Palimpsest (34 page)

The trains did not discover the breach in the tracks for some time. They were distracted, the season was not right for westbound travel, the Missal Line had gone into heat early for three years running—the life of a train is ever tossed by strange and chthonic tides. But as of late some few of them have begun to nose around Oathusk, sniffing the wind for news of the rosebud windows, of the black-faced sheep, of stationmasters gone to seed and drink. A train or two came quite close to the break, but reared in alarum and proceeded east into the comforting arms of the city once more.

There is concern, in the highest echelons of sport commuters, that a train might one day become bold enough to jump the tracks at Oathusk and escape Palimpsest altogether, into the wilds beyond and the mountains, through the wide farms and pastureland, and from thence who knows? Yet still others deride this idea as the worst sort of fancy: the trains are happy, they are loved, they are well-fed and well-mated. In the midst of debate, the tracks go unrepaired. The wheat bends the wind at Oathusk, and the stars watch the raspberries grow long.

_______

The next carriage is empty. It is a long, vast stretch of new tatami mats, redolent and bright green, their ribbons black and gold. Sei cannot begin to count them. There is a slender station map like an ukiyo-e painting on one wall, and the room shakes like a carriage, but there are no benches, no rails. It is a place she knows and does not wish to.

“No,” she groans. “I don’t want to be here.”

“But it is your home,” the Third Rail says. Plenitude scratches at her neck encouragingly.

“I don’t like it, I don’t want it. I told you. I want to go to the next car. The rabbit said there were horses.”

The Third Rail shakes her long head. She strides to the center of the room and Sei knows what will happen but she cannot bear it, she cannot bear this. “Why?” she yells at the Third Rail’s back. “What purpose could this possibly serve?”

The Third Rail turns and seats herself in the great room, letting her unlined kimono pool out around her and smoothing her long hair into two flat planks. She reaches into her robes and withdraws an enormous book—it is swollen and waterlogged, and reedy bits of kelp and grass peek out from its pages like ribbonmarks. She opens it on her lap; lake-water splashes out. The Rail beckons Sei with sweetness, as if she is luring a cat from under the bed.

“No,” Sei moans, but she is going to her, could never have done less than go to her.

“Imagine a book at the bottom of a lake,” the Third Rail says.

“I told you not to say that. I don’t like it.”

“But I have gotten you the book. It was a very deep lake, frozen in places, high at the top of the world. I held my breath for a very long time.”

“You’re lying. There was never any book. My mother was crazy. She said those things because she was sick.”

Yet Sei inches closer. She is watching the space between the Third Rail’s breasts, white and smooth. The book is open; its pages are blue. The Third Rail opens her arms to take Sei in and cuddles her against her hip, pointing her long finger to the pages so that Sei can read.

“This is to say: I will hold nothing back from you, with either hand. All things, at the bottom of all lakes.”

Sei rubs her throat; it is tight and thin and she wants to run from this, but she is the Sei-fish again, twelve years old, blue and separate from the other fish, and she does not know the piscine joy they find in this volume, but she wants to, so very much.

She peeks at the page.
Just a glance,
she thinks.
And then I will
end this. It is obscene, and I can shame her into stopping it.

The book reads:

I really was born in a train station, you know. My mother
went into labor, and I came so fast. I was always too fast. Too
soon. She took me home, and I grew up, just a little girl, my
head full of books, my hands full of calligraphy brushes. I
had dreams like some children have freckles. And my sisters
made fun of my name.

I married your father as soon as I could manage it, and he
left me so often. I was so alone. I had only books and dreams
and brushes then. And often I slept—but it was not like really
sleeping. The world went black, and it went light again much
later. My head hurt as though there was another baby inside
it, pushing with her little hands to get out. The walls seemed so
close, so close! The whole house was like a gag in my mouth, I
could never breathe, and I could not leave it—your father
could come home at any moment, and if I were not there, he
would never come home again, I was certain.

