Palimpsest

Plenitude caresses her cheek with a bold stroke.

Sei moans and falls into the Rail s arms. The long-faced woman wraps her kimono around the girl and holds her tenderly, sweetly, with infinite care.

ONE

THE RABBIT IN THE MOON

Sei woke sobbing in a strange apartment, her hair plastered to her face, clawing at her shoulder. Yumiko did not hold her. She just watched, calm as a teacher watching a slow student struggle through a simple passage.

“It's always hard to wake up,” she said.

Sei clutched her, her eyes rolling and wild as a dog's. “I need—”

“To go back? Yes. I know. Do you think I'm different than you?”

Sei could not breathe. Her body ached, her joints, her lungs. “Take me back, take me to someone, anyone, I don't care, just… the train, I can't leave them, they want me there, I have to go back!” She groaned. “God, let me go back to sleep!”

“You have to wait. The Floor of Heaven opens at dusk. I sympathize, I really do, but I've been where you are now, and I had to wait, too.” She put her arm around Sei's naked waist. “There's a tenor there, at a place called Thulium House. He gives me sapphires every night; he pierces my arms with a long needle and hangs me with jewels until I cannot move for the weight. He puts opals on my eyelids, and kisses on my lips until I am bruised with him, and all over blue. Do you think I don't miss him?”

“There is a train, full of strange fields and forests …”

“I envy you.”

“They need me!”

Yumiko put her head to one side. “Have they said what for?”

“No…”

“Then it can't be good. Don't be in such a rush.”

Yumiko rose and began the rustling, habitual motion of making tea. Sei realized that this must be Yumiko's place. The walls were bare; she had a bed and a table and nothing else. The apartment looked like someone has just moved in, or expected to move out soon.

“My mother told me once,” said Sei softly, to Yumiko's back, “when I was little, she told me that dreams are small tigers that live behind your ears, and they wait until you're sleeping to leap out and tear at your soul, to eat it up at very civilized suppers to which no other cats are invited.”

Yumiko quirked an eyebrow. “Was your mother, if it's not impolite, totally crazy? I mean, that's not really a working theory of the subconscious.”

Sei shrugged. “Back then, I just thought she was wild and beautiful, like a goose, and like a goose she flew at me in a rage sometimes, and bit my toes. And sometimes when I came to see her in our tatami room her kimono would be torn to pieces, and she'd be naked and bleeding on the floor, her own skin under her nails. She was bleeding like that when she told me about the tigers. So I guess she was crazy, when I think about it now, but when I was a kid I believed her because she was my mother and mothers know everything.”

Yumiko set a thin green tea down on the floor. She ran a hand through Sei's hair.

“But you aren't, you know. Crazy. I know what you know. We're not like your mother. There are no tigers for us, just a city, waiting, and it loves us, in whatever ways a city can love.”

“Maybe the tigers are there. Maybe they're just better at hiding than trains and tenors.”

The Floor of Heaven.

The little brass plaque said nothing it did not say before. Sei stood in front of it, motionless, while Yumiko straightened her plaid skirt.

“Ready?” said the faux-schoolgirl, her eager smile a little too manic and stretched for Sei to find it comforting. Sei closed her fists at her sides, suddenly not very brave. She could see that night plainly in her mind, how it would play out in that dar

k, furtive club, how every other night would unfold, too.

So many people would crawl inside her.

Sei knew she would search them out like a fox, the ones whose maps linked together to create a route, a route to keep her on the train, on course. She would find them in the shadows of the Floor of Heaven, in the offices of that place with tall silver cabinets, in the bathrooms with Asahi posters glued to the walls.

Sei could see it all happen, the whole tawdry parade: