Palimpsest

November raised her eyebrow, rubbing her fingers absently.

“I don't know,” snapped Clara defensively. “It's over, the war is over. There's enough of that shit here. It's supposed to be different there, nicer, prettier.”

“Prettier, anyway.”

“You only say that because of your face, and your hands.” Clara's voice pitched upward, like a vase about to fall. Her gray eyes narrowed. “It's better for the rest of us. Easier. It's the most beautiful place in the world. Nothing but flowers and perfume and jewels. Once I went to a ball where everyone wore masks made of bones—so many skulls—waltzing to violins played by little girls with no faces. The chandelier dripped crystals— everyone rushed to catch them when they fell! It was good luck, you know? My mask was a roc's skull with a hundred moonstones set into it—do you know what a roc is?”

“Sure. A huge white bird that eats elephants.” The children of librarians are rarely faced with an obscurity they cannot name. November smiled a little, proud of herself.

“Well, I didn't know. I had to ask the man in the alligator skull mask, and while he told me about the elephants he undid the ribbons of my dress and let it fall to the floor. He ground his teeth against my beak and called me Corazon and kissed me until I couldn't breathe. I danced naked with all those men in jeweled skulls, and they lifted me up into the air, fed me chocolates, poured blue champagne into my mouth …” Clara was transported by the memory, her hands on her throat, her eyes wide and shining. She looked at November for confirmation; her savaged face brought Clara back to the little table and the tea. “I'm sorry it's so bad for you,” she hissed. “I'm sorry it took your face. I'm sorry she took your fingers. But don't ruin it for me.”

November smiled weakly. Would she go there, someday, and wear a mask of bone? Would Casimira take her, and dance with her under that dripping chandelier? Would she take a thumb as payment for that?

“Do you know what you carry on your skin? What part of the city?” November asked, eager to talk about anything but her face.

“No, of course not. No one does, unless you're lucky enough to get into a neighborhood next to it. What are the chances, though?”

“It's her house, Clara. Casimira's. On your stomach, right there. And it's huge, and alive, and she took me inside—”

“I don't want to hear about this! Casimira is way beyond the circles I move in, and the circles I move in don't want anything to do with her.”

November waved her hand apologetically, the one that was whole and unmarred and easy to look at. She took a deep breath—this was the big question. The only question. She let it fall between them like a little meteorite, smoking on the table, spoiling the tea.

“Is there a way to go there in the daytime, do you think? Like emigration. Permanent.”

Clara grinned, her elfish beauty returning in a rush from hidden, angry furrows. She leaned in, taking up November's meteorite and letting it glow. “There are some theories. You know, no one really knows. It's not like there's a manual. A couple of times, I heard that someone wanted to write one, publish it as fiction—but we would know. We would see right through all those made-up characters and silly little narrative twists. We would know what it was: a primer.”

“What happened?”

Clara giggled—a wild, uncanny sound, not a feminine laugh or a trivial one, but a panicky, animal thing.

“Well, you know, they'd cheerfully burn down any warehouse that carried it. Letters got written, stock changed hands. No one would publish it, not ever, not anything that even mentioned the city. Not me, but… there's this Chinese guy, glasses. Has a sister. It's really kind of funny, if you take a step back. Like freaking West Side Story. She wants to let everyone in; he'd be the first in line to torch any book that smacked of the place.”

November sipped her tea, overwhelmed for a moment by the blueness of its taste. She thought of Xiaohui's brother, endlessly crawling through the Internet and low-circulation magazines to erase a single notice. “I think I know him,” she said.

Clara shrugged. “Probably. There's not too many of us on the West Coast. No one knows where it started, though once, there was this guy, maybe the fourth or fifth one I had, you know, the fourth or fifth one with the tattoo, and he told me this horrible story. We were lying around naked in his house, eating leftover pad thai and drinking bourbon, and he looked at me all funny and said he'd heard there was a woman in Cambodia or something, I think it was Cambodia, anyway it was a really long time ago, way before the war—”

“Which war?”

“Either one. Before, like, white people or anything. Anyway there was this woman. She fell in the Mekong River when she was pregnant, and these mynah birds came flying in from everywhere and fished her out, and they bit her a lot doing it and she almost bled to death after almost drowning. The river mud got all into her, and she had fevers and infections for weeks and weeks. Everyone prayed over her. And then, after ages, she just got up and walked again one day. Talking and making soup and things like that. But she was crazy afterwards, and she went to every village and got their shamans to tattoo her with secret, obscene things, ugly things, and she couldn't stop until she was completely black, all over, and no one could tell anymore what her tattoos looked like, and that was a relief.

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“But she had her baby and named it Chan thou—I think it was Chan thou—and after that no one would feed her or let her sleep in their huts. Because the baby was tattooed all over, too, not as much as her mother, but still pretty bad, even the whites of her eyes. And the baby never learned to talk, even when she grew up, so they thought she was a devil. But she was still beautiful. The men in the village paid her to let them fuck her, and so she got to eat, still. Probably her mother, too. Not a lot of work in a village like that. But it was the daughter they paid the most for. And every time one of them slept with her, they'd wake up with one of her tattoos, and one space on her body would be clean and blank again, just skin. The men had to hide it, but the daughter was so beautiful and so quiet and so good that they couldn't leave her alone. But that kind of stuff is pretty hard to hide.”

Clara looked nervously away from November's blackened face and cleared her throat. “So finally, the wives in the village got together and snuck up on her at the well and beat her until they thought she was dead. They just left her there. And that was it, right? Except that no one buried her, since she was a witch and all. But the body disappeared. After that, the men who had slept with her kept on seeing her in the jungle, without any tattoos, smooth and brown, just standing there, all quiet and creepy, with a tiger sitting on either side of her. She would hiss at them, like a cat, and disappear.

“But then the mother disappeared too. And after a while no one saw the girl or her tigers anymore. But just when everything was normal again, the men started to disappear, one by one, and the women, too. There was no one to take care of the farms or keep the well clean or keep the roofs sewn up. And when the shamans from other villages came to see what had happened to the village, to see why no one came to trade rice or shrimp or ask for wives, there was no one left in the village at all, and they put bones and stuff at all the corners and threw salt everywhere and said it was cursed. And supposedly no one lives there even now, it's just a blank space in the jungle. A big circle.”

“Sounds kind of familiar.”

“Yeah. I admit, I always kind of keep my eyes open for a girl with tigers, but even if it were true, it would've happened so long ago that I suppose that's pretty stupid.”

November shrugged. “But you don't know how to get there any other way? Or how to stay?”

“Nope. Nobody does. Nobody here. I don't think there, either, though. But come on. Just… enjoy it. Isn't it nice to know a secret?”

The tea had gone cold. “But the thing is, Clara, I don't think I can get there that way, anymore. My face and my hand… it's hard enough for you, and you've lived with me for three days.”