Palimpsest

If Sei tries—and it is becoming harder and harder—but if she tries to feel the others whose phantom senses float up under her own, under her tongue, under her fingers, under her feet, if she tries to feel them, she can just discern the smell of a train station, of the oily tracks, of the underground.

“Let her come,” Sei says, and falls asleep on her mother’s lap.

ONE

WISHES TO THE TREES

It’s over,” Sei said, folding her hands in her lap. They sat, squinting in the bright sunlight, at a restaurant wedged between two Buddhas.

“What does that mean?” Yumiko said, slurping her mushroom soup. “It’s not like you’re the first. Get an abortion.”

“It means,” Sei breathed deeply, ignoring her, “that I think there is no one left in the Floor of Heaven who is new for me. I’m not . . . like you. When I am there, I am always on my train, always with the folk there, and they barrel through under the city at such a speed—I’ve had to chew through Kyoto at the velocity of a new whore just to keep up. I am tired, and there is no one left. It’s time for me to go home. To visit my mother’s grave. To see if I still have a job. To figure out what to do about the baby. To find others, if they are there.”

Yumiko frowned. “An abortion would be better.”

“I’m not saying it wouldn’t.”

Yumiko shook her head. “You don’t understand. I said you weren’t the first. Occupational hazard, you know? It happens, kind of a lot. It happened to me. I had a son, about two years ago.”

“You never told me this before.”

“My father kicked me out. I come from a small town—girls don’t turn up pregnant there, except, you know, when they do. But I’d been coming into the city for years by then, and he sent me back there, to sleep with demons and drink myself to death, he said.” Yumiko saluted Sei with a glass of yellow wine. “I didn’t know how it would be. I had my baby, because I had some misplaced idea about the sanctity of motherhood, and I was young enough that I figured it would be more or less like having a doll. I had it, in the back room of the Floor of Heaven, between the wineglasses and the bar rags. My son was covered in streets, these long black lines from his scalp to his feet—but it wasn’t Palimpsest. It was someplace else. I think it was someplace new. I’ve never heard of a street he had on him, and anyway they didn’t look the same. They were long and straight and even, a grid. It was someplace else. And he looked at me, just turned his baby head and very clearly said: I want to go back. I screamed for a week. He was in me all that time, dreaming and traveling and learning, and I couldn’t bear to have him look at me.”

“What happened to him?”

“The owner and his wife adopted him. Thank god. I told them never to bring him there, bring him up to be a priest, hope he dies a virgin.” Yumiko took a long, shaky drink of her wine. “So, you see, you’re not breeding. You’re not having a child. Itis. Palimpsest. An abortion would be better.”

Sei swallowed hard. She couldn’t answer. Couldn’t imagine that child, couldn’t imagine her own.

“And I don’t want you to go,” Yumiko said. “I won’t say I love you, I think we’re both beyond that. But it’s good to have a friend who knows what I know. Peaceful. Who never doubts that there are wonders outside this city. Isn’t it peaceful to know what we know, and know it together?”

“Of course it is.”

“Then stay. Stay a few days more. Pray for your mother here. There are more shrines and temples than you could count in a lifetime. One of them is good enough for her.”

Sei scratched her cheek and stared off into the bustling street. It was peaceful to know, and yet to know meant that the volume, the resolution, the brightness of Kyoto was dimmed and fuzzed, and she could not pick out faces here anymore, because they were not long or red.

“My mother killed herself when I was fourteen,” Sei said slowly. “She stabbed herself in the chest with a kitchen knife and crawled into our tatami room to die. I found her when I came home from school. Do you know how long it takes someone to die from a wound like that? Hours and hours. More hours than I could count then or now.”

“Sei . . .”

“And I never called a doctor. I’d like to say she begged me not to, but she didn’t. She just looked at me, she just waited to die, and didn’t pull out the knife, didn’t move. She talked about the tigers, when she talked. I held her for hours and I let her die and all I said was: Go, go, please just go. Which shrine do you suggest to purge that, Yumiko? What god do you think will forgive me?”

“I don’t know. I know you’re not her, whatever you think.”

“I talk about crazy things and abandon my child.”

Yumiko took Sei’s hand, laced her fingers through it, shaking her head all the while. “Please: stay, stay, please just stay.”

The late afternoon light played in Sei’s hair, turning it turquoise and black, like the light at the bottom of a lake, like the light in hidden places.

_______

Two women stood on a wide pavilion of crushed white stones and high orange pillars, one with blue hair, and one with a blue skirt. Hand in hand they sought out the row of heavy bronze bells with their ponderous red ropes. They clapped their hands and rang the bells for the soul of Amaya Usagi; they gave their coins to the gods and stood in the shadowy alcoves in contemplation of statues with dead eyes. They tied wishes to the trees, and did not tell each other what they wished for—there was no need.

They drank silver sake and fell asleep in each other’s arms, without kisses, without farewells.

77th and Ambuscade

THE ZOO THAT ONCE SPRAWLEDover Ambuscade Street is empty. The cages are still there, and pigeons have found them acceptable housing, being full of slow, fat lizards and flies like blackberries. But the animals have gone. There are kiosks whose awnings were once gaily gold, and sold frozen green apples and phials of crystal honey—but they are empty now, and the spilled seeds have long sprouted so high that each of them is a small grove, and if children ever ventured here any longer, they would find the apples so cold, so cold and sweet.

At night, the moon sweeps through the paths like a tumbleweed. The stars sit on the benches and smoke corncob pipes and throw petrified peanut shells at the ghosts of giraffes.

There is no mynah bird left to tell you what happened here.

But I will tell you, for I feel we have become friends, you and I. Casimira, beloved of my soul, fought with such weapons as she had: vermin, and insects, and scurrying creatures. Her ca

The opposition could not bear her strength, and her soldiers seemed to be endless, as ants and bees always seem to be. They felt, Ululiro felt, that they must become as she was if they were to save the city from her green hands.

So the Ambuscade Zoo was confiscated, cordoned off, and the animals in it brought to a building like a palace, but not a palace, where they were pe