Palimpsest (20 page)

_______

Again, there is a moment like a hyphen in the space between cars. Sei can see the track rushing by beneath them, in the spaces, in the joining, in the iron grate below her feet.

“Why do you look down?” the Third Rail demands. “Do you wish to see me more naked than I am? Am I not more pleasant to you in this shape than deep in mire and grease?”

“You are beautiful. In grease. In mire. In flesh. Why is it so important that I think you’re beautiful?”

“Because if you do not, you will never love us, and if you do not love us, you will not help us, and we need your help, or we shall never get where we are going.”

“I already said I would help you.”

“You can’t say that yet! I would like to believe you, Sei, but I am wicked, and I have hidden things from you, and you will not tell the truth about us until you know them all, and you will not know them all until we get to the last carriage. We have to hurry—you don’t have all night.”

She pulls Sei into the third carriage with the eager stumbling of a child on the morning of their birthday. The seats are lined with great pale cabbage plants, deeply veined in violet and green. The walls are silver leaf, untarnished, gleaming like water. Women hang in harnesses, polishing it with their impossibly long hair. The cabbages cover floor and cushion, even the ceiling, extending far into the distance, though the walls are closer here, and there are windows which show a coppery rush of city flashing by outside, the beginnings of frost at the frames.

They walk sedately, two queens surveying an empire. Sei looks for Yumiko among the polishing women, and yes, she is there, of course she is there, a jade pendant hanging between her breasts, her bare feet tucked up like a ballet dancer’s. Their eyes nearly meet. But the Third Rail flushes a furious black and moves between Sei and her lover, shaking her prodigious head. There is a pleading in her small eyes, and Sei acquiesces, still shaken by the keening of the villagers with their long ladles. She will see Yumiko in the morning, and her girl will forgive this one minute, small slight.

“Is there such a need for cabbages in the world?” Sei asks, wondering, trailing her hand across the leaves which are thick and hoary as chilblained flesh.

“Of course not. These are not for eating.” The Third Rail lifts the leaf of one, and within, couched in vegetable, wet and black, wrinkled and quivering like a newborn butterfly, is a character, a slightly wobbly kanji, signifying “plenitude.” It murmurs softly, and stretches up like a baby seeking a nipple. Sei strokes it with her knuckle, and it writhes beneath her hand.

“They have to be born, you know,” the Third Rail says. “They don’t come from nowhere! When a child sits in her chair with a clean
suzuri
and her long brush, she believes she is writing, but she is simply calling to these poor lambs, calling them to attend her, to pass through her. We can hardly keep up with demand; the pollination season is intense. And yet, they learn fewer and fewer kanji as the years go by, and more and more English, more katakana, more foreign things. The graveyard is on another train, where turtles set incense on the stones of words no one learns in your world anymore, words passed out of the reach of any mouth. It is important work we do. We hope you agree, of course, but we are willing to admit it is foolish if you call it so.”

Plenitude crawls up Sei’s arm like a caterpillar, and perches just inside her elbow, fluttering its strokes.

“Of course it is not foolish,” Sei says, wondering. “I had no idea.”

“It is not widely known, or else we might be subject to poachers.”

“Does that mean there are … spaces to pass between this city and the child at her desk in my world? Tunnels? Bridges?”

The Third Rail slides her eyes sidelong at Sei. “Did you not pass through such a place?”

“I suppose, but kanji are … ill-equipped to come by the path I took.”

“How many roads are there into Tokyo?”

“I don’t know … dozens.”

The scarlet woman shrugs and smiles secretively. “Palimpsest is the same. Only one, though, is big enough for people to squeeze through. But a character is small, small as a thought. She does not need such a great highway.”

Sei considered, and tried to shake off Plenitude. The little kanji clung to her, making tiny gurgling sounds, like ink bubbling.

“They get attached so easily. Insoluble little dears,” the Third Rail coos.

“How much longer does this night last, Rail?”

“One more car, Sei. It pains me that you cannot stay longer. Perhaps one day you will allow us to become dear enough to you that you will do what is necessary to stay.”

Sei grips the Rail’s arm, hard and hot beneath her hand. “What is necessary? I don’t know! Tell me how.”

“I do not know either,” the crimson woman says, dropping her chin in shame. “I am too big to pass by that path. I must stay here, there is no road wide enough to bear me. But I hope one is wide enough for you.”

_______

A rich and mushroomy loam covers the floor of the fourth car, toadstools fulminating beneath benches. Pine trees sprout everywhere they can grasp hold, growing sideways, diagonally, crawling across the aisle. Between them nestle parcels, wrapped with brown paper, tied with twine, dozens upon dozens. The contorted, warty pine-roots splay over cushion and wall, sucking tentatively at windows. Their needles shine dark and glossy and thick, and from their boughs hang great orange-gold lanterns, globes ablaze with light. Some few folk in severe black clothes clutch the handholds and stare into the lanterns. Their faces are marked with white lines like smears of chalk. Sei looks up—the ceiling is far too distant, far too high, and there seem to be stars there, behind green-gray clouds.

At the far end of the great carriage there is a fox. He is also red, and his nose black, in the manner of foxes.

“I know you,” he says dispassionately.

“I don’t think you could,” Sei replies.

“Imagine a book at the bottom of a lake.” The fox yawns. He paws the soil and lies down to sleep.

“Fish,” the Third Rail whispers tenderly, “read it. We read it.”

Sei shuts her eyes against sudden tears. The room seems to tilt, and the great peace of the rice and the cabbages drains from her like rain. Plenitude quivers in distress on her shoulder. “I can’t,” she gasps. “I couldn’t … I don’t want to. This is too much. You talk like a dream. Nothing matters in dreams.”

“We talk like your mother talked.” The Third Rail scratches her elongated cheek fretfully. “We thought you would like it.”

“I don’t!” Sei cries, half a scream, the other half squeezed off by her suddenly aching throat.

The scarlet woman hangs her head in shame and pulls her kimono around her breast to hide herself. “We are not infallible,” she whispers.

“What’s in the packages?” Sei feels ill. The shaking of the carriages tips her into the arms of a seated pine, which wriggles with pleasure and cradles her in its branches. It allows one ecstatic drop of sap to fall onto her hand.

The Third Rail looks toward the sleeping fox in agony. “If you don’t like it we shall take them away! We promise!”

Sei shrugs off the purring pine tree and pulls frantically at the twine of the package nearest to her. It comes open cleanly in her hands, like origami falling away from itself. Inside is a red mask, longer than a human face, its eyes and mouth hard black slits. One of the men in his black tunic reaches in and pulls it onto his face. He sighs resignedly, as if he knew all along that it would come to this. Sei gapes, hides her face in the pine tree. She does not want to look at the Rail again, at her hard, red, long face.

But the Third Rail kneels in submission at Sei’s feet, imploring her in silence, her face a broken panic.

“These trains speed past each other
,” she says,
“utterly silent,
carrying each a complement of ghosts who clutch the branches
like leather handholds, and pluck the green rice to eat raw, and
fall back into the laps of women whose faces are painted red from
brow to chin … ”

Plenitude caresses her cheek with a bold stroke.

Sei moans and falls into the Rail’s arms. The long-faced woman wraps her kimono around the girl and holds her tenderly, sweetly, with infinite care.

ONE

T
HE
R
ABBIT IN THE
M
OON

S
ei woke sobbing in a strange apartment, her hair plastered to her face, clawing at her shoulder. Yumiko did not hold her. She just watched, calm as a teacher watching a slow student struggle through a simple passage.

“It’s always hard to wake up,” she said.

Sei clutched her, her eyes rolling and wild as a dog’s. “I need—”

“To go back? Yes. I know. Do you think I’m different than you?”

Sei could not breathe. Her body ached, her joints, her lungs. “Take me back, take me to someone, anyone, I don’t care, just … the train, I can’t leave them, they want me there, I have to go back!” She groaned. “God, let me go back to sleep!”

“You have to wait. The Floor of Heaven opens at dusk. I sympathize, I really do, but I’ve been where you are now, and I had to wait, too.” She put her arm around Sei’s naked waist. “There’s a tenor there, at a place called Thulium House. He gives me sapphires every night; he pierces my arms with a long needle and hangs me with jewels until I cannot move for the weight. He puts opals on my eyelids, and kisses on my lips until I am bruised with him, and all over blue. Do you think I don’t miss him?”

“There is a train, full of strange fields and forests … ”

“I envy you.”

“They need me!”

Yumiko put her head to one side. “Have they said what for?”

“No …”

“Then it can’t be good. Don’t be in such a rush.”

Yumiko rose and began the rustling, habitual motion of making tea. Sei realized that this must be Yumiko’s place. The walls were bare; she had a bed and a table and nothing else. The apartment looked like someone has just moved in, or expected to move out soon.

“My mother told me once,” said Sei softly, to Yumiko’s back, “when I was little, she told me that dreams are small tigers that live behind your ears, and they wait until you’re sleeping to leap out and tear at your soul, to eat it up at very civilized suppers to which no other cats are invited.”

Yumiko quirked an eyebrow. “Was your mother, if it’s not impolite, totally crazy? I mean, that’s not really a working theory of the subconscious.”

Sei shrugged. “Back then, I just thought she was wild and beautiful, like a goose, and like a goose she flew at me in a rage sometimes, and bit my toes. And sometimes when I came to see her in our tatami room her kimono would be torn to pieces, and she’d be naked and bleeding on the floor, her own skin under her nails. She was bleeding like that when she told me about the tigers. So I guess she was crazy, when I think about it now, but when I was a kid I believed her because she was my mother and mothers know everything.”

Yumiko set a thin green tea down on the floor. She ran a hand through Sei’s hair.

“But you aren’t, you know. Crazy. I know what you know. We’re not like your mother. There are no tigers for us, just a city, waiting, and it loves us, in whatever ways a city can love.”

“Maybe the tigers are there. Maybe they’re just better at hiding than trains and tenors.”

_______

The Floor of Heaven.

The little brass plaque said nothing it did not say before. Sei stood in front of it, motionless, while Yumiko straightened her plaid skirt.

“Ready?” said the faux-schoolgirl, her eager smile a little too manic and stretched for Sei to find it comforting. Sei closed her fists at her sides, suddenly not very brave. She could see that night plainly in her mind, how it would play out in that dark, furtive club, how every other night would unfold, too.

So many people would crawl inside her.

Sei knew she would search them out like a fox, the ones whose maps linked together to create a route, a route to keep her on the train, on course. She would find them in the shadows of the Floor of Heaven, in the offices of that place with tall silver cabinets, in the bathrooms with Asahi posters glued to the walls.

Sei could see it all happen, the whole tawdry parade:

A man with a silver tooth would want her to get on her knees in the black-tiled bathroom. She could see herself kissing the depth-chart etched on his toes, his wrinkled knees, his exhausted cock.

A woman with two children sleeping at home and a mole on her left thigh would slip her fingers into Sei’s cunt right on the dance floor, in front of everyone. Sei could see herself writhe, impaled, embarrassed and abandoned.

There would be a sweet boy with a thin little beard—his thumb nearly black with gridlock and unplanned alleys, as though he had been fingerprinted in an unnamable jail. Sei saw herself straddling him on one of the long leather couches that lay between the club-lights, grinding against him until he came so hard he started to hiccup, and she found him so ridiculous she wanted to cry. That one would run after the train in her dreams, trying to catch it, trying to catch her, too poor in skill to manage either feat.

Sei knew she would seek out the dream-city on all those skins. She would seek out passage on her train, and all these fleshly tickets would fall to her feet, used and pale. She knew she would refuse to return to Tokyo, where it would not be so easy to find them, to snarl at them:
Take me, take me, why are you
waiting?

Sei would never want to drink, or dance, only to grip them between her thighs and then sleep like a dead thing. She would become naked and raw and without guile; she would seek as truly as a knight.

Sei could see it all so clearly, a path through the woods: touch no one who does not carry the map—she and Yumiko would certainly agree between themselves that this was wrong, risky, that the secret was theirs and those of their tribe, and not to be squandered.

But perhaps once, after the snow melts, Sei thought she could imagine a version of herself that would make an exception for a young man with cedar-colored skin and a nose ring like a bull’s, or a minotaur’s. No one special. Someone who came to the club and was, of course, turned away. By then he would seem so alien and strange to Sei, so blank and empty. Pristine. Possessed of purity.