Palimpsest

Clara flushed with embarrassment. She seemed so young, built up out of snow and ice cream. “November,” she said angrily, “it doesn't work like that. It's not just pretty people. You can't hide what you are, now, and I'm sorry. But it's not the end of anything.”

“I was lucky even to find you.”

“Oh, that?” Clara gestured away a world of concern. “I'll give you a number. You'll be fine.” She closed her hand over November's maimed hand. “It gets easier. Really.”

November had not been able to bear her bees when she got home from Clara's tea and wide hips. She knew it was wrong, neglectful, that the honey might suffer from their distress, but she could not make herself cross her little wheat-tufted field to the hives. Instead she sat in her bare, angular bedroom and pulled a single brown book from the endless rows of brown books. The one with the naked child on the cover, holding up her dress to catch the wind. She opened it to a well-thumbed first page. When her father finally bought the book for her, instead of letting her drip honey and milk all over the library copy, she often used to just read the first page, for comfort, like covering herself in a favorite blanket.

Once upon a time, a girl named September grew very tired indeed of her father's house, where she washed the same pink and yellow teacups and gravy boats every day, slept on the same embroidered pillow, and played with the same small and amiable dog. Because she had been born in May, and because she had a mole on her left cheek, and because her feet were very large and ungainly, the Green Wind took pity on her, and flew to her window one evening just after her birthday. He was dressed in a green dinner jacket, and a green carriage-driver's cloak, and green jodhpurs, and green snowshoes. It is very cold above the clouds, in the shantytowns where the Six Winds live.

“You seem an ill-tempered and irascible enough child,” said the Green Wind. “How would you like to come away with me and ride upon the Leopard of Little Breezes, and be delivered to the great sea which borders Fairyland? I am afraid I cannot go in, as Harsh Airs are not allowed, but I should be happy to deposit you upon the Perverse and Perilous Sea.”

“Oh, yes!” breathed September, who, as it has been said, disapproved deeply of pink and yellow teacups, and also of small and amiable dogs.

November wiped the tears from her eyes with the back of her mangled hand. September had said yes. More than the name, that had been what had struck November, then, in her father's house, swinging her legs under a huge chair. She had said yes, without hesitation, without worry or fear, without a moment's thought for her mother or her father. September had said yes, with all her heart, and so she had gotten to go to Fairyland, where other children had to stay in Omaha and wash dishes.

In the margins of Hortense Weckweet's novel, November had written long ago in a tiny, uncertain hand: Things I Will Try to Say More Often: Why? I love you. I'm sorry. May I have chocolate? Yes. yes. yes.

November picked up her telephone and dialed the number Clara had given her. It rang twice: precisely correct. He would be here in two hours.

It is a long drive from the city, you understand.

Of course, yes.

When he arrived, November was surprised just how little she felt about the whole business. He was nothing to her, a conduit, a door. When she closed her eyes, she could not picture his face, even though his lips moved over her shoulders. He was just a door, a tall, broad door in a long green coat, which made her smile so brightly and with such a keen joy that despite her face and her missing fingers he swept her up into his arms as though they were in a movie. November let herself warm to him. She touched his face, a thin dark beard, sweet green eyes that seemed tired—from the drive, she thinks. We all get plenty of sleep, after all.

But his arms were huge around her, slabs of flesh closing her in, keeping her safe. November had never been with a man so much bigger than she was. He dwarfed her, protected her with his mass, sheltered her in his coat. He tried to take it off, but November insisted, delighted with its rough wool against her heavy breasts. Her legs seemed so small around his waist, a doll's limbs—but she didn't want that, she decided. Didn't want to make room for him inside her. November clambered up onto her knees and tucked her hair behind her, leaning down to take him in her mouth, a thing she rarely did and did not enjoy. But he wore a green coat, and he came to her door to take her to Fairyland.

