Palimpsest

“One more car, Sei. It pains me that you ca

Sei grips the Rail’s arm, hard and hot beneath her hand. “What is necessary? I don’t know! Tell me how.”

“I do not know either,” the crimson woman says, dropping her chin in shame. “I am too big to pass by that path. I must stay here, there is no road wide enough to bear me. But I hope one is wide enough for you.”

_______

A rich and mushroomy loam covers the floor of the fourth car, toadstools fulminating beneath benches. Pine trees sprout everywhere they can grasp hold, growing sideways, diagonally, crawling across the aisle. Between them nestle parcels, wrapped with brown paper, tied with twine, dozens upon dozens. The contorted, warty pine-roots splay over cushion and wall, sucking tentatively at windows. Their needles shine dark and glossy and thick, and from their boughs hang great orange-gold lanterns, globes ablaze with light. Some few folk in severe black clothes clutch the handholds and stare into the lanterns. Their faces are marked with white lines like smears of chalk. Sei looks up—the ceiling is far too distant, far too high, and there seem to be stars there, behind green-gray clouds.

At the far end of the great carriage there is a fox. He is also red, and his nose black, in the ma

“I know you,” he says dispassionately.

“I don’t think you could,” Sei replies.

“Imagine a book at the bottom of a lake.” The fox yawns. He paws the soil and lies down to sleep.

“Fish,” the Third Rail whispers tenderly, “read it. We read it.”

Sei shuts her eyes against sudden tears. The room seems to tilt, and the great peace of the rice and the cabbages drains from her like rain. Plenitude quivers in distress on her shoulder. “I can’t,” she gasps. “I couldn’t . . . I don’t want to. This is too much. You talk like a dream. Nothing matters in dreams.”

“We talk like your mother talked.” The Third Rail scratches her elongated cheek fretfully. “We thought you would like it.”

“I don’t!” Sei cries, half a scream, the other half squeezed off by her suddenly aching throat.

The scarlet woman hangs her head in shame and pulls her kimono around her breast to hide herself. “We are not infallible,” she whispers.

“What’s in the packages?” Sei feels ill. The shaking of the carriages tips her into the arms of a seated pine, which wriggles with pleasure and cradles her in its branches. It allows one ecstatic drop of sap to fall onto her hand.

The Third Rail looks toward the sleeping fox in agony. “If you don’t like it we shall take them away! We promise!”

Sei shrugs off the purring pine tree and pulls frantically at the twine of the package nearest to her. It comes open cleanly in her hands, like origami falling away from itself. Inside is a red mask, longer than a human face, its eyes and mouth hard black slits. One of the men in his black tunic reaches in and pulls it onto his face. He sighs resignedly, as if he knew all along that it would come to this. Sei gapes, hides her face in the pine tree. She does not want to look at the Rail again, at her hard, red, long face.

But the Third Rail kneels in submission at Sei’s feet, imploring her in silence, her face a broken panic.

“These trains speed past each other,” she says, “utterly silent, carrying each a complement of ghosts who clutch the branches like leather handholds, and pluck the green rice to eat raw, and fall back into the laps of women whose faces are painted red from brow to chin . . . ”

Plenitude caresses her cheek with a bold stroke.

Sei moans and falls into the Rail’s arms. The long-faced woman wraps her kimono around the girl and holds her tenderly, sweetly, with infinite care.

ONE

THE RABBIT IN THE MOON

Sei woke sobbing in a strange apartment, her hair plastered to her face, clawing at her shoulder. Yumiko did not hold her. She just watched, calm as a teacher watching a slow student struggle through a simple passage.

“It’s always hard to wake up,” she said.

Sei clutched her, her eyes rolling and wild as a dog’s. “I need—”

“To go back? Yes. I know. Do you think I’m different than you?”

Sei could not breathe. Her body ached, her joints, her lungs. “Take me back, take me to someone, anyone, I don’t care, just . . . the train, I can’t leave them, they want me there, I have to go back!” She groaned. “God, let me go back to sleep!”

“You have to wait. The Floor of Heaven opens at dusk. I sympathize, I really do, but I’ve been where you are now, and I had to wait, too.” She put her arm around Sei’s naked waist. “There’s a tenor there, at a place called Thulium House. He gives me sapphires every night; he pierces my arms with a long needle and hangs me with jewels until I ca

“There is a train, full of strange fields and forests . . . ”

“I envy you.”

“They need me!”

Yumiko put her head to one side. “Have they said what for?”

“No . . .”

“Then it can’t be good. Don’t be in such a rush.”

Yumiko rose and began the rustling, habitual motion of making tea. Sei realized that this must be Yumiko’s place. The walls were bare; she had a bed and a table and nothing else. The apartment looked like someone has just moved in, or expected to move out soon.

“My mother told me once,” said Sei softly, to Yumiko’s back, “when I was little, she told me that dreams are small tigers that live behind your ears, and they wait until you’re sleeping to leap out and tear at your soul, to eat it up at very civilized suppers to which no other cats are invited.”

Yumiko quirked an eyebrow. “Was your mother, if it’s not impolite, totally crazy? I mean, that’s not really a working theory of the subconscious.”

Sei shrugged. “Back then, I just thought she was wild and beautiful, like a goose, and like a goose she flew at me in a rage sometimes, and bit my toes. And sometimes when I came to see her in our tatami room her kimono would be torn to pieces, and she’d be naked and bleeding on the floor, her own skin under her nails. She was bleeding like that when she told me about the tigers. So I guess she was crazy, when I think about it now, but when I was a kid I believed her because she was my mother and mothers know everything.”

Yumiko set a thin green tea down on the floor. She ran a hand through Sei’s hair.

“But you aren’t, you know. Crazy. I know what you know. We’re not like your mother. There are no tigers for us, just a city, waiting, and it loves us, in whatever ways a city can love.”

“Maybe the tigers are there. Maybe they’re just better at hiding than trains and tenors.”

_______

The Floor of Heaven.

The little brass plaque said nothing it did not say before. Sei stood in front of it, motionless, while Yumiko straightened her plaid skirt.

“Ready?” said the faux-schoolgirl, her eager smile a little too manic and stretched for Sei to find it comforting. Sei closed her fists at her sides, suddenly not very brave. She could see that night plainly in her mind, how it would play out in that dark, furtive club, how every other night would unfold, too.

So many people would crawl inside her.

Sei knew she would search them out like a fox, the ones whose maps linked together to create a route, a route to keep her on the train, on course. She would find them in the shadows of the Floor of Heaven, in the offices of that place with tall silver cabinets, in the bathrooms with Asahi posters glued to the walls.

Sei could see it all happen, the whole tawdry parade: