But only Hester came. “Well, fuck,” she had said succinctly, and he had curled up on the floor.

But Hester had recognized it all, all of him, all of his acts. She knew him, somehow. She sat up with him and talked about the night she had woken up in the graveyard and all those gray fingers had reached out of the bamboo to her, and all she could smell was death. He didn’t understand why this could upset her so, but he listened. He was good at hearing, at receiving. She had known that there must be others, but had not sought them out. Could not bear the smell. Once in a while one of them found her, and she hated them for it, for their eagerness, for the beauty of the city they told her about, when she knew it was not so, that it was a cold, grim thing crawling with worms, still reaching out for her. Hester could never see the burnished, gleaming thing they saw, and she reviled them.

“What did you see after me?” he asked her.

Hester quavered, and a tear fell past her chin to the sodden floor. “I couldn’t,” she hissed. “I took my pills. I took eightof them. I needed to be sure I wouldn’t dream. I took enough that it couldn’t get through, it couldn’t touch me. It stayed in its tree.”

_______

That sort of thing happened when he spoke to her. He often did not. She left the juice and food near his prostrate body and locked the door behind her. He had made her a key on a particularly good day when the sun was out and she had brought bisque from a far-off, surely mythical, deli. He had felt warmly toward the little brass thing. It was hot in her hand. But the days were not always so kind. He stared at his bed for a good and honest shift of nine hours, and willed Mila to appear there. In a moment, she will come,he thought. Now. Now.But she was not, and would not.

He slept as often as he could, until his body was so weary of sleep it tasted like ash settling over him when he could manage it at all. He wanted Hester’s pills, but they would take his dreams, and that he would not allow. He hadn’t taken his own pills in weeks. It didn’t help—Lyudmila would not shiver into being on the footboard of his bed.

Oleg called her sleeping and waking, letting that horrid little boat float up and down the river of cream, calling her name. She did not appear there, either. He had lost her utterly, a more profound loss than the day she drowned. The girls with their braided nets stopped their fishing to stare at him as he screamed for her, screamed until his voice was gone and he could only whisper her name to the stars.

His hipbones had begun to bother him—he could not sleep on his stomach any longer, as they lay against the floor like sharp prongs holding him up. Oleg didn’t think about it much, just rolled to his back and murmured her name again, like a koan. His shoulder blades protruded like wings, and that hurt too, but not as badly. Hester brought ointment for his sores and he did not know why, did not know why it would matter to her.

“It hurts you,” she had said, finally, her face a mask of distress. “The city. It hurts you like it hurts me. It’s notjust me. It’s not kind to everyone else and cruel to me. It’s cruel to you, too. On the outside, and to me on the inside.”

“I just want Mila to be there when I go back. For her to be somewhere, anywhere. I did a bad thing to her. I scared her, the way the graveyard scared you. And now she won’t come back. But I want to, I want to . . .”

Hester had cried with him and eaten the rest of his lunch. She did not come back for two days, and he mildly wondered what might happen if she left him, if she decided that he was not kin to her after all. He supposed he would starve. Mila would come then, wouldn’t she? She’d have to, to get him. To pack his bags for the country of death.

But Hester returned, wearing two scarves against the cold, and set a great, swollen address book beside him on the graying floor. Business cards stuck out of it like porcupine quills. It bristled.

“I told you they always tried to find me,” she said. “It used to happen so often. Nightclubs and bus stops and grocery stores, they’d just come up to me and grab me, like they had the right. I spat at them, especially when they sat there, all fat and in love, and tried to tell me all the wonderful things they’d seen. But I keep everything, really, everything.”

There were numbers, so many, and addresses. Organized, if not neatly. He looked up at her, imploring. How could he choose?

“Fine, fine,” she snapped. “Boy or girl?”

He laughed hollowly. “I’m not . . . in fighting shape. I think it’ll have to be a boy.”

Hester wrinkled her nose, though he could not tell if her distaste was for his choice or that he meant to do this at all. But there was a boy, by dinnertime—hardly a boy, a bookish-looking man with a thin beard that ran around his jawline and a long coat with its collar turned up. He kissed Hester and she let him, but when his hand strayed to her breast she bit him, hard, and shoved him toward Oleg in the sodden bedroom. He tripped a little on the doorframe. Hester stood in the doorway, shaking, rubbing her fingertips and keeping her mouth so tightly closed a soul could not have slipped through the space.

The bookish man did not seem to mind Oleg’s thinness, or that he was too weak with hunger and too much sleep to do much of anything but let himself be kissed, his legs plied open. But the man had a gentleness in his mouth, held there like a sliver of candy, a sliver of sweetness. He looked with understanding and pity on Oleg, and held him so very close.

“I know,” he whispered in his ear, “I know.”

And there had been some heat, some pain, some desire in his dull, depleted body when Oleg felt himself suddenly full of the bookish man, suddenly weeping with need for this, for this living thing within him, for the leaping, bright, and blood-rich life that was abruptly in him where only sleep and Mila had been before. The man held his sharp hips firmly and tenderly, so as not to bruise him, and came quickly as though he knew Oleg could not take very much of this. He called a name as he did, and Oleg wished him well of that stranger, wherever they were, wherever he could find them.

Hester watched, and wept, and clutched her book to her chest.

Seriatim and Deshabille

ONE MUST CRAWL TO ENTER A TEAHOUSE. Those who do not know this are too prideful ever to approach. There is a door in the side, big enough for shoulders, for a head bent in humility. The roof is thatched from the fingernails of hermits who send small black boxes full of translucent clippings every winter. They are never yellow, or else the true connoisseur would know that the tea brewed there is inferior, brewed by those of dubious skill and biography.

Darkness confronts you when you enter; there is so little light to be found when you are on your knees. The dim shadows clear as your feeble eyes adjust, and you see the golden walls, like skin, like the inside of a saint’s body. There are pillows for your penitent knees. A painting on the wall shows, in the quick, sure brushstrokes of a certain school of art, a city whose buildings are nearly as tall and spired as those of Palimpsest. But it is not Palimpsest, and you know it. It is just a landscape, like a mountain, or a flower; it was the great fashion some years past to sketch cities of the mind, places remembered or hoped for, with the same reverence given to a peony or a plover.

A man and a woman move through a ceremony which will be inexplicable to you, ignorant and foreign as you are. Rosalie will draw her tongs of mother-of-pearl from her dress and pull new cups from a kiln of great beauty and delicate construction, whose gaping red mouth is the only light in the teahouse. Scamander will draw his tongs of black pearl from an ice bath, and pluck a disc of frozen tea from an icebox of great beauty and delicate construction whose gaping blue mouth is all you are able to see. There are tea leaves suspended in the greenish ice. He places the disc within the glowing cup, and the cup is cooled by it as the tea is heated, and the steam which unfolds is as rare and sweet as a ghost of sugarcane long perished. They will hold your head as you drink, exactly as parents teaching their child to drink will do. And when you have had your fill, they will smash the cups against the wall and wail in grief for their passing, and you will be brought low by their pure and piercing cries.