What Is Not Yours Is Not Yours

by Helen Oyeyemi

She had to quickly pop back to the fifteenth century to find a word for how beautiful he was. The boy was makeless.

AT THE FRONT desk of the Glissando, guests can request and receive anything, anything at all. Odette was there when a man with very bad nerves had asked for a certificate guaranteeing that the building’s foundations were unassailable; this man was convinced that he was pursued by a burrowing entity that lived beneath any house he lived in and raised his floors by a foot every year, the entity’s long-term goal being to raise his quarry so high that he could never again descend into the world of his fellow human beings. Our mother made no comment on this man’s convictions but provided him with a certificate stating that there never had been and never could be room for any form of other dwelling beneath the Hotel Glissando. The only thing a hotel guest may not ask for is, for some reason, an iguana-skin wallet. The woman who requested one was told to “Get out of here and never come back.” And as the doorman threw the ex-guest’s luggage out onto the street he said: “An iguana-skin wallet? Where do you think you are?”