Palimpsest (11 page)

Yumiko pushed
A History of Train Travel
firmly back across the tatami. Sei grabbed it gratefully, held it to her chest to warm again with her skin against it. Yumiko shook her head.

“I want to take you somewhere tonight, Sei, will you come?”

Of course she would. Kyoto was a great red basin, and she fell toward its center, toward Yumiko in her blue plaid skirt, toward her mouth and her dreamy, abrupt way of speaking. Toward that other place that Yumiko knew, the place on the other side of night, the place whose trains were wholly without end.

“In the meantime,” Yumiko said cheerfully, “want to see a whole lot of wasted money?”

_______

And so they went into the city, through the high garden walls and narrow streets, toward the phoenix-heart of Kyoto.

Yumiko was right, the Golden Pavilion was ugly. It squatted on the water like a fat yellow raccoon about to paw for fish. The pond was utterly still, reflecting the thing back at itself without a ripple. Sei could not quite convince herself the building was gold, though she knew it was: her grandmother had given over her jewelry to the leafing of the pavilion after it burned all those years ago. It just seemed yellow now, just paint. She wanted to touch it, even so, to feel her grandmother’s necklaces again, bouncing against an old, soft breast.

It had burned in the fifties, the whole thing. A monk had been obsessed with it, had loved it, and had set it on fire one cold night. He had wanted to burn with it, but the smoke was not enough, and he outlived the object of his adoration. When they learned about him in school, Sei thought that she understood him, the need to be rid of a thing, and also to scream with it and in it and breathe it until you choke. Koi moved hugely through the little lake surrounding the temple, improbably moveable stones.

_______

Once, she had made the mistake of asking her mother where she was born.

Usagi had put a butterfly comb into her daughter’s hair and said: “I was born in a train station, my little orchid-stem. Your grandmother was too big to travel, but she longed to see the cherry blossoms at Tsukayama Park, where she was a girl, before the war, before she married and danced south to Kyoto with ribbons in her hair.”

“How can you be born in a train station? There aren’t any doctors,” sensible little Sei had said.

“Did you know, in stations that are very deep underground, there are things called weepholes, little holes in the walls to let wetness out? Water trickles out of them and it looks as if the station is crying, crying for all those souls that pass through it and do not stay. In the station where I was born, the weepholes had been made into little kabuki faces with great eyes that really wept, all that water, rolling down their cheeks.

“‘Push harder,’ said the weepholes to your grandmother.

“‘Lie below us, and we will watch over you,’ they cried, and their mouths were very tragic, the way mask mouths so often are.

“‘Your child is a girl,’ they said when it was over, and though some of them were disappointed, most of them seemed pleased and wept tears of joy.

“‘She is like a small rabbit, kicking her big red feet,’ they said, and so I was called Usagi, and lived to become your Usagi-Mother. On Grandparents Day, I return to the station to wipe away the tears of my midwives.”

“I wish I had been born in a train station,” Sei had sighed.

“Perhaps when you have a baby, you will long to see cherry blossoms,” Usagi had answered, and tickled her under the chin.

Sei’s mother had been better than a book. She had been stranger, both more closed and more open. Even when she was a child she suspected her mother was mad—a little mad, in a charming way, that made her say funny things in funny ways, not horribly mad, like the women on television who tore their hair. But whenever her mother read from the book at the bottom of the lake, the stories were impossible and sad, and Sei knew they were not true. But she could not help remembering them, and taking them into herself like food and water, and when she learned of the wicked monk who burned up the Golden Pavilion in the holocaust of his own desire, it sounded rich and odd, like a story her mother would have told her, and she had thought of the weepholes that presided over her mother’s birth, and the beautiful trains that must have borne witness to such a thing.

What is happening to me in this old, old city? I cannot stop chasing my
thoughts around, around and around. Where am I going, O Monk, O
Mother, O Rabbit in the Moon?

_______

The place Yumiko wanted to take her was called the Floor of Heaven. A small plaque above the door announced as much in quiet
hiragana
like the fall of sudden rain. Yumiko held her hand tightly, still wearing her school uniform.

“Why do you wear that fucking thing?” Sei asked. “You’re not in school anymore.”

