Palimpsest

  “Of course not. What funny ideas you have! Didn't you hear me? We are all going to the seashore-you might call it a family reunion.”

  Sei does not know how to proceed past him. She wants to hug him, to stroke his ears and his mangled paws and ask how he came to be so wretched. But she feels it would shame him, and she will not do it.

  “My name is not Usagi,” she says, “but I would like to help you.”

  “There is only one way you can help us, Sei.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I have not been authorized to give you that information.” His voice sounds oddly automated, like a telephone operator. “But you can take your mother's place, if you like.”

  The rabbit holds out his hammer to her, and it is surprisingly light, like a huge feather in her hand. She steps into the rice barrel as though she means to crush wine grapes with her toes, and he stands behind her to help her with her stance. She thinks of the men in exclusive Tokyo golf courses with their bored instructors holding them just so. Plenitude winces and holds its breath, sure it will be dislodged and crushed into rice-candy Sei lifts the mallet and he corrects her grip quickly before she brings it down with a shout of joy and glops of sticky rice fly against the sides of the barrel.

  The rabbit in the moon kisses her on the temple, sweetly, tenderly, like an uncle proud of his blood.

  The Third Rail watches them as Sei gleefully sets about smashing sugared rice to paste. She says nothing, but her eyes are full of red and viscous tears.

  ONE

  EIGHT THOUSAND DOORS

  Sei held Sato Kenji's book before her like a lantern meant to illuminate her path. She consulted it as frequently as an address book, and followed it, believing in his accuracy.

  The book led her to this: Sei stood on the main platform with Sato Kenji's book clutched to her chest. She wore black, her best effort at a suit, her silver-black shirt of that first journey south with Kenji at her back rendered respectable by a business jacket. She thrust her face into the wind whipping down the empty tracks.

  I have been told of a secret society in Tokyo that requires its members to take shifts monitoring certain pla forms. It is easy to believe that the men in black suits who stand beside you or me waiting for the train are held to the same standards and schedules as we are, that they have appointments to keep, meetings to attend, supervisors who do not tolerate truancy. But it would seem that some of them are not, but instead are sentinels of a sort, and the blank looks on their faces are careful masks of religious significance.

  The society believes that a train pla form is a nexus, a crossroads that connects many cities that do not otherwise touch border to border. They believe that in the beginning of the world, the first gods stood not upon a bridge of light, but on a high train platform buffeted by winds, and from this place they thrust their jeweled spear into the ocean and created all land and mountain and shore.

  Thus, they reason, this primal pla form must exist yet in some part of Japan, though surely fallen from its greatest height in the heavens, and they have many warring theories about which it is. So, upon almost every platform on the Japanese Isles members of this society stand watch, ready to alert their brothers of the arrival of the Train of Eight Thousand Doors, whose engine was fashioned from that very jeweled spear which dwelt for millennia beneath the sea until it was unearthed by devoted monks, at least according to the majority faction. The minority argument goes that Japan Railways desired it greatly and funded recovery operations.

  In any event, the Train of Eight Thousand Doors is believed to traverse the known world, its doors opening onto London one moment, Ulan Bator the next, Tokyo, Montreal, São Paulo, and so forth. One must only attend to the station callings within the great train and one may enter or exit at any platform in the world. To be possessed by this train is the desire of every black-suited initiate, and he would give his soul for such a ticket.

  I have myself stood watch with them, and they are pleasant enough gentlemen, if single-minded. I am sorry to report that only the neighborhood local and the express to Asakusa arrived during my vigil.

  Both were punctual.

  Kenji would not tell her a thing was possible if it was not. If such a train existed, it would take her there. Sei was sure of it. Sure of him. There had to be another way in.

  I'm so tired, she thought.

  I'm so tired. Her mother had said this, more often than anything else. Why am I always so tired?

  Because you have all those tigers to fight, Mama, she had said. And you have to swim all the way to the bottom of a lake to read my book for me.

  What a clever girl I have! Usagi slept on the floor like a cat, her hair in her face, her nails chewed ragged. And Sei had waited, she always waited, as patiently and quietly as she could, for her mother to wake up and smile at her and make tea for them, with sweets.

