5.

Xárpád was waiting in our compartment. Xárpád and the continued absence of light.

“You found her?” Xavier asked. He sounded just a little fuzzy; he seemed to have been sitting in there for a while, just staring straight ahead of him.

I took his hand and threaded his fingers through mine. “Yup. It was HELLO, not HELP.”

“That’s a relief. I’ll have to tell her so myself.”

“Ah, about that. She does like having us on board and everything, but . . . just in case you see her around . . . we’re not actually allowed to talk to her.”

“What? Why?”

“Er . . .”

“You didn’t find out why.”

“It’s for health reasons, I reckon. She mentioned a doctor. And seems a bit transfixed by loss. People she knew and loved who are gone.”

“Mourning?”

“I don’t know if I’d describe it that way. She seems more . . . expectant? Anyway, it’s the sort of the thing that takes time, and four days from now we’ll be gone. Shouldn’t be too difficult to respect her wishes. Just wait ’til you see the library, and taste train-grown tomatoes,” I told him. “We can pick violets for our salad too. Maybe even marry Árpád off while we’re at it . . .”

“Marry him off to who? Ava Kapoor?!”

“No . . . you’ll see. Well, I hope you will.”

He slapped his knee. “I’ll prepare my share of the bride price accordingly. Also, I see your library and tomatoes and raise you a portrait gallery and a postal-sorting carriage . . .”

Something had disconcerted him as he mentioned those two carriages. Or maybe it was an unconnected thought that crossed his mind; anyway, he let go of my hand. I took a seat opposite him, dumping my jeans, shirt, and Saturday underwear on the neighbouring seat and cautiously tilting backward until my head met the wall, which was unexpectedly plush. I tried to think “velvet cushion” and not “padded cell.” Sunlight lined the bottom of the compartment door and the base of the window blinds, but apart from that, the figures of Xavier and Árpád were mainly distinguishable by size and silhouette. One much shorter than me, one taller. One with a tail, one without. Everything mellowed once we sat still, feeling the train in our backs and necks and feet, that affable and determined rattle of the axle within the round, the wheels beneath us carrying us away. I listened intently for a while, for footsteps or some other commotion in the hallway, or the crackling that precedes a tannoy announcement. But there was only quiet. And Árpád’s sweet slumber was making me bitter—he could at least have made a show of looking for a power socket or a way to open the window blind. I said as much, and Xavier stretched out his leg and crossed his ankle over one of mine. “It’s not too bad like this,” he said. “We can talk.”

I wiggled my toes. “Can implies ought, Mr. Shin.”

“In that case, Mr. Shin, I’ll get it all off my chest. I’m thinking about being eleven and twelve,” he said.

“Nice and specific . . .”

Veronica Park, Xavier’s mum, has saved his first passport, the one he used from the ages of two to twelve. We’ve looked at it together. Each page is a wall of watermarked squares and rectangles of smudged ink with entry dates and times written in them. Xavier was born during strange times for the Shins of Sangju. This was how Veronica prefaced his childhood situation when I asked her about it. Strange times for the country in general: a towering cream puff of an economic miracle sombrely nibbled away at the edges by martial law. But in addition to that tense prosperity—only contentment is legal—there was a lot of pain for the Shins as a clan that just kept shrinking. Infertility, miscarriages, fatal paediatric illness, a terrible accident, cot death—Veronica ticked each vast sorrow off on her fingers and thumb as she told me what her husband’s sisters had endured over the course of nine months. And then Veronica gave birth to this sweet-natured little rosebud who bounced with health. He was baptised very quickly and named after the saint who’d converted one of his ancestors to Catholicism. Veronica tried not to like the rosebud too much. He’d hold on to her little finger and give her soulful looks, and she’d stare back, knowing, just knowing, there had to be a catch. By the time he was about four weeks old she was already panic plotting. She’d hide him somewhere. Yes, that’s what she’d do, that’s how she’d prolong the time they had together. Clownish notions, as if she was Death’s jester, thinking up ways to make her laugh by trying to escape her. Veronica and the rosebud stayed exactly where they were, attending all scheduled doctor’s appointments as faithfully as they did mass, and, to everyone’s surprise, the rosebud made it through his first year without major incident.

Then four of his aunts all but abducted him, squabbling between themselves as they passed him from country to country, each one instructing him to call her Mother, or Mamoune, or Omma. Nobody else in Xavier’s family could forget that these four sisters were mothers to children who had only almost been born, or had lived far too briefly. When you thought of that, you knew you didn’t have the right or ability to chastise. So Xavier and two of his cousins were dragged around between aunts for years. Do Yeon-ssi, the fifth sister, was the eldest of Xavier’s aunts. When she thought about what was going on, she felt weak with fear. It was all wholly ordinary and all utterly out of hand. She’d been keeping an eye on Xavier and surreptitiously comparing him to her friends’ twelve-year-old kids. He was all worn out from being given different names and not knowing what to call people or how much affection to show, or whether to bother saying anything at all to anyone since he didn’t know how long it would be before the next sister swooped in. Thinking about all this, Do Yeon-ssi had a talk with Veronica Park. She pointed out that her home was Xavier’s best chance of a stable environment. She’s a person whose sisters don’t love her but fear her, because of all the things she did to guarantee that when they were all growing up. This must be true, since the house of Shin Do Yeon turned out to be the only place Xavier’s other aunts didn’t dare try to take him from.

“Eleven and twelve,” Xavier said. “Those were the years when I was spending a lot of time in compartments like this. Only with people I didn’t know, or just me and a book. It mostly felt safe, but also, how do I put this . . .”

“Like some kind of incubator for intense encounters?”

“Yes! Even more than stations are. Is it that sticky mix of enclosure and exposure? The temporary privacy? You just get . . . involved with each other. Can’t avoid it.”

“And where was that? São Paulo?”

“Nope, São Paulo was the year before, I think. This was the route between Paris and Marseilles. By the way, are you completely naked underneath that dressing gown?”

“You’re too easily distracted. And you’re getting nothing from me until you tell all about this French train orgy.”

“Did you see that?” he asked.

“What?”

“I just rolled my eyes. Good, you didn’t see it. So if you do it too, I won’t know. This is perfect.”

