Palimpsest (12 page)

Miruna dwells within a column of glass. She sleeps there, when she sleeps, standing upright like a horse. A young bellhop with a shining cap who loves her with all his valise-hung heart brings her a lavish meal once a day: six roasted finches and grapes so plump and purple it pains the eye to look on them. He is too awed to speak to her, but he brings her songbirds and watches her eat in a rapture of adulation.

Miruna faces the Lady so that her heart may always be elevated by her work. She wears a wimple of simple flax over her white hair and a diadem fashioned from—impossibly precious!—a railroad tie that fell from the Fountain decades past. She is thankful that it was during her tenure that it fell, so that she could bend her own hands to it and shape it to her own head. She is the abbess of the terminal, and her gaze bestows luck wherever it falls. A great bronze horn curls from the top of the column in a long spiral to end at her mouth in a dish very like the mouth of a trumpet. She closes her eyes in paradisiacal servitude and holds the light of the Lady, the light of the train lamps, in her breast as she speaks her psalm, her voice low and kindly as a mother:

Arrivals, Track 3: Marginalia, Stylus, and Sgraffito Lines.
Sgraffito departs for Silverfish at Eight of the Clock. Thank you
and Good Evening.

_______

Sei dashes under the
Points North
lintel. She has no ticket; her heart rattles a cup against her ribs in protest. There is a screaming in her ears, a throttling of voices, thousands crying out at once, the sound of horses galloping. She shoves aside the stirring feelings of strange others within her—they are eating, all of them, and her stomach seems to fill with foreign things, her lips hum with hot goblets. Someone is smoking near one of the members of her quartet, but not tobacco, something sweeter and darker, like dry figskins. She growls within herself at them, and they recede, quivering. She prepares to leap the turnstile—she will not be turned away; she knows her mark. There is only one place she longs for in this faceted city.

Poor child—you will not see the rest! There are wonders above ground, too … ah, but she will not listen. They never do. They want only their very private toys and candies, and will not share.

The long brass bars part for her, smoothly, with a gentle whistle. She laughs shrilly and runs faster, her feet bare against the marble, slipping around the corner and onto the platform.

Sei cannot hear the viola anymore—that was far from here, she supposes, that small old station with no fountains. Instead she can hear a faint harpsichord, and she glimpses a young woman hunched over a painted instrument far down the track, her hair flying as she compels it to groan for her. The trains do not like the music, or have scented something they like better: they hurtle past the harpsichordist towards Sei, shying away from the music in the same elephantine manner they leaned into the viola player. As they slide to a rest at her side, the doors before her open—but the doors before the other commuters and travelers and wide-eyed children with amber lollipops in their fists remain immutably shut. The car is black within, lightless, soundless, but she is not afraid, any more than she was once afraid of the room of grass and her mother’s open arms, her torn kimono, her eyes that wept so easily, so often. Usagi had been no less black inside.

Sei leaps into the train, and the doors of the car close happily behind her: the long silver beast careens forward into the tunnel, leaving the folk on the platform shaking their heads and ruefully winding their watches.

_______

The rumble of the meeting of carriage and track sounds hard and happy in the marrow of the girl called Sei. She stands in the dark, hands groping up for leather straps she does not find. There is the sound of a thick match striking; Sei blinks in the soft and sudden light of a red lantern. The carriage rocks from side to side, gently, as though trying to sing her to sleep. But she will not let herself sleep; if she sleeps, she will wake, and she could not bear that.

The walls are draped in red silk. A few vague forms hunch at scattered tables—the sound of soup slurping echoes. A tall woman stands a little space away. She is wearing a black kimono with a jade-colored lining, but it is beltless; her small breasts show, and her slender legs. Her long face is painted red from brow to chin, and it is starkly angular, curiously stretched just slightly past human proportion. Her lips etch a hard black line; her hair folds back and back like the wrapping of a present. She approaches, her red eyelids downcast, and in her naked hands she cradles a teacup. The tea, too, is red, and smells of cinnamon. The woman opens her dark mouth and inserts her thumb and forefinger—she pulls a small lump of opium from beneath her tongue and places it into the cup like a lump of sugar. She sets the tea on a table with a complete and elaborate Western setting glistening on it, and strides swiftly forward, enveloping Sei in her arms and unpinning her hair so that it unfolds around them like a cut accordion. Into her ear the woman whispers:

“We are so glad you have come. Please take our food from us and also our drink. Please take our doors and open them, please find our cars beautiful. If it is not too much to ask we would wish to be dear to you, but we are patient and undemanding.”

