Palimpsest (21 page)

Sei knew her weaknesses—she would plead with Yumiko:
I
am weak. Sometimes it is still about love, and need.

When she wakes with him, in that not-very-distant future, that Sei watched blankly in the reflection of a brass plaque, the grid will brachiate out from his footpad, its angles dark and bright, and she will envy him, for wherever he walks now he walks in Palimpsest, and it will be all new for him, all new. Before he stirs, she will leave his house without tea or farewell.

Standing before the door to the Floor of Heaven, the train hurtled so fast into the future. She could hardly bear the speed, the inevitable, unavoidable sequence of stops and passengers, the toll, never to be paid in full. Tears pricked behind her eyes.

It all stood in front of her, behind a black featureless door, ready to swallow her whole.

“Yes,” Sei said. “I’m ready.”

Inamorata

I
NAMORATA
S
TREET ENDS
in silver sand and a great craggy finger of stone, stretching out into the sea. The glittering water flows out to the horizon and over it, a great dark expanse, whitecaps glistening in the moonlight. Foam shatters into seaglass on the beach, and couples walk arm in arm along a strand of shards, glittering and wet. Striped tents dot the beach head: red and yellow, green and white, rose and powdery blue. Women change into bathing uniforms with flared waists and broad hats to keep out the moonlight; tuba players march back and forth, blaring out nocturnes.

The infirm of Palimpsest come here to recover, to collect seaglass on their bedside tables and write novels on the nature of the solitary soul. Mustached men sell bottles of seawater in the inland markets for the price of kingdoms, and false phials abound. The air blows fresh and sweet; it smells of tangerines and salt and white sage, and charlatans bottle this too and sell the empty glasses to immigrants for the price of a parliament seat.

Each evening the hopelessly ill are brought in gauzy palanquins to view the moonrise, and all applaud the appearance of its white disc over the water. The wind is considered to have such restorative power that surgery is performed on the beach, anesthesia administered by waifish women with hair like spun sugar, who close their mouths over the ailing and breathe the vapors of their crystalline hearts into weakened lungs.

Ermenegilde has been a patient here since the war ended. She is a charity case; her reassignment went poorly and she was rendered useless for the field. She has bled from her wounds every day for twelve years. Bluebells drape her palanquin: the veteran-flower. Medical gauze swathes her face in long bridal veils. All agree that if not for her mouth, she would be now a great dowager-beauty. But there is her mouth, it remains, and cannot be denied.

Once, in a field hospital set up for such amputations, surgeons removed her jaw, her teeth and the better part of her nose. In its place, they inexpertly sewed a panther’s muzzle. The practice was new then, though it was to become the single great symbol of the war—there were no experts in those days. Ermenegilde’s graft did not take, it would not heal, and stitches are still required to keep her two faces joined together. The wiry knots are black with blood. And though her new teeth are sharp and vicious, as they were intended to be, though her whiskers can detect the smallest drop in barometric pressure, she suffers infections and fevers.

And of course, of course she cannot speak. None of them can.

Ermenegilde is always the first to be carried to the shore for moonrise. She took up photography many years past, and her nurses help her each evening to set her daguerreotype in place so that she may print her plates of the great full face she still hopes will mend her. She breathes deep, and prays the moon will hold still for her portrait. Ermenegilde knows, however, that it is difficult to do, and does not blame the heavenly body for her restlessness. She, too, has had to sit for pamphleteers and medical historians alike. She is possessed, after all these years, of immense empathy.

_______

November cradles her left hand gingerly in her right. She does not want to think about it, not now, that morning three days past when she had woken up with that poor girl’s pale hair covered in blood and her own fingers gone. Her blessing fingers. It’s almost funny. There was no wound, the stumps as smooth and tan as if some hand had simply plucked off her fingers like fruit. But there was blood, blood everywhere, though it came from nowhere, and they had scrubbed and scrubbed to get it clean.

But Casimira was right. Things are clearer now. There would be no more of this “it’s only a dream” business. What happens here happens there. November is not a slow student. In her way she appreciates the act. It’s like cheating on a test—so much easier when you have the answers written on your hand.

“My house misses you,” comes Casimira’s brandywine voice beside her.

November turns, and the green-haired woman is there, her curls loose to the backs of her knees, in a bathing dress that reveals no skin at all, billowing and green. November puts her hand over the place in Aloysius’s dress where her own belly shows through. “He weeps dust all night long and has turned all the calendars to fall. It is extremely tiresome. If you do not visit I shall have no peace at all.”

“How did you know I would be here?”

“When will you learn that if a fly, if a bee, if the smallest worm witnesses a thing, I witness it also? I have tried so hard to explain matters clearly. Will it take another finger to impress this upon you?”

“No,” says November hurriedly.

“If the fingers are a very great loss, I can arrange for replacements here. In that, you are lucky to have come to this place above others. The sea is so good for one’s health. Also the surgeons gather here to beg for work. The debauched and the desperate are always drawn to water, is that not strange?”

Casimira kisses November’s broken hand like a mother kissing her child’s ills away. “I can purchase a whole paw, I think, though they are not very dexterous. Tiger, perhaps, or lion? Cougar? Or maybe just the fingers, in which case it will have to be an ape of some flavor. Please do not think of the cost.”

“What about human?”

Casimira laughs. “Don’t worry, they’re quite skilled at it by now. War is such a marvelous instructor.”

“If the options are ape or cat, I think I’ll have to decline.”

“No fun at all.” Casimira smirks.

_______

The two women stride arm in arm along the beach. Casimira shoos away the beggar-surgeons with her umbrella, and saves a piece of seaglass for November to keep on a bedside table, should she ever acquire one. They talk about the air and the water, and how November’s father might have benefited, in the days when he vomited blood and had to be carried to his tiny downstairs bathroom to do it.

“We do not exist, however sad your father’s case may have been,” Casimira says primly, “for the benefit of all.”

November does not want to discuss it, not really. She knows her place in the universe, knows its label, and none of it can help her father now. There are mushrooms in his skull, and that is all.

“What is wrong with them?” she asks instead. “The ones on the long beds, the woman with the muzzle sewn onto her face.”

“There was a war. I told you that. It was not a very long time ago, not very long at all. I was a child when it began.”

“What happened?”

Casimira’s mouth curls into a feline grin. She looks up, sidelong, at November. “I won, is that not apparent?”

November starts, a lock of faded brown hair pulling free of her knot. “What, you against everyone?”

“Not quite so simple, no, but it ended that way, certainly.” Casimira turns sharply to November, and though she is quite short, manages to look precisely like a stern schoolteacher. “List for me, November, the reasons one may start a war.”

November blushes, frightened, unwilling to speak her lists aloud, into the sea, into the surf. Not when ordered to. They aren’t soldiers, they don’t come when called. They’re
private
, they’re hers, Casimira has everything in the world. She can’t have them, too.

“Now,” the matriarch orders, “or it’s orangutan fingers for you.” Nearby, a bent old man in a white laboratory coat shoots them a hungry glance.

“Religion,” November whispers, her stomach knotted, her heart seizing itself in shame, as though she had just opened her dress and shown herself naked to the matriarch of Palimpsest. “Territory. Vengeance, historical enmity, alliances.” She starts to hitch and sob, losing her list to the air, to the wind and the sea, lost to her notebooks, to herself. “Resources—food, fuel, water, labor, expansionist government, I don’t know … I’m sorry, I can’t think …”

November’s face burns. She wants to cry again but will not allow it. She will not humiliate herself, and she is sure she has not hit upon the cause Casimira wants to hear.

“Can war, do you think, be a tool of policy?” she says with a gentle didacticism, as their walk takes them around a bend in the surf that throws up glimmering, half-translucent urchin shells onto the beach.

“I don’t … I’m a beekeeper … you can start a war however you like …”

“Well, thank you, but, in your opinion.”

“Of course …”

Casimira looks November up and down, her dark eyes glittering with amusement. “Immigration policy, perhaps?”

November wrings her hands, closing her right hand over the place where her left fingers have been. She is still not used to the wretched stumps and recoils from herself as though burned.