When Xavier Shin was eleven years old, the Parisian couple he lived with at the time sent him to boarding school in Provence. They had driven him there and back at the beginning and end of the first few terms, but midway through his second year, partly because both of them liked a drink too much to volunteer as designated driver, they suggested taking the train instead. The journey by train was almost four hours long, and he travelled unaccompanied. That didn’t seem appropriate for a child as soft-spoken and baby-faced as he was, but all he really had to do was find the right platform at Gare de Lyon or at Gare de Marseille St. Charles, sit on the train, and be met on the other side by a responsible adult. Other passengers looked out for him, thinking him neglected or lost, but he was fine. He read comic books, began and completed homework assignments, or he listened to Handel’s water music on his Walkman, imagining that it had been composed for him to listen to aboard a flower-bedecked barge on the river Thames. All of this was more than preferable to the train ride Xavier had taken with a pair of inordinately squiffy parental bodies who’d lugged him from car to car inviting other passengers to quiz him on his weakest academic subjects . . . That will teach you, Francis Xavier Jae Kyung Shin . . . that will teach you to get a B in History. Oh, and just like a radioactive rainbow following acid rain, Mamoune’s star turn: accusing a frail old lady of stealing her pearl necklace, snatching the pearls off the lady’s neck, then realising, when she put it on and strand clinked against strand, that she was already wearing the necklace she’d been thinking of. After that Xavier took the train unaccompanied, or he didn’t go at all. That was the ultimatum he made, and they could tell he was serious.

One July afternoon, he was on his way back to those Paris people for the summer, body in his seat, mind hopping backward along the track, gaze holographically layering the chalky ridges that outlined miles and miles of storage crates over the bucolic picture-postcard scenes the windows had shown him just a few minutes ago. He was thinking, Six weeks, six whole weeks. He was at an age where six weeks made the difference between one shoe size and another. He was getting taller and broader and all the rest of it . . . by autumn he’d practically be somebody else. Bodywise, anyway. Yet he’d still be stuck with the same parental bodies, the ones who’d arranged a best friend and auxiliary friends for him. The best friend and the auxiliary friends were no more interested in Xavier than Xavier was in them, but none of them could escape the unfortunate fate of being the offspring of business associates. On summer afternoons they roamed the grounds of Disneyland Paris, the Palace of Versailles, or the Jardin du Luxembourg, each member of the group lost in silent and unsmiling thought, the ones who had real friends keeping an eye on their watches so they could dash off as soon as this chore was over. The group was international in appearance and dressed in varying shades of a colour that had been agreed upon the night before, so they looked like a meditative gang or the junior branch of a cult. Other children would approach in twos and threes and shyly ask if they could join. These were the pastimes that would eat up Xavier’s summer weeks, then a few days before he was due to go back to school, his “what I did over the summer” essay would be dictated to him, with the aid of exhibition catalogs from various galleries the Paris parents had visited by themselves. It had been explained that it wasn’t really lying for Xavier to say that he’d gone along to the galleries too, because that definitely would have happened, if not for the fact that mixed in with the masterworks there were many sights that would be detrimental to his moral and emotional development. Xavier guessed that this year he would write that he had been to the Uffizi, the Kunsthistorisches Museum, and the Rijksmuseum, and that he would claim he saw paintings of bread, cheese, apples, vases of flowers, and holy families, just like the ones he said he’d seen at the Courtauld Gallery and Sternberg Palace. He’d write the essay without looking at the pages of the book proffered to him: “This one, see?” He didn’t care for paintings of bread, cheese, apples, vases of flowers, and holy families . . . they made him want to go out and join a crime syndicate. A much less refined gang than the one he was certain the Paris parents were part of. Yet Xavier Shin would take the dictation without changing a word, shaking his head as he did so. Xavier was the type of kid who scored highly in nonverbal reasoning tests. It was too soon for him to claim to know much about life, but he could tell this wasn’t it. Thinking about the six weeks ahead of him, the schoolboy got all jittery about the legs. He was alone in the compartment, so he didn’t have to make a pretence of composure; he could hunch up, hug his kneecaps, and say, Stop it, stop it. But it continued, bone bashing bone, as if his left leg was hell-bent on pulverising his right, and vice versa.

Xavier told his knees that the people he was living with weren’t that bad. There was that last-minute summer trip he’d taken with the male Paris parent—Xavier had had to go with him because the female Paris parent was away and there was no time to arrange to leave him with anyone. The male Paris parent had received a phone call very early in the morning. He hadn’t said much, only held the phone away from his ear and grimaced as high-decibel howls of hysteria interspersed with heavily accented French ricocheted around the room. A couple of hours later, Xavier and the male Paris parent were on their way to Macao, where they’d taken gondola ride after gondola ride, drifting between the artfully begrimed pillars of a casino’s underground fantasy of Venice. The blue of their gondola was even brighter than the LED sky above, and there were these pastries . . . little clouds of flaky, butter-fattened flour crowned with silken custard. At some point during the course of these meetings—for it was meetings Xavier’s companion was conducting in these gondolas, the male Paris parent and some third passenger writing out figures on their respective notepads, then either nodding or reaching out to cross out a figure and replace it with a new one more to their liking—the male Paris parent said to Xavier: “This Venice is better than Venice Venice, you know. You have a better time when you’re not expecting anything real. That’s why seriously tacky people manage to enjoy themselves wherever they are.”

There was nothing about the view from their gondola that he didn’t like, so that was how Xavier Shin discovered he was a seriously tacky person. You could wander around Venice Venice during the day, and you could do the same thing at night, but you got more bang for your buck here, because in this cavernous basement it was both day and night. You could see it in the way they were acting, the lovers and the shoppers and the selfie takers and the cocktail-supping bon vivants strolling unhurriedly around this little campo; it was whatever time they wanted it to be. As for the houses that lined the square—they had twice as much personality as they would’ve had if they’d had to choose between a.m. and p.m. The daylight gave the stone facades a feathered glow, and crackles of light from the streetlamps painted thick zigzags of shade over and under the eaves. The combination made the houses look . . . loud. They seemed inhabited by spirits too high to be contained. You could even fancy that the barcarolles roving across the water originated with the houses, and not some discordant choir of invisible gondoliers (or speakers emitting a looped soundtrack). Xavier wouldn’t really have minded visiting more imitation cities. Disneyland wasn’t the same. There was no amazing aftertaste of citrus-sharp malice after trips to Disneyland, no sense of irreality pouncing upon the real and quite deliberately eating it for breakfast. But the day at the Venetian Macao was a one-off, and he wasn’t allowed to tell anyone about it. Not truthfully, anyway. The official story was that they’d been to Venice Venice. Par for the course, really.

The Paris parents overwhelmed him with their secrecy. Some of it was absolutely necessary in terms of avoiding prison, but there were too many non-illegal matters that they did their utmost to cover up. Things like having vulgar tastes, or not being happy, or being stressed out. He knew that sooner or later they would make him just like them, hiding things instead of dealing with them. Through the window he watched grass turn to water, water to concrete, concrete to scrawny trees, then hedgerows, leaf to stone, then back again, the landscape clothing itself in uninspired uniforms of grey, brown, black, and blue as it jogged alongside the train, no longer expanding the horizon but levelling it. It was as if a great rusty zip was closing in all his senses. Two pairs of police officers boarded the train at Avignon station, blue padded vests and all. A sight rare enough to make him consider not sitting like someone who was possibly hiding something. But they passed his compartment door without saying anything. Clearly they had much bigger fish to fry. Xavier was in the fifth of ten carriages, and he heard four pairs of feet part ways at the furthest door. Two pairs went onward, and two returned, went further back. He kept his head down and stayed as he was for maybe seven stops, legs gathered up against his chest, peering out from under his elbow as the station names changed. Pressing his fingers and thumbs to his patellas had a soothing effect, as if his fingerprints were unlocking the rest of him. Someone wheeling a refreshment cart down the corridor stopped to tell Xavier he seemed dehydrated, and was ignored. “Look, you don’t have to buy a drink, but why sit here alone?” said the vendor. “I don’t know if you saw, but there are police on board, looking for someone. Join the family next door, OK? Don’t give some escaped convict a chance to come in here and cause problems . . .”

Xavier said, “OK, thanks, I’ll move,” but he didn’t. A cold, slick veil fell between him and all the figures he saw, all the posters advertising films and foodstuffs. Everything swirled and then separated into droplets of oil and sweat. The train stopped and started up again, two passengers breezed into the compartment and took seats facing each other, but he didn’t look up or loosen his grip on his knees. The police officers were still on the train—at least that’s what these newcomers were saying, and he didn’t think escaped convicts could wonder aloud about les flics with quite as unconcerned an air as these two. One of them sounded like a girlish Québécois, and the other voice, much deeper, spoke with an accent that was harder to place. The conductor popped in to check their tickets, and when he’d left, the male voice addressed Xavier in a gruff and grandfatherly way: “Young man, are you in pain? Is there anything we can do for you?”

The directness of the question—“Are you in pain?” replacing more typical formulations like “Are you all right?” or “Hope nothing’s wrong?” almost led Xavier to confess, but after a beat the girlish voice piped up. He guessed she was a couple of years older than him, if that. “Let’s not bother him, Papa. He’s a thinker, thinking . . .”

“She’s right,” Xavier said into his trousers. “That’s what I’m doing. But thank you for asking; please enjoy your journey.”

The girl’s delighted “Ha” sparked a haphazard wish for an older sister, someone at home who talked to and about him like this, mocking and affectionate in equal measure. She’d drive everyone completely mad with her cynically idealistic remarks as they grew up—friends, other family members, would be suitors, colleagues, everyone—and he, Xavier Shin, would be her most partisan associate. This sister of his would always be able to say, “Well, Xavier knows what I mean!” even if he didn’t. He listened as the other two arranged their board and discussed the order of play, the grandfatherly sounding father good humouredly fending off accusations of having plotted his own defeat in advance. Hearing them like each other aloud was almost as bad as the leg spasms. He drew such comfort from their company, from their existence, that he almost wished they’d leave. It had been better before they came. Before they’d swanned in, he had almost coaxed himself into thinking that this was what the train home was like for most people, and there was no good reason why things should be different for him. Most people feel themselves depart as they arrive at their station. We’d all like to keep the impressions we just gathered, keep the hope we had and the interest we took in our surroundings; we’d like to be like that all the time and every day, but by the time you get home, that’s all snuffed out. In you go, in you go, creature who dwells in the stationery box, in you go, clutching your withered posy . . .

Xavier had a hunch that these two were somehow exempt. How had they managed it? They played their board game, and against the backdrop of sound they made (muffled exclamations, drawn out “hmms,” pebbles knocking wood), Xavier heard the name of his station announced. He watched and listened as passengers boarded and disembarked. And as the train swept onward he also glimpsed the male Paris parent standing near the ticket barrier in animated conversation with a station guard, possibly being told a son wasn’t something you could ask about at the Lost Property counter. He emptied his lungs all the way out, then fully restocked. What did he do now that he’d missed his stop and his treacherous legs had very conveniently gone back to normal? Think, he had to think. There was every chance that his two carriage-mates would get off at the very next station, but he wished so much that they would stay awhile. Not for long. Just for, say, three more stops. Then he’d turn around and face the six weeks.

He dropped his feet onto the floor, raised his arms, rolled his neck around a few times to get the crick out of it, looked at the grandfatherly father and then at the girl. A stocky black man with a button nose and so many smile lines his entire mouth area looked crumpled. His daughter resembled him about the nose but had otherwise branched out on her own with a patron-saint-of-adventuresses look. Twinkly eyes, masses of frank forehead, and a halo of curls. They were playing Baduk. The girl’s hand hovered above the square she’d just chosen, and Xavier could see why she’d been cross in advance about her dad letting her win. She’d probably thought she was a Baduk genius, had never lost a game since birth . . . until she’d faced an opponent other than this man, who was mysteriously and embarrassingly bad at Baduk. Both father and daughter were older than he’d expected. The girl looked about sixteen, and the man about sixty. Xavier didn’t seem to look the way they’d thought he would either—he supposed he seemed younger. The surprise wasn’t unpleasant on either side, though the girl did raise her eyebrows and ask if Xavier was a runaway or what.

