Palimpsest

_______

In a train station, a woman with blue hair is suddenly dizzy; on a street of cedar, a beekeeper in a long dress sneezes as her nose fills with wool.

_______

There is a river flowing beneath the street of coats, a river the color of milk. It is slow and thick, rolling in long, lugubrious currents of cream and curdle. There is a fla

He walks along the bank, a crumbling, ornate rill carved with lamenting faces whose tears feed the river. Their mouths contort, their eyes plead, and they pass by unmarked beneath his feet. He limps, and this disturbs him, for in dreams does not one fall painlessly, like a sigh?

There is a bench, one of those that seem, wherever they are, that they ought to have been in Paris, with a view of the Seine. There is a woman sitting there in a long dress, watching the mushrooms flutter. As he draws closer, the dress becomes deeply blue, spattered with silver stars. It is formal; it has a bustle like the base of a cupola. Her hair is wild and loose, though, mouse-colored, very like his own, and strung through with snow, though no flakes fall underground. She turns to face him and he groans; the mushrooms recoil.

“I missed you, Olezhka,” says his sister, and holds out her long arms.

FOUR

THE ARCHIPELAGO

Lucia was gone.

Ludovico sat naked in his hall, cross-legged, as if to be shriven. The Etymologiaeflowed up the walls around him: Lucia’s breadcrumbs, all raven-devoured, and he the child left behind in the wood. He touched them, the tiny grooves in the paint, places where she had been, where her fingers had moved. If he closed his eyes he could dwell in the circuit of air that had once held her, he could hold his breath and be inside her again, within the close and burning borders of her—she stood here, washed her hair in this sink, wrote upon this wall, ate roasted chicken at this table. There was no place he could enter where she had not also been, her echoes hanging in the air like pages hung to dry. No place that did not suppurate in her absence, which was not ringed with the light of her old selves, like film burned with a cigarette.

He could smell her leonine scent in their bed, and would still, even weeks after she had slept there. He could not bear to sleep where she had, to ruin the imperceptible outline of her body, which was surely now only a fevered hope and a lie of unwashed linens. Her laugh, harsh and cruel and short, hung like garlands of blackened roses by the long, thin windows. He had hardly eaten but to put his teeth to the bones she had left on a chipped plate in the kitchen, to fit his mouth to a dead thing she had once worried.

Ludo pressed his cheek to the wall, and the letters warmed beneath him like her shoulders in winter: Cum leones dormierint, vigilant oculi; cum ambulant, cauda sua cooperiunt vestigial sua, ne eos venator inveniat. . . the words bent the corner sharply, winding on past the telephone table with its slender green lamp. When lions sleep, their eyes are ever watchful, and when they walk, they obliterate their tracks with their tails so that the hunter may not find them . . .

Ludo dug his nails into leones, into ambulant, as if to unearth from them her face, her stride, her long golden tail brushing paw prints from the scrub-dust.

They had always been beasts, curled and snarling in their cave, intractable, invidious. Of course they had, chimera and saint—but hadn’t they made their monstrous contract, hadn’t they eaten youths together and made a lair of these five rooms? Hadn’t he seen her face in some shield years past and been rooted to this floor, his stone arms pi

He looked at the apocalypse of the Japanese book: spread over the floor, hundreds of linen pages, silver paint, black silks. He screamed at them: impassive, inelegant illustrations, trains like limp snakes. She would have done better, they would have been yawning leviathans under her pen, chewing through the belly of the earth. The ceiling swallowed his cry with genteel embarrassment. His deadline was long past, the contract given to another binder in Parma. He did not care, he had let it go. And this was left in place of his wife: pages, paint, silk. He pissed on them, he spat, he tore them, he ate them, he threw them from his window. There seemed to be no end to their number—it was an infinite beast, one surely known to whatever podium occupied his beloved Spaniard in the libraries of the dead. Ludo laughed in the dark and began to scrawl on the wall, near the baseboard, where he would not crowd Lucia’s hand:

18.c.1. In the remote west are creatures whose body is that of a great book with a spine of wood and glues the matter of which is like unto the blood of a man. In rage does the beast snap its covers and gnash its chapters one against the other, and should a man attempt to make end to such a one, it will spew forth the substance of its life in the form of pages without end, and he shall be overwhelmed entirely by the copious waste of the brute, and thus does the beast ransom itself from death . . .

He stopped, having no further joke to share with the ghost of her.

Seven sewn covers empty of pages stacked themselves into a rough Ionian column to bear up his coffee; spilled glue from the sinew of an ox had hardened into caramel below the defunct radiator. Four hundred and twelve pages had swallowed up the couch, the one Lucia had bought in Ostia because it was precisely the color of a pecan shell, on which she had slept naked and alone for three nights so as to drink up all that billowing color into her impossible skin. The ruin of the Japanese book covered his floor like a wrought carpet, and his steps sounded loudly, too loudly, on their leaves.

Ludo lay over them, the couch soft and flaccid beneath him now, no longer smelling of Lucia or the sea, or that summer on the beach when she wore only yellow, and she had not yet frowned in his presence, not even once. He put his face into the pages and breathed the desiccated smell of long-dry ink, sifting through it with archaeological patience, searching for the vanished weight of his wife’s knees pressing little cups into the fabric.

By the time the moon slid out of the sky like a button in a dress, Ludo had fallen asleep, curled in the lap of his book monster, an illuminated dining car stuck to his cheek.

_______

“Have you seen her?”

The sentence, its mere shape in his mouth like an old, flattened fig, exhausted him. He had stamped it with his tongue like a press, copy after copy, into the hands of everyone he met, all of their friends with tortoise-shell glasses and buckled shoes, briefcases with embossed mottos, pens tapped against teeth, frosted lips pursed, napes pinched, Chianti in fat-bellied glasses at a dozen cafés where he tasted nothing of the cakes or coffees set before him. He and Lucia had not been good friends, the two of them curled up like turtles into the shape of the other. They had rarely sought out the people they had known before the advent of their walled world, their untouchable quiet.

The woman across from him now was a university acquaintance, quite far down the list of Lucia’s folk. He was reasonably certain her name had been, presumably still was, Nerezza, something stiff and severe like that. Lucia collected severe and baroque humans like a grotesque kind of zookeeper. Nerezza’s flecked eyes were small and narrow; she looked angry even when she laughed.