by Paul Park
Something was splashing in the water to his left.
He could feel his sister’s body sag, her muscles loosen. Her cheek was on his shoulder. He looked down to find his footing, and when he looked up the cat was gone.
He crossed over to the bank and laid Cassia down in the high grass. A mosquito, disturbed by the pressure of her body, rose up whining but he batted it away. Cassia appeared to be sleeping; he shook her shoulder and she responded groggily. So he watched her for a moment and then gathered her again into his arms, and lifted her up into the bungalow.
Inside there was a raised platform built of cinder blocks. On an earlier occasion he had cleared away a pile of fallen plaster and had made a bed of bamboo leaves and branches. He had slept there many times since he had first discovered it by chance, when he was still a child.
Around the bungalow stood others farther back, away from the water. This was the only one that had retained its roof of corrugated tin. The forest had taken back the rest, and there persisted only an odd pattern of broken walls, covering several acres. It was all that remained of the infamous slave-labor camp of Seven Saints, which had chewed up lives by the thousand at the time of the last autumn harvests, when all that land was under cultivation. The swamp which Rael and Cassia had crossed was all that still remained of Sorrow Lake, whose waters in the old days had been fouled and silted with crushed bones. The gigantic holding pens upon the far shore had disappeared; conditions there had been so miserable that even the bishop had come to hear of them, the twenty-ninth bishop of Charn. He had ordered the camp closed, surprising many, for he himself was a hard man.
Rael sat by Cassia with his hand upon her arm. Her breath had settled down. The platform of cinder blocks had once supported the desk of Father Labial Starbridge, the last commander of the camp. He had shot himself where she now slept.
* * *
She was dreaming. But in the dream she imagined herself awake, reliving the events of the past night. And because it was a dream she felt no emotion—no emotion when from the porch of the council house she saw a fire glowing in the belly of the clouds above Mr. Sarnath’s hill. She felt no emotion, and her heart wasn’t hammering and her breath wasn’t choking her, and she couldn’t hear the cries of the men around her, the cries of people in the village. All was silent.
And then the dream transported her up to the hilltop, and it was as if she herself were standing in the clearing on the hilltop when the flames went up. Suddenly all sensation came back to her, and in her dream she could smell the smoke and hear the crackle of the flames. Above her the smoke spread like a black veil, covering the moonlight, while flecks of burning ash made constellations of new stars.
And there were others, also, near her in her dream, so that she didn’t have to look into the burning building, and didn’t have to imagine a dark, seated shadow there. But when she turned around, she could see the light on the men’s faces as they spread out to watch the cabin burn. She admired their different expressions: Cathartes red with anger, pacing back and forth. The student with his pimpled, livid cheeks, the fire burning in the lenses of his spectacles. Then she was moving through the council of elders, and Canan Bey was grimacing; his lips formed silent words. And Palam Bey was shielding his eyes, and Langur Bey was crying out, his face transfigured, wet with tears. Mayadonna Bey had fallen to the ground.
She turned back toward the fire. And in her dream she understood that she had reached the dividing point. Rael, sitting beside her as she slept, understood it too. Before she had been turning and twitching in her sleep. But now she fell back into another layer of slumber, and the dream was using memories that were no longer her own. The fire was still burning, but now it was burning in the middle of a walled enclosure, and she was watching it from a high window. From the window she could see also towers and domes and battlements above the streets of a strange city, and a fire burning under the starless, moonless, black night sky. The courtyard below her was full of strangers in red robes, and they were laughing, crying, shouting with amazement at the sight of a tree growing up out of the flames, taking shape as they watched, an enormous chestnut tree with silver blossoms and red fruit, spreading its limbs out over the courtyard. And Cassia understood also that this tree was hers, that it was responding to her power as she stood watching at her prison window. Rael was there also, and he was sitting near her with the golden cat upon his lap, stroking it along its spine again, again, again, and he was not her brother in that world.