Which led him to consider what exactly he was. He came to some conclusions he couldn’t share. His mouth couldn’t say that he’d been given one shell to inhabit, only one—the obedient son of the Paris parents. And now that he’d passed the station where the male Paris parent was waiting for him, that shell was in pieces, and he’d fallen out, neither solid nor liquid, but a wisp of air, easily dispersed. Doubtless they’d already begun—phone calls, messages, arrangements: “Yes, same as last time.” The Paris parents had had other sons, boys from other branches of his family they’d taken guardianship of with promises to turn them into cultured and highly educated men. Disappointments one and all. So now, again, the things in the son’s room would be given away, his withdrawal from school records would be made in absentia, and anybody who’d ever had anything to do with him would be made aware that he’d been sent abroad. To a better school, or for treatment, because his health had taken a very serious downturn. Even if he went back to them now, one or the other of them would be on the way to Switzerland or somewhere, passport in hand, more than capable of looking him quite calmly in the face and saying, “This is very sad, and I do hope you find your own parents, but my son is very sick, my partner is with him right now, I’m just on my way to visit them.” He had deliberately missed his stop, and that was how he’d become a secret, to be walled up in darkness along with all the other matters the Paris parents couldn’t let anybody know about. Xavier was so frightened he was sure his heart would implode, but he smiled at the girl and her father. He was thinking: Even if this is it for me, I’ll be smiling as I go. I want the Paris parents to find out about it and wonder what that crazy little bastard was smiling about as he died . . . and as they ask themselves about that I want them to feel like something’s coming for them . . .

Xavier told them he was on a trip with his mother. And if you want to make a list of things that are scary, put words at the top. Because just as the girl and her father had begun to gently dismantle Xavier’s assertion—his mother had been gone for quite a while, hadn’t she, where were her things, and so on—a woman who could very easily pass as Xavier’s mother stepped into the compartment and sat down with them. Age, check; face just as Korean as his was, check; soft drink brought back from the restaurant car for her patiently waiting son, check. Two drinks, actually. One for him and one for the girl, whose name he still didn’t know.

“Oof, such a queue . . . ,” the woman said. Her soft, raspy accent was familiar to him—it was from Burgundy, just like his favourite French teacher, who always sounded as if he was talking through a mouthful of sugar cubes. But the accent was the only thing Xavier recognised. Everything else about the woman was like a warning not to lie, never, ever to lie unless you wanted what you said to come true. She was wearing an SNCF uniform, navy and red, but she whirled her loose hair up into a bun, pulled a gauzy white shawl out of a leather tote, and draped it around her shoulders as she took her seat beside the girl Xavier had imagined was his sibling. The newcomer proceeded to slap a can of Ricqlès down in front of each of the two youngest passengers, who now found themselves facing each other with identical wide-eyed stares, as if perhaps this being who’d gone from SNCF employee to archetype of chic maternity in two seconds flat could still be banished if only they didn’t make eye contact with her. They sought out the emergency cord instead. Xavier couldn’t see it, so he had to assume the girl had her eyes fixed on it. It was high up and to the right of his head, far from the window. Quite a scramble, even if you could count on not being tackled before you got there.

“Draw the curtains and drink up, kids,” the woman said, gesturing with something pearl grey that seemed to fold over and under the lines of her hand—a gauntlet? Xavier glanced at it: it was an exceedingly ladylike pistol. The girl’s father, who had actually been looking at the woman, had caught this development in real time. No wonder he’d kept his reaction minimal. The girl arranged the curtains from her side, and Xavier mirrored her actions. Xavier opened his can of minty fizz, and so did the girl. Now looking anywhere but at each other, they drank up, somehow managing not to choke. The woman turned the pistol on the girl’s father, who rubbed his face hard and in slow motion, trying to wake himself up. At the count of ten . . .

“You’re going to shoot me? Why?”

The man looked at the woman as he asked this, and the question was posed in English. The woman took a pair of handcuffs from her tote and threw them over to Xavier, who caught them reflexively, though he fumbled with the keys she threw half a second later. “Cuff his ankles,” she instructed in French, then tapped her gun against the tabletop. “Quickly. Now.”

Kneeling on the carriage floor, flinching in expectation of kicks to the face administered either by the man or his daughter, Xavier mumbled apologies as he snapped the cuffs around silk-clad ankles. He rose, slid the keys across the table to this newly materialised mother of his, and she jangled them in the man’s direction and addressed him in French: “No running off, sir. We’re about to play Go.”

Still in English, the man said, “The police will pass by soon. They’ll see this. Is that OK with you?”

The woman looked down at the Baduk board and then swept the grid clean with one hand, sending stones shooting in every direction. The man put his hand on Xavier’s arm, asking in English: “Young man, do you understand me?”

Xavier nodded.

“But she doesn’t, right?”

Xavier looked across the table at the woman who so urgently wanted to play Go that she was prepared to play it under these conditions, with an ankle-cuffed opponent and a pistol in one hand. She had liquid labyrinths for eyes, and the more the man spoke English to her and to Xavier, the more likely it began to seem that she was going to shoot them all. It was very, very difficult to tell if this was language-barrier frustration or a more general irritability. Xavier avoided taking linguistic sides by shrugging.

“Can you tell her,” the man said. “Can you tell her that even though she would rather talk in French, I can’t right now. I was never fluent in the first place, and right now—it’s all gone. I’m pissing myself here. Because of my daughter . . . just ask her to let my daughter go first. Fuck. The girl never wanted to take this trip anyway. Who cares about that bar in Montmartre where the pianist has his newspaper set up in front of him in place of a music score and all the regulars know to leave the street door open so the breeze can turn the pages for him; you’d better just care about that sort of thing on your own, that’s what my daughter says. Let’s send Laura away first; then we can talk any way she wants.”

Xavier could have squeaked, And what about me? But saved his breath. The girl didn’t say anything either, though it was clear that if she was going to pick a battle, it would be the one against any heroics her dad tried to pull.

“He seems upset,” the woman said to Xavier. “What did he just say?”

The boy hesitated. He wasn’t so sure that she didn’t already understand. But he couldn’t think of a reason for her to test him like this. Then again, he couldn’t think of a reason for anything she’d done so far.

He’d wavered too long: the man’s daughter answered for him. “He wants to know why you’re doing this,” the girl said, and then came the uncanny quiet of the minute or two that followed, the little coughing sounds she made as the woman pistol-whipped her, the flailing of her hands. She sank down into the corner of her seat, her face turned to the wall, her breathing shallow but regular.

