Helen Oyeyemi - What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

Chedorlaomer seemed like a nice person and so did Tyche; if either one was ill-natured they hid it very well. But it didn’t matter; I was there to end their romance. They were in love, and laughed at everything, and assaulted me with the odor of all the sex I was being denied. I know I said denied, as if I had a right to it. But those two filled my brain with the filthiest helium — I watched their wandering hands and I watched Aisha’s Deadly Beige and when I blinked diverse, divine contortions appeared to me, all wrapped up in satin sheets. The bodies I saw and felt combining were mine, Aisha’s, Chedorlaomer, Tyche’s… even the puppets got a look in. I propositioned Chedorlaomer, but the typical halfheartedness of my attempt aside, Jean-Claude’s son was immune to my charms. He talked about Aisha and explained that anybody who hurt her wasn’t going to find it easy to live with all the injuries he and Aisha’s stepdad would inflict upon them. He made these remarks in such dulcet tones that it took me a few minutes to realize he was warning me.

After that I had to let Aisha in on my project, before Mr. Protective told her. Once I’d told her everything she looked at me with the most peculiar expression.

“So you have a tendency not to want anything more than you already have?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“And you think that’s a problem?”

“Clearly it is: It’s a difference that’s slowly estranging me from my family!”

“What if I told you that I know both Ched and Tyche well enough to be fairly sure there’s no need for you to break them up?”

“I’ve still got to do it. My word’s my bond. I told Jean-Claude—”

“As for Jean-Claude,” Aisha said, stirring her tea with sinister emphasis.

“Oh, don’t.”

“All right, forget Jean-Claude for now. Listen Freddy, you’re my guy, and together we can accomplish anything. Here’s how you break them up…”

“Your guy … accomplish anything… anything, your guy,” I said, thinking I was talking to myself. But she heard me, and asked if I was OK.

“Me? Yeah? I mean… yeah. Always. I— Sorry, I interrupted you, didn’t I? Go on.”

Aisha knew a man who gave “relationship-ruining head.” She suggested getting together with this man and Tyche one evening, giving them both a lot of wine and letting nature run its course. So we did that; I pretended to find it funny when I discovered that this giver of relationship-ruining head was my flatmate Pierre.

—

TYCHE ARRIVED with Chedorlaomer, and left with him too. Such a companionable couple, enjoying each other and us, his energy so upbeat, she full of quips and observations, both kept revealing their visionary natures, all these hopes and plans, all a bit exhausting really. Meanwhile Pierre drank and drank without getting drunk. He also made meaningful eyes at Aisha. I drank water the whole night; gulped it actually, just trying to cool down. Avoiding inebriation helped me think fast and not write that entire evening off — there on the kitchen counter were the glasses Tyche and Chedorlaomer had drunk out of and then left on the kitchen counter. I swiped them for the next stage of the project.

The results of the DNA test were disappointing. Bloodwise Tyche and Ched were as unrelated as could be, so I’d have to make some effort… I looked the results over carefully, consulted friends with some knowledge in the field, and went to work falsifying particulars. The end result only had to look legitimate to two dumbfounded laymen. I stress that this was not about Jean-Claude’s Tyche-phobia, or about money, or even about proving to my mother that as a true Barrandov I was equal to any task. I asked them to meet me in the bar at the Glissando.

“What’s this about?” Chedorlaomer asked, and Tyche appeared to very briefly meditate on the two envelopes on the counter before me before asking what was in them.

—

MY MIND TICKED over as I stammered the words I’d prepared; some words about never really knowing our fathers, how we only think we know them, how our fathers’ undisclosed dalliances may well cause the world around us to teem with flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood, correspondences we may only recognize subconsciously.

“Exactly what is he saying right now?” Tyche was talking to Ched and looking at me. The voice of reason piped up in my ear, beige through and through: Freddy’s lost his marbles. Lost them? What was this about loss? Ah well — I’d found something I really, really wanted. It was my dearest wish that Tyche and Chedorlaomer would believe my lie. If they believed me and shunned each other, then I had won. If they believed me and stayed together, then… well, that was another version also worth watching, even if it meant I’d lost. I still think I might not have gone as far as I did if they hadn’t arrived coated in that scent that drove me to frenzy.

Every time someone comes out of the lift in the building where you work you wish lift doors were made of glass. That way you’d be able to see who’s arriving a little before they actually arrive and there’d be just enough time to prepare the correct facial expression. Your new colleague steps out of the lift dressed just a tad more casually than is really appropriate for the workplace and because you weren’t ready you say “Hi!” with altogether too much force. She has: a heart-shaped face with subtly rouged cheeks, short, straight, neatly cut hair, and eyes that are long rather than wide. She’s black, but not local, this new colleague who wears her boots and jeans and scarf with a bohemian aplomb that causes the others to ask her where she shops. “Oh, you know, thrift stores,” she says with a chuckle. George at the desk next to yours says, “Charity shops?” and the newcomer says, “Yeah, thrift stores…”

Her accent is New York plus some other part of America, somewhere Midwest. And her name’s Eva. She’s not quite standoffish, not quite… but she doesn’t ask any questions that aren’t related to her work. Her own answers are brief and don’t invite further conversation. In the women’s toilets you find a row of your colleagues examining themselves critically in the mirror and then, one by one, they each apply a touch of rouge. Their makeup usually goes on at the end of the workday, but now your coworkers are demonstrating that Eva’s not the only one who can glow. When it’s your turn at the mirror you fiddle with your shirt. Sleeves rolled up so you’re nonchalantly showing skin, or is that too marked a change?

—

EVA TAKES no notice of any of this preening. She works through her lunch break, tapping away at the keyboard with her right hand, holding her sandwich with her left. You eat lunch at your desk too, just as you have ever since you started working here, and having watched her turn down her fourth invitation to lunch you say to her: “Just tell people you’re a loner. That’s what I did, anyway.”

Eva doesn’t look away from her computer screen and for a moment it seems as if she’s going to ignore you but eventually she says: “Oh… I’m not a loner.”

Fair enough. You return to your own work, the interpretation of data. You make a few phone calls to chase up some missing paperwork. Your company exists to assist other companies with streamlining their workforce for optimum productivity; the part people like you and Eva play in this is attaching cold, hard monetary value to the efforts of individual employees and passing those figures on to someone higher up the chain so that person can decide who should be made redundant. Your senior’s evaluations are more nuanced. They often get to go into offices to observe the employees under consideration, and in their final recommendations they’re permitted to allow for some mysterious quality termed potential. You aim to be promoted to a more senior position soon, because ranking people based purely on yearly income fluctuations is starting to get to you. You’d like a bit more context to the numbers. What happened in employee QM76932’s life between February and May four years ago, why do the figures fall so drastically? The figures improve again and remain steady to date, but is QM76932 really a reliable employee? Whatever calamity befell them, it could recur on a five-year cycle, making them less of a safe bet than somebody else with moderate but more consistent results. But it’s like Susie says, the reason why so many bosses prefer to outsource these evaluations is because context and familiarity cultivate indecision. When Susie gets promoted she’s not going to bother talking about potential. “We hold more power than the consultants who go into the office,” she says. That sounds accurate to you: The portrait you hammer out at your desk is the one that either affirms or refutes profitability. But your seniors get to stretch their legs more and get asked for their opinion, and that’s why you and Susie work so diligently toward promotion.