Palimpsest

“But he wasn't her family. There can be no real love between strangers. I love you, and that is enough.”

But he had loved the brown-eyed girl anyway, though he never touched her, even once. Lyudmila said that this was the way of the world, but he turned his back to her in their thin little bed, and she had not been able to stop him, being as she was and not other than that.

He told no one of her except the doctor who dispensed the pills which did nothing to banish her, and she promised that she had not told her friends about him either. She seemed to grow up more or less as he did, even though she should have been older. Still, she had not chased off his girlfriends or even scowled at the occasional boyfriend or thrown jealous fits on the fire escape. She just sat on the footboard as she always had, and if there was no one in his bed and he could not sleep, she would slip in beside him and he would wake up with wrinkled fingers and drenched pillows.

“I love you, Mila,” he said to the empty room. He did not ask where she went; it seemed like bad manners, and folk who have lived together as long as Oleg and Lyudmila rely on manners.

“You have something on your tummy,” she said as he was brushing his teeth after what could hardly have been called breakfast—still he could not stand the taste of stale red tea on his teeth. She sat pertly on the sink, where she could daintily spit out her water rather than letting it run down her chin.

He looked down—beneath the slight fur there was something. He pulled up the skin of his stomach. Around his navel, brachiating out like a compass rose, were long, spindly black lines, crooked and aimless. He could almost make out writing above them, but it hurt his eyes to peer so close at something upside down. It was the mark that the other Lyudmila had had on her neck—he might pretend he had spilled ink or something, but he recognized it— had he not tasted it, kissed it?

“Maybe you shouldn't be kissing strange girls,” she said archly. “You could catch something.”

He rubbed at it a little—it stayed, of course. He hadn't really thought it would come off. Like Mila, he supposed, he was stuck with it. He shrugged. It didn't much matter. A man who has learned to live with a ghost can live with a scar.

“Mila,” he said, drawing a tired breath, “drop dead.”

She smirked, and spat into the sink. He followed suit.

It was nine days later. Afterward, he would count on his fingers to arrive at the number, sure he was right, within one or two. He'd been called uptown in the stiff kind of cold that growls at engines and whips them cruelly A young man stamped his feet outside a tall brownstone, blowing into his slender fingers and tugging at a knit cap. Oleg's breath puffed in the air as he knelt to his work.

Lock-outs: the small, sweet, reliable lost souls who made up the bulk of his business with their forgetful habits and careless keys. He felt fatherly about them, even when it was a septuagenarian in his bathrobe and a cold pipe. Poor kittens, locked into the world.

Oleg looked into the lock, looking deep, as was his habit, looking as he looked into his sister's eyes, through the imagined telescoping locks of his interior estates, into the kid's kitchen door just past the threshold, and the chipped white bedroom door, and out of the brownstone into the next, all the way to Brooklyn and still further, to the foaming Atlantic nosing at the strand. He listened as to a seashell, for the lock to cry out its secret grief. It wept; he comforted.

“Thanks for getting here so fast,” the young man said, shoving his hands into his black jacket pockets. He was tall and narrow, dark Spanish eyes, the opposite of soft, generous Lyudmila with her great blond mane.

“My shop isn't far.” Oleg shrugged. “And we can't have you turning stray and pawing at neighbors’ doors for fish.”

The young man snorted laughter. They talked in the way one checks one's watch on the train platform or blows on one's fingers: something to do, a way to keep warm. The boy's name was Gabriel. He was an architecture student. He built great miserly things that held locks gingerly fiercely.

The door popped gratefully open and Gabriel gave a yelp of relief not unlike a puppy seeing his master come home, miraculously, from the frightening world. His black jacket flopped open and Oleg could see, snaking up over his collarbone, a fine mark, as if painted by a calligrapher, black and spindled, branching out as if searching for new flesh to conquer.

Oleg leapt up. He grabbed the man's shirt before he could stop himself, but Gabriel did not protest, nor even seem surprised. He just smiled, an affable, lopsided smile utterly unlike the ghastly, knowing glances to which Oleg had all his life been subject.

“Go ahead,” the boy whispered. “It's okay.”

And so Oleg, his hands shaking and wind-reddened, unbuttoned the crisp workday shirt and spread it open, the mark there, livid, alive, darker than dreams.

“Do you know what it is?” Oleg said softly.

Gabriel bent his head to catch the locksmith's stare and lifted his chin with two brown fingers.

“Don't you?”

“No, I … it was there—”

“When you woke up? Yeah.”

“Tell me, please.”

“I can do better.”

And the architect kissed him, very gently, the way a widow kisses the feet of a statue. His tongue tasted of orange candy. Oleg thought he ought to have been startled, affronted, even, but twenty years in the school of his sister had permanently excised the ought from him. He stiffened, unsure, and the strangeness of an unshaven cheek against his own habitually haggard skin struck him, an oddly innocent thing, more naked even than Lyudmila's scented face. His hand was still on Gabriel's chest, and he thought, though such a thing could not be, not really, that the black lines beneath his palm burned.

Oleg sighed into the circuit of the architect's arms, imagining Gabriel as a great house, elbows unfolding in perfect angles to take him in, to cover him in rafters and drywall, to keep the rain from his head and the cold from his bones. They stood thus as the air thinned in a sudden certainty of snow to come, and kissed a second time on the doorstep before the boy led him in, through the kitchen door just past the threshold, through the chipped white bedroom door, through the tall, thin brownstone, and still further.

When Gabriel entered him, Oleg thought he might break into pieces with the pain of it, but he did not, of course. He opened, his insides unfolding to allow another human within him. He whimpered at the bare walls, trying not to seem unprepared for the strength of it. But Gabriel smoothed his hair and kissed the back of his neck and whispered: