Palimpsest Read online

  “In the land of the dead,” she rasped, weeds tangling up her tongue, “a boy who was run over by a black automobile fell in love with the Princess of Cholera, who had a very bright yellow dress and yellow hair and shiny yellow shoes. The boy chased after her down all the streets of the dead, past the storefronts and the millineries, past the paper mills and the municipal parks. But the princess would not stop running, for cholera is swift as anything. Finally, he caught her in the stillborn slums, where those who have not got anything of life to make a house out of dwell. And she said to him: ‘I will never love you, for you are not one of my people.’ So the boy painted his face white and gray, and wore a yellow rainslicker for her sake, and bled from his mouth for her love. But still she would not look at him with sweetness, and so he was made to go to the city well and draw up the fouled water so that he might forget her, and himself, and all things save the hospice where such unfortunates sleep who cannot find peace even behind the doors of the world.” She kissed his cheek, and ever after he would feel the mark. “So you see? It will all come out right.”

  “I don't really see. That's a terrible story.”

  “But he wasn't her family. There can be no real love between strangers. I love you, and that is enough.”

  But he had loved the brown-eyed girl anyway, though he never touched her, even once. Lyudmila said that this was the way of the world, but he turned his back to her in their thin little bed, and she had not been able to stop him, being as she was and not other than that.

  He told no one of her except the doctor who dispensed the pills which did nothing to banish her, and she promised that she had not told her friends about him either. She seemed to grow up more or less as he did, even though she should have been older. Still, she had not chased off his girlfriends or even scowled at the occasional boyfriend or thrown jealous fits on the fire escape. She just sat on the footboard as she always had, and if there was no one in his bed and he could not sleep, she would slip in beside him and he would wake up with wrinkled fingers and drenched pillows.

  “I love you, Mila,” he said to the empty room. He did not ask where she went; it seemed like bad manners, and folk who have lived together as long as Oleg and Lyudmila rely on manners.

  “You have something on your tummy,” she said as he was brushing his teeth after what could hardly have been called breakfast—still he could not stand the taste of stale red tea on his teeth. She sat pertly on the sink, where she could daintily spit out her water rather than letting it run down her chin.

  He looked down—beneath the slight fur there was something. He pulled up the skin of his stomach. Around his navel, brachiating out like a compass rose, were long, spindly black lines, crooked and aimless. He could almost make out writing above them, but it hurt his eyes to peer so close at something upside down. It was the mark that the other Lyudmila had had on her neck—he might pretend he had spilled ink or something, but he recognized it— had he not tasted it, kissed it?

  “Maybe you shouldn't be kissing strange girls,” she said archly. “You could catch something.”

  He rubbed at it a little—it stayed, of course. He hadn't really thought it would come off. Like Mila, he supposed, he was stuck with it. He shrugged. It didn't much matter. A man who has learned to live with a ghost can live with a scar.

  “Mila,” he said, drawing a tired breath, “drop dead.”

  She smirked, and spat into the sink. He followed suit.

  It was nine days later. Afterward, he would count on his fingers to arrive at the number, sure he was right, within one or two. He'd been called uptown in the stiff kind of cold that growls at engines and whips them cruelly A young man stamped his feet outside a tall brownstone, blowing into his slender fingers and tugging at a knit cap. Oleg's breath puffed in the air as he knelt to his work.

  Lock-outs: the small, sweet, reliable lost souls who made up the bulk of his business with their forgetful habits and careless keys. He felt fatherly about them, even when it was a septuagenarian in his bathrobe and a cold pipe. Poor kittens, locked into the world.

  Oleg looked into the lock, looking deep, as was his habit, looking as he looked into his sister's eyes, through the imagined telescoping locks of his interior estates, into the kid's kitchen door just past the threshold, and the chipped white bedroom door, and out of the brownstone into the next, all the way to Brooklyn and still further, to the foaming Atlantic nosing at the strand. He listened as to a seashell, for the lock to cry out its secret grief. It wept; he comforted.

  “Thanks for getting here so fast,” the young man said, shoving his hands into his black jacket pockets. He was tall and narrow, dark Spanish eyes, the opposite of soft, generous Lyudmila with her great blond mane.

