Palimpsest

Poor child—you will not see the rest! There are wonders above ground, too . . . ah, but she will not listen. They never do. They want only their very private toys and candies, and will not share.

The long brass bars part for her, smoothly, with a gentle whistle. She laughs shrilly and runs faster, her feet bare against the marble, slipping around the corner and onto the platform.

Sei ca

Sei leaps into the train, and the doors of the car close happily behind her: the long silver beast careens forward into the tu

_______

The rumble of the meeting of carriage and track sounds hard and happy in the marrow of the girl called Sei. She stands in the dark, hands groping up for leather straps she does not find. There is the sound of a thick match striking; Sei blinks in the soft and sudden light of a red lantern. The carriage rocks from side to side, gently, as though trying to sing her to sleep. But she will not let herself sleep; if she sleeps, she will wake, and she could not bear that.

The walls are draped in red silk. A few vague forms hunch at scattered tables—the sound of soup slurping echoes. A tall woman stands a little space away. She is wearing a black kimono with a jade-colored lining, but it is beltless; her small breasts show, and her slender legs. Her long face is painted red from brow to chin, and it is starkly angular, curiously stretched just slightly past human proportion. Her lips etch a hard black line; her hair folds back and back like the wrapping of a present. She approaches, her red eyelids downcast, and in her naked hands she cradles a teacup. The tea, too, is red, and smells of ci

“We are so glad you have come. Please take our food from us and also our drink. Please take our doors and open them, please find our cars beautiful. If it is not too much to ask we would wish to be dear to you, but we are patient and undemanding.”

She pulls away and there is a smear of red paint on Sei’s cheek. Sei shakes her head slightly, her mouth open and wondering.

“But you . . . you know I have only tonight here, that I am . . . nocturnal, ephemeral.”

The red woman nods. “We are confident you will find your way to us no matter where you wake in the city. To believe otherwise would be to believe a carriage can exist without her train. You are our own thing, our squash-blossom, our orchid-stem. We are the leaves of you, you must look at us and call us green, call us gold.”

Sei sits at the table and closes her fingers around the alien utensils. The woman sits opposite her, closing her kimono over her nakedness, her scarlet face beaming.

“Who are you?” Sei asks.

“I am the Third Rail.”

Sei laughs hollowly, her voice echoing metallic in the car, disturbing the diners. “You don’t look like it. Or feel like it.”

The Third Rail demurs, her excitement crackling at the tips of her hair. “I wanted a body, and the components of a body were available to me. But I run beneath you, silent and fatal and huge, and I love you, Amaya Sei. For you I have put on this red flesh and poured their red tea, for you alone.”

And Sei notices for the first time that other crimson women walk the car, tending to the hunched figures. Other women have folded up their hair, do

Sei covers her eyes with one hand. She would like to think this is true, that a train could really love her back this way. But she knows better. “Why should you love me, Rail? I’m nobody. I’m a ticket-taker for Japan Rail. I live alone. I go to work. I eat rice-balls. I’m not special, I’m not anyone.”

The Third Rail twirls a finger in her own cooling tea. “We need you. That is what love is, we think. Needing. Taking.”

“What for?”

The Third Rail shifts in her chair like a child who fears that permission for ice cream is about to be revoked. “Can you not just love us as we are without silly questions?” she pleads. “We have waited so long for you. We do not want to spoil everything with long interrogations. It is a small thing, so very small. We will be so good to you, we will give you such nice things. We promise.”

“You sound like my mother.”

“She can come too, if that will please you.”

Sei laughs hollowly. “She can’t. She’s dead. Tickets from the underworld are so expensive, you know?”

“We are sorry. Are we expected to be sorry?”

“You don’t have to be. It was a long time ago.” Sei does not want to think about Usagi, not here. This is her own thing, her mother ca

“Will you come with me, Sei? Please say yes.”

Sei looks into her tea, bloody and bright. She shuts her eyes and drinks it down, the spice of it puckering her cheeks. She feels the opium ball knock against her teeth but does not swallow it.

“Yes,” she says finally, setting down her cup. “I need you, too.”

She takes the hand of the Third Rail, and the woman’s fingers laced in hers are white and hot.

TWO

PROTOCOLS

Things that begin and end in grief: marriage, harvest, childbirth. Journeys away from home. Journeys toward home. Surgeries. Love. Weeping.

November pulled herself into a gray corner and clutched her notebook. She found the man in the willow-green shirt’s apartment unutterably lonely: only the corner she pressed up into spoke to her of living souls. She wriggled into the empty space there, a pale square in the dust-shabby paint: the ghost of a previous tenant, the restless shade of a vanished bookshelf. She huddled into its borders, knees drawn up against her nakedness. She pressed her cheek against the cold wall, her blackened, burning cheek. A tear slipped between her face and the plaster.

The young man slept still. The willow-green shirt slept, too, forgotten in the small kitchen. His books were propped up on cement blocks; there was a thin lithoid television, a pair of brown shoes. November drew further into the corner. She missed the bees, her own bees and the dream-bees. She worried for her hives like a mother—spending the night in the city is reckless behavior for the mistress of so many.