Palimpsest

  But he liked it there. He couldn't help it. Ruins were calming to the scholarly soul. He liked to think about the Vestals in their great round house, which always looked to him like a salt mill, tending their little fires and writing diaries forever lost, diaries of quiet lives spooled out into virginity and the contemplation of a goddess of whom no stories were told at all.

  Ludovico liked to think that, in the long years of their seclusion, the sisters wrote amongst themselves a secret Encyclopedia of the Acts of Vesta, stories of the hearth in which Vesta was a great and beautiful thing, her long hair dropping embers wherever she walked, striving in knightly fashion—of course she would have a furnace-grate for her shield, and a curling black poker as her lance—against demons of the everyday, against unfaithful wives and the winds of winter, against cruel merchants out to cheat her and against those many-headed ogres who seek the death of children: sleeping sickness, starvation, military service. Against the death of love.

  Ludo liked to contemplate how their virginity was meant to keep the city whole, and as he sat in the shade of Byronic cypresses, he suspected it wholly true: that the inviolability of one soul can keep the whole of hell outside the gates of the city she chooses as her own.

  Ludo thought, that day as they sat together on a low rise of crumbled stones far from the center of things, that Nerezza should have been a Vestal. In her utter impenetrability, she could have held the whole of Rome within her, red brick and tufa and aqueducts and catacombs, within the borders of her womb, and they would have been safe within her, safe forever, for no Goth or Gaul could broach that barrier.

  “They didn't sting me, at all, not even once.” Ludo sighed.

  “I'm not surprised. Insect life is a funny thing there.” Nerezza squinted herself in the broad, brazen sun, the molten light which poured like splashing wine over every shattered plinth and capital.

  Ludo cleared his throat a little. “The Etymologiae says that bees are virtuous because they are much loved by all, and sought after with great longing by everyone, because their honey tastes as sweet in the mouths of paupers as in the mouths of kings. Do you think that's logical? That a creature can be virtuous just because it is loved and sought after, that the act of being loved, of being sought after, even if it is passive, is equal to an act of martyrdom or great piety, which is active? That it can confer grace to a whole species?”

  “I think any encyclopedia is bound to have a great number of lies and fancied-up stories in it, Ludo.”

  Ludo shut his eyes against the light; he saw the pinkness of his eyelids swim before him. “But what does it mean, then, if a man is sought out by those virtuous bees? Sought out with great longing by creatures whose very souls are defined by the fact that they are greatly longed for?”

  “I don't know.”

  “I wanted them to sting me. It was like the church, with all the silent people and their awful limbs, animal limbs. I wanted to be covered by other souls until mine was pressed to death, like a witch. Why do I feel that so much, when I'm there? Why do I want to be drowned in other people? I never want that here.”

  “It's different, for everyone. I can't answer any of these things, Ludo. I'm glad you saw Lucia, that it… gave her up to you. Because you can't really think that by chance you stumbled onto her Sunday tea. But I have no grace, nothing to add to any encyclopedia of that place, I am not sought after and I have no virtue.”

  He wanted to say: I seek you. He wanted to say: You are not my wife, but you are my Virgil, leading me through circle after circle of Purgatory How can a man not love the body that brings him so close to God ? But in the face of her inviolable mood, her frowns and her stares, he could not make himself drag her into Dante.

  “Oh, Ludo,” she whispered, “if you want to be happy, just let it be.”

  “Before the teahouse, I would have clawed through the earth for fifty years to find Lucia on the other side, an old woman, bald and tired, leaning on a cane. Maybe she'll still be there, with arthritis and absolution. But even if I never see her again, I have to go, I have to keep going to Palimpsest. I have to try. It is a world without an Etymologiae. Without an etymology, without origin. I'll go, and I'll lay a map of that place over my heart instead of Rome. I'll rent a small shop, an accountant's office, and write columns upon columns, everything that people know in that city. I will write, do you understand? I'll bind books, too, I'll bind them, as I have always done, and there will be pages like raw cream and the finest glues, the strangest glues, made from every kind of rendered beast, but I will bind only what I have written. Perhaps in fifty years, an old woman, bald and tired, leaning on a cane, will pass my shop and ask herself what strange old man is looking for his glasses in the display window, and we shall have a great deal to talk about. We will have coffees. I will save a chair for her. I am capable of that. Of waiting, of faithfulness. I am capable of service, of holding a city in my inviolable belly.”

