Beyond Binary

by Brit Mandelo

  In his lonely apartment I kissed his stomach. In his lonely apartment, on a bed without a frame which lay wretched between milk crates and cinder blocks, the moon shone through broken blinds and slashed my back into a tiger’s long stripes.

  In his lonely apartment, on a pillow pounded thin by dozens of night-fists, I dreamed. Perhaps he dreamed, too. I thought I saw him wandering down a street filled with balloons and leering gazelles—but I did not follow. I stood on a boulevard paved with prim orange poppies, and suddenly I tasted brandy rolling down my throat, and pale smoke filling up my lungs. My green-scarved quarter was savoring her snifter and her opium somewhere far from me. I saw the ostrich-child that night. I smelled the Seraphim sidewalks, rich and red, and traded, with only some hesitation, my long brown hair for the dress. Aloysius cut it with crystal scissors, and I walked over wood, under sulfurous stars, trailing dark feathers behind me. The wind was warm on my bare neck. My fingers were warm, too—my bald quarter was stroking a woman with skin like a snake’s.

  There were others. A man with a silver tooth—a depth-chart crawled over his toes. With him I dreamed I walked the tenements, raised on stilts over a blue river, and ate goulash with a veteran whose head was a snarling lion, tearing his meat with fangs savage and yellow. He had a kind of sign language, but I could only guess correctly the gestures for mother, southeast, and sleep.

  There was a woman with two children and a mole on her left thigh—between her shoulder blades severe turns and old closes poked on an arrondissement-wheel. With her I dreamed I worked a night’s shift in a restaurant that served but one dish: broiled elephant liver, soaked in lavender honey and jeweled with pomegranate seeds. The staff wore tunics sewn from peacock feathers, and were not allowed to look the patrons in the eye. When I set a shimmering plate before a man with long, grey fingers, I felt my black-eyed quarter pick up her golden fork and bite into a snail dipped in rum.

  There was a sweet boy with a thin little beard—his thumb was nearly black with gridlock and unplanned alleys, as though he had been fingerprinted in an unnamable jail. He fell asleep in my arms, and we dreamed together, like mating dragonflies flying in unison. With him, I saw the foundries throwing fire into the sky. With him I danced in pearlescent scales, and pressed into being exactly fifty-seven wild hares, each one marked on its left ear with Casimira’s green seal.

  Lucia! They all cry out when they lie over me. Lucia! Where will I find you?

  Yet in those shadow-stitched streets I am always alone.

  I sought out the dream-city on all those skins. What were plain, yellow-lined streets next to Seraphim? What was my time-clock stamping out its inane days next to the jeweled factory of Casimira? How could any touch equal the seizures of feeling in my dreams, in which each gesture was a quartet? I would touch no one who didn’t carry the map. Only once that year, after the snow, did I make an exception, for a young woman with cedar-colored breasts and a nose ring like a bull’s, or a minotaur’s. She wore bindi on her face like a splatter of blood. Her body was without blemish or mark, so alien and strange to me by then, so blank and empty. But she was beautiful, and her voice was a glass-cutting soprano, and I am weak. I begged her to sing to me after we made love, and when we dreamed, I found her dancing with a jackal-tailed man in the lantern-light of a bar that served butterfly-liquor in a hundred colors. I separated them; he wilted and slunk away, and I took her to the sea, its foam shattering into glass on the beach, and we walked along a strand of shards, glittering and wet.

  When I woke, the grid brachiated out from her navel, its angles dark and bright. I smiled. Before she stirred, I kissed the striated lines, and left her house without coffee or farewells.

  ∞

  Quiescent and Rapine

  There are two churches in Palimpsest, and they are identical in every way. They stand together, wrapping the street-corner like a hinge. Seven white columns each, wound around with black characters which are not Cyrillic, but to the idle glance might seem so. Two peaked roofs of red lacquer and two stone horses with the heads of fork-tongued lizards stand guard on either side of each door. They were made with stones from the same quarry, on the far southern border of the city, pale green and dusty, each round and perfect as a ball. There is more mortar in the edifices than stones, mortar crushed from Casimira dragonflies donated by the vat, tufa dust, and mackerel tails. The pews are scrubbed and polished with lime-oil, and each Thursday, parishioners share a communion of slivers of whale meat and cinnamon wine. The only difference between the two is in the basement—two great mausoleums with alabaster coffins lining the walls, calligraphied with infinite care and delicacy in the blood of the departed beloved contained within. In the far north corner is a raised platform covered in offerings of cornskin, chocolate, tobacco. In one church, the coffin contains a blind man. In the other, it contains a deaf woman. Both have narwhal’s horns extending from their foreheads; both died young. The faithful visit these basement-saints and leave what they can at the feet of the one they love best. Giustizia has been a devotee of the Unhearing since she was a girl—her yellow veil and turquoise-ringed thumbs are familiar to all in the Left-Hand Church, and it is she who brings the cornskins, regular as sunrise. When she dies, they will bury her here, in a coffin of her own.

