Palimpsest (13 page)

He drank from a glass of water left on a makeshift nightstand—a pile of thick hardbacks. “Traveling? Passing over? Expatriating? About five years, I think. It’s hard to pinpoint, because hardly anyone remembers the first night. One dream is just a dream, you don’t give it a thought. It’s only the second one that sticks, and if you’re lucky, your second lover has been at it long enough to have figured out a thing or two.”

November swallowed. “How many of …
us
… are there?”

He looked at her very seriously, tilting his gaze over his glasses. “Not as many as you’d think. But enough. We’re secretive about it, you know? It’s
precious
, like a pearl at the bottom of the sea. There are no magazine ads, no decadent clubs, in this country anyway, no websites. We keep it contained. If a site goes up, the rest of us take it down, one way or another. You gotta be strictly
low-tech
. Analog. Fly low—an old-fashioned underground, get it? Sometimes I think I spend half my time crawling the web for … well, we call them
errata
. Hasn’t been one that’s stayed up longer than twenty-four hours in years. It’s … hard. Holy work is always hard. We keep to ourselves on this side, to protect it. Sacred places, you owe them something. We owe it. You wouldn’t want just
anybody
—”

“So only the
right
people get to go? People who are rich enough or pretty enough?” November said bitterly.

The young man clenched his jaw and released it slowly.

“Sweetheart, imagine someone who’s a big man over here. The head of a corporation, or, hell, the president of a country. Imagine that in the sorts of places those men go to cheat on their perfect little wives, one of them picks up a little virus—hey, it doesn’t hurt his health, really, and he can cover up the black mark for press meetings. But imagine that he’s smart enough to figure out what’s happening to him when he goes to sleep, which, given his Ivy League pedigree, he probably is. Imagine what happens when a man like that finds a city of impossible, untapped wealth, a nearly limitless labor force, power that isn’t magic, not really, but close enough that he could dazzle the world, become a wizard-king with his amazing machines.” The young man crossed his arms.

“Now you tell me how long you think it would be before troops started forming lines at brothels. How long before there are boots in every street in Palimpsest? Sacred places, November. You
owe
them something. You stand between them and the rest of the world, or else the world gets its ugly, stupid way.”

November reeled back, chastened. She could not bear the thought of a man like that in Orlande’s shop, his feet filthy with ink. She did not want to know it could happen.

“But Xiaohui—”

He barked laughter like a sea lion. “Xiaohui? Oh, god. You poor kid.” He got up and padded over to her, sitting against the wall without noticing the absent bookshelf, his naked limbs tossed casually about like toys.

“Xiaohui’s … sort of an evangelist. There’s a few of us like her. We try to keep them contained, too. They don’t get invited to parties, generally. She’s a big girl, bigger on the inside than on the outside, you know, and she can’t bear the thought of being alone in that place. She takes anyone she finds, even blanks like you. It’s … well, some people would call it immoral. She never cared. I spent my junior year chasing her errata through these obscure little knitting magazines.”

“Have you and she … ?”

The young man blinked. “She’s my sister. You knew that, didn’t you? I mean, it’s our mother’s shop, there’s hardly anyone but you who eats there without blood ties.”

November chewed her lip vigorously, as though she meant to devour herself voice-first. She glanced up at him gravely, for there were not so very many blithe expressions granted to her grim and earnest face.

“But have you?”

He seemed to grow sudden wrinkles, his eyes creased with old worries. He exhaled a long-held breath and picked at a toenail intently. “She never cared about any of that, not immigrant morality, not anyone’s. The city was everything to her. The rest—just bodies. One body, two. Mine, hers. She showed me her leg—god, it was so long ago! She took me into the storeroom and the cookie dough was flattened out into all these long, gold runners on the counters, and piles of blank fortunes, so many, like confetti. She pulled up her dress and I laughed at her, but it shut me right up, that mark on her, like some ghost had punched her as hard as he could. And she kissed me so hard, her little teeth, she kissed me so hard and bit at me and I bled in her mouth, and she just didn’t care. She never did. It was only once, only ever once with her. An experiment, I think. To see if she could go that far. She pushed me onto the fortunes and I came so fast and hard it blinded me for a minute, like a flashbulb bursting. I could say I gave in, that it was all her, but that would be a bigger lie than I can fit my mouth around.” He sniffed sharply, waiting for her disapproval, hurrying to head it off. “You do things, when you’ve been there, you do things you could never even have thought up before. I mean, it’s not exactly
safe
, is it, what we do? You could end up churned up inside with disease, pregnant a dozen times over, dead. But it doesn’t matter. We’d take all that and more besides if it means
getting
there
. Incest hardly ranks.”

November considered him coldly, and the creases of his eye seemed to speak of debauch and torment, but more of love and longing and blind stumbling in the dark. She doubted he had ever worn his rings turned outward in his life. She doubted he had thought of anything when he had cried out like a falling sparrow within her but Xiaohui. Certainly she had not.

He cupped his hand against her cheek. “I’m sorry it was your face. That’s … unlucky. No one gets to choose.”

Things that cannot long be kept secret: death in the family, the loss of a
ring, corruption of the spirit, boredom, illicit love. Sickness. Addiction.
Pregnancy.

Within the pure white wimple of her beekeeping suit, wrapped in buzzing, worried voices panicked that their mistress had strayed from them, November told herself that Xiaohui’s brother was the last, that she would stop this here. She would stay in her home; she would travel for cacti twice a year; she would send her crates of honey through the hands of others. Plenty of takers, plenty of drivers. The bees did not care whether she was disfigured. She would be a nun of the hive, a soul in the sisterhood of summer.

It would be all right—she had touched a secret thing, but a touch was enough. She had no brothers with which to debase herself, but she did not need or want them. She would not move down the path. If it meant so many strange lovers, if it meant allowing so many people into the small space of her, she could give up Palimpsest. She would refuse it. It was easy; it would be easy. She had enough here—had that not been the purpose of this house, these hives, this place so near to her moss-blanketed father? To have enough, to grow precisely large enough for this place and no larger? The gigantism that the city and those telescoping lovers promised with such vigor was no friend to her.

But this did not save her from her dreams. No nun has ever been saved by virtue from ecstatic visions of demons and angels breaking the stalks of one another’s wings. She called out to the brassy city in her sleep, she touched the Memorial, the ostrich-orphan in the center of the road. She felt within her those three strange folk who moved and ate and sang so far away from her. She felt the bees on her breast. She stood thirty nights in the shop of Aloysius, who shook his white-wigged head at her in such disappointment it pierced her true as his needles. Once he had even wept at her feet, his face pressed to her stomach.

Why? Why will you not do as the rest have done? Why do you haunt me
like this? Is it because of what I said? Because I was rude? I apologize. A hundred
times I apologize. When will you yield to us, you awful girl, you who saw
me so clearly and purely that my heart broke in your hands?

Yet when she tried to run from his pleading or his admonitions, when she tried to flee with her lavender-suited homunculus, when she tried to go, not to the shop of Aloysius at all, but down the long planks of another street entirely, she was turned back. Walls of amber shadow coalesced in her path, or barricades of impassably tangled streetlamps like briars sprang up, or else the street simply vanished into a void she could not cross. The world of her allowable presence was limited to two avenues and no more. Her city was constant, faithful, every night her own, but she could not pass beyond the places she had touched that first night she dreamt against the shorn neck of Xiaohui’s brother.

In the mornings, she woke weeping. She would snatch her notebooks and cover them with furious scrawls:
Things I Will Not
Do, Things Beyond My Abilities, Women I Am Not, Places I Will Not Go,
Things Which Are Not Real, Things Which Will Surely Destroy Me.

She flung the notebooks against the wall. They left marks in the perfect whiteness, and she listed those too. She shut her eyes against her own self, her own need for that place as though it were a person she had not seen in years and missed terribly.

_______

“Everything has its place,” her father had once said to her when she was young, showing her the long cedar drawers of a card catalogue in the great library where he worked, the brass brackets on its face shining like a policeman’s buttons. “But more important, everything’s place is
labeled
. Order is transitive: order one precious thing and order the universe.”

“Do I have a place in there?” November had asked, peeking over the rim of the long boxes.

“Of course, baby,” he had said, and with his big brown hand, cuffed in plaid and smelling of lemon rinds from her mother’s morning tea, riffled through a drawer and pulled a card from the stack:

006.332.
The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her
Own Making.
H. F. Weckweet, 1923. Gleiss & Schafandre: New York.