Having made her point, the woman turned to Xavier and asked again. “What did he say?”

Xavier was quick with his answer this time: “Right now he’s saying please, please.”

“And before?”

Xavier told her, hoping panic hadn’t altered his memory. The woman took a sip of Xavier’s drink as she listened, and then she said: “Well, yes. That can happen to the best of us: going blank at moments when it’s really important to get things right. Good thing you’re here.”

She told Xavier to pick up the Baduk stones and put the black stones on her side and the white stones on the man’s side. She talked as he did so, telling the man they were going to play until the last stop. The man nodded, his gaze flitting from his daughter to the window to the compartment door . . . How was he going to play Baduk with his pupils sliding in and out of focus like that . . .

The man was saying: “Why isn’t anybody coming? Oh God, what has this woman done . . . Why isn’t anybody even passing by?” The man’s daughter stirred, and the man kept his eyes on her from then on, his tone softening as he spoke to her; Xavier didn’t understand what he was saying, but it sounded as if he was trying to keep her as alert as possible, asking her to keep her eyes open, something like that. “Laura . . . Laurinha . . .” Whatever it was the man had said, it served to rouse the girl somewhat; she answered him in French, muttering that he should clear his mind and just play. She told him to make sure to win and that she was cheering him on. “Proud of you, Dad . . .” She seemed to have decided that they were at a tournament. She agreed to keep her eyes open a little while longer.

Xavier watched the woman with apprehension; she’d grown misty-eyed, and it couldn’t be the case that she was touched by her own handiwork. She sighed, leaned forward, and told Xavier he was sitting next to a brilliant man.

OK, he was sitting next to a brilliant man, and she was sitting beside a barely conscious girl who was leaking blood from her left ear. As for why nobody had come . . . Xavier very clearly pictured every passenger in the carriages on either side slumped in their seats—it wouldn’t have been free goodies offered from the refreshment cart that would’ve sent them to dreamland. People can be so picky and you can’t always rely on them to accept free food or drink, so she’d probably secreted some kind of canister above the back wheels of the cart and trundled through those carriages with a heady haze in her wake, not thick enough to cause wheezing but conspicuous enough to cause complaints about not being able to open the windows before everybody nodded off. Xavier didn’t know what he and this woman really had to do with each other, but he felt like he’d been cursed with an ability to read only one mind: the one he least wished to.

“A brilliant man,” the woman repeated. “Duarte De Souza.”

The man mumbled, “Call me Eddy . . .”

The woman paused to glare at him, then continued: “He was North American Go champion for seven years in a row. And, you know, eligibility is on a geographical basis, not a cultural one. So you’ve got the cream of America and Canada’s considerable crop, you’ve also got contestants from twenty-one other countries, and you’ve also got contenders from eleven independent territories and I can’t remember how many islands. But Monsieur De Souza sent them all packing for seven years! People started saying the things they’ve always said about virtuosity. They’d say he had a pact with the devil, or that he was a robot . . . Actually, some engineers started building a robot of their own, to see if it could learn enough about the game to beat him, but he retired before they could finish.”

“Ah,” said Xavier. North American Go champion. Could such a person actually exist? She might as well have said the man sat beside him was Fantômas—that seemed more likely. Xavier looked at Eddy, to see if he’d understood the woman. He had, and he said: “That’s a very selective view. She neglects to mention that once a North American Go champion tries to compete internationally, forget about it. I was never able to clear the preliminary round for the LG Cup. She should pick on someone else.”

The woman listened with knitted brow, then turned to Xavier with an enquiring expression.

“He says . . .” Xavier took a deep breath, today was lies-come-true day, plus he thought he could guess what she wanted to hear. “He says he remembers you. You play to an international standard, not just regional, that’s what he said. You’re LG Cup standard.” Surely a little flattery couldn’t hurt?

The woman reached for Xavier’s can of Ricqlès, then changed her mind mid-reach. There could be no toilet breaks, so she had to pace herself. She began to count the Baduk stones on her side of the board instead. Without looking up, she said: “Hmmm . . . he’s lying about remembering me. I don’t look like I did back then. The prison years show.”

The bit about prison seemed to ring a bell and earned her a piercing glance from Eddy, then a much longer second look. He nudged Xavier. “This person . . . this person already beat me,” he said. “It was my second-to-last championship tournament, and she broke my eight-year winning streak. She was magnificent. I can’t believe it’s her . . .”

What . . . they really had met before? Plus, Xavier had had to leave a bit out. Eddy’s words of awed approval included something along the lines of “this person wrecked my strategy like a quickly scattering pair of evil bitch demon pincers.” Which exceeded Xavier’s own French vocabulary limit. He says your strategy was . . . like a force of a nature? Nah. The part of him that would grow up to be a ghostwriter was already evaluating how convincingly he could pass his own voice off as someone else’s.

She wasn’t the type who slowed down for compliments anyway. “If you remember that much, sir, then you must remember all the letters I wrote to you afterwards,” she said.

“Letters?” said Eddy (in English), and then Xavier (in French).

“You never replied. Perhaps you never read past the part where I demanded a rematch. Mere formalities: I didn’t really have any hope that you’d agree to that of your own free will. But I do want to know—” The woman had finished counting the black stones and stretched a hand across the board to count the white stones. “Did you truly play your best that day?”

Eddy and Xavier babbled in duet: Of course Eddy had been playing his best. The game became a matter of not losing, of not being humiliated in front of the crowd of spectators who’d come to see Eddy De Souza beat a young upstart nobody had even heard of before this tournament. He’d drawn on every resource he had in order to withstand her aggression. And he’d still lost.

“A weed, your fans were calling me. And you were the mighty pesticide. Some people came up to you backstage wearing ‘Mighty Pesticide’ T-shirts—”

“Do you think I liked any of that?” (Eddy’s English words were faithfully echoed in French, though Xavier took care to point at Eddy when he said “I” . . .)

“You signed their T-shirts, Monsieur De Souza. So I don’t know what to think. But that doesn’t matter. I could hardly say anything about T-shirts when I was wearing my own floral-print monstrosity with the logo of a soap company and ‘WASH YOUR HANDS BEFORE YOU GO’ printed on the front and back. I’d had to talk a local manufacturer into sponsoring me; there was no other way I’d have been able to fly to Mexico City for the final. And I had to play you. There are more skilled technicians than you, but you’re the lyric poet of this game. You saved me without knowing it. I’d just lost my job at a stationery company in Gatineau. But things like that are hardly rare, are they. I’d been promised promotions and a pension and all the rest of it, and then one of my superiors messed up some figures. Perhaps with criminal intent, but more probably out of laziness, I think, knowing that guy. I wasn’t quick enough to get out of the way when he turned around to point the finger. And I was clueless right up until the final meeting with Human Resources. I asked about my cardboard box. You always see it on TV and at the cinema—the employee walking away from their desk with the cardboard box full of personal effects. And the gentleman at HR said, ‘Look, if you want a box, we’ll sell you one for fourteen dollars, but don’t you already have some plastic bags somewhere, you could just use those.’ Oh yes, I could have taken the company to court, gone bankrupt, and probably still lost the case . . . Instead I took my severance pay and left with my plastic bags, completely demoralised. I didn’t even have the heart to try to change what was on record about my dismissal. That I was an untrustworthy employee and so on. I did temp work when I could get it, and I read the papers . . . There was an article about you. The photo of you was just a photo, the face of a winner, so what? But there was another picture, of the board at the end of the game you’d just won. You’d played white. Night had fallen all across the board, but you’d exploded stars all the way across it and even brought the moon crashing down right in the middle. Stars, moon, that’s not really what I mean, but . . . I saw it when I closed my eyes. I can still reproduce the pattern stone for stone right now. But seeing it all develop . . . that’s different, better. Watching your games made me feel as if I could begin again. Even as I placed the losing stones, I shared in the making of the art. So I was fine just playing until I won enough games for it to be clear that this wasn’t just love of the game—there was aptitude too. Then I got greedy. It was a three-year project, competing until I qualified for the tournament, then working my way up the ranking so I could play you. All I studied were the kingdoms you laid out on the board. Your orthodoxies, your breaks with convention, your gambits. And the funny thing is, knowing those inside and out were almost enough for me to beat my other opponents. I did have to tamper with the schedule a bit, eliminate a couple of people I knew I couldn’t beat so I’d be assigned new opponents with less intimidating game history. But it was all arranged so that I wouldn’t be found out until after the final, and I was willing to do the time. I don’t know that I even wanted to beat you, sir. I just wanted that game. Every fifth or sixth move a meteor flight . . . Ah, this moon-and-stars talk again. That’s what you lyric poets do to us. You reveal the indescribable, and then we go gaga.”

The woman’s gun hand held steady throughout, monitoring the girl beside her, whose inactivity she was probably wise to mistrust, before travelling around to Eddy and then back to the girl again. It seemed she thought of Xavier as a teammate now; no looking down the barrel of her pistol for him.

The train stopped at a station. A silent station, and no one boarded.

Eddy De Souza said (and Xavier translated): “Madame Hébert—that’s your name, isn’t it, Louise Hébert? I swear to you that I played to the best of my ability that day. And if we played now . . . fright aside, I would be at my worst. I don’t think about Go for thirty minutes out of every hour the way I used to. My moves are flabby; they’ve had no exercise in years. You’ve already won. You know that.”

“Yes, yes—in front of an audience that didn’t move or make a sound when my win was confirmed. I remember looking around as the lights beyond the stage came up, expecting to see all the seats empty, since it was so quiet. But they were all there, glaring. There was a little motion here and there as some people shook their heads . . .”

“I lost even though I had their support, Madame Hébert. And you won without it. What, then, do you need from those people? You say you came just to play me. Did you forget that I stood up and applauded you? With sincere respect . . .”

“And when nobody joined you, it started to look like sarcasm. It was so strange, a few minutes later, struggling to hold up the trophy so a photograph could be taken. I’d gained nothing. In fact, I’d been depleted. It felt like my arms would shatter or something. But I was careful to follow the instructions I’d been given beforehand. In the event of a win, I had to hold the trophy up high so the T-shirt was clearly visible and anyone looking for some small way to partake in the glory would know which brand of soap they should wash their hands with before they Go. The photographer took one quick snap and left . . .”

The woman was directing all her answers at Xavier, since all the replies she understood came from him. Light flared through the curtain, and the carriage clattered as it burst out into the sunshine again. The next stop was the last, and it felt as if the driver was picking up speed, intent on the final dash.

“Madame Hébert—”

“And then every account of the match added that you hadn’t been in top condition, do you remember that? Your hands had been trembling earlier on, or you had a cold, or something.”

“I don’t know why anybody would think that. It wasn’t anything I said. If anybody had asked me, I’d have assured them that I wasn’t at any disadvantage. Madame Hébert, I think people were just . . .”

Eddy thought for a moment, then asked Xavier for some paper and a pen. Upon receipt of both, he wrote a simple declaration to the effect that he, Duarte De Souza, had been defeated by Louise Hébert, superbly and in all fairness, on such and such a date in Mexico City, and that the title of North American Go Champion for that year was rightfully hers. He signed the note and handed it to her. But he had written it in English, and when Louise Hébert saw that, tears ran down her face. She said: “I don’t know what this says. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have scared you so badly.”

Xavier indicated that he would read it to her. But she, Louise, the woman with the dove grey pistol, the person whose mind Xavier couldn’t read after all, said: “Time to take my medicine.” She took a small bottle out of her handbag, sprayed some of its contents down her throat, gargled for a second, then tipped her head back and began swallowing Baduk stones exactly as if they were pills.

