Palimpsest

“There's only one dish here. Just put the plates down and go back to the kitchen for more. Get through the night-you'll be paid, and it's better to have money here than not to.”

And so they work. After

the wine and bread come snails in flaming brandy with thin little slices of banana sizzling in their shells, followed by great bone platters piled up with obscene slabs of meat, ruby-bright steaks that slide over the rims of the plates, crusted in broiled white-brown skin: albino elephant, Oleg hears ten, twenty dinners breathe in ecstasy. The meat is crowned with tumbling cascades of pomegranate seeds, drenched in honey-amber wine. The smell of it is so rich and sweet it nearly knocks Oleg back-his stomach clenches, but they will not allow him to eat.

“Novitiate!” cries a woman with three rings on her right hand and a coiling bracelet of silver and agate on her left that winds around all her fingers and up her arm. Oleg is careful not to look at her. His feet ache from the pilgrimages to the kitchen, and he does not want to talk to her. Her fingernails are wet with pomegranate juice.

“How long have you lived in Palimpsest, Novitiate?” she asks haughtily.

“I…”

“Speak up!”

“I think this is my second night, if I understand everything.”

She claps her hands and squeals, a high sound like a broken chime. “I thoughtso! Your gait is quite gauche. An immigrant! How charming! Tell us, boy, is it true that you can't see yellow or blue? That you feast in the rubbish heaps after we've all gone to our beds and our teawine? That you all get here by…” She leans down to catch his eye, to get him in trouble, but he averts his gaze in time, and sees only her long red hair brushing her wineglass, still streaked with strawberry. “Well, by rutting like filthy old cows? What do you eat? You must tell us all your foul rites!”

Oleg fixes his eyes on his shoes. His face burns with a shame he did not know, until this moment, he possessed. He has not heard the word immigrant flung like that since he was a boy-of course, he is an immigrant. There and here. The strange woman with her hooting, triumphal laughs and her gingery perfume makes him want to run, and also to stay and grind her glass into her face.

Slowly with a deliberateness he savors, and will savor still in the morning, he raises his head and stares at her directly, her clear, spangle-painted eyes, her cheeks with tiny jewels embedded in the skin which is just beginning to show wrinkles, laugh lines, without bitterness or malice. Silence crashes through the hall and explodes at his feet.

“I'm sure,” Oleg says evenly, “its all true. Every word. Want to come to the rubbish heaps with me? We can rut under the moon and see where you end up.”

The woman's violet mouth opens slightly perhaps in shock, perhaps in pleasure at being confronted at last with real live immigrant manners. The giraffe-legged maître d’ surges up behind him and cuffs his ear with one enormous, manicured hand. He seizes Oleg's arm, and without a word hauls him from the glassy cobalt hall and deposits him unceremoniously onto Zarzaparrilla Street.

Gabriel strolls out a few minutes later-sweet boy, good boy, loyal compatriot.

“ I told you,” is all he says, as he pulls the gondola's lead free of the dock and pushes them out into the street of coats again. He is cold, as though Oleg transgressed against him personally embarrassed him, made him a fool.

“But it's a dream,” Oleg insists. “It was fun. We won't even remember it in the morning.”

“You don't know anything, Oleg,” sighs Gabriel, and they do not speak while the wind picks up through the last, late stars and light begins, lemony and cool in the east.

“Give me the scissors?” Oleg says finally smiling as brave and bright as he has ever learned to do. But Gabriel has turned away; his gaze is over the sweet, small rooftops, down alleys Oleg does not know. He is gone: softly, subtly, irrevocably. He doesn't turn to look, or graze fingers as he hands over blades longer than his legs. Oleg stands, nearly toppling them, and holds his architect-not his, not really-and whispers against his neck his best apology:

“I want to tell you a story Its short, I promise. And its about love. See, in the land of the dead, a boy who was run over by a black car fell in love with the Princess of Cholera, who had a very bright yellow dress and yellow hair and shiny yellow shoes…”

But Gabriel is not listening, and his back is stiff beneath his coat. Oleg sadly takes up the bronze scissors and knifes through the flowing street below the boat. Dismayed threads pop free of shoulder seams; buttons fly. Below he sees nothing but more sleeves and brume, but he is both a swimmer and a maker of keys, and he knows how to fit himself into gaps too small for others. He cannot stay in the wreck of Gabriels disapproval, and the night is almost done. Oleg holds his breath and dives blade-first he falls and falls, so far.

In a train station, a woman with blue hair is suddenly dizzy; on a street of cedar, a beekeeper in a long dress sneezes as her nose fills with wool.

There is a river flowing beneath the street of coats, a river the color of milk. It is slow and thick, rolling in long, lugubrious currents of cream and curdle. There is a flannel sky over it, and a long brick tunnel overgrown with golden moss and flabby, half-translucent mushrooms, slick and silver, like the flesh of oysters. It has fallen through in places, and Oleg has fallen through the places.

He walks along the bank, a crumbling, ornate rill carved with lamenting faces whose tears feed the river. Their mouths contort, their eyes plead, and they pass by unmarked beneath his feet. He limps, and this disturbs him, for in dreams does not one fall painlessly like a sigh?

There is a bench, one of those that seem, wherever they are, that they ought to have been in Paris, with a view of the Seine. There is a woman sitting there in a long dress, watching the mushrooms flutter. As he draws closer, the dress becomes deeply blue, spattered with silver stars. It is formal; it has a bustle like the base of a cupola. Her hair is wild and loose, though, mouse-colored, very like his own, and strung through with snow, though no flakes fall underground. She turns to face him and he groans; the mushrooms recoil.

“I missed you, Olezhka,” says his sister, and holds out her long arms.

FOUR

THE ARCHIPELAGO

Lucia was gone.

Ludovico sat naked in his hall, cross-legged, as if to be .J shriven. The Etymologiae flowed up the walls around him: Lucia's breadcrumbs, all raven-devoured, and he the child left behind in the wood. He touched them, the tiny grooves in the paint, places where she had been, where her fingers had moved. If he closed his eyes he could dwell in the circuit of air that had once held her, he could hold his breath and be inside her again, within the close and burning borders of her—she stood here, washed her hair in this sink, wrote upon this wall, ate roasted chicken at this table. There was no place he could enter where she had not also been, her echoes hanging in the air like pages hung to dry. No place that did not suppurate in her absence, which was not ringed with the light of her old selves, like film burned with a cigarette. He could smell her leonine scent in their bed, and would still, even weeks after she had slept there. He could not bear to sleep where she had, to ruin the imperceptible outline of her body, which was surely now only a fevered hope and a lie of unwashed linens. Her laugh, harsh and cruel and short, hung like garlands of blackened roses by the long, thin windows. He had hardly eaten but to put his teeth to the bones she had left on a chipped plate in the kitchen, to fit his mouth to a dead thing she had once worried.

Ludo pressed his cheek to the wall, and the letters warmed beneath him like her shoulders in winter: Cum leones dormierint, vigilant oculi; cum ambulant, cauda sua cooperiunt vestigial sua, ne eos vena-tor inveniat… the words bent the corner sharply, winding on past the telephone table with its slender green lamp. When lions sleep, their eyes are ever watchful, and when they walk, they obliterate their tracks with their tails so that the hunter may not find them…