Helen Oyeyemi - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

—

JACOB PHONED her when he and Vi arrived at the prison where she worked. The timing was inconvenient because Jill had just made accidental eye contact with the governor of the prison and had done what she usually did when that happened — she’d walked around the nearest corner to hide. She was well aware that the governor thought she was useless. Not Jill as an individual, necessarily, but her role within the framework of the prison. “Letting young offenders have half an hour a week tapping out fuchsia landscapes on a chromatic typewriter doesn’t really do much toward turning them into better citizens, does it?” Not a fair summation of her work, but getting on with her job was Jill’s only answer, amiable until some bureaucratic roadblock popped up. And once it had been dealt with she was a nice person once more, even nicer than before. She and Jacob repeated their three conversations for the camera and then she went back to work.

Jill knew what all the boys had done, or as much as they would admit to, anyway. They all received treatment; they could talk to her as long as they tried to say what was true for them. Everything they said was recorded, and her office door stayed open whenever a boy was in there with her. There was a guard at the door too, just in case, but problems between her and the boys were infrequent. Many of them called her “Miss,” quite tenderly— Tell me if anyone’s rude to you, Miss. Just tell me his name, yeah? — as if she was their favorite teacher at school. She had hope for them, even though the things they told her made her shake like a jellyfish when she got a moment in her office alone.

Ben and Solomon were the two boys whose progress she dwelled on the most, and they came to see her that afternoon, one after the other. Ben was deeply introverted, coping relatively well with his incarceration and mostly harmless — if only she could get him to express some, or any, emotion to her so that she could confirm or revise these impressions of his coping and his harmlessness. He had language and could understand everything that was said to him, but his introversion was so deep that he often looked as if he no longer knew whether he’d spoken aloud or not; he was irked when she pressed him to answer her questions: I already answered, Miss…

A phone had recently been discovered in Ben’s cell; there were no incoming or outgoing calls or messages recorded on it. Nobody could explain how Ben had come by the phone but it was easy to tell how long he’d had it because the photo album was full of selfies he’d taken. He posed in exactly the same way in each one, fingers held up in a peace sign. Only the backgrounds were different. He favored empty rooms and, occasionally, the backdrop of two or more of his fellow inmates doing their best to bash each other’s heads in.

—

SOLOMON WAS MUCH more communicative with her, but that didn’t mean she understood him any better. His record was something of a puzzle in that he’d only turned to a life of crime relatively recently. For the first fifteen years of his life his record was spotless, then one day he’d approached a gang whose members had been torturing him on and off, joined, and became their leader. His explanation of the change he’d made: “It was time.”

Jill was aware that Solomon’s younger brother had been struggling with illness for years, and that the brother’s brain tumor had gone into remission when Solomon was thirteen. The beginning of Solomon’s career of criminal violence coincided — if you could really call that a coincidence — with doctors detecting a recurrence of cancerous cells in his brother’s brain. This made Jill afraid for Solomon, and afraid of him too. He admitted to wanting to help his brother, but would say nothing more about it. He was like a boy in a fairy tale; there was a set of steps he was to follow with no concession whatsoever as to how others viewed his actions. Then at the end of it all there’d be a reward. Solomon had just heard from his family — his brother’s cancer was back in remission. But the young man showed no relief; the news only deepened the look of concentration in his eyes. This is what Jill saw when she tried to see life Solomon’s way: Your brother had been selected at random and hurt, so by selecting others at random and hurting them, you won relief for your brother. If that’s how it was then Solomon would eventually be compelled to select one more person at random and kill them so that his brother could live. Much of what she said to him was mere diversion, her attempt to knock down the tower of logic he was building. Sometimes she thought it was working. Sometimes he cried when she made him realize a little of what he was doing. He wasn’t a sniffler so the tapes didn’t catch his remorse. And when she asked herself whether she’d support a recommendation for his early release a year from now, she very much doubted being able to do that. For a while he would hate his false friend Doctor Akkerman, obsess, fixate, and possibly decide that the life he’d take for his brother’s sake should be hers. She was only 100 percent sure of these things, and had no clear idea of how far the boy’s attempt would progress before he was restrained or what injuries would be sustained. Perhaps none, perhaps none…

Still, it was Jill’s duty to mention this likelihood, and she’d do so in her reports closer to the time.

“Have a good holiday, Doctor Akkerman,” Solomon said at the end of their session. The only boy to acknowledge they wouldn’t be seeing each other for the next two weeks.

—

JILL TOOK HER suitcase over to the Catford flat and slept there the night before Presence was due to begin. Jacob wasn’t dead to her yet, so they played at a long-distance love affair over the phone. Jill had Radha and Myrna’s permission to take down any images that might interfere with Jacob’s presence, so as she talked to her husband she walked around the flat dropping pictures of the intimidatingly photogenic couple and their puppet and human friends (hard to tell which was which) into a jewelry box. She heard no echoes of Max’s ranting or her own frenzied screeching, and when she went into the bedroom where she’d slept so that she wasn’t tempted to injure Max in the night she found it full of small stages. Some cardboard, some wood and textile, and there were silky screens for casting shadows through too. “Looks like only playfights are allowed in here now,” Jill said to Jacob, and then, as she opened the fridge and took note of its being crammed with bottles full of something called “Kofola”: “I was thinking — won’t it be easier for you to get hold of my presence over there than it will be for me to get hold of yours over here? You’ve never been here.”

“I’m curious about that too,” Jacob said. “People who end up using Presence may need to be able to travel with it, use it in a new house, and so on…”

Two minutes until midnight. She looked around at the pale blue walls, then out of the window and into the communal garden; there was a night breeze, and the flowers were wide-awake.

“Is there a button I press to… activate or something?”

“Vi’s going to start it remotely.”

“For both of us?”

“Yes… goodnight, J.”

“Goodnight.”

She drew the curtains, switched off the lights, and was knocked down onto the bed by a wave of darkness so utter her eyes couldn’t adjust to it. It felt as if she’d fainted… that was what she liked about fainting, the restful darkness that bathed your eyelids. After what felt like an hour (or two?) she held her phone up to her face to check the time, still couldn’t see anything, and decided she might as well just sleep.

—

SHE WOKE UP feeling chilly; her feet were sticking out from under the covers. A head had been resting on the pillow beside hers — all the indentation marks were there. She picked up her notepad and wrote that down. Even though she’d made the marks herself they contributed to a sense of not having slept alone. It was twelve-thirty, the latest she’d woken up in a while, and the room temperature was unusual for an early afternoon in July. She checked the thermometer and wrote the temperature down. Low, but it felt even lower. She put two jumpers on, made tea, plugged headphones in, and called up the first recorded conversation on her computer screen. There was Jacob, smiling at her, speaking. At a much lower pitch she heard her voice answering his: “Your singing makes it cheesy. I love that song…” There were strings of words that she remembered in the correct order, and she tried to say them before her recorded voice did, but the cold threw her off balance and she was left just listening and watching instead of participating. She added that observation to the others in her notepad.