Sugar Rain

by Paul Park

  In a bronzewood chest she found a necklace of gold beads and malachite. The holes in her earlobes and nostrils had grown closed; she passed over a tray of earrings and jewelled studs, and selected instead a golden bracelet, and clasped it to her wrist. It hung down over the back of her right hand, a web of interlocking chains, fastened to her fingers with gold rings. It jingled when she moved her hand.

  Again, outside, she heard the soldier’s voice but took no notice. She sat cross-legged on a carpet, rubbing her nails. In a lower section of the chest she found a case of aromatic powders: kohl, crushed amber, and antimony. With a rat-tailed brush she traced a line of gold along the hard muscles of her jaw, and rimmed her eyes with indigo. She put a drop of kohl into each eye.

  The brush was long and made of silver, intricately carved and sharpened to a point. She held it suspended above her eye, staring into the mirror that was set into the back of the box. She had not seen her own face in a long time.

  She was still sitting there when the soldier came into the tent. He too had washed and changed his clothes. He wore a satin shirt with a ripped sleeve. In one hand he carried an open bottle of champagne, and in the other a tin plate of food. He ducked his head under the tent flap and then stood in the doorway looking down at her. Already he smelled drunk, and he wavered a little on his feet. She couldn’t see his face. The lantern threw a soft and peaceful light.

  “I’ve brought you some food,” he said. Two white, round potatoes rolled along the edge of his tin plate.

  “You take them,” said Charity. Her voice had no expression, and she didn’t look at him. Only she sat with the brush poised over her eye.

  “Not good enough, I guess,” complained the soldier. But he shifted the neck of the bottle to the crook between his fifth and smallest fingers, and with his forefinger and thumb he picked up the potatoes, one after the other, and put them on his tongue. He closed his eyes and crushed them in his mouth, and washed them down with wine.

  “There’s chocolate in the bag,” he said, wiping his lips. He nodded towards the corner. But when Charity made no movement, he grunted: “I don’t blame you. Six weeks ago I had my first piece, and I thought I’d never get enough. Now . . .” He shook his head.

  Charity sat still, and admired the lamplight on the canvas of the tent, and on the heaps of Starbridge treasure. The gold, especially, seemed to glow. On a pile of maps and manuscripts in the corner of the tent, fourteen golden statues lay in a line, arranged upon their backs. There was Angkhdt the Lord of Animals, and Angkhdt the God of Light, and Angkhdt the Dancing Master, and Angkhdt of a Thousand Eyes, and Angkhdt dismembered in the Warlock’s tomb, and Angkhdt the God of Rapture, his penis stiff and hard, and winking with encrusted gems.

  The shadows moved. The soldier made a movement with the bottle in his hand. “Take some,” he said. And when Charity made no reply, he stepped forward, away from the entrance of the tent, holding out the bottle by its neck. “Take some,” he repeated. “I want you to enjoy it. Enjoy it when I . . . when I fuck you.”

  At that, Charity drew her eyebrows together, and knotted her forehead into a frown. She looked at the soldier for the first time since he had come into the tent, and she studied his face and clothes and hair, and saw for the first time how young he was, how vulnerable, how dangerous. A woman has a kind of power, she thought, her mind slow and sad.

  She had been holding her silver paintbrush in the air, poised between them like a weapon. “I am not making myself beautiful for you,” she said.

  “No?”

  “No. Tomorrow I will be in Caladon.”

  The soldier took another swig of wine. “We’ll see about that,” he said. “When the rest get back, then we’ll see. The last woman we had here, she lasted a long time.”

  Charity looked at the lamplight on the soldier’s young face. She remembered part of a song that the antinomial had taught her, one of the many kinds of fire songs, and this one was about shadows on an uneven surface when the lamplight touched it like a finger. “Not for you,” she said. “Not for you and not for them. You think I am a whore, but I am not. I am Charity Starbridge, princess of the seventh rank. I am not the woman for your stupid games.”

