What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

freddy barrandov checks… in?

As I was saying, I’m an inadequate son. I didn’t really notice this until I reached the age my father had been when he was imprisoned for repairing the broken faces of clock towers without authorization. He’d incurred the wrath of those who require certain things not to work at all. That’s what the broken clock towers had been designated as: remembrances of a civil war that stopped time at various locations scattered across my father’s country. Fixing the mechanisms seemed political, though it was impossible to agree on the exact meaning of the gesture. When my dad saw his first splintered clockface he just thought it was a proud and beautiful work that, if restored, would take the mortal sting out of being told how late you are, or how long you’ve been waiting, or how much longer you’ll have to wait.

—

MY MOTHER affirms life in her own way: She did some of her most thorough affirmation on behalf of a government-sponsored literary award that posed as a prize sponsored by a company that made typewriters. One year the writer chosen to win the award declined without giving a reason and asked that her name not be mentioned in connection with the award at all. Unfazed, my mother congratulated the next best writer on his win, but was almost laughed off the phone line: “It’s sweet of you to try this, but everybody knows my book isn’t that good,” he said. He named another writer and suggested the prize go to her, but the recommended writer didn’t fancy it either. There had to be a winner, so my mother went through all the shortlisted writers but it was “Thanks but no thanks” and “Oh but I couldn’t possibly” all round, so she went back to the originally selected winner and made some threats that caused the woman to reconsider and humbly accept her prize.

Even though all went on as before, Mum’s developed a sort of prejudice against writers; there are behaviors she now calls “writerly,” but I think she actually means uncooperative. Anyway, my mother agreed with my father about the clockfaces they saw; she wanted to organize the ruin away. So the newlyweds had worked at this project together, though he never allowed anybody to even suggest that she’d been involved, taking all the blame (and speculation, and, in some quarters, esteem) onto his own shoulders. In court my father pleaded that he’d thought he was demonstrating good citizenship by providing a public service free of charge, but was asked why he’d provided this public service anonymously and at dead of night… why work under those conditions if you believe that what you’re doing is above reproach? And then all he could say was, Right, I see. When you put it like that it looks bad.

Another thing the law didn’t like: He’d broken into the clock towers, and left them open to people seeking shelter, attracting all sorts of new elements into moneyed neighborhoods and driving established elements out into shabbier neighborhoods so that it was no longer clear what kind of person you were going to find in any part of the city.

—

MY FATHER got a three-year prison sentence and came out of it mostly in one piece due to his being a useful person; a sort of live-in handyman. He gained experience in tackling a variety of interesting technical mishaps that rarely occur in small households, and now works alongside my mother at a niche hotel in Cheshire… Hotel Glissando, it’s called, and it’s niche in a way that’ll take a while to describe. Dad’s Chief Maintenance Officer there. He more or less states his own salary, as the management team (headed by my mother) hasn’t yet found anyone else willing and able to handle all the things that suddenly need fixing at Hotel Glissando.

As Frederick Barrandov Junior, there was an expectation that I’d follow in Frederick Barrandov Senior’s footsteps, that at some point I’d leave my job as a nursery school teacher and join Hotel Glissando’s maintenance team.

—

A MONTH or so after I’d turned thirty-three I learned that Mum had assured the hotel’s reclusive millionaire owner that I’d join the team before the year was out.

She broke this news to me over lunch.

“Where do you see yourself in ten years’ time?” she asked.

My answer: “Not sure, but maybe on a beach reading a really good mystery. Not a murder mystery, but the kind where the narrator has to find out what year it is and why he was even born…”

Would I have answered differently if I’d known that Mum intended this to be a proper talk about my future? Probably not.

Mum was livid.

“Sitting on a beach reading a good mystery novel? Sitting on a beach reading a good mystery novel?? If that’s the height of your ambition you and I are finished, Freddy.”

“Come come, Mother… How can we ever be finished? I’m your son.”

