The Cult of Loving Kindness

by Paul Park

  He went back to the bucket at the entrance to the tent. It was made of silver, carved in a geometric pattern. Everything they gave her was made of silver now, and they were always given the best food, more than they could eat while the rest went hungry.

  He lifted the cover and let the steam escape. They had found some rice somewhere, and cooked it with a sweet potato. He thrust his hand down into the wet, hot grains. “Food,” he said. The lamp inside the tent was burning brighter, and he could see Cassia through the mosquito net, kneeling by the statue.

  “In the wind now coming in the dark,” he said. “Is a tree leaf flutter now.” He breathed the cool and pungent air. In the distance he could hear the river, the wind stirring the trees. Bugs in the grass.

  He cocked his head. Competing now with the night sounds, he could hear chanting from inside the tent, part of the song cycle of prayer that Cassia now offered daily to the little god. “Come out,” he said, but he could see her sit back on her heels, her head bowed low. He pushed the net aside and crawled back into the tent, wanting to disturb her.

  “Rice,” he said, but she was saying words that made no sense:

  “Nutmeg from the Orient,

  Candied ginger will I bring you.

  Topaz, diamonds, and quartz,

  From the mines at Ranakpore,

  From the turbaned Negro’s toil,

  From the fabled mountainside,

  From the bottom of the sea,

  Pearls as big as plover’s eggs.

  I will bring a bag of pearls,

  Enough to spell my name out

  on the ground,

  And I will spell it ANGKHDT,

  And you will say my name,

  And you will say my name out loud.”

  He put the bucket down beside her. He scooped out a dollop of the rice onto the plate and started eating. She had lit some incense, and she had sprinkled some powder on the lamp to make it burn up bright.

  “Tonight is the last night,” she said.

  The food stuck in his throat. There was no moisture in it. It was dry as sand. “I don’t say it to hurt you,” she went on. “But it is the truth.”

  She sang another song while he lay back upon the pillows, chewing slowly. Then he cleared his mouth. “Go,” he said. “Is going through the trees. Foot and foot and foot, in the wild run.”

  “No,” said Cassia.

  “No,” repeated Rael.

  “I can’t be what I am not,” she said.

  In the bucket was a silver spoon. She took a spoonful of the rice and swallowed it. “This is drugged to make us sleep,” she said.

  In fact, after just a few mouthfuls a lethargy was spreading over his body. He picked up a glass ewer from the floor. It was full of water, and he drank it dry.

  “Don’t let us be apart tonight,” she said. “I know this is hard for you.”

  There was a bronze crown between the statue’s feet. Cassia poked the stick of incense through the tines and left it balanced, so that the column of smoke divided around the muzzle of dog-headed Angkhdt. She had the spoon in her right hand, and with her left she reached out to touch Rael’s leg. “Don’t let us be apart,” she said.

  And so he put his arms around her. He stripped away the sheet from her soft body, and after an hour they made love again, softly and sleepily as the drug took hold. At different times, each one was asleep, but the other was so gentle that it didn’t matter.

  * * *

  Soldiers took Deccan Blendish down the road. In the guardhouse by the loading dock they gave him a nice meal, the first he’d had in a long time. He ate it all, and then he threw up on the plate.

  Soldiers took him to a shower in the courtyard. He stood in it and watched the cold water bead on his body while they took his clothes away to burn them. He could tell that they were frightened. They didn’t let him use a towel. They just turned off the water. He stood on a slotted wooden platform in the courtyard and let the dark air dry him. He lifted up his hand, examining it in the light of a single naked bulb, which was set into a corner of the yard.

  He had kept his wallet when they took his pants. He had kept his spectacles, his mealcard, his wristwatch, and his student ID. When the shower stopped, they were arranged on the bench next to his new clothes. Even the currency was there.

  He put on his spectacles and arranged his belongings in the pockets of his new pants. They were made of comfortable black cotton, loose and light; he admired the fabric as he dressed himself. The pads of his fingers seemed unnaturally sensitive as he buttoned up his shirt and put the hood around his neck. The pads of his feet seemed unnaturally sensitive as he slipped on a pair of rope-soled shoes. The axe hung from a loop in his belt.

  “You in there. You finished?”

  He was finished. He caught a glimpse of himself in a broken triangle of mirrored glass, set into the stucco of the wall. He caught a glimpse of himself in the face of the guard who opened the wooden door and stood aside to let him pass. It was different; he could feel the difference just by putting on the clothes. The clothes made him understand how to walk and where to put his hands. The costume made it just a little more real—the black hood around his neck, the axe in his belt. The costume told the audience that the performance had begun. Now suddenly, the gathering man had stepped onstage—his shaved head, his pockmarked face stripped to the bone, his eyes red with broken blood vessels, his teeth too heavy for his mouth. He was the incarnation of dark death, his flesh seething with parasites, and he could see it in the guard’s disgust, the way he lifted up his hand.