Things got hazy for Xavier after that. He understood a bit more when he visited the first arrondissement commissariat that evening. One or the other of the Paris parents had called Do Yeon-ssi—they’d had no plans to let him disappear without a trace, had in fact been panic struck when he hadn’t appeared at Gare de Lyon—and Xavier sat hand in hand with his aunt as they watched some footage from the train. He hadn’t been able to see any of the onboard cameras, but they were of course right there recording, though the footage could only be viewed remotely and with a time delay. The security guard who had been watching had been quite tentative about raising the alarm at first. The sleeping passengers in the carriages on either side of the Go carriage hadn’t fallen asleep instantaneously, or even en masse. It had happened a couple of stops after the police had disembarked, and it had all looked natural enough. One passenger settling down to sleep, the sight of which reminded another passenger that they too could do with a nap. It happens. Just like with yawning . . . someone yawns and then you have to as well, you just have to, even if you’re not tired. The woman-with-a-gun-swallowing-stones situation was much less ambiguous, though nobody was quite sure how to proceed regarding the girl Hébert had assaulted. Laura De Souza. Laura, who’d snatched up the pistol, pressed it against Louise Hébert’s forehead, and eventually managed to pull the trigger after a lot of fumbling. The woman’s patience while the girl worked out how to fire should’ve clued her in . . . It was a broken, empty-chambered weapon anyway. So far so good, the girl isn’t a murderer even if she wanted to be. And there were aggravating circumstances for her fear and animosity . . . but as the guard reviewed the footage, he still felt that maybe they should do something about the girl. He didn’t know what, but something. Especially at the point where one of the Baduk stones Louise Hébert was taking medicinally finally went down the wrong way and the woman began to cough and clutch at her throat (Eddy De Souza could be seen falling across the table, seizing her by the shoulders, and pounding on her back—it’s probably too much to expect a North American Go Champion to be well acquainted with CPR). While Eddy was getting on with that, Xavier pulled the emergency cord and pounded on the train windows, but Laura . . . Laura De Souza was back for murder attempt number two, stuffing more stones into Madame Hébert’s trembling mouth. The officer paused the tape and asked Xavier: “What’s Mademoiselle De Souza shouting here?”

Xavier cleared his throat. “He lost! He lost! How can a loser pick on another loser! Just die. Just—”

“OK, I get the gist. This was in French?”

“Yes.”

The point at which Madame Hébert lost consciousness was far from clear; the limp figure of Hébert jerked between help and harm for another minute or two as the De Souzas’ tug-of-war continued. Then the transport police arrived on the scene. They did have to focus on Hébert; there was the false police tip-off, the intimidation and assault, and, of course, the sedation of her fellow passengers. But some note should probably be made about the girl as well . . .

Do Yeon-ssi muttered in Korean: “What will you write in the note? That the girl has a competitive spirit?”

Xavier was looked to for a translation, and when he didn’t provide one, the officer decided that Do Yeon-ssi was asking whether Louise Hébert was pressing charges against Laura De Souza. She wasn’t. Nor the De Souzas against her.

---

“Laura,” I said. “That was the girl’s name?”

“Laura De Souza. I’ll never forget.”

A Laura with a jolly demeanour, hints of a horrible temper, and a strong insistence on following behavioural codes . . .

But it couldn’t be. What were the odds?

Suddenly I absolutely had to see where we were, or at least get an inkling of where we were going. I stepped out of my shoes and walked across the long seat, stopping at the window and running my hands along the insides and outsides of the window casements. It really shouldn’t have been that hard to access a source of light.

“Is this called Clock Carriage because the darkness is meant to reset your biorhythm?” Xavier asked. There was a smile in his voice.

“No, it’s so you can take me back in time with you . . . and I was glad to go. But it’s great to be back. With you and Árpád, and without a Baduk board.”

Just as Xavier told me not to try to make Baduk the villain of the piece, my fingertips struck a long oval button and the blinds rustled open. He came to stand beside me. We were crossing a long iron bridge that arched across a turquoise river. The window glass was so clean and clear that it felt as if we could dive straight from the train into the water below. The sun followed us for a while, and just as it sank beneath the mossy riverbank, Árpád slunk out of the compartment. Sunset sent up ribbons of gold that looped themselves around our clasped hands and, before too long, our entwined bodies.

Sometime later the moon came up—I say “sometime” . . . it felt like only a minute, but it can’t have been that quick. By then Xavier and I had ventured into the other empty compartments and found our carriage’s equivalent of a restaurant car, a well-stocked pantry carriage. Fridge highlights included bottles of white wine and champagne and a bottle of vodka, and there was a dining table by the central window, also bearing gifts: a bottle of Kentucky bourbon and a tub filled to the brim with crispy pieces of salted egg fish skin. Our favourite drinking snack! Xavier lifted the tub and revealed a notecard: To Otto and Xavier—here’s to unseeing the world—Ava.

Next we converted the carriage seats into a bed, with a zone prioritised for Árpád, who’d returned for supper and lay on his belly chewing worms, seemingly as transfixed by the graphic gleam of that night’s moon as I was. The absence of light switches and accessible power sockets was intentional—all charging of devices was to be done in the pantry carriage next door. There in Clock Carriage, Xavier’s phone aside, the sky was both lamp and blindfold. Cue the woo-woo perceptions: Maybe this is what it would be like to live inside a clock, or even to be a clock, I thought. Time would tell itself to you, bringing with it a whole host of physical memoranda, the flaring and dwindling of this orb and that. Time would crowd in close that you didn’t feel it passing. “Clocks don’t actually know the time,” I said to Árpád. “They only repeat what they’ve been told.”

Árpád looked round at me. A You all right, mate? kind of look. Xavier anthropomorphises Árpád too: at that very moment he said, “You all right, mate?” in a voice that approximated the scratchy, whistling sound of Árpád’s call. Then, indicating the moon in the heavens, he added in his own voice: “I try not to look. I’d rather see it sketched or in paint. Otherwise all I can think about is the hundred and eighty something kilos of garbage we’ve already managed to leave up there. Ninety-six bags of piss and fecal matter . . .”

“Mucky puppies, astronauts. But you’re absolutely confident, are you, that in their place you’d have managed to hold it all in until you got home?”

“Ugh . . . I know it couldn’t be helped. And I don’t have any better space travel waste disposal ideas. But I’m just . . . I feel bad that this is what it is to be human, Otto. To journey that far on wings so painstakingly won, all those centuries of artistic dreams and scientific thought . . . only to arrive with bags and bags of waste. In the end, that’s what we produce the most of, isn’t it? And maybe it’s what we’re best at.”

He balanced his e-reader atop the “V” of his crossed ankles, reached for the vodka bottle, and poured another two shots. He’s the only other person I know who can read, drink, and converse at the same time, and his drunken TED Talks take on a different character depending on what he’s reading. What I really want is to get him sloshed when he’s on a Wodehouse jag, to see whether he leans Jeeves-ward or Wooster-ward. But that evening it was The Brothers Karamazov. We were playing a drinking game within parameters he’d devised but hadn’t shared with me. I just took a shot whenever he did. Whatever it was we were drinking about, he seemed to find it in every page. As if that wasn’t enough, it felt like the speed of the train was accelerating the effects of the alcohol. I was leaving the pleasantly drunk phase and approaching nausea. Oh, to be like Xavier, Spera, or other friends who treat throwing up as a kind of debauchery tax that they can quickly pay before getting straight back to the merrymaking . . .

I downed the shot Xavier held out to me, swallowed hard, then took both our empty glasses and stacked them over the lid of the vodka bottle. I put the bottle out of easy reach, did the same thing with Xavier’s e-reader, then rolled over, gathering him into my arms and nipping his earlobe when he grumbled that all I was going to do was nod off.

“Let’s get out at the next station,” Xavier said.

“Even if it’s the sort of station only freight trains stop at and we have to wait days ’til we can hitch a ride back?”

“Even if by the time we get back Do Yeon-ssi’s signed the house and our lives over to our friend Yuri. Let’s get off this train.”

“Huh. Mind telling me why?”

“At the risk of sounding like a thirty-something-looking teenager on Dawson’s Creek, I just really need to know where we are.”

“Well . . . you’re not asking too much there.”

I thought, but didn’t say, that there was something vaguely compulsive about the way that when we were together we thought and talked about anything and everything except the train we were on. But that was probably our issue, not the train’s.

Instead I told him: “You’re Joey, I think. Always had a soft spot for that girl.”

“Say that again? Couldn’t understand you, since you’re already slurring . . .”

“Shhhh . . . you’re slurring. I’m Pacey.”

“You wish,” he said. “You’re Dawson. Don’t fight it.”

“Hey, I’ve got a train story too . . .”

“Is it from today?”

It was from the year before, when Árpád and I had attended an international mesmerism convention in Springfield, Illinois. The conference had ended, and we were on our way to New York to visit a cousin of mine who’d adopted one of Árpád’s littermates. Ours was a pretty abstracted carriage. Everybody was reading or responding to written messages on phones and tablets, and Árpád was very still in the seat opposite me, wearing the special floppy-brimmed hat that slows him down while those members of the public unused to mongooses get comfortable with the idea of him. The brim of that hat is embroidered all around the inside: birds and frogs flying and hopping across a grassy vista. While Árpád was intently regarding all this, a couple boarded at Chicago’s Union Station and sat across the aisle from us, both of them fresh-faced, long-haired, extensively tattooed, and engrossed in a conversation they seemed to have begun hours before. The more talkative half of the couple was an actor I recognised at once but pretended not to. The show she was on was still somewhat under the radar. Season one had been streamable for three months or so, and the buzz around it was only just building among those who’d already binged all the big shows and were searching really hard for alternatives to reruns of Friends. The actor’s partner was a good listener, but aside from that, a mostly unknown element. The actor had hit a career speed bump, you see. She’d been the show’s costar but wouldn’t be returning for season two. Someone named Carla (the actor’s agent, presumably) had told her it was because she was too pretty. Viewers didn’t find her relatable. The actor knew there must be more to it than that; she just didn’t know what. She was also strangely content with the way she looked, so undergoing any kind of procedure was out of the question. I say “strangely content” because how often do you come across someone who doesn’t want to reduce this or increase that?

At any rate, the actor was saying she’d just try to get as much voice work as she could. That way, even if it took a really long time to become relatable, even if it took so long that her looks expired, at least she’d have developed as an actor. Having made this statement of intent, she laid her head on her partner’s shoulder and submitted to her protective embrace. After a moment, the partner cleared her throat . . . Uh, I think you’re right, hun. It’s not the way Carla says it is. Maybe I should have said something earlier, maybe not, but . . . this could all be down to that online petition.

What petition! Show me.

The man in the seat next to mine had been eavesdropping as hard as I was, but he didn’t know the actor’s name or what show she appeared in. He googled season 2 + petition, couldn’t find anything, and wordlessly acquiesced as I took the phone from him and supplied the missing terms that made the query fruitful. We studied the petition together. The number of signees correlated with the show’s just-shy-of-respectable viewing figures at the time. The signees demanded that the “too pretty” actor’s lines and scenarios be given to her colead, who played an ugly version of her. The tremendous attractiveness of the ugly colead was a topic for another time. Us normals are too grotesque to be seen in public, so we’d better just stay at home watching TV . . . Isn’t that what such casting choices tell us? The petition saved all that for season 3 and simply argued that the silliest thing about season 1 was the division of this particular role between two actors when one of them had sufficient range to play both an ugly and a pretty version of the same person without a single costume alteration. Ostensibly, someone somewhere in the decision-making chain had listened to the viewers and had left it to the too-pretty actor’s agent to let her down as gently as possible. Looking around the carriage at my fellow eavesdroppers, I could see which side each passenger was on. It was America, so people spoke up too, stopping on their way to or from the toilets or the restaurant car to express outrage at the turns mass entertainment was taking (“What’s next; will they want to decide what does and does not happen in the story? Those losers should just stick to Choose Your Own Adventure books!”), or to tell the pretty actor they would sign a counter-petition in her favour. The actor hadn’t realised how loudly she’d been talking, and she blushed all the way down to her ankles. I got her autograph to cover for my own frequent staring. It wasn’t the actor I’d grown interested in, but the woman she was with. This companion’s tactful and compassionate utterances indicated she was everything you could wish for in a life partner. Except that she was the very person who’d started the online petition. She must’ve brought it up because she couldn’t quite bear going altogether incognito; it’s very hard not to resist boasting about your accomplishments. I can’t prove anything, I’m going on micro-expressions alone . . . but don’t forget I’m hyperaware of those, having been trained to focus on them. So I stand by my observation. As we all filed off the train at Penn Station, I caught the actor’s eye, gave her a bearer-of-the-gladdest-tidings-type smile and predicted that everything was going to be all right. I did the same to her partner. Both paused as they briefly contemplated battle plans, then both smiled back at me. Affirmation bright and dark. “Yes, it will, won’t it?” the actor said, and her partner said: “Absolutely!”

I doubt I managed to put much of this across to Xavier. I could hear myself getting very mumbly, so maybe all Xavier picked up was “actor—petition—ankles—partner—” before I was fast asleep and he rejoined the Karamazov fraternity.