Palimpsest (19 page)

_______

Ludovico chooses the Left-Hand Church. He cannot say why. It does not seem like much of a choice, but he makes it, with determination. If there is anything a Roman man knows, it is how to associate with a church, how to choose one in a city of churches and become loyal to it, to know its clerestory and its finials like the breasts of a wife. To predict the exact tone into which it will weave your voice with all its heights and rafters and soaring galleries.

The congregation is silent, though the pews are crowded with parishoners. Ludovico treads softly on the aisle, which is covered in chrysanthemums planted deep in the soil of the church’s most secret parts. Far above, ravens line the clerestory, and between them some few folk with long black wings, dangling their feet in the air. He stares at them in horror and enthrallment: there are no humans here. Each of the faithful is in part another thing: men with the heads of great serpents, women with shells like tortoises upon their backs. Children with long, hairy orangutan arms fidget and bent, scolding crones’ legs end in elephantine feet, or cheetah feet, or musk-ox soles, warted and blackened. A man with a giraffe neck grafted to his shoulders sits politely in the rear row, so as not to block anyone’s view. Not a few have fins protruding painfully from their backs which their aunts and uncles keep solicitously wet with the help of small and sacred cups.

At the altar, a priest with the head of an ancient, worried lion holds out her arms in mute supplication, her mouth gaping, her feline face red with the effort of her silence, tears streaming through her whiskers. A few worshippers are crying, too, and nodding as though she spoke. A little girl in the front row holds out her long, mottled arms to the priest, an octopus’s tentacles, their suckers opening and closing in mute pleas. The child opens her mouth and wails as children will do when they are grieved, but only a throttled gurgling emerges. Her parents gather her in and she buries her face in their scaly breasts.

Ludovico sinks to his knees in the flowers, overcome. Why should he care for these wretched animals? Perhaps because they are in church? He trembles—this is not like the Troposphere with its pounding mechanical horses. It is so quiet here.

Here begins the book of the nature of beasts,
Ludo thinks.
All
the best bestiaries begin that way. If I were to write of this place, I
could make a book longer than Isidore’s, greater than the
Etymologiae.
Here there are creatures beyond any Spaniard’s
fever-dream and more, they are
real.
I have seen them. I will be
able to write truly that I knelt among them, I prayed with them
and saw them weep as though they were possessed of souls. No
Pope will ever believe me, or beatify me, or sanctify my encyclopedia,
but I will know it was true.

The silence lays hands on him and Ludovico is moved beyond himself. For this church of invalids he will bear mouse-women and eel-women and anything else. He will bear Lucia’s abandonment, for this is the land of St. Isidore. Bee-crowned Isidore, who wrote the great compendium of wisdom and Christian magic, human behavior and the names of monsters that medievalists still pore over with glee—he must have seen this place. He only reported what he saw. Ludo’s hands fly to his St. Isidore’s medal. The vision of the octopus-child compels him to his knees. In his life, Ludovico has never loved a thing that did not destroy him, and he goes gladly to this third thing in his small catalogue of loves which before now was comprised of a book and a woman alone.

He stretches out his arms, his skinny, human arms to the lion-priest and calls out to her, his voice ghastly in the echoing cathedral, a thing made for shattering.

“Ave Maria, gratia plena!”
he cries. It is all he knows how to say, the most sacred thing.
“Dominus tecum, benedicta tu in
mulieribus, et benedictus fructus ventris tui!”

He is laughing and weeping, and all stare at him. The octopus-girl pulls away from her parents as he begins again:

“Ave Maria!”

She walks toward him like a little bride, serious in her white dress, hair the color of a bruise hanging in two long, straight planks to her knees. Her pace is slow and she does not try to run—Ludo is sure she has been told not to run in church. She puts her cold, wet tentacles around his neck; they coil heavily on his shoulders. She fixes him with a solemn expression. Slowly, she kisses his cheek.

“Ave Maria!”
he sobs, and the congregation, as if released by the child’s gestures, descends upon him, straining to put their paws and their hands on him, their fur and their slime.

“Ave! Ave! Ave!”
he howls, and the ravens recoil, wheeling in the rarified air of the upper balconies, screaming in alarm and ecstasy.

