Palimpsest

The Third Rail shifts in her chair like a child who fears that permission for ice cream is about to be revoked. “Can you not just love us as we are without silly questions?” she pleads. “We have waited so long for you. We do not want to spoil everything with long interrogations. It is a small thing, so very small. We will be so good to you, we will give you such nice things. We promise.”

“You sound like my mother.”

“She can come too, if that will please you.”

Sei laughs hollowly “She can't. She's dead. Tickets from the underworld are so expensive, you know?”

“We are sorry. Are we expected to be sorry?”

“You don't have to be. It was a long time ago.” Sei does not want to think about Usagi, not here. This is her own thing, her mother cannot have it. “She killed herself,” Sei says shortly, and even the Third Rail seems to understand that the topic is shut.

“Will you come with me, Sei? Please say yes.”

Sei looks into her tea, bloody and bright. She shuts her eyes and drinks it down, the spice of it puckering her cheeks. She feels the opium ball knock against her teeth but does not swallow it. “Yes,” she says finally, setting down her cup. “I need you, too.” She takes the hand of the Third Rail, and the woman's fingers laced in hers are white and hot.

TWO

PROTOCOLS

Things that begin and end in grief: marriage, harvest, childbirth. Journeys away from home. Journeys toward home. Surgeries. Love. Weeping.

November pulled herself into a gray corner and clutched her notebook. She found the man in the willow-green shirt's apartment unutterably lonely: only the corner she pressed up into spoke to her of living souls. She wriggled into the empty space there, a pale square in the dust-shabby paint: the ghost of a previous tenant, the restless shade of a vanished bookshelf. She huddled into its borders, knees drawn up against her nakedness. She pressed her cheek against the cold wall, her blackened, burning cheek. A tear slipped between her face and the plaster.

The young man slept still. The willow-green shirt slept, too, forgotten in the small kitchen. His books were propped up on cement blocks; there was a thin lithoid television, a pair of brown shoes. November drew further into the corner. She missed the bees, her own bees and the dream-bees. She worried for her hives like a mother—spending the night in the city is reckless behavior for the mistress of so many.

“I'm not going to hurt you,” he said, muffled in powder-colored sheets. “You could have stayed in bed. It's warmer.”

“I'm not good at that.”

He emerged from linen, a blur of haphazard black hair and sleep-flattened cheeks. He groped for his glasses. “You're not good at staying in bed?”

“At any of it. At other people. At mornings.” She closed her lips against the forming list. They were for her notebooks, not for speaking, not for saying. Air could ruin them, take them apart, make them meaningless. They were fragile, like honeybees. Like cobwebs. November sniffed and wiped at her face. Men were difficult, she had always found them so. Hoary old birds on the bough, staring with sharp mouths. They chewed and chewed at you until there was nothing of interest left.

He watched her, propped on one elbow; he had watched her even when he had pulled her onto him, watched her in the calculating way of owls watching a hinge-jawed vole—will she run? Will she scream? What will she taste like? How many others like her are hidden in the grass?

“You're so new,” he had breathed into her collarbone, his thumbs under her breasts, fingers splayed out against her back. “So new.”

She had watched him, too. Distantly, from a great height, from far off. She had moved mechanically, keeping her mouth bitten shut. She hadn't come; she hadn't wanted to. She hadn't wanted him particularly, he had no blue eyes, no lineages in his heart, prophet to caliph to teacher's assistant. He had not even told her his name, so eager was he to touch her face, to trace the streets there. So eager to return to this gray smear of a house, to the mattress on the floor, lonely of box spring or frame. And his long, tapered finger, so wound with blackness, sliding in and out of her, as though the whole city could fuck her, just like that.

He had told her about that place, told her its name, told her how to get there, pulled her close with the promise of a city she remembered in small bursts, like novae, a dream that was not a dream.

That was enough, she would suffer his body in hers for that. And she believed him, she believed because of Xiaohui, who had told her nothing but wedged her open, and all these others, now, all these others could enter where Xiaohui had forgotten to close her when she went.

“Living alone,” November whispered, “is a skill, like running long distance or programming old computers. You have to know parameters, protocols. You have to learn them so well that they become like a language: to have music always so that the silence doesn't overwhelm you, to perform your work exquisitely well so that your time is filled. You have to allow yourself to open up until you are the exact size of the place you live, no more, or else you get restless. No less, or else you drown. There are rules; there are ways of being and not being. This sort of thing,” she gestured imprecisely at the room, the bed, him, “is forbidden. It expands or contracts me, I'm not sure which, beyond the… set limits. I'm not good at that, either. Expanding, contracting.”

Her companion uttered a small noise between a sharp sigh and a soft laugh.

“You don't have to be, you know,” he said with a sliding sadness. “This has been going on for some time. There are patterns to us now.” He moved his hand on the sheets as if to reach out to her. “Rules. Protocols. You don't even have to talk to me, if you don't want to. People worked this out a long time ago. It used to be awkward, when you wanted the entrance and not the person. The invitation, not the plus-one. It varies a little from place to place—it's pretty formal here, like a transaction. If,” he looked down at his fingernails, “if you'd wanted me for myself, you would have turned the stone on that ring you wear on your middle left finger inward. If you wanted it to be more than once, you would have turned your pinky ring in. There are codes like that. If you wanted a feast, elaborate sex, if you wanted to make a ritual of it, you would have worn green shoes. I didn't expect you to be here in the morning, with no ribbons in your hair and all your rings turned out. And two buttons, not three, undone on your dress. That means strictly business, altogether. But you're new, so I guess I should have figured you didn't know the ropes.”

“How long have you had it? Has your finger been like that? Have you been…”

He drank from a glass of water left on a makeshift night-stand—a pile of thick hardbacks. “Traveling? Passing over? Expatriating? About five years, I think. It's hard to pinpoint, because hardly anyone remembers the first night. One dream is just a dream, you don't give it a thought. It's only the second one that sticks, and if you're lucky, your second lover has been at it long enough to have figured out a thing or two.”

November swallowed. “How many of… us… are there?”

He looked at her very seriously, tilting his gaze over his glasses. “Not as many as you'd think. But enough. We're secretive about it, you know? It's precious, like a pearl at the bottom of the sea. There are no magazine ads, no decadent clubs, in this country anyway, no websites. We keep it contained. If a site goes up, the rest of us take it down, one way or another. You gotta be strictly low-tech. Analog. Fly low—an old-fashioned underground, get it? Sometimes I think I spend half my time crawling the web for… well, we call them errata. Hasn't been one that's stayed up longer than twenty-four hours in years. It's … hard. Holy work is always hard. We keep to ourselves on this side, to protect it. Sacred places, you owe them something. We owe it. You wouldn't want just anybody—”

“So only the right people get to go? People who are rich enough or pretty enough?” November said bitterly.