Palimpsest

“Out of the way! I shall trample you thoroughly, see if I won't!”

The cart-herons squawk harshly and swing wildly around the quartet, galloping onto 16th Street with long, graceless strides. Eight hands shake free of each other; the men clutch their elbows in nervous agitation. The girl with blue hair stares at them with dark eyes.

“Which way to the trains?” she whispers to her comrades. Wrong question, child! You mean to say: Where am I? Who are all of you? What has happened to us? But no one ever asks after sensible things. The others shake their heads-they cannot help her. And so she runs in the direction that seems best, turning as sharply as the herons onto a brightly glowing avenue that shears off from Hieratica like a broken branch.

Abandoned, the others scatter like ashes. The road stretches before and beyond, lit by streetlamps with swollen pumpkin-globes, and the gutters run with a sudden, utter rain.

PART I :

INCIPIT LIBER DE NATURIS BESTIARUM

ONE

THE FLAYED HORSE

Sei woke with the grassy, half-rotten smell of ryokan-tatami in her nose and her face streaked with tears. She immediately tried to go back to sleep, to catch the herons, fading already, but alas—sleep lost is sleep lost. She felt a weight on her wrists, like the memory of heavy bracelets. Her second thought was to find Sato Kenji, to shake him and bite his mouth and ask him if he had written a book about the city, too, if she could press it against the other, which lay still in her backpack, cold and black. When would he fly north again to Tokyo on their sleek white serpent? Tomorrow? Never? In what car might he wait for her? Useless, she decided, to ask.

She dressed without thinking about it much, took two rice-balls—one stuffed with salted plum, one with salmon—and Sato Kenji's little book with her, and fled the milling, noisy hostel into the city. Kyoto was designed on the pattern of a Go board, by imaginative and impish urban planners who surely drank a great deal. As she progressed from square to square, staring vacantly at the thick cypress bark rooftops and leering Fu dogs, Sei felt strange, floating. She was a smooth white disc, clapped on all sides by slippery black pieces, reflecting the sky, helpless, with the Shinkansen on one hand and the endless pavilions of Kyoto on the other.

She chose the Silver Pavilion out of all the temples. It had been her mother's favorite, and so, like an inheritance, was hers. It was shaded in autumn leaves so bright the trees seemed to bleed. The persimmons were so golden they hurt her eyes, and the sun stabbed at her through the blazing fruit. She had a terrible dry taste in her mouth, as though she had drunk too much, though she had had nothing but water since Tokyo.

The temple grounds were deserted. She settled onto the grass a ways off from the great silver temple. She watched it, how dark and mottled its silver leaf was, centuries of tarnish which the monks, in their inscrutable perambulations, had never polished, settling on the holiness of obscured metal. It looked like the crouched and looming house of a succubus from one of her mother's books. She almost expected some yellow-eyed monster with wings of patchworked sin to snap open the door and screech some infernal koan at her. Yet Sei liked the mossy, irritable temple, which seemed honest, unflappable, like an old, hunchbacked elephant.

She opened Kenji's book on her lap and flipped through the pages. She did not want to read this book from start to finish, or rather, she thought perhaps it did not want her to. Instead she practiced the art of bibliomancy trusting the book to show her what it wanted her to know.

In Osaka, I heard a very strange account of the antique initiation rituals of conductors. I was told by a retired man who was adamant I not reveal his name that before the war, when new conductors were assigned their first train, they were brought on board on a very cold winter's night when the train was stopped and no one lingered in the cars. The senior engineers gathered tightly in the conductor's cabin. They put the earnest young man's hands onto the control console and anointed them with viscous oil from the engine before pulling loose several wires and tying them into knots around the man's fingers. He was then told the secret name of the train, which he could reveal to no one. They cut into the third finger of his left hand, mingling his blood with the oil, which was then returned to circulation in the engine. In this way the train became the beloved of the conductor, and the man who told me this story said that it felt very much like a grave wedding service.

Sei's hands throbbed, feeling the open, oil-spattered wires beneath her own hands, a phantom console alive beneath her. The wind picked up and rustled her blue hair, blowing it over her cheeks. She might have remained in such a pose until the sun slid away below the tin rooftops, her hands frozen over the book, had a young woman not sat down next to her without warning, still dressed in her school uniform, her hair hanging in a long, loose braid. Sei started and scowled, but she uttered nothing, as manners demanded.

“It's funny,” the young student said casually, in the authoritative, overeager tone of a local girl speaking to a tourist, her accent unmistakably Kyoto. She turned to Sei, her face open and attentive as a cat's. “The Golden Pavilion is the famous one, but it only ever looked yellow to me. It's ugly, just kind of garish. All that gold, and it just looks like yellow paint. But the Silver Pavilion … nobody cares, its not a big tourist draw, and if you didn't know, you might not even think it was silver—the tarnish is so thick it matches the cypress bark on the roof. Doesn't it look sad and run down? But it seems real to me, and the Golden Pavilion seems … well, it's belligerent, thinking it's so beautiful. Arrogant old bitch.”

Sei blinked.

“My name is Yumiko,” the girl said helpfully.

Sei frowned further. “I haven't been to the Golden Pavilion yet,” she said, handing over her grudging answer like bus fare. Yumiko shook her dark head.

“If you do, you'll see what I mean.”

Yumiko was silent then. She stared at Sei for a long while before grinning, wiping her palms on a blue plaid skirt, and extending her tongue slowly, as far as it could reach, nearly grazing the tip of her delicate chin. Sei gaped; blood rushed to her cheeks. She saw it there, on the red flesh of the girl's tongue, whipped with wind: Kenji's mark, the grid of lines, the map, blazing blue-bright.

“What is that?” she cried, leaping up from the grass. The black book tumbled to the ground. “Tell me!”

Yumiko closed her mouth with a gentle little sound. “Don't you know?” she said, her brow creased as a page.

“No, of course not, how could I?”

The girl stood, her braid slipping entirely loose, and stood very close, s

o close they might have kissed. She reached for Sei's blouse and began to slide the buttons from their stitched eyelets. Sei pushed her away, but Yumiko smiled.

“Please,” she murmured.

Yumiko opened the crisp black shirt like a theater's curtains. There, on Sei's skin, were the strange dark lines, snaking across her sternum, arcing slightly onto the curve of her breasts. It seemed as though a great insect had attached itself to her, to suckle and grow.

Yumiko did not step away. She cradled Sei's face in her manicured hand and leaned back, stretching, a smug, satisfied cat.

“I would like to be a novice here,” she said airily “I would like to live in the temple and drink bamboo tea every day, and eat only seven grains of rice until I was thinner than the Buddha and twice as beautiful. I would leave clean water for the sacred cats and sweep the rushes and the red leaves aside in the fall. I would smell the sake breweries in the winter, and eat one persimmon a year, on the Emperors birthday. Every morning and every evening, I would cut a square from one of my kimonos and with it I would polish the walls until the tarnish fell away like an old woman's hair, until it gleamed like water. After a year I would be naked and polish the walls with my own hair, and under my body it would look like a house hollowed out of the moon.”