What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

is your blood as red as this?

I.

(NO)

YOU ALWAYS SAID, Myrna Semyonova, that we weren’t right for each other. And it always made my heart sink when you said that, but my answer was always: You’re wrong. I’ll show you. I’ll show you. I’ve got something that other lovers would give a great deal to possess: a perfect memory of the very first time I saw you. I was fifteen, and my handsome, laconic eighteen-year-old brother burned brightest among my heroes. I followed him everywhere — well, he sometimes managed to escape me, but most of the time he didn’t make too much of an effort. That’s Arjun’s gift; never trying too hard, always doing just enough. Somehow he knew how to be with people, when to make eye contact and when to gaze thoughtfully into the distance, how to prove that you’re paying attention to what you’re being told. It was Jyoti’s breaking up with him that improved his people skills. For three years Jyoti had been warning him and warning him about his tendency not to listen to her, or to anyone. Don’t you ever think that one day you might miss something really important, Arjun, she’d say. Something that someone can only say one time? He tried to focus. Well, he claimed that he was trying, but he still tuned out. If Jyoti was talking, then he’d gaze adoringly at her but not hear a word, and with everyone else he’d just fall silent and then insert a generic comment into the space left for him to speak in. God knows where his mind used to go.

One day Jyoti met up with him at the café down the road for a make-or-break conversation. She had a favor to ask him, she said, and if he didn’t at least consider doing it then there was no point in their being together. Jyoti, you have my full attention, he said immediately. Tell me — I’m listening. Fifteen minutes later, she checked her watch, kissed him on the cheek, and left the café beaming. She was late to meet a friend, but he’d agreed to do her the big favor she’d asked for. Only he had no idea what the favor was supposed to be. She’d lost him about four words in.

He asked a woman sitting nearby if she’d overheard the conversation, and if she could by any chance tell him what had been asked of him, but the woman was elderly and said: “Sorry love, I’m a bit hard of hearing nowadays.”

A couple on the other side of him categorically denied having heard anything, even after he told them the future of his relationship depended on it — this was England after all, where minding one’s own business is a form of civil religion. So all he could do was wait for Jyoti’s furious I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU phone call, and vow to win her love again one day, when he’d become a better man. I was learning a lot from Arjun. And I had lots more to learn. In those days when anyone spoke to me I became a flustered echo, scrambling up the words they’d said to me and then returning them as fast as I could. Blame it on growing pains, or on the ghost I shared my bedroom with.

—

MYRNA, BEFORE YOU I could only really talk to my brother and the ghost. There was something disorganized about the way she spoke that rubbed off on me. Plus she (the ghost) had warned me that the minute I grew up I wouldn’t be able to see her anymore. “How will I know when I’ve grown up?” When I started using words I didn’t really know the meaning of, she said. I said I did that already, and she said yes but I worried about it and grown-ups didn’t. (Of course I’m paraphrasing her; when I think back on her syntax it’s like hearing a song played backward.) So then there’s this trepidation that you’re going to suddenly find yourself having a conversation that turns you into a grown-up, a conversation that stops you being able to see things and people that are actually there. My brother knew about the ghost, but described her as an alarmist, said I needed to get out more and invited me to his friend Tim’s nineteenth birthday party. The party where I met you, Myrna.

“You can be my date tonight if you like,” Arjun said.

“Won’t people think it’s creepy?” I asked.

“Nah… if anything females are into males who are nice to their verbally challenged little sisters,” he said. “Gives the impression of having a caring side and stuff like that.”

“What a relief! I’d hate to come between you and the females.”

“Don’t even worry about that, Radha. That’s never going to happen.” (And so on.)

I know what it is to have a brother that people like talking to, so I brought a book just in case the evening took Arjun away from me. But he stuck with me, introduced me to the birthday boy, called upon his friends to observe the way I calmly matched him beer for beer, generally behaved in a way that made me feel as if I was something more than a stammering fly on the wall. Then a boy approached us — well, Arjun, really — a nondescript sort of boy, I’m surprised to say, since his hair was green. He had a look of rehearsal on his face, he was silently practicing sentences he’d prepared, and Arjun said to me quietly: “Wonder what this one’s after.”

The boy, Joe, was Tim’s cousin.

“Joe who goes to the puppet school?” Arjun asked.

“Yeah…”

“Seen, seen,” Arjun said. “What you saying?”

“Girls like you, don’t they?” Joe asked.

Arjun lowered his eyelids and shrugged; if I’d been wearing sleeves I’d have laughed into one of them. Joe had a twenty-pound note, which he was willing to hand over to my brother right now if Arjun would go over to a certain girl, dance with her, talk to her, and appear to enjoy her company for a couple of hours. Once I realized what he was asking, I thought: Even Arjun will be lost for words this time. But my brother must’ve had similar requests before (can teenage boys really be so inhuman?) because he asked: “Is she really that butters? I haven’t seen any girl I’d rate below a seven tonight. A good night, I was thinking.”

The boy had the good grace to blush. “No, she’s not that ugly. Just… not my type.”

“Why did you even bring her then, if she’s not your type?” Arjun asked.

“It was a dare,” Joe said, miserably. “I don’t usually do things like this — you can ask Tim — just believe me when I say I didn’t have much of a choice. I didn’t think she’d say yes. But she did.”

“Mate… don’t pay people to hang out with her.”

“I don’t know what else to do. She’s got to have a good time. She’s my headmaster’s daughter. I don’t think she’d get me expelled or anything — maybe she won’t even say anything to him. But she’s his daughter.”

“Better safe than sorry,” my brother agreed. Myrna, by that point I was already looking around to see if I could spot you (what level of unattractiveness forces people to pay cash so as to be able to avoid having to look at it or speak to it?) and when Joe said that he’d been trying to talk to you but you just sat there reading your book, I searched all the harder.

“What kind of person brings a book to a party,” Arjun said expressionlessly, without looking at me, but he gave a little nod that I interpreted as a suggestion that I seek this girl out.

“What’s her name?” I asked. Joe told me. I found you half buried in a beanbag, pretending to read that dense textbook that takes all the fun out of puppeteering, the one your father swears by — Brambani’s War Between the Fingers and the Thumb. Curse stuffy old Brambani. Maybe his lessons are easier to digest when filtered through stubbornly unshed tears. You had a string of fairy lights wrapped around your neck. I sort of understood how that would be comforting, the lights around your neck. Sometimes I dream I’m falling, and it’s not so much frightening as it is tedious, just falling and falling until I’m sick of it, but then a noose stops me short and I think, well, at least I’m not falling anymore. Clearly I hadn’t arrived in your life a moment too soon. You looked at me, and this is how I saw you, when first I saw you: I saw your eyes like flint arrows, and your chin set against the world, and I saw the curve of your lips, which is so beautiful that it’s almost illusory — your eyes freeze a person, but then the flickering flame of your mouth beckons.

