Peaces

have talked at her like that, on and on, bulldozing every attempt to change the subject to something that didn’t feel like the gory murder of her brain cells. On and on and on, lying in wait at the end of her attention span, stopwatch and tiny scissors in hand, ah, here’s my chance, the boredom has become physically unbearable, and then—a gormless chuckle here, a little pressure of the hand there, and had it all gone the way it was supposed to, it would soon have been done; I’d have trimmed the edge off Do Yeon-ssi’s sense of time so that she circled and circled the same instant, unable to conceive of any other until the next was presented to her. The energy of such a trance is elemental. At least, that’s what I was taught, that the subject is struggling with all their might to break through into the next moment, or to recall the preceding one. And break through they inevitably will, unless—Well, that would depend on the hypnotist’s own strength of mind. Us bog-standard Svengalis have about twenty seconds, thirty seconds max, to work with. So we work fast, and our brushstrokes are crude. Into the eerie calm of Do Yeon-ssi’s boredom I intended to embed a line of gibberish, a sound pattern she could repeat until it smoothed out into a silken slide that tumbled into a sea of self-undoing. I’ve overheard Do Yeon-ssi talking to her pillow. All about qualms and grudges and topics to consult Google about in the morning. She recites misremembered poetry stanzas and foreign language phrases she’d never been able to use in ordinary conversation, and then she scolds the pillow for only pretending to understand.
Drifting far from the reach of these day thoughts and night thoughts, Do Yeon-ssi would bag herself a thousand and one nights’ worth of sleep over the course of a few hours, I’d prove I was more than just a purveyor of parlour tricks, and Xavier would no longer feel the need to keep track of Do Yeon-ssi’s ever-increasing sleeping pill dosage by counting the capsules. And there we’d be: three happy bunnies hopping along together.
Like I said, that was the plan. But I couldn’t get a fix on Do Yeon-ssi’s attention span at all. I felt her lose interest in our discussion. That happened fairly quickly. But—and here’s the horror story—she lost interest without losing focus, continuing to respond to my inanities as if something was actually at stake. It’s like this: At a marionette show you find four types of engaged audience—four different philosophies of enjoying the performance. There are those whose attention is reserved solely for the actions of the marionette: that’s Árpád XXX, wishing to believe that the figure is alive in one way or another. Then there are the ones who can’t and won’t stop looking at the puppet master (or seeking signs of the puppet master, if that person is hidden): that’s how Xavier is. There are those who watch the faces of their fellow audience members: my preference, obviously, since I’m the one here talking about the other types. And there are those who follow the strings and the strings alone. Do Yeon-ssi is a string watcher. She may not much care about the order of the strings—if they tangle, they tangle. Still, they express something to her, something about the nature of the illusion before her. That’s enough of a reason for her to pursue the strings to their vanishing point.
No, Xavier doesn’t quarrel with Do Yeon-ssi, and neither do I. I tuned out as she spoke of Árpád’s best interests. I let my thoughts drift across the shabby scholastic heaven that was our aunt’s study. Parchment dust, tarnished gilt, faded brocade. Probably hell for an asthmatic, actually. I stuck to unassuming gestures, pouring tea for the three of us and stuffing down the sandwiches and fondant fancies she selected and placed on the edge of my plate. To be fair to Do Yeon-ssi, she made sure I got the most appealing ones every time, occasionally slapping Xavier’s hand away when he hindered her objective. She praised Árpád XXX to the skies, yet in the same breath asked us to acknowledge that the dark side of an exceptional mongoose is bound to be exceptionally dark. There was grim talk of overnight deterioration, there were documented cases … Do Yeon-ssi read to us from the mid-1960s account of a Bombay mongoose whose latter years were punctuated with inexplicable frenzies … this mongoose would completely lose it, for no reason at all, and the only thing that restored her to her right mind was copious Pepsi consumption. I tried not to let it show, but I was a bit shaken by the case of the Bombay mongoose. Not even Coke … Pepsi. The preferred beverage of souls damaged beyond repair. I found myself nodding in agreement as Do Yeon-ssi made her closing statements: We three must take a trip, Xavier, Árpád, and me. As soon as possible. We’d thank her for it later.
Her first idea had been to buy the train for us. Its backstory struck her as romantic. She showed us an impossibly glossy historical overview one of her secretaries had prepared: centuries ago, when English tea lovers had faced a 119 percent tax on the price of their favourite drink, this train had been a logistical link in a chain forged by tea and emerald smugglers. But these days the train had a permanent resident who wouldn’t be parted from her charming home at any price. All Do Yeon-ssi could find out about her was that her name was Ava Kapoor, that the train had belonged to this Ava Kapoor’s family from the beginning, and that she was some sort of recluse. Though apparently not the sort who was averse to lovebirds. She seemed young, in spirit, if not in physiology. And she seemed kind. At least that’s what I decided after looking at the letter she’d