Palimpsest

Industry, she wrote below it. Commerce. Transportation, construction, tenements. Habitation. Suburbs. Circuses. Exhibitions of Force and Fervor. Religion. Ritual.

Darkness, grief, the moon. Women. Dreams.

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The skin of her cheek recalled pressing against the legs of the lost Xiaohui. November mourned, as much as she could ever mourn those gone in the morning, in her kitchen, at a red table, with a white cup full of milky coffee. She held her palm against her face—she was not sorry the historian had gone, but her body wept. She stared into her coffee, sitting in a thin blue dress that tangled in her calves. She often felt that she chased the ideal cup of coffee in her mind from table to table, the rich, thick, creamy coffee, spicy, bittersweet, that betrayed no hint of thi

She wore copper rings that turned her fingers green, and tapped them idly against her cup. Her book of lists lay closed on the table, and she considered briefly a roll of the attributes of the grail-coffee which did not fill her cups, but could not, in the end, decide it had sufficient worth. The bees would be no help; they would tumble over each other like golden babies and thrum wordlessly on the subjects of queens and sex and pollen-gluey feet.

November, like a queen in a story, with black hair and a long story ahead of her, was possessed of a beautiful mirror that had belonged to her mother. Its frame was oily iron, figured in broken fleur-de-lis and curling leaves. She kept it near the door of her little house, for it was only when she meant to go into the world that she cared how the world might see her.

Her face showed faithfully on that morning, ringed with baroque foliage: a messy knot of hair, a mild brown gaze—and a black mark like a slap on her cheek, an explosion of lines and angles like the work of a furious spider or a drunken architect, brachiating from a point near her ear up towards the corner of her right eye and down towards the crease of her lip, long, undulating lines like the banks of a black river. She put her hand against it, shaking—rubbed at it, but it remained, a mark like the one on Xiaohui’s vanished thigh, hot, as though only just branded there.

Things that are left in the morning: memory, thought, snow. Light. Work. Disease. Dreams.

November returned to the Chinatown café and the soupy peppered oysters, the greasy, soft fortune cookies, but Xiaohui was not there. She briefly considered becoming a hermit, a nun, a bee-abbess. She was halfway there already, really. She could not hide her face as Xiaohui had hidden her leg, and the toll-taker at the crux of the gloomy gray bridge had stared so long that the cars behind her had blared indignation. But the wizened woman at the café counter, Xiaohui’s mother, her wrinkled hands clamped up in rings so old their metals had gone black, did not stare. She looked up at November through blue-white hair and allowed the smallest smile, as if in broad, universal pity, the way Mary smiles when she is the star of the sea. November blushed—what she had done blazed as plain as a pregnancy. She offered no excuse, and the crone said nothing.

She shrugged a little, as if to say: That’s what you get for sleeping with strange women.

Slumped into her plates, November swallowed the happy steam of onions, shrimp paste, plum sauce. She sat separated by two tables from her lone fellow patron—a young man with glasses and a glossy willow-colored button-down shirt. He ate deftly and she thought his hands had a woman’s grace, or a beekeeper’s. He was reading a book with a black cover and embossed silver characters. When he reached up to turn the onionskin page, November saw that his forefinger was black from nail to palm, wound around with those broken, swerving lines, haphazardly, as if drawn with a terrible, shaking pen.

He would look up eventually, he had to. She was patient—nothing she could say would cry out in the same shrill pitch as her ruined face. Her blood beat like a bruise blossoming, and she willed him to see her, to abandon his book and raise up his eyes. While she waited for him, her folded cookie arrived, and she unfolded it with great care. She could hear so much blood in her ears, more blood and thicker than she could have had in her. On the thin slip of sugared paper she read:

I am sorry. My daughter is also careless.

As if a bell had rung in his ear, the man in willow-green looked up—and smiled, beatifically, light opening across his face like a window flung open at noon. His dark eyes flashed recognition, and in two quick strides he reached her table, casting a green shadow. He took her face in his hands and kissed her mouth hard, clumsily, a disaster of teeth and skin.

212th, Vituperation, Seraphim, and Alphabet

IN THE CENTER OF THE ROUNDABOUTsits the Memorial. It is tall and thin, a baroque spire sheltering a single black figure—a gagged child with the corded, elastic legs of an ostrich, fashioned from linked hoops of iron. Through the gaps in her knees you can see the weeds with their flame-tipped flowers. She sits in the grass, her arms thrown out in supplication. Bronze and titanium chariots click by in endless circles, drawn on tracks in the street, ticking as they pass like shining clocks. Between her knock-knees is a plaque of white stone, blank as a cheek. Once, on this spot, one thousand and twelve hearts stopped without a gasp. An army wrangled without screams, without sound. In the center of the roundabout, the ostrich-girl died unweeping while her father had his long throat slashed with an ivory bayonet. The great post-war sculptor Lydia Weckweet, who is responsible for so many of the small and lovely renderings that grin or frown at i

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November stumbles across the tracks, tripping on their glittering rails, blind, the smell of train-catacombs in her nose, the smell of things that crawl, but also things that race and never cease. She falls into the arms of the iron ostrich-wastrel, hanging on her bolted neck, shuddering as the traffic clatters around her in an endless circuit, like breath, like blood. Under her hands she feels the heft and shape of strange great scissors with wet handles, but her fingers are empty. Under her mouth she tastes a bitter woman with nails in her tongue, but she is alone. The beekeeper hunches in the half-circle of the orphan’s outflung hands, rocking on her heels, her fists pressed up against her eyes.

A soft thing falls onto her feet. The feel of it is familiar. The infinitesimal motion, the golden weight. She hears, through the din of the sensations that pit her hands against her eyes, a dim, welcome thrum, a hum like a heartbeat, and November laughs amid the wheeling cars and far-sung indignant squawks of drivers she ca

She brings the bee to her lips; its wings hush against her. Slowly, as if to prove the deliberateness of its small deed, the creature presses its stinger into November’s mouth, pauses for a moment on the tip of her tongue, stiff against the taut flesh of it, and then eases into her, piercing her tongue deftly and perishing in a paroxysm of venom and religious ecstasy.