Thank God Joe was so uncharacteristically panicky and stupid that evening. I discovered that I could talk to you in natural, complete sentences. It was simple: If I talked to you, perhaps you would kiss me. And I had to have a kiss from you: To have seen your lips and not ever kissed them would have been the ruin of me…

—

AS FOR WHAT you saw of me — I think you saw a kid in a gray dress gawping at you like you were the meaning of life. You immediately began talking to me as if I were a child at your knee. You told me about how stories come to our aid in times of need. You’d recently been on a flight from Prague, you told me, and the plane had gone through a terrifyingly long tunnel of turbulence up there in the clouds. “Everyone on the plane was freaking out, except the girl beside me,” you said. “She was just reading her book — maybe a little bit faster than usual, but otherwise untroubled. I said to her: ‘Have you noticed that we might be about to crash?’ And she said: ‘Yes I did notice that actually, which makes it even more important for me to know how this ends.’”

I got you to dance, and I got you to show me a few of the exercises you did for hand flexibility, and I got you to talk about your school and its classrooms full of students obsessed with attaining mastery of puppets. I liked the sound of it. Your eyes narrowed intently as you spoke of your final year there: The best two students were permitted to choose two new students and help them through their first year. It was in your mind to play a part in another puppeteer’s future, that much was clear. You believed in the work that puppet play can do — you’d seen it with your own eyes. Before your father began teaching, back in the days when he performed, you had seen a rod puppet of his go down on its knees before a girl who sat a little aside from his audience of schoolchildren. This girl had been looking on with her hair hanging over her face, only partly hiding a cruel-looking scar; her eyes shone with hatred. Not necessarily hatred of your father or of puppets or the other children, but a hatred of make-believe, which did not heal, but was only useful to the people who didn’t need it. Man and long-bearded puppet left the stage, walked over to the girl, and knelt — the puppet’s kneeling was of course guided by your father’s hand, and every eye in the audience was on your father’s face, but his uncertain expression convinced everyone that the puppet had suddenly expressed a will of its own. “Princess, I am Merlin, your Merlin,” the puppet man said to the girl. “At your service forever.”

“Me?” the girl said, suspicious, on the edge of wrath—you just try and make me the butt of your joke—“Me, a princess? You, at my service?”

“It’s no mistake.” The puppet’s hand moved slowly, reverently; it held its breath despite having no breath to hold, the girl allowed that wooden hand to fondly brush her cheek — watching, you were absolutely sure that no hand of flesh and bone would have been allowed to come that close. “This is the sign by which we recognize you,” the puppet said, “but if you wish you may continue as you are in disguise.”

And your father and his puppet returned to the stage, never turning their backs on the girl, as is the protocol regarding walking away from royalty. The girl’s teacher cried, but the girl herself just looked as if she was thinking. She continued to think through the second act of the puppet play, but by the third act she was clapping and laughing as loudly as the rest of them. I really don’t know why I thought your reaching the end of that story would be a good moment to kiss you; I wasn’t entirely surprised that it didn’t work.

—

“YOUNG LADY, I’m flattered — and tempted — but — how old are you, anyway?” you asked. Then you said I was too young. Too young, not right for you, blah blah blah. Always something.

Joe and Arjun appeared with our coats, and you slid my book out of my coat pocket. “What’s this?”

Fate is what it was. Yes, fate that the book I had with me was a novel written by my great-grandfather, a text you couldn’t read because my great-grandfather had put a permanent ban on any of his works being translated into English, Russian, or French. He was adamant that these three are languages that break all the bones of any work translated into them. Since people like getting around rules, there are various unofficial translations of my great-grandfather’s books floating around online, but all of them just seem to prove his point.

—

“JUST TELL ME the beginning of it, then,” you said, and I opened the book to translate for you. You liked the beginning — a woman opens her front door to find a corpse on her doorstep, but before the body can topple across the threshold of her home she says, “Oh no you don’t,” pushes it back out with a broom, and legs it out of the back door.

“Wait,” you were saying, as I walked away arm in arm with my brother—“Hang on, Radha, I need to know—”

“I’d say she’s at least an eight,” my brother said, surprised. (You have my permission to make him regret marking girls’ physical appearance out of ten.) When I got home the ghost immediately knew something was up. She said she’d been wondering when I’d meet someone.

“If I–I don’t know, if some sort of miracle happens and I have sex with someone, will I stop being able to see you?”

The ghost looked crafty for a moment, then relented and said no, I was stuck with her. And she was pleased for me when you phoned me the next day to ask me to translate the next paragraph of my great-grandfather’s book. You hung up as soon as I gave you the paragraph, but the ghost said you’d come back for more, and you did. You began to talk to me a little after each day’s translation, asking me questions about myself and my day and whatever music happened to be playing in my bedroom whenever you called. “Glad you like it — I don’t know what this song is called, but it’s probably quite a bit older than we are. The truth is we’ve got a nostalgic ghost for a DJ around here,” I’d say, and you’d laugh, thinking I’d made a joke.

The ghost observed that I was going to come to the end of my translation one day.

“Yeah, but come on. We’re only halfway through the second chapter. And after this book there are fifteen others by the same author.”

The ghost asked if I thought my great-grandfather would be impressed by this use of his hard work.

“Oh, ghost — what have you got against love?”

Nothing, said the ghost, sounding injured. She had nothing whatsoever against love. She was just saying.

The ghost showed that she was on my side when she heard you mention the news that you were one of the two final-year students who got to select a newcomer to mentor. “It’s going to be fun. We get to watch the applicants through hidden panels in a soundproofed room so they don’t hear us booing or cheering them.”

This terrified me, but the ghost breathed on the windowpane and wrote FOR GO IT on the misted glass.

“Who’s the other student?” I asked. “Not green-haired Joe?”

“Haha, no. Though he does put on interesting Punch and Judy shows. Dad says he’s going to be very good one day. The other student’s a boy called Gustav Grimaldi. I don’t like the way he performs; it’s scruffy. And I’d say his puppets have a nihilistic spirit, if you’d understand what I meant by that.”

“Nihilistic, eh… sounds bad,” I said, pinning the phone to my ear with my shoulder as I googled “nileistic.”

