Palimpsest (15 page)

The song is complex and awful and so beautiful November’s stomach twists in fear that it might end. But end it will and end it does, and the singer’s tears have fallen into her ear. She puts up her hand in the dark, and it falls upon a wet face, as near to her as kissing, and then it is gone. The unseen soprano retreats; the wall slides back. Casimira takes her blindfold away; November takes hers.

“She will go to the next room, now, and the next, and the next,” Casimira sighs. “The opera is an austere and intimate thing, it cannot bear very much light. She will sing in a hundred ears before the night is done. She will sing of the war, and the miserable remnants of it, and of love in the days when Hieratica Street was an inferno.” Casimira puts her small hand on November’s sternum. “This
is
the world,” she says sternly, “just the world,” she says, her eyes half-glowing in the shadows. “Terrible things happen here, to children, to the grown. We have a history the same as you do. When you are in your own home and ask where you have found yourself, what do you answer? You say to yourself:
I am home, in such and such city,
in such and such province, in a country, in the world.
You are in Palimpsest. It is just a city. I am not a magical thing. I am not a beast or a sylph. I just live; we all just live. We eat and starve, we hoard and we fling open our stores. We fall from grace, we lose faith.” Casimira circles November’s waist with her gloved arms. “We become obsessed over things against good advice.”

“If all that is true, why must I wake up? Why must I sleep with strangers to get here at all?”

“Do you not have borders in your country? And guards? And passports and papers of identification?”

“Of course.”

Casimira smiles softly. Her teeth shine. She puts her hand on November’s ruined cheek.

“Of course you do. And so do we.”

From beneath her dress Casimira draws something that sings as it leaves her side. November can see, even in the murky shadows, a long knife, so pure and silver it is nearly white.

“This is the world, November. It’s a difficult thing for someone like you to remember, but I am a helpful woman if I am nothing else. I want to help you. I want you to come back. To promise me you will come back, that you will not make me wait again.”

“I’ll … I’ll try …” November’s eyes open wide in the dark, trying to see where the knife has gone. Her voice trembles.

“I am going to help you see the way of things. To see more quickly than the other lost, bumbling fools who plague my rats in this place. To see as clearly as my bees see. It will go easier for you. There will be no boring existential crises. When you come to my house again, things between us will have progressed very far.”

Casimira pulls her right glove off finger by finger and lays it around her neck like a stole. She grasps November’s wrist resolutely and spreads her fingers against the smooth cold floor, pushing her first two fingers together into a blessing. November almost falls with the force of the woman dragging her hand downward. But she catches herself: it is a dream and she will be all right, she is sure of it. Almost sure. She closes her eyes and calms her body, sinking into the other woman’s grip.

“I’ve kept a room for you,” Casimira whispers, so faintly November barely snatches it from the air before the patroness of Palimpsest swings the long knife down and severs two of her fingers in one long slice.

Three people cry out and fall to their knees, clutching their fingers in anguish—and then it is gone, and they shake their heads, and they walk on through the night, understanding nothing.

THREE

S
IMPLE
D
ECLARATIONS

O
leg swam up toward waking, unwilling, fighting the current of consciousness. Gabriel’s voice sliced through his sleep.

“There’s coffee. Drink it. Or don’t.”

The wadded up weight of Oleg’s jeans tossed casually at him brought him fully into the world. Gabriel frowned at him over the rim of a mug that proudly announced the indomitable strength of Denham Steel.

“Please leave as soon as possible, either way,” he said flatly.

“What’s wrong?”

Gabriel’s look turned withering and he tossed the remainder of an ugly, thick black brew into the sink. “Nothing. I don’t like company in the morning. Just, please go.”

Oleg dressed without hurry. Mila often watched him dress, out of a vague anthropological curiosity, and it felt much like that now, with Gabriel’s cold eyes on him. He buckled his jeans with a grimace. His hands smelled vaguely of condoms and lubricant, a smell he associated with things he probably shouldn’t have done. That seemed to be about where he was at.