“I’m going to give you one more chance,” she said. “What are your plans for the next few years? What motivates you?”

I spoke of the past instead of the future; a past, it turned out, I had neither lived for myself nor been told about. I remembered a sign that read REBEL TOWN, but not in English. I remembered people striding around with cutlasses, and a nursemaid who was a tiger — her lullabies were purred softly, and the melodies clicked when they caught against her teeth: Sleep for a little while now, little one, or sleep forever…

“That was my childhood, not yours,” my mother snapped. “Yours is a pitiful existence. I had you followed for six months and all you did apart from turn up to play in a sandpit with infants was go to galleries, bars, the cinema, and a couple of friends’ houses. What kind of person are you? I spoke to your weed dealer and he said you don’t even buy that much. You are without virtue and without serious vice. Do you really think you can go on like this?”

“What shall I do then?”

“You’ll start working at Hotel Glissando next week.”

“Will I? Can’t somebody else do it?”

“No, Freddy. It’s got to be you.”

—

THIS WAS SEXISM; my younger sister Odette is much handier than me. I pointed this out, but my mother seemed not to hear and proposed that I shadow Dad at the hotel for a few months in order to acquire the skills I lacked. I told Mum that I wouldn’t and couldn’t leave Pumpkin Seed Class at this crucial moment in the development of their psyches. Mum told me her career was at stake. A bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and unscrupulous woman who was just below Mum in the chain of command was gunning for her job, subtly and disastrously leaving my mother out of the loop so that she missed crucial directives and was left unaware of changes to the numerous hourly schedules and procedures that it was her task to oversee and complete. I could see my mother’s stress as she spoke: It was there in her hair, which usually looks thoroughly done to a state-regulated standard. But now there were knots in my mother’s hair. I’d never seen that before.

—

HAVING SAID I’d sleep on my decision I went over to my sister’s flat and we talked all night. We both like the Glissando well enough. Discretion is its main feature: You go there to hide. The furnishings are a mixture of dark reds and deep purples. Moving through the lobby is like crushing grapes and plums and being bathed in the resultant wine. There are three telephone booths in the lobby. Their numbers are automatically withheld and they’re mainly used for lies. Once as I was leaving the hotel after running an errand for my dad I saw a man in a trench coat stagger into one of those phone booths. He had what looked like a steak knife sticking out of his chest and must’ve trailed some blood into the booth and lost a lot more at quite a rapid rate thereafter, though I didn’t see much of this. Blood’s a near-perfect match for the color scheme — each drop is smoothly stirred in.

I lingered in order to provide assistance; the man with the knife sticking out of his chest picked up the phone, dialed, and explained to somebody on the other end that he was working late. “Heh — yes, well, save me a slice!” His voice was so well modulated that if I hadn’t been able to see him I wouldn’t have entertained even the faintest suspicion that there was a knife in him. Then he phoned an ambulance and collapsed. That man impressed me… he impressed me. As he waited for the paramedics his eyes darkened and cleared, darkened and cleared, but he gripped the knife and his grip held firm. He looked honored, extraordinarily honored, seeming to care more for that which tore his flesh than he did for the flesh itself, embracing the blade as if it were some combination of marvel and disaster, the kind that usually either confers divinity or is a proof of it. To the boy gawping through the glass it seemed that this man strove to be a worthy vessel, to live on and on at knifepoint, its brilliance enmeshed with his guts. If he was a man without regrets then he was the first I’d seen. And I remember thinking: Well, all right. I wouldn’t mind ending up like that.

—

AT THE FRONT desk of the Glissando, guests can request and receive anything, anything at all. Odette was there when a man with very bad nerves had asked for a certificate guaranteeing that the building’s foundations were unassailable; this man was convinced that he was pursued by a burrowing entity that lived beneath any house he lived in and raised his floors by a foot every year, the entity’s long-term goal being to raise his quarry so high that he could never again descend into the world of his fellow human beings. Our mother made no comment on this man’s convictions but provided him with a certificate stating that there never had been and never could be room for any form of other dwelling beneath the Hotel Glissando. The only thing a hotel guest may not ask for is, for some reason, an iguana-skin wallet. The woman who requested one was told to “Get out of here and never come back.” And as the doorman threw the ex-guest’s luggage out onto the street he said: “An iguana-skin wallet? Where do you think you are?”

As far as we know, that’s the only time a Glissando guest’s request hasn’t been fulfilled. For years Odette and I have felt that our parents’ dedication to taking care of Hotel Glissando’s guests borders on the unnatural. Odette has told me that in some way the hotel and its guests are like the broken clockfaces, except that Mum and Dad are compensated for their work instead of being punished.

Even so: “They’ve given the best years of their lives to that place, and that’s their own business — but now they want to throw my life in too?” That was how I put it to Odette. Odette said she felt I was overlooking something: For as long as we’ve known our parents, my mum’s professional value has been dependent on my dad’s. She’s been treated as a facilitator for his talents for so long that she’s come to believe that’s what she’s here for. Mum brought Barrandov Senior to Hotel Glissando, so by hook or by crook she’ll bring Barrandov Junior there too.

“I don’t know… if I give in to this won’t I be setting that image in stone? Is that really good for Mum?”

Odette’s eyes twinkled. She said she thought I’d actually ruin the image, since there was no way I could match up to Dad.

“Thanks, sis… many thanks…”

“I, however, can match up to Dad, and maybe even outdo him.”

Was Odette’s confidence well-founded? I thought so. She’d always wanted to learn all that Dad had wanted to teach us. And when we asked Dad which of us he’d prefer to work with he said: “Odette, obviously.” My sister was making a killing as a self-employed plumber, but she gave all that up to be there for my parents. She had no regrets either: said she loved the work and could see why our parents were so committed to the Glissando. I asked her to elaborate and she became so emotional that it made me feel lonely.

—

I, ON THE other hand, lost my way for a while. Mum took to behaving as if I’d never even existed: “Imagine if I’d only had one child… one child who’d throw my life’s work away in favor of Hayseed Class or whatever it’s called,” she told Odette. Dad and I spent Sunday evenings at the pub as usual, but it just wasn’t the same. I hadn’t realized how important it was for me to have both parents on my side. Mum did a lot for us when we were coming up. Just like all their other work, she and Dad split their share of raising us right down the middle, finding mostly trustworthy grown-ups to be with us when they couldn’t, keeping track of all our permission slips, hobbies, obsessions, allergies (both faked and genuine), not to mention the growth spurts, mood swings, the bargaining for their attention, and the attempts to avoid their scrutiny. I remember Mum repeatedly telling us we had good hearts and good brains. When she said that we’d say “thanks” and it might have sounded as if we were thanking her for seeing us that way but actually we were thanking her for giving us whatever goodness was in us. She didn’t believe I was giving my all to teaching and she was right. She wants to see good hearts and good brains put to proper use, but I’m not convinced that everybody ought to live like that, or even that everybody can.

—

AISHA TOLD me — what did she tell me, actually? What does she ever tell me? She’s what people call an “up-and-coming” filmmaker; far more accustomed to showing than telling. So what did she show me? Plenty, but not everything. We live in the same building and met in the stairwell: I’d locked myself out and was waiting for my flatmate Pierre to come home. It was going to be a long time before he came home: You see, being a key part of the socialization process for Poppy Class is only Pierre’s daytime identity. At weekends he turns into the lead singer for a band, Hear It Not, Duncan, and their gigs go on forever. Of course I couldn’t get him on the phone, and it seemed every other friend who lived on our bus route was at the gig too, so I sat outside my front door going through all the business cards I’d ever been given and dialing the mobile numbers on them, getting voicemail each time since nobody likes surprise phone calls anymore.