  Nerezza watched him with murky eyes, shaded by pity and loathing and envy. Ludo did not understand it, but the nature of eel-kind is beyond the comprehension of land-dwellers, and he let her invisible body, black as rope, circle him, circle him, crackling, sere.

  “How can you talk about it as if you've already managed everything, merrily planning your little life in Palimpsest? Such a selfish little boy you are, Ludovico! You've borrowed a toy, and you think it's yours forever. If Lucia had shoved you off her that night you would never have known about any of this.” Hard, friable tears moved in her eyes. “Do you understand anything? Radoslav is dead. If we have it right, if what Agostino told you is true, if we've guessed the way, I can never go. Not ever. And I won't watch you gaily traipse into my country because your wife thought it was easier to just lie there and let you fuck her.”

  Ludovico chewed his lip. Mine, mine and not yours. For as often as he heard it, there might as well have been a sign reading thus hanging over the city.

  “I suppose a knight cannot always expect the monsters he meets in the wood to kindly point the way.”

  Nerezza narrowed her dark eyes. “Are you the only human in the world then? And all of the rest of us monsters?”

  She stood and strode away over the broad ruin, leaving him to chase after her, to seek her, to follow her meandering path home.

  But Nerezza lost him in the close streets, and when Ludo finally came to her door she was not there. Clever bee, sought out after all. Agostino answered the bell, and sat with him on the couch while he warmed his hands around a mug of coffee— Ludovico found he could not bear the thought of tea, after the wonderful cups and discs of ice. Tea on this side of the world was too quotidian, too bitter, too thin.

  “They've gone for the night, Anoud and Nerezza,” Agostino said, rubbing the bridge of his enormous nose. “You must have upset her.”

  “Probably.” Ludo sighed. “I seem to do that rather more often than I mean to.”

  The two men sat on Nerezza's long, hard chaise. “How did you find her?” Ludo finally said, trying to keep his voice from sounding too eager. He had no jealousy in him anymore with regards to his eel-girl, anyway. Not too much. Impossible to pull such a feeling up and into the sunlit world. She was un-possessable, a Vestal with a terrible gaze.

  “She found me.” Agostino shrugged. “I don't know how she managed it. I was living in Madrid, my company's satellite offices are there. I was in sales.” He laughed a little, rueful, amazed, at who he used to be. “We made pencils. I used to smell of nothing but graphite. One morning my phone rang and a woman told me very matter-of-factly that I would need to come to Rome immediately, that she knew me and needed me and loved me, and even her voice was like someone reaching through the line to kiss me and strangle me at the same time. I couldn't even say no to her voice. She's … like that. You can't say no. And, you know, we had a lot to talk about. She introduced me to Lucia,” Agostino hurried forward nervously, “and we found Anoud together, brought her up from Rabat. She was working in an olive oil plant, can you imagine that? S
he was always shiny, like she couldn't get it out of her skin, even after we kissed her and kissed her. And Radoslav…” But there he trailed off, his voice grew husked and tight, and he passed a broad hand over his eyes.

