Even as a toddler that forebear of mine was the solid type. The mongoose had bolted, but someone had been reading the child potted biographies of wise warriors. One name had got stuck in his head, and he knew it must belong to the mongoose: he waited until he could be heard over the nursery maid’s hysterical screams, then he murmured, “Árpád,” over and over, with his pudgy little arms outstretched. And once Árpád the First had made herself presentable, she came to see him.
Do Yeon-ssi hadn’t heard this legend. There was never the right time or the right sort of atmosphere in which to bring it up. When people ask about Árpád XXX, or about his mother, it’s always been simpler just to say, “Yeah, domestic mongooses are the new cats and dogs—it’ll catch on, you’ll see.” But Do Yeon-ssi’s lecture on mongoose psychology was far from brief, and I longed to lecture my lecturer, really set the scene for her, give her some idea of … I don’t know, the intertwining of two fates or something. That was all Montague stuff, though, and I’m a Shin now. I held my peace. Xavier knows all about the Árpáds, but he stayed quiet too. That was no surprise. I’ve never heard him talk back to his aunt. She’s been the parental authority in his life for decades, and he’s learned that contradicting her sets up the first link in a chain of counter-contradictions that drags you to the underworld.
Better to immediately cooperate with Do Yeon-ssi … that’s what Xavier calls her: Miss Do Yeon. Her more old-fashioned friends are shocked that he puts things on a first-name basis like this, but what can Do Yeon-ssi do? She devoutly watched over this brat for so many years, and this is how he repays her … by depriving her of the honorifics that are due her. But she’s not going to cry over it, that’s just the way it goes, she didn’t do it for the honorifics anyway …
That’s how Do Yeon-ssi spins it, with full awareness that Xavier calls her “Miss” in tribute to her heart-shaped petal of a face. Her ink-black hair is streaked with strands of white, and it mostly looks after itself, running semi-divine riot around her shoulders and down her back, making you think of aureoles and oceans. And then there’s the look in her eyes. The look of Eve in Eden … some amalgam of devotion and brutality that’s only really satisfied by encounters with the interior and therefore eviscerates everything in sight. It’s fitting for an optical lens magnate to be embodied the way she is, each eye a magnifying glass. I should’ve known better than to go along with her request to be placed under hypnosis. She asked if I could make it so she’d fall asleep whenever she wanted to. “Deep sleep … the kind that gets you really well rested, OK?” She did need more sleep of that kind. After one of her more acute bouts of insomnia, she looks so tired nobody realises she’s rich. Those bleary eyes with dark circles around them somehow make everything she’s wearing and holding look stolen.
“Yeah, no prob,” I said. I was cocky. After all, that was how I made my living at the time. That and boosting diet willpower, deleting fear of public speaking, and some stuff with a few other phobias. My artist friend Spera loves to have a go at me for not putting my “powers” to more profound uses. According to Spera, Emily Dickinson would be disappointed in me. She quotes from Dickinson’s letters: Cherish Power—dear—remember that stands in the Bible between the Kingdom and the Glory, because it is wilder than either of them. This utterance brought forth the most thoughtful and mature response I could conceive of: sepulchral silence as I dropped a cashew nut down the front of Spera’s top. Let others do their bit towards revolutionising human consciousness: I’ve learned to treat an attention span as a pulse with a regularity observable right down to the millisecond. I make a few test runs, track a few signals, and then I weary my hypnotee into a light stupor with the most minuscule of small talk. With Do Yeon-ssi I picked the issue of daylight savings, listing times I’d been late for appointments because of it, or had been too early, decided to come back later, and then missed the appointment altogether. I also provided meticulous descriptions of the weather on each of the occasions I described, and invited her to share similar experiences. When she declined to do so, I invented daylight savings mix-ups for her, resoundingly minor scenarios I vowed she’d told me about herself. I was loving the way Do Yeon-ssi’s face changed as she observed my commitment to the strangely dreary lies I was telling. Her expression had been a mixture of confusion, wonder, and distaste, and it began to congeal into abject dismay. And she kept interjecting to ask when the hypnotism would begin. Ostensibly Do Yeon-ssi was free to tell me to get lost, but she didn’t because of the position I occupied. I knew that keeping her captive in that particular way wasn’t real power, but it felt close enough. This woman who might not have had the time of day for me under any other circumstances had promised her nephew I’d be just as precious to her as he was. Ha! Xavier would never
