Palimpsest Read online

  This is the part I like best. When they are so new. Newborn colts are not so innocent.

  The frog pushes them out of her shop like a mother urging her children toward the coach on their first day of school: Never fear, my darlings! All these horrors are yours to survive!

  Is it an accident of the clock that the four of them wheel dazed onto the thoroughfare at the same moment that a wave of crickets come hopping from the factory, bowing a complex binary minuet on their platinum legs? Or perhaps merely poetic? Casimira presses vermin beneath her porcelain and chitin molds, Orlande presses them beneath red yarn, and out they go into the city together, new and raw and empty as a saucepan. It is an admirable symmetry.

  The four of them stand in a street cross-hatched with desiccated lily leaves, as though they did not know that one may be crushed there, staring dumbly at each other, a herd of idiot gazelles. They have not let go of each others hands; they cannot bear it: not yet, not yet! Their feet, benumbed, are overrun by crickets with glass wings.

  There are obvious things to say, but none of the four of them can find a voice buried in their ribs. Will you stand there forever? Will you become a piece of statuary on which children will swing and clover will grow?

  No-here is a gilded cart drawn by twin herons, their long black legs rustling the street-leaves. Out of the green-curtained window the head of a third heron, spectacularly turquoise, extends, eyes narrowed to avian slits.

  “Out of the way! I shall trample you thoroughly, see if I won't!”

  The cart-herons squawk harshly and swing wildly around the quartet, galloping onto 16th Street with long, graceless strides. Eight hands shake free of each other; the men clutch their elbows in nervous agitation. The girl with blue hair stares at them with dark eyes.

  “Which way to the trains?” she whispers to her comrades. Wrong question, child! You mean to say: Where am I? Who are all of you? What has happened to us? But no one ever asks after sensible things. The others shake their heads-they cannot help her. And so she runs in the direction that seems best, turning as sharply as the herons onto a brightly glowing avenue that shears off from Hieratica like a broken branch.

  Abandoned, the others scatter like ashes. The road stretches before and beyond, lit by streetlamps with swollen pumpkin-globes, and the gutters run with a sudden, utter rain.

  PART I :

  INCIPIT LIBER DE NATURIS BESTIARUM

  ONE

  THE FLAYED HORSE

  Sei woke with the grassy, half-rotten smell of ryokan-tatami in her nose and her face streaked with tears. She immediately tried to go back to sleep, to catch the herons, fading already, but alas—sleep lost is sleep lost. She felt a weight on her wrists, like the memory of heavy bracelets. Her second thought was to find Sato Kenji, to shake him and bite his mouth and ask him if he had written a book about the city, too, if she could press it against the other, which lay still in her backpack, cold and black. When would he fly north again to Tokyo on their sleek white serpent? Tomorrow? Never? In what car might he wait for her? Useless, she decided, to ask.

  She dressed without thinking about it much, took two rice-balls—one stuffed with salted plum, one with salmon—and Sato Kenji's little book with her, and fled the milling, noisy hostel into the city. Kyoto was designed on the pattern of a Go board, by imaginative and impish urban planners who surely drank a great deal. As she progressed from square to square, staring vacantly at the thick cypress bark rooftops and leering Fu dogs, Sei felt strange, floating. She was a smooth white disc, clapped on all sides by slippery black pieces, reflecting the sky, helpless, with the Shinkansen on one hand and the endless pavilions of Kyoto on the other.

  She chose the Silver Pavilion out of all the temples. It had been her mother's favorite, and so, like an inheritance, was hers. It was shaded in autumn leaves so bright the trees seemed to bleed. The persimmons were so golden they hurt her eyes, and the sun stabbed at her through the blazing fruit. She had a terrible dry taste in her mouth, as though she had drunk too much, though she had had nothing but water since Tokyo.

  The temple grounds were deserted. She settled onto the grass a ways off from the great silver temple. She watched it, how dark and mottled its silver leaf was, centuries of tarnish which the monks, in their inscrutable perambulations, had never polished, settling on the holiness of obscured metal. It looked like the crouched and looming house of a succubus from one of her mother's books. She almost expected some yellow-eyed monster with wings of patchworked sin to snap open the door and screech some infernal koan at her. Yet Sei liked the mossy, irritable temple, which seemed honest, unflappable, like an old, hunchbacked elephant.

