The Cult of Loving Kindness

by Paul Park

  There was an insect on his thigh, perhaps two inches long. His leg was stretched out on the ground, his knee locked straight, and she was holding his leg still. He shuddered and breathed deep, but her hands upon his leg seemed to calm him, to keep him from moving. He looked down again—the insect, dark, wet, and bedraggled, seemed to be moving too, according to the rhythm of his breath. He watched one of its wings start to unfold; it was a butterfly.

  * * *

  Behind him on the slope, Rael was peering through the trees. He watched his sister bending down over the stranger’s leg. He watched her work the stranger’s knee. In his hand he gripped his broken stick of wood. He reached out and thumped it lightly on the ground. Not loud enough for them to hear; he turned and climbed back silently up to the path, perfectly silent in the complicated woods. Perfectly silent, he walked back to the village, his head cocked at an uncertain angle.

  For several months he had been working with the bullock in the lower terraces. It was work he liked, and he was better at it than the others. By humming songs, he found he could influence the bullock’s meager thoughts, and with his hand upon its hump he found that he could guide it, for it responded to his strength.

  That morning he had been working in one of the new rice fields below the village, which the new strangers had designed. That morning he had fastened chains around a teakwood log, but then he had gone away, down to the stream below the almond path, obeying an impulse that he didn’t understand. He’d left a boy working the bullock, but he’d made a mess of it. When Rael returned, the boy was gone. The log was stuck inside a hill of mud, invisible except for the chain that led to the beast’s yoke.

  In the middle of the flooded field, the hot mud reached above his ankles. Opposite him, its front legs splayed apart, its big head lowered almost to the surface of the mud, the bullock stood its ground. Its heavy features were cast in an expression of distrust, of disappointment and intolerable stupidity; Rael found his broken stick was twitching in his hand, his mind full of the image of his sister Cassia, bending over the flabby stranger.

  Ah, he thought. Is broke now wrongness in this town is touching all is breaking now apart.

  As he bent down behind the animal to unhook the chain, the mud was slippery and disgusting around his feet, around his legs also. It gave off a hot, fermented smell; the chain was slick with it. He was humming a small sad wordless song to calm the beast, but he must have hit a bitter note, for suddenly, without warning, the bullock lurched forward with a grunt. Rael, his fingers in the chain, was pulled off-balance and slipped down into the mud; then he was up, his stick gripped in his fist. He seized the bullock by its nearer horn and yanked its head around until he was staring down into its dim-witted, bloated face. Then he was slashing at its face with all his strength, slashing at its hairless cheeks, trying to find its eyes. Tormented, it yanked free, but it was held fast by the anchored chain, and Rael was leaping around it, slashing at its eyes until it screamed.

  Honest Toil was standing on the dike. Honest Toil was there. He came splashing down across the mud. “Oh, no, no, no,” he said, just as Rael took one last swipe at the beast’s head.

  * * *

  After she had cut the insect from his leg, the girl retreated to the far edge of the tarpaulin where she sat hugging her knees. He thought she was embarrassed to have touched him, embarrassed to have come so close—now she was shy. She hugged her knees, watching Blendish as he cleaned out his leg with hydrogen peroxide. Living here with only her brother to keep her company, perhaps—he thought—she did not understand his pockmarked ugliness. He carefully repacked his box of medications. He took off his spectacles and wiped them, and then returned them to his sweaty nose.

  “I was born on the frontier,” she said. “Is that where you’re from?”

  “I’m from the city.”

  “Ah.”

  She raised her head up from her knees. “I can remember Cochinoor,” she said. “That is the city, isn’t it? Sarnath took a job there in the post office, when my brother and I were children. I remember the main street. We were living in a room.”

  Blendish also remembered Cochinoor, a stinking lumber town where he had drunk some of the water that had made him sick. “I am from Charn,” he said.

  “Ah.”

  In this syllable he thought he could detect a tone of longing and regret. “Ah,” she said, “why did you come?”

