Ludo slowly extends his tongue. Rain spatters it; he lets it run.
“Take it,” he says. “Take my voice as the toll of this lock. Take my tongue, and I will be silent, like you, like all of them. I will be a monument-better than all the rest because I will bear witness to your suffering. Folk will look at me, setting my watch, drinking my coffee, and they will say: Ululiro snatched victory from her enemies after all. She got to choose. She chose the first one, and marked him as her own. Everyone will know that you had a battle left in you, and bought one last joy in the name of the silent.” Ludo was so close to Ululiro he could smell her fishy, acrid breath, seething between sharp, yellowed teeth. “Mark the frame with my blood, General. I will be silent forever in your name. An immigrant. A veteran. And it will be over.”
Ululiro s throat worked beneath a ghastly scar that marked the join of her shark skin with her human body. She burned to speak and could not. Nerezza reached for her elbow, but the general slapped her away, seizing Ludovico s arm and stalking to the door frame, tossing her head from side to side as though swimming through deep ocean. Freckles and No-Ear backed away from her, pulling Oleg with them, spines suddenly straight with fear and love.
Ululiro snatched Freckless knife and caught Ludo by the throat. She raised the blade, and with a soundless howl slashed through his tongue.
FOUR
THE KINGDOM OF HEAVEN
Nerezza sat between November and Ludovico. Her face was a mess of flushed skin and tears. Ludovico shook to see her so, and looked to November to steady himself.
“I don't want to,” Nerezza hissed in fluid, cultured English.
“You don't have to,” November said softly “But I am asking you.”
“Why should this be easy for you? Why? It is not easy for me,” she spat at Ludovico in Italian.
Agostino had taken Anoud to his house while the three of them talked—he had at first been delighted with November, and they had played the visitor's game of half-signed, half-remembered phrase-book slivers of the other's language. But Ludo had found himself suddenly jealous, and he did not know who he envied more. None of them were playful and dear with him. When Nerezza had finally returned home, however, and seen the shape of things, she had crumpled to the ground as though the steel strings which had held her all this time were slashed through and dashed against her walls.
“Get her out,” Nerezza had begged, over and over. “Get her out. If we cannot have our Radya, he cannot have her. He can't.”
November had gone to her and taken her in her arms. Ludo could see she was hardly more used to this than Nerezza herself, but she held Nerezza's dark head under her chin and rocked her, and sang softly to her, and Nerezza bore it. She bore it and did not protest, but her jaw clenched, she ground her teeth, nonetheless. They spoke to each other in English, and he did not understand them. But he had asked his eel-girl to translate, and the tears had come again.
Nerezza looked at the newcomer with black and glittering eyes. In the bald apartment light, November was even less impressive-looking than she had been at the baths, her scars deep, her mutilated hand undisguisable. And the mark on her face—what she must have borne, unable to hide herself as they could! She was a ruin of a woman, and as thus he found her calming, like the white-stoned forum.
Slowly, Nerezza began to nod, and he suspected it was because to look at November was to know it had not been easy for her, not in the smallest part, and Nerezza saw her own grief writ in blood and ink and scar tissue on the American woman's body. He saw November take a deep breath, and her hands trembled. Whatever she was saying was intricate, painful for her, and she was afraid of it. He longed to reach out and touch her face—would she, lithe ibex, leap from him to land on her horns and bounce up, bounding off into meadows he could not touch? Nerezza turned to him, not meeting his gaze.
“This is what she says, Ludo. If you can make sense of it, good luck to you. ‘These are the folk who may pass into the kingdom of heaven: the grief-stricken, lovers, scholars of a certain obsessive disposition. Brute beasts. Women who have become as men and men who have become as women. Writers of books with long titles. Only those knights who have failed to touch the Grail. Industrious women. You, and I, and a boy named Oleg, and a girl with blue hair.’”
