Palimpsest

“There is not so very far left, not so very much left of the train,” the Third Rail says. “Before we open the conductors cabin and pay our respects, tell me, my Sei, my little fish, my child: is there someone who would come looking for you?” Her red voice is suddenly softly accusing.

“No, of course not. No one knows me here.”

“We knew you.”

“That's different. There's no one, I promise.”

“And yet she is here.” The Third Rail kisses Sei on her shoulder and purses her pale lips. “Tell us. Give us a command. Tell us to open our doors to her, or keep them shut as a mouth and leave her gasping on the platform. Guide us, tell us what it is right to do.”

If Sei tries-and it is becoming harder and harder-but if she tries to feel the others whose phantom senses float up under her own, under her tongue, under her fingers, under her feet, if she tries to feel them, she can just discern the smell of a train station, of the oily tracks, of the underground.

“Let her come,” Sei says, and falls asleep on her mother's lap.

ONE

WISHES TO THE TREES

It's over,” Sei said, folding her hands in her lap. They sat, squinting in the bright sunlight, at a restaurant wedged between two Buddhas.

“What does that mean?” Yumiko said, slurping her mushroom soup. “It's not like you're the first. Get an abortion.”

“It means,” Sei breathed deeply, ignoring her, “that I think there is no one left in the Floor of Heaven who is new for me. I'm not… like you. When I am there, I am always on my train, always with the folk there, and they barrel through under the city at such a speed—I've had to chew through Kyoto at the velocity of a new whore just to keep up. I am tired, and there is no one left. It's time for me to go home. To visit my mother's grave. To see if I still have a job. To figure out what to do about the baby. To find others, if they are there.”

Yumiko frowned. “An abortion would be better.”

“I'm not saying it wouldn't.”

Yumiko shook her head. “You don't understand. I said you weren't the first. Occupational hazard, you know? It happens, kind of a lot. It happened to me. I had a son, about two years ago.”

“You never told me this before.”

“My father kicked me out. I come from a small town—girls don't turn up pregnant there, except, you know, when they do. But I'd been coming into the city for years by then, and he sent me back there, to sleep with demons and drink myself to death, he said.” Yumiko saluted Sei with a glass of yellow wine. “I didn't know how it would be. I had my baby, because I had some misplaced idea about the sanctity of motherhood, and I was young enough that I figured it would be more or less like having a doll. I had it, in the back room of the Floor of Heaven, between the wineglasses and the bar rags. My son was covered in streets, these long black lines from his scalp to his feet—but it wasn't Palimpsest. It was someplace else. I think it was someplace new. I've never heard of a street he had on him, and anyway they didn't look the same. They were long and straight and even, a grid. It was someplace else. And he looked at me, just turned his baby head and very clearly said: I want to go back. I screamed for a week. He was in me all that time, dreaming and traveling and learning, and I couldn't bear to have him look at me.”

“What happened to him?”

“The owner and his wife adopted him. Thank god. I told them never to bring him there, bring him up to be a priest, hope he dies a virgin.” Yumiko took a long, shaky drink of her wine. “So, you see, you're not breeding. You're not having a child. It is. Palimpsest. An abortion would be better.”

Sei swallowed hard. She couldn't answer. Couldn't imagine that child, couldn't imagine her own.

“And I don't want you to go,” Yumiko said. “I won't say I love you, I think we're both beyond that. But it's good to have a friend who knows what I know. Peaceful. Who never doubts that there are wonders outside this city. Isn't it peaceful to know what we know and know it together?”

“Of course it is.”

“Then stay. Stay a few days more. Pray for your mother here. There are more shrines and temples than you could count in a lifetime. One of them is good enough for her.”

Sei scratched her cheek and stared off into the bustling street. It was peaceful to know and yet to know meant that the volume, the resolution, the brightness of Kyoto was dimmed and fuzzed, and she could not pick out faces here anymore, because they were not long or red.

“My mother killed herself when I was fourteen,” Sei said slowly. “She stabbed herself in the chest with a kitchen knife and crawled into our tatami room to die. I found her when I came home from school. Do you know how long it takes someone to die from a wound like that? Hours and hours. More hours than I could count then or now.”

“Sei…”

“And I never called a doctor. I'd like to say she begged me not to, but she didn't. She just looked at me, she just waited to die, and didn't pull out the knife, didn't move. She talked about the tigers, when she talked. I held her for hours and I let her die and all I said was: Go, go, please just go. Which shrine do you suggest to purge that, Yumiko? What god do you think will forgive me?”

“I don't know. I know you're not her, whatever you think.”

“I talk about crazy things and abandon my child.”

Yumiko took Sei's hand, laced her fingers through it, shaking her head all the while. “Please: stay, stay, please just stay.”