Palimpsest Read online

  “I'm not sure how that's any of your business.”

  “It isn't, of course. I like them, too. I own a car, I have no need to ride the Shinkansen back and forth from Tokyo to Kyoto like some kind of Bedouin. It's an expensive habit. But love is love, and love is compulsion. I must, and I do.”

  He gently tapped the brass clasp on his briefcase and drew out a slender book, bound in black, its title embossed in silver:

  A HISTORY OF TRAIN TRAVEL ON THE JAPANESE ISLES,

  by Sato Kenji

  Sei ran her hand over the cover as she had done the window glass. Her skin felt hot, too small for her bones. He opened the book—the pages were thick and expensive, so that the stamp of the press had almost made little valleys of the kanji, the cream-colored paper rising slightly above the ink. Kenji took her hand in his. His fingernails were very clean. He read to her with the low vibratory tones of shared obsession.

  A folktale current in Hokkaido just after the war and passed from conductor to conductor held that the foor of heaven is laced with silver train tracks, and the third rail is solid pearl. The trains that ran along them were fabulous even by the standards of the Shinkansen of today: carriages containing whole pine forests hung with golden lanterns, carriages full of rice terraces, carriages lined in red silk where the meal service brought soup, rice-balls, and a neat lump of opium with persimmon tea poured over it in the most delicate of cups. These trains sped past each other, utterly silent, carrying each a complement of ghosts who clutched the branches like leather handholds, and plucked the green rice to eat raw, and fell back insensate into the laps of women whose faces were painted red from brow to chin. They never stop, never slow, and only with great courage and grace could a spirit slowly progress from car to car, all the way to the conductor's cabin, where all accounts cease, and no man knows what lies therein.

  In Hokkaido, where the snow and ice are so white and pure that they glow blue, it is said that only the highest engineers of Japan Railways know the layout of the railroads on the floor of heaven. They say that those exalted engineers are working slowly, generation by generation, to lay the tracks on earth so that they mirror exactly the tracks in heaven. When this is done, those marvelous carriages will fall from the sky, and we may know on earth, without paying the terrible fare of death, the gaze of the red women, the light of the forest lanterns, and the taste of persimmon tea.

  Sato Kenji looked up from his book and into Sei's eyes. She knew her face was flushed and red—she did not care. Her hands shook, her legs ached. She could not harness her breath. She did not need these trains for simple transport either, but longed for them, the cold rush of their passing as she stood on the wind-whipped platform, the slink of doors sliding closed behind her as the train accepted her as its own. That ache had begun long before Kenji had come on board. She felt their hands touching, their train-haunted hands. She took his book from his easy grip and held it to her, her heart beating against it, as if to read it through bone and flesh and leather, directly, needfully, ventricle pressed to page. A kind of knowledge passed between them—she would not return it, and he would not ask for it back.

  Instead—and later she would wonder why she did it, why such a thing would have occurred to her, and will never be able to say—she took Sato Kenji by their linked hands and led him to the rickety, shivering place between the carriage cars, where the wind keened and crooned through the cracks in the grating and the white walls gave way to chrome. She kissed the gray of his hair. The space between them was thick, crackling, and though she told herself that it was unwise, a reckless thing, she moved through that wild, manic air and into him, his mouth, his skin.

  He buried his face in her neck and, as though she weighed nothing, hefted her up against the carriage door, her blue hair flattening against the glass. Sei let out a small cry, like the whistle of an engine, and ground against him, shifting to let him enter her, his breath warm and even against her collarbone. His palm was pressed against her back, the black mark hot there, a sear, a brand. Sei clutched his book against his back and shut her eyes, feeling the train jerk and jolt against her. She felt enormous, cracked open, as though she had taken all of the great train into herself, as though the shuddering, scholarly thrusts of Sato Kenji were the loving gestures of her beloved Shinkansen, only guided by the man with the briefcase, guided up and out of him, guided into her, guided across the silver tracks of heaven.