  But this new sharpness to his senses, this was not part of the costume. It was not part of the act. They took him out and put him into a car with plastic seats and an electric motor. An intolerable hum was rising from the gearbox. Deccan Blendish put his fingers into his ears. When the soldier let the brake out, they moved slowly down the roadbed, and the metal wheels were screaming on the crushed volcanic stones. He could feel it in the inside of his ear, and it was as if the inside of his ear was a house with separate chambers, and in each chamber lived a sound, and he could move back and forth up the corridors, opening doors and closing them, mixing sounds in any combination: the squeal of the metal on the rock. The muttered questions of one soldier in the seat behind him. The responses of the other.

  Those were the big rooms. But there were numerous small cubbyholes and closets; as the car headed down the roadbed toward the gate, he rushed back and forth. In one room, a row of boxes, and each contained a single insect. There to his left, an owl in the woods. The crack of a branch. He dug his fingers tight into his ears. And then he was moving backward down the corridor toward the cellar door. He leaned his cheek against it. Inside, the whisper of his lungs. The thumping of his heart upon the cellar steps. Down below, a scurrying in the blackest dark.

  Or his eyes. It was true—the circle had contracted. The parasites had closed out the periphery. But in that circle everything was clear. It was as if he were inhabiting a world of darkness, a world that nevertheless contained a single spotlight. Whatever that light touched, stood out with a painful starkness.

  He looked into the woods on either side of the descending road. Electric lanterns shone at intervals, hung from branches or else perched on top of poles. And when the spotlight hit them there was a reaction. The compass of his vision filled with brittle, crystalline, prismatic patterns, spreading out into the leaves.

  But when they drove up to the fence he couldn’t tolerate it. He put his head down on the plastic dashboard. He pulled his hood around his face. He made a space of darkness for his eyes. In it he began to see what it might mean to be the gathering man, and to be walking backward down the path toward death. In that space of darkness he could feel himself receding from the world. The strings which held him to the world were snapping one by one, and these last strings, the five strings of his senses, were stretching and aching and twisting now. He didn’t have to look. Even without looking he could smell the beery sentries at their
watch. He knew the brands that they were drinking. He could tell their ages.

  The car scraped to a halt and he could hear through the plug of his fingertips and through his thumping heartbeat the murmured conversation. “What the fuck is this?” they asked. And a little later: “I can’t believe this shit.” They pulled him from his seat, stood him up straight, and stripped his hood away.

  The razorwire fence, electrified and sparking gently, cast a long bright shadow of intersecting lines. At intervals concrete towers rose through the trees; he stood between the guardtowers of the gate. He looked through into the blessed darkness on the other side.

  One week ago, two weeks ago—when had he last come through that gate? It had been daylight then. Coming from the village, sitting with Cathartes in the university car, he had passed by acres of sweet potato fields. He had passed through the security barracks—how different it had seemed. Now black night had come. In his hospital bed in Carbontown, he had achieved a metamorphosis. Or maybe not. Maybe it was only that he had lost so much flesh. Maybe there was an essential core of death in every man and woman, covered up by layers of life. Maybe as time went on you shed each layer like a skin, until you died. Maybe it was so gradual that you didn’t notice. But with him, in one week or two weeks they had peeled away a layer, many inches thick.

  One said: “He’s got a map. But I’m supposed to take him to the camp.”

  “Don’t get killed.”

  “The prof says there’s a truce tonight. This one—he’s the messenger.”

  “Is that right? They were stealing food this afternoon.”

  He was the messenger. They were ejecting him into the world, hoping that whatever rag of skin he still retained would last the night. He put his fingers on the axe blade at his waist, feeling with minute clarity the imperfections in the steel.

  The guard talked. Deccan Blendish stepped through the gate. The wind brought him a hundred forest smells. Off to his right, the flooded fields.

  He was the messenger. Yet it was not his plan to kill a woman in an isolated tent at five-fifteen precisely. Someone who had helped him. Someone whom already he’d betrayed. Lying in his hospital bed while Cathartes talked, he had rehearsed how he would say yes. Then he would take his money and his wallet and strike out along the path toward Cochinoor, toward Charn. He had the map. Oh, yes in Charn he had been happy, in that fellowship of scholars, and in the evenings he had walked on the embankment, eating peanuts in his waddling body, thick with layers of life. Eating peanuts through sheer loneliness and listening to the street music near the Lamont Theatre while the lights on the marquee shone green and white.