* * *
When she woke up he was gone. But he had left a rusted hubcap on the platform where she slept, filled with clean water. Her head was singing, her face felt puffy, stung. She could see the morning through a fissure in the wall, and it was saturated, overcast.
For a moment all the fragments of her dream were plain to her, and all the fragments of the night before uncovered, bare. But then the conscious day was seeping into her again, covering them up. She lay on her side, watching some termites struggle with some eggs among the plaster shards. She watched them. Sarnath had often told her to let the present moment fill her like a cup.
Outside, the sun hung low over the trees. A fallen log protruded from the bank into the swamp, and it defined an eddy that was cleaner than the rest, the water black instead of green. She stripped off her dress and soaked it in the water, and balancing upon the log she washed her head, her armpits, and her crotch. Then she pulled on the dress again, grateful for the slap of the wet cloth against her skin. She ran her fingers through her thick wet hair.
Then in a little while she heard her brother’s whistle, coming from the trees beyond the bungalow. He was smiling when he appeared, and he was holding in his hands a rolled-up blanket, which he had secreted in a hollow tree upon some earlier occasion. Bees were buzzing lazily around his head.
Also he was carrying a single, massive durian. And his pockets were full of a small fruit, which Mr. Sarnath, long before, had shown them how to eat. The hide covered a poisonous wet pulp, which covered in its turn a nut just barely edible, for it was mottled, sour, dry. Nevertheless, with water and wild durian they made a kind of breakfast, sitting on the concrete bank beside the log. Inside the blanket Rael had stored a sharpened metal spike, and with it he managed to puncture the durian’s armored plates, levering them back to reveal the pungent fruit, so nauseating, yet so sweet. He reached in his hand and pulled out a slick gobbet of the flesh; it was sliding down between his fingers, and she was sucking it from off his fingers until Rael started to laugh. He rolled onto his back. He rubbed his sticky fingers on his stomach and then fell asleep for a half hour or so. It wasn’t until midmorning that they were ready to depart.
But then he led them swiftly, following a path he had discovered months before, part of the old trail of tears at Seven Saints, up through the rotted concrete bunkers, climbing up away from the old lake, up to the low place in a ring of hills, where they rested underneath the portals of a church. Wide stone steps led to a brass door. Rael had no interest in the place. But Cassia was listening to an echo in her mind; she brought him up the steps. “I want to see,” she told him, and he shook his head. But he was smiling, unresisting, his gut still full of fruit; she brought him to the door.
Its surface, originally carved with scenes from the life of Beloved Angkhdt, had been broken with a hammer and defaced with blue spray polymer—slogans from the revolution now illegible with age. The door was two feet thick. The staples which held it to its stone frame had subsided, yet there remained a crack. Cassia squeezed through it into the nave of the church, while Rael waited outside.
It was a narrow, roofless building. Again, the carvings which once decorated it had all been smashed, except for one single frieze above the level of the windows, which was still partly intact. A procession of stone letters made the circuit of the walls, verses, Cassia knew, from the same document that Mr. Sarnath had translated. “Fill me with your sperm,” it said, but most of the rest was hidden by the leaves of saplings which had grown u
p through the flagstones. They were smaller and more stunted than the trees outside, as if they still felt the effects of an old power. At the transept of the church there was still an open place around the pedestal where the statue of Beloved Angkhdt had stood.
The pedestal was split in half. Of the statue, nothing remained. Yet Cassia, walking through the piles of broken masonry remembering her dream, found her mind possessed by an image of how it might have been, scowling down at her with its dog’s head, and its brass penis pointed toward the sky.
* * *
That was on the first day. It wasn’t until the fourth day after the fire that they passed outside the limit of Rael’s knowledge. They had been climbing steadily while the land changed around them. At night the wind was cool, the air was dry, and on the fourth day they came into a forest of rhododendron, all in bloom. They walked through glades of white and pinkish flowers, following a path that was well maintained, though they saw no one.