Nerezza was crying again. She turned to November, speaking rapidly, angrily, and all Ludovico could understand was the name Radoslav, repeated and repeated, desperately added to the list. But Ludo hardly heard Nerezza. He stared at November, her wet and hopeful eyes. She thought he would not understand. That he would think her words irrelevant. But he did know, he understood, for he had loved St. Isidore all his life, an encyclopaedist, a man whose intellect was confined in long, precise, radiant columns of text, illuminated lists which placed together circumscribed the world.
Nerezza looked back and forth between them, helpless and livid.
“Another one is coming,” she hissed in Italian. “I heard her talking on the telephone. I hate you both, and I curse you, as well as I am able to curse anything. You blithely stumble into this, and in a few weeks you've done what I can never, never do. Do you understand? Radoslav is dead. None of us can ever go. Not ever. And it took us years to find each other. It took everything from us. Husbands, wives, jobs, children. You're like a rich man's son, who has earned nothing in his life and is given everything. I let you live in my house and you cover it with your shit. I hate you. I hate you.” Her voice was even and furious, it did not hitch or break, and he could see the sparks of her eel-flesh grimly blue at her ears.
“Nerezza,” November said, “Nerezza. Nerezza.”
November kissed her reddened forehead. “I'm sorry,” she whispered, over and over. “I'm sorry.” And she kissed her mouth, her jaw, her ear, her neck, trying to kiss everything hard of her away, and if he had not felt the bees in her, if he had not heard them sing, he would not have understood how November, broken and battered as she was, could have the courage to comfort the wildness, the bestial scream of Nerezza.
But Nerezza would not let herself be kissed. She was stiff and cold, her body held tight and inviolable. She clamped her eyes onto Ludo, full of bile and bitter loathing.
Then Nerezza's eyes shone, and suddenly she smiled. She put her arms around November, never taking her gaze from Ludo, and let herself warm, alight, feign ardor. Ludo shuddered. What had she hatched in that lightless heart?
Nerezza clung to November as the bee-stung woman pushed the top of her own green dress down to her waist and held her breasts out like St. Agatha, an offering. November opened her eyes and caught his gaze over Nerezza's shuddering body. Ludo could not tell if the shuddering was false or true. She was whispering in Italian, too ashamed to be understood, and Ludo knew the beekeeper could not hear it, and vowed to explain it to her, when he saw her on the other side of night.
“Am I, November?” Nerezza was saying. “Am I among the folk who are permitted to enter the kingdom of heaven? Tell me. Tell me.”
He left them then. He did not want to watch. He did not want to see.
But he knew November now, he knew her, and she was his Isidore, his Isidora, and he would tell her everything, everything he knew, everything engraved in his marrow, when all this was done and they could speak, and drink together wine like blood, through the starry night and into day.
PART V:
THE GREEN WIND
THERE IS A PLACE on the far western edge of Palimpsest where the tracks have fallen into disrepair. It is wild and sunny, furry with green wheat and snarling raspberry vines. An olive tree, some speculate, rooted out the rails, while others are certain that the nearby sheep are the culprits, that they gnawed at the tracks until they broke, and surely their owner ought to be held responsible for damages. No one has volunteered to take up the wig and adjudicate the issue, and so lonely moth-bothered Oathusk Station has slid slowly and genteelly into disuse. It was not often frequented even in the first heady days of the transit system, and so few consider it a great los
s, save, perhaps, for enthusiasts of the particular pastoral style of architecture employed in the station house, whose rosebud windows were once a mild source of pride.
The trains did not discover the breach in the tracks for some time. They were distracted, the season was not right for westbound travel, the Missal Line had gone into heat early for three years run-ning-the life of a train is ever tossed by strange and chthonic tides. But as of late some few of them have begun to nose around Oathusk, sniffing the wind for news of the rosebud windows, of the black-faced sheep, of stationmasters gone to seed and drink. A train or two came quite close to the break, but reared in alarum and proceeded east into the comforting arms of the city once more.