  She will plug your ears with wax when you enter, and demand silence. You may notice the long rattlesnake tail peeking from under her skirt and clattering on the mosaic floor, but it is not polite to mention it—when she says silence, you listen. It is the worst word she knows.

  The suburbs of Palimpsest spread out from the edges of the city proper like ladies’ fans. First the houses, uniformly red, in even lines like veins, branching off into lanes and courts and cul-de-sacs. There are parks full of grass that smells like oranges and little creeks filled with floating roses, blue and black. Children scratch pictures of antelope-footed girls and sparrow-winged boys on the pavement, hop from one to the other. Their laughter spills from their mouths and turns to orange leaves, drifting lazily onto wide lawns. Eventually the houses fade into fields: amaranth, spinach, strawberries. Shaggy cows graze; black-faced sheep bleat. Palimpsest is ever-hungry.

  But these too fade as they extend out, fade into the empty land not yet colonized by the city, not yet peopled, not yet known. The empty meadows stretch to the horizon, pale and dark, rich and soft.

  A wind picks up, blowing hot and dusty and salt-scented, and gooseflesh rises over miles and miles of barren skin.

  ∞

  I saw her in November. It was raining—her scarf was soaked and plastered against her head. She passed by me and I knew her smell, I knew the shape of her wrist. In the holiday crowds, she disappeared quickly, and I ran after her, without a name to call out.

  “Wait!” I cried.

  She stopped and turned towards me, her square jaw and huge brown eyes familiar as a pillow. We stood together in the rainy street, beside a makeshift watch-stand.

  “It’s you,” I whispered.

  And I showed my knee. She pursed her lips for a moment, her green scarf blown against her neck like a wet leaf. Then she extended her tongue, and I saw it there, splashed with raindrops, the map of Palimpsest, blazing blue-bright. She closed her mouth, and I put my arm around her waist.

  “I felt you, the pipe of bone, the white smoke,” I said.

  “I felt the dress on your shoulders,” she answered, and her voice was thick and low, grating, like a gate opening.

  “Come to my house. There is brandy there, if you want it.”

  She cocked her head, thin golden hair snaking sodden over her coat. “What would happen, do you think?”

  I smiled. “Maybe our feet would come clean.”

  She stroked my cheek, put her long fingers into my hair. We kissed, and the watches gleamed beside us, gold and silver.

  ∞

  125th and Peregrine

  On the south corner: the lit globes, covered with thick wrought- iron serpents which break the light, of a subway entrance.
The trains barrel along at the bottom of the stairs every fifteen minutes. On the glass platform stands Adalgiso, 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, singing tenor, her smoke-throated voice pressing against his strings like kisses. Her eyes are heavily made-up, like a pharaoh’s portrait, her hair long and coarse and black. 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.

  On the north corner: a cartographer’s studio. There are pots of ink in every crevice, parchment spread 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 they are collected in a little tin trough. Lucia and Paola have run this place for as long as anyone can remember—Lucia with her silver compass draws the maps, her exactitude radiant and unerring, while Paola 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 Lucia 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 and far from this one. Look—for you she has made a folding pamphlet that shows the famous sights: the factory, the churches, the salon, the memorial. Follow it, and you will be safe.

  Each morning, Lucia 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 mid-air: it has papery eyes, inky feathers, vellum claws.

  It stares down the long avenues, searching for mice.

  ∞

  Another Coming

  Sonya Taaffe

  death’s angel is my cousin but I never said

  he was my favourite relative

  —Phyllis Gotlieb, “Doctor Umlaut’s Earthly Kingdom”

  ∞

  Rain was still falling when she stepped off the tracks, walking the old railroad under a sky like newsprint too sodden to read. Down a bank of gravel and clinker, small scraping crunches underfoot as Acacia stepped carefully in the slick weather, the cool slanting mist that clung in her hair and made her skin feel clammy, spongy as something drowned; she could not wipe it off. The air smelled of earth, dark and chill, and faintly of smoke and iron. Freight echoes, from a time when these rails and ties had rattled daily under flatbeds, sleepers, ores and travelers stitching cities together; but the stitches had come out and only steel scars remained behind for Acacia to walk the right of way, a small tight-shouldered figure against the stingy trees, malt-colored hair trailing out of its braid and her eyes a little warmer than the wet bark around her in the cloud-melted light. Her stomach hurt, turned over and in on itself; she put both hands in the pockets of her long coat, Leo’s borrowed oilskin, away from the insistent feeling of something minute and irretrievable—a fleck, a grain, pearl-grit—lodged deep within her flesh. A riddle in nine syllables. She would need several more to explain this.

  Here the trains’ cargo had come, where the trees gave onto a yard of scabbed asphalt and the buildings that had stood cold for longer than Acacia had been alive. Some abandoned industry, the shell and skeleton of a steel-driving age: high brick walls and each grid of close-set windows cracked inward or outward, cloudy glass still clinging in the frames like old ice, panes of glaucoma; skylights fallen in around the steel braces, flat stretches of tarry gravel for the remaining roofs and some of the gutters still copper and sallow green. Even the company’s name, high on one time-blackened face of brick, had worn off over the neglected decades; ground to illegible traces of block-lettered paint, replaced by graffiti, ivy, and the amorphous scripts of lichen and acid rain. Acacia had never seen anyone else inside, though sometimes she found the leftovers of trash-barrel fires below the catwalks and flaking presses, the detritus of bottles and cans as everpresent as dust or oxidation. Only Quince, or Leo, or herself: footsteps in oil stains and shadow, disturbing a country of obsolescence and rusted memory.

