The Cult of Loving Kindness

by Paul Park

  With the pads of his fingers, he tapped himself three times upon his high, flat forehead. Aloud, he repeated a quotation of the master’s: “ ‘When it is no longer possible to live correctly, then it is time to think of further options.’ ”

  That night he was waiting for the moon, which was rising in those latitudes for the first time since the month that Cassia and Rael were born. A silver glow was shining to the east. The clouds were full of light and darkness, and they were combed in strips across the sky. Sarnath imagined the clear pure airless void above them, where perhaps the soul mounted after death. Then the moon rose out of a low bank of clouds.

  Once, when he was a child, he had sat out with the master underneath the peepul tree, one night when the moon was visible from earth. Then the master had told him of the Starbridge myth, of how the souls of men and women had descended from the moon, had been reborn on earth. And after death, perhaps, they might reascend, either to their lunar paradise, or else farther still to planets less hospitable even than this one.

  When he was a child, the moon had been remote. The master, raising his hand toward it, had been able to occlude it with his thumb. Then, the legend had seemed ludicrous to him, and he had not understood how something so absurd could have enslaved whole generations. Now he could understand it better, now that the moon was truly Paradise again, fully one quarter larger even than the last time he had seen it, when Cassia and Rael were born. Now it rose out of the clouds, luminescent, pale, wonderful, the bright sister of the dark and troubled earth, and on its sweet, miraculous surface he could see contours that he could imagine might be mountains; ranges of mountains, shores of glistening seas. And if he looked closer he could see patches of light and darkness, a rolling stippled plain, and on the verge of it what looked like the refractions from a million mirrored roofs—perhaps a town.

  He sat staring till the clouds came in again. And when Paradise was covered up he rose to go, pulling himself slowly to his feet, for his knees and back were aching. He put his hand out to the tree trunk for support. Erect, he stood rubbing the bark fondly, sadly, giving a loose strip of it a final farewell tug, and then bringing his fingers to his nose to smell them. Then he was off along the path, climbing through the almond trees up toward the village, his head bent low.

  On the way, he passed the new logging camp, and the boundaries of the new plantation. The lights from several long barracks glimmered through the trees. Inside: new men from Cochinoor; he could hear their voices. Underfoot, moonlight glinted on a litter of tin cans. He stepped around them delicately and then stepped over the bridge; there he felt better. And as he came up through the houses of the village, people greeted him, for many were sitting out on their verandas, where they had been watching for the moon. Their soft voices, their soft gestures followed him as he climbed the main street, up to the house of elders, where a light was burning. He put his hand out to the railing at the bottom of the steps, and then gathering his forces, he mounted quietly, allowing not a single creak to escape out of the split bamboo. And when he reached the porch, he stood still next to the bamboo post.

  As luck would have it, the screen was drawn along his side, shielding him from the council chamber. He could see the light shining through the carved palm slats. The council was in session. Sarnath could see a row of four black, bulging shadows, projected along the bottom of the screen.

  He could hear the drone of voices from within. Or rather one single voice, mellifluous and soft. Sarnath listened with appreciation to the sound, not bothering to wonder if he could distinguish words. That wasn’t the important part. The important part was just to look, to understand, to see her once; and so, after standing still for several minutes, he moved forward noiselessly across the porch, until he stood behind the screen.

  Just below eye level, a tracery of geometric patterns was cut into the slats. Sarnath bent down carefully, applied his eye to a triangular hole.

  They had placed a lantern in the middle of the floor. On the nearer side, the four elders sat upon a mat, and Sarnath could see the outline of their backs, and see the light reflected off their polished heads. Beyond them on the other side, next to the master’s statue with its garland of fresh flowers, Cathartes sat upon a bamboo armchair. He had had it constructed in the village for his use. Occasional pain in his lower vertebrae made it impossible to sit upon the floor.