She had taken it seriously. Even then she had not known another method of doing things. The book was on the seventh floor and she had walked the steps, every one, knowing that this was the only proper way to proceed to her place in the universe—an elevator is cheating. The book was small, in a brown leather cover embossed faintly with a little girl standing naked on a raft, straight as a mast, her stance determined, holding up her dress as a sail. It was, at the time, the oldest thing she had ever seen.

November had read it exactly two hundred and seventeen times, not counting unfinished perusals, since that day. It was, in fact, a long series of novels for children, but November did not care for the others: her father had not pulled them from the great catalogue and called them hers. She had not climbed seven flights of stairs for them. She had spent her birthday this year, her thirty-first, reading it cover to cover, dawn to dawn. The girl in the book was named September, and she had known that this was meant for her, a message from Hortense Francis Weckweet and her father. Perhaps if the girl had not been called September, November would not have read it two hundred and seventeen times.

Behind her eyelids the image of her father with his hands full of catalogue cards like a poker player warred with the image of Aloysius weeping, begging her:
Leave me alone, I cannot bear
it, I cannot bear you.

November sunk her head in her hands.
I cannot bear it, either,
but the alternative is too big for me. I have nothing. I am not a brave girl
.

The bay fog slid over the hills like tea steeping.
I am not brave,
she thought,
but I do have a dress. I have that. A dress like a sail.

She dried her eyes and pulled a cough of orange silk from her closet. She brushed back her hair into a librarian’s bun so that no one would miss her face. Alleyways burned triumphant on her cheek. She turned all her rings firmly outward. They glittered like a knight’s glove.

_______

It took nine nights in the city. She drank foully sweet things and waited. Hard-angled, fashionable people stared nakedly at her. Her skin flared hot with shame and determination.
I will
stand upon my raft until the Green Wind comes for me
, she thought, quoting Weckweet, quoting the book of her childhood.
My dress;
my sail.

And the Green Wind did come, slowly, gently, though in no chrome-walled bar or library annex. November was tired, heading home, walking through the thronging battalion of pigeons in Union Square, back to her car, back to the bridge and the bees and home, to Hortense Weckweet and a thousand unfinished lists.

The woman looked like she must have come from the North Pole: frizzy pale red hair blossoming around broad red cheeks whipped flush by the cold, a great long scarf trailing behind her. She wasn’t pretty, but she wasn’t plain. She didn’t say anything, but her face was so bright and hopeful, so welcoming that November’s ribs ached. The woman ran to her and stopped up short, her breath fogging in the evening air, the cutting blue breezes that belong to the Bay at dusk. She unbuttoned her peacoat with shivering gloveless fingers and pulled up her sweater like a child. It was on her belly, just under her left breast, like a patient spider crouching on her skin. The girl glanced at November’s rings and grasped her face in delicate fingers, kissing her with the ferocity of a newborn bear suckling at its mother.

Krasnozlataya and Corundum

A
HOUSE SITS SQUARELY ON THE CORNER
of Krasnozlataya and Corundum Streets. Over the years it has grown to encompass nearly the whole of both boulevards, up to 19th Street and down to 6th. Through the spaces where its cornerstones do not mark the earth, the gardens of this house spill out onto the street in long emerald swathes. Beggars sleep beneath the pomegranate trees, and the carriage tracks swerve gracefully to avoid the intruding verdancy.

The house itself was planted as a sapling, its roots bound up in muslin and soaked in rose water. Three women brought it in a pine bucket, stroking its bark to keep it calm. They buried it in secret, hidden by a complicit moon, in the soft earth that was then Krasnozlataya Street, before the underground trains and the elevated tracks, before the great spires, before water-spouting, mice-headed gargoyles bred on that broad road with such zeal. The women wore gray veils and crowns of steel gears. They knew how to conduct rites properly—how to dress, how to stand. They came each night thereafter to feed it and whisper to it, they came silently and with sweet things in their pockets: sugar and apples and Spanish tiles and slivers of False Crosses, braids from their own head, ivory buttons, golden sewing needles and the heels of a thousand Sunday roasts, cherries with pits of hard molasses, faucet heads in the shape of men’s mouths, frankincense and myrrh, lye and whiskey, long black pokers and swaddling clothes, handbags and haircombs, Christmas cakes, hemlock, lemon tea and glass goblets, a slaughtered blue sheep, and, lastly but most important, the sad gray form of one of their sons, who had strangled in his umbilical cord.