  “My shop isn't far.” Oleg shrugged. “And we can't have you turning stray and pawing at neighbors’ doors for fish.”

  The young man snorted laughter. They talked in the way one checks one's watch on the train platform or blows on one's fingers: something to do, a way to keep warm. The boy's name was Gabriel. He was an architecture student. He built great miserly things that held locks gingerly fiercely.

  The door popped gratefully open and Gabriel gave a yelp of relief not unlike a puppy seeing his master come home, miraculously, from the frightening world. His black jacket flopped open and Oleg could see, snaking up over his collarbone, a fine mark, as if painted by a calligrapher, black and spindled, branching out as if searching for new flesh to conquer.

  Oleg leapt up. He grabbed the man's shirt before he could stop himself, but Gabriel did not protest, nor even seem surprised. He just smiled, an affable, lopsided smile utterly unlike the ghastly, knowing glances to which Oleg had all his life been subject.

  “Go ahead,” the boy whispered. “It's okay.”

  And so Oleg, his hands shaking and wind-reddened, unbuttoned the crisp workday shirt and spread it open, the mark there, livid, alive, darker than dreams.

  “Do you know what it is?” Oleg said softly.

  Gabriel bent his head to catch the locksmith's stare and lifted his chin with two brown fingers.

  “Don't you?”

  “No, I … it was there—”

  “When you woke up? Yeah.”

  “Tell me, please.”

  “I can do better.”

  And the architect kissed him, very gently, the way a widow kisses the feet of a statue. His tongue tasted of orange candy. Oleg thought he ought to have been startled, affronted, even, but twenty years in the school of his sister had permanently excised the ought from him. He stiffened, unsure, and the strangeness of an unshaven cheek against his own habitually haggard skin struck him, an oddly innocent thing, more naked even than Lyudmila's scented face. His hand was still on Gabriel's chest, and he thought, though such a thing could not be, not really, that the black lines beneath his palm burned.

  Oleg sighed into the circuit of the architect's arms, imagining Gabriel as a great house, elbows unfolding in perfect angles to take him in, to cover him in rafters and drywall, to keep the rain from his head and the cold from his bones. They stood thus as the air thinned in a sudden certainty of snow to come, and kissed a second time on the doorstep before the boy led him in, through the kitchen door just past the threshold, through the chipped white bedroom door, through the tall, thin brownstone, and still further.

  When Gabriel entered him, Oleg thought he might break into pieces with the pain of it, but he did not, of course. He opened, his insides unfolding to allow another human within him. He whimpered at the bare walls, trying not to seem unprepared for the strength of it. But Gabriel smoothed his hair and kissed the back of his neck and whispered:

  “It's ok, it's ok, Oleg. I need you so much. You have no idea.”

  ZARZAPARRILLA STREET IS PAVED with old coats. Layer after layer of fine corduroy and felt and wool the colors of coffee and ink. Those having business here must navigate with pole and gondola, ever so gently thrusting aside the sleeves and lapels and weedy ties, fluttering like seawee
d, lurching as though some unlunar tide compelled them. The gondolas are rimmed in balsam and velvet, and they are silent through the depthless street. Great curving pairs of scissors are provided in case of sudden disaster, tucked neatly beneath the pilots seat.

  All along the cloth-canal are minuscule houses, barely large enough for a man to stand straight beneath the rafters. They are houses of shame, and try their best to make themselves small. Every so often the wind, fragrant with juniper and blackberry wine brewing in a great pearl vat somewhere far within the corkscrewing streets, blows a door open, and a great eye, blue or brown or yellow as cholera, will peer out from the jamb. The wind, sensitive to their natures, shuts the doors again as soon as it may.

  This is the banking district of Palimpsest, and you must keep a respectful silence. Within the hunched houses a great and holy counting occurs, and even the sun does not wish to interrupt. It has been years since the sky has seen one of the beggars who dwell in the houses, who, once housed, could not bear to be parted from those precious walls, those beatific chimneys, who grew and grew until they filled the places wholly and could not even be cut from their parlors with gondoliers scissors. But the clouds judge that they do not cry out in their sleep, and so must be learned in some school of happiness.