  His knees were splayed apart. The light was on his face. His mouth was open; he was smiling. He wore a milk-colored shirt, brown trousers and high boots, and he was holding in his hand next to his ear, pinched between his thumb and finger, Cassia’s lucky coin.

  A bug had settled on his shoulder near his neck. He made a small spasmodic motion, and it walked a few inches down his arm.

  Only Sarnath had not been required at this gathering. The three members of the agronomic team were there, sitting near Cathartes on the floor, whispering among themselves. And the young student was there also, the syncretist, the evolutionist. Watching him, Mr. Sarnath felt a mix of pity and revulsion which was like his feeling for himself, for it was as if the two of them had conspired to bring the others to this place, conspired and then regretted it, for the student’s face was pale and unwholesome. Doubtless he knew, as Sarnath did, that what was happening was in a larger sense inevitable and their stupidity had not caused it, nor could their cleverness have avoided it. If so, he took, as Sarnath also took, no consolation in the fact.

  Honest Toil was there, sitting with a simple smile upon his face. Yet he was moving his lips a little as he listened to Cathartes, perhaps repeating certain phrases. Perhaps he was happy about two good things—he was not blamed for the bullock’s death, and Rael had run away.

  Only Cassia was to blame, thought Sarnath: Cassia and himself. Though they would all be punished for it, only Cassia was to blame—Sarnath had looked at everyone except for her, studied all of them in turn, as if trying to make a context for her in his mind, as if trying also to prolong the moment when he still had not yet seen her for the last time. But then he moved his eye into the middle of the triangular hole, and she was there, seated on a woven mat next to Cathartes’s hand.

  Her legs were bent beneath her and her knees were pressed together. The weight of her body was supported on her left arm, while her right arm lay across her lap. She had been looking at the floor but now she raised her head. Her hair fell away from her face, revealing an expression that was full of . . . something: pride, contempt, fury, sorrow—what was it? Human beings were so hard to read, their crowded faces.

  And at first he didn’t know whether it was just by chance, but she was staring at him, focusing her eyes upon that little hole, though surely he could not be seen. He flinched and pulled away. But then he bent back down again and took a long look, studied her for a long moment. Soon she turned her head. But she had splayed the fingers of her right hand in her lap; now she raised them toward him, and they were trembling a little.

  * * *

  Paradise had risen through the clouds now, and was shining at the apex of the sky. Or it was as if the roiling clouds had been vanquished by its power, and had been pushed back from around it in a perfect circle, whose edges were still touched with light. Mr. Sarnath felt the pressure of it on his head as he came up the path toward his cabin at the top of the hill. Out of breath, he rested by the banyan tree. And then he moved forward into the clearing, the moonlight like a hand on his bald head, pushing him down into the earth, for his pace was faltering and old as he crept forward toward his house and shambled up the steps onto his porch. There again he waited until his eyes got used to the new darkness, then he moved across the threshold into his small room and sat down on his cushion near the fireplace. The light made bulky silver boxes on the floor, protruding from the doorway and the single window.

  He sat there for perhaps an hour, contemplating each detail of the little room. He sat until he could read the titles of the books above his bed, see the pattern of the weave of the dry matting on the wall. Then he
got up, his knees whispering and complaining, and gathered six or seven of the books, and tore down several strips of the dry palm. He arranged the books and matting on the hearth, and then, turning again, uncorked a bottle of imported fuel water and drenched the pile he had made. The water puddled between the hearthstones; sitting down again upon his cushion Mr. Sarnath pulled two of these stones aside, so that the liquid spread across the floor, until it was absorbed into the dry bamboo.

