Palimpsest

A man with a silver tooth would want her to get on her knees in the black-tiled bathroom. She could see herself kissing the depth-chart etched on his toes, his wrinkled knees, his exhausted cock.

A woman with two children sleeping at home and a mole on her left thigh would slip her fingers into Sei's cunt right on the dance floor, in front of everyone. Sei could see herself writhe, impaled, embarrassed and abandoned.

There would be a sweet boy with a thin little beard—his thumb nearly black with gridlock and unplanned alleys, as though he had been fingerprinted in an unnamable jail. Sei saw herself straddling him on one of the long leather couches that lay between the club-lights, grinding against him until he came so hard he started to hiccup, and she found him so ridiculous she wanted to cry. That one would run after the train in her dreams, trying to catch it, trying to catch her, too poor in skill to manage either feat.

Sei knew she would seek out the dream-city on all those skins. She would seek out passage on her train, and all these fleshly tickets would fall to her feet, used and pale. She knew she would refuse to return to Tokyo, where it would not be so easy to find them, to snarl at them: Take me, take me, why are you waiting?

Sei would never want to drink, or dance, only to grip them between her thighs and then sleep like a dead thing. She would become naked and raw and without guile; she would seek as truly as a knight.

Sei could see it all so clearly, a path through the woods: touch no one who does not carry the map—she and Yumiko would certainly agree between themselves that this was wrong, risky, that the secret was theirs and those of their tribe, and not to be squandered.

But perhaps once, after the snow melts, Sei thought she could imagine a version of herself that would make an exception for a young man with cedar-colored skin and a nose ring like a bull's, or a minotaur's. No one special. Someone who came to the club and was, of course, turned away. By then he would seem so alien and strange to Sei, so blank and empty. Pristine. Possessed of purity.

Sei knew her weaknesses—she would plead with Yumiko: I am weak. Sometimes it is still about love, and need.

When she wakes with him, in that not-very-distant future, that Sei watched blankly in the reflection of a brass plaque, the grid will brachiate out from his footpad, its angles dark and bright, and she will envy him, for wherever he walks now he walks in Palimpsest, and it will be all new for him, all new. Before he stirs, she will leave his house without tea or farewell.

Standing before the door to the Floor of Heaven, the train hurtled so fast into the future. She could hardly bear the speed, the inevitable, unavoidable sequence of stops and passengers, the toll, never to be paid in full. Tears pricked behind her eyes.

It all stood in front of her, behind a black featureless door, ready to swallow her whole.

“Yes,” Sei said. “I'm ready.”

INAMORATA STREET ENDS in silver sand and a great craggy finger of stone, stretching out into the sea. The glittering water flows out to the horizon and over it, a great dark expanse, whitecaps glistening in the moonlight. Foam shatters into seaglass on the beach, and couples walk arm in arm along a strand of shards, glittering and wet. Striped tents dot the beach head: red and yellow, green and white, rose and powdery blue. Women change into bathing uniforms with flared waists and broad hats to keep out the moonlight; tuba players march back and forth, blaring out nocturnes.

The infirm of Palimpsest come here to recover, to collect sea-glass on their bedside tables and write novels on the nature of the solitary soul. Mustached men sell bottles of seawater in the inland markets for the price of kingdoms, and false phials abound. The air blows fresh and sweet; it smells of tangerines and salt and white sage, and charlatans bottle this too and sell the empty glasses to immigrants for the price of a parliament seat.

Each evening the hopelessly ill are brought in gauzy palanquins to view the moonrise, and all applaud the appearance of its white disc over the water. The wind is considered to have such restorative power that surgery is performed on the beach, anesthesia administered by waifish women with hair like spun sugar, who close their mouths over the ailing and breathe the vapors of their crystalline hearts into weakened lungs.

Ermenegilde has been a patient here since the war ended. She is a charity case; her reassignment went poorly and she was rendered useless for the field. She has bled from her wounds every day for twelve years. Bluebells drape her palanquin: the veteran-flower Medical gauze swathes her face in long bridal veils. All agree that if not for her mouth, she would be now a great dowager-beauty But there is her mouth, it remains, and cannot be denied.

Once, in a field hospital set up for such amputations, surgeons removed her jaw, her teeth and the better part of her nose. In its place, they inexpertly sewed a panther's muzzle. The practice was new then, though it was to become the single great symbol of the war-there were no experts in those days. Ermenegilde's graft did not take, it would not heal, and stitches are still required to keep her two faces joined together. The wiry knots are black with blood. And though her new teeth are sharp and vicious, as they were intended to be, though her whiskers can detect the smallest drop in barometric pressure, she suffers infections and fevers.

And of course, of course she cannot speak. None of them can.

Ermenegilde is always the first to be carried to the shore for moonrise. She took up photography many years past, and her nurses help her each evening to set her daguerreotype in place so that she may print her plates of the great full face she still hopes will mend her. She breathes deep, and prays the moon will hold still for her portrait. Ermenegilde knows, however, that it is dif ficult to do, and does not blame the heavenly body for her restlessness. She, too, has had to sit for pamphleteers and medical historians alike. She is possessed, after all these years, of immense empathy.

November cradles her left hand gingerly in her right. She does not want to think about it, not now, that morning three days past when she had woken up with that poor girl's pale hair covered in blood and her own fingers gone. Her blessing fingers. It's almost funny. There was no wound, the stumps as smooth and tan as if some hand had simply plucked off her fingers like fruit. But there was blood, blood everywhere, though it came from nowhere, and they had scrubbed and scrubbed to get it clean.

But Casimira was right. Things are clearer now. There would be no more of this “it's only a dream” business. What happens here happens there. November is not a slow student. In her way she appreciates the act. It's like cheating on a test-so much easier when you have the answers written on your hand.

“My house misses you,” comes Casimira's brandywine voice beside her.

November turns, and the green-haired woman is there, her curls loose to the backs of her knees, in a bathing dress that reveals no skin at all, billowing and green. November puts her hand over the place in Aloysius's dress where her own belly shows through. “He weeps dust all night long and has turned all the calendars to fall. It is extremely tiresome. If you do not visit I shall have no peace at all.”

“How did you know I would be here?”

“When will you learn that if a fly if a bee, if the smallest worm witnesses a thing, I witness it also? I have tried so hard to explain matters clearly. Will it take another finger to impress this upon you?”

“No,” says November hurriedly.

“If the fingers are a very great loss, I can arrange for replacements here. In that, you are lucky to have come to this place above others. The sea is so good for one's health. Also the surgeons gather

here to beg for work. The debauched and the desperate are always drawn to water, is that not strange?”

Casimira kisses Novembers broken hand like a mother kissing her child's ills away. “I can purchase a whole paw, I think, though they are not very dexterous. Tiger, perhaps, or lion? Cougar? Or maybe just the fingers, in which case it will have to be an ape of some flavor. Please do not think of the cost.”

“What about human?”