  The soldier sat down in front of her. “What a pain in the ass,” he grumbled, but Charity wasn’t listening. The lamplight fell obliquely on the moving canvas near her head. Her mind was full of songs and wordless memories. And then suddenly she became aware of something in the tent, an object that protruded at an angle from a pile of gold and gems. It was a length of copper pipe, with a row of holes punched into its side.

  With a cry, Charity lowered the silver paintbrush and reached forward. For many minutes, without seeing it, she had been staring at the copper flute. Now suddenly she understood why the fire music was so fresh in her, the presence of the antinomial so imperative. With a cry, she reached forward and plucked the flute out of the pile of gold. The soldier shied away, reaching for his knife, but Charity did nothing. Only she sat cross-legged, grasping the flute in her left hand, feeling unexpected strength course through her. “What is this?” she cried. “Where did you find this?”

  The soldier looked at her warily, his hand upon his knife. Then he shrugged. “It belonged to a woman who was here.”

  Again Charity felt the music surge inside of her, tangled fire songs, snatches of memory. “Where is she?” she cried. “Where is she now?”

  The soldier set the bottle down between them on the carpet. It was empty. “She ran away,” he said. “She bit through her ropes and ran away.”

  He was the kind of person who finds it hard to ignore a question. He had an instinct for the truth, and he was young and nervous. Charity felt that with a reflex of her mind, and felt where her advantage lay.

  More than that, there was something about this subject that still puzzled him. “Her teeth were sharp,” he said. “She bit through the gag between her teeth. The ropes around her hands. She stole one of the horses. Jonas said that he would kill her. He rode after her, but never came back. That was a week ago.”

  “She escaped?”

  The soldier shrugged. “Who knows? I didn’t care. She was an ugly brute. Ungrateful. We rescued her from farmers who were trying to kill her. On the riverbank. They were hitting her with shovels, but we chased them off. That first night she bit a hole in Joney’s cheek.”

  “But did you know? Did you understand what she was?”

  The soldier frowned. “Of course. We could hear the sounds she made. She was a meat eater. Antinomial. Marco wanted to kill her right away. But Jonas and the rest—besides, I am not like them. I had read the speaker’s book.”

  He had been staring at the flute in Charity’s hand. But then he looked up at her face. “Enough of that,” he said. “Besides, what do you know about it? No—don’t answer that. I found you, and I want you. Before the rest get back. I want you first.”

  Impatient, Charity shook her head. “Tell me,” she said. “Tell me what happened. Later, perhaps I’ll give you what you want. You’d like that better, wouldn’t you?”

  A gust of wind shook the tent, bringing them the music from the Whisper Bridge. The soldier turned his head, as if he were listening to something else, far in the distance. Charity took advantage of the moment to slip the silver paintbrush into the sleeve of her silk gown. When the soldier turned back she was frowning at him, and she put the flute down on the floor beside the bottle of champagne.

  The soldier shrugged. “I’m not like them,” he said at last. With unsteady fingers he reached into the top of his left boot, and withdrew a stained and battered pamphlet. It was entitled The Redundancy of Suicide in crude block letters. There was no author’s name. But Charity recognized the coarse yellow paper on which Raksha Starbridge printed his tracts.

  The pamphlet was much smudged with orange dye. The soldier leafed through it, and then ran his finger down the margin of one page. “Listen to what the speaker says,” he said. And then he began to read, badly and very sl
owly, mispronouncing many words.

  “ ‘How then,’ ” he said, “ ‘can we know that we exist? Surely not by our own sensations, for, as we have seen, such subjective information is worth nothing. God created man, but God does not exist, that much is clear. What does that say about the universe, to know that its architect and builder was fictitious? No, we cannot look for proof outside ourselves.’ ”

  The soldier broke off in the midst of reading. “You understand,” he said. “Look—here in your eyes, I see something. I talk, you talk. I know that I’m alive. But what if that is part of it—just nothing, just two ghosts? Two ghosts, trying to fool themselves? But that woman—so I thought, here is a woman who is free. No future. No past. No name. We all say that God does not exist; here was a woman, finally, who knew it. Not just in her brain, but in her heart.”