  TWO

  CITIES OF THE BEES

  There is a place on the interstate where the last black fingernails of Los Angeles fall away and the whole of the San Joaquin valley spreads out below the mountains, impossibly golden, checkered in green and wheat and strawberry fields and orange groves and infinitely long rows of radishes, where the land is shriven of all the sins of palm-bound, artifice-mad Southern California.

  November knew that place, knew it so well that her bare foot on the gas pedal throbbed as it approached, as her little green car, heavy with produce, crested the last rise in the tangled highways of the Grapevine, and the light began to change, gratefully, from raw, livid brume to a gold like the blood of saints. Her throat caught as the great, soft fields unfolded below her, yawning, stretching all the way to San Francisco and further still, to the redwoods and Oregon, all the way up.

  She had often imagined, as a girl, when her mother drove back and forth between the two great cities of the west, that I-5 went on simply forever, past Canada to the North Pole, where the center divider would be wrapped up in ice and the bridges cut out of arctic stone. Even now, charting the coast in her own right, she sometimes thought of ignoring the off-ramps and speeding up and up, to the cold stars and fox-haunted glaciers. But in the end, it was always the city of St. Francis that stopped her, and the rest of the world was lost behind a curtain of fog and gnarled red trees.

  She could never escape the feeling of strange Spanish holiness that California bestowed—the cities named for saints, angels, benediction. The capital itself a sacrament. Like communion wafers she tasted the places on her tongue, the red roof tiles blood-vivid. Her own blood bisected the state, her mother, retired, warming her bones against the southern sea, her father, dead ten years, buried in the wet northern moss.

  They met in the south, on a dock far out in the frothing turquoise Pacific, her young mother in rolled-up olive overalls with a great long knife in her hands, slaughtering a small blue shark she had caught by accident, trying for salmon. She was bloody to her elbows, her clothes a ruin, arterial spray across her cheek. Her father tied his little sailboat to the pier and she looked up at him over a carcass of silver and scarlet. They had both laughed.

  Long before he died, November's father was gone, up north, away from his wife and the sea. They could not bear each other, in the end, and perhaps a thing begun in blood and death and salt must end that way. They could not live with less than three mountain ranges to separate them. And between them they strung their daughter, and like a shining black bead counting out refutations of love, she slowly slid back and forth, back and forth. Finally, she had settled on her father's country, and left the loud blues and golds of the south, unable to bear them herself.

  She did not live in San Francisco, of course. She could not afford it. But she was drawn to it, rising up from the bay like the star of the sea, resting in a shell, all blue veils and promises of absolution. And at night it was a mass of light at the end of all those bridges, all those highways, looking east with huge black eyes.

  November kept her father's grave in Benicia, holding tenuously to the town's boldly proclaimed blessings, and with the grave she tended sixteen hexagonal beehives. She had named all the queens. She kept for them pristine and intricate gardens to flavor their feet, and the honey in turn, and it was this golden science that occupied the small and guarded territory of her interior, even as she traveled the long, slow road out of the desert, her trunk full of sleeping yucca bulbs and infant jacarandas, their roots bound up in earth and linen. Even as she found herself turning from t
he last scrap of highway and into the interminable column of cars creeping across the great iron mass of the Bay Bridge.

  How we are willing to wait, she thought, like a line of penitent adulterers at a white altar, to be allowed into the city. How we gather at this dull gray gate, knowing that the golden one is a lie. It is only there for show. The faithful know that God lives nowhere near gold. The tourists gawk at the orange cathedral, while the wise gather here, in the low and long, waiting patiently to hand over their coins and be permitted, for a moment, to look upon, but not touch, the mass of jewels and offerings in which San Francisco wallows.

  November drove slowly in, and the water below her was black. She sought out Chinatown reflexively found a shop cashiered by a spectacled biology student which sold star anise and scallions. She loved Chinatown at three in the morning— the reds and greens were muted, shadowed into black by the gaps between streetlamps. It was secret, lonely; every pink neon character seemed brave against the dark.

