Palimpsest

“No,” she groans. “I don’t want to be here.”

“But it is your home,” the Third Rail says. Plenitude scratches at her neck encouragingly.

“I don’t like it, I don’t want it. I told you. I want to go to the next car. The rabbit said there were horses.”

The Third Rail shakes her long head. She strides to the center of the room and Sei knows what will happen but she ca

The Third Rail turns and seats herself in the great room, letting her unlined kimono pool out around her and smoothing her long hair into two flat planks. She reaches into her robes and withdraws an enormous book—it is swollen and waterlogged, and reedy bits of kelp and grass peek out from its pages like ribbonmarks. She opens it on her lap; lake-water splashes out. The Rail beckons Sei with sweetness, as if she is luring a cat from under the bed.

“No,” Sei moans, but she is going to her, could never have done less than go to her.

“Imagine a book at the bottom of a lake,” the Third Rail says.

“I told you not to say that. I don’t like it.”

“But I have gotten you the book. It was a very deep lake, frozen in places, high at the top of the world. I held my breath for a very long time.”

“You’re lying. There was never any book. My mother was crazy. She said those things because she was sick.”

Yet Sei inches closer. She is watching the space between the Third Rail’s breasts, white and smooth. The book is open; its pages are blue. The Third Rail opens her arms to take Sei in and cuddles her against her hip, pointing her long finger to the pages so that Sei can read.

“This is to say: I will hold nothing back from you, with either hand. All things, at the bottom of all lakes.”

Sei rubs her throat; it is tight and thin and she wants to run from this, but she is the Sei-fish again, twelve years old, blue and separate from the other fish, and she does not know the piscine joy they find in this volume, but she wants to, so very much.

She peeks at the page. Just a glance,she thinks. And then I will end this. It is obscene, and I can shame her into stopping it.

The book reads:

I really was born in a train station, you know. My mother went into labor, and I came so fast. I was always too fast. Too soon. She took me home, and I grew up, just a little girl, my head full of books, my hands full of calligraphy brushes. I had dreams like some children have freckles. And my sisters made fun of my name.

I married your father as soon as I could manage it, and he left me so often. I was so alone. I had only books and dreams and brushes then. And often I slept—but it was not like really sleeping. The world went black, and it went light again much later. My head hurt as though there was another baby inside it, pushing with her little hands to get out. The walls seemed so close, so close! The whole house was like a gag in my mouth, I could never breathe, and I could not leave it—your father could come home at any moment, and if I were not there, he would never come home again, I was certain.

You do not know that I went away when you were very small. I was not even finished nursing you. I went away to a place in the country where they folded me up into a very white bed and put a piece of wood in my mouth and arced blue electricity through me. I remember that it was blue, like the light at the bottom of a lake. I held it all within me, all of it, all that light, I would not let the smallest bit out of me. I held it as though I was made to hold it, as though I was a third rail and all the world’s tracks laid around me—it was mine to move the lightning, mine to bear the white heat and the burning. I am sure they were impressed. They knew they could trust me with it, they gave me more and more, so that I could keep it safe for them, and I know you saw it when I came home, saw how incandescent I was, saw the light sizzling in the roots of my hair.

Sei looks up, her tears naked and hot as blood. The Third Rail is bleeding, thick trails of it, hot as tears. The space between her breasts is gouged open, and her blood pools on the already sodden book, stains the hems of her kimono.

“Please stop. Please, please.”

The Third Rail puts her hand to the bottom of her red mask and lifts it, and of course it is Usagi beneath it, Usagi-mother with such sad eyes, her face wan and worn, her lips shaking.

“ The floor of heaven, Sei, is laced with silver train tracks, and the third rail is solid pearl. And they carry each a complement of ghosts, who clutch the branches like leather handholds, and pluck the green rice to eat raw.”

“But this is not heaven. It isn’t.”

“No, Sei. But it is enough. For you. Everything for you.”

“ Why?What do you want?”

“We want to fly. We want to leave the tracks, we want to roam and graze and howl at the mountains. We want to escape the world of our mother and our father, who pretend not to know we live and move and desire under the earth, just as they do. Don’t you want to escape your mother?”

Sei stares at the blood on her lap. She is not listening.

“I sat with you for hours, and there was so much blood. It took so long. It took so long.”

“It takes a long time to die. Even if it is quick, it takes a long time. It was hard to leave you—I think that is what you want me to say. That I did not want to leave my child. But it takes a long time. Your heart must stop, and your breath, and then the small things that you did not know kept you alive, books and dreams and brushes. And then you must walk a very long way in the dark, through the mountains, and there are pine trees there, and lanterns, and you can see before and behind the long trail of lanterns winding up and down the mountain, before you and behind.”

“You’re not really my mother. I know you’re not.”

“I am as good as your mother. I can be your mother, and you can be mine. It will be like a game. I remember your mother. I was built to remember. I was built out of remembering.”

Sei looks into eyes that could be Usagi’s, that could be her own sad, confused expression, with all those tigers at her ears. She puts her hand to her mother’s breast, the ruin of tissue and blood there, the wound like a heart.

“Lie below me,” Sei says, remembering her grandmother beneath the weepholes and her mother beneath the earth and she herself so far from the sun. “And I will watch over you.”

Beneath her palm the slash of her mother’s wound vanishes, as though the skin there had never dreamt of tearing.

Sei sinks into the arms of the red-masked ghost, and the Rail holds the blue-haired girl tightly, with a love like light. The Third Rail rocks her, and Plenitude curls up between her arm and her still-flat belly, and soon enough begins to snore inkily.

“There is not so very far left, not so very much left of the train,” the Third Rail says. “Before we open the conductor’s cabin and pay our respects, tell me, my Sei, my little fish, my child: is there someone who would come looking for you?” Her red voice is suddenly softly accusing.

“No, of course not. No one knows me here.”

“We knew you.”

“That’s different. There’s no one, I promise.”

“And yet she is here.” The Third Rail kisses Sei on her shoulder and purses her pale lips. “Tell us. Give us a command. Tell us to open our doors to her, or keep them shut as a mouth and leave her gasping on the platform. Guide us, tell us what it is right to do.”