Aisha walked past me as I was leaving somebody a rambling voicemail message about the time I was walking past a neighbor’s front door, stuck my hand through the letterbox on a whim only to have that hand grabbed and firmly held by some unseen person on the other side of the door — that really happened, and I’ve never been so frightened or run so fast since. Aisha walked past and heard me saying this, and she smiled. She smiled. I’m a simple lad, unfortunately the kind that Aisha can’t really smile at unless she wants a boyfriend. I told her I was locked out and did all I could to inspire pity; she asked me if I had a car and asked if we could go and pick up hitchhikers and take them to their destinations. She’d always wanted to do that, she said. “Yeah, me too!” I said. We drove up and down the A534 but couldn’t persuade anybody to get into the car with us: Maybe we seemed too keen. We got back at dawn and Pierre had come home; I wonder what would’ve happened if he hadn’t.

—

AISHA TOOK to knocking on my door as she went past, inviting me to screenings and more, but no matter what meeting time we agree on she arrives half an hour later than that, sometimes forty-five minutes late. I’d probably wait for an hour or longer but she mustn’t ever discover that. Perseverance doesn’t seem to move her: I only ever get to seduce her up to a very specific point. I’ve tried to think this through, but I only get as far with the thinking as I do with the seduction. When entwined, our bodies build the kind of blaze in which sensation overtakes sense — it becomes possible to taste sound — that half hiccup, half sigh that tells me she likes what my tongue is doing to her. And so we each take a little more of what we like and lust swells until, until she pulls away. No penetration permitted, no matter how naked we are or how good the stroking and sliding feels, no matter how delectably wet she is when I nudge her legs open with my knee. I look into her eyes and see craving there, but there’s also what seems to be abhorrence. Then she breaks contact.

Could it be that nobody likes a man without ambition and everything is withheld from him until he changes his ways? Is A saving herself for some fictional character, Willow Rosenberg or fucking floppy-haired Theodore Lawrence or someone like that? Is there somebody else, somebody nonfictional? Is she doing this to make me tell her in words that I want her? I don’t like saying that kind of thing. So for now, if she doesn’t want to then I can’t. This sounds completely obvious but I’ve heard stories, from men, from women, that demonstrate that that’s not how it is for others. Consent is a downward motion, I think — a leap or a fall — and whether they’ll admit it or not, even the most decisive people can find themselves unable to tell whether or not their consent was freely given. That inability to discover whether you jumped or were pushed brings about a deadened gaze and a downfall all its own.

—

PIERRE SAYS it sounds like Aisha “just doesn’t want dick.”

“So she prefers pussy?”

“Perhaps, but the only thing that concerns you in particular is that she doesn’t want dick. I just mean… OK, so there’s some guy, and he’s absolutely desperate to get inside you. Maybe it’s a bit off-putting?”

I can always count on Pierre to offer his honest opinion. Or to try to give me some sort of complex. Or both.

Here’s the thing that keeps me from trying anything rash: Aisha’s other passions expose her. She loves cinema so well that I can find her there, hints and clues in each of her favorites. I know whose insolent lip curl she imitates when she hears an order she has no intention of following, and I know who she’s quoting when she drawls, Oh, honey, when I lose my temper you can’t find it anyplace! Full carnal knowledge of this woman eludes me, true — yet I know her. Aisha used to want to write poetry, since she liked reading it. But the muse spake not unto her. Then she’d wanted to write prose, but had stopped bothering when she realized she couldn’t bring herself to write about genitalia. “A real writer has to be able to write about the body. They have to. It’s where we live.”

So A’s foible could simply be this: She doesn’t want lust to be the one to lead me in. It may be that lust is a breathtaking traitor, the warden’s daughter seen in the walled city at all hours of the night singing softly and teasing the air with a starlit swan’s feather. Lust, the warden’s daughter; a little feckless, perhaps, but not one to cause injury until the day her telescope shows her that troops are marching on the walled city. When darkness falls she slips through the sleeping streets, meets the foe at the city gates, and throws those gates wide open: Take and use everything you want and burn the rest to the ground…

… When it’s all over no observer is able to settle on a motive for this brat’s betrayal, illogical or otherwise. Historians dissect her claims that she was sleepwalking. Such are the deeds of lust, a child of our walled cities. But say whatever you want about her, she will not be denied. Or will she???