During this time, also, the way they knew each other underwent a change, and the long silences between them became galling, frustrating to each of them, for different reasons. When they were children, they had lived together almost without speaking, and it had always been comfortable to them, during the time that they were traveling with Mr. Sarnath, and then later in the village in the trees. This was partly because Rael had learned to talk so late, long after they had come to know each other well, partly also because among the Treganu there had been no competition for their sympathy. It had always seemed to Cassia that they shared a closeness that was subtle, fluid, fully formed, and yet separate from language. In fanciful and in exasperated moments it seemed to her that they were part of each other in some new organic way, that together they formed one organism, she the mental, conscious part, he the physical, unconscious. It was not that they always understood each other, still less that they always agreed. Two halves of the same mind, she thought, may be hidden from each other even though they touch at every point.
The village had been an insulating, alien cocoon for them, providing an outside pressure that had kept them close. Mr. Sarnath too had formed a link between them. But in the days following their flight, it became clear to Cassia that they needed some new thing to replace that link, that pressure, which was now dispersed. Now also, for almost the first time, they had plans and subjects to discuss. Now especially because after the fourth day Rael could no longer guide them—the rhododendron forest was as strange to him as it was to her.
She thought it was not possible for them to wander on forever, eating wild fruit. Yet always it was difficult to talk to him precisely, and difficult to understand him when he talked. Pronouns for him were interchangeable; the distinctions between “I” and “she” and “you” were always jumbled in his mind. Adjectives and adverbs he disdained, or else he had incorporated them into his small store of nouns—he would talk about “a bitter,” for example, or “a quick.” Verbs made up the bulk of his vocabulary and included many he’d invented, or adopted from other parts of speech. Yet he used them in peculiar ways. To imply another tense beside the present, he would put a verb into the negative—“not eat,” for example, could mean “will eat,” “want to eat,” or “ate.” It was as if everything that was not actually happening was equally unreal.
“Not burn is a Sarnath not not not dead burn black dead,” he once asked her. There were no interrogatives in his language.
Often, during those first few days, Cassia would ask herself whether he even remembered the village, remembered Mr. Sarnath. For there was nothing in the way he behaved to suggest he had regrets, or that he found anything unusual with their present way of life. Only he was surly and distracted, and she guessed it was because he was feeling something of what she was feeling. It was not jealousy alone that had made him kill the bullock. But he too had sensed that their exclusive closeness had depended on their isolation, and that their isolation was now coming to an end.
On the fourth night, miserably hungry, they stayed in an abandoned building near a stream. Perhaps a granary or a garage in the old days, it was a vast, dark, airless place, built of naked cinder blocks, and unrelieved by any windows. They slept on a floor of blank concrete, wrapped in the old blanket that Rael had taken from the hollow tree. Cassia had been afraid that animals might come—perhaps a tapir or a waterlion—she pulled close to Rael during the night. She was lonely, hungry, and more than ever she hated the way he turned his back and turned his head and stretched down flat upon his stomach. Yet that was his way; terrified and lonely, she put her head upon his shoulder, and all night she dreamt of men with lion faces, tapir faces—a variation on erotic dreams that she had had since childhood—until she shuddered and woke up.
Then for an instant she was still more terrified. Her hands ranged over her body, and she could smell her own sweat and her own moisture—her breasts ached, and for an awful moment she had no memory of where she was. She thought perhaps she was safe in her dormitory, yet why was she sleeping on the floor? And who was that beside her? Then the whole sickening finality of Mr. Sarnath’s death came back to her, the insecurity of the past days, and she put her hand out to Rael’s shoulder for comfort. But it was too much to ask, though he was not asleep. Those nights he never seemed to sleep, and she could feel his wakefulness and feel the tension in his body, and feel the way he drew away from her.
