My oligarch

Raymundo has come round to see me. He is a new arrival in the village, and is still settling in. I agreed we could spend some time together whenever he needed someone to talk to. He mostly wants to talk about his arm. He is certain that before he came here, his right arm was an oligarch.

I know it sounds like an unusual thing to say, Raymundo tells me. I mean, it’s definitely not something I have heard of before, but it’s a fact. My arm is an oligarch – or formerly was. I mean, I can still tell.

He seems to grow agitated whenever he gets onto the subject of whether his arm is still an oligarch or if his arm is a former oligarch. Can a limb on an individual citizen continue to be an oligarch? If you looked at the definition of oligarch in the dictionary, and then looked at the definition of an arm – they do not seem compatible. And something about this unresolvable pair of definitions has a profound impact on Raymundo.

I try to calm him again – as I did when he arrived and immediately discovered that his arm was no longer simply an arm.

‘Raymundo,’ I said to him then. ‘Is that your name? Raymundo?’ He confirmed yes, his name was Raymundo.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Ok, Raymundo I want you to think about it like this. Can you use your arm in the normal way? Could you pick up a stick do you think?’

And Raymundo looked around us at the various fallen twigs and minor branches that cover the ground at the edges of the clearing.

He considered it for a second and then he selected a stick and went over to it. ‘This one,’ he said. He seemed to be asking me if this was a suitable stick.

‘Yes. That’s a good one,’ I said.

Using the oligarch arm, Raymundo picked up the chosen stick and waved it around. Tentatively, and then above his head – like a flag maybe, or a flare you might use on a makeshift runway. ‘It seems fine,’ he said.

‘Good,’ I said – I moved over to where he was standing and talked softly to him. ‘Raymundo before you say or do anything else, I want you to understand that I believe you, ok? I believe you when you say your arm either is now or formerly was an oligarch. Does that register? You understand? I believe you and we’re going to find a way through this together.’

‘Thank you, yes,’ said Raymundo. His cheeks had reddened and his breath grew a little ragged. I put a hand on his shoulder.

‘Great. You’ve done amazingly well. You can put the stick down now.’ Raymundo put the stick down carefully on the ground.

‘Thank you,’ I said. I reached into my arrivals trunk and passed over the articles of first welcome.

‘Here is a blanket, I said. ‘And a first aid pouch, a sticker that says you have been welcomed by the first Welcomer – that’s me, and a warm hat. The hats are new – we are trying out the hats, so let me know if it is of help. You can return all of this or not when you feel ready. Now you can continue down the path. Go down the hill there and someone – either Brad or Sue or Pradeep will give you a cup of tea.’

That was all a few weeks ago, and now Raymundo is visiting me for maybe the third or fourth time. He wants to discuss how it happened – how the oligarch became his arm.

I have warned him that memories of what happened before arriving in the village can be treacherous, but he wants to discuss it anyway. This is fine with me.

The oligarch latched itself to him, he thinks, in a coffee place where Raymundo was meant to be having a date. In fact, he was being stood up. The date was not going to turn up.

The point is, it was an innocent thing. That’s what Raymundo wants me to understand. It had been just an innocent standing-up that Raymundo was experiencing. He was in the coffee place, waiting to be joined by his date, realising as the minutes ticked by that his date was not going to arrive. He started going through his affirmations – the little rituals he always went through when dates went badly or meetings went badly or phone calls went badly.

Raymundo had normal affirmations. (You can’t control other people’s feelings. You can only control what’s in your space. Your space is ready to receive goodness. An end to your money problems is coming. Abundance is coming. Love is coming. You cannot control other people’s decisions. You cannot control the behaviour of illnesses. You cannot control the failures of the government. You cannot control the irreversible decline of the soil.)

Just normal things that he silently ran through in order to preserve his confidence – when suddenly the door opened and the air seemed to change. For a second, Raymundo thought his date had arrived, but instead, all at once, an oligarch was there in the coffee place, pushing to the front of the queue.

The oligarch was wearing an awful hat, just horrendous. Rayundo was aware that this awful hat was necessary because of some brain experiments the oligarch had been trying out. The head of the oligarch was – as the oligarch had been proud to announce on social media – about 90% negative space now. ‘I’m becoming the universe now,’ the oligarch had posted.