Yumiko giggled, put her hand over her mouth, and then stopped abruptly, utterly serious. “I enjoy the archetype,” she said. “It’s our greatest export, you know, this skirt, these shoes. It’s like being a
kami
. I
embody
.”

Yumiko knocked at the door, and when it opened reluctantly, stuck out her tongue with the catlike pleasure she had shown when she had done the same for Sei. The man in the door-shadow looked quizzically at Sei. She unbuttoned her blouse with calm fingers. He grunted acquiescence.

Inside, there was soft music, koto and guitar played together, and long copper-colored couches. There were tables and drinks of exotic colors, as in any club Sei had ever seen—black wood and a green vial on it; graceful fingers tented against the belly of a glass full of pink froth. The room was sparsely populated, patrons in clusters like grapes, no one dancing, no one laughing.

There were, as there would be, maps on the walls, of London, Paris, Buenos Aires. Low whispers floated above the drinks.

“Tell me,” Yumiko said, pressing her cheek to Sei’s on the empty dance floor. “Do you want to go back?”

“To Tokyo?”

“No.”

“Oh.
There.
”

“It has a name.”

Sei found that she had trouble saying it: a foreign word, and she balked at the admission that she knew the name of an impossible place, even to Yumiko, who presumably did not think it impossible at all.

Sei thought of the trains, how perfect and white, how swift. The man playing the viola, how his hair had fallen over his face like a mourning veil and the train cars, ah, the train cars had opened for him, their doors like rapturous arms!

“It wasn’t a dream.”

“No. Better than a dream.”

“Yes, I want to go.” Sei clenched her fists against the desire for it, for those trains, trains that would nod sagely at everything in Kenji’s book, saying:
yes, that is what we are
. She thought of Tokyo, waiting for her in the north like a crocodile, languid, vicious. What waited for her? Her tempered glass booth at Shinjuku Station, the endless tickets for everyone but her, her Japan Rail uniform with its crisp lapels? It was nothing, all nothing, because it was not
there
, not those trains, not that place.

Yumiko put her thumb against Sei’s lower lip as though marking her place in the book of her. “That’s what we all want, Sei. Hardly anyone even comes as far as this place, where we can find each other, like drawn to like. Where it is so easy to find a street which ends in that city. They built the Floor of Heaven about twelve years ago, when there were enough of us in Kyoto to need it, to long for it.”

“Who’s
they
?”

“I don’t know, really. Big money, from up north. I don’t really know about the higher-ups, the important people here who figure out how to be important in Palimpsest. I’m just a tourist, you know? But the club makes things so much simpler. You’ll see.”

Sei looked around the room—hardly a couple did not embrace, and hardly a couple’s eyes met. They grasped each other shaking like invalids, impassive and fanatical. Sei’s eyes watered. She thought she understood it, the anatomy of what Yumiko offered her—she could guess at its musculature, the number of its bones.
It’s like a virus. This is more like a hospital than
a nightclub, really. The Southern Prefectural Home for Invalids, with an
open bar.

Sei moved away from Yumiko across the floor and extended her arms like wings. She moved as best she could, as best she knew how, as she had moved in a hundred rooms livelier and harder than this in Tokyo. She circled her hips, she held her belly and tipped her toes. She shut her eyes and hoped herself beautiful enough to deserve what any one of these could give her: a way in, a way through. Her black dress, shimmering like depthless water, snapped and flared.

Yumiko caught her in a long turn, her breath quick, blowing out little strands of hair from her face.

“You don’t have to do that,” Yumiko said solemnly. “No one dances anymore. It’s a waste of time. We’ve cut it all down to the barest necessary interactions. It’s better that way. They won’t say no, not ever. You don’t have to dance for them.”

“I want to. I want to.” Sei laced her fingers into Yumiko’s pink-nailed hands. “Don’t you want to have fun, to feel alive here, too?”

Yumiko blinked, and she looked suddenly very tired.

“I just want to stay there, Sei,” she sighed. “It’s so hard to come back.”

“Then stay.”

“I don’t know how! No one knows. We just know how to get there for a little while, how to see little parts of it. How to dream a thing that is better than a dream.”

Yumiko drew her toward a table. Two tall, thin glasses glittered on the wood. One had a golden drink in it, the other a creamy, pale blue one. There was a man there, not so old as Kenji, with a poppy in his lapel. The petals were black in the low light.

“I won’t promise,” Yumiko whispered, pulling Sei’s hand under her skirt to rest on the soft flesh of her hip, “that they will all be as pretty as me, or as easy to charm as him. Most of them will not have a book written just for you in their pockets. But this is how you do it: through the body and into the world. You fuck; you travel. That sounds crude, and you know, it usually is. It’s usually ugly, and fat, and sweaty, and lonely. Luckily, it’s also usually quick. But afterwards … we find a place where we belong.”

The man, who was well on the way to fat, his neck bulging out of a black suit, his hair greasily combed over, put his hand over Sei’s. He was nodding along with Yumiko; tears flowed down his round cheeks. With his other finger he pulled his earlobe aside so that she could see the map there, glowering, calling. Sei leaned in to examine it, but Yumiko shook her head.

“If you want to continue on the train, and not … come with me … you have to be more careful. You only get to go to the place they’ve got on their skin, so you need to practice some good old-fashioned cartography and map a route.”

Together they auditioned men and women, lifting sleeves and hats and skirts to peer at maps so tiny they made Sei’s head throb. Yumiko seemed to know what she was looking for, but all the same it was not until nearly two in the morning that she found a nervous, skinny man with scarred cheeks and a scraggly mustache whose hip was scrawled over with a dense map Yumiko seemed to like, but Sei thought looked much like the rest.

“That’s the next station on the line. You should have clear passage from where you started—it should work out, one way or the other.” Yumiko smiled gently, like a mother coaxing her child onto a frightening carnival ride. “It’s quick,” she said. “Be quick,” she implored the scarred man.

But Sei thought only of the trains, hurtling through her. She gave a wan smile and leaned into her schoolgirl briefly.

“The source of all suffering is desire,”
Sei recited.

“Yes,” Yumiko breathed fervently. “
Yes, it is
.”

Sei let herself fall into the man’s nameless arms. His kisses were not spare or elegant, like Sato Kenji’s, or sweet and fluttering, like Yumiko’s, or bruising and angry like the three lovers before them. His were soft and overripe, a pear fallen in the rain. His tongue was flat and round. He pulled at her white coat and the black dress beneath it, stroking her bare back. He drew her into an alcove near the bathroom, and she felt that this was unnecessarily tawdry, needlessly crude—why could they not all be like Yumiko, who had arranged her legs over her shoulders like flowers and sank into her with a lightness like water?

The man lifted her against the wall; he was small in her, small and urgent and hard, a little bullet aimed at the center of her, and he buried his face in the mark between her breasts, his teeth bared against her in the dark.

Sei thought of the trains, and the shadows hid her face as the scarred man jerked and shook inside her.

It was quick.

Colophon Station

C
OLOPHON
S
TATION IS THE CENTRAL
transit terminal for the trains of Palimpsest. The stately prewar cinquefoils show the evening sky, deeper than gold and warmer than blue. The great ambulatory is lined with pillars of plum trees trained to support the long, ochre-tiled roof, blossoming grasping branches twisting the doves into living capitals. Within, eleven pyrite staircases spiral down to the grand floor, a marble expanse in which the old wheel of Palimpsest is laid out in rosewood, the face of the circular city when it was small and unassuming, a walled place, home only to a few celery farmers and astronomers. Great lancet arches lead further into the earth, labeled with stern roman capitals:
Points East, Points North,
Points Far, Points Near.
In the center of the rosewood wheel the Verdigris Fountain splashes and trickles: a woman bound up in railroad ties, her arms flung upward in ecstasy, water streaming from her palms, her hair spread out as in a many-armed corona. Green age encrusts her, her eyes worn smooth by water, her nose half-gone. Yet still she watches over travelers, Our Lady of Safe Transfer, Star of the Underground.

The ceiling of Colophon Station is unpainted, for it was the desire of the architect, whose name was long ago buried under a black quoin, that passersby become aware in the most piquant way that they have passed underground. Therefore the roof of Colophon is planted over with flame-colored ginger flowers, whose thick golden roots reach down thirstily into the interior, and any traveler may look up and see only earth and straining roots, and the wonderful smell of it penetrates the skin for days afterward.