Palimpsest

“I have listened to so many of you move through the city,” Casimira says mildly. “The beetles know you, and also the ants. You crush them beneath your feet because you are ignorant. I feel their infinitesimal deaths in my smallest finger. I have seen so many proceed as you proceed now, your silly pilgrim’s progress through a place which is my home, which is no more strange to me than milk at breakfast. You are all so confused, so young. I feel as though I have heard your dullard’s questions so often my stomach is sick of them, though no one has ever gotten close enough to me to ask lip to ear, as you do. They ask it of the heavens, and the dark, and icons, and the stars, and beggars, and the moon. The spiders hear it all and laugh at them. It is unutterably boring, the multitudes in progression from i

A hushing, sliding sound interrupts politely, and a draft tells November that one of their walls had been drawn up like a curtain. The skin on her cheek pricks up in gooseflesh. Her pulse throbs.

The voice begins quietly, a low, cheerless note held terribly long. A tremor passes through her—she can feel the singer’s breath on her neck, the electric brush of lips at her ear. And the song goes on, the ballad, the aria, so close she knows each motion of the invisible mouth. A woman sings of a child with the head of a frog who fought in the war, who in the center of the battlefield sang dirges to all she killed with her small pistols. The child loved a boy with wolf’s hands, and to her song he always came, faithful, to dwell in the peculiar grace of those who have just escaped a great, black thing. But the generals heard her song, too, and came with their tall surgeons to cut out the child’s larynx, so that she could no longer give away their position to the enemy. She stood in the center of the battlefield and sang until she cried and her face was red with the effort of it, but she was silent, and without her song the boy with wolf’s hands was lost, caught searching for her behind the lines, and gleefully executed by the frog-girl’s fellow soldiers.

The song is complex and awful and so beautiful November’s stomach twists in fear that it might end. But end it will and end it does, and the singer’s tears have fallen into her ear. She puts up her hand in the dark, and it falls upon a wet face, as near to her as kissing, and then it is gone. The unseen soprano retreats; the wall slides back. Casimira takes her blindfold away; November takes hers.

“She will go to the next room, now, and the next, and the next,” Casimira sighs. “The opera is an austere and intimate thing, it ca

“If all that is true, why must I wake up? Why must I sleep with strangers to get here at all?”

“Do you not have borders in your country? And guards? And passports and papers of identification?”

“Of course.”

Casimira smiles softly. Her teeth shine. She puts her hand on November’s ruined cheek.

“Of course you do. And so do we.”

From beneath her dress Casimira draws something that sings as it leaves her side. November can see, even in the murky shadows, a long knife, so pure and silver it is nearly white.

“This is the world, November. It’s a difficult thing for someone like you to remember, but I am a helpful woman if I am nothing else. I want to help you. I want you to come back. To promise me you will come back, that you will not make me wait again.”

“I’ll . . . I’ll try . . .” November’s eyes open wide in the dark, trying to see where the knife has gone. Her voice trembles.

“I am going to help you see the way of things. To see more quickly than the other lost, bumbling fools who plague my rats in this place. To see as clearly as my bees see. It will go easier for you. There will be no boring existential crises. When you come to my house again, things between us will have progressed very far.”

Casimira pulls her right glove off finger by finger and lays it around her neck like a stole. She grasps November’s wrist resolutely and spreads her fingers against the smooth cold floor, pushing her first two fingers together into a blessing. November almost falls with the force of the woman dragging her hand downward. But she catches herself: it is a dream and she will be all right, she is sure of it. Almost sure. She closes her eyes and calms her body, sinking into the other woman’s grip.

“I’ve kept a room for you,” Casimira whispers, so faintly November barely snatches it from the air before the patroness of Palimpsest swings the long knife down and severs two of her fingers in one long slice.

Three people cry out and fall to their knees, clutching their fingers in anguish—and then it is gone, and they shake their heads, and they walk on through the night, understanding nothing.

THREE

SIMPLE DECLARATIONS

Oleg swam up toward waking, unwilling, fighting the current of consciousness. Gabriel’s voice sliced through his sleep.

“There’s coffee. Drink it. Or don’t.”

The wadded up weight of Oleg’s jeans tossed casually at him brought him fully into the world. Gabriel frowned at him over the rim of a mug that proudly a

“Please leave as soon as possible, either way,” he said flatly.

“What’s wrong?”

Gabriel’s look turned withering and he tossed the remainder of an ugly, thick black brew into the sink. “Nothing. I don’t like company in the morning. Just, please go.”

Oleg dressed without hurry. Mila often watched him dress, out of a vague anthropological curiosity, and it felt much like that now, with Gabriel’s cold eyes on him. He buckled his jeans with a grimace. His hands smelled vaguely of condoms and lubricant, a smell he associated with things he probably shouldn’t have done. That seemed to be about where he was at.

This was stupid. They liked each other, they had been happy, he had seen it in Gabriel’s face afterward, sinking into sleep with his head on Oleg’s chest. They could have been less lonely in the presence of the other. What had he done?

Oleg collected his tools and stood with finality before the architect, whose eyes were red and slightly wild, shaken.

“Just a dream, right?” Gabriel said, like an accusation, like certainty of guilt.

Yes, just a dream, a dream they shared, a dream that made itself manifest on his stomach. Livid, like a bruise.He took a deep breath, a last effort. “Even if it were real, Gabriel, what’s the difference between punching a clock here and punching it there? Are you better off, serving elephant to rich people who won’t let you look them in the eye?”