The bees flow out from November, propelled by her will, and their buzzing in the dark streets sounds like names, whispered over and over.
TWO
YES
Things that are unsightly: birthmarks, infidelity, strangers in one's kitchen. Too much sunlight. Stitches. Missing teeth. Overlong guests.
Her name was Clara. November stayed in her apartment for four days. They made love again on the fifth, a small and cheerless farewell. After everything, it wouldn't really be fair to call it anything more. Clara had kept her eyes shut when November kissed her, fiercely shut, her lids wrinkling with the effort.
November was too much for most of them, she understood. Too much now, with her ruined face and her severed fingers. No one else was mutilated like that. It had never cost any of them so much. She was hard to look at. I can't even look at you, Clara had said, after they had gotten the blood out of her hair. November thought it better to leave when the sky was still a cutting blue, and Clara lightly snoring. She did not have to see again the disappointed, pitying look on that pleasant face. She ran from the house with her hooded coat drawn up around her face like a leper.
But Clara had been kind, and possessed a strange and tiny tea service of solid blue agate, brought home from Iran by a lover of hers. A lover from before. Clara poured blueberry tea into the palm-sized cups and rubbed vitamin E oil into November's fingers, though that did not seem to be strictly necessary. She made chicken sandwiches and brought oranges from the winter market. After the second day she managed to stop looking at November's mauled hand while they drank and ate and spoke softly as if the apartment might overhear them.
“Clara, do you know who Casimira is?” November had whispered on the third day, over that blueberry tea and frosted gingerbread. She was in a fever, her mind slamming pistons into place, full of Casimira, full of the house. She had hardly remembered to make her list that morning, she was so prickled with high blood and the ghostly soprano in her ear. “Have you heard her name, you know, There?” November disliked how she had begun to capitalize the indistinct “there” in her mind, but the name of that secret city remained a thin knife in her mouth.
Clara tapped her cup with sparkling fingernails and averted her eyes. She hated to talk about it, November had learned. Wordless communion was Clara's way. She preferred unspoken understandings and the meeting of knowing eyes across vast spaces.
“She's the one with the bugs, right?” Clara clicked a tongue piercing against her front teeth nervously.
“Yes.”
“I don't know, I've heard the name. I've never met her, if that's what you mean. Nobody likes her. I think she had something to do with the war everyone's always going on about.”
November raised her eyebrow, rubbing her fingers absently.
“I don't know,” snapped Clara defensively. “It's over, the war is over. There's enough of that shit here. It's supposed to be different there, nicer, prettier.”
“Prettier, anyway.”
“You only say that because of your face, and your hands.” Clara's voice pitched upward, like a vase about to fall. Her gray eyes narrowed. “It's better for the rest of us. Easier. It's the most beautiful place in the world. Nothing but flowers and perfume and jewels. Once I went to a ball where everyone wore masks made of bones—so many skulls—waltzing to violins played by little girls with no faces. The chandelier dripped crystals— everyone rushed to catch them when they fell! It was good luck, you know? My mask was a roc's skull with a hundred moonstones set into it—do you know what a roc is?”
“Sure. A huge white bird that eats elephants.” The children of librarians are rarely faced with an obscurity they cannot name. November smiled a little, proud of herself.
“Well, I didn't know. I had to ask the man in the alligator skull mask, and while he told me about the elephants he undid the ribbons of my dress and let it fall to the floor. He ground his teeth against my beak and called me Corazon and kissed me until I couldn't breathe. I danced naked with all those men in jeweled skulls, and they lifted me up into the air, fed me chocolates, poured blue champagne into my mouth …” Clara was transported by the memory, her hands on her throat, her eyes wide and shining. She looked at November for confirmation; her savaged face brought Clara back to the little table and the tea. “I'm sorry it's so bad for you,” she hissed. “I'm sorry it took your face. I'm sorry she took your fingers. But don't ruin it for me.”