  But Sei was so tired now. As tired, perhaps, as her mother had always been. Her legs were sore and her lips were swollen with kisses and she was sick to screaming of people floundering on top of her as though she were a ship that would take them to safety. But she could not stop—how could she stop? How could she go home, where there was no place called the Floor of Heaven, no easy way, no quick path? The train needed her. She had to keep up. Had to go faster. Had to have more, always more, had to run twice as fast to stay in place. She felt as though the train crouched by her even in the daytime, hiding behind clouds and temples, waiting as patiently and quietly as it could for her to wake up and smile at it and make tea, with sweets.

  Sei did not want to be an Usagi-mother to the train. She did not want to disappoint it. She shuddered on the platform.

  There was a man with a black suit and an attaché case standing a polite distance from her, stone-still, his profile cutting the breezes of the Shinkansen platform—why were they all so high up? The nature of a train is to fly underground, beneath cities. It is a clay bird, its natural element is earth. But the Shinkansen loves the air, confuses the sparrows, and it is so white the wind must feel filthy to touch it. The high platforms were another world, a glimpse into a cosmos without fundament.

  The man glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. He held his hand flat out at his hip, rigid, palm down. She was meant to understand this, clearly, but she didn't.

  Usagi had whispered in her ear once, twice, that men in plain suits were servants of the Spider-Kami, who had not eight legs but eight thousand, and they did not sleep in beds, but schemed in empty storefronts where they slept close together on a rack, hangers protruding from their collars. You must never approach one, she said tremulously, or he will take you away from your mother and she will be at the mercy of everything in the world. And that Sei particularly believed, for her father worked in the city and often did not come home at night, and it was easy to think of him hung up in a store like a blazer for sale.

  Sei could not quite help how frightened she was to speak to this stranger, who was not a safe stranger in the Floor of Heaven with a long glass of vodka in his hand and a friendly face and a black mark like a map at the bottom of it all.

  “Is it coming?” she whispered. “Is there a better way? Will it really take me to any city, any city at all?”

  The man in the suit looked puzzled and not a little alarmed. The shame of it was like a slap to Sei's face. He was just a man. Kenji did make some things up, and more fool her for believing so much of it. Just because they were true there did not mean they were true here. But the man's jaw unclenched slowly and he spoke as though unused to it:

  “My calculations suggest today the 4:10 southbound. But I have been wrong before.”

  Sei's belly lifted in relief and her fingers fluttered to the neckline of her shirt. She pulled it toward her shoulders like theater curtains, and the mark smirked there, between her breasts, as though she had spilled the water of death as she drank it. This revelation of skin had become as easy as speaking to her—easier, it communicated more with less. She smiled be-atifically eager, sure.
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  The man stared dumbly. His mouth opened and closed; his throat bobbed ridiculously up and down. He covered his mouth with one hand, aghast.

  “What happened to you?” he gaped. “Do you need a doctor?”

  Sei blinked, and then she laughed. What a long time since anyone had looked at her chest and not immediately taken her into their arms. What a long time since speech was necessary or even pleasant. Hard to imagine that her codes were not valid in any dark-filthy corner of the world. Enough secrets for all of us to have our own, she thought. She rearranged her clothes to hide it again, and waited silently, a vigil, a sentinel, for the 4:10 southbound. The man would not come near her, neither to breathe her air nor risk physical contact. She watched his chest sag as the 4:10 arrived and expelled a noisy crowd of children at his feet. It accepted him apologetically in return, with sheepish doors, bound for Nara and nothing more.

  Back, always back. To the brass plaque and the dance floor and the long, thin glasses. The Floor of Heaven, which was dark and empty. This is my tatami room now, Sei thought in the slow blue evening, when the persimmon trees seemed to bear only black fists. I close myself up; I tell stories to open faces and the stories make no sense to anyone but me. But they are always believed, I am always believed. Oh, Usagi, I pound the rice after all. After all.

