Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi (best books to read for self improvement .txt) 📕

Přemysl. He had seen me, had given me a look of terror. I thought, Why doesn’t he run? Maybe fright had glued him to the ground, inflating his eyes and the “o” of his mouth, hollowing his muscles and pouring itself through them. He stared down, I stared up, a cupboard fell (on him? behind him?), and I ran in through the main door of the house—which was where I’d seen Karel, his father, on the stairs. The wheezing, grey-faced man, thrusting his cane further up along the banisters to try to speed his progress, the flies around him—I will always remember them as having flown out of his open jaws, even though I know that can’t have happened. The old man’s breath in my face as he pulled at my jacket and said: “My son. Please …” I’m not sure what he said next. I talked about this with the psychiatrist I got referred to afterwards; it’s fairly similar to Xavier wavering between readings of Ava’s sign. I think the man said, Please help my son, but I also heard Please stop my son. The psychiatrist said I might have conflated meanings into one word. Meanings that disorganised my hearing. I’d stopped the discussion there, because both of the meanings were moot; the flat was empty, and running in there didn’t help or stop anyone.

“Otto? It seems as if you’ve seen Karel and Přem before?”

“You already said that,” I muttered.

“I’m giving you another chance to answer while it’s just us. Laura’s on her way over, and there are things it’s better not to discuss in front of her. So if you know anything, Otto, it’s important to say so now. Please.”

Watching her as she spoke, I saw what I’d missed in our first encounter, when she’d mostly been listening. A current flickered across that billion-facet face; the kind generated by habitual flow between two opposing thoughts (or future events?). One troubled her, and the other got her all overjoyed. She couldn’t choose which would prevail, so she made preparations that removed her from the present and placed her one step ahead of us. But only one. She exhibited the top two characteristics I look for in those who book hypnotism sessions with me: marked inattention towards immediate surroundings and heightened sensory arousal. It’s even better (from a lazy hypnotist’s perspective) when one is linked to or caused by the other. In short, Allegra Yu was highly suggestible.

“They’re friends of Ava’s, aren’t they?” I said. “The composer and …”

“They were friends of mine too. Přem’s a dabbler, but mostly he ran the publishing house his father set up. Until he disappeared.”

“When was that?” Xavier asked.

“Well, the last time anybody we know of spoke to him in person was about five years ago. The summer of 2014. There’ve been e-mails and phone conversations since, mostly to do with the publishing house, but the house has had to drop him because they’re almost sure the person e-mailing and taking calls isn’t actually him, and they can’t really work with a mystery publisher, no matter how efficient. When did you see him, Otto?”

(The summer of 2014. The fire was in July.)

“Who? Přem? I’ve never seen him,” I said.

The firefighters had found no one in the flat, and the man who’d called them, the same man who’d asked me to help or stop his son, told them he was there to collect post; he said he’d known his son wasn’t at home. He couldn’t remember exactly what he’d said to me, but he thought it must have been something like That’s my son’s flat. I couldn’t let myself believe that that old man was lying, but it felt even less possible that he was telling the truth. And actually I didn’t need to know what kind of event I had experienced that day, as long as it was never revived or repeated.

“If only you knew how much you sound like Ava right now.” Allegra reached up, took off my sunglasses, and continued unfazed by my devil-red eyes: “That’s why Karel gave her these paintings; she kept asking what Přem looked like. She wouldn’t speak to Přem, and she’d look at a chair he was sitting in or an area he was standing in, then say there wasn’t anyone there. It got a bit creepy. I think Přem was freaked out by it as well, so the atmosphere was a bit prickly until she finally let the joke go.”

Ava had told me about playing her theremin to a vacant room. Now it sounded like she’d never stopped considering the room vacant; she’d only stopped mentioning that aspect to those who were uncomfortable with it.

Allegra paused when Xavier asked about photos of Přem. “If you give each other significant looks after I say this I’m kicking you both off the train right now, but … when Přem went missing, we tried to dig up photos of him, and there aren’t any.”

“Not a single photo, eh,” I said.

“Of someone who walked this earth for over thirty years,” Xavier said.

It was only the viewpoint that had changed; I’d moved my whole body, not just my head. Xavier had switched positions too. That was why the self-portrait now appeared to be looking at Allegra. Those were the reasons, the very good reasons, for the apparent alteration; Přemysl was not going to look at me next, no, no, nothing of the sort.

I copied his focus on Allegra, who was telling us: “Look, now that we don’t spend time together anymore I feel like there’s something fishy about the lack of photos as well. And other things come to mind, all sorts of niggling things I suddenly want to bother him about and have him explain away. For example, look at those paintings … Přem made them too. He got rid of all the others, so these are the only ones left.”

She gestured towards the two blank canvases, a narrow streak of white above each of the connecting doors.

“They’re not paintings,”