A hundred hands and more cover his mouth, gently, like aunts tasked with the care of an unruly boy. He bellows grief into their embraces, and the Left-Hand Church is filled with the sound of him as he is rocked in the arms of the wretched and the plagued, rocked until he is quiet, and can bear their kind eyes and their grotesque kisses.

PART III:

T
HE
P
RINCESS OF
P
ARALLELOGRAMS

In Transit, Westbound: 8:17

S
IX EXPRESS TRACKS
and twelve locals pass through Palimpsest. The six Greater Lines are: Stylus, Sgraffito, Decretal, Foolscap, Bookhand, and Missal. Collectively, in the prayers of those gathered prostrate in the brass turnstiles of its hidden, voluptuous shrines, these are referred to as the Marginalia Line. They do not run on time: rather, the commuters of Palimpsest have learned their habits, the times of day and night when they prefer to eat and drink, their mating seasons, their gathering places. In days of old, great safaris were held to catch the great trains in their inexorable passage from place to place, and women grappled with them with hooks and tridents in order to arrive punctually at a desk in the depths of the city.

As if to impress a distracted parent on their birthday, the folk of Palimpsest built great edifices where the trains liked to congregate to drink oil from the earth and exchange gossip. They laid black track along the carriages’ migratory patterns. Trains are creatures of routine, though they are also peevish and curmudgeonly. Thus the transit system of Palimpsest was raised up around the huffing behemoths that traversed its heart, and the trains have not yet expressed displeasure.

To ride them is still an exercise in hunterly passion and exactitude, for they are unpredictable, and must be observed for many weeks before patterns can be discerned. The sport of commuting is attempted by only the bravest and the wildest of Palimpsest. Many have achieved such a level of aptitude that they are able to catch a train more mornings than they do not.

The wise arrive early with a neat coil of hooked rope at their waist, so that if a train is in a very great hurry, they may catch it still, and ride behind on the pauper’s terrace with the rest of those who were not favored, or fast enough, or precise in their calculations. Woe betide them in the infrequent mating seasons! No train may be asked to make its regular stops when she is in heat! A man was once caught on board when an express caught the scent of a local. The poor banker was released to a platform only eight months later, when the two white leviathans had relinquished each other with regret and tears.

A great number of commuters witnessed the girl with blue hair and her now-famous leap into the waiting doors of the Marginalia. Their coats flapped in the hot wind of the station-bowels. Their lips went suddenly dry; their pulses quickened as one stream of blood through one heart. A few smiled, and all noted in their observances that a woman was taken from the platform on this date, at that time. It is important to know these things. They have happened before. Rarer than mating season is this one, and they must know when it begins and when it ends, in order to compare notes with their fellow enthusiasts so that they may predict when the contents of their prayers must change, and when they will shift to the Secondary Prime Schedule, which conforms to both the phases of the moon and the retrograde orbit of Mercury.

Three men were crushed beneath the trains in order to prove the Second Prime, and their names are holy writ.

_______

The space between carriages is a rollicking, noisy, dank place, nothing like the chrome interstices of the Shinkansen. Sei thinks briefly of Sato Kenji, and wishes for the fourth or fifth time that she had known when she held him shaking against her what manner of creature he was, possessed of what secrets. Her heart would have beat faster, would have leapt into him fully.

The Third Rail regards her solemnly. The two of them are pressed close together, and Sei does not think the red-faced woman’s long cheeks and slitted eyes are entirely flesh, not entirely. They seem always wet and hard, like a lacquered mask. But it is so dark; the light is fitful and unkind. Sei does not think she hears her breathing. The Third Rail grazes her collarbone with long white fingers, hesitant and slow, as if unsure of permission to do so. Sei takes her hand and kisses her palm—the skin burns her, like medicine, like ice, but she does not flinch, and the Third Rail shivers in pleasure.

“We are so very eager for you to see us,” she says, and her scarlet face tilts towards the clattering carriage door. “We have dressed ourselves specially: we have had to guess the things you like.”

Sei smiles uncertainly, and presses her hand to a black square to release the door. The wet smell of weedy swamps waft out; her nose wrinkles. But the Third Rail sweeps Sei into the next carriage, childlike in her delight, stroking her cobalt hair with a possessive affection.