  It took skill, a mapmaker's skill, to find an open restaurant that would not turn a lone woman away, sure that her cup of coffee and wonton soup are hardly worth the effort of clearing a table. But on that night of all nights, November needed only a half an hour's cartomancy before she found one, and the starchy benevolence of a plate full of steaming soup dumplings, braised pork, and peppered oysters.

  The booth was hard, cracked vinyl the color of a Chevrolet interior left in the sun for twenty years. A television mounted in the ceiling corner flashed the news from Beijing without subtitles. Thus, her attention wandered and fell on a young woman in the next booth over sipping soup, her bright blue eyes belying Chinese features. The two women watched each other for a space, the only customers in an empty café, until finally, the other woman placed one delicate finger against her iris and deftly slid the contact lens aside like a curtain, quirking a smile as the wrinkled lens showed black beneath.

  When November tries to remember this night a year from now, she will think the woman's name was Xiaohui. She will be almost sure she can remember the ring of the name, falling into her ear like a little copper bell. She will remember that they shared dumplings, and that the woman was a Berkeley student, a historian who knew the names of every one of Mohammed's grandchildren, and could recite the drifting census data of the ancient city of Karakorum, where the Khans raised tents of scarlet.

  November had only her bees. They suddenly seemed paltry to her, poor and needy.

  “Tell me about the cities of the bees,” Xiaohui said, her head cupped in one hand. “Tell me how big around the queen's belly is. Tell me what their honey tastes like.”

  November laughed, and the owner's wife scowled over a tray of tomorrow's cookies.

  “I gave them orchids this year,” November said shyly, “orchids and belladonna and poppies. You can only alter honey a little, really—it tastes like itself, and only faintly of anything else, as though it remembers, with difficulty, white and purple petals, thick greenery, woody stems. Last year I kept them to a patch of red lilies and lavender. I like… I like to use brightly colored flowers, even though I suppose it doesn't make any difference.”

  Xiaohui arched her eyebrows, and November blushed. She reached into her purse, drew out a small jar with a lily stamped on the lid, and passed it over the plastic table like a spy relinquishing her secrets. The blue-eyed woman dipped her thumb into the murky honey and licked it quickly from her skin, closing her eyes, pressing her lips together, so as not to lose a drop. She took November's hand in hers as she tasted, lacing their fingers.

  The fortune cookies came, not wrapped in cellophane but fresh from the oven, sitting greasily on the check. They cracked into them, and Xiaohui nodded in the direction of the owner's wife.

  “My mother makes them every day,” she whispered. “She writes nonsense-fortunes, whatever she is thinking about when she's baking: The fog is too thick today! Jiangxi Province had proper mist. I am allergic to milk, that sort of thing. People think she's crazy, but they buy the cookies by the dozen.”

  “What do you think?”

  Xiaohui shrugged. “She's my mother. Jiangxi Province did have nicer weather.”

  November glanced down at the scrap of white paper in her hand. It read:

  Is not my daughter sweet?

  But she was not, November found, when she kissed her outside the restaurant, under the washed-out constellations. She tasted like flour, flour and salt. Their breasts pressed tight together between two fog-dewed overcoats, the ache of it half-painful and half-pleasant. Xiaohui took her to a little apartment above a grocery store, and they fell together just inside the doorframe, awkwardly, like great beasts too eager for niceties. She bit November's lower lip, and there was blood between them then.

  “You need me,” said Xiaohui breathlessly, pulling November over her, sliding hands under her belt to claw and knead. “You need me.”

  “Don't you mean ‘I need you’?” whispered November in the girl's ear.

  “No,” she sighed, arching her back, tipping her chin up, making herself easy to kiss, easy to fall into, easy to devour. “You'll see. You'll see.”

  As Xiaohui drifted to sleep, one arm thrown over her now black and honest eyes, the other lying open and soft on her thin student's sheets, November stared up into the dark, awake. This was not such a new thing in her ordered world—relationships required such vigilance, such attention. You had to hold them together by force of will, and other people took up so much space, demanded so much time. It was exhausting. This was better, the occasional excursion into Chinatown, into the city of St. Francis, who after all watched over wild and wayward animals. This was better, but she slept fitfully afterward.

  November stroked the inside of Xiaohui's thigh gently, a mark there, terribly stark, like a tattoo: a spidery network of blue-black lines, intersecting each other, intersecting her pores, turning at sharp angles, rounding out into clear and unbroken skin. It looked like her veins had darkened and hardened, organized themselves into something more than veins, determined to escape the borders of their mistress's flesh. In her sleep, Xiaohui murmured against her lover's neck, something about the grain yields of the farms in fourteenth-century Avignon.

  “It looks like a streetmap,” November whispered, pressing her hand tenderly against it, so that Xiaohui's pale skin seemed whole and unbroken.

  THREE

  THE DREAMLIFE

  OF LOCK AND KEY

  There was nothing in Oleg's apartment that was not locked away, safer than treasure, safer than a heart. Even the thin light from a tall and dusty lamp, tinged brown at the edges like an old apple, was bound and locked, a key turned, bolts slung firm. It could not leave this room, it would shine only here, for Oleg, and only for him.

  Oleg was a locksmith. He had always thought the term overwrought, implying that he spent his days torturously pouring molten brass into molds banging out locks on some infernal anvil. It implied a burlier, more archaic man than he. Anyway, most of his public business was in keys, not locks. His private business was collection.

  Keys did not really fascinate him, though he collected them as well, matching them carefully, not to the lock that was made for them, modern to modern, brass to brass, keycard to slot, as a common locksmith might, but to the ones he felt they yearned for, deep in their pressed metal hearts. He possessed a rusted iron key with an ornate lion's grimace at its head, slung alongside a gleaming hotel's card-slot lock, its red and green lights dead. He had laid an everyday steel housekey against the rarest of locks, real gold, with lilies raised up on its surface, a complex system of bolts and tumblers concealed within. Only Oleg had heard their cries for each other. Only Oleg knew their silent grief that they could not join.

  He remembered Novgorod only vaguely, where he was born, where he had been a boy, briefly. It did not seem to Oleg that he could have been a boy long. Surely he would remember more of it, if it had been an important time. He had only images, as though he had once gone on vacation there—snaps
hots, postcards, souvenirs. He was born, properly, when they left, wafting like tea-steam through Vienna, Naples, and into New York. They had gone silently from those places, trying hard not to disturb the air. In his memory he searched for a single word his mother might have said to him on the trains and ships between the two mismatched slabs of his life. He could only summon her cold white hands and the aquamarine that hung from her neck on a golden chain, clear and hard, swinging back and forth to the rhythm of the train. Snapshots. Souvenirs.

  Yet Novgorod hung in his heart, an alien thing, hidden as a key. He could recall dimly the quicksilver bleed of the Volkhov River, pale cupolas under the snow like great garlic bulbs. But those churches were all nameless to him—he could not pluck the saints who owned them from his forgetful heart, and for this sin he did guilty penance among his locks. Everything was white and gray in that Novgorod-of-the-mind, even the violinists on Orlovskaya Street, men without blood, playing fiddles of ash. This white pendulum swung within him, even as he bent with his tools to locks more beautiful and complicated than memory.

  He lived in New York, but the New York of Oleg Sadakov was not the New York of others, and he alone ministered this secret place, stamped onto the back of the city like a maker's mark. He crept and crawled through it, listening, for Oleg could listen very well, better than rabbits or horses or safe-crackers.

  The trouble was, New York was famous. Oleg had even seen it in Novgorod—a city so often photographed, filmed, recorded that there was truly no one who did not know its name, its outline, the shape of its body. So many books had been written about it, so many people had loved it and lived in it until their clothes smelled of its musk, so many had eaten its food and drunk its water and extolled its virtues like a gospel of the new world, that it had, with infinitesimal slowness, ceased to be, melted into vapor and dust. What rose now on the island of Manhattan was no more than the silver-white echo of all those millions of words expended on its vanity, the afterimage of all those endless photographs and movies which broadcast it to anyone who might live ignorant of its majesty. A monster, a fairy-tale mirror, glittering but false, a doppelgänger, a golem with New York City engraved roughly on its forehead.