Palimpsest (35 page)

The late afternoon light played in Sei’s hair, turning it turquoise and black, like the light at the bottom of a lake, like the light in hidden places.

_______

Two women stood on a wide pavilion of crushed white stones and high orange pillars, one with blue hair, and one with a blue skirt. Hand in hand they sought out the row of heavy bronze bells with their ponderous red ropes. They clapped their hands and rang the bells for the soul of Amaya Usagi; they gave their coins to the gods and stood in the shadowy alcoves in contemplation of statues with dead eyes. They tied wishes to the trees, and did not tell each other what they wished for—there was no need.

They drank silver sake and fell asleep in each other’s arms, without kisses, without farewells.

77th and Ambuscade

T
HE ZOO THAT ONCE SPRAWLED
over Ambuscade Street is empty. The cages are still there, and pigeons have found them acceptable housing, being full of slow, fat lizards and flies like blackberries. But the animals have gone. There are kiosks whose awnings were once gaily gold, and sold frozen green apples and phials of crystal honey—but they are empty now, and the spilled seeds have long sprouted so high that each of them is a small grove, and if children ever ventured here any longer, they would find the apples so cold, so cold and sweet.

At night, the moon sweeps through the paths like a tumbleweed. The stars sit on the benches and smoke corncob pipes and throw petrified peanut shells at the ghosts of giraffes.

There is no mynah bird left to tell you what happened here.

But I will tell you, for I feel we have become friends, you and I. Casimira, beloved of my soul, fought with such weapons as she had: vermin, and insects, and scurrying creatures. Her cannon, her artillery, her cavalry were all these things—oh, the days when the rabbits of Casimira were larger than horses! When her elephantine crows soared high, casting their gargantuan shadows over whole districts! Was there ever a general like her, ever a creature who dared more? How could I not love her? How could I not give myself to her?

The opposition could not bear her strength, and her soldiers seemed to be endless, as ants and bees always seem to be. They felt, Ululiro felt, that they must become as she was if they were to save the city from her green hands.

So the Ambuscade Zoo was confiscated, cordoned off, and the animals in it brought to a building like a palace, but not a palace, where they were penned up, frightened, shaking, cats with cats and fish with fish and like with like. Ululiro herself underwent the procedure, as a gesture of loyalty, and I did love her then, too, in that moment. But my heart was given, given already. Ululiro wept as they cut into her, and into the shark, and her blood is yet upon the door frame of that palace which is not a palace, indelible as the stone.

Thus the soldiers of the opposition became as Casimira: innumerable beasts, stronger limbs were sewn in the place of weak human ones, stronger teeth, more vicious heads. And because they were ashamed, because to become what they became was to become inhuman, the surgeons cut out the larynxes of all the poor souls they altered, so that they could not speak of what had been done to them, or what they would do in service of the war. Perhaps they knew, even then, how uncharitable their cause had become. I cannot say—they do not speak of it now.

I know you weep for these things. I weep for them. And more for those brave, gallant souls of Casimira’s tribe who underwent such procedures secretly, without glory or fellowship, in order to be trusted by the opposition, in order to fight well, who took mule-legs for her sake, and bear-feet, and frog’s heads.

_______

Ambuscade Station is a dreary, dank place since there is no zoo to draw the laughing or the moneyed. The shouts of the not-too-distant Troposphere barely penetrate the gloom. The platform is empty, and spiders crawl along the poles, ticking, clicking, and November can almost understand them, they are close to bees in language, but in the end they are beyond her, their paeans to Casimira private and eight-versed.

She stands, and cannot imagine what time the train might come, but she knows the train is the right thing, she knows the girl with blue hair is nearby, and she trusts, she trusts now, that the golden, liquid hymn vibrating within her will call it like a river-lure.
Please
, she thinks,
oh, please
.

The train arrives like an answer, and the doors slide open. She is surprised. It is a long, silver train, bright, new, gleaming like an arrow shot from the moon.

Would you like to ride upon the Leopard of Little Breezes?
she thinks, and leaps before her stomach can answer.

