Palimpsest

The door popped gratefully open and Gabriel gave a yelp of relief not unlike a puppy seeing his master come home, miraculously, from the frightening world. His black jacket flopped open and Oleg could see, snaking up over his collarbone, a fine mark, as if painted by a calligrapher, black and spindled, branching out as if searching for new flesh to conquer.

Oleg leapt up. He grabbed the man’s shirt before he could stop himself, but Gabriel did not protest, nor even seem surprised. He just smiled, an affable, lopsided smile utterly unlike the ghastly, knowing glances to which Oleg had all his life been subject.

“Go ahead,” the boy whispered. “It’s okay.”

And so Oleg, his hands shaking and wind-reddened, unbuttoned the crisp workday shirt and spread it open, the mark there, livid, alive, darker than dreams.

“Do you know what it is?” Oleg said softly.

Gabriel bent his head to catch the locksmith’s stare and lifted his chin with two brown fingers.

“Don’t you?”

“No, I . . . it was there—”

“When you woke up? Yeah.”

“Tell me, please.”

“I can do better.”

And the architect kissed him, very gently, the way a widow kisses the feet of a statue. His tongue tasted of orange candy. Oleg thought he ought to have been startled, affronted, even, but twenty years in the school of his sister had permanently excised the oughtfrom him. He stiffened, unsure, and the strangeness of an unshaven cheek against his own habitually haggard skin struck him, an oddly i

Oleg sighed into the circuit of the architect’s arms, imagining Gabriel as a great house, elbows unfolding in perfect angles to take him in, to cover him in rafters and drywall, to keep the rain from his head and the cold from his bones. They stood thus as the air thi

_______

When Gabriel entered him, Oleg thought he might break into pieces with the pain of it, but he did not, of course. He opened, his insides unfolding to allow another human within him. He whimpered at the bare walls, trying not to seem unprepared for the strength of it. But Gabriel smoothed his hair and kissed the back of his neck and whispered:

“It’s ok, it’s ok, Oleg. I need you so much. You have no idea.”

413th and Zarzaparrilla

ZARZAPARRILLA STREET IS PAVEDwith old coats. Layer after layer of fine corduroy and felt and wool the colors of coffee and ink. Those having business here must navigate with pole and gondola, ever so gently thrusting aside the sleeves and lapels and weedy ties, fluttering like seaweed, lurching as though some unlunar tide compelled them. The gondolas are rimmed in balsam and velvet, and they are silent through the depthless street. Great curving pairs of scissors are provided in case of sudden disaster, tucked neatly beneath the pilot’s seat.

All along the cloth-canal are minuscule houses, barely large enough for a man to stand straight beneath the rafters. They are houses of shame, and try their best to make themselves small. Every so often the wind, fragrant with juniper and blackberry wine brewing in a great pearl vat somewhere far within the corkscrewing streets, blows a door open, and a great eye, blue or brown or yellow as cholera, will peer out from the jamb. The wind, sensitive to their natures, shuts the doors again as soon as it may.

This is the banking district of Palimpsest, and you must keep a respectful silence. Within the hunched houses a great and holy counting occurs, and even the sun does not wish to interrupt. It has been years since the sky has seen one of the beggars who dwell in the houses, who, once housed, could not bear to be parted from those precious walls, those beatific chimneys, who grew and grew until they filled the places wholly, and could not even be cut from their parlors with gondolier’s scissors. But the clouds judge that they do not cry out in their sleep, and so must be learned in some school of happiness.

Almudena, Mendicant-Queen! The smallest house must surely be hers, most debased, most humble. Her scissors broke here, and she begged each splinter of her house from the great and tall. What creature was it gave her that tiled roof? That oak porch? But it is her mumbling you hear beneath the great green streetlamps with their globes of gold. They say it is her long tail that seeks the street edge in warm weather, su

Take her what coins you have, she will bite them to know their worth and count them into her memory, which is finite and bounded as her own bones. A rib counts for a hundred, vertebrae twenty-five each, cartilage for decimal places, her liver for units of one million, and neither you nor I will ever see her priceless heart. Without calculating machine, Almudena uses the map of her flesh to recall deposits, withdrawals, points of interest. She ca

_______

Gabriel poles through the jackets, his face bright and wind-whipped—but the wind here is warm, it carries with it red flowers and the sea. Oleg peers over the edge, through the spaces between the coat-waves. He is bent double over the side of the gondola, his vision blurred as though with sudden pain, his hands cold—he feels mold beneath them, mold and metal. He tastes snail flesh in his mouth, and his head throbs with the doubled, trebled, quartered actions of each of his hands, each of his eyes. He shakes it and brass dust falls from his hair, the dust of a thousand keys grinding.

“What’s at the bottom?” Oleg asks thickly, almost catching a noseful of brass buttons.

“I don’t know. Can’t swim, myself. Train tracks? Morlocks? Alligators, definitely.”

Oleg sits back, rubs his head like an old man trying to remember his glasses.

“Why did you bring me here?” he says, staring off into the slamming doors and blinking eyes of the low houses. His gondolier—his? Probably not his, not really, not his own—turns, his haphazard black hair stung with moonlight.

“It’s where I’ve got, Oleg. Only place I could take you. That’s how it works. You sort of . . . lease your skin to this place. This is the part you saw on my chest, so this is where we end up, though I had to hustle to meet you here. And it’s a big favor, Oleg. Now I have to wait till tomorrow night to find out what neighborhood you’ve got on you.”

“What if you sleep with someone . . . new? Without the mark. Where do you go?” Where did Lyudmila go?

Gabriel shrugs and poles through a knot of tweed. “I don’t know. I’ve never been with anyone new. It’s a waste of time. Nowhere, maybe. I don’t like to think about it.”

Gabriel pulls open his shirt, not very different than the one they’d left crumpled in a heap on an old cedar dresser—and the mark is there again, deeper if anything, like sword-slashes, like a flaying. Oleg follows a long brown finger toward the most savage of the black lines, and yes, just above it, in the tiniest possible script, scrawled by a moth or a hummingbird: Zarzaparrilla Street. Crossed by 413th, 415th, and 417th at severe, acute angles, nothing like the soothingly regular grid of New York.