Palimpsest

“It's ok, it's ok, Oleg. I need you so much. You have no idea.”

ZARZAPARRILLA STREET IS PAVED with old coats. Layer after layer of fine corduroy and felt and wool the colors of coffee and ink. Those having business here must navigate with pole and gondola, ever so gently thrusting aside the sleeves and lapels and weedy ties, fluttering like seawee

d, lurching as though some unlunar tide compelled them. The gondolas are rimmed in balsam and velvet, and they are silent through the depthless street. Great curving pairs of scissors are provided in case of sudden disaster, tucked neatly beneath the pilots seat.

All along the cloth-canal are minuscule houses, barely large enough for a man to stand straight beneath the rafters. They are houses of shame, and try their best to make themselves small. Every so often the wind, fragrant with juniper and blackberry wine brewing in a great pearl vat somewhere far within the corkscrewing streets, blows a door open, and a great eye, blue or brown or yellow as cholera, will peer out from the jamb. The wind, sensitive to their natures, shuts the doors again as soon as it may.

This is the banking district of Palimpsest, and you must keep a respectful silence. Within the hunched houses a great and holy counting occurs, and even the sun does not wish to interrupt. It has been years since the sky has seen one of the beggars who dwell in the houses, who, once housed, could not bear to be parted from those precious walls, those beatific chimneys, who grew and grew until they filled the places wholly and could not even be cut from their parlors with gondoliers scissors. But the clouds judge that they do not cry out in their sleep, and so must be learned in some school of happiness.

Almudena, Mendicant-Queen! The smallest house must surely be hers, most debased, most humble. Her scissors broke here, and she begged each splinter of her house from the great and tall. What creature was it gave her that tiled roof? That oak porch? But it is her mumbling you hear beneath the great green streetlamps with their globes of gold. They say it is her long tail that seeks the street edge in warm weather, sunning its scales on the curb.

Take her what coins you have, she will bite them to know their worth and count them into her memory, which is finite and bounded as her own bones. A rib counts for a hundred, vertebrae twenty-five each, cartilage for decimal places, her liver for units of one million, and neither you nor I will ever see her priceless heart. Without calculating machine, Almudena uses the map of her flesh to recall deposits, withdrawals, points of interest. She cannot, of course, forget her own joints, the mathematics of her own little pancreas, and her lungs cannot be robbed of their accounts. If we were to cut her open, who knows if we would find blood-at night the gondoliers swear you can hear coins rolling through her ventricles, notes folded into cranes fluttering at the ends of her hair, trying to lift her house free of Zarzaparrilla Street and bear her past all dreams of lucre.

Gabriel poles through the jackets, his face bright and wind-whipped-but the wind here is warm, it carries with it red flowers and the sea. Oleg peers over the edge, through the spaces between the coat-waves. He is bent double over the side of the gondola, his vision blurred as though with sudden pain, his hands cold-he feels mold beneath them, mold and metal. He tastes snail flesh in his mouth, and his head throbs with the doubled, trebled, quartered actions of each of his hands, each of his eyes. He shakes it and brass dust falls from his hair, the dust of a thousand keys grinding.

“What's at the bottom?” Oleg asks thickly, almost catching a noseful of brass buttons.

“I don't know. Can't swim, myself. Train tracks? Morlocks? Alligators, definitely.”

Oleg sits back, rubs his head like an old man trying to remember his glasses.

“Why did you bring me here?” he says, staring off into the slamming doors and blinking eyes of the low houses. His gondolier-his? Probably not his, not really not his own-turns, his haphazard black hair stung with moonlight.

“It's where I've got, Oleg. Only place I could take you. That's how it works. You sort of… lease your skin to this place. This is the part you saw on my chest, so this is where we end up, though I had to hustle to meet you here. And it's a big favor, Oleg. Now I have to wait till tomorrow night to find out what neighborhood you've got on you.”

“What if you sleep with someone…new? Without the mark. Where do you go?” Where did Lyudmila go?

Gabriel shrugs and poles through a knot of tweed. “I don't know. I've never been with anyone new. It's a waste of time. Nowhere, maybe. I don't like to think about it.”

Gabriel pulls open his shirt, not very different than the one they'd left crumpled in a heap on an old cedar dresser-and the mark is there again, deeper if anything, like sword-slashes, like a flaying. Oleg follows a long brown finger toward the most savage of the black lines, and yes, just above it, in the tiniest possible script, scrawled by a moth or a hummingbird: Zarzaparrilla Street. Crossed by 413th, 415th, and 417th at severe, acute angles, nothing like the soothingly regular grid of New York.

“Besides,” Gabriel laughs, “immigrants never have any money you know. This is the best place to get some. I guess you could say were commuting.” He poles through the coats, enormous bronze scissors stuck through his belt, which he draws now and again to slice through an impassable blue tangle of recalcitrant suits. His voice softens, quiets. “Most of them… most of us never figure it out. Bad dream, they think, or good one. Funny rash, never really goes away, but Doc says it's fine, nothing to worry about. Why dwell on it? But some people, they just can't let it go.” He stares at the teetering houses with their enormous eyes blinking out of the windows. “Some people drink themselves out of school trying to find it again, trolling through bars where the shadows are so greasy they leave trails on the walls, just to find a way in, a way through. Some people forget too that you're supposed to stop sleeping, you're supposed to have a life in the sun.”

“Is it always dark here?”

Gabriel sniffs, wipes his eyes with the cuff of his coat. He seems so young, young and tired and needful. “No, no, ‘course not,” he says. “We just never come here in the daytime.”

Oleg looks over the rim of the boat again. There are flower garlands strung there, calla lilies, he thinks, and bluebells. They sag into the clothed street; their smell is old, a remnant, a relic.

“But it is a dream, after all,” he says to the woolen tide. “Nothing matters in a dream. It's just… crazy things, over and over until you wake up.”

There is a long and somehow ugly silence. “Sure,” Gabriel says, “just a dream,” but his eyes are hollow, shallow, low and dim. “What else?”

Oleg trails his hand in the street. He is good at the ephemeral, at ghosts, at dreams. At veiled things and at the untouchable. If it's a dream, he will be all right; these are places he can know. If he can bring up a ghost, he can find his way to waking in this place.

Gabriel pulls the gondola into a little dock and lashes it to the pole. He smiles, but it is breezy and thin.

“Time to punch the clock,” he says.

They enter a great cathedral-like building of deep blue glass from buttress to cornice. A few others straggle in after them, and Oleg follows Gabriels lead as they receive aprons from an absurdly tall and silent man with glossily spotted giraffe legs, along with fine shirts, rouge for their cheeks, cologne. They pass through a long hallway lined with portraits of maître d's with proud aquiline noses. Before them dozens of tables spread out with ruby-colored tablecloths and pearl candelabras-it is a restaurant, vast and bustling.

“Don't look at them,” Gabriel whispers as he takes a tray of slim goblets filled with hot strawberry wine.

“At who?” Oleg struggles under the weight of his own burden: globes of white butter clattering in little dishes of hollowed-out diamonds, square loaves of moist, spiced bread. Pressed into service as a waiter, he thinks. Wonderful.

“The patrons,” Gabriel hisses. “It's the law, here. You can never look them in the eye. Keep your head bent, like you're praying. There shouldn't be any need to speak, and anyway they aren't allowed to talk to you unless they call you ‘Novitiate.’”

“How do I take their orders if I can't speak?”