  She pressed her sternum with two of her fingers, though it was not her mark she sought. The doors were open to her, she no longer needed to show her pass. In her suit she would not draw so many as usual, but it wouldn't matter, not really. She would find someone. Two, three. She had to have more than the rest, to stay on the train, to speed through so much city so fast, so very fast. She would drag their hands to her if she had to. She would bear the old and foreign and maimed; she had done it before.

  Yumiko was so often late now, wandering into the club past midnight, drinking mechanically, the colors of her cocktails a shifting spectrum, red to ultraviolet. Sei thought she might be able to manage her first lover before Yumiko even arrived, in her uniform, looking disappointed, looking desperate. A mirror in a blue skirt, and Sei could not bear very much of mirrors anymore.

  But Yumiko was not late, not that night. She was drinking already, throwing glasses of sake into her mouth. She teetered on her heels and embraced Sei with relief, the two of them squeezing the other's thin ribs together. They couldn't let go, either of them.

  “What do you say?” Yumiko whispered in her ear, her breath like rotted plums. “Nothing tonight. No one. Just you and I. I'll take you to meet my parents. We'll eat noodles. It'll be just like we're normal.”

  “I'm pregnant,” Sei answered.

  THE WEALTHY OF PALIMPSEST send their children to finishing school at St. Folquet s, whose brick and marble and long, sloping peasants roof of wild grass and violet sprigs nestles between two defunct fountains. Groping bladderwrack and redolent poppies have reclaimed the hydras nine dry mouths and the bronze bulls regal horns. Feral cats sleep in the coils of the serpent and in the twisted, gaping mouth of the bull. The serpent and the bull are beloved of the students, and many exercises have been composed as to their sym-bology though the faculty know that it is a happy accident of urban planning that the school was established there and not between, say, a golden lion and a silver stag. It keeps the little ones busy.

  The prosperous keep this great secret: their children require this charming institution, require it as surely as water and milk. They would prefer it were not so; they have prayed at the Right-Hand Church in earnest, fur-wrapped cabals for surcease of it. They watch the children of immigrants and the poor grow sharp-featured and brash-voiced, they watch the wastrels play in the river and their hearts fill up with bile. St. Folquets is a blessing beyond blessing, a curative of highest worth, but the process is long and severe, as are all things in Palimpsest, and they miss their small ones so.

  Where does it begin? What may one hoard and yet avoid this congenital plague? How many silos of barley, how many vineyards, how many horses with buttery flanks, how many houses with crisp Weckweet finials may they acquire before this gentle disaster settles down upon the wombs and seed of those who love sealskin and rubies? Accountants from Zarzaparrilla Street have been fed with chocolate and songbirds’ livers, tobacco like corn silk rolled into linen for their pleasure, yet none have been able to locate the tipping point, at what decimal doom descends.

  If we have passes, we may be able to look within the ponderous pearwood doors and glimpse classes in session. Let us say we have, let us treat ourselves to the costly jewel of a hall pass. Nightfall courses have just begun, the children are all in their rows, hands folded slackly before them. The teacher has not yet arrived, indolent wretch! Yet why do they not move, you ask? Why do they not pelt each other with erasers or crack jokes about the stock market, as the spoiled offspring of the affluent are wont to do?

  Because they are not finished.

  The children of Palimpsests aristocracy are born with a terrifying blankness: they are receptive, they respond to stimuli, they learn to walk and they learn to sit very quietly, but they do not speak, they do not run and play and they have no faces, no hair, no genitalia at all. For this reason, in whispers they are called Brauria, a word from a language the fashionable cannot be concerned with remembering, signifying “little bears.” For bears in epochs long dead were said to be born formless, shapeless, and licked into bear-form by their mothers.

  The Brauria are small dolls, posable, pliant, but they are unfinished, unreal, and the day a lady of rank gives birth, wrapped up in her lionskin with purple rings on her fingers, she prays she has not earned enough to earn this. She listens for the cry of her child; it does not come. And she knows it is St. Folquet s for this one, and all its brothers and sisters to come. When she rises from childbed, she will begin to give away her dresses one by one, her houses, her lovers, hoping to descend once more into grace.

