There is a photograph on the north wall—but how can it be a photograph? Yet it is, black and white, faded beyond any reasonable verisimilitude, and certainly someone spilled tea on it one hundred years ago, two hundred. Its frame is lead, hung with fishing weights in a previous curator’s attempt at festive decoration. It shows, as if from the air—but how can it? How can this angle ever have been possible in a world without airplanes, how can anyone have photographed this thing?—a broad, flattened circle on a vast, muddy plain full of twisted tamarisk trees and mammoth, antediluvian ferns. High, vicious mountains ring the savannah, and the sun is feeble between their peaks. The circle is enormous, and nothing grows within it. There are faint lines criss-crossing the circle—ah, but they must be creases, accordion folds, some crude soul must have mishandled this fragile thing! Your credulity can be stretched only so far! The lines are no more than spidery streaks where one sort of mud becomes another. But they remind you of something, of marked skin and maps. They spoke from the center of the plain like a wheel, and the center is a black space, like a hole dropping down through the earth and out again, and the tamarisks seem to lean in to peer at nothing at all.

The card beneath it, which was once handwritten, and is now neatly letter-pressed with inhabited initials and other unnecessary flourishes, reads:

The Plain of Palimpsest, Seen from a Great and Unknown Height.

There is no date. There could not possibly be a date. It is surely a fake, and not even a clever one, as photography is hardly an ancient art. Of the half-dozen annual visitors, at least four angrily accuse Oduvaldo of playing them for fools. He sits placidly in his great felt chair, crosses his mottled mule-legs, and smokes his churchwarden with satisfaction. He knows nothing of archeophotography and does not care to—the picture was in the museum when his grandfather was young, and that is enough for him.

In the glass cases various items rest on faded velvet—a primitive tattoo needle, coins of indeterminate age and vaguely Asiatic appearance, a street sign from some early local settlement, the word Thoalarge and still clear, if faded nearly to the color of the wood. And there is a remarkable variety of anchors, one artifact that comes easily to the curdled lowlands of the Albumen. There is a large and colorful mural of the great naval battle of Kausia Shallows—Casimira’s green galleons explode with oily abandon, showering the beached and wretched wooden frigates defending this very spot with a vicious rain of glistening spiders. It is garishly colored in a school of art long out of favor, but its very gaudiness lends it gravitas. There are three musket balls and five desiccated spiders, their innards smashed and molten, arranged in an elegant star-shape on a threadbare velvet pedestal below it.

Oduvaldo is content with his life. He served his time in the army, he feels justified in his contentment. Maud has labeled all her toys and the silverware as well with small, hand-printed placards, and he is confident in her inheritance. He has no secrets, save the bits of chocolate he smuggles into every drawer in the museum, so that after lunch, and coffee, and his churchwarden, he can slide a black square into his mouth, close his eyes, and let it melt on his tongue as the sun fades his artifacts with gentle, inexorable affection.

_______

Oleg huddles under what he understands, but does not care to know, is the Kausia Bridge. Angry, leviathan cockerels sneer down at him as a diffident rain begins to take an interest. The old man had not liked the look of him, and when he touched one of the musket balls, the old beast had silently, furiously, shoved him out of the door and into the first creamy puddles of the river. He wants to see that photograph again. He knuckles rain out of his eyes and squints at the current, at the towns across the water, at the lanterns on fishing boats still hoping for koi at this hour.

Miserable in one city, miserable in another. Oleg hunches against the gracefully arching underside of the bridge and turns up his collar. He has seen movies with men like him in them, turning up their collars against the rain, made wretched by women, beautiful in their gruff, cigarette-studded despair. He is not beautiful now if he ever was, he knows. He is a ghost, and it is not as pleasant as he had thought. Lyudmila was always so even-tempered, and the land of the dead, when she spoke of it, seemed to him a sensible and well-ordered place, full of all the sorts of things lands and nations ought to have, save that they are populated with people like his sister, with awful, unblinking gazes and unflinching faithfulness. Instead, he is cold and unhappy, and alone. He cannot find Lyudmila no matter how many impossible creatures he confronts. And it rains in the land of the dead, or whatever this place is; it rains and old men kick him out of shabby little shops.

A fish flops in the frothy pale water, its orange tail sweeping up and slapping thickly down again. Oleg scowls at it. He will not find her. She does not want to be found. Mila’s river is deep and she is a strong swimmer. She ought to be, by now.

“I’m sorry!” he screams to the river. “Come back!”

But she does not, and he knows, now that his head has cleared itself with small and shameful ritual, that it is because he does not deserve it. He has not made himself worthy, in this place, of this Lyudmila. It was all right that he had kissed her—she was not his sister, not really, and even so ghosts had no morality. But he had hurt her, and whatever the red stuff so like blood had been, he should not have spilled it. If one has the power, he thought, to make ghosts bleed, one must be careful with it, so careful.

He hears footsteps behind him, and whirls, expecting the usual city villainy—a knife, a gap-toothed lunatic. But it is just a sorrowful-looking man with glasses, soaked to the bone, his blue sweater leadened by rain. A carriage glides smoothly away above them, and Oleg blinks, baffled.

“Are you Oleg Sadakov?” the man says.

“Yes, why?”

“My name is Ludovico Conti. I came to find you.”

“I don’t want to be found,” he snaps. But the man looks familiar, instinctively familiar, like one’s own hand.

“Don’t you remember?” Ludovico says softly, his voice all but blown into the clouds. “The frog-woman. The ink. The girl with blue hair. I know I’m not memorable, but . . . ”

Oleg blinks again, his mind scrambling to assemble itself into a shape capable of understanding what he is being offered.

“The one with the bee stings sent me. Her name is November. She . . . she has access.To everything, it seems like. Anyway, I’m meant to tell you how to find us, in the real world, or, rather, the other world. I don’t think it’s any more real, not really . . . I don’t suppose you enjoy medieval literature?”

Oleg shakes his head dumbly.

“Well, there’s a book, like an encyclopedia. It’s called the Etymologiae. And it’s full of impossible things, really impossible, like griffins and phoenixes, right alongside ants and turtles and cities in Christendom. And I think this is like that. Palimpsest and the real world. An impossible beast sitting next to a possum. Or something like that.”

“Why do I need to find you?”

Ludovico looks up from under his lashes, as though he is afraid to give voice to what he knows.

“It would appear that is how we come here. Permanently. Emigration, you understand? The people we came with, if we can find them in the daylight, we can, somehow, be here for good, for all the time.”

Oleg reels. His heels slip in the beige mud, rendered impossibly silky and rich by the milky river. He sits down heavily in it, neither knowing nor caring.

“No,” he whispers. “I don’t want to come here. Permanently. Forever. It’s fine for people with accessand green carriages. But I work in restaurants and hide under bridges. I hurt her and she’ll never come back here. But maybe, in the real world—and it is more real, it has to be, it has to be—she’ll come home, and forgive me, and it will be all right again.”