“Sometimes his puppets won’t perform at all. He just lets them sit there, watching us. Then he has them look at each other and then back at us until it feels as if they have information, some kind of dreadful information about each and every one of us, and you begin to wish they’d decide to keep their mouths shut forever. There’s no entertainment in it at all, and I don’t understand why he chooses this way to put on a show when he knows so many other ways. He shouldn’t be allowed to choose any new students. If there’s anyone bound to introduce unsavory elements into our group, it’s Grimaldi.”

“Good thing I’m extra wholesome then. Do applicants have to have experience with puppets and all that?” I asked, and when you said that in fact your father liked people to come to the field fresh, I asked if fifteen was too old to start.

“Not if you’re serious. Are you?”

“As serious as I can be. I don’t feel one hundred percent sure that I’m not a puppet myself,” I said.

“No wonder I like you,” you said. The ghost gave me a high five.

“You need a puppet,” you went on. “Competition for places is quite fierce — people do what they can to stand out. Some people make their own puppets. I did, out of paper and pins. The thing fell apart mid-performance, but I built that into the story.”

—

MUM AND DAD wouldn’t be thrilled by my new career ambitions. Don’t forget your Uncle Majhi… Majhi the mime… and ask yourself, do we really want more people like that in our family? My parents worked a lot — no need to bother them with something that might not work out. The thing to do was gain admission first and talk them round later. I bought a brown-skinned glove puppet. He came with a little black briefcase and his hair was parted exactly down the middle. The precision of his parting made me uneasy; somehow it was too human at the exact same time as exposing his status as a nonhuman. I got him a top hat so I wouldn’t have to think about the cloth hair falling away from the center of his cloth scalp. You gave me a hand with some basics of ventriloquism, even though you definitely weren’t supposed to help — it was then that I began to hope that you’d stop saying I wasn’t right for you — and I taught my puppet to tell jokes with a pained and forlorn air, fully aware of how bad the jokes were. Sometimes you laughed, and then my glove puppet would weep piteously. When you took the glove puppet he alternated between flirtatious and suicidal, hell-bent on flinging himself from great heights and out of windows. I noticed that you didn’t make a voice or a history for the puppet, but you became its voice and history. I’d have liked to admire that but felt I was watching a distressing form of theft, since the puppet could do nothing but suffer being forced open like an oyster.

—

WE DECIDED it would be better for my puppet to continue the daily translations — my great-grandfather’s book, line by line, first in Hindi, next in English, as you listened, rapt, and then repeated the line in Russian and French. Thus the book’s bones were broken. I didn’t realize it until about a week before my audition, when I reread the book’s last chapter, which I was yet to translate for you, and the bright words flew through my mind like comets. That feeling was gone from the other chapters; somehow it had seeped out. And I told my glove puppet that it was not to say the final words of the book.

The ghost approved, but she was also quite sure that you wouldn’t choose me if my glove puppet didn’t say the words we’d planned it would say, you and I. The ghost even advised me not to bother turning up. Naturally I disregarded her advice. A couple of days later, the waiting room of your grand old school encased me in marbled fog as I watched other hopefuls practicing with their puppets. Some were more actors than puppeteers, but others handled their marottes and tickle puppets and Bunraku puppets with an ease and affection that didn’t exist between my glove puppet and me. I think the soul must be heavy and smooth, Myrna: I deduce this from the buoyant, jerky movements of puppets, which lack souls. The girl beside me was very pretty — tousled dreadlocks, dimples, and night-sky skin — you know, with this radiance blended into the darkness. But I considered myself taken, and so I merely asked where her puppet was. “It’s this.” She took a small box out of her jacket pocket, and out of that box she took a porcelain chess piece. A plum-colored queen, her only features her crown and a slight wave that conceded the existence of hips and a bosom.

“Did you make her yourself?”

“No, I found her. I know she doesn’t look like a puppet, but she is one. I know it because when I first picked her up I said something I’d never said before. I put her down and then when I picked her up I said the thing again without meaning to, and again it was something I hadn’t said before, even though the words were the same.”

“What’s her routine?”

“At the moment she only asks this one question, but I’m hoping to learn how to get her to ask another.”

“What’s her question?”

The girl looked uncomfortable. She pointed at her nametag: “This is me, by the way.” Tyche Shaw. My own nametag was lost in my hair, so I shook hands with her and said: “Radha Chaudhry. What’s your puppet’s question?”

Tyche mumbled something, too low for me to hear. I’d just decided not to ask again — maybe she was saving it up for the audition — when she repeated herself: “Is your blood as red as this.”

A chess piece asking a personal question, possibly one of the most personal questions that could be asked. I didn’t know how to answer. At my instruction my glove puppet shook its head, No, surely your blood is redder. Tyche turned the purple queen around on her palm and asked the question again; this time the note of challenge left her voice and the question became droll; the next time the chess piece asked her question she sounded worried, seeking comparison for the sake of measuring normality. Frustration came next (after all, the chess piece wasn’t even red… therefore as red as what, compared to what). From what you’d said about Gustav Grimaldi’s puppets I knew you would strongly disapprove of the question Tyche Shaw’s puppet asked; in fact you would hate it. But this tiny queen’s question was large; she spoke and you couldn’t think of anything else but her question, and how to answer it. The sharpest thing I had on me was a brooch — I could prick my finger with my brooch pin, and then we would see.

“You’re good, Tyche,” I said, and I wasn’t the only one who walked out for fresh air. Several other demoralized applicants followed me out and had last-minute conversations with their puppets.

“I’m not going to be able to get this job done for you,” my own glove puppet said to me.

“Shhh, I won’t let you pretend this is your fault,” I told it. “I’m just going to have to find another way to show Myrna.”

—

THERE WAS A FRAMED photograph hung on the wall in front of me, and when I said your name I saw you in the picture. Well, I saw your back, and your long, bright ponytail fluttering. The image is black and white, and you’re running, and you cast a number of shadows that cluster about you like a bouquet. There’s a figure running a little ahead of you and at first that figure seems to be a shadow too, except that it casts a backward glance that establishes an entirely separate personality. The figure’s features are wooden, but mobile — some sort of sprite moves within, not gently, but convulsively. A beauty that rattles you until you’re in tears, that was my introduction to Rowan Wayland. You and the puppet — I decided it was a puppet — were leaping through one upright rectangle into another. An open door seen through an open door, and in the corner of that distant room was a cupboard, fallen onto its side. There was a sign on the cupboard door. (I tilted my head: The sign read TOYS.)

