Palimpsest

Her rooms were as severe as the angles of her own bones. There was a black chaise, a glass cabinet. She poured him a resinous yellow wine he did not like. He felt his eel—not his, surely!—circle him and was feebled by her. Nerezza settled her weight on his lap—she was heavier than she looked, as though her bones were made of iron. She moved her violet skirt aside—such an expensive thing, thick as a book cover, and her legs like pages.

“I am a path to her,” she said, her black eyes piercing and undeniable. Ludo had followed with a monk's faith. He opened his mouth against her neck like a wolf, as though he could tear her open that way and find Lucia hiding, or waiting, inside. She moved her legs around him, sliding, squeezing things that would not let him free, so tight that his knuckles were pressed against them as he fumbled with his belt and kissed her again, deeply, with a crawling feeling of loss—Lucia would not like this. Or she would not care. Which did he want? Ludovico scratched her back brutally with his free hand, hoping that his marks would show as dark and dire as the maps on their flesh, the map she had no right to, yet bore.

Nerezza would not open her mouth no matter how he moved in her. She was wild-eyed, seething, but breathed serenely through her aquiline nose, her black eyes clamped on him like a bite. She was narrow within and without, and the press of her all around him threatened to force his soul out through the top of his head. He screamed into her—he could not help it. He screamed into the dark, into the empty house, into the compact interior world of Nerezza, the eel-hearted, the great and solemn beast who did not cry out in her shu

ddering, but bit his cheek savagely and held it hissing in her canines as he came like glass breaking.

THE LANES OF PARIMUTUEL CURVE in long, lazy arcs, so as to take in their circuit the whole of the Troposphere. The city shakes three times when the races ring the great baleen-railed track, when a hundred hooves send up sprays of black pearls, when the spectators as one throw back their heads and scream out the substance of their ecstatic wills. There is a dome, for rain in Palimpsest is like an eager lover: ever-present and zealous, steaming with ardor. Under the dome, chocolate silk sweeps down from a frame of kaleidoscopic glass, each bar blown in as many colors as a church window. Enormous orange lamps hang like miniature suns, banded up in black chains. And the track, the track of pearls, wheels in its grand circle, ever on. The stands are rarely empty: slavering, pilgrim-fervent, the crowd leans forward as one great, spangled body to see the poor beasts run.

Traugotts voice, a copper pan shaken in the wind, sings up from the stalls. He is a breeder of snails and dwells in a house of three stories. In his youth he covered each of the floors in rich soils of black and red, leaves of gold and green, grains brown and sweet, violet petals as thick as a pat of butter. In his middle age, birch and fig saplings sprouted through the kitchen tile; hedges ring the furniture. His great petit-gris slowly move from parlor to wash-closet, gorging themselves in paroxysms of helicicial rapture. They mate in the chimney, sing softly the hymns of snails on the windowsills when the moon blanches the verdant paint to black.

And when the days of races approach, he takes the roundest and sweetest of them into his bedchamber, and on a brocaded bed so great it spans the floor entire, so soft he cannot bear to sleep upon it, he lays them down like children. There Traugott instructs his beloveds in an ascetic discipline, a consecrated fast, for the stomachs of men cannot bear very much of what the stomachs of snails contain. He leads them in prayer to the high Helix on her throne of soil, her opalescent flesh bound with sweet grasses, her eyestalks quivering with compassion, with mercy. So Traugott quivers as his jewels perish in purgation and starvation, so Traugott weeps for them as he polishes their shells and packs them into a green valise.

And with his bright case, Traugott stalks the stalls, his beard dyed to match the favored mounts of the day-today it is a spectral scarlet, and children reach out to touch the light of his long hairs, soft as a maids. He holds up his broad hands, full of little golden sacks-snails brim the edges, iridescent, the size of a dainty fist. He slurps one slowly with pleasure, with grief. The taste of them like buttered brandywine, like sugared goosefat, melts on his tortured tongue. Seeing the bobbing of his ruddy, guilty throat, a dozen spectators clamor for his service.

Nerezza wears a wide black hat festooned with long, pale swan-feathers tipped in onyx and obsidian. The whole affair is pinned with the lacquered pelvis of a lynx. It shadows her face like an eclipse and she licks the meat from her snail shell with precise delicacy flicking the shriveled body into her narrow mouth. She stares down at the track from their high box, garlanded with leather reins, and raises a pair of silver opera glasses, trembling, to her face.

“It will start soon,” she says.

“What will?” Ludovico sits straight as a soldier. His left hand itches-there is nothing there, but he feels his flesh blazing, crawling with bees, while his right droops with the weight of a cold porcelain hand. He can hear the roaring of trains and the small voice of a viola in the dark. He is arrested by these things which he can feel but are not with him, not present in the stadium. But the scent of the steaming snail cuts through their shadows, and a murmur passes through the waiting audience. They hold their breath as one.

“The night races, Ludo.”

“You promised me Lucia, not horses.”