  Ludo put his arm around the young man, and a single wracked sob escaped his skinny chest as he let himself be held. After a long while Agostino turned his face to Ludo's neck and kissed him gently, hesitantly and again on his jaw his ear. Ludovico stiffened and sucked in his breath. It was not that he had not expected something like this—surely his wife had not been prudish, and had as many women as men. But he was not Lucia, not a great serpent-lion with long and indiscriminate teeth. He did not have a different body for everyone. He did not look at men the way he looked at women. Ludo tried. He tried to decide where Agostino might fit in the menagerie of his recent lovers—the Bull, he thought, testing it against the heft of his heart. Evangelist, earth-tiller, labyrinth-tenant. Could he take such a thing within himself? If his body refused such an inversion of the usual order, would Agostino be hurt, angry? How could women do this, how could Lucia have done this? How could they bear so many other bodies within their own?

  But it was not, in the end, necessary. Agostino seized his face and the kiss between them was rough and ungainly, slouching, mismatched, but Ludo found his hands knotted in his short hair, found his tongue sweet, found himself hard, after all, wrestling the bull into service. They struggled with clothes in the manner of new lovers, but Ludo was afraid, still afraid, to touch the rigid, unavoidable penis that rose to meet his own, could not be so abandoned. But when Agostino lay beneath him, tears shed for the vanished Radoslav dried on his cheeks, Ludo could see the mark, flared black and deep on his hip, and he was overcome, as surely as he had ever been overcome by the twisting bodies of the three wild creatures before this one. He hooked his fingers into Agostino's scrawny hips and shut his eyes again, against the light, against the world outside. He let his soft stomach cover Agostino's hardness, and the young man moaned, cried out as Lucia had refused to, as Narezza had refused, under him. He could think of nothing but spit to ease the passage, and when Agostino winced, his heart gave way for him, hardly more than a kid, hardly ready for any of this. And it was not so alien a thing as he had imagined to move within the tall, ungraceful boy whose cries were, in the end, so very like the lowing of a great bull.

  PART IV:

  CHARON

  IT BECAME APPARENT TO ENT HUSIASTS of locomotive travel that there was at least one unscheduled train on the tracks of Palimpsest. It did not stop at any of the stations, for one thing. Astrologers and geologists were consulted; they are much the same folk in this part of the world. The astrologer gazes upward and scries out shapes in the sky, and to do this he builds great towers so as to be closest to the element of his choice. The geologist is an astrologer who once, just once, happened to look down. From such great heights she glimpses the enormous shapes stamped on the earth, the long polygons made by the borders of farms and rivers and mill towns, littoral masses and city walls, a reflection of the celestial mosaic. In these loamy constellations Palimpsest is but a decorative flourish; they are so vast and complex that in her lifetime the geologist may chart but the tiniest part of the conterration which contains her tower. It is a long and lonely life to which few are called.

  The great transportation system is of some mild interest to the geologist, as it comprises a small and only half-organic Constellation of Utility. However, a famed scholar of the fundament consented to turn her moss-clogged oikeioscopes onto the commune of the trains and discover the origins of this stubborn and unyielding train that escapes all their attempts to tame it.

  The calculations involved for even such a small terrestrial chart are immense, and it took a full year for the geologist to return her findings, and another years delay in presenting them, for the oceanic currents were trined with the annual snowfall, and this surely portended disaster in the revealing of great works. But at last she drew her colleagues and interested parties to the grand convocation chamber of Colophon Station, and announced that the 3:17 northbound Decretal had had a somewhat unhappy affair with the 12 22 eastbound Foolscap. The mysterious train was their child, and like any child whose parents no longer love each other, it runs wild and does what it likes and there is little at all to be done about it.

  Sei does not know quite what to do with herself. She feels as though she has been struck in the head with a branch wrapped up in flowers. She doesn't think she ought to smile, as it is certainly not at all funny, but she cannot stop herself, and her head feels thick and drunk as she shakes it.

  There is a rabbit on the train. He has a silver mallet, and is standing in a very large barrel of rice looking quite determined.

  He is not really a rabbit. But he is not a man in a suit either. He is more like a very sad-looking man who has had bits of rabbit attached to him by someone who was not particularly good at it. Wild black hair tumbles over long, limp ears, fuzzy and gray, the skin within white as crushed pearl. He has long, droopy whiskers like hoary old mans hair, and she supposes he has a tail, though if she went looking for it she would be sure to burst into uncontainable giggles, and he seems like a very serious rabbit.

