Palimpsest

Casimira laughs. “Don't worry, they're quite skilled at it by now. War is such a marvelous instructor.”

“If the options are ape or cat, I think I'll have to decline.”

“No fun at all.” Casimira smirks.

The two women stride arm in arm along the beach. Casimira shoos away the beggar-surgeons with her umbrella, and saves a piece of seaglass for November to keep on a bedside table, should she ever acquire one. They talk about the air and the water, and how November's father might have benefited, in the days when he vomited blood and had to be carried to his tiny downstairs bathroom to do it.

“We do not exist, however sad your father's case may have been,” Casimira says primly, “for the benefit of all.”

November does not want to discuss it, not really She knows her place in the universe, knows its label, and none of it can help her father now. There are mushrooms in his skull, and that is all.

“What is wrong with them?” she asks instead. “The ones on the long beds, the woman with the muzzle sewn onto her face.”

“There was a war. I told you that. It was not a very long time ago, not very long at all. I was a child when it began.”

“What happened?”

Casimira's mouth curls into a feline grin. She looks up, sidelong, at November. “I won, is that not apparent?”

November starts, a lock of faded brown hair pulling free of her knot. “What, you against everyone?”

“Not quite so simple, no, but it ended that way, certainly.” Casimira turns sharply to November, and though she is quite short, manages to look precisely like a stern schoolteacher. “List for me, November, the reasons one may start a war.”

November blushes, frightened, unwilling to speak her lists aloud, into the sea, into the surf. Not when ordered to. They aren't soldiers, they don't come when called. They're private, they're hers, Casimira has everything in the world. She can't have them, too.

“Now,” the matriarch orders, “or it's orangutan fingers for you.” Nearby, a bent old man in a white laboratory coat shoots them a hungry glance.

“Religion,” November whispers, her stomach knotted, her heart seizing itself in shame, as though she had just opened her dress and shown herself naked to the matriarch of Palimpsest. “Territory. Vengeance, historical enmity, alliances.” She starts to hitch and sob, losing her list to the air, to the wind and the sea, lost to her notebooks, to herself. “Resources-food, fuel, water, labor, expansionist government, I don't know… I'm sorry, I can't think…”

November's face burns. She wants to cry again but will not allow it. She will not humiliate herself, and she is sure she has not hit upon the cause Casimira wants to hear.

“Can war, do you think, be a tool of policy?” she says with a gentle didacticism, as their walk takes them around a bend in the surf that throws up glimmering, half-translucent urchin shells onto the beach.

“I don't… I'm a beekeeper… you can start a war however you like…”

“Well, thank you, but, in your opinion.”

“Of course…”

Casimira looks November up and down, her dark eyes glittering with amusement. “Immigration policy, perhaps?”

November wrings her hands, closing her right hand over the place where her left fingers have been. She is still not used to the wretched stumps and recoils from herself as though burned.

“Casimira, I don't know!”

The older woman's face softens and she stops, taking November's cheeks into her hands. “Am I being very dreadful to you? It is hard for me to remember, sometimes, that others live alone, and do not have a billion children to whom lullabies simply mustbe sung. Come, let us get you a drink, it will do you good. And then we must go home, for my house is threatening to tear down the haberdashery next door if I do not bring you as soon as I am able.”

As they walk toward a gleaming black pier, something like obsidian strung with white lanterns, folk they pass, ill and well, shrink back from Casimira, cross themselves or sink to their knees in reverence. One or two doctors spit at her. She holds her head high, until the spit splatters on the hem of her bathing dress. She casually flicks her fingers in the direction from which it had come, a gesture like removing dust from a collar Three wasps fly from her sleeve with a high, rageful, indignant screech, and defend their mistress with keen stingers of brass. The doctors fall to the shore, their arms raised over their heads.

On the black pier, Casimira takes a great wooden pitcher from a wire rack and dips it into the sea. She offers it to November, who still trembles and rubs her elbows. She drinks; it tastes of tangerines, and salt, and white sage. It tastes nothing like the sea she knows, nothing like her Pacific with its long gray arms-it is sweeter, and thicker. The midnight tide crashes diamond wave against stony shore, sending spray into the thready silver clouds that collar the moon.

Did I ever think San Francisco was beautiful? marvels November. I was a fool.

“We must take a circuitous route.” Casimira sighs. “You are too new to have forged any reasonable path through the city.”

“I'm sorry, I tried… you know, on the other side, there are people who try to keep you from finding too many people.”

Casimira snorts. “There are people like that here, too, I assure you. But of course you tried, my dear. One cannot really be so fortunate as to choose adjacent lovers. No one blames you.”