You do not know that I went away when you were very
small. I was not even finished nursing you. I went away to a
place in the country where they folded me up into a very white
bed and put a piece of wood in my mouth and arced blue electricity
through me. I remember that it was blue, like the light
at the bottom of a lake. I held it all within me, all of it, all that
light, I would not let the smallest bit out of me. I held it as
though I was made to hold it, as though I was a third rail and
all the world’s tracks laid around me—it was mine to move the
lightning, mine to bear the white heat and the burning. I am
sure they were impressed. They knew they could trust me with
it, they gave me more and more, so that I could keep it safe for
them, and I know you saw it when I came home, saw how incandescent
I was, saw the light sizzling in the roots of my hair.

Sei looks up, her tears naked and hot as blood. The Third Rail is bleeding, thick trails of it, hot as tears. The space between her breasts is gouged open, and her blood pools on the already sodden book, stains the hems of her kimono.

“Please stop. Please, please.”

The Third Rail puts her hand to the bottom of her red mask and lifts it, and of course it is Usagi beneath it, Usagi-mother with such sad eyes, her face wan and worn, her lips shaking.

“
The floor of heaven, Sei, is laced with silver train tracks, and
the third rail is solid pearl. And they carry each a complement of
ghosts, who clutch the branches like leather handholds, and pluck
the green rice to eat raw.
”

“But this is not heaven. It isn’t.”

“No, Sei. But it is enough. For you. Everything for you.”

“
Why?
What do you want?”

“We want to fly. We want to leave the tracks, we want to roam and graze and howl at the mountains. We want to escape the world of our mother and our father, who pretend not to know we live and move and desire under the earth, just as they do. Don’t you want to escape your mother?”

Sei stares at the blood on her lap. She is not listening.

“I sat with you for hours, and there was so much blood. It took so long. It took so long.”

“It takes a long time to die. Even if it is quick, it takes a long time. It was hard to leave you—I think that is what you want me to say. That I did not want to leave my child. But it takes a long time. Your heart must stop, and your breath, and then the small things that you did not know kept you alive, books and dreams and brushes. And then you must walk a very long way in the dark, through the mountains, and there are pine trees there, and lanterns, and you can see before and behind the long trail of lanterns winding up and down the mountain, before you and behind.”

“You’re not really my mother. I know you’re not.”

“I am as good as your mother. I can be your mother, and you can be mine. It will be like a game. I remember your mother. I was built to remember. I was built out of remembering.”

Sei looks into eyes that could be Usagi’s, that could be her own sad, confused expression, with all those tigers at her ears. She puts her hand to her mother’s breast, the ruin of tissue and blood there, the wound like a heart.

“Lie below me,” Sei says, remembering her grandmother beneath the weepholes and her mother beneath the earth and she herself so far from the sun. “And I will watch over you.”

Beneath her palm the slash of her mother’s wound vanishes, as though the skin there had never dreamt of tearing.

Sei sinks into the arms of the red-masked ghost, and the Rail holds the blue-haired girl tightly, with a love like light. The Third Rail rocks her, and Plenitude curls up between her arm and her still-flat belly, and soon enough begins to snore inkily.

“There is not so very far left, not so very much left of the train,” the Third Rail says. “Before we open the conductor’s cabin and pay our respects, tell me, my Sei, my little fish, my child: is there someone who would come looking for you?” Her red voice is suddenly softly accusing.

“No, of course not. No one knows me here.”

“We knew you.”

“That’s different. There’s no one, I promise.”

“And yet she is here.” The Third Rail kisses Sei on her shoulder and purses her pale lips. “Tell us. Give us a command. Tell us to open our doors to her, or keep them shut as a mouth and leave her gasping on the platform. Guide us, tell us what it is right to do.”

If Sei tries—and it is becoming harder and harder—but if she tries to feel the others whose phantom senses float up under her own, under her tongue, under her fingers, under her feet, if she tries to feel them, she can just discern the smell of a train station, of the oily tracks, of the underground.

“Let her come,” Sei says, and falls asleep on her mother’s lap.