It’s a photo in which lines abruptly draw back from each other and ceilings and floors spin off in different directions, but for all that the world that’s pictured doesn’t seem to be ending. You were both running in place, you blurred around the edges, the puppet hardly blurred at all, and the puppet was looking back, not at you, but at me. It felt like the two of you were running for your lives, for fear I’d take them. Or you could’ve been racing each other to that cupboard door, racing each other home. TOYS, the sign reads, but signs aren’t guarantees. Either way I wanted to go too, and wished the puppet would hold out its hand to me, or beckon me, or do something more than return my gaze with that strange tolerance.

—

WHEN MY NAME was called I entered the audition room and my glove puppet made an irresolute attempt to eat a sugar cube from a bowlful that had been left on a table, then gave in to despair and decided to sleep. After a minute there was a crackling sound in the corner of the room and I heard your voice through the speaker, Myrna, trying to give me a chance. “Miss Chaudhry, don’t you have anything prepared? You’ve only got ten more minutes and as you may have seen in the waiting room, we’re observing quite a few applicants today.”

This reminder had no effect on me; I continued as I was until someone knocked on the audition room door and then came in, glancing first at the clock and then through the mirrored wall to the spot where I presumed you were sitting. It was a boy who came in — he had a hand behind his back, and I think I would’ve found that threatening if it weren’t for his deep-set, elephantine eyes, the patience in them.

“I’m Gustav,” he said. “Give me your puppet and you shall have a different one.”

“What will you do with mine?”

“It’s up to him. He can sleep all he wants and have as much sugar as he likes, make new friends, maybe change the position of the parting in his hair if he’s feeling daring. Quickly, take her.”

I handed over my glove puppet and received a brass marionette in exchange. “I got this one out of the store cupboard. She hasn’t been out in a while… a lot of people find they can’t work with her; she’s haunted,” Gustav said over his shoulder, as he left the room. Smashing.

—

ORCHESTRATING this new puppet’s movements seemed hopeless; I was holding the wooden bar that controlled all her strings correctly, and none of the strings were tangled, but that had been Gustav’s quick, deft work, not mine. Though we both stood still I felt the marionette advance upon me, and without moving I shrank away.

“Five minutes,” you said through the speaker, not hiding the note of incredulity in your voice. I spoke to the puppet in the looking-glass English that my ghost friend speaks. I asked her if she was haunted or something worse. She answered eagerly, as you do in a foreign country when you need assistance and come upon someone who speaks your language: “Worse thingsome,” was her answer. “Worse thingsome.” And if I help you now, you must help me later.

You won’t ask me to harm anyone? I asked.

Never.

Then I accept.

Good. Simply translate what I say. I will speak; don’t worry about the controls, I will match your posture, it’ll look better.

She spoke the way that my ghost friend spoke — it cannot be that all ghosts speak the same way, I knew that even then — and I translated. It didn’t take long:

I am not a haunted puppet, we said, I am living. My name is Gepetta and a long time ago I was an apprentice to two puppeteers whose names are honored in this place. I took care of the puppets in the workshop — I was a kind of nurse to them, tending to their damage, and making sure that they lasted. Their masters grew old and died, and I stayed with the puppets. They were not living, but one step away from living, always one step away. They know when human life is near them, and they need human life to be near them; it keeps them from going… wrong.

I began to train others in the care of puppets. In my time it seemed such knowledge was dying out… I trained a few boys and girls who wanted to learn, but a plague came. Not a plague that revealed itself in the skin, this one crept through the air. My apprentices died, and I would have too, but my puppet charges forbade it.

Each puppet sacrificed something — a leg, an arm, torso, head, and so on… you will replace these things when you are ready, they said.

They assembled a body, but didn’t join up the parts.

Look at your new body. You will go in, they said.

I said I would not, but it happened hour by hour; I would drowse a little and when I woke another part of me had been replaced. It began with my left hand and ended with my right foot. Think of it: looking down at your human foot out of a pair of brass eyes. And then I grew smaller, and all of a piece, as I am today. My name is Gepetta; long have I wanted to say this, but nobody would help me to say it…

—

SO THAT WAS how I met my friend Gepetta. And as you know, Myrna Semyonova, three days later I was called back to your school, our school, and I found Tyche Shaw waiting for me. And you were there, and so was Gustav Grimaldi. Then I knew I’d been chosen, and I went to you. You smiled and said, “Well done,” but it was Gustav who took my hand and said: “Welcome, Radha. We’ll do such things together!”

My ghost friend was right: I disobeyed you and so you didn’t choose me. But what were your reasons for choosing Tyche? I saw even then that you would try your best to break what she carries.

Why are you telling me all this again, you say impatiently, but a person doesn’t easily recover from the sadness of finding that it’s not always affinity that draws us together (not always, not only), that you can be called to undo the deeds of another. You make a lot of work for me — my blood runs cold to think of it all — but you see I take strength from remembering that you began with intentions that were pure.

II.

(YES)

RADHA AND GUSTAV had a shaky start. She brought me along to their first meeting and the three of us walked around Berkeley Square. “Hi, Gepetta,” Gustav said to me. He always says hello to me, even though I never reply. His good manners are his own affair. Radha threw breadcrumbs to pigeons. Gustav kept his sunglasses on the entire time and talked at length about the work of several mid-twentieth-century filmmakers Radha had never heard of. I could see Radha making up her mind that if she was going to learn anything from Gustav it would be by accident, and I saw her changing her mind when he introduced her to his puppets—“You’ve brought yours,” he said to Radha, nodding in my direction, “and I’ve brought mine.” Four of them had accompanied him to this meeting; two peeping out from each of his coat pockets. They were good-natured fatalists one and all, never in a rush, preferring to put off action until matters had resolved themselves without anyone in the troupe having had to lift a finger. The leader of the pack was a disheveled sophisticate named Hamlet. It was Hamlet who became Radha’s chief extracurricular guide, her lecturer, heckler, cheerleader, and coconspirator. At those times we all forgot whose voice and hands Hamlet and company were making use of, and the next day Radha would report mastery of some minor voice control trick to Gustav as if he hadn’t been there in the room with us. Initially it seemed that this type of forgetfulness seriously displeased Gustav, but as we grew more comfortable with him I began to see that when Radha told him something odd or amusing that Hamlet or one of his other puppets had said or done, what Gustav actually expressed was restrained interest. He was observing a process we were not yet privy to.

