Palimpsest

  The Third Rail slides her eyes sidelong at Sei. “Did you not pass through such a place?”

  “I suppose, but kanji are … ill-equipped to come by the path I took.”

  “How many roads are there into Tokyo?”

  “I don't know… dozens.”

  The scarlet woman shrugs and smiles secretively. “Palimpsest is the same. Only one, though, is big enough for people to squeeze through. But a character is small, small as a thought. She does not need such a great highway.”

  Sei considered, and tried to shake off Plenitude. The little kanji clung to her, making tiny gurgling sounds, like ink bubbling.

  “They get attached so easily. Insoluble little dears,” the Third Rail coos.

  “How much longer does this night last, Rail?”

  “One more car, Sei. It pains me that you cannot stay longer. Perhaps one day you will allow us to become dear enough to you that you will do what is necessary to stay.”

  Sei grips the Rail s arm, hard and hot beneath her hand. “What is necessary? I don't know! Tell me how.”

  “I do not know either,” the crimson woman says, dropping her chin in shame. “I am too big to pass by that path. I must stay here, there is no road wide enough to bear me. But I hope one is wide enough for you.”

  A rich and mushroomy loam covers the floor of the fourth car, toadstools fulminating beneath benches. Pine trees sprout everywhere they can grasp hold, growing sideways, diagonally crawling across the aisle. Between them nestle parcels, wrapped with brown paper, tied with twine, dozens upon dozens. The contorted, warty pine-roots splay over cushion and wall, sucking tentatively at windows. Their needles shine dark and glossy and thick, and from their boughs hang great orange-gold lanterns, globes ablaze with light. Some few folk in severe black clothes clutch the handholds and stare into the lanterns. Their faces are marked with white lines like smears of chalk. Sei looks up-the ceiling is far too distant, far too high, and there seem to be stars there, behind green-gray clouds.

  At the far end of the great carriage there is a fox. He is also red, and his nose black, in the manner of foxes.

  “I know you,” he says dispassionately.

  “I don't think you could,” Sei replies.

  “Imagine a book at the bottom of a lake.” The fox yawns. He paws the soil and lies down to sleep.

  “Fish,” the Third Rail whispers tenderly, “read it. We read it.”

  Sei shuts her eyes against sudden tears. The room seems to tilt, and the great peace of the rice and the cabbages drains from her like rain. Plenitude quivers in distress on her shoulder. “I can't,” she gasps. “I couldn't… I don't want to. This is too much. You talk like a dream. Nothing matters in dreams.”

  “We talk like your mother talked.” The Third Rail scratches her elongated cheek fretfully “We thought you would like it.”

  “I don't!” Sei cries, half a scream, the other half squeezed off by her suddenly aching throat.

  The scarlet woman hangs her head in shame and pulls her kimono around her breast to hide herself. “We are not infallible,” she whispers.

  “What's in the packages?” Sei feels ill. The shaking of the carriages tips her into the arms of a seated pine, which wriggles with pleasure and cradles her in its branches. It allows one ecstatic drop of sap to fall onto her hand.

  The Third Rail looks toward the sleeping fox in agony. “If you don't like it we shall take them away! We promise!”

  Sei shrugs off the purring pine tree and pulls frantically at the twine of the package nearest to her. It comes open cleanly in her hands, like origami falling away from itself. Inside is a red mask, longer than a human face, its eyes and mouth hard black slits. One of the men in his black tunic reaches in and pulls it onto his face. He sighs resignedly, as if he knew all along that it would come to this. Sei gapes, hides her face in the pine tree. She does not want to look at the Rail again, at her hard, red, long face.

  But the Third Rail kneels in submission at Sei s feet, imploring her in silence, her face a broken panic.

  “These trains speed past each other,” she says, “utterly silent, carrying each a complement of ghosts who clutch the branches like leather handholds, and pluck the green rice to eat raw, and fall back into the laps of women whose faces are painted red from brow to chin…”

  Plenitude caresses her cheek with a bold stroke.

  Sei moans and falls into the Rail s arms. The long-faced woman wraps her kimono around the girl and holds her tenderly, sweetly, with infinite care.

  ONE

  THE RABBIT IN THE MOON

  Sei woke sobbing in a strange apartment, her hair plastered to her face, clawing at her shoulder. Yumiko did not hold her. She just watched, calm as a teacher watching a slow student struggle through a simple passage.

  “It's always hard to wake up,” she said.

  Sei clutched her, her eyes rolling and wild as a dog's. “I need—”

  “To go back? Yes. I know. Do you think I'm different than you?”

  Sei could not breathe. Her body ached, her joints, her lungs. “Take me back, take me to someone, anyone, I don't care, just… the train, I can't leave them, they want me there, I have to go back!” She groaned. “God, let me go back to sleep!”

  “You have to wait. The Floor of Heaven opens at dusk. I sympathize, I really do, but I've been where you are now, and I had to wait, too.” She put her arm around Sei's naked waist. “There's a tenor there, at a place called Thulium House. He gives me sapphires every night; he pierces my arms with a long needle and hangs me with jewels until I cannot move for the weight. He puts opals on my eyelids, and kisses on my lips until I am bruised with him, and all over blue. Do you think I don't miss him?”

  “There is a train, full of strange fields and forests …”

  “I envy you.”

  “They need me!”

  Yumiko put her head to one side. “Have they said what for?”

  “No…”

  “Then it can't be good. Don't be in such a rush.”

  Yumiko rose and began the rustling, habitual motion of making tea. Sei realized that this must be Yumiko's place. The walls were bare; she had a bed and a table and nothing else. The apartment looked like someone has just moved in, or expected to move out soon.

  “My mother told me once,” said Sei softly, to Yumiko's back, “when I was little, she told me that dreams are small tigers that live behind your ears, and they wait until you're sleeping to leap out and tear at your soul, to eat it up at very civilized suppers to which no other cats are invited.”

  Yumiko quirked an eyebrow. “Was your mother, if it's not impolite, totally crazy? I mean, that's not really a working theory of the subconscious.”

  Sei shrugged. “Back then, I just thought she was wild and beautiful, like a goose, and like a goose she flew at me in a rage sometimes, and bit my toes. And sometimes when I came to see her in our tatami room her kimono would be torn to pieces, and she'd be naked and bleeding on the floor, her own skin under her nails. She was bleeding like that when she told me about the tigers. So I guess she was crazy, when I think about it now, but when I was a kid I believed her because she was my mother and mothers know everything.”

  Yumiko set a thin green tea down on the floor. She ran a hand through Sei's hair.

  “But you aren't, you know. Crazy. I know what you know. We're not like your mother. There are no tigers for us, just a city, waiting, and it loves us, in whatever ways a city can love.”

  “Maybe the tigers are there. Maybe they're just better at hiding than trains and tenors.”

  The Floor of Heaven.

  The little brass plaque said nothing it did not say before. Sei stood in front of it, motionless, while Yumiko straightened her plaid skirt.

  “Ready?” said the faux-schoolgirl, her eager smile a little too manic and stretched for Sei to find it comforting. Sei closed her fists at her sides, suddenly not very brave. She could see that night plainly in her mind, how it would play out in that dar
k, furtive club, how every other night would unfold, too.

  So many people would crawl inside her.

  Sei knew she would search them out like a fox, the ones whose maps linked together to create a route, a route to keep her on the train, on course. She would find them in the shadows of the Floor of Heaven, in the offices of that place with tall silver cabinets, in the bathrooms with Asahi posters glued to the walls.

  Sei could see it all happen, the whole tawdry parade:

  A man with a silver tooth would want her to get on her knees in the black-tiled bathroom. She could see herself kissing the depth-chart etched on his toes, his wrinkled knees, his exhausted cock.

  A woman with two children sleeping at home and a mole on her left thigh would slip her fingers into Sei's cunt right on the dance floor, in front of everyone. Sei could see herself writhe, impaled, embarrassed and abandoned.

