Palimpsest

“Why do you assume she has left you? There might have been an accident; you could call the police.” She measured out her voice through her lips like an iron flattening a sleeve.

Lions are watchful even when they sleep,he thought. “Because I know her! She meantto leave. She was always . . . a woman of intent.”

Nerezza laughed like a cough. “Yes, she was. How fu

Ludo waited, trying to be patient with her, to see what Lucia had loved in her, even in this to touch his wife. His palms sweated through the knees of his trousers. Such an ugly thing, the ever-leaking body. Nerezza scowled.

“Tell me, Ludovico,” she said, drawing deeply on her thin little cigarette. “Have you had any dreams lately? Bad ones, crazy ones, like the kind you have in a hospital, when they won’t let you out and you can’t see your family.”

“Of course. My wife has left me. I have terrible dreams, when I sleep at all.”

“That’s not what I mean. How about a rash? Like hives, but it doesn’t itch. Black. Like a tattoo.”

“Yes, yes, on my back. I don’t care about that. She had it on her knee. She said it was nothing. Communicable nothing, I guess.”

Nerezza rolled her eyes, stubbed out her cigarette. Ludovico loathed smoking. He had tried to explain to Lucia once that it contorted the humors, it was hot and dry and would burn out the delicate phlegmatic apparatiand leave her breathing fire. He had been earnest; she had kissed him with her mouth full of smoke, and his lungs had trembled, blazing, parched.

Nerezza rolled up the sleeve of her violet dress. There were lines on her forearm, Lucia’s lines, his lines. How dare she? How dare she bear on her body that last thing which had passed from his wife to him? But no cherubs winged at the edges of Nerezza’s streets. There was an oblong track in the center of the snaking avenues, like the Hippodrome seen from an impossible distance. On her flesh the mark was horrible to him, bare, violent, as though she had torn into herself with jagged glass—torn into him, into Lucia, taken their secret disease, their private travail.

“Now,” she said quietly, laying her arm on the table between them like a meal, like meat. “It is possible for me to say that I have seen Lucia. It is also possible that I know where she is now, that I am certain she is safe and well. It is even possible that I touched her face not three days past, and that we have passed men like a whiskey flask between us. These things I have to give you, but they are also lies, for I have not seen Lucia in the waking world, nor do I know where she is while we speak here, at this place, drinking this coffee, eating this crème caramel. It is for you to decide if you will take these things from me.”

Ludo closed his eyes. She talked like Lucia, dreamily, darkly, pregnant with meaning he sometimes thought pretended. The sun pressed its hands upon his face and he burned. “I will take them, Nerezza. Tell me where she is so that I can bring her home.”

“Ludovico, poor soul, Lucia will never come home. She won’t, and she doesn’t want to. I think—and it has been a long while since I knew either of you well—but I think it would be better if you told yourself she was dead, and believed it, and became a widower.”

Nerezza allowed a small smile, though it fit her face poorly. It was an encouraging smile, even motherly. Go along and play, little boy,it said. We are so busy; it is such work to be grown up.

Ludo grimaced. “If the world contained within it enough black to mourn her, perhaps I could. As things are, I am what I am, and she is what she is, and we are neither of us dead.”

She took his hand gingerly, the gesture of a sleek-legged rider approaching a great beast she intends to master. He was surprised to find no sugar lump in her palm. If Lucia was a chimera, heaving her great lion’s body from couch to floor to bed, Nerezza was an eel, dark and snapping, too slippery to touch, however fiercely she might be held. He recalled his Etymologiae: that the eel is born in mud, and eats earth, that the mud of the Ganges gives birth to giant eels, black and worm-blind, gargantuan, holy. Perhaps it was her and her inscrutable tribe of which Isidore spoke, sliding up out of the great ashy river with water beading on their breasts.

He gripped her hand suddenly and she disentangled herself with a deft motion, practiced at escape.

_______

Her apartment was not far from the café, but they did not stumble into it in the ma

Her rooms were as severe as the angles of her own bones. There was a black chaise, a glass cabinet. She poured him a resinous yellow wine he did not like. He felt his eel—not his, surely!—circle him and was feebled by her. Nerezza settled her weight on his lap—she was heavier than she looked, as though her bones were made of iron. She moved her violet skirt aside—such an expensive thing, thick as a book cover, and her legs like pages.

“I am a path to her,” she said, her black eyes piercing and undeniable. Ludo had followed with a monk’s faith. He opened his mouth against her neck like a wolf, as though he could tear her open that way and find Lucia hiding, or waiting, inside. She moved her legs around him, sliding, squeezing things that would not let him free, so tight that his knuckles were pressed against them as he fumbled with his belt and kissed her again, deeply, with a crawling feeling of loss—Lucia would not like this. Or she would not care. Which did he want? Ludovico scratched her back brutally with his free hand, hoping that his marks would show as dark and dire as the maps on their flesh, the map she had no right to, yet bore.

Nerezza would not open her mouth no matter how he moved in her. She was wild-eyed, seething, but breathed serenely through her aquiline nose, her black eyes clamped on him like a bite. She was narrow within and without, and the press of her all around him threatened to force his soul out through the top of his head. He screamed into her—he could not help it. He screamed into the dark, into the empty house, into the compact interior world of Nerezza, the eel-hearted, the great and solemn beast who did not cry out in her shuddering, but bit his cheek savagely and held it hissing in her canines as he came like glass breaking.

Parimutuel Circle

THE LANES OF PARIMUTUEL CURVEin long, lazy arcs, so as to take in their circuit the whole of the Troposphere. The city shakes three times when the races ring the great baleen-railed track, when a hundred hooves send up sprays of black pearls, when the spectators as one throw back their heads and scream out the substance of their ecstatic wills. There is a dome, for rain in Palimpsest is like an eager lover: ever-present and zealous, steaming with ardor. Under the dome, chocolate silk sweeps down from a frame of kaleidoscopic glass, each bar blown in as many colors as a church window. Enormous orange lamps hang like miniature suns, banded up in black chains. And the track, the track of pearls, wheels in its grand circle, ever on. The stands are rarely empty: slavering, pilgrim-fervent, the crowd leans forward as one great, spangled body to see the poor beasts run.

Traugott’s voice, a copper pan shaken in the wind, sings up from the stalls. He is a breeder of snails and dwells in a house of three stories. In his youth he covered each of the floors in rich soils of black and red, leaves of gold and green, grains brown and sweet, violet petals as thick as a pat of butter. In his middle age, birch and fig saplings sprouted through the kitchen tile; hedges ring the furniture. His great petit-grisslowly move from parlor to wash-closet, gorging themselves in paroxysms of helicicial rapture. They mate in the chimney, sing softly the hymns of snails on the windowsills when the moon blanches the verdant paint to black.