In the coffee queue, the hat was not containing the negative space. The negative space of the oligarch’s head was constantly whispering to itself, they lyrics of a song. ‘It could have been the Grease Supermix by Jive Bunny,’ Raymundo says. ‘But whispered on the in breath and on the out breath, so it sounded desperate and weird. Nnnn-yu-thu-wun-thada-wan-hhhh-doo-doo-doo-hny. Like that. Sometimes it didn’t sound like a song at all. Just air escaping. Air getting chased away. Air spiralling and becoming bored.’

We pause to sip tea and eat a biscuit. I have learnt not to pressure anyone at this point. I want to push Raymundo forward in his narrative, but it won’t help. If he needs to list the different sounds the oligarch’s head was making, then that’s what he needs. I let it happen. I try not to look at his arm. I try not to hear it hissing, because I am sure the arm wants to hiss, but if we don’t let it then it won’t hiss.

‘Are you ok?’ Raymundo asks me.

‘Your arm is not hissing,’ I say. And we have more biscuits. I’m thinking hard about this but I don’t want Raymundo to feel worried. To be absolutely honest, I am a bit worried. But there are ways of solving this problem there are always ways. I prefer it not to be a problem in the first place. That’s my preference.

‘So any way,’ Raymundo says, and he carries on telling me what happened.

The oligarch was emotional. Moving like a drugged bear through the coffee place seating area. Raymundo, feeling the presence of the oligarch like a kind of gravitational force, lost track of his affirmations. The joy that had once been in the coffee place was gone. The hope Raymundo had felt waiting for his date was a dead, grey memory. He wondered if the horrifying whispering noise coming from the oligarch was actually, in fact, the sound of eating. A million million tiny little mouths eating things. A miserable breath came out of the oligarch. A complaint. Something about the coffee. The origins of the coffee. The boringness of the complaint, the stink of joylessness overwhelmed Raymundo.

‘A door seemed to open up?’ I asked. Always, the journey to the village begins with the opening of a door that hadn’t been there before. Ask anyone, it’s always the same. Is this really what happened? We just don’t know. But it’s always what seems to have happened.

‘A door opened up,’ Raymundo affirms.

‘And you went through it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Into the misty place?’

‘Yes.’

‘But you didn’t feel alone? You felt like someone had come through with you? This shouldn’t be possible.’

Raymundo looks very sad. Ashamed almost. He seems to have come to a halt.

‘What’s wrong, Raymundo?’ I say. ‘You can tell me.’

‘The door,’ he says. He is very pale. His eyes are wide. The air is cold suddenly, and has the fragrance of bleach on it, like someone is cleaning and you just want to relax and not be bothered. But they are cleaning so you are unsettled. It’s like that.

‘What about the door?’ I ask – again I am carefully watching Raymundo’s oligarch arm.

‘The door was in the hat,’ he says at last. He seems to surprise himself as he says it. ‘The back of the hat opened up and I needed to pass through, so I passed through, but the oligarch noticed me. He started complaining to his body guards who were obviously disgusted but felt compelled to act. The bodyguards lunged for me, and I leapt into the door in the oligarch’s hat.’

I know what happened next. Raymundo was in the mist. We all go to the mist.

‘But my arm was wheezing. Wheezing and wheezing. And I knew that somehow the oligarch had followed me. I have maybe brought one here. And I am so sorry.’

Raymundo is crying, but I have had an amazing idea.

‘Your affirmations need to change,’ I said. ‘Your new affirmations are: This is my arm. This is not an oligarch. There can be no oligarchs in the village. I am welcome here. My arm is just an arm. It’s a beautiful arm. My arm hair is gorgeous.’

‘My arm hair is gorgeous,’ Raymundo says. ‘This is not my oligarch. I am welcome here.’

‘You are SO welcome here, Raymundo,’ I say. ‘And now I want you to do this final thing. As hard as you can, as loudly as you can, as long as you can, I want you to clap. Clap until both your arms are numb.’

So Raymundo starts clapping, and I stop him because actually I don’t think I should watch what happens next.

‘Not right now. Go home and clap. Go to your dwelling and clap.’

He cannot resist starting early. Raymundo gets up and nods a thank you to me, and then I can hear him, in the woodland area on his way to his dwelling, I can still hear him now, clapping and clapping, and each time I can hear the wheezing oligarch fade away, and joy return to the air.