By Christopher Barnard

Mabouya’s interest in palimpsests from an early age had drawn him into the field of radiography and medical imaging. He wanted to know what was beneath surfaces. Or more exactly, what surfaces hid. He was now a radiographer at Midtown Hospital—in a town as placid as its name suggests.

In the Middle Ages, before the use of paper became common, people wrote on parchment, made from animal skins. Parchment was expensive, so scraping the writing off the parchment and writing a new text on top of it became a common practice. This scraped-off page, with the writing later added, was called a palimpsest.

The new text was the “overwriting.” Often, the original writing (the “underwriting”) was faintly visible under the overwriting. But even if invisible, it could sometimes be retrieved by modern imaging techniques. With improved techniques, the invisible and indecipherable are becoming visible and readable.

Mabouya was famous for his skill in interpreting medical scans. Even the most experienced doctors would call on him for advice. The hospital in-joke was that Mabouya could see what was behind any image.

He interpreted “underwriting” in a wide sense. He saw it as more than just some writing on a palimpsest. When he walked along meandering Hospital Road on his way to work, he thought about the winding river that was under his feet in grid-built Midtown. Now constrained by a large conduit. To him, the river was the underwriting, and the road the overwriting.

This was an obvious example. The observant eye would notice more subtle examples: old roads, destroyed churches, ancient fortifications. 

One afternoon, after finishing some painstaking work at the hospital on angiograms (the imaging of the arteries, veins, and heart chambers), he was walking along a quiet, leafy road that led to the Technical University. He was on his way to attend a public lecture on “X-ray fluorescence imaging in the deciphering of palimpsests.”

As he walked along in a contemplative mood, he started to see flashes of images of tree roots under the soil. Initially, they were vague, jaggedy, out of focus; but then he began to see the roots more clearly. They were intertwined with each other, and with stones and unidentifiable debris. 

He was disturbed. Surely what he was seeing was some kind of after-image of the angiograms he had been examining all day? The roots as blood vessels and stones as internal organs. Or perhaps anticipation of the lecture on palimpsests had focused his subconscious on what was probably beneath the surface of the road.

As the days went by, these images became more frequent, and clearer. He was looking down into the underwriting of the city, while he was living on the overwriting. He saw rivers, drains, sewers, dead animals, rats scurrying around, possible archaeological sites. 

One day, when walking on the overwriting, he started to hear sounds like ice cracking and felt the surface tilting. He became terrified that he would fall through to the underwriting.

He decided to take all the holiday time owed him. He stocked up on food and retreated to his apartment—unfortunately on the ground floor. The underwriting was visible. It was an old graveyard. He saw what looked like hundreds of corpses that had been unceremoniously buried—stacked on top of each other. A mass grave from a time of plague?

An inspired guess, and a lot of aluminum kitchen foil on the floor of his apartment cut off the view of the underwriting. He assumed that the image of the underwriting was reflected by the foil. (Shiny side down seemed to work best.) Unfortunately, the foil tended to tear and crinkle up as he walked over it. 

The thought of using aluminum foil sunshades sold for car windscreens occurred to him. Amazon delivered two dozen of these, and he laid them on top of the kitchen foil. He now had a double layer of aluminum over which he could freely move. Despite living in isolation, he was nevertheless reasonably comfortable. 

Mabouya reassured himself that he was just having a kind of temporary psychotic episode. Too many palimpsests and too many medical scans had, in some way, worked themselves into his subconscious. It was all in his brain. Not in the earth beneath him. He would just rest for a while, enjoy comedy shows on television, read books, do some cooking.

But he knew that he could not spend his whole life in isolation. He would have to leave his apartment sooner or later. He summoned up the courage to make an exploratory foray.

He cut out part of an aluminum sunshade, and the use of some tape and staples allowed him to fashion a pair of sunshade overshoes. As a precaution, he inserted an aluminum foil inner sole, shiny side downwards. With aluminum between him and the underwriting, he ventured forth. He considered, and then rejected, the idea of shedding his overshoes and, experimentally, stepping directly onto the overwriting. 

He was relieved when the overshoes worked as he had hoped. He could see no underwriting. Releasing his pent-up energy, he broke into a vigorous stride. The aluminum overshoe on his right foot came off. He gingerly touched the ground for balance with the toes of his right foot as he bent down to pick up the overshoe. As he inserted his foot into the overshoe, he transferred all his weight to his left foot.

He felt the surface cracking, and his left foot breaking through the surface of the overwriting. He realized that although the aluminum overshoes protected him, he still had to distribute his weight. This he had not done.

As his body broke through into the underwriting, he turned ‘round to look for a firm ledge on which he could pull himself up. But there was no ledge. 

Mabouya sank deeper. He knew he would not survive in the underwriting. Perhaps someone, someday, would scrape the overwriting away and find him entangled in roots.