Palimpsest

“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said, muffled in powder-colored sheets. “You could have stayed in bed. It’s warmer.”

“I’m not good at that.”

He emerged from linen, a blur of haphazard black hair and sleep-flattened cheeks. He groped for his glasses. “You’re not good at staying in bed?”

“At any of it. At other people. At mornings.” She closed her lips against the forming list. They were for her notebooks, not for speaking, not for saying. Air could ruin them, take them apart, make them meaningless. They were fragile, like honeybees. Like cobwebs. November sniffed and wiped at her face. Men were difficult, she had always found them so. Hoary old birds on the bough, staring with sharp mouths. They chewed and chewed at you until there was nothing of interest left.

He watched her, propped on one elbow; he had watched her even when he had pulled her onto him, watched her in the calculating way of owls watching a hinge-jawed vole— will she run?

Will she scream? What will she taste like? How many others like her are hidden in the grass?

“You’re so new,” he had breathed into her collarbone, his thumbs under her breasts, fingers splayed out against her back. “So new.”

She had watched him, too. Distantly, from a great height, from far off. She had moved mechanically, keeping her mouth bitten shut. She hadn’t come; she hadn’t wanted to. She hadn’t wanted him particularly, he had no blue eyes, no lineages in his heart, prophet to caliph to teacher’s assistant. He had not even told her his name, so eager was he to touch her face, to trace the streets there. So eager to return to this gray smear of a house, to the mattress on the floor, lonely of box spring or frame. And his long, tapered finger, so wound with blackness, sliding in and out of her, as though the whole city could fuck her, just like that.

He had told her about that place, told her its name, told her how to get there, pulled her close with the promise of a city she remembered in small bursts, like novae, a dream that was not a dream.

That was enough, she would suffer his body in hers for that. And she believed him, she believed because of Xiaohui, who had told her nothing but wedged her open, and all these others, now, all these others could enter where Xiaohui had forgotten to close her when she went.

“Living alone,” November whispered, “is a skill, like ru

Her companion uttered a small noise between a sharp sigh and a soft laugh.

“You don’t have to be, you know,” he said with a sliding sadness. “This has been going on for some time. There are patterns to us now.” He moved his hand on the sheets as if to reach out to her. “Rules. Protocols. You don’t even have to talk to me, if you don’t want to. People worked this out a long time ago. It used to be awkward, when you wanted the entranceand not the person. The invitation, not the plus-one. It varies a little from place to place—it’s pretty formal here, like a transaction. If,” he looked down at his fingernails, “if you’d wanted me for myself, you would have turned the stone on that ring you wear on your middle left finger inward. If you wanted it to be more than once, you would have turned your pinky ring in. There are codes like that. If you wanted a feast, elaborate sex, if you wanted to make a ritual of it, you would have worn green shoes. I didn’t expect you to be here in the morning, with no ribbons in your hair and all your rings turned out. And two buttons, not three, undone on your dress. That means strictly business, altogether. But you’re new, so I guess I should have figured you didn’t know the ropes.”

“How long have you had it? Has your finger been like that? Have you been . . .”

He drank from a glass of water left on a makeshift nightstand—a pile of thick hardbacks. “Traveling? Passing over? Expatriating? About five years, I think. It’s hard to pinpoint, because hardly anyone remembers the first night. One dream is just a dream, you don’t give it a thought. It’s only the second one that sticks, and if you’re lucky, your second lover has been at it long enough to have figured out a thing or two.”

November swallowed. “How many of . . . us. . . are there?”

He looked at her very seriously, tilting his gaze over his glasses. “Not as many as you’d think. But enough. We’re secretive about it, you know? It’s precious, like a pearl at the bottom of the sea. There are no magazine ads, no decadent clubs, in this country anyway, no websites. We keep it contained. If a site goes up, the rest of us take it down, one way or another. You gotta be strictly low-tech. Analog. Fly low—an old-fashioned underground, get it? Sometimes I think I spend half my time crawling the web for . . . well, we call them errata. Hasn’t been one that’s stayed up longer than twenty-four hours in years. It’s . . . hard. Holy work is always hard. We keep to ourselves on this side, to protect it. Sacred places, you owe them something. We owe it. You wouldn’t want just anybody—”

“So only the rightpeople get to go? People who are rich enough or pretty enough?” November said bitterly.

The young man clenched his jaw and released it slowly.

“Sweetheart, imagine someone who’s a big man over here. The head of a corporation, or, hell, the president of a country. Imagine that in the sorts of places those men go to cheat on their perfect little wives, one of them picks up a little virus—hey, it doesn’t hurt his health, really, and he can cover up the black mark for press meetings. But imagine that he’s smart enough to figure out what’s happening to him when he goes to sleep, which, given his Ivy League pedigree, he probably is. Imagine what happens when a man like that finds a city of impossible, untapped wealth, a nearly limitless labor force, power that isn’t magic, not really, but close enough that he could dazzle the world, become a wizard-king with his amazing machines.” The young man crossed his arms.

“Now you tell me how long you think it would be before troops started forming lines at brothels. How long before there are boots in every street in Palimpsest? Sacred places, November. You owethem something. You stand between them and the rest of the world, or else the world gets its ugly, stupid way.”

November reeled back, chastened. She could not bear the thought of a man like that in Orlande’s shop, his feet filthy with ink. She did not want to know it could happen.

“But Xiaohui—”

He barked laughter like a sea lion. “Xiaohui? Oh, god. You poor kid.” He got up and padded over to her, sitting against the wall without noticing the absent bookshelf, his naked limbs tossed casually about like toys.

“Xiaohui’s . . . sort of an evangelist. There’s a few of us like her. We try to keep them contained, too. They don’t get invited to parties, generally. She’s a big girl, bigger on the inside than on the outside, you know, and she can’t bear the thought of being alone in that place. She takes anyone she finds, even blanks like you. It’s . . . well, some people would call it immoral. She never cared. I spent my junior year chasing her errata through these obscure little knitting magazines.”