Palimpsest

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There are four of them there now. Shall we peer in? Shall we disrupt their private sacraments? Are you and I such unrepentant voyeurs? I think we must be, else why have we come so close to the door of cassia, the windows of cracked glass? Let us peer; let us disrupt. It is our nature.

A girl with blue hair slumps slack against her chair. Her listless hand is tied to the wrist of a man with thi

They are so young, young and sleepy and unknowing—unknowable, if you want to know the truth. Orlande’s muddy ink seeps up through the soles of their feet and the girl with blue hair yawns, a frank and unchecked gesture, like a newborn swaddled in her crèche.

ONE

SIC TRANSIT TOKYO

Sei pressed her cheek against the cold glass; strips of black mountains tore by under lantern-blue clouds beyond her wide window. She knew a man was watching her—the way men on trains always watched her. The train car rocked gently from side to side, hushing its charges like a worried mother. She chewed on the ends of her dark blue hair. A stupid childhood habit, but Sei couldn’t let it go. She let the wet curl fall back against her bare shoulder blades. She stroked the glass with her fingertips, shifted her hips against the white of the carriage—she was always moved to do this on the long-distance trains which crisscrossed the islands like corset stays. They were so pale and pure and unfathomably fast, like iridescent snakes hissing down to the sea. The Shinkansen was always pristine, always perfect, its aim always true.

Sei’s skin prickled as the man’s eyes slid over her back. She felt their cold black weight, shifting her shoulders to bear up under it. He would be watching the small of her back now, where her silver-black shirt fell away into a mess of carefully arranged silk ropes and tin chains. He would watch her angles under the strings, the crease of her legs beneath an immodest skirt, her lips moving against the glass. The little wet fog of her breath. She could almost tell what he looked like without turning her head: good black suit, a little too small, clutching his briefcase like a talisman, probably a little gray at the temples, no rings on his hands. They all looked like that.

Sei turned, her blue hair brushing her hipbones. Good black suit, a little too small, clutched briefcase, freckles of gray in the hair. No rings. He did not seem startled or doubled over with desire as they sometimes were. He was calm, his answering smile measured and almost sweet, like a photograph of a soldier lost in a long-ago war. Coolly, without taking his dark eyes from hers, he turned over his left palm and rested it on the creamy brown edge of his briefcase.

His hand was covered in a mark she first thought horrible—it snaked and snarled, black and swollen, where fortune-teller’s lines ought to have been. Like a spider it sent long web-spokes out from a circle in the center, shooting towards the pads of his fingers and burrowing into the tiny webbing of skin between them. She took a step forward, balancing expertly as the car sped on, and stared. It was something like a little map, drawn there by an inartful and savage hand. She could make out minuscule lettering along the inky corridors: street names she could hardly read. There seemed even to be an arcane compass near his thumb. As she leaned in, the man shut his fist.

“Sato Kenji,” he said, his voice neither high nor low, but cultured, clipped, quiet.

“Amaya Sei.”

He quirked an eyebrow briefly, slightly, in such a way that no one afterwards might be able to safely accuse him of having done it. Sei knew the look. Names are meaningless, plosives and breath, but those who liked the slope of her waist often made much of hers, which denoted purity, clarity—as though it had any more in the way of depth than others. They wondered, all of them, if she really was pure, as pure as her name a

She balanced one hand—many-ringed—on her hip and jerked her head in the ma

“Nothing.” Kenji smiled in his long-ago way again. She quirked her own eyebrow, also blue, and delicately pierced with a frosted ring. He gestured for her to sit down and, though she knew better, they sat together for a moment, her body held tense and tight, ready to run, to cry out if need be. Their thighs touched—a gesture of intimacy she had never allowed herself with another passenger.

“I think you like trains rather too much, Sei.” The older man smelled of sandalwood and the peculiar thinscent of clean train cars.

“I’m not sure how that’s any of your business.”

“It isn’t, of course. I like them, too. I own a car, I have no need to ride the Shinkansen back and forth from Tokyo to Kyoto like some kind of Bedouin. It’s an expensive habit. But love is love, and love is compulsion. I must, and I do.”

He gently tapped the brass clasp on his briefcase and drew out a slender book, bound in black, its title embossed in silver:

A HISTORY OF TRAIN TRAVEL ON THE JAPANESE ISLES,

by Sato Kenji

Sei ran her hand over the cover as she had done the window glass. Her skin felt hot, too small for her bones. He opened the book—the pages were thick and expensive, so that the stamp of the press had almost made little valleys of the kanji, the cream-colored paper rising slightly above the ink. Kenji took her hand in his. His fingernails were very clean. He read to her with the low, vibratory tones of shared obsession.

A folktale current in Hokkaido just after the war and passed from conductor to conductor held that the floor of heaven is laced with silver train tracks, and the third rail is solid pearl. The trains that ran along them were fabulous even by the standards of the Shinkansen of today: carriages containing whole pine forests hung with golden lanterns, carriages full of rice terraces, carriages lined in red silk where the meal service brought soup, rice-balls, and a neat lump of opium with persimmon tea poured over it in the most delicate of cups. These trains sped past each other, utterly silent, carrying each a complement of ghosts who clutched the branches like leather handholds, and plucked the green rice to eat raw, and fell back insensate into the laps of women whose faces were painted red from brow to chin. They never stop, never slow, and only with great courage and grace could a spirit slowly progress from car to car, all the way to the conductor’s cabin, where all accounts cease, and no man knows what lies therein.

In Hokkaido, where the snow and ice are so white and pure that they glow blue, it is said that only the highest engineers of Japan Railways know the layout of the railroads on the floor of heaven. They say that those exalted engineers are working, slowly, generation by generation, to lay the tracks on earth so that they mirror exactly the tracks in heaven. When this is done, those marvelous carriages will fall from the sky, and we may know on earth, without paying the terrible fare of death, the gaze of the red women, the light of the forest lanterns, and the taste of persimmon tea.