She pulls away and there is a smear of red paint on Sei’s cheek. Sei shakes her head slightly, her mouth open and wondering.

“But you … you know I have only tonight here, that I am … nocturnal, ephemeral.”

The red woman nods. “We are confident you will find your way to us no matter where you wake in the city. To believe otherwise would be to believe a carriage can exist without her train. You are our own thing, our squash-blossom, our orchid-stem. We are the leaves of you, you must look at us and call us green, call us gold.”

Sei sits at the table and closes her fingers around the alien utensils. The woman sits opposite her, closing her kimono over her nakedness, her scarlet face beaming.

“Who are you?” Sei asks.

“I am the Third Rail.”

Sei laughs hollowly, her voice echoing metallic in the car, disturbing the diners. “You don’t look like it. Or feel like it.”

The Third Rail demurs, her excitement crackling at the tips of her hair. “I wanted a body, and the components of a body were available to me. But I run beneath you, silent and fatal and huge, and I love you, Amaya Sei. For you I have put on this red flesh and poured their red tea, for you alone.”

And Sei notices for the first time that other crimson women walk the car, tending to the hunched figures. Other women have folded up their hair, donned a mask, and painted their mouths into a black line. Other women pull opium from their mouths. But none are naked under their kimono but the one who called herself the Third Rail, none show their flesh to the drinkers of their tea. The others wear four layers of robes and wide belts of stiff silk.

Sei covers her eyes with one hand. She would like to think this is true, that a train could really love her back this way. But she knows better. “Why should you love me, Rail? I’m nobody. I’m a ticket-taker for Japan Rail. I live alone. I go to work. I eat rice-balls. I’m not special, I’m not anyone.”

The Third Rail twirls a finger in her own cooling tea. “We need you. That is what love is, we think. Needing. Taking.”

“What for?”

The Third Rail shifts in her chair like a child who fears that permission for ice cream is about to be revoked. “Can you not just love us as we are without silly questions?” she pleads. “We have waited so long for you. We do not want to spoil everything with long interrogations. It is a small thing, so very small. We will be so good to you, we will give you such nice things. We promise.”

“You sound like my mother.”

“She can come too, if that will please you.”

Sei laughs hollowly. “She can’t. She’s dead. Tickets from the underworld are so expensive, you know?”

“We are sorry. Are we expected to be sorry?”

“You don’t have to be. It was a long time ago.” Sei does not want to think about Usagi, not here. This is her own thing, her mother cannot have it. “She killed herself,” Sei says shortly, and even the Third Rail seems to understand that the topic is shut.

“Will you come with me, Sei? Please say yes.”

Sei looks into her tea, bloody and bright. She shuts her eyes and drinks it down, the spice of it puckering her cheeks. She feels the opium ball knock against her teeth but does not swallow it.

“Yes,” she says finally, setting down her cup. “I need you, too.”

She takes the hand of the Third Rail, and the woman’s fingers laced in hers are white and hot.

TWO

P
ROTOCOLS

Things that begin and end in grief: marriage, harvest, childbirth. Journeys away from home. Journeys toward home. Surgeries. Love. Weeping.

N
ovember pulled herself into a gray corner and clutched her notebook. She found the man in the willow-green shirt’s apartment unutterably lonely: only the corner she pressed up into spoke to her of living souls. She wriggled into the empty space there, a pale square in the dust-shabby paint: the ghost of a previous tenant, the restless shade of a vanished bookshelf. She huddled into its borders, knees drawn up against her nakedness. She pressed her cheek against the cold wall, her blackened, burning cheek. A tear slipped between her face and the plaster.

