unwittingly gained the affections of the guards by asking a variant of the question “Shouldn’t you be staying here in this cell with me, you piece of shit?” each time the tyrant said his farewells for the day. As per tyrannical command the guards withheld Arkady’s meals as punishment for his impudence, but they didn’t starve him as long they could have. One night Arkady even heard one of the guards express doubt about his guilt. The guard began to talk about buildings with doors that could all be opened with the same key. He’d heard something about those keys, he said, but the other guard didn’t let him finish. “When are you going to stop telling old wives’ tales, that’s what I want to know… anyway no landlord would run his place that way.”

—

LOKUM AGREED to marry the tyrant on the condition that there would be no more drownings, and he sent Eirini the First and Eirini the Fair across the border and into a neighboring country so that he could begin his new life free of their awkward presence. After a long absence, the tyrant appeared before Arkady to tell him this news, and to inform him that he’d lost the key to Arkady’s cell. The key couldn’t be recut either, since he’d had the only man with the requisite expertise drowned a few years back. Lokum had a point about the drownings being counterproductive, the tyrant realized. “Sorry about that,” he said. “Maybe it’ll turn up again one of these days. But if you think about it you were going to be here for life anyhow.”

“No problem,” Arkady said. And since it was looking as if this was the last time the tyrant was going to visit him, he added casually: “Give my regards to Lokum.”

The tyrant looked over at the prison guards, to check whether they had seen and heard what he’d just seen and heard. “Did he just lick his lips?” he asked, in shock. The guards claimed they couldn’t confirm this, as they’d been scanning the surrounding area for possible threats.

—

“HMMM… SPRING the lock so that the cell kills him,” the tyrant ordered as he left. The guards unanimously decided to sleep on this order; it wasn’t unheard of for the tyrant to rethink his decisions. The following day the tyrant still hadn’t sent word, so the guards decided to sleep on it another night, and another, until they were able to admit to themselves and to each other that they just weren’t going to follow orders this time. Their first step toward rebellion, finding out that disobedience didn’t immediately bring about the end of the world… the prison guards cautiously went into dialogue with their counterparts at the palace and at border crossings, and a quiet, steady exodus began.

—

THE NEIGHBORING countries welcomed the escapees, and with them the opportunity to remove the tyrant’s power at the same time as playing a prank on him by helping to empty out his territory. If the tyrant noticed that the streets were quieter than usual, he simply said to himself: “Huh, I suppose I really did have a lot of these people drowned, didn’t I…” It probably wouldn’t have helped him one way or the other to notice that as the living people left, the marshland stretched out farther and farther, slowly pulling houses and cinemas, greengrocers, restaurants, and concert halls down into the water. If you looked down into the swamps (which he never did) it was possible to see people untangling their limbs and hair, courteously handing each other body parts and keys, resuming residence in their homes, working out what crops they might raise and which forms of energy they could harness.

—

MEANWHILE THE TYRANT was congratulating himself for having dealt with Arkady. He had disliked the way Lokum had begged for Arkady’s life, and cared even less for her expression upon being told her pleas came too late. He didn’t think they’d had a love affair (that lanky pyromaniac could only dream of being worthy of Lokum’s attention), but Lokum’s behavior was too similar to that of the man Eirini the First loved. What was wrong with these people?

—

THE TYRANT set Lokum alight on their wedding day. Thanks to Arkady, fire had risen to the top of his list of elimination methods. He forced her to walk to the end of the longest bridge spanning the marshlands, and he drenched her in petrol and struck a flame. He’d given no real thought to decreasing his own flammability, so the event was referred to as an attempted murder-suicide. “Attempted” because when he tried to run away, the burning woman ran after him, shouting that she’d just that moment discovered something very interesting; he couldn’t kill her, he could never kill her… she took him in her arms and fed him to the fire he’d started. There was still quite a lot of him left when he jumped into the swamp, but the drowned held grudges and heaved him out onto land again, where he lay roasting to death while his bride strolled back toward the city, peeling blackened patches of wedding dress off her as she went. She put on some other clothes and took food to the prison where Arkady sat alone contemplating the large heap of questionable publications the guards had left him on their departure. Before Arkady could thank Lokum for the food (and, he hoped, her company) she said, “Wait a minute,” and ran off again, returning an hour later with his two friends. Leporello shook Arkady’s hand and Giacomo licked his face; this was a joke they’d vowed they’d make the next time they saw Arkady, and they thought it rather a good one. Arkady called out his thanks to Lokum, but she had no intention of staying this time either: “We’ve got to get you out of there,” she said, and left again.

“It’s autumn, isn’t it?” Arkady asked Giacomo. He’d seen that Giacomo’s shoes and Leporello’s feet were soaking wet too, but he wanted to finish eating before he asked about that.

“Yes! How did you know?”