Sei can make out seats and railings, handholds looping down, certainly, though from no visible ceiling. But the walls are wider than they ought to be, and a broad yellow sun beams where fluorescent lamps should shine. The seats terrace up the sides of the wall, and what Sei at first takes to be brilliant blue cushions are glimmering rice paddies, rippling water combed by raw green shoots. Folk tend them in wide red hats trimmed in a fringe of tiny hanging pocketwatches, golden as her grandmother’s, golden as a temple. They pluck the rice and savor it, all the way up, past Sei’s vision, like a mountainside dwindling to nothing. She is dizzy with the sudden space. A child, his red hat jangling, holds out a green stalk to her, his little face happy and new.

“Thank you,” Sei says, and the child hugs her.

“Thank you, thank you!” he cries into her hips. “We thought you would never come!”

Sei chews the thick, unprocessed rice. She knows she ought not to do it. She remembers clearly a day when her mother was not well and not strong enough for the room of the grass-mats. She had fallen, shaking, to the floor of their little kitchen, and screamed as she pulled Sei’s hair painfully:
Do not eat the food of the dead!
They will try anything to make you eat, but no child of mine would
do it!
She had burned all their
mikon
oranges in a great fire that night, insisting that the moon had filled them up with poison, that the poor, unassuming fruit would kill them all. Usagi shuddered and wept beside the flames, holding her elbows and rocking back and forth as the air filled with the acrid smell of boiling orange-flesh.

Sei knew she ought not to, but she had come this far, and already drank their bitter tea, and she could not imagine a version of herself which did not swallow this thing in her palm.

“It is the rice of grief,” the boy said brightly. “I have harvested it all my life. Every fortnight, the flowers of the rice of grief weep and must be comforted with a glass bell and soothing hymns concerning incense and virtuous fathers with black beards. I have soothed them in your name, Sei! And they were comforted! With my own fingers I cleared the mud from them, and with my mouth I plucked them from the water. I would like you to become proud of me, because I have done this thing. If you do not believe I have enacted a sufficient virtue, I will ask my overseer to send me to the rice of martial prowess, but the application process is long, and I have heard that the rice is bitter.”

Sei pinches the boy’s chin lightly and grins at him. He blushes deeply and is too overcome to speak. She bends to him and lifts his hat to gently kiss his forehead, the rice of grief heady on her breath. The child’s eyes well with tears and he squeezes them shut, leaning close to her for the smallest and longest of moments. He runs to his friends to boast and preen, and Sei laughs.

“How kind you are,” the Third Rail says. “I did not expect you to be kind. It is not a trait we select for.”

“What do you select for? And for what are you selecting?”

The Third Rail looked coy. “Loneliness. Old grief. World-weariness. Stamina. Mechanical aptitude. But if I were to tell you the rest it would spoil the surprise.”

“Does that boy live here? All the time?”

“Of course. Where else should he live? If you had sent him to the rice of martial prowess, he would have brought you a red sword in one year, and begged you to bless it. If you had not, he would have sought the rice of the intellect, and become as clear to look upon as glass, and begged you to breathe the fog of a soul upon him. He has waited his whole life to know which rice is best. It was kind of you to give him such a short journey.”

The other rice-pickers wave and shout from their high terraces, and as one offer her a copper ladle full of water from their sacred wells.

“I am satisfied!” she calls out. “I do not need to drink!”

A ripple of fear and despair moves through the rice paddies, and Sei sees one girl with long braids fling herself from a great height, only to be caught up by a solicitous handhold. She hangs there by the waist, in misery, weeping.

The Third Rail offers no comment, but shakes her head in untouchable sorrow. She guides Sei through the fields, the glowing green grain which is so bright she suffers sunspots in her vision.

“I’m sorry,” she says to the villagers with their long-handled ladles. “Please forgive me, please slake my thirst.” She reaches out for their water and they lean toward her, keen and terrible hope like welts on their faces. She sips; they collapse in relief, and as the carriage door closes behind her she can hear the beginnings of a festival, music like water spilling, and a boy’s high, reedy voice singing a psalm above the pounding of drums. She knows she will refuse nothing else. She drinks and she can hardly feel them anymore, the phantom others, who drink wine like tiger’s blood when she drinks water. They are so far from her.