  There would be a sweet boy with a thin little beard—his thumb nearly black with gridlock and unplanned alleys, as though he had been fingerprinted in an unnamable jail. Sei saw herself straddling him on one of the long leather couches that lay between the club-lights, grinding against him until he came so hard he started to hiccup, and she found him so ridiculous she wanted to cry. That one would run after the train in her dreams, trying to catch it, trying to catch her, too poor in skill to manage either feat.

  Sei knew she would seek out the dream-city on all those skins. She would seek out passage on her train, and all these fleshly tickets would fall to her feet, used and pale. She knew she would refuse to return to Tokyo, where it would not be so easy to find them, to snarl at them: Take me, take me, why are you waiting?

  Sei would never want to drink, or dance, only to grip them between her thighs and then sleep like a dead thing. She would become naked and raw and without guile; she would seek as truly as a knight.

  Sei could see it all so clearly, a path through the woods: touch no one who does not carry the map—she and Yumiko would certainly agree between themselves that this was wrong, risky, that the secret was theirs and those of their tribe, and not to be squandered.

  But perhaps once, after the snow melts, Sei thought she could imagine a version of herself that would make an exception for a young man with cedar-colored skin and a nose ring like a bull's, or a minotaur's. No one special. Someone who came to the club and was, of course, turned away. By then he would seem so alien and strange to Sei, so blank and empty. Pristine. Possessed of purity.

  Sei knew her weaknesses—she would plead with Yumiko: I am weak. Sometimes it is still about love, and need.

  When she wakes with him, in that not-very-distant future, that Sei watched blankly in the reflection of a brass plaque, the grid will brachiate out from his footpad, its angles dark and bright, and she will envy him, for wherever he walks now he walks in Palimpsest, and it will be all new for him, all new. Before he stirs, she will leave his house without tea or farewell.

  Standing before the door to the Floor of Heaven, the train hurtled so fast into the future. She could hardly bear the speed, the inevitable, unavoidable sequence of stops and passengers, the toll, never to be paid in full. Tears pricked behind her eyes.

  It all stood in front of her, behind a black featureless door, ready to swallow her whole.

  “Yes,” Sei said. “I'm ready.”

  INAMORATA STREET ENDS in silver sand and a great craggy finger of stone, stretching out into the sea. The glittering water flows out to the horizon and over it, a great dark expanse, whitecaps glistening in the moonlight. Foam shatters into seaglass on the beach, and couples walk arm in arm along a strand of shards, glittering and wet. Striped tents dot the beach head: red and yellow, green and white, rose and powdery blue. Women change into bathing uniforms with flared waists and broad hats to keep out the moonlight; tuba players march back and forth, blaring out nocturnes.

  The infirm of Palimpsest come here to recover, to collect sea-glass on their bedside tables and write novels on the nature of the solitary soul. Mustached men sell bottles of seawater in the inland markets for the price of kingdoms, and false phials abound. The air blows fresh and sweet; it smells of tangerines and salt and white sage, and charlatans bottle this too and sell the empty glasses to immigrants for the price of a parliament seat.

  Each evening the hopelessly ill are brought in gauzy palanquins to view the moonrise, and all applaud the appearance of its white disc over the water. The wind is considered to have such restorative power that surgery is performed on the beach, anesthesia administered by waifish women with hair like spun sugar, who close their mouths over the ailing and breathe the vapors of their crystalline hearts into weakened lungs.

  Ermenegilde has been a patient here since the war ended. She is a charity case; her reassignment went poorly and she was rendered useless for the field. She has bled from her wounds every day for twelve years. Bluebells drape her palanquin: the veteran-flower Medical gauze swathes her face in long bridal veils. All agree that if not for her mouth, she would be now a great dowager-beauty But there is her mouth, it remains, and cannot be denied.