November smiled weakly. Would she go there, someday, and wear a mask of bone? Would Casimira take her, and dance with her under that dripping chandelier? Would she take a thumb as payment for that?
“Do you know what you carry on your skin? What part of the city?” November asked, eager to talk about anything but her face.
“No, of course not. No one does, unless you're lucky enough to get into a neighborhood next to it. What are the chances, though?”
“It's her house, Clara. Casimira's. On your stomach, right there. And it's huge, and alive, and she took me inside—”
“I don't want to hear about this! Casimira is way beyond the circles I move in, and the circles I move in don't want anything to do with her.”
November waved her hand apologetically, the one that was whole and unmarred and easy to look at. She took a deep breath—this was the big question. The only question. She let it fall between them like a little meteorite, smoking on the table, spoiling the tea.
“Is there a way to go there in the daytime, do you think? Like emigration. Permanent.”
Clara grinned, her elfish beauty returning in a rush from hidden, angry furrows. She leaned in, taking up November's meteorite and letting it glow. “There are some theories. You know, no one really knows. It's not like there's a manual. A couple of times, I heard that someone wanted to write one, publish it as fiction—but we would know. We would see right through all those made-up characters and silly little narrative twists. We would know what it was: a primer.”
“What happened?”
Clara giggled—a wild, uncanny sound, not a feminine laugh or a trivial one, but a panicky, animal thing.
“Well, you know, they'd cheerfully burn down any warehouse that carried it. Letters got written, stock changed hands. No one would publish it, not ever, not anything that even mentioned the city. Not me, but… there's this Chinese guy, glasses. Has a sister. It's really kind of funny, if you take a step back. Like freaking West Side Story. She wants to let everyone in; he'd be the first in line to torch any book that smacked of the place.”
November sipped her tea, overwhelmed for a moment by the blueness of its taste. She thought of Xiaohui's brother, endlessly crawling through the Internet and low-circulation magazines to erase a single notice. “I think I know him,” she said.
Clara shrugged. “Probably. There's not too many of us on the West Coast. No one knows where it started, though once, there was this guy, maybe the fourth or fifth one I had, you know, the fourth or fifth one with the tattoo, and he told me this horrible story. We were lying around naked in his house, eating leftover pad thai and drinking bourbon, and he looked at me all funny and said he'd heard there was a woman in Cambodia or something, I think it was Cambodia, anyway it was a really long time ago, way before the war—”
“Which war?”
“Either one. Before, like, white people or anything. Anyway there was this woman. She fell in the Mekong River when she was pregnant, and these mynah birds came flying in from everywhere and fished her out, and they bit her a lot doing it and she almost bled to death after almost drowning. The river mud got all into her, and she had fevers and infections for weeks and weeks. Everyone prayed over her. And then, after ages, she just got up and walked again one day. Talking and making soup and things like that. But she was crazy afterwards, and she went to every village and got their shamans to tattoo her with secret, obscene things, ugly things, and she couldn't stop until she was completely black, all over, and no one could tell anymore what her tattoos looked like, and that was a relief.
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“But she had her baby and named it Chan thou—I think it was Chan thou—and after that no one would feed her or let her sleep in their huts. Because the baby was tattooed all over, too, not as much as her mother, but still pretty bad, even the whites of her eyes. And the baby never learned to talk, even when she grew up, so they thought she was a devil. But she was still beautiful. The men in the village paid her to let them fuck her, and so she got to eat, still. Probably her mother, too. Not a lot of work in a village like that. But it was the daughter they paid the most for. And every time one of them slept with her, they'd wake up with one of her tattoos, and one space on her body would be clean and blank again, just skin. The men had to hide it, but the daughter was so beautiful and so quiet and so good that they couldn't leave her alone. But that kind of stuff is pretty hard to hide.”
Clara looked nervously away from November's blackened face and cleared her throat. “So finally, the wives in the village got together and snuck up on her at the well and beat her until they thought she was dead. They just left her there. And that was it, right? Except that no one buried her, since she was a witch and all. But the body disappeared. After that, the men who had slept with her kept on seeing her in the jungle, without any tattoos, smooth and brown, just standing there, all quiet and creepy, with a tiger sitting on either side of her. She would hiss at them, like a cat, and disappear.
“But then the mother disappeared too. And after a while no one saw the girl or her tigers anymore. But just when everything was normal again, the men started to disappear, one by one, and the women, too. There was no one to take care of the farms or keep the well clean or keep the roofs sewn up. And when the shamans from other villages came to see what had happened to the village, to see why no one came to trade rice or shrimp or ask for wives, there was no one left in the village at all, and they put bones and stuff at all the corners and threw salt everywhere and said it was cursed. And supposedly no one lives there even now, it's just a blank space in the jungle. A big circle.”
“Sounds kind of familiar.”
“Yeah. I admit, I always kind of keep my eyes open for a girl with tigers, but even if it were true, it would've happened so long ago that I suppose that's pretty stupid.”
November shrugged. “But you don't know how to get there any other way? Or how to stay?”
“Nope. Nobody does. Nobody here. I don't think there, either, though. But come on. Just… enjoy it. Isn't it nice to know a secret?”
The tea had gone cold. “But the thing is, Clara, I don't think I can get there that way, anymore. My face and my hand… it's hard enough for you, and you've lived with me for three days.”
Clara flushed with embarrassment. She seemed so young, built up out of snow and ice cream. “November,” she said angrily, “it doesn't work like that. It's not just pretty people. You can't hide what you are, now, and I'm sorry. But it's not the end of anything.”
“I was lucky even to find you.”
“Oh, that?” Clara gestured away a world of concern. “I'll give you a number. You'll be fine.” She closed her hand over November's maimed hand. “It gets easier. Really.”
November had not been able to bear her bees when she got home from Clara's tea and wide hips. She knew it was wrong, neglectful, that the honey might suffer from their distress, but she could not make herself cross her little wheat-tufted field to the hives. Instead she sat in her bare, angular bedroom and pulled a single brown book from the endless rows of brown books. The one with the naked child on the cover, holding up her dress to catch the wind. She opened it to a well-thumbed first page. When her father finally bought the book for her, instead of letting her drip honey and milk all over the library copy, she often used to just read the first page, for comfort, like covering herself in a favorite blanket.
Once upon a time, a girl named September grew very tired indeed of her father's house, where she washed the same pink and yellow teacups and gravy boats every day, slept on the same embroidered pillow, and played with the same small and amiable dog. Because she had been born in May, and because she had a mole on her left cheek, and because her feet were very large and ungainly, the Green Wind took pity on her, and flew to her window one evening just after her birthday. He was dressed in a green dinner jacket, and a green carriage-driver's cloak, and green jodhpurs, and green snowshoes. It is very cold above the clouds, in the shantytowns where the Six Winds live.
“You seem an ill-tempered and irascible enough child,” said the Green Wind. “How would you like to come away with me and ride upon the Leopard of Little Breezes, and be delivered to the great sea which borders Fairyland? I am afraid I cannot go in, as Harsh Airs are not allowed, but I should be happy to deposit you upon the Perverse and Perilous Sea.”
“Oh, yes!” breathed September, who, as it has been said, disapproved deeply of pink and yellow teacups, and also of small and amiable dogs.
November wiped the tears from her eyes with the back of her mangled hand. September had said yes. More than the name, that had been what had struck November, then, in her father's house, swinging her legs under a huge chair. She had said yes, without hesitation, without worry or fear, without a moment's thought for her mother or her father. September had said yes, with all her heart, and so she had gotten to go to Fairyland, where other children had to stay in Omaha and wash dishes.
In the margins of Hortense Weckweet's novel, November had written long ago in a tiny, uncertain hand: Things I Will Try to Say More Often: Why? I love you. I'm sorry. May I have chocolate? Yes. yes. yes.
November picked up her telephone and dialed the number Clara had given her. It rang twice: precisely correct. He would be here in two hours.