  Suddenly, he didn’t know. Suddenly, his mind was back in Charn, and he was loitering there on the riverfront, and he imagined it as she might see it. He imagined standing on the waterfront, watching the lights come on across the river, listening to the street musicians underneath the trees, drinking beer and eating peanuts with the smell of all the food-stands in his nostrils; here in the forest, he had eaten practically nothing but lentils for a month. Lentils and pounded yam.

  The girl was staring at him, hugging her knees, and it occurred to him with a sick nervous rush that he could use her interest. There was something in her face, and it occurred to him that if he chose the right sequence of words and acts, then he could touch her there upon that plastic tarpaulin, she would let him and be glad. If he could make her taste some of that beer, smell some of that ginger sambal—it was possible; he looked at her and then he dropped his eyes.

  “I’m studying a kind of ape,” he said unhappily. “I wonder, have you ever seen any large apes down here?” An idiotic question, and he felt her gaze slide past him momentarily toward the marshgrass. Then she looked back.

  “Apes,” she said.

  Her head was small, her neck was long and brown. There was a string around the bottom of her throat, a medallion on a string. “What’s that?” he asked, at random. She put her hand up to her throat.

  “It’s my lucky coin.”

  It was a small copper medallion. “Let me see.”

  She looked at him. Then she shifted her position and moved toward him, leaning forward so that once again he could smell the sweetness of her skin. Her skin was smooth and sweet like custard, and the top of her dress had slipped open an inch or so. Again, Blendish felt a sudden rush of nausea. He told himself: This is the moment. This is the moment, and it will not come again. Panicked, he reached out his hand. But instead of touching, as he meant to do, her cheek under her ear, instead of brushing back a strand of hair out of her eyes, instead of reaching out to stroke her shoulder, instead of stroking, as he meant to do, the heart-breaking distension of her breast, he allowed himself to be deflected at the final instant, and at the final instant he grabbed at the medallion as if at an amulet—something to save him from irrevocable shame. He wanted to preserve the moment when she had not yet rejected him, even if by doing so he risked and ruined everything. And he was risking it and ruining it, he could tell. Already by the time his fingers touched the metal, something had changed. He was chafing the copper medallion between his fingers, thinking something had changed—what was it? She still sat as before, still inside the circle of his reach. Her face still kept its serious look, as if she still took him seriously. Something had changed, and perhaps it was just wishful thinking; he clutched at the medallion, feeling in his heart and in his belly a mixture of relief, nausea, and regret, while his mind repeated dumbly: Abu Starbridge, Abu Starbridge. The reverse side of the medallion was engraved with a mark he recognized: the shining sun in splendor, the mark of Abu Starbridge.

  “Where did you get this?”

  She smiled and shook her head. She pulled back her neck so that he could feel some tension in the string, but he did not let go. The moment had passed, and now he was aware of something else in her, some new kind of concern.

  “Give it to me,” he said.

  She smiled and shook her head, but now he was aware of a new look in her eye, a sudden closure in her eye. It did not alter her expression in the slightest, yet somehow she had changed. A small window had closed, and he grasped the medallion, using his strength for the first time, clutching it with a new kind of desperation,
as if he could drag her back just a few inches, just thirty seconds or so back through their conversation, back to the instant before that window shut.

  “You can’t wear this,” he said. “Not with Cathartes here.”

  He closed his hand upon the devil’s mark, the shining sun of Abu Starbridge. “Give it to me,” he said. “I’ve got a steel dollar in my pocket.”

  She shook her head. The smile was gone, and he had not seen it go, although he had been studying her face. She pulled back, and Blendish could see the pressure of the string upon her neck; it made a thin pink line and he thought for the first time: I could force her. It was an idea he suppressed as soon as it had taken shape—suppressed it with a feeling of self-loathing, replacing it instead with a desire to protect. He was right. Doubtless she had picked the medal up somewhere, found it in the woods, got it from some traveling cultist; no one who understood its meaning would dare to wear it openly as decoration. Not with Cathartes here. He tightened his grip on it and then he yanked back with all the force of his frustration. The pink line turned red, and then it disappeared, and he was holding the medallion in his fist.