  She opened Kenji's book on her lap and flipped through the pages. She did not want to read this book from start to finish, or rather, she thought perhaps it did not want her to. Instead she practiced the art of bibliomancy trusting the book to show her what it wanted her to know.

  In Osaka, I heard a very strange account of the antique initiation rituals of conductors. I was told by a retired man who was adamant I not reveal his name that before the war, when new conductors were assigned their first train, they were brought on board on a very cold winter's night when the train was stopped and no one lingered in the cars. The senior engineers gathered tightly in the conductor's cabin. They put the earnest young man's hands onto the control console and anointed them with viscous oil from the engine before pulling loose several wires and tying them into knots around the man's fingers. He was then told the secret name of the train, which he could reveal to no one. They cut into the third finger of his left hand, mingling his blood with the oil, which was then returned to circulation in the engine. In this way the train became the beloved of the conductor, and the man who told me this story said that it felt very much like a grave wedding service.

  Sei's hands throbbed, feeling the open, oil-spattered wires beneath her own hands, a phantom console alive beneath her. The wind picked up and rustled her blue hair, blowing it over her cheeks. She might have remained in such a pose until the sun slid away below the tin rooftops, her hands frozen over the book, had a young woman not sat down next to her without warning, still dressed in her school uniform, her hair hanging in a long, loose braid. Sei started and scowled, but she uttered nothing, as manners demanded.

  “It's funny,” the young student said casually, in the authoritative, overeager tone of a local girl speaking to a tourist, her accent unmistakably Kyoto. She turned to Sei, her face open and attentive as a cat's. “The Golden Pavilion is the famous one, but it only ever looked yellow to me. It's ugly, just kind of garish. All that gold, and it just looks like yellow paint. But the Silver Pavilion … nobody cares, its not a big tourist draw, and if you didn't know, you might not even think it was silver—the tarnish is so thick it matches the cypress bark on the roof. Doesn't it look sad and run down? But it seems real to me, and the Golden Pavilion seems … well, it's belligerent, thinking it's so beautiful. Arrogant old bitch.”

  Sei blinked.

  “My name is Yumiko,” the girl said helpfully.

  Sei frowned further. “I haven't been to the Golden Pavilion yet,” she said, handing over her grudging answer like bus fare. Yumiko shook her dark head.

  “If you do, you'll see what I mean.”

  Yumiko was silent then. She stared at Sei for a long while before grinning, wiping her palms on a blue plaid skirt, and extending her tongue slowly, as far as it could reach, nearly grazing the tip of her delicate chin. Sei gaped; blood rushed to her cheeks. She saw it there, on the red flesh of the girl's tongue, whipped with wind: Kenji's mark, the grid of lines, the map, blazing blue-bright.

  “What is that?” she cried, leaping up from the grass. The black book tumbled to the ground. “Tell me!”

  Yumiko closed her mouth with a gentle little sound. “Don't you know?” she said, her brow creased as a page.

  “No, of course not, how could I?”

  The girl stood, her braid slipping entirely loose, and stood very close, s
o close they might have kissed. She reached for Sei's blouse and began to slide the buttons from their stitched eyelets. Sei pushed her away, but Yumiko smiled.

  “Please,” she murmured.

  Yumiko opened the crisp black shirt like a theater's curtains. There, on Sei's skin, were the strange dark lines, snaking across her sternum, arcing slightly onto the curve of her breasts. It seemed as though a great insect had attached itself to her, to suckle and grow.

  Yumiko did not step away. She cradled Sei's face in her manicured hand and leaned back, stretching, a smug, satisfied cat.