—

I CAUGHT ON LONG before Radha did. She spoke to Gustav’s troupe in a way that she would never have spoken to him directly. As this confidence flourished, so did a sympathy between Radha and Gustav’s puppets, who devoted themselves to making her laugh and would materialize en masse outside her classroom door and walk her to the bus stop at the end of the day, crying: “Make way for boss lady!” Gustav surrounded her with her especial favorites: Hamlet with his pudding bowl haircut, Chagatai, who was both assassin and merman (he kills sailors with his sexy falsetto!), Brunhild the shipbuilder, and an astronaut named Petrushka, who answered any question put to him in exhaustive detail. Also present was a toddler-sized jumping bean known as Loco Dempsey. Their master walked behind Radha, arms raised as he worked the controls high above her head. Under Gustav’s command all the strings stayed separate; Radha marveled at that and leaned into him so as not to be the body that tangled those clean lines. He nudged a few of the controls into her hands, lowered his arms so that he was holding her — not tightly, since there’s only so much you can do with your elbows. He whistled a brisk polonaise and her gestures led his as she set Brunhild and Loco to marching. Radha looked so happy that I thought some kind of admission was forthcoming later, but instead she turned to me and said: “That can’t be the same gang Myrna told me about.”

—

THE NIGHT a fortuneteller outside KFC seized Radha by both hands and told her that little by little she was falling for an invisible man, she was confounded and kept me awake until dawn asking who on earth it could possibly be…

I couldn’t decide whether the Grimaldi boy was to be pitied, congratulated, or scolded. Granted, this was one way to have a secret love affair, but there was no telling what his own feelings were, or whether this was just a routine seduction for him. Put yourself in his place: You’re descended from generations of people who speak and have spoken primarily through puppets… as such you’re a kind of champion at psychological limbo. And you happen to like girls with brilliant eyes that see hidden things and dark hair from which they occasionally retrieve forgotten notes to themselves. Then you meet a new one. Wouldn’t you try and see how close you could get without her noticing?

—

RADHA TOOK to checking her phone constantly but with no clear objective — most of her messages were from Tyche Shaw, who she felt both jealous and protective of and would have preferred not to have to deal with at all. Tyche was in the Orkney Isles with Myrna and her father, and in addition to relying on Radha to keep her updated on puppet school assignments, the girl insisted on being friendly and requesting personal news. Unaware that she had any, Radha settled for sending pictures of herself sitting on the curbstone outside her house drinking homemade smoothies with her brother. I was in the photo too, sat on Arjun’s shoulders. I never spoke to him and so he viewed me as a kind of fashion accessory of Radha’s. At that time I was getting some of my best fun from being alone with him and sporadically opening and closing my mouth whenever he blinked.

Me, Gepetta, and A.J. on the corner drinking heavy juice all day long. What about you and my wife?

That was all the invitation Tyche needed to flood Radha’s in-box with angst that Radha unintentionally increased by responding only with emoticons.

Where do I begin… well, everything I do pisses “your wife” off

I keep answering her rhetorical questions & then not daring to answer her non-rhetorical questions

Oh and her specialty seems to be saying insanely awful stuff out of nowhere

The kind of things you have to forget in order to be able to go on living, you know?

This one comment about my hands made me want to cut them off & just throw them away. Has anyone ever spoken to you like that

Never mind, I just avoid looking at my hands now, hahaha sob

Never been good at comebacks, so I just pick up rocks and pretend to clobber her when her back is turned.

How’s it going with Gustav anyway

Radha, what exactly do you like about this WENCH?

Her dad genuinely thinks she’s human…

—

FOR EVERY TEN MESSAGES from Tyche there were perhaps three or four from Myrna (all in praise of Tyche) and one from Gustav. One night, just as Radha had lain down on her bed, he sent a photo of his glove puppet Cheon Song Yi wielding a tube of lipstick like a sword. Accompanying text: Somebody stop her. As for Gustav, all that could be seen of him was a full, shapely lower lip stained orchid pink from Song Yi’s lipstick attack. He was positioned behind the puppet, but it was one of those photos where the background very gradually becomes the foreground. At first glance Radha snorted and rolled her eyes. Then she tilted her head, took another look, and slowly crossed and uncrossed her legs. Still studying the photo, she absentmindedly traced the shape of her own mouth and sucked the tip of her index finger. The bedroom ghost and I looked at each other and silently agreed to vacate the room.

—

I MISSED DESIRE. And I was glad my friend’s heart had been given a puzzle to work on while it ached over Myrna Semyonova. Even if it became necessary to drop Gustav, Radha had other tutoring options. Her classmates were a friendly bunch, lacking in the competitive spirit their teachers would have liked to see. They worked on one another’s ideas. Their puppets swapped costumes, props, catchphrases, and sometimes even characters. This kind of camaraderie made the ostracization of Rowan Wayland all the more marked.

—

HISTORY OF PUPPETRY was the hour of the week in which Radha and others played with paper, making puppets with pinned joints and hands and feet that spun like weather vanes. They were learning histories of Punchinello, a beak-nosed figure who stands for nothing. The place and century of his birth is the sort of thing learned people in tweed jackets argue about, but for a couple of centuries he’s been present in Austria, where he is Kasperle, setting his cunning aside to concentrate on brutality without pause, until every other puppet in his world is dead and then his master must see to it that he doesn’t go after his audience too. In Hungary he’s the terse and sardonic Vitéz László, in France the twinkle returns to his eyes and he becomes Polichinelle, a demon from the merriest of hells. In England Punch is a sensitive chap; any passerby who so much as looks at him the wrong way is promptly strangled with a string of sausages. When he takes up his Turkish residence Karagöz is too lazy to attempt very much murder, though he has a reservoir of verbal abuse to shower upon anyone who comes between him and his meals. Wherever you find him, he is careful not to discuss the past. Whatever it is you’re asking about, he didn’t do it and hasn’t the faintest idea who might be responsible, in fact he doesn’t know anything at all, he wasn’t “there,” see, he’s been “here” the whole time… which begs the question, where were you?

—

WHEN RADHA and I walked into the History of Puppetry classroom the first thing we noticed was the ocean of space that surrounded Rowan Wayland, and for caution’s sake we chose seats that maintained his solitude. We watched him but had difficulty finding out whether keeping our distance was weak or wise; nobody would talk about him. Wayland himself behaved as if his pariah status was perfectly natural, walking around the building looking straight ahead with his collar popped up around his ears. Radha remarked that he gave her the strange feeling of being an extra on a film set. It took two weeks for curiosity to change our seating vote. “Maybe he’s just misunderstood,” I said. Radha agreed to risk it.

He had a pair of red needles and a heap of wool on top of his books and was knitting while he waited for the teacher to arrive. There’s a gentle assurance many knitters have as they fix their patterns in place. Rowan’s knitting wasn’t like that. He stared at his sock-in-progress with an insistence that brooked no compromise, as if he’d learned that this was the only way to ensure that each stitch stayed where he’d put it. We took the seats alongside him, Radha said hello, and kept saying it until he acknowledged her with a sidelong glance.