—

I DRIFTED into unemployment without really noticing; I hung around in the lobby of the Glissando so much I didn’t have time to go to work. Somebody at the hotel might need some skill of mine and then I could rejoin the rest of my family and continue the Barrandov tradition of providing debatable necessities. But nobody had need of me. I watched my mother dashing to and fro muttering into a walkie-talkie and my dad and Odette striding about with their thumbs tucked into the vacant loops in their tool belts. Had I missed my chance? As I ran through my savings I decided to work on developing ambition at the same time as amusing myself. I stole expensive items and in the moment of acquisition found that I didn’t want to keep them and couldn’t be bothered to sell them. I returned them before anybody noticed they were gone. The trickiest and most pleasing endeavor (also the endeavor that required going up to London and applying the most detailed makeup and speaking with a Viennese accent that was perfect down to the pronunciation of the very last syllable) was the theft and fuss-free return of a diamond necklace from Tiffany’s on Old Bond Street. I almost didn’t put the necklace back, but Aisha didn’t like it and I couldn’t think of anybody else to give the thing to. The diamonds looked muddy. Upon stealing the necklace my first impulse was to give it a good wipe.

—

THERE’S A SHORT film of Aisha’s I watched more than a few times during this period. It’s called Deadly Beige, is set in Cold War — era St. Petersburg, and relates the dual destruction of the mental health of a middle-aged brother and sister. The siblings share a house and are both long-standing party members, employed as writers of propaganda. One night they receive notification from Moscow that it’s time for them to do their bit toward helping keep the party strong. They are to do this by raising subtle suspicion among their fellow party members that they, the brother and sister, are in fact spies and observing the investigation into their activities at the same time as doing their genuine best to thwart this investigation. Discussion of this “exploratory exercise” is prohibited, so the siblings are unable to discern whether their St. Petersburg colleagues are aware of this exercise. Neither do they have the faintest idea who to report back to in Moscow. The letter they received was stamped with an authentic, and thus unrefusable, official seal, but was unsigned. This letter is delivered to them very late at night — the sister takes it from the trembling hand of a man who is then shot by a sniper as he walks away from their front door. The siblings then hear further shots at varying heights and distances that suggest the sniper has also been shot, followed by the sniper’s sniper. There can be no doubt that disobedience would be stupid. So would half-hearted obedience: If the brother and sister fail to perform their tasks satisfactorily they will receive “reprimands”—what does that mean, what is this suggestion of plural punishment per failed task? The first task is to tear the letter up and eat it. In order to receive their instructions they take turns visiting a derelict house on the outskirts of the city, where they find that week’s instructions written on a bedroom wall. They’re instructions for setting up various staged liaisons and the preparation of coded, nonsensical reports. Having read and memorized the instructions, they are to paint over them. The brother and sister are forbidden to enter the house together. So she enters alone, he enters alone, and it wasn’t so bad concocting slanders against each other as long as they took care not to look each other in the eye. Another concern: Some of the staged liaisons they set up feel all too genuine.

The siblings are so very unhappy. They can’t understand how this could be happening to them when they’ve never put a foot wrong. A colleague makes a jocular comment at lunch and introduces the possibility that someone in Moscow is pissed off with the wonder siblings, finds them insincere, has settled on this tortuous scheme to force them to dig their own graves. As you watch these siblings squabble over daily chores and exchange bland commentary on the doings of their neighbors there are unfortunate indications that every word of praise these two write actually is profoundly insincere, and has been from the outset. They have denied themselves all social bonds; everybody’s just an acquaintance. Now they search their souls, discern silhouettes of wild horses stampeding through the tea leaves at the bottom of their cups… What omens are these? “The horses are telling us to drink something stronger than tea.” This counsel is invaluable — the siblings dearly wish to be quiet, and it’s been their experience that alcohol ties their tongues for them. So they drink that at the kitchen table, facial expressions set to neutral, knees scraping together as each stares at the amply bugged wall behind the other’s head.