_______

The carriage is lined in silk, red silk, and women in long, glistening masks the color of blood and thick, layered kimonos stand at small tables set with tea services. The tea is red, and there are lumps of black within. A few men and women sit hunched at the tables, and the women look proprietary, caring, possessive of their charges. They glare at her coldly. They offer her nothing.

She walks slowly down the polished floor of the carriage, and as she passes the women with their poised teakettles, they turn their heads as one to regard her with icy disdain. They smell of metal and cherry pits.

“Get out,” one of them hisses. “You can’t have her.”

November runs and steps into the space between carriages, her heart throbbing.

Where are you, Amaya Sei?

The next carriage is vast, covered in rice terraces stacking up to a genuine sky, a genuine sun. All along the terraces folk stand in red hats fringed in gold, lined up perfectly along the water’s edge, staring down at her with wintry, hurt expressions. She begins to walk under their gaze, but it is very far, the carriage is so long.

“I am thirsty!” she calls out.

A little boy with a jangling hat screams down: “There is nothing for you here! The rice of grief is withered because you have set foot here, where no one wanted you!”

“She wants me!” November cries. “Amaya Sei! I will find her!”

“She is ours! We have made all these things for her! You can’t take her away from us!”

And the villagers of the second car let loose long copper ladles from bows of rice roots, and November runs again, she must run, through the pleasant countryside, and even still the ladles strike her and bruise her and the bees within her shriek in terror. A fusillade crashes into the carriage door as she closes it, and November’s belly flinches with every blow.

She passes through the carriage of cabbages, and the plants recoil from her. One opens and there is a thing inside it, a word, in black print that wavers like skin crawling:
stranger
. It hisses at her, and ink spatters her already-black cheek. She passes through a carriage of pine trees, and men in long black suits scowl and spit upon her. As she passes them, they reach out to clutch at her coat, her breasts, her hair.

“We do not want you,” they slaver.

Amaya Sei,
she thinks,
is this your kingdom? Amaya Sei, is this
your hive?

November passes through a carriage of crusted white rock and hanging reeds. There is a rabbit-man there, a veteran, she thinks, mashing rice in a barrel with a great hammer. She tries to inch past him, but he blocks her way with a withered paw.

“Please, I am trying to reach Amaya Sei.”

“I know, child,” he says mildly.

November is surprised again—veterans do not speak.

“Then don’t stop me. If you want her so much, let me find her. It is the only way you can have her for good.”

“I know that, too.”

“Then I’m confused.” She touches his long, gray ear; he endures her wounded hand. “Were you in the war?”

“What an interesting question. No, you might say, and yes, you might say. You might say I am embroiled in its final skirmishes even now.”

“But you speak.”

“I was not in the war, I said. The mochi needed such care in those years, I could not leave it.”

“Then why have you such ears, such paws?”

The rabbit looks at November with a chagrined, sorrowing expression. “It is what she expected,” he says. “To see a rabbit with a hammer, and rice. I wanted to look right for her. For Amaya Sei. There are still surgeons in the world, and this train has caught a few when they were not looking. As it caught me, on a platform, on a Wednesday morning when the coffee was thick and I was not paying attention. As it caught a war-rabbit, still bound up in its saddle, in the last days of it all, when it bent to snuffle for scraps in the dark. I could not even tell my employers I would not be at my desk. I could not tell my wife or my son that I would be away. I was a candymaker, you know. I like to think the city went sour when I vanished from it, but that is probably not the case.”

“In what sense, candymaker, are you fighting the war even now? I am not a warrior, I have not come to fight you.”

The rabbit leans in close and brushes her nose with his. It is soft, as a rabbit’s ought to be. “Do you not know, even now, what they fought for? There was a time when it was easy to cross the bridges and tunnels into Palimpsest. When you might fall in a river or bleed until you fell through the skin of the earth. When you might dig a hole from China all the way here. But too many came, and the streets were always being renamed, and feral, hungry folk came, with money and polished spears, and they knew words like
empire
, and in killing them half the city was killed, in the ages before ages. All the ways were closed up. Painted over. Barricaded. And there was peace, for so long, so long.

