Palimpsest (28 page)

Sei bites her lip and looks down at her toes, a strangely childlike pose, but she cannot help it, with a rabbit-man so near. “Have you … seen my mother? Since she stopped working for you.”

The rabbit stares at her incredulously and looks to the Third Rail for help. The red-faced woman shrugs, and Plenitude shakes its strokes apologetically. “Wrong train, girl,” he finally says, laughing. “I think it’s my relations you want to talk to.”

“And who are they?”

“Mine is not the only moon, child. My cousin the mole lives on Triton, and Phobos has a fine fox. Ganymede has a whole family of turtles. The Horse in the Sun is chewing her oats a few cars down. She is not talkative, though. If you brush her, you may feel that you hear a kind of low chant in the basement of your heart, like nuns singing through a cloud of incense. There are other horses in the stable car, too. We have such a large family. The blue Arabians of Vega, the two-headed Appaloosas of Sirius, the monochrome Bay of Arcturus. But you’ll want the snow monkeys on Charon, who while away their long orbits in hot springs and ice huts. No candies for them, joyless lot. They hammer out souls. Perhaps she is there, pounded flat into a paste.”

Sei grimaces, but tries to turn it into a smile, and hands the rabbit a shovelful of sugar to cover her embarrassment.

“And this train is going there?”

“Of course not. What funny ideas you have! Didn’t you hear me? We are all going to the seashore—you might call it a family reunion.”

Sei does not know how to proceed past him. She wants to hug him, to stroke his ears and his mangled paws and ask how he came to be so wretched. But she feels it would shame him, and she will not do it.

“My name is not Usagi,” she says, “but I would like to help you.”

“There is only one way you can help us, Sei.”

“Tell me.”

“I have not been authorized to give you that information.” His voice sounds oddly automated, like a telephone operator. “But you can take your mother’s place, if you like.”

The rabbit holds out his hammer to her, and it is surprisingly light, like a huge feather in her hand. She steps into the rice barrel as though she means to crush wine grapes with her toes, and he stands behind her to help her with her stance. She thinks of the men in exclusive Tokyo golf courses with their bored instructors holding them just so. Plenitude winces and holds its breath, sure it will be dislodged and crushed into rice-candy. Sei lifts the mallet and he corrects her grip quickly before she brings it down with a shout of joy and glops of sticky rice fly against the sides of the barrel.

The rabbit in the moon kisses her on the temple, sweetly, tenderly, like an uncle proud of his blood.

The Third Rail watches them as Sei gleefully sets about smashing sugared rice to paste. She says nothing, but her eyes are full of red and viscous tears.

ONE

E
IGHT
T
HOUSAND
D
OORS

S
ei held Sato Kenji’s book before her like a lantern meant to illuminate her path. She consulted it as frequently as an address book, and followed it, believing in his accuracy.

The book led her to this: Sei stood on the main platform with Sato Kenji’s book clutched to her chest. She wore black, her best effort at a suit, her silver-black shirt of that first journey south with Kenji at her back rendered respectable by a business jacket. She thrust her face into the wind whipping down the empty tracks.

I have been told of a secret society in Tokyo that requires its members to
take shifts monitoring certain platforms. It is easy to believe that the
men in black suits who stand beside you or me waiting for the train are
held to the same standards and schedules as we are, that they have appointments
to keep, meetings to attend, supervisors who do not tolerate
truancy. But it would seem that some of them are not, but instead are
sentinels of a sort, and the blank looks on their faces are careful masks of
religious significance.

The society believes that a train platform is a nexus, a crossroads
that connects many cities that do not otherwise touch border to border. They believe that in the beginning of the world, the first gods stood not
upon a bridge of light, but on a high train platform buffeted by winds,
and from this place they thrust their jeweled spear into the ocean and
created all land and mountain and shore.