—

IT’S A SPECTRAL wisp of a film, film more in the sense of a substance coating your pupils than it is a stream of images that moves before you. It’s all felt more than seen; tension darkens each frame; by the end you can see neither into these siblings’ lives nor out. Neither, it seems, can they. The film seems to be a judgment upon the written word and the stranglehold it assumes. Woe to those who believe in what is written, and woe to those who don’t.

I put this to Aisha and she shook her head.

“It’s a puppet show,” she said. Yes, it’s that too. The film’s siblings are played by two feminine-looking puppets and voiced by a singer and a puppeteer, both friends of A’s stepfather. The sister towers over the brother; she’s wooden. The brother’s made of metal, and his face is one of the most arresting I’ve seen, composed entirely of jagged scales — scales for eyelids, a button-shaped scale for a nose. When he opens his mouth to speak, it’s as if the sea is speaking.

I’d decided to show the film to my own sister Odette, and as I waited in the lobby of Hotel Glissando I used the free Wi-Fi to watch it again in miniature, on my phone. A man tapped me on the shoulder and I looked up: He was a black man about my father’s age and half a head shorter than me. Those sideburns: I’d seen them (and him) before, but couldn’t think where. The man was talking. I pulled my earphones out.

“… looking well, Freddy. How have you been?”

“Yeah, really well, thanks. And yourself?” I hadn’t a clue who he was, but as long as one of us knew what was going on I didn’t mind chatting.

He nudged me with his elbow, winked. “You’re surprised to see me, eh? Thought I was dead, didn’t you?”

When he said that it all came back to me; this man really was supposed to be dead. He was my godfather, and I’d last seen him at my christening. I might have gone to his funeral but I’m not sure: I’ve been to so many they all blur together.

“Gosh, yes! So you’re alive after all? Excellent. How did you manage that? I mean, you went—”

“Sailing, yes,” he supplied, beaming.

“Right, sailing, you were circumnavigating the globe in your boat, and then there was that Cuban hurricane and bits of the boat washing up on various shores—”

“I ditched the boat pretty early on, Freddy,” my godfather said, serenely. “Sailing isn’t for me. I only came up with the idea to get away from the wife and kid, really, so once I got to Florida I just let the boat drift on without me.”

“So you let your family think you’re dead, er — Jean-Claude?”

“That’s right. I’ve been living here at the Glissando for years.” His hand moved in his pocket; I could guess what he was doing, having seen others perform the same ritual — he was running his finger around and around the outside of his room key card, doing what he should’ve done before he checked in and became subject to the rules. Before assuming ownership of a key you should look at it closely. Not only because you may need to identify it later but because to look at a key is to get an impression of the lock it was made for, and, by extension, the entire establishment surrounding the lock. Once you check into Hotel Glissando there’s no checking out again in your lifetime: I imagine this is a taste of what it is to be dead. In many tales people who’ve died don’t realize it until they try to travel to a place that’s new to them and find themselves prevented from arriving. These ghosts can only return to places where they’ve already been; that’s all that’s left for them. Depending on the person that can still be quite a broad existence. But whether its possessor is widely traveled or not, the key card for each room at Hotel Glissando is circular; if you took the key into your hand and really thought about it before signing the residency contract, this shape would inform you that wherever else you go, you must and will always return to your room.

“It’s nice and quiet here and every morning there are eggs done just the way I like them,” Jean-Claude said. “Jana divorced me in absentia and remarried anyway; she’s fine. And just look how well my boy’s doing!” My godfather opened a celebrity magazine and showed me a four-page spread of his son’s splendid home. Chedorlaomer Nachor’s House of Locks! Sumptuous! Mysterious!

“Chedorlaomer Nachor’s your son?” I waved my phone at Jean-Claude. “Did you know he’s in this film I’m watching?” The film had ended while we’d been talking; I played it again. Jean-Claude’s gaze flicked suspiciously between me and the screen of my phone. “All I see are puppets.”

“Yes, he’s the voice of the brother—” I waited until the silvery face was the only one on-screen and then turned up the volume. Jean-Claude listened for a moment and then nodded.

“What’s this film then?”

“Oh, it’s my… girlfriend’s. Well, she wrote and directed it…”

Jean-Claude gripped my arm. “You know my Chedorlaomer?”

“Well, not personally, but… why, do you want to be… you know, reunited?” I hadn’t missed my chance after all. Here was a service I could provide to Jean-Claude and his famous son. This would effect my own reunion with my mother, who would acknowledge my existence once more. But Jean-Claude had no wish for a reunion; his accountant advised very strongly against such sentiments. Instead he wanted me to rescue his son from the clutches of a dangerous character.

“Dangerous character?”

“Her name,” Jean-Claude said darkly, “is Tyche Shaw.”

“Really?”

“You’ve heard of her?”

I tapped my phone screen again. “She’s the voice of the sister!”

Jean-Claude flipped through another magazine until he found photos of Chedorlaomer stepping out hand in hand with a tall, buxom black woman. Her hair was gathered up to bare a neck that tempted me to B-movie vampirism. I wouldn’t have guessed she was a puppeteer, and neither would this magazine’s caption writer: Nachor’s mystery lady… Do you know her? Write in!

“Freddy,” Jean-Claude said. “I’ve been watching you for a few days now.”

“Watching me? From where?”

He pointed to a potted palm tree behind the farthest phone booth. “There’s a chair behind it. Yes, I’ve been watching you, and you look well, you do look well, but you also look as if you’re lacking direction…”

I didn’t dispute that.

“Would you like a bit of gainful employment, Freddy?”

“Well… yes.”

“Good! I’ll pay you this—” Jean-Claude wrote a number on the front cover of the topmost magazine. “If you break those two up as soon as you can.”

The figure was high; I had to ask why he was so invested in the breakup.

“I made some inquiries, and I found out some things about Tyche Shaw,” Jean-Claude said, his eyes turning to saucers for a moment. “Don’t ask me what they are, but let’s just say she’s not the sort of person my son should be seeing. Save him. If not for the money then at least out of human decency.”

“I’ll gladly do what I can. But have you tried asking the concierge or my mother about this?”

“Yes of course, but they say it’s only in their remit to handle requests that can be fulfilled on the premises.”

“I see… Well, don’t worry, Jean-Claude. I’ll deal with this.”

“Music to my ears, Freddy. That’s the Barrandov Way!”

—

I WAS GOING to have a lot of money soon, but the prospect didn’t excite me. Perhaps I’d get more excited as I went along. Aisha introduced me to Chedorlaomer without too much prompting: If anything she seemed amused that she’d discovered the fanboy in me.

Any friend of A’s is a friend of mine…

Chedorlaomer Nachor had been famous for years. He’d grown accustomed to living well and to feting his playmates; if you said you liked anything of his he gave it to you, even if that meant taking the item off his own body and putting it on yours. He was deliriously happy too — that was part of it. He freely admitted that Tyche was his first love, admitted this to anyone who’d listen. Wherever he was, the delectable, ambrosial Tyche Shaw wasn’t far away. They couldn’t keep their hands off each other. A blended scent rose from their skins — sulfurous, sticky, sweet. Wasn’t he rather old to be falling in love for the first time? And who was she? Since Jean-Claude wouldn’t tell me what he’d learned about her, I did some research of my own. She was a puppeteer, and very far from a well-known one, though she did associate with the likes of Radha Chaudhry and Gustav Grimaldi. Aisha added in an offhand manner that Tyche also did odd jobs and invocations. Odd jobs? Was Aisha hinting at prostitution?

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.