“I’m Radha,” Radha said, before he could look away again.

“OK,” he said. “Why — I mean, what do you want?”

“Nothing,” Radha answered, with the guileless good cheer that makes her so dear to me. “Just saying hello. This is Gepetta.”

He smiled at me, and kept knitting. At first, second, or even third glance it was difficult to pin down what made him so much avoided. Rowan’s physical effect — godlike jawline, long-lashed eyes, umber skin, rakish quiff of hair — is that of a lightning strike. In full sunlight the true color of his hair is revealed to be navy blue, and when he scratches his head, as he sometimes does when he’s thinking, his hair parts so that the two tiny corkscrews of bone at the front of his skull are visible. Yes, horns. Not scary ones — I think these were intended as a playful touch. The problem with Wayland is that he’s a puppet built to human scale. Masterless and entirely alive. No matter how soft his skin appears to be he is entirely wooden, and it is not known exactly what animates him — no clock ticks in his chest. Rowan is male to me, since he moves and speaks with a grace that reminds me of the boys and men of my Venetian youth. He’s female to Myrna. For Radha and Gustav Rowan is both male and female. Perhaps we read him along the lines of our attractions; perhaps it really is as arbitrary as that. He just shrugs and says: “Take your pick. I’m mostly tree, though.” His fellow students already had all those confusing hormone surges to deal with. So most of them stayed away, though I’m sure they all dreamed of him, her, hir, zir, a body with a tantalizing abundance of contours, this Rowan who is everything but mostly tree. I’m sure Rowan Wayland was dreamed of nonstop.

—

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.

—

AS A FORM of escape from involuntary giving, the girl tried to identify those who were in the most pain and spent evenings at her local hospital just sitting with people, holding hands for as long as she could. She tried to do the same on the psychiatric ward but the security was tighter there. When she came home she stayed near her mother, whose addiction to painkillers had already caused her to injure herself for the sake of high-strength prescriptions. The woman’s nerves tormented her so that only medication prevented her howling becoming a source of public or even domestic disturbance. From the little that the woman had been able to explain to her, the girl knew that her mother thought strange thoughts she could never tell anyone. Graphic structures appeared on the insides of her eyelids, a minute exhibition of X-ray photographs. There was affection between mother and daughter, but they’d given up trying to express it; rather than force a display they simply asked for each other’s good faith. And no matter how many times the girl offered her hand, her mother refused it. It was the usual struggle between one who loves by accepting burdens and one who loves by refusing to be one. Really the mother’s pursuit of pills wasn’t motivated by the necessity of avoiding pain, but a determination to avoid any feeling at all. That’s why the pills were better than holding the child’s hand.

—

THE GIRL’S father was a puppeteer, and there came a day when he was called to perform in Prague; an honor it would’ve been difficult to disregard. He’d never dreamed of being noticed by the puppeteers at work in that city, let alone considered a colleague. The professor’s wife read this as a sign that she must either break or bend. She told her husband it would be good for him to take their daughter traveling, and checked into a clinic as an answer to her family’s anxieties about her being alone. So the girl found herself living in Prague. Rowan himself has no particular view of Prague, but I know it a little, and it was fitting that the likes of Myrna Semyonova was let loose in a city whose streets combined sepia-filtered rainbows and shapes of nightmarish precision. If I truly remember the street Rowan mentioned, then Myrna and her father lived in a building that looked like an avenue of concrete gallows welded together with steel. Apart from enforcing her school attendance, her father left her to her own devices; she was free to watch his rehearsals and performances or to improve her graffiti skills, aggravate swans on the banks of the Vltava, or anything else that seemed like a good idea. Myrna loved to watch her father with his puppets — he showed her the influence it was possible to have from a slight distance — so she spent a lot of time at the theater that became his second home. But she also began a correspondence with her mother that pleased them and led to the discovery that both strudel and currant buns remain on the edible side after delivery by forty-eight-hour courier service. From time to time they briefly discussed recovery, and Myrna began to hear a change in the language her mother used to describe her pain — they were words that spoke more of bending than breaking.

—

MYRNA HAD ASSUMED command over two boys who lived in the flat above her own: Jindrich and Kirill, the Topol brothers. Myrna was both boys’ grand passion… they called her “London” and longed for a chance to rescue her from some danger or other. Sometimes one brother would menace her so that the other could defend her, even though she’d emphasized from the beginning that all she required of them was that they both die for her if and when such endeavor became necessary. The Topols were in the process of teaching Myrna some Czech, so her instructions were mostly mimed, but the brothers understood her at once. Death frequently crossed their minds, and why shouldn’t it, when Myrna had become a participant in their Sunday afternoon wrestling matches in Olšany cemetery? Kirill was ferocious and Jindrich was fleet of foot, but Myrna was nimbler still, and her brutality was fed by her desire not to cheat. Instead of laying hands on her opponent she wove figures of eight until he was exhausted and some obliging tree branch gave her the height to safely grab Jindrich or Kirill with both feet and slam him to the ground, with the additional offense of forcing him to break her own fall.

—

WITH ITS TENS OF THOUSANDS of graves, Prague’s Olšany cemetery is a large village, a small town, in itself. I, Gepetta, have been there, and I know that something travels in that place, something passes among the trees. I cannot say what this traveler is, since we’ve never crossed paths, but what I’ve been able to see for myself is that in some of Olšany clearings leaves lock together and form shadowy bridges from branch to branch, and the barks of these bridged trees peel back to show a color that glistens with rawness and decay, sap and old bone. The Topols and Myrna followed this trail, switching wrestling arenas for about a month, scrambling through swathes of undergrowth, administering the occasional surprise fly-kick (no matter how many times it’s happened before, it’s always startling to be assaulted by a bush) before they discovered the little wooden devil. The wooden devil had been aware of them for weeks. She was carved of rowan wood, and she retained the opinions of trees: one of them being that it was best not to have anything to do with human folk. “Firstly, they cut us down,” Rowan said. “Secondly they’re all insane, though I suppose they can’t help that, being rooted in water instead of earth.”

—

THE WOODEN devil got a good laugh out of the ones who passed by, though. They were so funny she couldn’t even feel sorry for them. They tried so hard to keep track of time. Whenever they were together they couldn’t let sixty of their minutes pass without asking each other what time it was; as if time was a volatile currency that they either possessed or did not possess, when in fact time was more of a fog that rose inexorably over all their words and deeds so that they were either forgotten or misremembered. The wooden devil’s official duty was to guard the grave of an alchemist named Rowan Wayland. The grave was empty; in fact it was one of seven scattered across the continent, and the other six were empty too. As an alchemist, Wayland had liked the idea of implying that he’d excelled at his profession — this could only work if he left absolutely no evidence of having died. His plan had worked. Six centuries had passed and the residents of the streets surrounding the cemetery still didn’t feel they could rule out the possibility of his being around somewhere. Every fourteenth of July without fail the town council received a bag of antique gold from an anonymous benefactor; symbolic payment for Wayland’s burial plot. It was actually somewhat unlikely that this payment came from Wayland himself, since the main reason King Rudolf had ordered the alchemist’s execution was his failure to produce gold from base metal as promised. Wayland had good friends. They arranged for a wooden puppet to be buried in place of his body. The man himself had fled the Czech lands and lived to advance his career in other royal courts.

The wooden devil had been through a lot since she’d been discovered to be the grave’s sole inhabitant — she’d been waxed and lacquered and pegged to the earth, frozen, drenched, and dried out again. She’d even seen the traveler in the trees: “Spinning, as a wheel does.” The life in the wooden devil was slight and vague, only a little more than that possessed by inanimate puppets, but it was maintained by the fact that the first impression she gave was one of humanity. Graveyard visitors approaching the wooden devil from behind tended to mistake her for someone about the same age as Myrna Semyonova was at that time, and would confidently strike up conversation, though they were either sheepish or oddly repulsed when they discovered their mistake. At any rate this persistence of address cultivated a silent response. The wooden devil had a good vantage point, and served as secret audience to a few Topol-Semyonova wrestling matches. The devil was slightly worried that Myrna and the boys would make a nuisance of themselves once they found her. But there was one tree that the wooden devil thought of as her mother, because this tree had murmured soothingly to her when she’d still been coming up as sapling. That tree watched over her still, and murmured what the elder trees at Olšany always murmured:

“To pominulo; stejně může i tohle.” That went by; so can this.

The tree was right. This situation wasn’t unique. The children were most likely to run for their lives as soon as they saw her.

—

MYRNA SAW THE DEVIL before the Topol brothers did, and she approached without calling out. She read the name on the headstone and brushed a little lichen out of the devil’s hair. Her gentleness left the devil nonplussed. It was highly irregular for anyone to be curious enough about the feel of her to voluntarily touch her. And nobody had ever seemed quite so pleased by their findings.

The boys overdid their nonchalance, treating the devil’s shoulders as coat pegs. The girl’s front door keys were always falling out of her pockets, so she left them on the devil’s lap before chucking her under the chin and saying: “Thanks, Rowan.” A sequence of elaborate stretches followed, and then Jindrich and Kirill were ready to fight, with Myrna playing referee. It was a highly unusual afternoon for the wooden devil, who was intensely aware of the arm that Myrna had casually flung around her shoulders, as if they were friends who had come to that place together.

—

AROUND DINNERTIME the boys took their jackets back. But Myrna left her door keys, and didn’t miss them until she reached her front door and stuck her hand into the pocket of her jeans.

Her father was still at the theater, so the Topols took her in for the evening. After dinner Kirill adjusted the lamplight until he’d created the correct conditions for shadow play and Myrna put on a little show. Her makeshift shadow puppets quarreled among themselves, hands thrown up, what to do, what to do… a spoon-headed creature had suddenly appeared in their midst and befriended their youngest boy. I promised him he could live with us… The shadow mother forbade this. Absolutely not! Send this fellow on his way, son. The boy set up a tent in the garden and courteously asked the spoon-headed creature to enter and consider himself at home. The spoon-headed creature offered to go away, as he didn’t want to bother anybody, but the boy insisted. The shadow father was just puncturing the tent with a fork when the Topols’ doorbell shrilled. This was followed by urgent knocking and then the sound of very heavy clogs clattering away as fast as they could. Myrna and Mr. Topol ran out onto the street but all they found were ordinary soft-shoed citizens. The lights were on in Myrna’s flat; she knocked and waved goodnight to Mr. Topol, but when her front door clicked open, seemingly by itself, she knew that her father wasn’t at home. Her father was not a man to hide himself behind a door as he pulled it open.

She called out, “Dad?” anyway, but there was no answer. She only really started shaking when she saw her key ring on the hall table. She considered running to fetch Jindrich or Kirill or both, but she didn’t like to turn her back on that open door, and besides, Mrs. Topol had been complaining of an especially bad headache all evening and she didn’t know how many more times she could politely shrug off the woman’s surreptitious attempts to touch her before the situation became awkward. So she called Jindrich Topol on the telephone even though he was only a flight of stairs away; she talked about nothing and kept talking about nothing as she walked through the flat room by room. Everything was just as usual in every room except her bedroom, where, being well versed in horror story search procedures, Myrna looked under her bed last and found Rowan Wayland lying flat on her back, filled with loathing for keys. A key ring gets left in your care and you reject all responsibility for it yet can’t bring yourself to throw it away. Nor can you give the thing away — to whom can someone of good conscience give such an object as a key? Always up to something, stitching paths and gateways together even as it sits quite still; its powers of interference can only be guessed at. The wooden devil suspected keys cause more problems than they solve, so she followed Myrna with one plan in mind, to do her bit to restore order. Myrna’s home had seemed like a clever — and strictly temporary — hiding place. But with typical slyness the keys had let Rowan in and then been of no assistance whatsoever when it came to getting out.

—

ALL THAT SKINSHIP shared by friends, families, and lovers — Myrna had seen plenty of it and had proudly despised them for needing such comforts. Now that she had tried and liked a little of it — shyly, Myrna reached for Rowan again, touched her wooden wrist, and felt something like a pulse flicker through it — she feared it would be hard to go on without any more. It took time for Rowan and Myrna to understand each other’s words; they had to take hold of each other and think clearly, then know. Finder’s keepers. Zabaveno nálezcem… and humans only lived a few years, so afterward Rowan could go home again, back to half-sleep and voices that asked nothing of her. She and Myrna took their time presenting the situation to Professor and Mrs. Semyonov. They waited until the family was reunited in London, their chief concerns being that Mrs. Semyonova might call in an exorcist and the professor might try to find out how to make more living puppets by taking Rowan apart. But the Semyonovs weren’t like that. There were a few words of Neruda’s they were fond of:

I don’t know anything about light, from where

it comes, nor where it goes

I only want the light to light up…

Rowan took a little bow, to indicate that he’d told all that he wished to tell.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

He sighed. “I’m afraid Myrna is not turning out well. All she seems to have learned is a way to take pain away without touching anybody.”