There is concern, in the highest echelons of sport commuters, that a train might one day become bold enough to jump the tracks at Oathusk and escape Palimpsest altogether, into the wilds beyond and the mountains, through the wide farms and pastureland, and from thence who knows? Yet still others deride this idea as the worst sort of fancy: the trains are happy, they are loved, they are well-fed and well-mated. In the midst of debate, the tracks go unrepaired. The wheat bends the wind at Oathusk, and the stars watch the raspberries grow long.
The next carriage is empty. It is a long, vast stretch of new tatami mats, redolent and bright green, their ribbons black and gold. Sei cannot begin to count them. There is a slender station map like an ukiyo-e painting on one wall, and the room shakes like a carriage, but there are no benches, no rails. It is a place she knows and does not wish to.
“No,” she groans. “I don't want to be here.”
“But it is your home,” the Third Rail says. Plenitude scratches at her neck encouragingly.
“I don't like it, I don't want it. I told you. I want to go to the next car. The rabbit said there were horses.”
The Third Rail shakes her long head. She strides to the center of the room and Sei knows what will happen but she cannot bear it, she cannot bear this. “Why?” she yells at the Third Rail's back. “What purpose could this possibly serve?”
The Third Rail turns and seats herself in the great room, letting her unlined kimono pool out around her and smoothing her long hair into two flat planks. She reaches into her robes and withdraws an enormous book-it is swollen and waterlogged, and reedy bits of kelp and grass peek out from its pages like ribbonmarks. She opens it on her lap; lake-water splashes out. The Rail beckons Sei with sweetness, as if she is luring a cat from under the bed.
“No,” Sei moans, but she is going to her, could never have done less than go to her.
“Imagine a book at the bottom of a lake,” the Third Rail says.
“I told you not to say that. I don't like it.”
“But I have gotten you the book. It was a very deep lake, frozen in places, high at the top of the world. I held my breath for a very long time.”
“You're lying. There was never any book. My mother was crazy. She said those things because she was sick.”
Yet Sei inches closer. She is watching the space between the Third Rail's breasts, white and smooth. The book is open; its pages are blue. The Third Rail opens her arms to take Sei in and cuddles her against her hip, pointing her long finger to the pages so that Sei can read.
“This is to say: I will hold nothing back from you, with either hand. All things, at the bottom of all lakes.”
Sei rubs her throat; it is tight and thin and she wants to run from this, but she is the Sei-fish again, twelve years old, blue and separate from the other fish, and she does not know the piscine joy they find in this volume, but she wants to, so very much.
She peeks at the page. Just a glance, she thinks. And then I will end this. It is obscene, and I can shame her into stopping it.
The book reads:
I really was born in a train station, you know. My mother went into labor, and I came so fast. I was always too fast. Too soon. She took me home, and I grew up, just a little girl, my head full of books, my hands full of calligraphy brushes. I had dreams like some children have freckles. And my sisters made fun of my name.
I married your father as soon as I could manage it, and he left me so often. I was so alone. I had only books and dreams and brushes then. And often I slept-but it was not like really sleeping. The world went black, and it went light again much later. My head hurt as though there was another baby inside it, pushing with her little hands to get out. The walls seemed so close, so close! The whole house was like a gag in my mouth, I could never breathe, and I could not leave it-your father could come home at any moment, and if I were not there, he would never come home again, I was certain.
You do not know that I went away when you were very small. I was not even finished nursing you. I went away to a place in the country where they folded me up into a very white bed and put a piece of wood in my mouth and arced blue electricity through me. I remember that it was blue, like the light at the bottom of a lake. I held it all within me, all of it, all that light, I would not let the smallest bit out of me. I held it as though I was made to hold it, as though I was a third rail and all the world's tracks laid around me—it was mine to move the lightning, mine to bear the white heat and the burning. I am sure they were impressed. They knew they could trust me with it, they gave me more and more, so that I could keep it safe for them, and I know you saw it when I came home, saw how incandescent I was, saw the light sizzling in the roots of my hair.