The young man slept still. The willow-green shirt slept, too, forgotten in the small kitchen. His books were propped up on cement blocks; there was a thin lithoid television, a pair of brown shoes. November drew further into the corner. She missed the bees, her own bees and the dream-bees. She worried for her hives like a mother—spending the night in the city is reckless behavior for the mistress of so many.

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, muffled in powder-colored sheets. “You could have stayed in bed. It’s warmer.”

“I’m not good at that.”

He emerged from linen, a blur of haphazard black hair and sleep-flattened cheeks. He groped for his glasses. “You’re not good at staying in bed?”

“At any of it. At other people. At mornings.” She closed her lips against the forming list. They were for her notebooks, not for speaking, not for
saying
. Air could ruin them, take them apart, make them meaningless. They were fragile, like honeybees. Like cobwebs. November sniffed and wiped at her face. Men were difficult, she had always found them so. Hoary old birds on the bough, staring with sharp mouths. They chewed and chewed at you until there was nothing of interest left.

He watched her, propped on one elbow; he had watched her even when he had pulled her onto him, watched her in the calculating way of owls watching a hinge-jawed vole—
will she run?

Will she scream? What will she taste like? How many others like her are hidden
in the grass?

“You’re so new,” he had breathed into her collarbone, his thumbs under her breasts, fingers splayed out against her back. “So new.”

She had watched him, too. Distantly, from a great height, from far off. She had moved mechanically, keeping her mouth bitten shut. She hadn’t come; she hadn’t wanted to. She hadn’t wanted him particularly, he had no blue eyes, no lineages in his heart, prophet to caliph to teacher’s assistant. He had not even told her his name, so eager was he to touch her face, to trace the streets there. So eager to return to this gray smear of a house, to the mattress on the floor, lonely of box spring or frame. And his long, tapered finger, so wound with blackness, sliding in and out of her, as though the whole city could fuck her, just like that.

He had told her about that place, told her its name, told her how to get there, pulled her close with the promise of a city she remembered in small bursts, like novae, a dream that was not a dream.

That was enough, she would suffer his body in hers for that. And she believed him, she believed because of Xiaohui, who had told her nothing but wedged her open, and all these others, now, all these others could enter where Xiaohui had forgotten to close her when she went.

“Living alone,” November whispered, “is a skill, like running long distance or programming old computers. You have to know parameters, protocols. You have to learn them so well that they become like a language: to have music always so that the silence doesn’t overwhelm you, to perform your work exquisitely well so that your time is filled. You have to allow yourself to open up until you are the exact size of the place you live, no more, or else you get restless. No less, or else you drown. There are rules; there are ways of being and not being. This sort of thing,” she gestured imprecisely at the room, the bed, him, “is forbidden. It expands or contracts me, I’m not sure which, beyond the … set limits. I’m not good at that, either. Expanding, contracting.”

Her companion uttered a small noise between a sharp sigh and a soft laugh.

“You don’t have to be, you know,” he said with a sliding sadness. “This has been going on for some time. There are patterns to us now.” He moved his hand on the sheets as if to reach out to her. “Rules. Protocols. You don’t even have to talk to me, if you don’t want to. People worked this out a long time ago. It used to be awkward, when you wanted the
entrance
and not the person. The invitation, not the plus-one. It varies a little from place to place—it’s pretty formal here, like a transaction. If,” he looked down at his fingernails, “if you’d wanted me for myself, you would have turned the stone on that ring you wear on your middle left finger inward. If you wanted it to be more than once, you would have turned your pinky ring in. There are codes like that. If you wanted a feast, elaborate sex, if you wanted to make a ritual of it, you would have worn green shoes. I didn’t expect you to be here in the morning, with no ribbons in your hair and all your rings turned out. And two buttons, not three, undone on your dress. That means strictly business, altogether. But you’re new, so I guess I should have figured you didn’t know the ropes.”

“How long have you had it? Has your finger been like that? Have you been …”