Palimpsest

“Besides,” Gabriel laughs, “immigrants never have any money, you know. This is the best place to get some. I guess you could say we’re commuting.” He poles through the coats, enormous bronze scissors stuck through his belt, which he draws now and again to slice through an impassable blue tangle of recalcitrant suits. His voice softens, quiets. “Most of them . . . most of usnever figure it out. Bad dream, they think, or good one. Fu

“Is it always dark here?”

Gabriel sniffs, wipes his eyes with the cuff of his coat. He seems so young, young and tired and needful. “No, no, ’course not,” he says. “We just never come here in the daytime.”

Oleg looks over the rim of the boat again. There are flower garlands strung there, calla lilies, he thinks, and bluebells. They sag into the clothed street; their smell is old, a remnant, a relic.

“But it isa dream, after all,” he says to the woolen tide. “Nothing matters in a dream. It’s just . . . crazy things, over and over until you wake up.”

There is a long and somehow ugly ?ilence. “Sure,” Gabriel says, “just a dream,” but his eyes are hollow, shallow, low and dim. “What else?”

Oleg trails his hand in the street. He is good at the ephemeral, at ghosts, at dreams. At veiled things and at the untouchable. If it’s a dream, he will be all right; these are places he can know. If he can bring up a ghost, he can find his way to waking in this place.

Gabriel pulls the gondola into a little dock and lashes it to the pole. He smiles, but it is breezy and thin.

“Time to punch the clock,” he says.

They enter a great cathedral-like building of deep blue glass from buttress to cornice. A few others straggle in after them, and Oleg follows Gabriel’s lead as they receive aprons from an absurdly tall and silent man with glossily spotted giraffe legs, along with fine shirts, rouge for their cheeks, cologne. They pass through a long hallway lined with portraits of maître d’s with proud aquiline noses. Before them dozens of tables spread out with ruby-colored tablecloths and pearl candelabras—it is a restaurant, vast and bustling.

“Don’t look at them,” Gabriel whispers as he takes a tray of slim goblets filled with hot strawberry wine.

“At who?” Oleg struggles under the weight of his own burden: globes of white butter clattering in little dishes of hollowed-out diamonds, square loaves of moist, spiced bread. Pressed into service as a waiter, he thinks. Wonderful.

“The patrons,” Gabriel hisses. “It’s the law, here. You can never look them in the eye. Keep your head bent, like you’re praying.

There shouldn’t be any need to speak, and anyway they aren’t allowed to talk to you unless they call you ‘Novitiate.’ ”

“How do I take their orders if I can’t speak?”

“There’s only one dish here. Just put the plates down and go back to the kitchen for more. Get through the night—you’ll be paid, and it’s better to have money here than not to.”

And so they work. After the wine and bread come snails in flaming brandy with thin little slices of banana sizzling in their shells, followed by great bone platters piled up with obscene slabs of meat, ruby-bright steaks that slide over the rims of the plates, crusted in broiled white-brown skin: albino elephant,Oleg hears ten, twenty di

“Novitiate!” cries a woman with three rings on her right hand and a coiling bracelet of silver and agate on her left that winds around all her fingers and up her arm. Oleg is careful not to look at her. His feet ache from the pilgrimages to the kitchen, and he does not want to talk to her. Her fingernails are wet with pomegranate juice.

“How long have you lived in Palimpsest, Novitiate?” she asks haughtily.

“I . . .”

“Speak up!”

“I think this is my second night, if I understand everything.”

She claps her hands and squeals, a high sound like a broken chime. “I thoughtso! Your gait is quitegauche. An immigrant! How charming! Tell us, boy, is it true that you can’t see yellow or blue? That you feast in the rubbish heaps after we’ve all gone to our ?eds and our teawine? That you all get here by . . .” She leans down to catch his eye, to get him in trouble, but he averts his gaze in time, and sees only her long red hair brushing her wineglass, still streaked with strawberry. “Well, by rutting like filthy old cows? What do you eat? You musttell us all your foul rites!”

Oleg fixes his eyes on his shoes. His face burns with a shame he did not know, until this moment, he possessed. He has not heard the word immigrantflung like that since he was a boy—of course, he is an immigrant. There and here. The strange woman with her hooting, triumphal laughs and her gingery perfume makes him want to run, and also to stay and grind her glass into her face.

Slowly, with a deliberateness he savors, and will savor still in the morning, he raises his head and stares at her directly, her clear, spangle-painted eyes, her cheeks with tiny jewels embedded in the skin which is just begi

“I’m sure,” Oleg says evenly, “it’s all true. Every word. Want to come to the rubbish heaps with me? We can rutunder the moon and see where you end up.”

The woman’s violet mouth opens slightly, perhaps in shock, perhaps in pleasure at being confronted at last with real live immigrant ma

Gabriel strolls out a few minutes later—sweet boy, good boy, loyal compatriot.

“I told you,” is all he says, as he pulls the gondola’s lead free of the dock and pushes them out into the street of coats again. He is cold, as though Oleg transgressed against him personally, embarrassed him, made him a fool.

“But it’s a dream,” Oleg insists. “It was fun. We won’t even remember it in the morning.”

“You don’t know anything, Oleg,” sighs Gabriel, and they do not speak while the wind picks up through the last, late stars and light begins, lemony and cool in the east.

“Give me the scissors?” Oleg says finally, smiling as brave and bright as he has ever learned to do. But Gabriel has turned away; his gaze is over the sweet, small rooftops, down alleys Oleg does not know. He is gone: softly, subtly, irrevocably. He doesn’t turn to look, or graze fingers as he hands over blades longer than his legs. Oleg stands, nearly toppling them, and holds his architect—not his, not really—and whispers against his neck his best apology:

“I want to tell you a story. It’s short, I promise. And it’s about love. See, in the land of the dead, a boy who was run over by a black car fell in love with the Princess of Cholera, who had a very bright yellow dress and yellow hair and shiny yellow shoes . . .”

But Gabriel is not listening, and his back is stiff beneath his coat. Oleg sadly takes up the bronze scissors and knifes through the flowing street below the boat. Dismayed threads pop free of shoulder seams; buttons fly. Below he sees nothing but more sleeves and brume, but he is both a swimmer and a maker of keys, and he knows how to fit himself into gaps too small for others. He ca