“It was a dare,” Joe said, miserably. “I don’t usually do things like this — you can ask Tim — just believe me when I say I didn’t have much of a choice. I didn’t think she’d say yes. But she did.”
“Mate… don’t pay people to hang out with her.”
“I don’t know what else to do. She’s got to have a good time. She’s my headmaster’s daughter. I don’t think she’d get me expelled or anything — maybe she won’t even say anything to him. But she’s his daughter.”
“Better safe than sorry,” my brother agreed. Myrna, by that point I was already looking around to see if I could spot you (what level of unattractiveness forces people to pay cash so as to be able to avoid having to look at it or speak to it?) and when Joe said that he’d been trying to talk to you but you just sat there reading your book, I searched all the harder.
“What kind of person brings a book to a party,” Arjun said expressionlessly, without looking at me, but he gave a little nod that I interpreted as a suggestion that I seek this girl out.
“What’s her name?” I asked. Joe told me. I found you half buried in a beanbag, pretending to read that dense textbook that takes all the fun out of puppeteering, the one your father swears by — Brambani’s War Between the Fingers and the Thumb. Curse stuffy old Brambani. Maybe his lessons are easier to digest when filtered through stubbornly unshed tears. You had a string of fairy lights wrapped around your neck. I sort of understood how that would be comforting, the lights around your neck. Sometimes I dream I’m falling, and it’s not so much frightening as it is tedious, just falling and falling until I’m sick of it, but then a noose stops me short and I think, well, at least I’m not falling anymore. Clearly I hadn’t arrived in your life a moment too soon. You looked at me, and this is how I saw you, when first I saw you: I saw your eyes like flint arrows, and your chin set against the world, and I saw the curve of your lips, which is so beautiful that it’s almost illusory — your eyes freeze a person, but then the flickering flame of your mouth beckons.
Thank God Joe was so uncharacteristically panicky and stupid that evening. I discovered that I could talk to you in natural, complete sentences. It was simple: If I talked to you, perhaps you would kiss me. And I had to have a kiss from you: To have seen your lips and not ever kissed them would have been the ruin of me…
—
AS FOR WHAT you saw of me — I think you saw a kid in a gray dress gawping at you like you were the meaning of life. You immediately began talking to me as if I were a child at your knee. You told me about how stories come to our aid in times of need. You’d recently been on a flight from Prague, you told me, and the plane had gone through a terrifyingly long tunnel of turbulence up there in the clouds. “Everyone on the plane was freaking out, except the girl beside me,” you said. “She was just reading her book — maybe a little bit faster than usual, but otherwise untroubled. I said to her: ‘Have you noticed that we might be about to crash?’ And she said: ‘Yes I did notice that actually, which makes it even more important for me to know how this ends.’”
I got you to dance, and I got you to show me a few of the exercises you did for hand flexibility, and I got you to talk about your school and its classrooms full of students obsessed with attaining mastery of puppets. I liked the sound of it. Your eyes narrowed intently as you spoke of your final year there: The best two students were permitted to choose two new students and help them through their first year. It was in your mind to play a part in another puppeteer’s future, that much was clear. You believed in the work that puppet play can do — you’d seen it with your own eyes. Before your father began teaching, back in the days when he performed, you had seen a rod puppet of his go down on its knees before a girl who sat a little aside from his audience of schoolchildren. This girl had been looking on with her hair hanging over her face, only partly hiding a cruel-looking scar; her eyes shone with hatred. Not necessarily hatred of your father or of puppets or the other children, but a hatred of make-believe, which did not heal, but was only useful to the people who didn’t need it. Man and long-bearded puppet left the stage, walked over to the girl, and knelt — the puppet’s kneeling was of course guided by your father’s hand, and every eye in the audience was on your father’s face, but his uncertain expression convinced everyone that the puppet had suddenly expressed a will of its own. “Princess, I am Merlin, your Merlin,” the puppet man said to the girl. “At your service forever.”
“Me?” the girl said, suspicious, on the edge of wrath—you just try and make me the butt of your joke—“Me, a princess? You, at my service?”
“It’s no mistake.” The puppet’s hand moved slowly, reverently; it held its breath despite having no breath to hold, the girl allowed that wooden hand to fondly brush her cheek — watching, you were absolutely sure that no hand of flesh and bone would have been allowed to come that close. “This is the sign by which we recognize you,” the puppet said, “but if you wish you may continue as you are in disguise.”
And your father and his puppet returned to the stage, never turning their backs on the girl, as is the protocol regarding walking away from royalty. The girl’s teacher cried, but the girl herself just looked as if she was thinking. She continued to think through the second act of the puppet play, but by the third act she was clapping and laughing as loudly as the rest of them. I really don’t know why I thought your reaching the end of that story would be a good moment to kiss you; I wasn’t entirely surprised that it didn’t work.
—
“YOUNG LADY, I’m flattered — and tempted — but — how old are you, anyway?” you asked. Then you said I was too young. Too young, not right for you, blah blah blah. Always something.
Joe and Arjun appeared with our coats, and you slid my book out of my coat pocket. “What’s this?”
Fate is what it was. Yes, fate that the book I had with me was a novel written by my great-grandfather, a text you couldn’t read because my great-grandfather had put a permanent ban on any of his works being translated into English, Russian, or French. He was adamant that these three are languages that break all the bones of any work translated into them. Since people like getting around rules, there are various unofficial translations of my great-grandfather’s books floating around online, but all of them just seem to prove his point.
—
“JUST TELL ME the beginning of it, then,” you said, and I opened the book to translate for you. You liked the beginning — a woman opens her front door to find a corpse on her doorstep, but before the body can topple across the threshold of her home she says, “Oh no you don’t,” pushes it back out with a broom, and legs it out of the back door.
“Wait,” you were saying, as I walked away arm in arm with my brother—“Hang on, Radha, I need to know—”
“I’d say she’s at least an eight,” my brother said, surprised. (You have my permission to make him regret marking girls’ physical appearance out of ten.) When I got home the ghost immediately knew something was up. She said she’d been wondering when I’d meet someone.
“If I–I don’t know, if some sort of miracle happens and I have sex with someone, will I stop being able to see you?”
The ghost looked crafty for a moment, then relented and said no, I was stuck with her. And she was pleased for me when you phoned me the next day to ask me to translate the next paragraph of my great-grandfather’s book. You hung up as soon as I gave you the paragraph, but the ghost said you’d come back for more, and you did. You began to talk to me a little after each day’s translation, asking me questions about myself and my day and whatever music happened to be playing in my bedroom whenever you called. “Glad you like it — I don’t know what this song is called, but it’s probably quite a bit older than we are. The truth is we’ve got a nostalgic ghost for a DJ around here,” I’d say, and you’d laugh, thinking I’d made a joke.