Palimpsest

“No.”

“Oh. There.”

“It has a name.”

Sei found that she had trouble saying it: a foreign word, and she balked at the admission that she knew the name of an impossible place, even to Yumiko, who presumably did not think it impossible at all.

Sei thought of the trains, how perfect and white, how swift. The man playing the viola, how his hair had fallen over his face like a mourning veil and the train cars, ah, the train cars had opened for him, their doors like rapturous arms!

“It wasn't a dream.”

“No. Better than a dream.”

“Yes, I want to go.” Sei clenched her fists against the desire for it, for those trains, trains that would nod sagely at everything in Kenji's book, saying: yes, that is what we are. She thought of Tokyo, waiting for her in the north like a crocodile, languid, vicious. What waited for her? Her tempered glass booth at Shinjuku Station, the endless tickets for everyone but her, her Japan Rail uniform with its crisp lapels? It was nothing, all nothing, because it was not there, not those trains, not that place.

Yumiko put her thumb against Sei's lower lip as though marking her place in the book of her. “That's what we all want, Sei. Hardly anyone even comes as far as this place, where we can find each other, like drawn to like. Where it is so easy to find a street which ends in that city. They built the Floor of Heaven about twelve years ago, when there were enough of us in Kyoto to need it, to long for it.”

“Who's they?”

“I don't know, really. Big money, from up north. I don't really know about the higher-ups, the important people here who figure out how to be important in Palimpsest. I'm just a tourist, you know? But the club makes things so much simpler. You'll see.”

Sei looked around the room—hardly a couple did not embrace, and hardly a couple's eyes met. They grasped each other shaking like invalids, impassive and fanatical. Sei's eyes watered. She thought she understood it, the anatomy of what Yumiko offered her—she could guess at its musculature, the number of its bones. It's like a virus. This is more like a hospital than a nightclub, really. The Southern Prefectural Home for Invalids, with an open bar.

Sei moved away from Yumiko across the floor and extended her arms like wings. She moved as best she could, as best she knew how, as she had moved in a hundred rooms livelier and harder than this in Tokyo. She circled her hips, she held her belly and tipped her toes. She shut her eyes and hoped herself beautiful enough to deserve what any one of these could give her: a way in, a way through. Her black dress, shimmering like depthless water, snapped and flared.

Yumiko caught her in a long turn, her breath quick, blowing out little strands of hair from her face.

“You don't have to do that,” Yumiko said solemnly. “No one dances anymore. It's a waste of time. We've cut it all down to the barest necessary interactions. It's better that way. They won't say no, not ever. You don't have to dance for them.”

“I want to. I want to.” Sei laced her fingers into Yumiko's pink-nailed hands. “Don't you want to have fun, to feel alive here, too?”

Yumiko blinked, and she looked suddenly very tired.

“I just want to stay there, Sei,” she sighed. “It's so hard to come back.”

“Then stay.”

“I don't know how! No one knows. We just know how to get there for a little while, how to see little parts of it. How to dream a thing that is better than a dream.”

Yumiko drew her toward a table. Two tall, thin glasses glittered on the wood. One had a golden drink in it, the other a creamy, pale blue one. There was a man there, not so old as Kenji, with a poppy in his lapel. The petals were black in the low light.

“I won't promise,” Yumiko whispered, pulling Sei's hand under her skirt to rest on the soft flesh of her hip, “that they will all be as pretty as me, or as easy to charm as him. Most of them will not have a book written just for you in their pockets. But this is how you do it: through the body and into the world. You fuck; you travel. That sounds crude, and you know, it usually is. It's usually ugly, and fat, and sweaty, and lonely. Luckily, it's also usually quick. But afterwards… we find a place where we belong.”

The man, who was well on the way to fat, his neck bulging out of a black suit, his hair greasily combed over, put his hand over Sei's. He was nodding along with Yumiko; tears flowed down his round cheeks. With his other finger he pulled his ear-lobe aside so that she could see the map there, glowering, calling. Sei leaned in to examine it, but Yumiko shook her head.

“If you want to continue on the train, and not… come with me … you have to be more careful. You only get to go to the place they've got on their skin, so you need to practice some good old-fashioned cartography and map a route.”

Together they auditioned men and women, lifting sleeves and hats and skirts to peer at maps so tiny they made Sei's head throb. Yumiko seemed to know what she was looking for, but all the same it was not until nearly two in the morning that she found a nervous, skinny man with scarred cheeks and a scraggly mustache whose hip was scrawled over with a dense map Yumiko seemed to like, but Sei thought looked much like the rest.

“That's the next station on the line. You should have clear passage from where you started—it should work out, one way or the other.” Yumiko smiled gently, like a mother coaxing her child onto a frightening carnival ride. “It's quick,” she said. “Be quick,” she implored the scarred man.

But Sei thought only of the trains, hurtling through her. She gave a wan smile and leaned into her schoolgirl briefly.

“The source of all suffering is desire,” Sei recited.

“Yes,” Yumiko breathed fervently. “Yes, it is.”

Sei let herself fall into the man's nameless arms. His kisses were not spare or elegant, like Sato Kenji's, or sweet and fluttering, like Yumiko's, or bruising and angry like the three lovers before them. His were soft and overripe, a pear fallen in the rain. His tongue was flat and round. He pulled at her white coat and the black dress beneath it, stroking her bare back. He drew her into an alcove near the bathroom, and she felt that this was unnecessarily tawdry, needlessly crude—why could they not all be like Yumiko, who had arranged her legs over her shoulders like flowers and sank into her with a lightness like water?