  She was standing above him, her hand upon her neck. What was the expression on her face? Who knew—who ever understood what anyone was feeling? She was standing above him, and then she stepped back off the tarpaulin onto the grass.

  “You want too much,” she said.

  Her gaze—frank, serious, untroubled—filled him with shame. He bowed his head. When he looked up, she was gone.

  * * *

  He sat by the stream until the late afternoon. Toward four o’clock, the butterfly upon the tarpaulin separated its wings for the first time. They split apart suddenly, easily, like the halves of a rock, revealing a seam of turquoise that was completely unexpected, for the underside of the insect’s wings had been dirty and uninteresting. Blendish sat watching, waiting for the butterfly to take its first brave leap into the air. Its wings were dry and fully extended. There was nothing to be gained by the delay. Yet for an hour it barely moved; suddenly disgusted, Blendish brushed it off into the grass. He rose to his feet and packed his things into his bag. Then he climbed back up onto the almond path, sweaty, bad-tempered, out of breath.

  A hundred yards below the barricade he saw Dr. Cathartes striding toward him. He was frowning and smiling at the same time, and the language in his body seemed to speak of tension, purpose, and excitement. “I was looking for you,” he said, not loudly. Yet Blendish heard him from a dozen yards away, and there was something in his tone that seemed to pierce the pressure of the dull, hot, humid afternoon, pierce it and drain it away. His face was radiant, triumphant.

  He was dressed in tailored jungle fatigues, made of pleated cotton, and on the collar Blendish recognized the logo of a fashionable department store in Charn. Weary and dispirited, he stopped in the middle of the path, feeling his gorge rise and his bowels sink as the professor strode up close to him—too close. He stood inches away, and his breath was scented with some kind of mint. He was a handsome man, his skin perfumed and smooth, his lips voluptuous and red—Blendish stood sweating, pimpled, miserable, his mouth slowly filling with saliva.

  He had kept the copper medallion in the pocket of his jeans. With his right hand he reached down to touch it, to chafe it in his fingers. “I’ve been looking for you,” Cathartes said. Then he smiled. “Did you find your ape?”

  Blendish shook his head. “I’ve got to work farther afield. Today was a dry run. I’m too sick to work properly.” In his pocket, his hand squeezed the medallion tight between his index finger and his thumb.

  “You should take a guide. For safety’s sake.” Still smiling, the professor shook his head. “It’s not safe here by yourself—listen, do you remember what I said this morning?”

  Blendish did not reply. He was conscious of a subtle ringing in his ears, and his mouth was full of spit.

  “I said there was something strange about this place. Now I found a clue.”

  He was standing very close. Blendish could barely understand what he was saying, so conscious was he of the professor’s presence—“Listen. An hour ago I went by the new field. Kurt Sofar asked me to come down. There is a retarded man who lives here. An old man. Have you seen him?”

  Blendish nodded.

  “He was standing in the middle of the field. He had a club in his hand, and with it he had just finished beating a cow almost to death. The animal will have to be destroyed, I think. It was blinded in one eye.”

  Blendish nodded. He tried to swallow.

  “Can you imagine it? It’s against nature. Wanton cruelty to animals—I wish you could have heard it shriek. The old man just stood there. Sofar was incensed. He needed the animal for his project. This is an act of sabotage to him. He wants to have the fellow whipped.”

  The ringing in Blendish’s ears seemed to increase. He brought his hand up to his mouth. “He is retarded,” he ventured.

  “Not like that. I had spoken to him before. He was a gentle old man—no, there’s more to it than that. I’ve read about this countless times. I’ve seen photographs. Cruelty to animals—that’s often the first sign. And destruction of property; that creature was important to the village.”

  “And so?”

