Palimpsest

THE GIRL BEHIND BRIARS

Hester was gone. It was three days past now. She cried— Oleg remembered, as through a screen, her crying.

“I'm finished with this,” she said. “It's too much. I am not a very good person, in the end. I can't watch you—” she had clutched the wall as though it could clutch her back, “—with them. I can't watch this thing happen. It is so ugly, so very ugly.”

And she had gone. Oleg had thought once or twice in the intervening time that she might have hurt herself, her eyes were so red, so whipped and worn when she left, but he didn't have enough blood in him to fuel worry. He had not known her so very long. She was not a Princess of Cholera. She was not one of his people. There can be no real love between strangers.

Oleg had stumbled, painfully, on feet that had forgotten they were feet, to the grocer's twice now, bereft of Hester and her diffident care. The juice of a real orange was so bright it burned his throat. He tried to eat bread, and a little meat, but it was too much for him. He could stand only cold, fatty soup from the deli which was not, after all, mythical, and water.

His bed had dried, or frozen. It didn't matter which; he slept on it, dead weight, mute, ashen.

And on the fourth day, she came to him.

She sat on the edge of his bed in her little jacket with the fur-lined hood. There were great dark circles under her eyes and her lips had no color at all. There were dried tracks of spittle or vomit on her cheeks, and she stared at him hollowly, her knees drawn up to her chin.

But it was not his Lyudmila. It was Hester, and her tongue was swollen in her mouth, her speech slurred.

“Why are you here?” he asked fearfully, pulling up his sheet to protect himself.

“I don't want to be.”

“Then go away. I don't want you.”

“I did notice that.”

They stared at each other in silence, two wild animals who have caught each other's eye in the wood, and neither sure which is the less frightful.

“Are you okay?” Oleg finally whispered, his voice faint and weak. Hester narrowed her eyes and swallowed.

“I'm not feeling so well.”

“Me neither.”

Hester smiled then, a leering, half-hinged smile. “I think we could have been lovers, you know, real lovers, the kind that make coffee for each other and read the same books. We have so much in common. Both of us dying of despair. Murdered by a whole city”

Hester crawled into bed with him, pulling his sheets up over her cold shoulder. She put her arms around his neck. “Remember that story you told me?” she whispered, her voice a little slurry and strange. “About the land of the dead? Well, I have one for you. Once upon a time a girl swallowed all of her pills at once because she wanted to stop dreaming, and the angel she thought would save her turned out to be a crazy sack of shit. Do you like this story? I like it. It has a good ending.” She kissed his cheek, and ever after he would feel the mark. Her voice softened. “Do you think, if Columbus had stood on the bow of his ship, looked at the New World and understood everything to come, all the disease and death and betrayal, all the ugliness, all the blood—do you think he would have embraced it, called it paradise? Or do you think he would have run home as fast as he could? I just want to go home.”

Her eyes were so big in the dark of his bedroom, like locks, opening all the way to the Atlantic, and beyond, to the salt sea of the dead and all the dark islands there.

Hester turned away from Oleg and threw up onto the cold floor. He put his hand on her back and held her hair as it kept coming, all her grief, all her loneliness, everything, and he could not stop it. Her body heaved under his hands, determined to live, determined to expel all that was not living. She sobbed, and bent double over the bedside again, and through her spine something passed between them, more intimate than semen, a communion of agony beyond themselves. Oleg knew in that moment he would remember that about Hester, long after he forgot what it was like to move inside her, he would remember holding back her hair as she retched her heart out onto his floor.

Hester left before he woke up, and Oleg knew that was the last he'd see of her. No one wants witnesses to their failures.

That morning Oleg managed an egg and felt triumphant about it. With the help of a second orange and a makeshift umbrellacane, he managed an entire city block to check his bank accounts. He felt as though he stared into Hester's eyes again, dark and deep, and he leaned against the glassy, clean bank doors, to steady himself.

No one propped him up. His family here was gone. Lyudmila had left him, surely, permanently. His frozen bed was testament now to too many lost women. Only the Lyudmila in Palimpsest was left, alive and warm. A gift. He would find her there, he just had to follow the river—but not at this pace, too few nights strung together like loose beads. It was too slow.

If he didn't pay his rent, he had enough for a ticket to Rome.

If he bought a ticket to Rome, there was a possibility he would not have to be bothered with paying his rent. It seemed fair enough.

Except that he did not feel, at present, that he could make it to the airport. There was a rattle at the bottom of his lungs, like a shard of glass that each breath dislodged. He had slept for so long, such a desperate sleep, that he felt like the girl in the story, the girl behind briars, sleeping until she had throttled all the sleep in her, and waking to an empty castle full of ghosts. No part of him seemed entirely convinced it was awake.

Oleg withdrew his money, all he had, and closed himself into his room of locks and keys. He put the money in a neat stack on an ancient law-office lock with a little Libra sigil embossed in the brass.

He watched the money, to be sure it did not escape. The room smelled thickly of metal, a smell he had often found comforting, strong, impenetrable. Like him in no part. It was not a very large stack of money. But it was enough, he supposed. In the days when the gates of sleep were two, a gate of ivory and a gate of horn, they had put coins into the eyes of the dead to pay their passage across the wide, black river that separated the living from millineries and munitions factories. He had wondered, then, how the coins were translated from living to dead. The books were mum. How did it make the journey, the money of death, how was it expected to disappear here and reappear there? Was there a long road for them, too, down through mountains and up through rills—was it difficult? Was it harrowing? Did some of them give up, did some of them fall?

THE WAR ENDED on the day of First Midwinter twelve years ago. Winter is long in Palimpsest, and summer is longer, and the scholars of calendars are clever and formidable souls. Winter is divided into four seasons-the Winter of First Frost, the Winter of Branches, the Winter of Snow, and the Winter of Mud. The First Midwinter, the Midwinter of Frost, when there are still late and lazy fruits to be had and ciders brewed in diamond tankards, has always been a festival day, the Festival of the White Fox, the Festival of the New Rime, the Festival of the Swept Hearth. Like all things in Palimpsest, its name has been erased and rewritten many times.