ONE

W
ISHES TO THE
T
REES

I
t’s over,” Sei said, folding her hands in her lap. They sat, squinting in the bright sunlight, at a restaurant wedged between two Buddhas.

“What does that mean?” Yumiko said, slurping her mushroom soup. “It’s not like you’re the first. Get an abortion.”

“It means,” Sei breathed deeply, ignoring her, “that I think there is no one left in the Floor of Heaven who is new for me. I’m not … like you. When I am there, I am always on my train, always with the folk there, and they barrel through under the city at such a speed—I’ve had to chew through Kyoto at the velocity of a new whore just to keep up. I am tired, and there is no one left. It’s time for me to go home. To visit my mother’s grave. To see if I still have a job. To figure out what to do about the baby. To find others, if they are there.”

Yumiko frowned. “An abortion would be better.”

“I’m not saying it wouldn’t.”

Yumiko shook her head. “You don’t understand. I said you weren’t the first. Occupational hazard, you know? It happens, kind of a lot. It happened to me. I had a son, about two years ago.”

“You never told me this before.”

“My father kicked me out. I come from a small town—girls don’t turn up pregnant there, except, you know, when they do. But I’d been coming into the city for years by then, and he sent me back there, to sleep with demons and drink myself to death, he said.” Yumiko saluted Sei with a glass of yellow wine. “I didn’t know how it would be. I had my baby, because I had some misplaced idea about the sanctity of motherhood, and I was young enough that I figured it would be more or less like having a doll. I had it, in the back room of the Floor of Heaven, between the wineglasses and the bar rags. My son was covered in streets, these long black lines from his scalp to his feet—but it wasn’t Palimpsest. It was someplace else. I think it was someplace new. I’ve never heard of a street he had on him, and anyway they didn’t look the same. They were long and straight and even, a grid. It was someplace
else
. And he looked at me, just turned his baby head and very clearly said:
I want to go back
. I screamed for a week. He was in me all that time, dreaming and traveling and learning, and I couldn’t bear to have him look at me.”

“What happened to him?”

“The owner and his wife adopted him. Thank god. I told them never to bring him there, bring him up to be a priest, hope he dies a virgin.” Yumiko took a long, shaky drink of her wine. “So, you see, you’re not breeding. You’re not having a child.
It
is. Palimpsest. An abortion would be better.”

Sei swallowed hard. She couldn’t answer. Couldn’t imagine that child, couldn’t imagine her own.

“And I don’t want you to go,” Yumiko said. “I won’t say I love you, I think we’re both beyond that. But it’s good to have a friend who knows what I know. Peaceful. Who never doubts that there are wonders outside this city. Isn’t it peaceful to know what we know, and know it together?”

“Of course it is.”

“Then stay. Stay a few days more. Pray for your mother here. There are more shrines and temples than you could count in a lifetime. One of them is good enough for her.”

Sei scratched her cheek and stared off into the bustling street. It was peaceful to know, and yet to know meant that the volume, the resolution, the brightness of Kyoto was dimmed and fuzzed, and she could not pick out faces here anymore, because they were not long or red.

“My mother killed herself when I was fourteen,” Sei said slowly. “She stabbed herself in the chest with a kitchen knife and crawled into our tatami room to die. I found her when I came home from school. Do you know how long it takes someone to die from a wound like that? Hours and hours. More hours than I could count then or now.”

“Sei …”

“And I never called a doctor. I’d like to say she begged me not to, but she didn’t. She just looked at me, she just waited to die, and didn’t pull out the knife, didn’t move. She talked about the tigers, when she talked. I held her for hours and I let her die and all I said was:
Go, go, please just go
. Which shrine do you suggest to purge that, Yumiko? What god do you think will forgive me?”

“I don’t know. I know you’re not her, whatever you think.”

“I talk about crazy things and abandon my child.”

Yumiko took Sei’s hand, laced her fingers through it, shaking her head all the while. “Please: stay, stay, please just stay.”