  Almudena, Mendicant-Queen! The smallest house must surely be hers, most debased, most humble. Her scissors broke here, and she begged each splinter of her house from the great and tall. What creature was it gave her that tiled roof? That oak porch? But it is her mumbling you hear beneath the great green streetlamps with their globes of gold. They say it is her long tail that seeks the street edge in warm weather, sunning its scales on the curb.

  Take her what coins you have, she will bite them to know their worth and count them into her memory, which is finite and bounded as her own bones. A rib counts for a hundred, vertebrae twenty-five each, cartilage for decimal places, her liver for units of one million, and neither you nor I will ever see her priceless heart. Without calculating machine, Almudena uses the map of her flesh to recall deposits, withdrawals, points of interest. She cannot, of course, forget her own joints, the mathematics of her own little pancreas, and her lungs cannot be robbed of their accounts. If we were to cut her open, who knows if we would find blood-at night the gondoliers swear you can hear coins rolling through her ventricles, notes folded into cranes fluttering at the ends of her hair, trying to lift her house free of Zarzaparrilla Street and bear her past all dreams of lucre.

  Gabriel poles through the jackets, his face bright and wind-whipped-but the wind here is warm, it carries with it red flowers and the sea. Oleg peers over the edge, through the spaces between the coat-waves. He is bent double over the side of the gondola, his vision blurred as though with sudden pain, his hands cold-he feels mold beneath them, mold and metal. He tastes snail flesh in his mouth, and his head throbs with the doubled, trebled, quartered actions of each of his hands, each of his eyes. He shakes it and brass dust falls from his hair, the dust of a thousand keys grinding.

  “What's at the bottom?” Oleg asks thickly, almost catching a noseful of brass buttons.

  “I don't know. Can't swim, myself. Train tracks? Morlocks? Alligators, definitely.”

  Oleg sits back, rubs his head like an old man trying to remember his glasses.

  “Why did you bring me here?” he says, staring off into the slamming doors and blinking eyes of the low houses. His gondolier-his? Probably not his, not really not his own-turns, his haphazard black hair stung with moonlight.

  “It's where I've got, Oleg. Only place I could take you. That's how it works. You sort of… lease your skin to this place. This is the part you saw on my chest, so this is where we end up, though I had to hustle to meet you here. And it's a big favor, Oleg. Now I have to wait till tomorrow night to find out what neighborhood you've got on you.”

  “What if you sleep with someone…new? Without the mark. Where do you go?” Where did Lyudmila go?

  Gabriel shrugs and poles through a knot of tweed. “I don't know. I've never been with anyone new. It's a waste of time. Nowhere, maybe. I don't like to think about it.”

  Gabriel pulls open his shirt, not very different than the one they'd left crumpled in a heap on an old cedar dresser-and the mark is there again, deeper if anything, like sword-slashes, like a flaying. Oleg follows a long brown finger toward the most savage of the black lines, and yes, just above it, in the tiniest possible script, scrawled by a moth or a hummingbird: Zarzaparrilla Street. Crossed by 413th, 415th, and 417th at severe, acute angles, nothing like the soothingly regular grid of New York.

  “Besides,” Gabriel laughs, “immigrants never have any money you know. This is the best place to get some. I guess you could say were commuting.” He poles through the coats, enormous bronze scissors stuck through his belt, which he draws now and again to slice through an impassable blue tangle of recalcitrant suits. His voice softens, quiets. “Most of them… most of us never figure it out. Bad dream, they think, or good one. Funny rash, never really goes away, but Doc says it's fine, nothing to worry about. Why dwell on it? But some people, they just can't let it go.” He stares at the teetering houses with their enormous eyes blinking out of the windows. “Some people drink themselves out of school trying to find it again, trolling through bars where the shadows are so greasy they leave trails on the walls, just to find a way in, a way through. Some people forget too that you're supposed to stop sleeping, you're supposed to have a life in the sun.”

  “Is it always dark here?”

