Palimpsest

Sei moved away from Yumiko across the floor and extended her arms like wings. She moved as best she could, as best she knew how, as she had moved in a hundred rooms livelier and harder than this in Tokyo. She circled her hips, she held her belly and tipped her toes. She shut her eyes and hoped herself beautiful enough to deserve what any one of these could give her: a way in, a way through. Her black dress, shimmering like depthless water, snapped and flared.

Yumiko caught her in a long turn, her breath quick, blowing out little strands of hair from her face.

“You don’t have to do that,” Yumiko said solemnly. “No one dances anymore. It’s a waste of time. We’ve cut it all down to the barest necessary interactions. It’s better that way. They won’t say no, not ever. You don’t have to dance for them.”

“I want to. I want to.” Sei laced her fingers into Yumiko’s pink-nailed hands. “Don’t you want to have fun, to feel alive here, too?”

Yumiko blinked, and she looked suddenly very tired.

“I just want to stay there, Sei,” she sighed. “It’s so hard to come back.”

“Then stay.”

“I don’t know how! No one knows. We just know how to get there for a little while, how to see little parts of it. How to dream a thing that is better than a dream.”

Yumiko drew her toward a table. Two tall, thin glasses glittered on the wood. One had a golden drink in it, the other a creamy, pale blue one. There was a man there, not so old as Kenji, with a poppy in his lapel. The petals were black in the low light.

“I won’t promise,” Yumiko whispered, pulling Sei’s hand under her skirt to rest on the soft flesh of her hip, “that they will all be as pretty as me, or as easy to charm as him. Most of them will not have a book written just for you in their pockets. But this is how you do it: through the body and into the world. You fuck; you travel. That sounds crude, and you know, it usually is. It’s usually ugly, and fat, and sweaty, and lonely. Luckily, it’s also usually quick. But afterwards . . . we find a place where we belong.”

The man, who was well on the way to fat, his neck bulging out of a black suit, his hair greasily combed over, put his hand over Sei’s. He was nodding along with Yumiko; tears flowed down his round cheeks. With his other finger he pulled his earlobe aside so that she could see the map there, glowering, calling. Sei leaned in to examine it, but Yumiko shook her head.

“If you want to continue on the train, and not . . . come with me . . . you have to be more careful. You only get to go to the place they’ve got on their skin, so you need to practice some good old-fashioned cartography and map a route.”

Together they auditioned men and women, lifting sleeves and hats and skirts to peer at maps so tiny they made Sei’s head throb. Yumiko seemed to know what she was looking for, but all the same it was not until nearly two in the morning that she found a nervous, ski

“That’s the next station on the line. You should have clear passage from where you started—it should work out, one way or the other.” Yumiko smiled gently, like a mother coaxing her child onto a frightening carnival ride. “It’s quick,” she said. “Be quick,” she implored the scarred man.

But Sei thought only of the trains, hurtling through her. She gave a wan smile and leaned into her schoolgirl briefly.

“The source of all suffering is desire,”Sei recited.

“Yes,” Yumiko breathed fervently. “ Yes, it is.”

Sei let herself fall into the man’s nameless arms. His kisses were not spare or elegant, like Sato Kenji’s, or sweet and fluttering, like Yumiko’s, or bruising and angry like the three lovers before them. His were soft and overripe, a pear fallen in the rain. His tongue was flat and round. He pulled at her white coat and the black dress beneath it, stroking her bare back. He drew her into an alcove near the bathroom, and she felt that this was u

The man lifted her against the wall; he was small in her, small and urgent and hard, a little bullet aimed at the center of her, and he buried his face in the mark between her breasts, his teeth bared against her in the dark.

Sei thought of the trains, and the shadows hid her face as the scarred man jerked and shook inside her.

It was quick.

Colophon Station

COLOPHON STATION IS THE CENTRALtransit terminal for the trains of Palimpsest. The stately prewar cinquefoils show the evening sky, deeper than gold and warmer than blue. The great ambulatory is lined with pillars of plum trees trained to support the long, ochre-tiled roof, blossoming grasping branches twisting the doves into living capitals. Within, eleven pyrite staircases spiral down to the grand floor, a marble expanse in which the old wheel of Palimpsest is laid out in rosewood, the face of the circular city when it was small and unassuming, a walled place, home only to a few celery farmers and astronomers. Great lancet arches lead further into the earth, labeled with stern roman capitals: Points East, Points North, Points Far, Points Near.In the center of the rosewood wheel the Verdigris Fountain splashes and trickles: a woman bound up in railroad ties, her arms flung upward in ecstasy, water streaming from her palms, her hair spread out as in a many-armed corona. Green age encrusts her, her eyes worn smooth by water, her nose half-gone. Yet still she watches over travelers, Our Lady of Safe Transfer, Star of the Underground.

The ceiling of Colophon Station is unpainted, for it was the desire of the architect, whose name was long ago buried under a black quoin, that passersby become aware in the most piquant way that they have passed underground. Therefore the roof of Colophon is planted over with flame-colored ginger flowers, whose thick golden roots reach down thirstily into the interior, and any traveler may look up and see only earth and straining roots, and the wonderful smell of it penetrates the skin for days afterward.

Miruna dwells within a column of glass. She sleeps there, when she sleeps, standing upright like a horse. A young bellhop with a shining cap who loves her with all his valise-hung heart brings her a lavish meal once a day: six roasted finches and grapes so plump and purple it pains the eye to look on them. He is too awed to speak to her, but he brings her songbirds and watches her eat in a rapture of adulation.

Miruna faces the Lady so that her heart may always be elevated by her work. She wears a wimple of simple flax over her white hair and a diadem fashioned from—impossibly precious!—a railroad tie that fell from the Fountain decades past. She is thankful that it was during her tenure that it fell, so that she could bend her own hands to it and shape it to her own head. She is the abbess of the terminal, and her gaze bestows luck wherever it falls. A great bronze horn curls from the top of the column in a long spiral to end at her mouth in a dish very like the mouth of a trumpet. She closes her eyes in paradisiacal servitude and holds the light of the Lady, the light of the train lamps, in her breast as she speaks her psalm, her voice low and kindly as a mother:

Arrivals, Track 3: Marginalia, Stylus, and Sgraffito Lines. Sgraffito departs for Silverfish at Eight of the Clock. Thank you and Good Evening.

_______

Sei dashes under the Points Northlintel. She has no ticket; her heart rattles a cup against her ribs in protest. There is a screaming in her ears, a throttling of voices, thousands crying out at once, the sound of horses galloping. She shoves aside the stirring feelings of strange others within her—they are eating, all of them, and her stomach seems to fill with foreign things, her lips hum with hot goblets. Someone is smoking near one of the members of her quartet, but not tobacco, something sweeter and darker, like dry figskins. She growls within herself at them, and they recede, quivering. She prepares to leap the turnstile—she will not be turned away; she knows her mark. There is only one place she longs for in this faceted city.