  He wears a black farmer's yukata with white chrysanthemums on it and does not look well in it for it is extremely threadbare and dirty.

  Plenitude yawns on her shoulder and stretches its strokes; the Third Rail smiles quietly to herself and watches Sei, waiting for her approval or disapproval. That is becoming a great trial, if Sei can be honest. She cannot love everything wholly with all of herself, and it is such a great shame to all of them when she wrinkles her nose or coughs or looks bored. They wait to drink her reactions like beer, and it makes her tense.

  But there is a rabbit on the train. And the long seats of this new carriage are quite pale, covered in crusted rock like barnacles. From a high ceiling, so high it has its own clouds-though at least she can see the ceiling this time, its silver bands hard and true behind the mist-hang silver lanterns. Terns circle them mournfully crying out their dirges. The handholds are a green, rough rope of reeds. The rabbit does not look at her, but with a weary sigh heaves his mallet over his head and brings it down hard on the wet rice. Glops of the stuff splatter out onto Sei s shoes.

  “I know you!” Sei cries. “Usagi!” And not her mother, the real rabbit, the rabbit on the moon, speeding through the world in a locomotive that contains all the lunar landscape. Sei wants to laugh again.

  “Everyone knows me. That is why I am going to visit relatives by the sea, who will make me very expensive tea and not bother me with silly questions about where I get rice on the moon, and why I do not take up a respectable profession such as television repair, and who would consent to eat sweets prepared by a rabbit, even if he does it with great care and by hand. So to speak.”

  He holds up his right arm; it ends in a withered, oversized gray paw, a bumpy violet-blue scar ripping through his skin where the fur fades into a mans arm.

  “My mother was named Usagi,” Sei says shyly “When I was little I thought she had a secret life, making mochi when I wasn't looking and refusing to share them with me.”

  “Oh, she did,” the rabbit says casually. He seems so young, too young to have been at the rabbit business for long. “All people named Usagi are members of my guild. The broom closet is a common hiding place for the hammers. I suspect if you were to return to your house in Tokyo and look in the storage bins beneath your kitchen floor, you would find several black-and-gold boxes full of sweets she did not deliver on schedule. Your mother was not a good worker, I'm sorry to say. Unreliable.”

  “I'm sorry. She was… unhappy. It was part of her, you could not separate her from it. She was sad the way a horse is strong or a bird flies. I do not think mochi would have helped.”

  “Why should they? They do not help me, but everyone must have a vocation.”

  Sei bites her lip and looks down at her toes, a strangely childlike pose, but she cannot
help it, with a rabbit-man so near. “Have you … seen my mother? Since she stopped working for you.”

  The rabbit stares at her incredulously and looks to the Third Rail for help. The red-faced woman shrugs, and Plenitude shakes its strokes apologetically “Wrong train, girl,” he finally says, laughing. “I think it's my relations you want to talk to.”

  “And who are they?”

  “Mine is not the only moon, child. My cousin the mole lives on Triton, and Phobos has a fine fox. Ganymede has a whole family of turtles. The Horse in the Sun is chewing her oats a few cars down. She is not talkative, though. If you brush her, you may feel that you hear a kind of low chant in the basement of your heart, like nuns singing through a cloud of incense. There are other horses in the stable car, too. We have such a large family. The blue Arabians of Vega, the two-headed Appaloosas of Sirius, the monochrome Bay of Arcturus. But you'll want the snow monkeys on Charon, who while away their long orbits in hot springs and ice huts. No candies for them, joyless lot. They hammer out souls. Perhaps she is there, pounded flat into a paste.”

  Sei grimaces, but tries to turn it into a smile, and hands the rabbit a shovelful of sugar to cover her embarrassment.

  “And this train is going there?”