Palimpsest

“Are we the first? The first in all that time to come so near to it?”

The rabbit smirks, wiping rice paste from his mallet. “Casimira wanted to choose, of course. She wanted to pick her triumphs by hand.”

November swallows that. Half of her is proud; she is worthy, she was chosen. Half of her glowers. “If you want Sei you can have her, rabbit. Casimira may choose all she likes, but she ca

“I know.”

“Then let me pass.”

“November Aguilar, help me press the rice for the feast of her. Swing the hammer yourself, and I will let you go. I took ears for her, and paws, and I am delayed in my production, because of love, because of need.”

November nods with great solemnity, and steps into the barrel, lifting the hammer over her head and bringing it down hard onto the gluey white masses. It is so heavy, so heavy she can hardly lift it, but she swings and swings until her flesh burns and tears come and she falls back into the paws of the rabbit of the moon, who cleans her with his tongue and sings her the folksongs of the wild glow-worms that live in the Sea of Tranquillity.

_______

There is a blue-haired woman sitting in a wide, empty room lined with grass mats. She wears a long, unlined kimono, and her nakedness shines beneath it. Over her face is a long, red mask.

“Amaya Sei?”

“Yes.” Her voice is dull, almost drunk.

“My name is November.”

“I know. The train told me you were coming.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

“Partly I drank a great deal of rice wine so that I would not dream, and it did not work. Partly I am afraid.”

“Of what?”

“What is in the next car. I . . . I think I know. I think I know. I read a book, and I think it had my future written in it. But I am afraid. And I am so tired. It’s so hard, you know . . . to lie down under so many people. It is like taking on passengers. You get so heavy. So bare. And then there is the baby.” Sei touches her belly absently.

“What is in the car?”

Sei clears her throat and recites through her mask like a tragedian: “ When new conductors are assigned their first train, they are brought on board on a very cold winter’s night when the train is stopped and no one lingers in the cars. The senior engineers gather tightly in the conductor’s cabin. They put the earnest young man’s hands onto the control console and anoint them with viscous oil from the engine before pulling loose several wires and tying them into knots around the man’s fingers. He is then told the secret name of the train, which he may reveal to no one, and his third finger on his left hand is cut, and his blood mingled with the oil, which is then returned to circulation in the engine. In this way the train becomes the beloved of the conductor.”

“Oh. I see.”

“I think this train is lonely, and new. It’s like . . . a child. I think its parents left it when they parted ways, and it was . . . looking for me. Not me, but someone like me, for a long time. For a mother. For a conductor.”

“Sei, I have to tell you something important.”

“But I don’t know if I can bear enough men inside me, enough women in my mouth, to move with this train forever. So many . . . it’s just so many. It takes so many. My womb aches already. And I think . . . I don’t think I will really be myself, when I am the conductor. I think I will forget my name. I think my body will open up and flow along the tracks and become metal, become wire. And that means my child will become metal, and wire, and plastic, and never have a name, and never have eyes to open.”

“Isn’t it what you want? To be a conductor?”

“Yes.” Her voice breaks. “But I also want to be Sei.”

November breathes deeply; the air of the car is thin and grassy-sweet. “I need to know where you are. Just tell me where you are. In the real world.”

There is a long silence, and November can see tears drip from beneath the mask. “Kyoto. I’m in Kyoto.”

“Can you come to Rome, do you think? Could you?”

Sei shakes her head. “I don’t have any more money, really. I haven’t been to work in weeks. I can’t.”

“Okay, that’s okay, Sei. We’ll come. Just tell us where to meet you. In Kyoto. You have to tell me now, though, because on the other side I don’t speak Japanese, and it’s harder.”

“Who is us?”

“The man with the keys. And the man with glasses. And me, with the bee sting. Who were with you in the frog-woman’s shop. Who have gone down into the dark with you. Who have gone into the dark for you. We will come and get you, if you ca

There is another silence, and Sei begins to shake. “There’s a shrine,” she says finally. “With orange gates, a lot of them. Outside the city. It’s called Fushimi Inari. Meet me in the pavilion. I will be there every day at sundown until you come.”

November watches as Sei reaches into her kimono and draws out an enormous, waterlogged book. She opens it at a seaweed bookmark and begins to read.

All the pages are blank.

TWO

THINGS WHICH ARE FULL OF GRACE

The man from New York came on a Tuesday, and Nerezza immediately slammed her bedroom door, refusing to even look at him. He was so thin, November could slip her fingers around his wrist entirely. But his color was high and his eyes gleamed and he had once been a handsome man. She and Ludovico met him at the door and there was a long and awful moment of quiet, knowing that anything she said to Oleg Sadakov would be inexplicable to Ludo. She would not do that to him, would not make him an outsider. Not now, not after he awoke serene, radiant—and without a tongue, blood spattering the immaculate sheets, the muscle gone as though it had never been. Nerezza stared at him for a long time, and he held her gaze. November did not want to know what their silence said.

But if Ludo did not speak, she would not. Her hands, her face, her body, all knew the grief of having been stolen, and she would spare him her old pains. November instead took them both in her arms and the three of them stood for a moment, their heads pressed together, their arms hanging limp around each other’s waists. Ludo bit his lip. He kissed the top of November’s head with a rough tenderness; she laid her head in the crook of Oleg’s shoulder.

Things which are full of grace, she thinks. Mary. Orchids. The sea when it is calm. Frost, ruins, virginity. Us. Us. We are, we are so full of it we shine.

She was hardly aware she did it, the motion was so inevitable. She led them to the long, hard couch and both men fell against her, full also of exhausted want. Oleg kissed her lightly, hesitant, unsure. Ludo held her, stroking the back of her neck, his need already pressing against her. She kissed Oleg more fervently, as though she could push prayers into him, and a cry of recognition and half-spasmic joy ripped from his lips. Oleg whispered her name, and she could hardly bear his joy in finding, in the sacrament he made of her silly name.

November tried to be the bold one, the brave one. She was not good at it—she fumbled with belts and angles, trying to open herself enough for both of them. She took Oleg in her mouth, his cock thin and hard and earnest as the rest of him, and Ludo entered her from behind as she closed her eyes, rocking back and forth, into and onto and between them. She thought, idly, that this might have been considered ugly, filthy, a slatternly thing to do. Yes, slattern, she enjoyed that word, like a thing hurled. But it felt profound to her, a completed circuit, and she knew without seeing it that Ludo and Oleg found each other’s hands over the borders of her body, and there would be time for them, too, in the small rooms of this house, time enough for all of them before Japan and the endless orange gates that waited there.