  The soldier laid the book aside. After a little while he went on: “We tied her up. This was a week ago. The others were asleep; I got up and went outside. It was raining. So dark. Only in the darkness I could hear her breathing, in another tent. They had tied a rope around her mouth, but she was making a noise. Whistling in the dark. Music. Very slow. I went in and lit the candle. She was lying on her side. Tied up, you know. Tied hands and feet. But her eyes were open. I bent down to see. Her eyes were black from the darkness, but they got smaller as I brought the candle close. You understand—that was the only movement in her face. Her pupils closing down. Most people, their eyes are like a room, and you can go and live in there.”

  “You let her go,” breathed Charity.

  The soldier shook his head. “I hate to see an animal tied up,” he said. “I cut the rope between her teeth. She did the rest. In the morning she was gone.”

  Charity felt a surge of hope. “Well then,” she said softly. “Perhaps you’ll do the same for me.”

  As soon as she had spoken, she realized the mistake. She had succumbed to the temptation of weakness; the soldier put his thoughts aside. He picked up the empty bottle of champagne, raised it to his lips, and put it down. Then he reached out his hand and seized her wrist.

  With a single flex of his powerful arm, he twisted her around and pushed her down, so that she lay on her stomach on a pile of rolled-up carpets. He caught hold of both her wrists in one single massive hand, and with the other he grabbed her by the back of the neck, and forced her head down into the hard wool.

  “There is something else,” he said. “Some other way to tell.” He removed his hand from her neck and drew his knife with it, and laid the crooked steel next to her ear, along her cheek. He was kneeling behind her, forcing one knee up between her legs, forcing her forward until her thighs weakened and let go. She bit her lips to keep from crying out.

  Still, after all, he felt disposed to talk. “How do we know?” he said, from between clenched teeth. “How can we know that we exist? What is outside? Rocks and water and a few bugs. The speaker taught me everything, and now he’s dead.”

  He was hurting her. His hands were hard and strong. But at every twist, every shove, they seemed to hesitate, as if his brutality were still unreal to him, an act of will and not of instinct. And still he kept on talking. “When I was a kid,” he said, “I used to think, gold in my pocket, chocolate and champagne, naked women, princesses, freedom to go—I used to pray to God. But look at me. I have all that, and look at me. How can they pretend that life has meaning?”

  He forced his knee between her legs. He released her wrists; with one hand, filthy, orange, he held his knife next to her ear, and with the other he probed under her dress, scraping the flesh there with his fingernails. Charity lifted herself onto her forearms. She turned her cheek against the rough nap of the carpet. It was wet from her spit.

  The soldier put his hand around her tail. He was still talking, his slow, puzzled voice in contrast to his violent hand. “That speaker had discovered a new kind of sex. It’s in the book.” He ran his fingernail between the lips of her vagina. “Not here,” he said. Then, hesitantly, he forced his bunched-up fingers into her rectum, bringing tears to her eyes, bile to her mouth.

  “Here,” he said. “The speaker tells us we must change our ways.”

  Suddenly, miraculously, the hand was gone from her. On the cushions beside her, he was fumbling with his book. “ ‘We must take our sexuality out of the myth of procreation,’ ” she heard him say. He stumbled over the words and lost his place. Then again: “ ‘Making life is an illusion.’ ”

  As he spoke, he was unbuttoning his pants. But too much pedantry had robbed him of his urge; he pressed against her, and Charity could feel the limp skin along her back. And something else: Distracted by his own despair, he had let his knife slip from her ear. She turned her mouth into his hand and bit his thumb with all her strength. She felt her teeth turn on the bone.

  He cursed, and dropped the knife. With his other hand he tried to find her face, but she rolled away under his arm, reaching for the paintbrush in her sleeve. She stabbed it up into his neck, and he let go of her, bringing his hands up to protect himself; he thought it was the knife. She rolled free, and as he struggled to get up, she jumped on him.