  Once, in a field hospital set up for such amputations, surgeons removed her jaw, her teeth and the better part of her nose. In its place, they inexpertly sewed a panther's muzzle. The practice was new then, though it was to become the single great symbol of the war-there were no experts in those days. Ermenegilde's graft did not take, it would not heal, and stitches are still required to keep her two faces joined together. The wiry knots are black with blood. And though her new teeth are sharp and vicious, as they were intended to be, though her whiskers can detect the smallest drop in barometric pressure, she suffers infections and fevers.

  And of course, of course she cannot speak. None of them can.

  Ermenegilde is always the first to be carried to the shore for moonrise. She took up photography many years past, and her nurses help her each evening to set her daguerreotype in place so that she may print her plates of the great full face she still hopes will mend her. She breathes deep, and prays the moon will hold still for her portrait. Ermenegilde knows, however, that it is dif ficult to do, and does not blame the heavenly body for her restlessness. She, too, has had to sit for pamphleteers and medical historians alike. She is possessed, after all these years, of immense empathy.

  November cradles her left hand gingerly in her right. She does not want to think about it, not now, that morning three days past when she had woken up with that poor girl's pale hair covered in blood and her own fingers gone. Her blessing fingers. It's almost funny. There was no wound, the stumps as smooth and tan as if some hand had simply plucked off her fingers like fruit. But there was blood, blood everywhere, though it came from nowhere, and they had scrubbed and scrubbed to get it clean.

  But Casimira was right. Things are clearer now. There would be no more of this “it's only a dream” business. What happens here happens there. November is not a slow student. In her way she appreciates the act. It's like cheating on a test-so much easier when you have the answers written on your hand.

  “My house misses you,” comes Casimira's brandywine voice beside her.

  November turns, and the green-haired woman is there, her curls loose to the backs of her knees, in a bathing dress that reveals no skin at all, billowing and green. November puts her hand over the place in Aloysius's dress where her own belly shows through. “He weeps dust all night long and has turned all the calendars to fall. It is extremely tiresome. If you do not visit I shall have no peace at all.”

  “How did you know I would be here?”

  “When will you learn that if a fly if a bee, if the smallest worm witnesses a thing, I witness it also? I have tried so hard to explain matters clearly. Will it take another finger to impress this upon you?”

  “No,” says November hurriedly.

  “If the fingers are a very great loss, I can arrange for replacements here. In that, you are lucky to have come to this place above others. The sea is so good for one's health. Also the surgeons gather
here to beg for work. The debauched and the desperate are always drawn to water, is that not strange?”

  Casimira kisses Novembers broken hand like a mother kissing her child's ills away. “I can purchase a whole paw, I think, though they are not very dexterous. Tiger, perhaps, or lion? Cougar? Or maybe just the fingers, in which case it will have to be an ape of some flavor. Please do not think of the cost.”

  “What about human?”

  Casimira laughs. “Don't worry, they're quite skilled at it by now. War is such a marvelous instructor.”

  “If the options are ape or cat, I think I'll have to decline.”

  “No fun at all.” Casimira smirks.

  The two women stride arm in arm along the beach. Casimira shoos away the beggar-surgeons with her umbrella, and saves a piece of seaglass for November to keep on a bedside table, should she ever acquire one. They talk about the air and the water, and how November's father might have benefited, in the days when he vomited blood and had to be carried to his tiny downstairs bathroom to do it.

  “We do not exist, however sad your father's case may have been,” Casimira says primly, “for the benefit of all.”

  November does not want to discuss it, not really She knows her place in the universe, knows its label, and none of it can help her father now. There are mushrooms in his skull, and that is all.

  “What is wrong with them?” she asks instead. “The ones on the long beds, the woman with the muzzle sewn onto her face.”

  “There was a war. I told you that. It was not a very long time ago, not very long at all. I was a child when it began.”

  “What happened?”

  Casimira's mouth curls into a feline grin. She looks up, sidelong, at November. “I won, is that not apparent?”

  November starts, a lock of faded brown hair pulling free of her knot. “What, you against everyone?”

  “Not quite so simple, no, but it ended that way, certainly.” Casimira turns sharply to November, and though she is quite short, manages to look precisely like a stern schoolteacher. “List for me, November, the reasons one may start a war.”