“And that’s bad?”

“It is if your method involves causing the pain in the first place. But don’t worry, I’ll deal with her and Tyche both. But the main thing for you is that though you wish to alter your condition that wish will not be granted through me, if at all.”

I made no reply, since he’d given me much to consider.

(How much of this do I tell Radha?

As much as will change her feelings.

None of it, then.)

Rowan carried me home in his rucksack — to Radha’s house, not Myrna’s. Gustav answered the door. Behind him Radha was practicing a choreographed dance with Petrushka and Loco Dempsey, jumping in and out of different pairs of shoes.

“I’m sorry,” Rowan said, as he set me down on the doorstep.

“For what?” Gustav asked, laughing, but Rowan just plugged his earphones in and sauntered off.

—

TYCHE AND MYRNA came back from Scotland with tender new constellations, one tattooed on Tyche’s left arm and the other on Myrna’s right. They’d chosen a configuration of four brilliant stars collectively called the Chameleon. Rowan looked on impassively as Myrna tucked notes into Tyche’s locker for her to read later. Tyche whispered her replies into Myrna’s ear and Myrna smiled in a way that most onlookers took as confirmation of erotic intimacy, though knowing what I did about Myrna’s aversion to flesh I doubted it. As for Radha, the fight never quite went out of her — she admired the tattoos, continued to fluster Myrna by cheerfully calling her “wife” to her face, and invited Tyche and Myrna puppet shopping, though she returned from those trips empty-handed. Music was the only thing that exposed her; she found that she was too easily brought to tears by it, and skipped so many tracks on her playlists that I lost my temper and switched the music off altogether, leaving her to work at her desk amid a silence she looked grateful for. At times she held her head in her hands and laughed softly and ruefully. She found notification of a missed call from Gustav on her phone one night and made no attempt to return the call but stayed up late, very very late, in case he tried again. (He didn’t.) Ah, really, it was too annoying how bold these ones were when they were in each other’s company and how timid they were when apart. It was beneath me to knock all their pretty heads together and shout, “Exactly what are you trying to do with each other?” but it was my hope that Rowan would. Rowan was more interested in knitting a snowflake shawl, so Radha continued writing for Gustav’s puppets unhindered. She was scripting her contribution to the school’s end-of-term show; the working title was Polixena the Snitch and all that I was permitted to know about it was that it was mostly set in a karaoke bar for gangsters.

—

THE SEGMENT following Polixena the Snitch belonged to Tyche and Myrna, who were working on an idea of Tyche’s they called The shock of your life or a piece of cheese. We, the audience, received cards in advance: One version of the card read Shock, and beneath that word was an instruction to write a name (CANNOT BE YOUR OWN). The other version of the card read Piece of Cheese, and again there was space to write a name that was not your own. These cards provoked shudders of euphoric terror that only increased as the day and then the hour itself drew ever closer. The cards spoke to a suspicion that many whose work is play can never be free of: that you can only flaunt your triviality for so long before punishment is due. A date has been selected, and on that day there will be a great culling…

—

WE FILED into the school theater chattering with nerves. The volume increased when we were handed pens at the entrance and informed that choices made in pencil would not be accepted. When we sat down nobody removed their coats or bags; everybody was ready to evacuate immediately. Poor Radha and Gustav… their performance was merely something to sit through as we got ready for our shocks or our pieces of cheese.

Gustav’s puppet troupe was already onstage, seated on chairs with their backs to us. Brunhild the shipbuilder was tallest of them, and I could see the top of her head. There was a strangeness in the way that head was positioned: I accept that this is an almost meaningless thing to say about the posture of a puppet, which is intrinsically all sorts of strange. But still. I began to mention this to Radha, but Tyche and Rowan sat down beside us and I thought better of it. Tyche asked Radha which card she’d got: shock or piece of cheese? Radha smiled very sweetly and said, “Wait and see,” and Gustav walked onstage to the sound of TLC’s “No Scrubs.” As he did the puppets’ chairs turned, and after that everything compressed into a split second; we saw that every single one of the puppets’ throats had been slashed wide open so that they erupted strings; they’d been hacked at so savagely that even those internal strings were cut. And when Gustav saw them he lost consciousness. He didn’t collapse, exactly — it was more as if he’d been dropped from a height. He fell plank straight, and without making a sound, and that fall of his was just as unreal to us as the glazed eyes with which the puppets onstage surveyed their own innards. Their expressions were the kind that couldn’t be altered unless physically dismantled, each smile, scowl, or beseeching look disappearing piece by piece. Laughter was the first response, perhaps the only natural response to such excess. It felt intended that we laugh. Puppets and puppeteer slain by an unknown hand; for about thirty seconds the scene was so complete that no one dared intrude upon it. Then Gustav’s friends began to call out to him, reminding him that they’d always known he was too serious for comedy, demanding the next scene, telling him that it was time to get up, that they needed to know if he was OK. From where we sat he seemed to be comfortably asleep, and “No Scrubs” played on and on until Radha ran onto the stage, lifted the boy into her arms, turned his head to the side, and we saw that his eyes were open. Then it became official that Gustav wasn’t sleeping. Those of us in the front row even saw his eyes; they were like a void made visible. Professor Semyonova himself climbed onto the stage, checked vital signs, and shouted for someone to call an ambulance. The professor called for his daughter too, and she arrived on the stage among a swarm of other students proffering bottles of water and Tiger Balm and scarves and asking: “Is he breathing? Is he breathing?”

—

TYCHE, ROWAN, and I were the only ones who stayed where we were. That probably made us look guilty of something, but moving closer to the stage would have broken our concentration. Myrna said something to Radha that caused her to release Gustav and turn her attention to the maimed puppets, gathering the bodies one by one, running her fingers through Hamlet’s hair, knocking on Petrushka’s helmet, closing eyes pair by pair. As she did so Myrna clasped Gustav to her (“Did you know she liked him that much?” I heard one boy ask another), all of her body against all of his body. He moved his head, seemed to return to himself, and pushed her away, his hand seeking only Radha’s. Myrna stepped back into the crowd with a look of shock. What caused it; that the dose she’d given was enough for him? Or the way Radha bent over him looking into those sad eyes that had grown even sadder from the day he’d chosen her? My guess: The biggest surprise was that by looking at each other in this way they were hurting Myrna. A little pain — just enough to quicken her breathing. Tyche was half out of her seat trying to decide whether to go to Myrna or not, and Rowan tried to give me a high five, which I ignored. “As expected,” he said, and looked about him with an air of fulfillment that made it plain he was referring to more than just my snub.