  “I would like to be a novice here,” she said airily “I would like to live in the temple and drink bamboo tea every day, and eat only seven grains of rice until I was thinner than the Buddha and twice as beautiful. I would leave clean water for the sacred cats and sweep the rushes and the red leaves aside in the fall. I would smell the sake breweries in the winter, and eat one persimmon a year, on the Emperors birthday. Every morning and every evening, I would cut a square from one of my kimonos and with it I would polish the walls until the tarnish fell away like an old woman's hair, until it gleamed like water. After a year I would be naked and polish the walls with my own hair, and under my body it would look like a house hollowed out of the moon.”

  Sei stared.

  “What happened to me?” she whispered. “Who are you?”

  “What happens to any of us? Novices all.”

  “That's not an answer! How did you know? Just walking up to a stranger in a temple, how did you know I had that thing on me?”

  “It's not a thing, you know. It's … like a ticket. And once you've bought your ticket, and been to the circus, ridden the little red train, then you can sort of see other people who've done it, too. They… walk a certain way. Smell a certain way. Their whole body becomes like an accent. And you always recognize your own accent. I recognized you.”

  Sei's cheeks burned. She looked at the grass, and then at the sky. She didn't want to ask, like some stupid club girl begging for drugs, or a child begging for the candy she just knows will make her life complete.

  “How do I get back there?”

  Yumiko looked at her sideways, puzzled, as though Sei should know this, as though she had asked how to count to ten—basic stuff, kid! Who brought you up? But Yumiko sidled close and lowered her voice until it was no more than a dragonfly's cough. She let her lips brush Sei's ear. “Come with me. Peregrine and 125th is on my tongue. I'll meet you there. We'll take the subway to the end of the world!”

  She kissed her then, and the Silver Pavilion glowed dully behind them. Yumiko slid her hand under Sei's skirt and pressed her fingers against her urgently, furtively—there was no one around them, but the sun was frosty and white on them, and they were so bare. Sei opened her legs to allow the girl's hand inside her and shut her eyes against the warm air, the red leaves, the silver temple. She could not draw breath for the taste of sassafras and rum in Yumiko's mouth, the sharpness of her small white teeth. Sei felt herself flip over—white to black, disappearing into the board, lost.

  SEI DREAMS AGAINST HER TATAMI that night of an intersection garlanded with black flags fastened to string with clothespins of mother-of-pearl. On the north corner: a cartographer s studio. Pots of ink hide in every crevice, parchment spreads out over dozens of tables. A Casimira pigeon perches in a baleen cage and trills out the hours faithfully. Its droppings are pure squid-ink, and a little tin trough collects them dutifully Imogen and Philomena have run this place since the last cartographer went mad and began eating telegraph tape like pasta. Philomena with her silver compass draws the maps, her exactitude radiant and unerring, while Imogen illuminates them with exquisite miniatures, dancing in the spaces between streets. They each wear dozens of watches on their forearms.

  This is the second stop, after the amphibian salon, of Palimpsests visitors, and especially of her immigrants, for whom the two women are especial patrons. Everyone needs a map, and Philomena supplies them: subway maps and street maps and historical maps and topographical maps, false maps and correct-to-the-minute maps and maps of cities far from this one. Look-for this lost child she has made a folding pamphlet that shows the famous sights: the factory, the churches, the salon, the memorial. Follow it, girl, and you will be safe!

  Each morning, Philomena places her latest map on the windowsill like a fresh pie. Slowly, as it cools, it opens along its own creases, its corners like wings, and takes halting flight, flapping over the city with susurring strokes. It folds itself, origami-exact, in midair: it has papery eyes, inky feathers, vellum claws.

  It stares down the long avenues, searching for mice. This is the life cycle of Palimpsest fauna.

  Yumiko leans against the door post, holding her arms out like a sister who had never hoped to see her dear one again. She is not wearing her schoolgirls dress any longer, but a red scrap that clings to her waist like a spool of yarn pulled tighter than breathing. With a local girl s surety she guides Sei inside-a little scalloped bell chimes, and Imogen looks up from her parchments with a stern face, her black hair soft around a neck just slightly too long for a woman to wear in company.

  “The trains,” Sei murmurs. “I need a map of the trains. A… schedule.”

  Imogen produces a tiny booklet, hardly larger than her hand, with a design on the cover like an infinite tangle of wires compacted into a disc. Yumiko pays her with a fingernail cut quickly and fed to the pigeon. The cartographer smiles, and when she does, her face breaks open, smooths and unfolds into a heartbreaking beauty.

  Her map clutched to her breast, Sei runs out into the street, her hair streaming behind her like a smokestacks exhalation. She looks desperately around her, her breath quick and hoarse.

  She finds it on the south corner: lit globes, covered with thick wrought-iron serpents which break the light, of a subway entrance. Trains barrel along at the bottom of the stairs every fifteen minutes. On the glass platform below stands Adalgiso the Apostle-Fingered, playing his viola with six fingers on each hand. He is bald, with a felt hat that does not sit quite right on his head. Beside him is Assia, the Nymph of the Phonograph. She is singing tenor, her smoke-throated voice pressing long kisses against his strings. His playing is so quick and lovely that the trains stop to listen, inclining on the rails and opening their doors to catch the glissandos spilling from him. His instrument case lies open at his feet, and each passenger who takes the Marginalia Line brings his fee-single pearls, dropped one by one into the leather case until it overflows like a pitcher of milk. In the corners of the station, cockroaches with fiber-optic wings scrape the tiles with their feet, and their scraping keeps the beat for the player and his singer.

  Sei dashes down the steps into darkness and the metallic smell of the subterranean palaces of transportation before Yumiko can catch her. She stops short before the viola player and his tenor, and their eyes meet like magnets clicking together over the vibrating strings of his instrument.

  Miles away, on a street planked in cedar, a beekeeper cries out-her vision has gone dark, and all she can smell is the wet blackness of the underground.

  TWO

  THE UNHAPPY ROOK

  Things which are gone in the morning: sleep, darkness, grief, the moon. Women. Dreams.

  November sat cross-legged in her bedroom, a bare, white place she would never have thought to compare to her stacked hives but which nevertheless was cousin to them, those sixteen calm, angular spaces.

  On her lap was a wide blank book with rough-chewed edges, which she would never have thought to compare to her fingers, her thrice-dyed, badly cut hair, her chapped lips, but which nevertheless was sister to these things: the woman, the raw flesh, the small white room. She was possessed of a self as bare as the month her parents met, the month of her own name, a core fashioned from stark wood and a prescience of snow.

  In the book she had written, hesitantly. Her handwriting had been long ago corrupted: the vagaries of overzealous typing and an adolescent passion for calligraph
y. What remained was a ruin of pens pressed too deeply and sweeping capitals too uncertain to be majestic. She had sketched out the morning list without thinking, desperate to list her morning bed, empty as a coffee cup, used up, dry, to fold it into a kind of column that made sense of the depression where once Xiaohui lay, which was still warm with her.

  The keeping of lists was for November an exercise kin to the repeating of a rosary. She considered it neither obsessive nor compulsive, but a ritual, an essential ordering of the world into tall, thin jars containing perfect nouns. Enough nouns connected one to the other create a verb, and verbs had created everything, had skittered across the face of the void like pebbles across a frozen pond. She had not yet created a verb herself, but the cherry-wood cabinet in the hall contained book after book, jar after jar, vessel upon vessel, all brown as branches, and she had faith.

  And so she did not think that she was lonely, or as her mother would have said, drawn up into herself like an old turtle, simply that she was absorbed in a greater task than the wrangling of humans and the collecting of large houses or automobiles. She moved in long lines between her books, along her lists like ranked soldiers, administrating, shaping, carving with her quick, corruptible hands.

  November tasted the ink of her pen lightly. Acorns and copper. Ash.

  She had dreamed heavily and the dream clung to her still— November had always been a prodigy of dreams. Her father, a librarian, had made her write them down, and perhaps this had been the beginning of the slim brown books which now numbered so very many. She dreamed in color, more than color, in shades of gold and scarlet impossible in the waking world. She dreamed in languages she did and did not know, she dreamed strange and wonderful faces, narratives of recursive complexity, and her recall was meticulous, detailed, perfect as a list.