Thus, they reason, this primal platform must exist yet in some part of
Japan, though surely fallen from its greatest height in the heavens, and they
have many warring theories about which it is. So, upon almost every platform
on the Japanese Isles members of this society stand watch, ready to
alert their brothers of the arrival of the Train of Eight Thousand Doors,
whose engine was fashioned from that very jeweled spear which dwelt for
millennia beneath the sea until it was unearthed by devoted monks, at least
according to the majority faction. The minority argument goes that Japan
Railways desired it greatly and funded recovery operations.

In any event, the Train of Eight Thousand Doors is believed to traverse
the known world, its doors opening onto London one moment,
Ulan Bator the next, Tokyo, Montreal, São Paulo, and so forth. One
must only attend to the station callings within the great train and one
may enter or exit at any platform in the world. To be possessed by this
train is the desire of every black-suited initiate, and he would give his
soul for such a ticket.

I have myself stood watch with them, and they are pleasant enough
gentlemen, if single-minded. I am sorry to report that only the neighborhood
local and the express to Asakusa arrived during my vigil.

Both were punctual.

Kenji would not tell her a thing was possible if it was not. If such a train existed, it would take her there. Sei was sure of it. Sure of him. There had to be another way in.

I’m so tired
, she thought.

I’m so tired.
Her mother had said this, more often than anything else.
Why am I always so tired?

Because you have all those tigers to fight, Mama,
she had said.
And you have to swim all the way to the bottom of a lake to read my book
for me
.

What a clever girl I have!
Usagi slept on the floor like a cat, her hair in her face, her nails chewed ragged. And Sei had waited, she always waited, as patiently and quietly as she could, for her mother to wake up and smile at her and make tea for them, with sweets.

But Sei was so tired now. As tired, perhaps, as her mother had always been. Her legs were sore and her lips were swollen with kisses and she was sick to screaming of people floundering on top of her as though she were a ship that would take them to safety. But she could not stop—how could she stop? How could she go home, where there was no place called the Floor of Heaven, no easy way, no quick path? The train needed her. She had to keep up. Had to go faster. Had to have more, always more, had to run twice as fast to stay in place. She felt as though the train crouched by her even in the daytime, hiding behind clouds and temples, waiting as patiently and quietly as it could for her to wake up and smile at it and make tea, with sweets.

Sei did not want to be an Usagi-mother to the train. She did not want to disappoint it. She shuddered on the platform.

There was a man with a black suit and an attaché case standing a polite distance from her, stone-still, his profile cutting the breezes of the Shinkansen platform—why were they all so high up? The nature of a train is to fly underground, beneath cities. It is a clay bird, its natural element is earth. But the Shinkansen loves the air, confuses the sparrows, and it is so white the wind must feel filthy to touch it. The high platforms were another world, a glimpse into a cosmos without fundament.

The man glanced at her out of the corner of his eye. He held his hand flat out at his hip, rigid, palm down. She was meant to understand this, clearly, but she didn’t.

Usagi had whispered in her ear once, twice, that men in plain suits were servants of the Spider-Kami, who had not eight legs but eight thousand, and they did not sleep in beds, but schemed in empty storefronts where they slept close together on a rack, hangers protruding from their collars.
You must never approach one
, she said tremulously,
or he will take
you away from your mother and she will be at the mercy of everything in
the world.
And that Sei particularly believed, for her father worked in the city and often did not come home at night, and it was easy to think of him hung up in a store like a blazer for sale.

Sei could not quite help how frightened she was to speak to this stranger, who was not a safe stranger in the Floor of Heaven with a long glass of vodka in his hand and a friendly face and a black mark like a map at the bottom of it all.

“Is it coming?” she whispered. “Is there a better way? Will it really take me to any city, any city at all?”

The man in the suit looked puzzled and not a little alarmed. The shame of it was like a slap to Sei’s face. He was just a man. Kenji did make some things up, and more fool her for believing so much of it. Just because they were true
there
did not mean they were true
here
. But the man’s jaw unclenched slowly and he spoke as though unused to it:

“My calculations suggest today, the 4:10 southbound. But I have been wrong before.”

