Palimpsest

125th and Peregrine

SEI DREAMS AGAINST HER TATAMIthat night of an intersection garlanded with black flags fastened to string with clothespins of mother-of-pearl. On the north corner: a cartographer’s studio. Pots of ink hide in every crevice, parchment spreads out over dozens of tables. A Casimira pigeon perches in a baleen cage and trills out the hours faithfully. Its droppings are pure squid-ink, and a little tin trough collects them dutifully. Imogen and Philomena have run this place since the last cartographer went mad and began eating telegraph tape like pasta. Philomena with her silver compass draws the maps, her exactitude radiant and unerring, while Imogen illuminates them with exquisite miniatures, dancing in the spaces between streets. They each wear dozens of watches on their forearms.

This is the second stop, after the amphibian salon, of Palimpsest’s visitors, and especially of her immigrants, for whom the two women are especial patrons. Everyone needs a map, and Philomena supplies them: subway maps and street maps and historical maps and topographical maps, false maps and correct-to-the-minute maps and maps of cities far from this one. Look—for this lost child she has made a folding pamphlet that shows the famous sights: the factory, the churches, the salon, the memorial. Follow it, girl, and you will be safe!

Each morning, Philomena places her latest map on the windowsill like a fresh pie. Slowly, as it cools, it opens along its own creases, its corners like wings, and takes halting flight, flapping over the city with susurring strokes. It folds itself, origami-exact, in midair: it has papery eyes, inky feathers, vellum claws.

It stares down the long avenues, searching for mice. This is the life cycle of Palimpsest fauna.

Yumiko leans against the door post, holding her arms out like a sister who had never hoped to see her dear one again. She is not wearing her schoolgirl’s dress any longer, but a red scrap that clings to her waist like a spool of yarn pulled tighter than breathing. With a local girl’s surety she guides Sei inside—a little scalloped bell chimes, and Imogen looks up from her parchments with a stern face, her black hair soft around a neck just slightly too long for a woman to wear in company.

“The trains,” Sei murmurs. “I need a map of the trains. A . . . schedule.”

Imogen produces a tiny booklet, hardly larger than her hand, with a design on the cover like an infinite tangle of wires compacted into a disc. Yumiko pays her with a fingernail cut quickly and fed to the pigeon. The cartographer smiles, and when she does, her face breaks open, smooths and unfolds into a heartbreaking beauty.

Her map clutched to her breast, Sei runs out into the street, her hair streaming behind her like a smokestack’s exhalation. She looks desperately around her, her breath quick and hoarse.

She finds it on the south corner: lit globes, covered with thick wrought-iron serpents which break the light, of a subway entrance. Trains barrel along at the bottom of the stairs every fifteen minutes. On the glass platform below stands Adalgiso the Apostle-Fingered, playing his viola with six fingers on each hand. He is bald, with a felt hat that does not sit quite right on his head. Beside him is Assia, the Nymph of the Phonograph. She is singing tenor, her smoke-throated voice pressing long kisses against his strings. His playing is so quick and lovely that the trains stop to listen, inclining on the rails and opening their doors to catch the glissandos spilling from him. His instrument case lies open at his feet, and each passenger who takes the Marginalia Line brings his fee—single pearls, dropped one by one into the leather case until it overflows like a pitcher of milk. In the corners of the station, cockroaches with fiber-optic wings scrape the tiles with their feet, and their scraping keeps the beat for the player and his singer.

Sei dashes down the steps into darkness and the metallic smell of the subterranean palaces of transportation before Yumiko can catch her. She stops short before the viola player and his tenor, and their eyes meet like magnets clicking together over the vibrating strings of his instrument.

_______

Miles away, on a street planked in cedar, a beekeeper cries out—her vision has gone dark, and all she can smell is the wet blackness of the underground.

TWO

THE UNHAPPY ROOK

Things which are gone in the morning: sleep, darkness, grief, the moon. Women. Dreams.

November sat cross-legged in her bedroom, a bare, white place she would never have thought to compare to her stacked hives but which nevertheless was cousin to them, those sixteen calm, angular spaces.

On her lap was a wide blank book with rough-chewed edges, which she would never have thought to compare to her fingers, her thrice-dyed, badly cut hair, her chapped lips, but which nevertheless was sister to these things: the woman, the raw flesh, the small white room. She was possessed of a self as bare as the month her parents met, the month of her own name, a core fashioned from stark wood and a prescience of snow.

In the book she had written, hesitantly. Her handwriting had been long ago corrupted: the vagaries of overzealous typing and an adolescent passion for calligraphy. What remained was a ruin of pens pressed too deeply and sweeping capitals too uncertain to be majestic. She had sketched out the morning list without thinking, desperate to list her morning bed, empty as a coffee cup, used up, dry, to fold it into a kind of column that made sense of the depression where once Xiaohui lay, which was still warm with her.

The keeping of lists was for November an exercise kin to the repeating of a rosary. She considered it neither obsessive nor compulsive, but a ritual, an essential ordering of the world into tall, thin jars containing perfect nouns. Enough nouns co

And so she did not think that she was lonely, or as her mother would have said, drawn up into herself like an old turtle, simply that she was absorbed in a greater task than the wrangling of humans and the collecting of large houses or automobiles. She moved in long lines between her books, along her lists like ranked soldiers, administrating, shaping, carving with her quick, corruptible hands.

November tasted the ink of her pen lightly. Acorns and copper. Ash.

She had dreamed heavily and the dream clung to her still—November had always been a prodigy of dreams. Her father, a librarian, had made her write them down, and perhaps this had been the begi

There had been such a smell in the place of her dream, of sassafras and the sea, bay leaves and dandelion seeds blowing wild, of coffee plants, of sweat. The smell burned into her; she had striven after it in the way of dreams until she could hear the starry surf on a bright shore.

The following things are essential to a city, she wrote. She crossed out essentialand wrote necessaryabove it in compressed script. She did not erase or begin again—mistakes were as essential to the noun-stacks, the combs of names, as industry to a city. They showed that the stack was not arbitrary, that some words had been excised in favor of others, that choices had been made, casualties counted.