This was stupid. They liked each other, they had been happy, he had seen it in Gabriel’s face afterward, sinking into sleep with his head on Oleg’s chest. They could have been less lonely in the presence of the other. What had he done?

Oleg collected his tools and stood with finality before the architect, whose eyes were red and slightly wild, shaken.

“Just a dream, right?” Gabriel said, like an accusation, like certainty of guilt.

Yes, just a dream, a dream they shared, a dream that made itself manifest on his stomach.
Livid, like a bruise.
He took a deep breath, a last effort. “Even if it were real, Gabriel, what’s the difference between punching a clock here and punching it there? Are you better off, serving elephant to rich people who won’t let you look them in the eye?”

Gabriel’s broken eyes welled up. “Oh, Oleg,” he said, “you don’t understand. Here, nothing means anything. It’s all just …
random.
Men and women and buildings and holidays and dinners and streets. It’s all flat. It’s like it’s missing a dimension, deeper than depth. The dimension of
ritual
. There,
everything
means something
. Even dinner. Even a time clock.” He laughed, and then coughed harshly, as if hacking back a sob.

Gabriel collected himself. Dark circles bruised the skin under his eyes, and he was so thin, as if he hadn’t eaten in this world for days. “Get out,” he said quietly, picking at something invisible on the plastic counter. “Please just get out.”

_______

Oleg locked the door behind him, conscientious of the propriety of keys, and stepped into the snow.

_______

His apartment was empty.

Lyudmila was often out, on whatever business ghosts might have, and for this reason Oleg did not worry about it when she did not greet him or watch him pour tea or wet the table with her bare feet, except that he felt the errant and ugly need to cry, and had long passed the point where he could cry without her. She would come back. He buttered cold bread and boiled an egg. The back of his neck shivered; Gabriel had not seen the second half of Oleg’s dream, could not know it or guess it. How real she had been, how dry, how flesh.

Oleg understood the dead, or believed he did. He had been well brought up by them, well schooled. He knew their vespers and their matins. He walked in their city, rode their trains. He saw Manhattan for what it was because his sister had long ago taught him to recognize the signs, signs that rode on the moribund world like burn marks on an old lightbulb.

But dreams were not his to own as death was. He rarely remembered dreams, rarely cared for them. They were thin and small compared to her, compared to his city. He simply didn’t care. And the other city, Gabriel’s city—well, it didn’t matter. Lyudmila was there; Lyudmila was here. Why wouldn’t she be? Nothing else shone as brightly as her. What difference did it make if he fixed locks in a city of glass and stone or walked among mad bankers along a river of cream? At least he didn’t have to wait tables here. Lyudmila was a constant. The only constant. The backdrop didn’t matter. Gabriel couldn’t understand that, could never consider that it didn’t matter if the city was real or not.

But Lyudmila did not come back. Weeks passed, a month. She had never stayed away so long, even when he had fallen in love with a Polish girl from Brooklyn and ordered his sister, finally, away.
It was time to let her go,
he had thought. He wanted to marry this one. She wouldn’t understand a dead girl living with them. Mila hadn’t cried or yelled or broken anything. She had just slipped out a window. And stayed away for exactly seventeen days, each of which he had marked with a small cut on the inside of his calf.

She returned when he stopped eating and the Polish girl began a cozy acquaintance with his doctor.

“Why did you come back?” Oleg had asked.

“You needed bandaging,” Lyudmila had said, and buried her head in his shoulder.

The Polish girl had left him for a social worker who brought her orange blossoms every day until she forgot all about him. He hadn’t resented it. He had learned the lesson he needed and never sent Lyudmila away again.

But it had been twenty-seven days now, and he had begun to mark them as before, with a razor on the skin of his leg, not out of compulsion, but hoping to call her back through sympathetic magic. If he needed bandaging enough, she would come home. But she did not come. He thought of Gabriel occasionally, but his failure there seemed too big to move.

Oleg bent to his work. He had neglected them, his locks and his keys, in the madness of two such quick and strange lovers. These things happened. They forgave him. He removed the heavy front-door mechanism from a condemned hospital up the Hudson a ways and brought it back to the little bedroom that housed his collection. It shone with dull malevolence, the newcomer among the natives. He brought it a succession of keys to become devoted to, all of which it rejected with an upturned knob. He finally abandoned that. He listened as carefully as he could to each lock he repaired, for its secret cry, for the clicking and turning of its wishes. But most of all he listened for a small, cold voice calling him from further and further doors. He heard silence, and the distant Atlantic. Mila had never tormented him before; it was not her way.

Oleg began to leave the house in disarray. She would never scold him, but she had always been driven to comment upon it.
The egg has gone cold, the tea is acrid. The plate is dusty
. Simple declarations, without accusation or advice. Where could she have gone?

But he did know where she was, he supposed. He had seen her there, by a white river, wearing a blue dress. If she was not here she must be there—perhaps that was where she went when she could not bear any more of the living. Perhaps she fished a coat from the street and walked under palms with that strange snow in her hair. Perhaps she had a lover there.

And Oleg had been there, too, with his sister. He had held her cold hand on an iron bench. He had seen the curvature of her ear. He had been there, he had been there every night since, among the banks and drenched in the white river. And every night she looked up at him through snowy hair and shook her head in disappointment. She turned from him under dozens of moons and strode past the brick walls of the tunnel, and he could not follow her, somehow, could not pass into the places where she walked. Amber shadows gathered to block the way. It was like a puzzle, and he could not solve it. Could not follow.

But Oleg was not so dense that he did not surmise how the thing was done. He had held a lover’s body in his mouth twice, and twice he had slept into that place. But he did not know how to find anyone but the other Lyudmila with her liony long hair and wide mouth and thin, brittle Gabriel himself. There were others, there must be. A virus loves company. But he did not know how he could possibly find them. It had been an accident, like an unwanted child. He didn’t even know how to talk about it. He had practiced not talking about the things he knew until no man could be called his equal. Manhattan, Lyudmila, the furtive longings of locks and the shrill keening of their destined keys. It calmed him to collect the things he knew and did not speak of. A city on the other side of sleep. That had to be added to the tally, now. Behind the gate of horn—it was horn, right? He remembered that from a long-ago book his mother had loved. Virgil, he thought. A book about long journeys and the sea.
The gates of sleep are two, a gate of ivory and a gate of horn
. He had been horrified as a child, picturing a great door of tangled antlers and tusks.

Surely that was the gate of Palimpsest.

He swallowed the name of the city. It was hard in his throat, like a piece of candy lodged in the wet pinkness there. It was difficult, absurd, to say the word here, in his apartment, under all those other apartments with their individual lives wheeling inside. Hard to say how he knew it, just as he could not remember a time when he did not know that this place was New York, Manhattan. It just
was
. It just existed. It was just called that. But what the Holland Tunnel or the George Washington Bridge of Palimpsest was, he could not say. It had always seemed significant to him, whether one entered the city by bridge or tunnel. Ascending or descending, down to the underworld of violet shadows and civilized bowls of blood or up through the fog and into streets of silver and sheen.

But that place, that other city, Gabriel’s city, it was not clearly marked. Inconsiderate. Which way was intended? He was mired to the knees in the river muck, looking up at the lights.

_______

The easiest way,
Oleg thought, sitting at a public computer terminal in the great be-lioned library. Green study lamps bulged at every desk like guardian turtles. He should have thought of it before. People naturally form networks, spangled, spidery hoops of light lying over the world. People wanted to be found.

He logged in to the three or four social sites where he maintained mostly inactive accounts, as well as a handful of classified listings and held his breath while he typed into the empty, inviting, assuring text box:

Seeking travelers to the borough of Palimpsest. Unexplained spontaneous
tattoos? Bad dreams? Find me. Please, find me.

There,
Oleg thought. Obscure enough—no one would contact him who did not know what he meant, but plain enough to those who couldn’t ignore the black mark on their skin. Some flair. He posted it to all his accounts and classifieds and walked to the corner restaurant for half a Greek chicken, which he devoured. He chewed at the bones for a while.