  It was no contest. She was furious with rage, while he was drunk and dizzy. Besides, he didn’t care. He thought it was a game. In the end she knelt over his back, pulling on his hair, pressing the sharp end of the paintbrush deep against his throat. He was lying face down on his open book, his shoulders shaking as he laughed.

  “Do it,” he said. “Starbridge cunt!” His pelvis squirmed under her legs. He was humping his stiff cock against the floor.

  “Shut up,” said Charity. She thrust the silver paintbrush into his neck until she thought she must be hurting him, and finally he was quiet. But there was nothing in her mind. It was empty of possibilities. She looked around the tent: There was the lamp, its chimney still intact. There was the knife, under some pillows. There was the bottle; it had rolled onto its side. There was the flute. As she saw it, a small tremor of music started in her mind, and it mixed with the sound of wind in canvas, and the distant groaning of the bridge. And something else: quite close, the sound of drunken singing.

  The soldier heard it too. “Here they come,” he said.

  “Shut up,” she told him. “Shut your mouth.” She pushed his head down on the floor, but she could see that he was smiling.

  Together they listened to the voices coming closer. The soldier was wriggling his hips, squirming for relief against the carpets. “Do it,” he said again. And then he forced her, shouting out for help in his strong voice. She pressed down upon the paintbrush, running it deep into his neck, looking for the vein, spattering the open book with blood.

  * * *

  That night, in Caladon, in her oilcloth shelter, in the hospital beneath the city walls, Jenny Pentecost sat drawing. It was late. On the cot beside her, Mrs. Cassimer lay sleeping. Her fat old face was softened and relaxed. Her mouth was open, but she made no sound.

  In the corner, in the crib, the baby lay, sleeping too. From where Jenny sat, she could see his pale fist through the bars, but his head was hidden by his pillow.

  Light came from a single candle on her desk. Jenny turned back to her drawing. In it, three men led their horses over a rise of polished stone. One was carrying a torch. One was pointing down the slope, towards where five tents stood next to a small pool. One had stopped, astonished, his mouth shaped like an O. Above them, the wind had blown away the clouds, opening a path of blackness in the sky.

  * * *

  Charity leaped to her feet. The soldier was struggling wildly, rolling back and forth and screaming, stopping the blood flow with his hands. She stepped over his body. She bent to pick up the copper flute; with it she broke the chimney of the kerosene lamp. She remembered how the antinomial had broken the White-Faced Woman’s head with that flute and set afire the tomb of Chrism Demiurge. Bending low, Charity struck the soldier on the face, and then raised the lamp up to the canvas roof. Small flames fled from a central point above her
head, chased by the wind. She turned, and threw the lamp down in a pile of painted manuscripts. Then she ducked out through the door, running barefoot on the slippery stones, listening to the shouts of the soldiers—they were very near. But she thought that they would stop to save their wealth. The tent was well alight, burning in the wind. She turned and ran up past the little pool, towards the Whisper Bridge.

  With a cry, one of the men sprang after her. He was carrying a torch in one hand and a revolver in the other. He raised it up, but she was gone, vanished into darkness. Without the torch, perhaps he could have seen her jump from rock to rock. Perhaps he could have brought her down. But with the torch he was as good as blind, not that it mattered. He knew where she was going. He took the straightest path while she ran up to hide among the rocks. She watched him pass beneath her.

  Hugging her knees, she sat up among the rocks, waiting for the shouting to subside. She watched the men cavort around the fire, their shadows large and strange. One splashed water from the pool and pulled out treasure from the burning tent. The other knelt by their companion, bandaging his neck. Charity waited. And gradually the noise grew less, the light sank down. Occasionally a voice rang out, and clumps of darkness moved against the embers of the fire. But the man with the torch had not returned. For a while Charity had seen his light, up over the rise, glowing behind a mass of rock.

  Perhaps an hour went by before she dared to move. For a while she crouched upon her hands and knees, testing each stone before she trusted it. Her feet were bare. On the slope above the camp the rocks seemed smoother and more solid than they had down in the valley. The rain had washed them clean. And she could see before her the outline of the hills, smooth and gentle, black against a lighter black.