WE DECIDED it would be better for my puppet to continue the daily translations—my great-grandfather’s book, line by line, first in Hindi, next in English, as you listened, rapt, and then repeated the line in Russian and French. Thus the book’s bones were broken. I didn’t realize it until about a week before my audition, when I reread the book’s last chapter, which I was yet to translate for you, and the bright words flew through my mind like comets. That feeling was gone from the other chapters; somehow it had seeped out. And I told my glove puppet that it was not to say the final words of the book.
The ghost approved, but she was also quite sure that you wouldn’t choose me if my glove puppet didn’t say the words we’d planned it would say, you and I. The ghost even advised me not to bother turning up. Naturally I disregarded her advice. A couple of days later, the waiting room of your grand old school encased me in marbled fog as I watched other hopefuls practicing with their puppets. Some were more actors than puppeteers, but others handled their marottes and tickle puppets and Bunraku puppets with an ease and affection that didn’t exist between my glove puppet and me. I think the soul must be heavy and smooth, Myrna: I deduce this from the buoyant, jerky movements of puppets, which lack souls. The girl beside me was very pretty—tousled dreadlocks, dimples, and night-sky skin—you know, with this radiance blended into the darkness. But I considered myself taken, and so I merely asked where her puppet was. “It’s this.” She took a small box out of her jacket pocket, and out of that box she took a porcelain chess piece. A plum-colored queen, her only features her crown and a slight wave that conceded the existence of hips and a bosom.
“Did you make her yourself?”
“No, I found her. I know she doesn’t look like a puppet, but she is one. I know it because when I first picked her up I said something I’d never said before. I put her down and then when I picked her up I said the thing again without meaning to, and again it was something I hadn’t said before, even though the words were the same.”
“What’s her routine?”
“At the moment she only asks this one question, but I’m hoping to learn how to get her to ask another.”
“What’s her question?”
The girl looked uncomfortable. She pointed at her nametag: “This is me, by the way.” Tyche Shaw. My own nametag was lost in my hair, so I shook hands with her and said: “Radha Chaudhry. What’s your puppet’s question?”
Tyche mumbled something, too low for me to hear. I’d just decided not to ask again—maybe she was saving it up for the audition—when she repeated herself: “Is your blood as red as this.”
A chess piece asking a personal question, possibly one of the most personal questions that could be asked. I didn’t know how to answer. At my instruction my glove puppet shook its head, No, surely your blood is redder. Tyche turned the purple queen around on her palm and asked the question again; this time the note of challenge left her voice and the question became droll; the next time the chess piece asked her question she sounded worried, seeking comparison for the sake of measuring normality. Frustration came next (after all, the chess piece wasn’t even red . . . therefore as red as what, compared to what). From what you’d said about Gustav Grimaldi’s puppets I knew you would strongly disapprove of the question Tyche Shaw’s puppet asked; in fact you would hate it. But this tiny queen’s question was large; she spoke and you couldn’t think of anything else but her question, and how to answer it. The sharpest thing I had on me was a brooch—I could prick my finger with my brooch pin, and then we would see.
“You’re good, Tyche,” I said, and I wasn’t the only one who walked out for fresh air. Several other demoralized applicants followed me out and had last-minute conversations with their puppets.
“I’m not going to be able to get this job done for you,” my own glove puppet said to me.
“Shhh, I won’t let you pretend this is your fault,” I told it. “I’m just going to have to find another way to show Myrna.”
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