Sei looks up, her tears naked and hot as blood. The Third Rail is bleeding, thick trails of it, hot as tears. The space between her breasts is gouged open, and her blood pools on the already sodden book, stains the hems of her kimono.
“Please stop. Please, please.”
The Third Rail puts her hand to the bottom of her red mask and lifts it, and of course it is Usagi beneath it, Usagi-mother with such sad eyes, her face wan and worn, her lips shaking.
“The floor of heaven, Sei, is laced with silver train tracks, and the third rail is solid pearl. And they carry each a complement of ghosts, who clutch the branches like leather handholds, and pluck the green rice to eat raw.”
“But this is not heaven. It isn't.”
“No, Sei. But it is enough. For you. Everything for you.”
“Why? What do you want?”
“We want to fly. We want to leave the tracks, we want to roam and graze and howl at the mountains. We want to escape the world of our mother and our father, who pretend not to know we live and move and desire under the earth, just as they do. Don't you want to escape your mother?”
Sei stares at the blood on her lap. She is not listening.
“I sat with you for hours, and there was so much blood. It took so long. It took so long.”
“It takes a long time to die. Even if it is quick, it takes a long time. It was hard to leave you-I think that is what you want me to say. That I did not want to leave my child. But it takes a long time. Your heart must stop, and your breath, and then the small things that you did not know kept you alive, books and dreams and brushes. And then you must walk a very long way in the dark, through the mountains, and there are pine trees there, and lanterns, and you can see before and behind the long trail of lanterns winding up and down the mountain, before you and behind.”
“You're not really my mother. I know you're not.”
“I am as good as your mother. I can be your mother, and you can be mine. It will be like a game. I remember your mother. I was built to remember. I was built out of remembering.”
Sei looks into eyes that could be Usagi's, that could be her own sad, confused expression, with all those tigers at her ears. She puts her hand to her mothers breast, the ruin of tissue and blood there, the wound like a heart.
“Lie below me,” Sei says, remembering her grandmother beneath the weepholes and her mother beneath the earth and she herself so far from the sun. “And I will watch over you.”
Beneath her palm the slash of her mothers wound vanishes, as though the skin there had never dreamt of tearing.
Sei sinks
into the arms of the red-masked ghost, and the Rail holds the blue-haired girl tightly, with a love like light. The Third Rail rocks her, and Plenitude curls up between her arm and her still-flat belly and soon enough begins to snore inkily
“There is not so very far left, not so very much left of the train,” the Third Rail says. “Before we open the conductors cabin and pay our respects, tell me, my Sei, my little fish, my child: is there someone who would come looking for you?” Her red voice is suddenly softly accusing.
“No, of course not. No one knows me here.”
“We knew you.”
“That's different. There's no one, I promise.”
“And yet she is here.” The Third Rail kisses Sei on her shoulder and purses her pale lips. “Tell us. Give us a command. Tell us to open our doors to her, or keep them shut as a mouth and leave her gasping on the platform. Guide us, tell us what it is right to do.”
If Sei tries-and it is becoming harder and harder-but if she tries to feel the others whose phantom senses float up under her own, under her tongue, under her fingers, under her feet, if she tries to feel them, she can just discern the smell of a train station, of the oily tracks, of the underground.
“Let her come,” Sei says, and falls asleep on her mother's lap.
ONE
WISHES TO THE TREES
It's over,” Sei said, folding her hands in her lap. They sat, squinting in the bright sunlight, at a restaurant wedged between two Buddhas.
“What does that mean?” Yumiko said, slurping her mushroom soup. “It's not like you're the first. Get an abortion.”
“It means,” Sei breathed deeply, ignoring her, “that I think there is no one left in the Floor of Heaven who is new for me. I'm not… like you. When I am there, I am always on my train, always with the folk there, and they barrel through under the city at such a speed—I've had to chew through Kyoto at the velocity of a new whore just to keep up. I am tired, and there is no one left. It's time for me to go home. To visit my mother's grave. To see if I still have a job. To figure out what to do about the baby. To find others, if they are there.”