  But, lady weep not! At St. Folquets is hope, at least! When you leave your jewel-studded basket at their doorstep, it is not an orphan, not exactly an orphan, you abandon to their care.

  For the children do hear, they do receive, and their lessons are easy for all that. For fifteen years the students are calm and even-tempered, motionless. They must be washed and fed intravenously, and this is delicate work to be sure, but they grow, as all children do. And they are taught as though they could recite, do sums, and debate with vigor the concerns of the day. Their clumsy feet are taught to dance, their soft spines shaped to posture with dread machines.

  And when they are fifteen, they are finished.

  It is a ritual of intense secrecy-at least, the wealthy believe it to be a secret. In a dark room the congenial little bear is seated, and another child enters, a true child, no older than her subject, with sparkling eyes and wicked jokes on her lips. Great goblets of water are provided for her comfort. Slowly with infinite care and diligence, the child begins to lick the skin of the Braurion, just as a mother bear might before the bears decided collectively upon the inefficiency of this method. Every inch of skin is subject to her tongue, and she is merciless, though her own mouth becomes sore and tired, and though the process takes five days and nights-she has immeasurable endurance; she is strong.

  And beneath the blankness a grown person emerges, with an aquiline nose and a mole on the left cheek, with red hair or skin like coffee, with graceful hands or full breasts, with excellent posture and a fine, clear brow. On the fifth day the Braurion is no more, and in his or her place sits an exceptional soul, tempered by so many years of forced silence, of reliance on the utterly rarified spirits at St. Folquets, a soul who knows his Latin and her calculus, his rolls of kings and her ecclesiastical history. They are proficient in the composition of poetry and have extraordinary memories, trapped as they have been within themselves. They are soft-spoken, sweet-natured, and have a remarkable felicity for dancing.

  They are not returned to their families-how could they be returned? No one has a name or a face until he or she is finished, and t
o determine who belongs to whom is a tedious enterprise the responsibility of which no man is willing to take. From St. Folquets the little bears, now bears entire, go into the city and make their fortunes. It is extremely common for them to marry the child who licked them into being. The bond does not easily break.

  But where do they come from, the boys and girls who minister to the Brauria for five days and nights? How are they convinced to do such a thing?

  They are brought from the Aviary, of course. From the poorest of places, the Folquetters come to find those peculiar, clever, outcast children who are born into every part of Palimpsest, whether stews of goose or cat bubble over the hearth. The faculty bring in harvests of children, one for each of their poor charges, and until the young paupers are fifteen, they sleep well in their own soft barracks, the walls trimmed with garlands of wintergreen. They are taught no less than the Latin and calculus and ecclesiastical history of the Braurion, and more, for they are keen and quick and boisterous, and the faculty adores them after the maddening silence of the rest of the student body. They compose the essays on the nature of the serpent and the bull, and debate it merrily. They are doted upon, and fed sweetmeats on beds of beet and coconut. And they do not return to their families, either.

  Years hence, the ladies with their lionskins may come across a lovely young woman with a fiercely inquisitive young man on her arm, and she may notice that they never cease to touch one another in small ways, even as she chooses oranges and he squeezes quinces in the market. And she may ask Is this my child? But it is not for her to know, and in such a manner no one family rules Palimpsest for long.

  Save Casimira, always save her.

  There is a cat asleep in the bull's bronze mouth. Its paws flop over the hoop of the ring thrust through his flaring nostrils. November scratches its ears; it yawns. Her fingers still tingle with the bees’ exhalations; she wonders if she will ever get used to the feeling of it, of being possessed of a million arms which may reach out to anything. She pauses and listens within herself-but the bees are still in drunken celebration of her coronation and have nothing useful for her. A girl is dancing Cossack-style for coins on Zarzaparrilla Street. An old man has died of drink in the doorway of a bookshop on Vituperation and 9th. Nothing she cares for or can use. Instead, November considers the names: Oleg Sadakov. Amaya Sei. Ludovico Conti. She whispers them, like little rosaries. She almost thinks she knows what to do.