Free Palimpsest by Catherynne Valente

commuting.” He poles through the coats, enormous bronze scissors stuck through his belt, which he draws now and again to slice through an impassable blue tangle of recalcitrant suits. His voice softens, quiets. “Most of them … most of us never figure it out. Bad dream, they think, or good one. Funny rash, never really goes away, but Doc says it’s fine, nothing to worry about. Why dwell on it? But some people, they just can’t let it go.” He stares at the teetering houses with their enormous eyes blinking out of the windows. “Some people drink themselves out of school trying to find it again, trolling through bars where the shadows are so greasy they leave trails on the walls, just to find a way in, a way through. Some people forget too that you’re supposed to stop sleeping, you’re supposed to have a life in the sun.”
    “Is it always dark here?”
    Gabriel sniffs, wipes his eyes with the cuff of his coat. He seems so young, young and tired and needful. “No, no, ’course not,” he says. “We just never come here in the daytime.”
    Oleg looks over the rim of the boat again. There are flower garlands strung there, calla lilies, he thinks, and bluebells. They sag into the clothed street; their smell is old, a remnant, a relic.
    “But it is a dream, after all,” he says to the woolen tide. “Nothing matters in a dream. It’s just … crazy things, over and over until you wake up.”
    There is a long and somehow ugly ?ilence. “Sure,” Gabriel says, “just a dream,” but his eyes are hollow, shallow, low and dim. “What else?”
    Oleg trails his hand in the street. He is good at the ephemeral, at ghosts, at dreams. At veiled things and at the untouchable. If it’s a dream, he will be all right; these are places he can know. If he can bring up a ghost, he can find his way to waking in this place.
    Gabriel pulls the gondola into a little dock and lashes it to the pole. He smiles, but it is breezy and thin.
    “Time to punch the clock,” he says.
    They enter a great cathedral-like building of deep blue glass from buttress to cornice. A few others straggle in after them, and Oleg follows Gabriel’s lead as they receive aprons from an absurdly tall and silent man with glossily spotted giraffe legs, along with fine shirts, rouge for their cheeks, cologne. They pass through a long hallway lined with portraits of maître d’s with proud aquiline noses. Before them dozens of tables spread out with ruby-colored tablecloths and pearl candelabras—it is a restaurant, vast and bustling.
    “Don’t look at them,” Gabriel whispers as he takes a tray of slim goblets filled with hot strawberry wine.
    “At who?” Oleg struggles under the weight of his own burden: globes of white butter clattering in little dishes of hollowed-out diamonds, square loaves of moist, spiced bread. Pressed into service as a waiter , he thinks. Wonderful.
    “The patrons,” Gabriel hisses. “It’s the law, here. You can never look them in the eye. Keep your head bent, like you’re praying.
    There shouldn’t be any need to speak, and anyway they aren’t allowed to talk to you unless they call you ‘Novitiate.’ ”
    “How do I take their orders if I can’t speak?”
    “There’s only one dish here. Just put the plates down and go back to the kitchen for more. Get through the night—you’ll be paid, and it’s better to have money here than not to.”
    And so they work. After the wine and bread come snails in flaming brandy with thin little slices of banana sizzling in their shells, followed by great bone platters piled up with obscene slabs of meat, ruby-bright steaks that slide over the rims of the plates, crusted in broiled white-brown skin: albino elephant, Oleg hears ten, twenty dinners breathe in ecstasy. The meat is crowned with tumbling cascades of pomegranate seeds, drenched in honey-amber wine. The smell of it is so rich and sweet it nearly knocks Oleg back—his stomach clenches, but they will not allow him