“And then a child named Casimira was born. She should not have been allowed to stay with her family. She was a Braurion. She ought to have been sent out with a new name to haggle with lettuce merchants or bronze-casters. Instead, she grew up in a house that loved her as we love Amaya Sei, and when she was thirteen, she was so lonely that she went to the barricades and began to tear at them with her fingernails. ‘It is not right,’ she said, ‘that all our doors are closed!’

“They stopped her, of course, but Casimira is a creature of will, and she saw in her heart an open city, a city full of the world, full of new people who would love her and new suns in new skies. And she had a billion creatures at her command. Do you know what a thirteen-year-old girl can do when she is alone and frightened and believes she is right? And she wanted it so much. She wanted the immigrants back, and she opened, at last, with a treaty and a pen, under the eye of the shark-general, a single way. And she has waited for twenty years for someone to take it. All we have done and been done to has been for a lonely girl, and there are some of us who say that is enough of grace—that one of us is no longer lonely. We believed that. And now … there is Amaya Sei.”

“Are we the first? The first in all that time to come so near to it?”

The rabbit smirks, wiping rice paste from his mallet. “Casimira wanted to choose, of course. She wanted to pick her triumphs by hand.”

November swallows that. Half of her is proud; she is worthy, she was chosen. Half of her glowers. “If you want Sei you can have her, rabbit. Casimira may choose all she likes, but she cannot leave Palimpsest, she cannot know us beyond it, how we struggle and suffer. How we choose. I chose. And you cannot have Sei without me,” November says.

“I know.”

“Then let me pass.”

“November Aguilar, help me press the rice for the feast of her. Swing the hammer yourself, and I will let you go. I took ears for her, and paws, and I am delayed in my production, because of love, because of need.”

November nods with great solemnity, and steps into the barrel, lifting the hammer over her head and bringing it down hard onto the gluey white masses. It is so heavy, so heavy she can hardly lift it, but she swings and swings until her flesh burns and tears come and she falls back into the paws of the rabbit of the moon, who cleans her with his tongue and sings her the folksongs of the wild glow-worms that live in the Sea of Tranquillity.

_______

There is a blue-haired woman sitting in a wide, empty room lined with grass mats. She wears a long, unlined kimono, and her nakedness shines beneath it. Over her face is a long, red mask.

“Amaya Sei?”

“Yes.” Her voice is dull, almost drunk.

“My name is November.”

“I know. The train told me you were coming.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Partly I drank a great deal of rice wine so that I would not dream, and it did not work. Partly I am afraid.”

“Of what?”

“What is in the next car. I … I think I know. I think I know. I read a book, and I think it had my future written in it. But I am afraid. And I am so tired. It’s so hard, you know … to lie down under so many people. It is like taking on passengers. You get so heavy. So bare. And then there is the baby.” Sei touches her belly absently.

“What is in the car?”

Sei clears her throat and recites through her mask like a tragedian: “
When new conductors are assigned their first train, they
are brought on board on a very cold winter’s night when the
train is stopped and no one lingers in the cars. The senior engineers
gather tightly in the conductor’s cabin. They put the
earnest young man’s hands onto the control console and anoint
them with viscous oil from the engine before pulling loose several
wires and tying them into knots around the man’s fingers. He is then told the secret name of the train, which he may reveal
to no one, and his third finger on his left hand is cut, and his
blood mingled with the oil, which is then returned to circulation
in the engine. In this way the train becomes the beloved of the
conductor.
”

“Oh. I see.”

“I think this train is lonely, and new. It’s like … a child. I think its parents left it when they parted ways, and it was … looking for me. Not me, but someone like me, for a long time. For a mother. For a conductor.”

“Sei, I have to tell you something important.”

“But I don’t know if I can bear enough men inside me, enough women in my mouth, to move with this train forever. So many … it’s just so many. It takes so many. My womb aches already. And I think … I don’t think I will really be myself, when I am the conductor. I think I will forget my name. I think my body will open up and flow along the tracks and become metal, become wire. And that means my child will become metal, and wire, and plastic, and never have a name, and never have eyes to open.”