  “It’s like poisoning a well. I told the grant committee that there might be some form of devil worship here, some alien offshoot of the Cult of Loving Kindness. I based my proposal on a similarity between some of the sayings of the master and a quotation from the Starbridge catechism. At the time, I thought it was a long shot. But this community was formed after the revolution, when all the devil worshipers had been expelled from Charn.”

  Blendish held the medallion in his fist, making a bulge in the pocket of his jeans. He was squeezing it tightly, and as he increased the pressure the ringing in his ears seemed to increase also. He wiped his mouth with his left hand.

  Cathartes smiled. “It’s flimsy still, I know. But I’m making progress. And I could make something from this. That man Sarnath is the key. Canan Bey told me that he kept some bones up at his shack, which he was using for some private ritual. And it’s terrible what he did—to kidnap a young human girl and take her from her family. I can’t believe it doesn’t serve some purpose.”

  Blendish felt some vomit in his throat. He put his left hand on his mouth. Inches away, Cathartes watched him curiously. “Are you all right?” he asked, his face full of a quick, intolerable solicitude.

  Blendish squatted down. With amazement, he watched himself take his right hand out of his pocket. He was squeezing the medallion as hard as he could; then suddenly he stopped, relaxed his fist. And when he opened it to reveal the medallion on his palm, the buzzing in his ears suddenly stopped.

  * * *

  In the evening, Mr. Sarnath sat by the old peepul tree below the village. In the middle of a rapidly expanding glade, that one ancient tree stood isolated from the rest. The soil was particularly good there, in the bottomland between two hills. The new agronomists wanted to flood the stream and dam an area eleven acres in extent, where they hoped to experiment with a new type of ochoa shoot, a hybrid developed at the University of Charn.

  Their plans called for the eradication of the tree, whose roots spread under the entire field. It was a subject that had been debated in the council of elders, debated with a gentle melancholy, for the tree had been among the master’s favorite places. Every morning while he was still strong he had meditated for an hour beneath its branches, and every evening he had slept there for an hour upon a bamboo mat. Remembering this, still Langur Bey had argued for the tree’s destruction. Hesitantly, almost in tears, he had reminded the others that the symbol of a thing is different from the thing itself. Under that very tree, he said, the master had once warned him to be cautious of corporeal attachments.

  The council had not yet reached a conclusion. But in anticipation, the agronomists had already marked the trunk—a red X painted on its shaggy bark. In the darkness the mark appear
ed to glow. Sarnath sat under it, cross-legged, straight-backed, his heart full of a despair too rich for words.

  Through this excess of feeling, in his careful, controlled way, Sarnath had approached a kind of peace. The heavy branches stirred softly above him in the tiny wind. So he had often seen it, separate from all the stagnant forest, its massive leaves sensitive to breezes that no other tree could feel. Around him a soft glow from the sky fell upon the silent grass, fell upon the excavations and the fallen trunks that littered the edges of the glade, gilding them, making them perfect, reminding him of the transitory nature of all beauty, reminding him also that no change is wholly bad. His heart felt drunk on poison. Why is it? he asked himself. How is it we have failed? We are not evil men. Our hands were greedy for the grasp of truth, yet it has slipped away.

  Nor could he blame the rest of the council and not himself. Yes, he had argued against the production of the ikat trading cloth. But he had taken joy in questioning those first travelers, when the location of the village became known. He had advised the council what to trade for—medicine, laudanum, utensils, books, all of which he had used and enjoyed. Yet he could remember seven separate times when the master had told him to value self-containment above all.

  And on that other night of meditation, when he had seen the moth drown in the bowl and his ability to concentrate had reached a keenness it had never approached since—on that same night he had taken the copper medallion from his desk at Camran Head. The guard he’d hoped to bribe had been asleep, yet even so, he had slipped the coin into his pocket instead of throwing it away. He had kept it in the bottom of his pocket, even though he knew how dangerous it was. Who knew better? A dozen times he had chastised the owners of similar medallions—he knew what it had come to mean. Yet he had given it to Cassia to play with. He had threaded it upon a string, so that she could wear it round her neck.