Always they had slept apart in the village, in different houses. But often when they were together she could feel his physical excitement. When she reached the age when she was curious about such things, and the first of her dreams started to bother her, she would embrace him sometimes, and she would wonder why he’d always pull away. In part she understood his reticence; in part she felt it too. They had needed nothing in the village in the trees. But now when she lay sweating in the night—alone with her fears, alone with dreams that left her empty and abused—she felt he owed her something, some small comfort or at least some part of his self-possession. She had lost everything, and she resented knowing that he held something back. She wanted something real, to give something and receive something in return that would replace their inadequate attempts at communication, would replace the lost enclosure of the village. And she was half asleep.
She shook his shoulder. “Rael,” she whispered. “Rael.” He didn’t move, but she could feel the tension in his flesh. She raised her head, and rubbed her fingers down the muscles of his back, pushing along the groove of his spine until she reached his tailbone underneath the drawstring of his pants. She stroked his tailbone for a long time, and yet he didn’t move. Then she undid the bodice of her dress and rubbed her naked breasts along his back—he too was sweating, and the night was hot, and there was no air in that windowless black building by the stream. The blanket was already damp with their sweat; earlier in the night they had been bothered by insects, but now she stripped it off. And with her left hand she was rubbing his tailbone, and working the drawstring of his pants loose with her wrist.
She raised her head. She could hear the muffled roaring of the stream, ominous to her, because of all the subtle stirrings of the animals that could be hidden by the sound; her head was roaring also. She bent down to kiss Rael on the shoulder. Still he hadn’t moved. He hadn’t turned his head. But now he shifted his legs slightly, and she slid her hand over his tailbone. She slid her hand underneath him to hold his stiff unwieldy sex. She rubbed her breasts along his back. She squeezed with all her strength, showing no mercy until finally he yielded and turned over. Then she moved over his body. She put her hands upon his shoulders, sliding down on him, possessing him, grunting in pain at first, because he was bigger than the dreams that had prepared his way.
But she had not even finished that first grunting descent when she regretted it. The pain seemed to clear her head. She supported herself upright, her elbows locked, her hands splayed on his chest, her knees suffering on the bare concrete on either side of his hips. Her head fell forward and her hair tumbled in her face; still, except t
o turn over, he had not moved and she sat there for a long moment, feeling not much of anything where he had penetrated her, feeling also with a kind of horror the muscles of his arms and neck and chest start to relax, to gather strength.
His legs stirred under her legs. Almost she wanted to jump up away from him, so insecure she felt, so meager in her control. Then it was too late, and he had reached up to touch her breasts with his heavy hands, gently, softly, but she felt as if he’d broken the breath out of her. Gasping, she fell down onto his chest. His arms closed around her and she felt his body come alive. She couldn’t see his face.
In time, he turned her over onto her back, so that he lay above her. In time also, he experimented in different ways, though she was scarcely aware of it. It was as if she had retreated deep inside herself, and even her sensations had pulled back from the surface of her skin. Her thoughts chased each other in a tumbled mental landscape, appearing and reappearing, sometimes dim, sometimes with fleeting starkness, like figures in a fog. Yet all the time, and as it seemed, far away, she was conscious of the movement of her body, conscious of Rael, conscious of the odor of his skin, his intermittent weight, even her own groaning, her own muted feelings of pleasure and pain, all against the background of a slow, rhythmic grinding, an unstoppable and distant engine. Because he rested for a while, and then entered her again, and again in the early morning when the first haze of light was gathering by the ruptured metal door.
In the morning he rolled away from her onto his back, his head turned away. She lay stupefied for a time. “Rael?” she said. And he answered nothing, even though she knew he was awake; she could feel the presence of his brooding consciousness beside her. Quietly she lay, listening to him breathe, until she could no longer tolerate the thought that his feelings might be as ambiguous, as resentful as her own. Then she stumbled to her feet.
Outside, as it happened, the morning was fresh and clear. A breeze had come up during the night. The sun was visible through the treetops. Because of their change in altitude, it seemed softer than she was used to, and the quality of light was different too. A bird sang as she stumbled to the stream, down through a copse of mimosa trees. The sound she had heard during the night was from a waterfall, a narrow chute of water perhaps ten feet high, splattering into a shallow pool.