It is a long drive from the city, you understand.
Of course, yes.
When he arrived, November was surprised just how little she felt about the whole business. He was nothing to her, a conduit, a door. When she closed her eyes, she could not picture his face, even though his lips moved over her shoulders. He was just a door, a tall, broad door in a long green coat, which made her smile so brightly and with such a keen joy that despite her face and her missing fingers he swept her up into his arms as though they were in a movie. November let herself warm to him. She touched his face, a thin dark beard, sweet green eyes that seemed tired—from the drive, she thinks. We all get plenty of sleep, after all.
But his arms were huge around her, slabs of flesh closing her in, keeping her safe. November had never been with a man so much bigger than she was. He dwarfed her, protected her with his mass, sheltered her in his coat. He tried to take it off, but November insisted, delighted with its rough wool against her heavy breasts. Her legs seemed so small around his waist, a doll's limbs—but she didn't want that, she decided. Didn't want to make room for him inside her. November clambered up onto her knees and tucked her hair behind her, leaning down to take him in her mouth, a thing she rarely did and did not enjoy. But he wore a green coat, and he came to her door to take her to Fairyland.
Yes, she thought. Oh, yes. She wanted to thank him for ignoring her disfigurement, for behaving as though she were utterly whole, and the taste of him was neither sweet nor sour, but simply skin, clean and hard, so big she felt her jaw pop as he groaned and moved the shaft of his cock in and out of her throat. November closed her eyes and pictured herself on the velvet seat of the Green Wind's carriage—or was it Casimira's? While the huge man in her bed swelled towards his private, wordless orgasm, she was a thousand miles away, in the clouds above Omaha, pushing open the coat of the Green Wind and sitting astride him, taking his—surely green—flesh into hers, rocking back and forth while the Wind moaned and groaned and dug his emerald hands into her buttocks.
But there, in Benicia, November closed her hand over the black mark on the strange man's huge bare calf. He thatched fingers through her hair, and his cries echoed in her house like a list of things a man can want: god, god, god.
TENEMENTS LINE THE ALBUMEN RIVER, raised on stilts over
the wash. It is difficult to say in this late age how they were built, for the stilts are little more than spider silk, and they waver in the wind. But the houses are borne up nonetheless, and it is rumored in the wealthier neighborhoods that the poor have discovered a tree-possibly some sort of pygmy birch-which longs to fly. Logically then, the riverside slums are collectively referred to as the Aviary.
For obvious reasons, the manufacture of ladders is a highly prized skill in this part of Palimpsest. It is a holy profession, and each rung is possessed of spiritual significance. The first is the Rung of Honest Labor, and the last is the Rung of the Salt of Heaven. Between, each ladderer may stack his own path. If a rung should break, then bad luck infects the household, and at least one child must be adopted out to avert disaster. These are called Little Rungs, and tend to be swapped from house to house in a rough circle through the Aviary, as the quality of local laddery is never so great that they will not eventually return home.
When they are old enough, the young girls of the Aviary greet each morning on the banks of the Albumen. They braid their extraordinarily long hair together to make a great net, and hand in hand, float upon their backs on the gentle currents. Great golden koi live in the shallows of the river, and the poor beasts are obsessed with the taste of curls. They become tangled in the net, and by noon the girls drag themselves back to shore and gut their catch with small bone knives strapped to their calves. The koi perish in a rapture of braids and young girls’ savage laughter. Their meat tastes of coconuts and birdfat, and the girls have the rest of the long day for their lessons.
Nhean lives in one of the floating houses, an aged man with a paunch and the head of a snarling, split-lipped tiger. He has a livid, purple scar where stripes meet skin. He makes a yellow goulash of the unfortunate koi, and in it is a sweetness coveted by all his neighbors. But he does not like to share, even though he would not have any koi at all if the girls did not make their rounds and share their catch with the elderly who cannot fish for themselves. He eats by himself every afternoon, tearing his meat with fangs savage and rotting.