Palimpsest

Sei smiles uncertainly, and presses her hand to a black square to release the door. The wet smell of weedy swamps waft out; her nose wrinkles. But the Third Rail sweeps Sei into the next carriage, childlike in her delight, stroking her cobalt hair with a possessive affection.

Sei can make out seats and railings, handholds looping down, certainly, though from no visible ceiling. But the walls are wider than they ought to be, and a broad yellow sun beams where fluorescent lamps should shine. The seats terrace up the sides of the wall, and what Sei at first takes to be brilliant blue cushions are glimmering rice paddies, rippling water combed by raw green shoots. Folk tend them in wide red hats trimmed in a fringe of tiny hanging pocketwatches, golden as her grandmothers, golden as a temple. They pluck the rice and savor it, all the way up, past Sei s vision, like a mountainside dwindling to nothing. She is dizzy with the sudden space. A child, his red hat jangling, holds out a green stalk to her, his little face happy and new.

“Thank you,” Sei says, and the child hugs her.

“Thank you, thank you!” he cries into her hips. “We thought you would never come!”

Sei chews the thick, unprocessed rice. She knows she ought not to do it. She remembers clearly a day when her mother was not well and not strong enough for the room of the grass-mats. She had fallen, shaking, to the floor of their little kitchen, and screamed as she pulled Seis hair painfully: Do not eat the food of the dead! They will try anything to make you eat, but no child of mine would do it! She had burned all their mikon oranges in a great fire that night, insisting that the moon had filled them up with poison, that the poor, unassuming fruit would kill them all. Usagi shuddered and wept beside the flames, holding her elbows and rocking back and forth as the air filled with the acrid smell of boiling orange-flesh.

Sei knew she ought not to, but she had come this far, and already drank their bitter tea, and she could not imagine a version of herself which did not swallow this thing in her palm.

“It is the rice of grief,” the boy said brightly. “I have harvested it all my life. Every fortnight, the flowers of the rice of grief weep and must be comforted with a glass bell and soothing hymns concerning incense and virtuous fathers with black beards. I have soothed them in your name, Sei! And they were comforted! With my own fingers I cleared the mud from them, and with my mouth I plucked them from the water. I would like you to become proud of me, because I have done this thing. If you do not believe I have enacted a sufficient virtue, I will ask my overseer to send me to the rice of martial prowess, but the application process is long, and I have heard that the rice is bitter.”

Sei pinches the boys chin lightly and grins at him. He blushes deeply and is too overcome to speak. She bends to him and lifts his hat to gently kiss his forehead, the rice of grief heady on her breath. The child's eyes well with tears and he squeezes them shut, leaning close to her for the smallest and longest of moments. He runs to his friends to boast and preen, and Sei laughs.

“How kind you are,” the Third Rail says. “I did not expect you to be kind. It is not a trait we select for.”

“What do you select for? And for what are you selecting?”

The Third Rail looked coy. “Loneliness. Old grief World-weariness. Stamina. Mechanical aptitude. But if I were to tell you the rest it would spoil the surprise.”

“Does that boy live here? All the time?”

“Of course. Where else should he live? If you had sent him to the rice of martial prowess, he would have brought you a red sword in one year, and begged you to bless it. If you had not, he would have sought the rice of the intellect, and become as clear to look upon as glass, and begged you to breathe the fog of a soul upon him. He has waited his whole life to know which rice is best. It was kind of you to give him such a short journey.”

The other rice-pickers wave and shout from their high terraces, and as one offer her a copper ladle full of water from their sacred wells.

“I am satisfied!” she calls out. “I do not need to drink!”

A ripple of fear and despair moves through the rice paddies, and Sei sees one girl with long braids fling herself from a great height, only to be caught up by a solicitous handhold. She hangs there by the waist, in misery, weeping.

The Third Rail offers no comment, but shakes her head in untouchable sorrow. She guides Sei through the fields, the glowing green grain which is so bright she suffers sunspots in her vision.

“I'm sorry,” she says to the villagers with their long-handled ladles. “Please forgive me, please slake my thirst.” She reaches out for their water and they lean toward her, keen and terrible hope like welts on their faces. She sips; they collapse in relief, and as the carriage door closes behind her she can hear the beginnings of a festival, music like water spilling, and a boy s high, reedy voice singing a psalm above the pounding of drums. She knows she will refuse nothing else. She drinks and she can hardly feel them anymore, the phantom others, who drink wine like tiger s blood when she drinks water. They are so far from her.

Again, there is a moment like a hyphen in the space between cars. Sei can see the track rushing by beneath them, in the spaces, in the joining, in the iron grate below her feet.

“Why do you look down?” the Third Rail demands. “Do you wish to see me more naked than I am? Am I not more pleasant to you in this shape than deep in mire and grease?”

“You are beautiful. In grease. In mire. In flesh. Why is it so important that I think you're beautiful?”

“Because if you do not, you will never love us, and if you do not love us, you will not help us, and we need your help, or we shall never get where we are going.”

“I already said I would help you.”

“You can't say that yet! I would like to believe you, Sei, but I am wicked, and I have hidden things from you, and you will not tell the truth about us until you know them all, and you will not know them all until we get to the last carriage. We have to hurry-you don't have all night.”

She pulls Sei into the third carriage with the eager stumbling of a child on the morning of their birthday. The seats are lined with great pale cabbage plants, deeply veined in violet and green. The walls are silver leaf, untarnished, gleaming like water. Women hang in harnesses, polishing it with their impossibly long hair. The cabbages cover floor and cushion, even the ceiling, extending far into the distance, though the walls are closer here, and there are windows which show a coppery rush of city flashing by outside, the beginnings of frost at the frames.

They walk sedately, two queens surveying an empire. Sei looks for Yumiko among the polishing women, and yes, she is there, of course she is there, a jade pendant hanging between her breasts, her bare feet tucked up like a ballet dancer's. Their eyes nearly meet. But the Third Rail flushes a furious black and moves between Sei and her lover, shaking her prodigio

us head. There is a pleading in her small eyes, and Sei acquiesces, still shaken by the keening of the villagers with their long ladles. She will see Yumiko in the morning, and her girl will forgive this one minute, small slight.

“Is there such a need for cabbages in the world?” Sei asks, wondering, trailing her hand across the leaves which are thick and hoary as chilblained flesh.

“Of course not. These are not for eating.” The Third Rail lifts the leaf of one, and within, couched in vegetable, wet and black, wrinkled and quivering like a newborn butterfly, is a character, a slightly wobbly kanji, signifying “plenitude.” It murmurs softly, and stretches up like a baby seeking a nipple. Sei strokes it with her knuckle, and it writhes beneath her hand.

“They have to be born, you know,” the Third Rail says. “They don't come from nowhere! When a child sits in her chair with a clean suzuri and her long brush, she believes she is writing, but she is simply calling to these poor lambs, calling them to attend her, to pass through her. We can hardly keep up with demand; the pollination season is intense. And yet, they learn fewer and fewer kanji as the years go by, and more and more English, more katakana, more foreign things. The graveyard is on another train, where turtles set incense on the stones of words no one learns in your world anymore, words passed out of the reach of any mouth. It is important work we do. We hope you agree, of course, but we are willing to admit it is foolish if you call it so.”