  Quince was smoking under the scant overhang of a loose gutter, birch-bleached hair shaved down to pinfeather fuzz and her eyes half-closed against the shapeless, watercolor light. Black raincoat wrapped to her knees, heeled boots strapped and buckled mid-calf, she made an incongruous package among the corroded, autumn-colored wreckage: one foot angled up against the rain-worn bricks, the other planted in weeds and ash-brown grasses; rain dripped past her shoulders and she turned her head slightly at Acacia’s approach, no more movement anywhere than that, no more sound than the wind dividing itself through broken teeth of glass, empty doorways and the spaces where stairs used to be.

  “I thought you might have come out here first.” She dropped her other foot to the ground and came forward just enough to meet Acacia: a needless, neighborly gesture. All the bones of her face were exact, fluid, fared into one another as adroitly as joinery or etching, expressions done silverpoint on her pale skin. She moved in a cloud of cloves and old burning, like incense in the matte folds of her coat and her fine, close down of hair where rain glittered now; under the smoke, her skin gave off its own edged musk that made Acacia think, not unpleasantly, of civet cats and other predatory, perfumed creatures. “Every now and then, I’m wrong. But you’ve made me right, now that you’re here yourself—what have you done with Leo?”

  “I was going to ask you that.” Even as she tried to make the words into a smile, Acacia heard them pouncing, defensive, the question spun too quickly back at Quince in her private atmosphere of silver-streaked air and smoke. Her pulse was jammed in her throat, a dam for words. She considered asking Quince for a drag, an old nervous reflex that still dried the back of her mouth; but Quince was stubbing out her cigarette against the brick, and Acacia had never smoked after high school. “He left late last night, before you got back. Before I thought you’d get back,” wondering briefly where Quince had slept, in whose arms, and how it never mattered. Leo and Acacia, the two faces of Quince’s coin: one was as true as the other. Tears burned abruptly behind her eyes and she said, “I haven’t seen him all morning. We had a conversation. I thought you might have.”

  “No.” Restless, Quince knocked one heel against the cindery ground, looked slantwise at Acacia. In the overcast, drowned-grey clarity of light, she had a child’s lucid complexion; blackish brows and lashes limning her eyes like a mask. “But tell me how you’re using that word conversation. It has uneasy echoes.”

  The words were easier to say than she had feared: repetition, she thought bitterly, practice. “I’m pregnant.” Dead air; rain on industrial ruins. “We talked about that.”

  At a distance, Quince’s eyes were indefinitely dark; up close, they changed and became differentiable, shades and textures of dark, as telling and legible as a blush, a pallor, a frown. Her voice was as impenetrable as the bricks at her back. “It must be his.”

  Leo’s skin, like honey in the light, silk and ivory in the dark; all the words of sculpture and artistry that she used as shorthand for sensation, the touches and tastes of him, long watered-honey eyes and the feel of hard velvet under her hand; and Quince, laughing above or below them, her small breasts and her scars and her graceful hips, entering, entered, her seed as sharply aromatic as her flesh— Acacia shook her head. “I’m not sure.”

  “You can’t have mine.” Now Quince was shaking her head, denial in return; she had
a silver stud in her left ear, gold in her right. My brother, good morning: my sister, good night…. Her voice tipped slightly, a note sharp. “It’s got to be his.”

  Acacia discovered her arms crossed low, almost around her belly and the invisible weight within, and jerked them back to her sides. “I said, I’m not sure.” Her voice had gone ragged much faster than she expected, the unreliable ease flaking from her words like rust or dried blood, chips of brick from the wall that Quince slammed her hand up against, flat-palmed, percussive smack of meat and she swore between her teeth as Acacia said fiercely, “I haven’t had any tests done—”

  “You can’t!” Only in bed, in the warm chaos of caring and desire, had Acacia seen Quince as unguarded, as intense: perhaps as frightened. “You fucking can’t, Acacia. Not my child. It’s not—”

  “Not what, possible?” Between breath and word, she was shouting. Catching fire from each other, reflecting like always: she no longer felt the cold. “You’re not any more possible, what does that matter? Quince, it’s either yours or Leo’s, and it’s mine!” Less than five minutes, and things were already splintering: the center cannot hold and the poetry, immediate and familiar as a second language, was no comfort now. Quince shook her reddening hand, stared at Acacia. Rain sharpened on brick and battered glass, the sound of knives. “It doesn’t matter,” Acacia said quietly, around the hurt in her throat that might have been shouting and might have been her heart, “how much you want it not to be true. You can leave, Leo can leave. But I’m still pregnant. Tell me later why you don’t want it. I don’t really want to talk anymore right now.”