Palimpsest

I will never forgive you,” Nerezza said, clutching her wrist in her hand so tightly that it left red crescent moons in her skin. They had gone for coffee, because she could not bear the house.

Ludo tried to smile at her, his eel-girl, lost in the brumey water, circling herself in the dark.

“I have had to listen to the three of you fucking and laughing for days,” Nerezza snapped, “and I am sick to death of you.”

He was quiet for a long while. Why had he not taken them to his apartment? Because it is Lucia's place, and it is pleasant to be among people who know the same secrets. Agostino, Anoud. Even Nerezza.

Ludo took out a pad of paper and a pen. He wrote, in fine, even lines:

Is that why you gave us up to Ululiro and those men? To be rid of us?

Nerezza shrugged. She did not look away; she was not ashamed. “Why should you be different? Why should the rest of us be chained to the earth while you go free? I have done what I have done. It is mine to own and pay for. You lived.”

He reached for her hand, and she bore that touch, and so he thought perhaps she was not utterly lost to him.

He wrote: It is not so easy for me after all, you see.

“I do see,” she relented. “But I do not forgive you. And you should not forgive me.”

Ludo wrote: I want to give you what you need, Nerezza. It is important to me.

“You haven't the first idea what I need, Ludo. How dare you?”

He squeezed her hand and lifted it to his lips, kissed it, held it as though with that hand, all he was allowed, he could hold all of her. Ludovico let her hand fall and wrote furiously:

Have I ever told you why I go to the Forum? I go to look at the temple of the Vestals. They lived there, secluded, not just virgins, though that was important, but keepers of wills and historical papers. They wore white; they wore their purity like shields. They were the daughters of Vesta, Vesta, who kept the hearth. And as long as they were inviolable, the city was kept safe, kept whole. Forever. And maybe if they had—because they failed, sometimes, because they were young and they could not choose their nunnery, and they were punished for it, even killed—Rome would not have lost the favor of Vesta and fallen into the dark. Because it was the hearth-goddess who left them without light, without fire. Do you understand?

Nerezza's eyes were full of tears, but they did not fall, they were hard, harder than anything he had within him. Her eyes were sharp and dark, reflected into crystal. She shook her head.

They could not live in the city, Nerezza. They could not drink at the festivals, or take lovers in alleys, or eat mackerel in the market. But without them, the city fell into the dark and the cold, into a hole in the world. Because they were inviolable, the city lived within the circuit of their skin, and they kept it safe, like a mother, like a goddess.

She was crying in earnest then, angrily, harshly, without sound, without forgiveness, but she did not let go of his hand. He kissed her and kissed her again, and slowly, with a small smile, as though it was a joke shared long ago between them, he kissed the tears from her cheek with his round mouth.

Ludovico left her in the café, drying her face, composing it again into eelskin and electricity. He stepped into his taxi and sped off through the Roman streets toward the airport, washed with light, past the ruins of ruins, the city built on its own grave, built out of itself, time and again, a world without end.

ONE

THE FLAYED HORSE

A maya Sei sits in the broad open pavilion of the Fushimi Inari shrine. She folds her hands over her stomach, trying, for the hundredth time, to decide. One thousand blaze-orange torii gates open up behind her, winding up the mountain like a long tunnel into fire. Spiders of improbable size string their rain-colored webs in the corners of the gates. They are pale green, though that means nothing here, still it makes Sei smile. There are huge circles under her eyes, and she feels ill, sore in every joint, in every part. I am the Kami of Engines, she thinks to herself, and I have come to take the winds of my lovers into my belly, and to burn.

This is the eighth day she has waited at the shrine. The stone foxes—she has heard there are thirty-three thousand of them on the mountain, an exact number, yet infinite, infinitely variable vulpine faces, and they regard her now with familiar acceptance, like a family dog who has come to love a frequent visitor. The evening is crisp, the leaves almost all brown now, the persimmons flaccid and smeared on the stones. There is a belt of pale gold around the horizon, and above it, all is blue, a universe of blue, like the light at the bottom of a lake.

But today they do come, walking through the festooned gate of the shrine, three of them, holding hands. They are so beautiful, she thinks. So strong. I have paid such a price for their easy passage, she thinks. It was worth it, that they have not suffered as I have. The woman's skin looks as though it was burned many years ago, but it is healed now, and shining. She is wearing gloves in the cold. One of the men is tall and older, with glasses and poor posture. The other is younger, sad-looking, very thin. But they know her, they know her immediately, and she runs to them, as fast as she can, and despite everything she flings herself into their arms, and kisses the man with glasses as though he is her most desperate wish. He does not give her his tongue, and she does not seek it. And then the woman, whose mouth tastes like the sugar-candies her mother loved, and then the young man, who circles her waist with his arm and lifts her off the ground.

“Come on,” she says in Japanese, but they understand her meaning, and Sei leads them into the tunnel of gates, up and up, one thousand of them, into the crystalline blue night, into the infinite foxes, into the green spiders and the flame-colored pillars. Without knowing why, she begins to run ahead of them, and in her belly the first quavering movement comes with the pounding of her feet. Oh, she thinks, oh, you poor thing. I'm so sorry. You are a terrible toll to pay. I don't think it will hurt. Just… imagine a book at the bottom of a lake. Fish read it. It is your book, all your own, and you can find such wonderful things written there…

And she is filled with terror, and filled with joy, with the brightness of their kisses, with the fluttering of her child, with the light of the first stars, and—

And Sei is speeding at the head of the Flyleaf Line, th

e unpredictable child-train, through the underground and up into the city, the elevated rails, the sassafras-scented air. She cuts her hand with the edge of a steel disc and laughs softly as oil bubbles up from beneath the controls. She presses her palm to it and the shriek of ecstasy that erupts from train and girl shatters three streetlamps as they pass. She sinks into the arms of the Third Rail, and her legs seem to flow into the circuitboard, and her hair seems to flow back over the body of the locomotive, and her arms are pressed back against her sides so that her face, the face of the train, the new train, can feel the wind dancing by.

At Oathusk Station, they will say they saw a train fly. They saw it jump the tracks without the smallest hesitation, jump into the air as though it had waited a lifetime for that jump, and race into the tall grass. The black-faced sheep scattered, and the raspberries exulted as the train that is Sei who is the train moved like light toward the mountains and beyond.

The sound of its whistle, they will say, is like a mother and a child singing together.

VERSO: