“I don't want to hear this. I've only just gotten here. Let me lay my head on your lap again. Tell me stories about the municipal parks of the dead.”
“I am worried about you, Olezhka. I do not think you are very well at all, and I love you. I want you to be well.”
“No,” he moans. She grips her parasol tightly. Her snowy hair hangs all around her.
“Look at me, Olezhka! Listen to me. I am … something else. The thing I am is called a Pecia. I am … like a machine. You would think of me like a machine. I am made of snow, and of silver, and of the bones of river fish. I am c
overed in the patina of cupolas. Made out of all the things you remember about your childhood, out of Novgorod and the Volkhov, out of a little girl in a red dress, out of wintertime. I was made for you; there is a place where people like me are made. Inside me are not bones as you would think of them, nor blood, yet the things inside me are also red, and also white, as you know bones and blood to be.”
“This is insane. You're real, I can feel you.”
“Yes, I am real. And I am alive, and warm, and therefore I cannot be Lyudmila. But,” and Mila leans her parasol against the rail, the foxes snoring lightly She crawls to him along the floor of the boat, her long hair dragging below her. “But I remember Lyudmila. I remember what you remember of her. I know the story of the Princess of Cholera, and I can tell it to you, as many times as you want. I remember the girl in Brooklyn who you wanted to be your wife, and I remember her orange blossoms, how sickening their perfume was in our house. I was built to remember. I was built out of remembering.”
“Who built you?” Oleg is numb, his hand trailing in the pale river, his throat tight as a fist. She smiles and wraps her arms around his knees.
“Palimpsest. Olezhka, did you think it did not love you and pity you? Do you think I did not? For I am as much this place as I am Lyudmila. I remember when you were fourteen, how bitterly you wept in my arms when that little brown-haired girl mocked you. I remember carriages on my skin and a war in my belly But for all that I can smile at you with Milas lips and tell you Milas stories and even smell like Mila, all for your sake, to answer the terrible things you cry out for during the night.”
Oleg's palms sweat. He does not want to know the answer. Do not ask, he thinks, and tries to clench his throat around it. But the question is a lock and it seeks the key of her and he cannot stop himself, even though the taste of it is like the Volkhov, muddy and reedy and cold, and he doesn't want to, doesn't want to know, doesn't want to think or be, just bury himself, in her, in what looks enough like her to pass, in what is good enough. But it flops out of him anyway, and he stares at it, how ugly and pathetic, how himself, how shameful.
“Why,” he whispers, “if you, here, in Palimpsest, are not my Mila, if you are a robot or whatever you say you are, why has she stopped coming to me in the real world?”
Lyudmila looks up at him, and her face is so like his: elongated, made more graceful by high cheeks and fuller lips, by long hair and a finer jaw than his own. But it is his face, his mother's face, a thing shared privately, jealously among family. And it is so full of pity and sorrow, love and helplessness, and such disdain. He wants to claw at it with his nails until this well-dressed, lying thing dies and his own Mila is left, until she comes back, his girl, his, and she will remember everything, and apologize for leaving him like a poor dog, and they will be happy, and this will all end.
He grabs her face, his own face, and tilts it to him, pushing his nails into her cheek. Drops of blood show, real and red, red as dreams, and she does not seem very much at all like a machine. He doesn't want her to speak. He doesn't want her to say what she knows. But she is close and she does smell like Mila, like dead, wet Mila tangled up in his bedsheets. He kisses her; her mouth opens underneath his, pliable and cool. Oleg does not want to admit that he has wanted this. He claws deeper, and she does not cry out. She tastes like new paint and he wants to vomit, to die on the river rather than face this thing which looks so much like his sister. He shoves her away.
“Get out,” he hisses. “Leave me alone.”
“Am I for this, then? I am to understand that this is what I was built for, to bleed and be kissed? Would you take this whole city thus into your mouth, to bleed her and kiss her?”
“Just go! Mila! I didn't ask you to be built! It's not my fault.”
“No one asks to be made. I happen. We just happen. Look at my hand. This not a hand. It is a street winding to you, asking you to love it, asking not to bleed, asking to be walked and adored. You can kiss me if you want to, but not like that, please, I'm so tired, so tired of bleeding for the love of you, of everyone, of all the madmen clawing to get into me.”