“Casimira, I don’t know!”

The older woman’s face softens and she stops, taking November’s cheeks into her hands. “Am I being very dreadful to you? It is hard for me to remember, sometimes, that others live alone, and do not have a billion children to whom lullabies simply
must
be sung. Come, let us get you a drink, it will do you good. And then we must go home, for my house is threatening to tear down the haberdashery next door if I do not bring you as soon as I am able.”

As they walk toward a gleaming black pier, something like obsidian strung with white lanterns, folk they pass, ill and well, shrink back from Casimira, cross themselves or sink to their knees in reverence. One or two doctors spit at her. She holds her head high, until the spit splatters on the hem of her bathing dress. She casually flicks her fingers in the direction from which it had come, a gesture like removing dust from a collar. Three wasps fly from her sleeve with a high, rageful, indignant screech, and defend their mistress with keen stingers of brass. The doctors fall to the shore, their arms raised over their heads.

On the black pier, Casimira takes a great wooden pitcher from a wire rack and dips it into the sea. She offers it to November, who still trembles and rubs her elbows. She drinks; it tastes of tangerines, and salt, and white sage. It tastes nothing like the sea she knows, nothing like her Pacific with its long gray arms—it is sweeter, and thicker. The midnight tide crashes diamond wave against stony shore, sending spray into the thready silver clouds that collar the moon.

Did I ever think San Francisco was beautiful?
marvels November.
I was a fool
.

_______

“We must take a circuitous route.” Casimira sighs. “You are too new to have forged any reasonable path through the city.”

“I’m sorry, I tried … you know, on the other side, there are people who try to keep you from finding too many people.”

Casimira snorts. “There are people like that here, too, I assure you. But of course you tried, my dear. One cannot really be so fortunate as to choose adjacent lovers. No one blames you.”

An emerald carriage rolls onto the sand, spraying white granules, and opens a silent, solicitous door. November all but collapses into it. She lays her head in Casimira’s lap, exhausted. She has grown too big for herself, that is all. Terrible things occur when you outgrow the space allotted to you. You cannot really circumnavigate Fairyland like September did, not really. It’s too big for you.

A few forlorn bees crawl over her hands, their tiny clockwork wings whirring. November gives them a halfhearted smile and strokes them gently.

“I have three secrets I want to give to you, November. Like in a fairy story. They are very big things, and I have had them wrapped specially. But you must be good for me, if you want it. Do you understand?”

Suddenly she is alert. Three gifts—that is something. She knows how to behave, if this is the sort of story where an imperious woman offers her three gifts. “Yes,” November says, sitting up straight. Casimira pats her head.

“Good girl. My bees want a thing from you, and I would like to ask you to give them what they crave. It is not mine to give.”

“Aren’t we going to your house?”

Casimira laughs like a glissando of bells. “You have caused such a commotion in my districts! Everyone bawls and throws tantrums for you. You are the star of all their fever-dreams. I suppose all mothers must prepare for the day when their children fall in love and no longer need her, but it pierces me so! My heart is not so efficient as theirs! We are going to the factory, my love. Then home, where your present awaits, if you are a good girl and a pliable one.”

“
I will stand upon my raft until the Green Wind comes for me,
” November says gravely. “
My dress; my sail.
”

“That’s lovely. Scripture?”

“Yes,” November answers with fervency: clasped hands, wet eyes. “Hortense Weckweet.”

“How marvelous! Her daughter Lydia was such a fine sculptor.”

November gapes as the carriage clatters on, and Casimira offers nothing more.

_______

The factory is a mass of green-white spires, and the song of the shift change spills from it as though they are the pipes of a church organ. Casimira strides boldly through the front gate: it is her place, nowhere is her power so piquant as here. In a mother-of-pearl lockerroom where the third watch has left their helmets, she changes into no more than a wage-slave’s dress: white and green scales, laid one over the other, little pearly discs glittering in the spirelight. She provides one for November, and it is not very unlike being naked: every curve and wrinkle is visible, and the scent of the scales is like crushed mint stalks.