“She is here. I have not seen her yet. But I am watchful.” She proffers the glasses.

When lions sleep, their eyes are ever-watchful, he thinks. He takes the lenses, looks down to the track and its improbable gravel-there are horses there, yes, stamping their hooves and snorting, but they are monstrosities of leather hung over a clanking, clattering framework. Bronze ribs show through tears in the brown skin, creased and stained like an old map case. Their eyes are gaping holes that show occasional flames: whatever engine drives them spits out its heart in sparks and blue jets. They are thin; constricted chests tucked up like starving whippets, spindled legs never approaching equine proportion, concluding in bronze spikes that pierce the pearls of the racing ground. Their manes are braided backward into their tails, one massive leather cord proceeding from head to haunch in a sweeping arc.

“They are so beautiful,” Nerezza breathes. “I know the woman who makes them-she lives in Silverfish, on the outskirts, on an estate that would beggar Naples. She has a scar on the small of her back, shaped like a liver A colt bit her when she was young.”

“This is a dream,” Ludo sighs. He is not patient. “A dream, and I shall wake up sticky.”

She gives him a withering look, and several of the outlandishly dressed folk near them-one hoists a parasol of sleeping gray lizards-recoil as though he has uttered a vulgar curse. He is saved in his shame by the sounding of a long, low horn, something like those Swiss leviathans Lucia had loved. The leather horses explode from their dock-the crowd throws back their sparkling heads as one and screams. Nerezzas own cry is high and piquant and terrible, and the horses screech their response, like the death of a thousand owls. Their mechanical gait is awkward and jerky, their spikes driving into the track, but the speed is undeniable, and it is over before Ludo can think it a dream again, the one with a red handprint on its rump streaming ahead in the last stretch.

But no one applauds; their approval is silence, and it is total. Nerezza exhales slowly shakily, as she did when she climbed from him and fell asleep on the carpet like an exhausted cat.

The next racers line up, but they are not horses. They are men, and women, too, their legs contorted into animal limbs-leopard, gazelle, lion, lizard, horse, and ostrich. They stand upright, most of them, on two exotic legs and stare miserably into the stands, their glares like accusations.

“Who are they?” Ludo asked.

“Veterans,” Nerezza sniffed. “This is a charity race. Pay no attention, the box seats are not supposed to deign to watch.”

The horn sounds like the death of a great whale and Ludo obediently turns away, pretends to be reading the newspaper of his neighbor, a thing more like a broadside than La Repubblica; he admires the letter-pressing, the decorated corners, reads idly about the paramours of a woman whose name means nothing to him, philippics on immigration and quarantine. The Dvorniki have been spotted on the south side of Zarzaparrilla-this publication would like to take the opportunity to thank them for their difficult and vital work. The paper smells faintly but distinctly of vinegar. Nerezza laces her black-gloved hand through his; he stiffens, but supposes resignedly that this is within the sphere of licit behavior, given that her inner thighs must still be bruised by his thumbs. She wears a ring over the glove on her middle finger, a tourmaline beetle with bulbous copper eyes. He keeps his gaze firmly on it, and cannot be sure he does not see its antennae waver Her grip tightens on him, her finger-pads recalling thumbscrews. The beetle ring bites into his knuckle.

And he follows her eyes, eel-inscrutable, down the stands from their scarlet and leather box. Two women sit far below them: a blond creature with a green scarf, her hair like water pouring over an emerald riding uniform. Her gloved hand clasps the fingers of another woman, with coarse heaps of dark hair fastened with bronze compasses, graphite-nubs extending gracefully from their claws. She wears a calfskin dress, the exact color of her flesh. It is Lucia, of course it is Lucia, and her face is nakedly happy, a happiness it seems almost obscene to witness.

Ludovico calls out to his wife, and she turns slightly but surely she cannot hear him over the cannonade of hooves and foot-pads below them, the sudden rain of pearls. She screams with the rest; the blond woman shuts her eyes in the convulsion of her cry.

“Does this help you?” Nerezza says. “To see her, that she is here, that she belongs somewhere, that she is happy, that she has a lover, that she knows how to behave in the society? Does it fill up the place in you where she lived?”

Ludo screeches her name over the din, but Nerezza holds him, pins him, her beetle ring, her gloved hand. She is too far away, his Lucia, his chimera, snapping her tail in the dust to hide her tracks.

“She can't hear you. If you fling yourself over the balcony you will only bleed on the couple below us and break your bones on their chairs. Ludo, I brought you to see her, I didn't say you could touch her, that you could bring her back. You are a cut-rate Orpheus, and she has already vanished behind you on the stone stair-you did not even feel her go.”

“I don't understand! Lucia! Lucia!”

“She is blessed, Ludo. Perhaps she will touch a higher grace still, a grace we scream to enter but cannot even approach. That I cannot approach. We can only watch her, who may be permitted to see the silver cup but cannot touch it, can never drink.”