Palimpsest

“Do you think a ghost should be angry?” she asked, her wet mouth sopping her words. “I can try, if you think I ought to be. I think I remember ‘angry’—it was yellow, wasn’t it? Like custard.”

Oleg caught her gaze, as a fish catches a barb in its mouth—it must have known such a thing was inevitable. But he smiled. The dyed lace on her collar was twisted up around her neck, and her face was open and sweet, her broad cheeks, her dripping hair.

“I love you, Mila.”

She nodded absently. “Yellow, right?”

“Yes, it was yellow.”

_______

When he climbed out of the bath, she was gone. It was like that. He’d grown accustomed to her comings and goings, as one becomes accustomed to a wayward wife or, indeed, a cat only partially belonging to the places she sleeps. When he was seven he had awoken from some nameless child’s dream-terror to see her sitting on his ashen footboard, knees drawn up to her chin, her dress seeping a wet crescent onto the edges of his blankets.

“That’s mybed,” she had said, and crawled in next to him, sodden and sniffling and cold. She had put her arms around his neck and fallen asleep that way, her face buried behind his ear. In the morning, his father had been furious that he’d wet the bed, and though he knew he hadn’t, he could not argue with the soaked, wadded sheets.

And so it had gone. She was not entirely his sister, nor really his friend. She did not do any of the things he had thought ghosts might do: steal his breath, demand sweets from the cupboard, send him on dangerous quests through the forests. She did not drive him mad. She did not plead for stories of the living. She did not, beyond dripping the Volkhov all over his bed, destroy his things or get him in trouble. He counted himself lucky to have got such a polite ghost. She also knew she was a ghost, or at least that she was dead, and Oleg felt that this was a lucky thing as well, for he would not have liked to tell her about it, about that day on the river, and how his mother cried so loud he heard it deep in her belly, and how he cried too.

Once, when he was fourteen and a brown-eyed girl in his class had made fun of his accent, when he had beat his pillow with his ski

“In the land of the dead,” she rasped, weeds tangling up her tongue, “a boy who was run over by a black automobile fell in love with the Princess of Cholera, who had a very bright yellow dress and yellow hair and shiny yellow shoes. The boy chased after her down all the streets of the dead, past the storefronts and the millineries, past the paper mills and the municipal parks. But the princess would not stop ru

“I don’t really see. That’s a terrible story.”

“But he wasn’t her family. There can be no real love between strangers. I love you, and that is enough.”

But he had loved the brown-eyed girl anyway, though he never touched her, even once. Lyudmila said that this was the way of the world, but he turned his back to her in their thin little bed, and she had not been able to stop him, being as she was and not other than that.

He told no one of her except the doctor who dispensed the pills which did nothing to banish her, and she promised that she had not told her friends about him either. She seemed to grow up more or less as he did, even though she should have been older. Still, she had not chased off his girlfriends or even scowled at the occasional boyfriend or thrown jealous fits on the fire escape. She just sat on the footboard as she always had, and if there was no one in his bed and he could not sleep, she would slip in beside him and he would wake up with wrinkled fingers and drenched pillows.

“I love you, Mila,” he said to the empty room. He did not ask where she went; it seemed like bad ma

_______

“You have something on your tummy,” she said as he was brushing his teeth after what could hardly have been called breakfast—still he could not stand the taste of stale red tea on his teeth. She sat pertly on the sink, where she could daintily spit out her water rather than letting it run down her chin.

He looked down—beneath the slight fur there was something. He pulled up the skin of his stomach. Around his navel, brachiating out like a compass rose, were long, spindly black lines, crooked and aimless. He could almost make out writing above them, but it hurt his eyes to peer so close at something upside down. It was the mark that the other Lyudmila had had on her neck—he might pretend he had spilled ink or something, but he recognized it—had he not tasted it, kissed it?

“Maybe you shouldn’t be kissing strange girls,” she said archly. “You could catch something.”

He rubbed at it a little—it stayed, of course. He hadn’t really thought it would come off. Like Mila, he supposed, he was stuck with it. He shrugged. It didn’t much matter. A man who has learned to live with a ghost can live with a scar.

“Mila,” he said, drawing a tired breath, “drop dead.”

She smirked, and spat into the sink. He followed suit.

_______

It was nine days later. Afterward, he would count on his fingers to arrive at the number, sure he was right, within one or two. He’d been called uptown in the stiff kind of cold that growls at engines and whips them cruelly. A young man stamped his feet outside a tall brownstone, blowing into his slender fingers and tugging at a knit cap. Oleg’s breath puffed in the air as he knelt to his work.

Lock-outs: the small, sweet, reliable lost souls who made up the bulk of his business with their forgetful habits and careless keys. He felt fatherly about them, even when it was a septuagenarian in his bathrobe and a cold pipe. Poor kittens, locked into the world.

Oleg looked into the lock, looking deep, as was his habit, looking as he looked into his sister’s eyes, through the imagined telescoping locks of his interior estates, into the kid’s kitchen door just past the threshold, and the chipped white bedroom door, and out of the brownstone into the next, all the way to Brooklyn and still further, to the foaming Atlantic nosing at the strand. He listened as to a seashell, for the lock to cry out its secret grief. It wept; he comforted.

“Thanks for getting here so fast,” the young man said, shoving his hands into his black jacket pockets. He was tall and narrow, dark Spanish eyes, the opposite of soft, generous Lyudmila with her great blond mane.

“My shop isn’t far.” Oleg shrugged. “And we can’t have you turning stray and pawing at neighbors’ doors for fish.”

The young man snorted laughter. They talked in the way one checks one’s watch on the train platform or blows on one’s fingers: something to do, a way to keep warm. The boy’s name was Gabriel. He was an architecture student. He built great miserly things that held locks gingerly, fiercely.