  Gabriel sniffs, wipes his eyes with the cuff of his coat. He seems so young, young and tired and needful. “No, no, ‘course not,” he says. “We just never come here in the daytime.”

  Oleg looks over the rim of the boat again. There are flower garlands strung there, calla lilies, he thinks, and bluebells. They sag into the clothed street; their smell is old, a remnant, a relic.

  “But it is a dream, after all,” he says to the woolen tide. “Nothing matters in a dream. It's just… crazy things, over and over until you wake up.”

  There is a long and somehow ugly silence. “Sure,” Gabriel says, “just a dream,” but his eyes are hollow, shallow, low and dim. “What else?”

  Oleg trails his hand in the street. He is good at the ephemeral, at ghosts, at dreams. At veiled things and at the untouchable. If it's a dream, he will be all right; these are places he can know. If he can bring up a ghost, he can find his way to waking in this place.

  Gabriel pulls the gondola into a little dock and lashes it to the pole. He smiles, but it is breezy and thin.

  “Time to punch the clock,” he says.

  They enter a great cathedral-like building of deep blue glass from buttress to cornice. A few others straggle in after them, and Oleg follows Gabriels lead as they receive aprons from an absurdly tall and silent man with glossily spotted giraffe legs, along with fine shirts, rouge for their cheeks, cologne. They pass through a long hallway lined with portraits of maître d's with proud aquiline noses. Before them dozens of tables spread out with ruby-colored tablecloths and pearl candelabras-it is a restaurant, vast and bustling.

  “Don't look at them,” Gabriel whispers as he takes a tray of slim goblets filled with hot strawberry wine.

  “At who?” Oleg struggles under the weight of his own burden: globes of white butter clattering in little dishes of hollowed-out diamonds, square loaves of moist, spiced bread. Pressed into service as a waiter, he thinks. Wonderful.

  “The patrons,” Gabriel hisses. “It's the law, here. You can never look them in the eye. Keep your head bent, like you're praying. There shouldn't be any need to speak, and anyway they aren't allowed to talk to you unless they call you ‘Novitiate.’”

  “How do I take their orders if I can't speak?”

  “There's only one dish here. Just put the plates down and go back to the kitchen for more. Get through the night-you'll be paid, and it's better to have money here than not to.”

  And so they work. After
the wine and bread come snails in flaming brandy with thin little slices of banana sizzling in their shells, followed by great bone platters piled up with obscene slabs of meat, ruby-bright steaks that slide over the rims of the plates, crusted in broiled white-brown skin: albino elephant, Oleg hears ten, twenty dinners breathe in ecstasy. The meat is crowned with tumbling cascades of pomegranate seeds, drenched in honey-amber wine. The smell of it is so rich and sweet it nearly knocks Oleg back-his stomach clenches, but they will not allow him to eat.

  “Novitiate!” cries a woman with three rings on her right hand and a coiling bracelet of silver and agate on her left that winds around all her fingers and up her arm. Oleg is careful not to look at her. His feet ache from the pilgrimages to the kitchen, and he does not want to talk to her. Her fingernails are wet with pomegranate juice.

  “How long have you lived in Palimpsest, Novitiate?” she asks haughtily.

  “I…”

  “Speak up!”

  “I think this is my second night, if I understand everything.”

  She claps her hands and squeals, a high sound like a broken chime. “I thoughtso! Your gait is quite gauche. An immigrant! How charming! Tell us, boy, is it true that you can't see yellow or blue? That you feast in the rubbish heaps after we've all gone to our beds and our teawine? That you all get here by…” She leans down to catch his eye, to get him in trouble, but he averts his gaze in time, and sees only her long red hair brushing her wineglass, still streaked with strawberry. “Well, by rutting like filthy old cows? What do you eat? You must tell us all your foul rites!”

  Oleg fixes his eyes on his shoes. His face burns with a shame he did not know, until this moment, he possessed. He has not heard the word immigrant flung like that since he was a boy-of course, he is an immigrant. There and here. The strange woman with her hooting, triumphal laughs and her gingery perfume makes him want to run, and also to stay and grind her glass into her face.