  Then he sat still again, breathing the aroma of the water fumes. They attacked his nose and made him feel light-headed, and he breathed deeply until he felt habituated, and the effect of the fumes had subsided. Then he took up the box of matches from its place by the hearth, and with careful, studied gestures he removed one matchstick. He struck it; it flared up, burning fiercely in the saturated air. The flame illuminated the whole room, and it was roaring softly in his ears, and by its light he could see a small fragment of charred paper, which had been uncovered when he moved the rocks. It was a part of his translation from the Song of Angkhdt, which Cassia had burned there months before, and by the light of the match, in the moment before he dropped it on the hearth, he could read a few charred words:

  It is our ability to deceive, which makes us men.

  * * *

  That same night, Rael sat by the silver pool. He stretched his feet out in the shallow water. His foot was sore. He had bruised it on his run through the forest, away from the village, away from the hurt beast.

  He was sitting on an outcropping of brick, soaking his legs in the water, letting the mud soak away, and it wasn’t until almost midnight that he raised his head. Around him, the water seemed to glow. The moon had risen up above the clouds, and he could see it groping through the forest canopy until a single finger of it stretched down through the leaves into his crevice in the jungle, stroking the rim of the pool near where he sat, rendering the water suddenly opaque, shining like a coin.

  Toward midnight also a pale scum of foam rose to the surface of the water. When Rael finally raised his head, it was to see the hypnogogic ape standing erect upon the opposite beach.

  For the first time, he could see it clearly. Or rather, its face was still in shadow, but the moon had laid its hand upon the creature’s head and neck, giving an illusion of bright hair.

  The ape stood about four feet tall. It bore no trace upon its body of their previous struggle. Unlike that time also it seemed naked, devoid of hair below its shoulders; the moonlight fell across its wide hips, its flat sunken dugs. In the crook of its small arm the shadow had accumulated, but it was holding something there, a tiny precious bundle, perhaps a child.

  Part Six:

  Flight

  IN SUMMERTIME, THE WOODS STRETCH north and west into the mountains, twelve hundred miles from the sea. They are the home of hairless foxes, capybara, and a hundred thousand kinds of birds. They are the home of ground sloths, lizards, gibbons, as well as larger and less manageable beasts: leopards, anacondas, tapirs, men.

  In summer of the year 00016, the woods provided shelter for all the refugees who had ever fled or been expelled from Charn. A dozen cults and sects persisted in small, secret, isolated, ingrown groups. Cadres of the Desecration League were there, still mouthing the precepts of their martyred speaker. Adventists were there, inhabiting the sparser, drier uplands near Mt. Bromo, calculating on the bark of trees the date and hour of God’s thunderbolt, arguing and struggling over their results. Rebel Angels were there, as well as many subsects of the Cult of Loving Kindness. In an area of deep ravines and shallow limestone caves, doddering Starbridge priests still administered the sacrament to furtive congregations of the faithful, and offered prayers to Angkhdt, the god of love. And in the deepest fastness of the forest, scattered families of antinomials wandered north into the hills, hunting tigers, eating meat.

  During the sixteenth phase of summer, 00016, there was new pressure on all these groups, as the University of Charn mounted new gigantic projects in all sectors of the forest. This process was accelerated by the completion, with the help of foreign capital, of the new system of trains and roads, which opened up much of the area as if for the first time. By September of the sixteenth phase, the school of forestry had inaugurated twelve new “campuses” in various locations, the largest of which employed a population of twenty thousand laborers. They lived in barracks built of black mahogany, and they had already cleared a tract of hardwood seventy miles by twenty-five, from Kivu to Mt. May. There Professor Marchpane, acting in collaboration with the school of mines, had reopened the glass factory at Crystal Lip, and had rebuilt the old blast furnaces at Carbontown.

  Closer in around the city, some of the student food cooperatives covered as many as one hundred thousand acres. Every week the Board of Overseers issued new statistics to the team leaders, along with new and dismal charts and graphs. Always there were fierce debates over their accuracy, but in those days it was possible to measure that the productivity of the soil was already past its peak, that the earth had made its turn, that the climate was already changing by infinitesimal degrees, while at the same time the population multiplied unchecked. And since the new imported swath machines, the threshers, and the twenty-four-man combines all had to be paid for in hard currency, or else in millet, rice, and maize, the storage silos in the city were barely one-third full. Though almost thirty thousand days remained until the first frost, still the work was behind schedule.

  * * *

  But in those days, fragments of the forest still remained untouched, beyond the village in the trees. The back side of Mr. Sarnath’s hill descended steeply through black undergrowth and the coarse black trickling rocks—a path known only to Rael and to one pregnant tapir, which he had seen climb down that way.

  Late at night, after the fire at Mr. Sarnath’s cabin was almost out, Cassia had crept from her bedroom and crept up the hill. There was no one to watch her. Cathartes’s inquest had broken up in confusion at the first alarm. Now a guard was posted in the clearing, one of the three agronomists, but he was already asleep, wrapped in a cocoon of mosquito cloth. So she had stayed on the fringes near the trees, sitting with her arms around her shins in the sharp grass, watching the red embers glimmer out one by one, watching the white muffled shape of the agronomist, waiting for her brother’s whistle: the three notes of the curlew.

  And when it came, finally, it was in the blackest part of the black night, when her eyes were so weak he had to hold her by the hand and guide her back into the trees. The sky was overcast; the moon was hidden, and Cassia’s own dark tangled thoughts were taken over by the forest. She was putting out her hand to take hold of a root and she was slipping down along the steep wet muddy track, and she was aware of nothing but the slow exertions of her body. She was thinking nothing but bare simple thoughts from which the covering of what was past, the covering of what might be to come had both been stripped away. Only she was holding her brother by the hand, letting him support her weight, letting him think and see and feel for her, closing down her circle of sensation until the only things that penetrated it were sudden roots and branches, sudden stones. Once she was aware that they were walking through a stream.

  They rested and went on, rested again. Inside of her there was an ember of red fire, a hot red burning place, but it was suffocated by the darkness. And when she sat to rest, she curled herself around it, turning her attention inward until her body had become an inmost layer of darkness. Only she was aware of small sensations: a drop of sweat along her ribs, the ache of some cut on her big toe—a small throb, but it hurt when she moved it, and when she tried to move her mind it felt the same. It was by keeping her thoughts motionless that she could tolerate them. And in the meantime her body had become part of the darkness, and the darkness was clenched around that coal of fire like some suffocating hand, hurting itself, allowing neither light nor heat nor memory to escape.

  They rested and went on, rested and went on. Once Rael carried her for a few steps across the channel of a
swamp—she turned her face into his neck and smelled his skin, and the odor was mixing with the slow miasma from the mud. She could feel the vapors beading in her hair. And she was aware also of the sulphur smell of phosphorescence, and when she turned her head she could see it flickering and scattering in the grass, a weak white flame that burnt itself out as soon as it was lit. Rael was standing up to his shins in the black swamp. He had lifted her into his arms and she could feel his arms begin to slip.

  Twenty feet away, a broken concrete bank protruded down into the water. It was overgrown with moss, crumbling with age, a broken boatslip from another season. From the top of it a chimera stood looking down on them, a jungle cat almost three feet long. Phosphorescence played along its flanks. Lit by that ghostly radiance, it seemed to rise up from the darkness, a sentinel upon the threshold of another life. Later she would look back to that vision as the start of a long journey back through time, for it combined with the shock of the night to open up a part of her that could never be resealed. Later she was to enter into it as if into the storage chambers of a long-dead soul, peering at portraits, sorting through the alien memories. And the first memory was the flash of lightning, and a golden cat.

  Behind them, all around them, the world was covered up in darkness. Rael, with his cleaner eyes, could see much more—the single horizontal stripe upon the brow of the chimera, the cage of rotting reinforcement rods upon the concrete pedestal. Above his head rose up a bloatwood tree with its suspended veil of moss. On the bank—the white walls of a ruined bungalow, where he had hoped to stay for a few hours.