Oleg shrinks away from her, his eyes rolling, his fists bunched against his knees. He begins, slowly to hit his head against the side of the boat. It calms him. He ignores the others’ sensations within him, whose hands he has felt on women, on cabbages, on snail-shells. They are so faint, now, anyway. He has allowed himself to bloody his head only once or twice before. He has not wanted to violate the act, for fear that it would lose its potency with familiarity. Thunk, thunk, thunk. It is as though his poor, battered head can fit within the lock of the world, and turn tumblers to some semblance of symmetry and grace, some kind of rightness, of evenness. Thunk, thunk, thunk. It doesn't hurt, not really It is rhythmic, like a heartbeat. His heart is not enough, it needs this to keep the time.
Lyudmila stares at him. She presses down the front of her dress, fretful, unsure. She does not think he means to stop. She wore the snow for him, and the stars, but he does not mean to stop. She wants to touch him-it is in her to want that, she remembers wanting that, and wants it herself, all at once. She is in sync, as she was meant to be, the model of her and she herself in perfect alignment. She feels her components sing with the pleasure of it, but still he does not stop. He will not stop. Slowly Mila turns and dives into the river, leaving him, her bustle bobbing up like the fin of a great fish, and begins to swim for shore.
THREE
NOW. NOW.
Hester came to visit Oleg, most days. She was always prettier when she had come in from the cold. The blood in her face was whipped up, her hair full of snowflakes that barely melted in the air of his apartment. She brought him a little bottle of orange juice, which he somehow remembered being sweeter than this, tasting more of sunshine, of mad and green places with Spanish names. It was acidy instead, thin. Hester could not keep food warm on the long walk to him: gray hamburgers arrived with gluey ketchup, street hot dogs with sauerkraut frozen at the edges. Oleg wolfed it down, every afternoon. He did not care.
One day, Hester arrived to find him shivering, an empty paint bucket in his hands. Oleg had filled it in the industrial sink down by the boiler and lugged it up five flights to dump it onto his bed with a dull splash. He stared at it until it started to freeze—he had stopped paying the heat a week before. But she hadn't come, not her, not Lyudmila, the one he wanted, not his sister in her squeezing, tiny red dress who would hold him until all his memories which were not of her fled, and she was the only thing left in him. But only Hester came. “Well, fuck,” she had said succinctly, and he had curled up on the floor.
But Hester had recognized it all, all of him, all of his acts. She knew him, somehow. She sat up with him and talked about the night she had woken up in the graveyard and all those gray fingers had reached out of the bamboo to her, and all she could smell was death. He didn't understand why this could upset her so, but he listened. He was good at hearing, at receiving. She had known that there must be others, but had not sought them out. Could not bear the smell. Once in a while one of them found her, and she hated them for it, for their eagerness, for the beauty of the city they told her about, when she knew it was not so, that it was a cold, grim thing crawling with worms, still reaching out for her. Hester could never see the burnished, gleaming thing they saw, and she reviled them.
“What did you see after me?” he asked her.
Hester quavered, and a tear fell past her chin to the sodden floor. “I couldn't,” she hissed. “I took my pills. I took eight of them. I needed to be sure I wouldn't dream. I took enough that it couldn't get through, it couldn't touch me. It stayed in its tree.”
That sort of thing happened when he spoke to her. He often did not. She left the juice and food near his prostrate body and locked the door behind her. He had made her a key on a particularly good day when the sun was out and she had brought bisque from a far-off, surely mythical, deli. He had felt warmly toward the little brass thing. It was hot in her hand. But th
e days were not always so kind. He stared at his bed for a good and honest shift of nine hours, and willed Mila to appear there. In a moment, she will come, he thought. Now. Now. But she was not, and would not.
He slept as often as he could, until his body was so weary of sleep it tasted like ash settling over him when he could manage it at all. He wanted Hester's pills, but they would take his dreams, and that he would not allow. He hadn't taken his own pills in weeks. It didn't help—Lyudmila would not shiver into being on the footboard of his bed.
Oleg called her sleeping and waking, letting that horrid little boat float up and down the river of cream, calling her name. She did not appear there, either. He had lost her utterly, a more profound loss than the day she drowned. The girls with their braided nets stopped their fishing to stare at him as he screamed for her, screamed until his voice was gone and he could only whisper her name to the stars.