Palimpsest

“I’ve never printed a book like that.”

“Well, I can’t tell you what it is. I don’t know. Pretend your wild chimera-wife got a tattoo and don’t think about it.”

But he could not stop thinking about it, and the Japanese book receded from his care like water tossed from a window. He began, instead, to sketch the patterns of the grid on his wife’s leg in the margins of the errata copies, invading neat lines about the essential nature of trains and their conductors with serpents and winds. When Lucia dressed to go out in the evening, he begged her to stay, to crook her knee for him, to let him touch the stain, the grid, the map.

She acquiesced, and lay on her stomach so that he could examine her like a manuscript in desperate need of restoration. She pressed her face into the pillow; he pressed his lips to her skin, tasting the rough, salty roads printed there by whatever invisible press had hunted and leapt upon Lucia in the dark. Ludo closed his eyes against them, let his eyelashes shudder over their routes and byways. His tongue was a letter press on her, stamping out his desire. She tried to turn over, but he stopped her, unable to bear the disappearance of the knee-map. He kissed the backs of her thighs and slid his hands under her stomach, whispering her name with all the reverence of abandoned Catholicism, pressing his cheek to the side of her long neck, which he had always thought slightly too long for comfortable human proportion. He held her hair aside in one hand as he entered her, and she shut her eyes, silent, pliable as pages. He willed her to cry out, pushing harder, to hurt her, even, if she would only say his name, or moan, anything. But she did not, and he could not make her.

As they moved in an old and practiced pattern, his fingers found her knee again and felt the streets of some u

Hieratica Street

THEY DREAM AGAINST WARM BREASTSand empty beds of the four black pools in Orlande’s house. They stare straight ahead into her pink and gray-speckled mouth, and the red thread sweeps tight against their wrists. On four laps the frog-oracle lays four cards, but they do not look down, not yet.

But we may, we who peer. We who disturb.

On her bare knees sits the Flayed Horse, signifying Sacrifice in Vain, Loveless Pursuit, Fecundity Unlooked-For. Her blue hair brushes the hard, creased edges of the old card.

On his threadbare lap balances the Three of Tenements, predicting Auditory Hallucination, Cirrhosis, a Man Turned Away from Salvation. He fondles his keys, and the sound of it seems, to our eyes at least, to soothe him.

On her denim-shrouded thighs lies the Unhappy Rook, suggesting Grief without Name, Symmetry of Experience, an Empty Larder. She alone takes up the card, holds it to her cheek, covering the bee sting there with the plain, stark image of a broken chess piece.

On his linen trousers rests the Archipelago, foretelling a Plague of Eels, Loveless Pursuit, a Dark-Haired Woman with Two Fingers Missing. His ink-stained fingers dig into the meat of his palms.

They lace their hands together instinctively as she ties the yarn—all their many fingers tenuous and needful, blindly groping. Before their eyes Orlande’s great green head floats, rimmed in silver, like an icon. The frog-woman shows them a small card, red words printed neatly on yellow paper:

Go. You have been Quartered.

The knots slacken, fall away. The four of them walk out, across the frond-threshold, into the night which smells of sassafras and rum, and onto broad, ci

This is the part I like best. When they are so new. Newborn colts are not so i

The frog pushes them out of her shop like a mother urging her children toward the coach on their first day of school: Never fear, my darlings! All these horrors are yours to survive!

Is it an accident of the clock that the four of them wheel dazed onto the thoroughfare at the same moment that a wave of crickets come hopping from the factory, bowing a complex binary minuet on their platinum legs? Or perhaps merely poetic? Casimira presses vermin beneath her porcelain and chitin molds, Orlande presses them beneath red yarn, and out they go into the city together, new and raw and empty as a saucepan. It is an admirable symmetry.

The four of them stand in a street cross-hatched with desiccated lily leaves, as though they did not know that one may be crushed there, staring dumbly at each other, a herd of idiot gazelles. They have not let go of each other’s hands; they ca

There are obvious things to say, but none of the four of them can find a voice buried in their ribs. Will you stand there forever? Will you become a piece of statuary on which children will swing and clover will grow?

No—here is a gilded cart drawn by twin herons, their long black legs rustling the street-leaves. Out of the green-curtained window the head of a third heron, spectacularly turquoise, extends, eyes narrowed to avian slits.

“Out of the way! I shall trample you thoroughly, see if I won’t!”

The cart-herons squawk harshly and swing wildly around the quartet, galloping onto 16th Street with long, graceless strides. Eight hands shake free of each other; the men clutch their elbows in nervous agitation. The girl with blue hair stares at them with dark eyes.

“Which way to the trains?” she whispers to her comrades. Wrong question, child! You mean to say: Where am I? Who are all of you? What has happened to us?But no one ever asks after sensible things. The others shake their heads—they ca

_______

Abandoned, the others scatter like ashes. The road stretches before and beyond, lit by streetlamps with swollen pumpkin-globes, and the gutters run with a sudden, utter rain.

PART I:

INCIPIT LIBER DE NATURIS BESTIARUM

ONE

THE FLAYED HORSE

Sei woke with the grassy, half-rotten smell of ryokan-tatami in her nose and her face streaked with tears. She immediately tried to go back to sleep, to catch the herons, fading already, but alas—sleep lost is sleep lost. She felt a weight on her wrists, like the memory of heavy bracelets. Her second thought was to find Sato Kenji, to shake him and bite his mouth and ask him if he had written a book about the city, too, if she could press it against the other, which lay still in her backpack, cold and black. When would he fly north again to Tokyo on their sleek white serpent? Tomorrow? Never? In what car might he wait for her? Useless, she decided, to ask.

She dressed without thinking about it much, took two rice-balls—one stuffed with salted plum, one with salmon—and Sato Kenji’s little book with her, and fled the milling, noisy hostel into the city. Kyoto was designed on the pattern of a Go board, by imaginative and impish urban pla