Sei’s belly lifted in relief, and her fingers fluttered to the neckline of her shirt. She pulled it toward her shoulders like theater curtains, and the mark smirked there, between her breasts, as though she had spilled the water of death as she drank it. This revelation of skin had become as easy as speaking to her—easier, it communicated more with less. She smiled beatifically, eager, sure.

The man stared dumbly. His mouth opened and closed; his throat bobbed ridiculously up and down. He covered his mouth with one hand, aghast.

“What happened to you?” he gaped. “Do you need a doctor?”

Sei blinked, and then she laughed. What a long time since anyone had looked at her chest and not immediately taken her into their arms. What a long time since speech was necessary or even pleasant. Hard to imagine that her codes were not valid in any dark-filthy corner of the world.
Enough secrets for all of us to
have our own
, she thought. She rearranged her clothes to hide it again, and waited silently, a vigil, a sentinel, for the 4:10 southbound. The man would not come near her, neither to breathe her air nor risk physical contact. She watched his chest sag as the 4:10 arrived and expelled a noisy crowd of children at his feet. It accepted him apologetically in return, with sheepish doors, bound for Nara and nothing more.

_______

Back, always back. To the brass plaque and the dance floor and the long, thin glasses. The Floor of Heaven, which was dark and empty.
This is my tatami room now
, Sei thought in the slow blue evening, when the persimmon trees seemed to bear only black fists.
I close myself up; I tell stories to open faces and the stories make no sense
to anyone but me. But they are always believed, I am always believed. Oh,
Usagi, I pound the rice after all. After all.

She pressed her sternum with two of her fingers, though it was not her mark she sought. The doors were open to her, she no longer needed to show her pass. In her suit she would not draw so many as usual, but it wouldn’t matter, not really. She would find someone. Two, three. She had to have more than the rest, to stay on the train, to speed through so much city so fast, so very fast. She would drag their hands to her if she had to. She would bear the old and foreign and maimed; she had done it before.

Yumiko was so often late now, wandering into the club past midnight, drinking mechanically, the colors of her cocktails a shifting spectrum, red to ultraviolet. Sei thought she might be able to manage her first lover before Yumiko even arrived, in her uniform, looking disappointed, looking desperate. A mirror in a blue skirt, and Sei could not bear very much of mirrors anymore.

But Yumiko was not late, not that night. She was drinking already, throwing glasses of sake into her mouth. She teetered on her heels and embraced Sei with relief, the two of them squeezing the other’s thin ribs together. They couldn’t let go, either of them.

“What do you say?” Yumiko whispered in her ear, her breath like rotted plums. “Nothing tonight. No one. Just you and I. I’ll take you to meet my parents. We’ll eat noodles. It’ll be just like we’re normal.”

“I’m pregnant,” Sei answered.

121st and Hagiography

T
HE WEALTHY OF
P
ALIMPSEST
send their children to finishing school at St. Folquet’s, whose brick and marble and long, sloping peasant’s roof of wild grass and violet sprigs nestles between two defunct fountains. Groping bladderwrack and redolent poppies have reclaimed the hydra’s nine dry mouths and the bronze bull’s regal horns. Feral cats sleep in the coils of the serpent and in the twisted, gaping mouth of the bull. The serpent and the bull are beloved of the students, and many exercises have been composed as to their symbology, though the faculty know that it is a happy accident of urban planning that the school was established there and not between, say, a golden lion and a silver stag. It keeps the little ones busy.

The prosperous keep this great secret: their children require this charming institution, require it as surely as water and milk. They would prefer it were not so; they have prayed at the Right-Hand Church in earnest, fur-wrapped cabals for surcease of it. They watch the children of immigrants and the poor grow sharp-featured and brash-voiced, they watch the wastrels play in the river and their hearts fill up with bile. St. Folquet’s is a blessing beyond blessing, a curative of highest worth, but the process is long and severe, as are all things in Palimpsest, and they miss their small ones so.