Yes, she thought. Oh, yes. She wanted to thank him for ignoring her disfigurement, for behaving as though she were utterly whole, and the taste of him was neither sweet nor sour, but simply skin, clean and hard, so big she felt her jaw pop as he groaned and moved the shaft of his cock in and out of her throat. November closed her eyes and pictured herself on the velvet seat of the Green Wind's carriage—or was it Casimira's? While the huge man in her bed swelled towards his private, wordless orgasm, she was a thousand miles away, in the clouds above Omaha, pushing open the coat of the Green Wind and sitting astride him, taking his—surely green—flesh into hers, rocking back and forth while the Wind moaned and groaned and dug his emerald hands into her buttocks.

But there, in Benicia, November closed her hand over the black mark on the strange man's huge bare calf. He thatched fingers through her hair, and his cries echoed in her house like a list of things a man can want: god, god, god.

TENEMENTS LINE THE ALBUMEN RIVER, raised on stilts over

the wash. It is difficult to say in this late age how they were built, for the stilts are little more than spider silk, and they waver in the wind. But the houses are borne up nonetheless, and it is rumored in the wealthier neighborhoods that the poor have discovered a tree-possibly some sort of pygmy birch-which longs to fly. Logically then, the riverside slums are collectively referred to as the Aviary.

For obvious reasons, the manufacture of ladders is a highly prized skill in this part of Palimpsest. It is a holy profession, and each rung is possessed of spiritual significance. The first is the Rung of Honest Labor, and the last is the Rung of the Salt of Heaven. Between, each ladderer may stack his own path. If a rung should break, then bad luck infects the household, and at least one child must be adopted out to avert disaster. These are called Little Rungs, and tend to be swapped from house to house in a rough circle through the Aviary, as the quality of local laddery is never so great that they will not eventually return home.

When they are old enough, the young girls of the Aviary greet each morning on the banks of the Albumen. They braid their extraordinarily long hair together to make a great net, and hand in hand, float upon their backs on the gentle currents. Great golden koi live in the shallows of the river, and the poor beasts are obsessed with the taste of curls. They become tangled in the net, and by noon the girls drag themselves back to shore and gut their catch with small bone knives strapped to their calves. The koi perish in a rapture of braids and young girls’ savage laughter. Their meat tastes of coconuts and birdfat, and the girls have the rest of the long day for their lessons.

Nhean lives in one of the floating houses, an aged man with a paunch and the head of a snarling, split-lipped tiger. He has a livid, purple scar where stripes meet skin. He makes a yellow goulash of the unfortunate koi, and in it is a sweetness coveted by all his neighbors. But he does not like to share, even though he would not have any koi at all if the girls did not make their rounds and share their catch with the elderly who cannot fish for themselves. He eats by himself every afternoon, tearing his meat with fangs savage and rotting.

He is mute, as all of his kind are.

Even the babies of the Aviary know that veterans usually end up here, in the river muck. Children learn better than to chatter at them. A woman with hyenas feet in the third ward lets some of the fishing girls watch her while she cleans her cassia-wood shunt and peer with held breaths into the place where her larynx once was. Nhean would never allow this. His family has lived in Palimpsest for longer than trees have longed to fly and he understands the necessity of certain dignities.

Though he has a kind of sign language of his own invention, the local children can only guess correctly the gestures for mother, southeast, and sleep. They would have given up long before now if his goulash was not so wonderful, if it did not have green onions floating in it, and also flowing orange fishtails.

Nhean is also a ladderer, and the rungs between Honest Labor and the Salt of Heaven he names strange things: Phirun, Who Loved Betel Nuts; Sovann, Who Did Not Like His Wife but Never Let Her Know; Veasna, Who Was a Drunk and No Good to Anyone.

Samnang Who Loved Her; Vibol Who Loved Her; Munny Who Loved Her.

Chanthou Who Loved No One.

No one understands this nomenclature, and he does not have the voice explain it. It must be the war, they say. Those must have been the people in his battalion. In his squad. Maybe people he killed. They are wrong, but it is a reasonable story, and he lets it lie.

Nhean, for many years now, has made two of his rungs weak. They will splinter, eventually and sooner than the rest. That is how it should be, how it happened in a village long ago, in a green country whose name he cannot even remember anymore.

I remember it, of course. I could tell him. I don't think it would comfort him. Shall we spoil his day completely? Lean in to his big, striped ear and tell him a single word, a word from another world, which will bring back all the terrible memories he ever wept to forget?