  The breeze brought him a hundred dirty smells. Yet Charn was out there somewhere with its hot grease and its ginger and its peanuts, perhaps touched by a cousin of this same wind. Right now, he thought, fat lonely men were walking underneath the lights of the embankment.

  And now he wanted a new plan, because he was dying. He needed a new plan, to go with his new clothes. He ran his finger up and down along the blade. “One stroke,” Cathartes said. He had to smile. He would need all the painkillers in all the world to accomplish such a thing.

  “You come on. You—asshole—yeah, let’s get this over. It’s a seven-mile walk.” The guard passed him and went on down the road. Blendish followed, and in a little while a path split off into the woods.

  “Asshole, this way,” said the guard. Blendish followed him into the trees.

  * * *

  Cassia woke up. She kept an image from her dream. It was the woodman standing over her in his black robe; his bright axe was raised above his head.

  She lay back on the pillows until she could no longer feel her heart. Rael was asleep, his mouth open. Breath whistled through his lips, a comforting sound. She put her hand out to his shoulder and touched the pack of muscle there.

  Now she was coming to the end. She raised herself up onto her elbow and looked at the image of Beloved Angkhdt, sitting cross-legged around the burning flame. The lamp cast a wavering shadow on the side of the tent—dog-muzzled, black, ominous. How can we give these things such power? For a moment she was Cassia again. For a moment the bishop was asleep, still sleeping in her prison cell the night before her execution. For a moment, the burden of her was gone—so beautiful, magnanimous, and full of destiny, the center of a world striving toward death, her death the spark of the new revolution. For a moment all that was like the woodman in her dream, empty, inflated with emptiness, and as she lay back on the pillow and the time ticked by, she wondered whom they had found to play the other part in the performance, to mimic the killer while she mimicked his victim. What small creature would be struggling inside the woodman’s robe?

  Miss Azimuth had given her a wristwatch. It lay beside her pillow, the hands at ten to four. More than enough time. She lay back. And to compose her mind, she ran it through an exercise that her father had taught her in the happy days. First with her eyes open, then with her eyes closed, she tried to reconstruct the face of a person she had known. She tried to fill her mind with it and to exclude all else, and to rebuild as if from the skull outward, layer by layer, the skin, the cheekbones, the complexion, and the eyes, nose, ears of Palam Bey, of Mayadonna Bey, of her old teacher Langur Bey. And of her father, Mr. Sarnath. The point was to allow no trace of sentiment to pollute memory—these were not images, these were not judgments of men. These were the men themselves, as close as she could come now they were dead, and she was careful to exclude any regret, any pleasure, any sadness, any sense even of recognition as she rebuilt Mr. Sarnath’s long-ridged head, his long nose, his dry eyes. The point was to allow a thought to grow inside that head, a product of that brain which would be separate from her thoughts.

  Her imagination faltered. She was full of warm, soft feelings of regret. She was sleepy now, drifting toward sleep again, and as her thoughts started to tumble in slow motion away from her control she felt something change, a chasm open up, because somewhere on the other side of her mind now the bishop was stirring. The image in her mind was no longer Mr. Sarnath, but some other old man with tattooed hands, a golden robe, a shrunken scavenger face—so different.

  “Ah,” she murmured. Cold, perhaps, she rolled away off of the pillow, and put her head on Rael’s shoulder. Though it was not quite Rael anymore. Though his face and smell and body were the same, her last thought as she fell into sleep was that he had changed and the bed had changed and everything had changed, and at last it was the bishop’s wild unnamed lover lying by her side.

  * * *

  Deccan Blendish sat beside the forest path two miles away. The guard had gone on ahead. Blendish could see his lantern shining in the trees; he had no need of it. He had stopped to rest. He sat on a log, and with his axe he chopped at the bark. He looked from side to side, because all around him creatures lurked now in the dark periphery of his cramped eyes. He thought to surprise them by quick erratic changes in his line of sight. It did no good; they were too fast. The wood was full of questing life, of seething darkness. Thick heavy branches hung above him—masses of slick leaves, their undersides gleaming with reflected starlight. Clusters of white locusts or of roaches, two or three hundred of them in a trembling ball were packed into a crack between the branches. And all he had to do was look at them to make them disappear, to make them explode into a winged flurry too fast for him to follow. A luna moth slid through the air, ghostly, transparent, swooping down toward him; it was gone. Tarsiers and bats whistled around him; he knew they were there. The undergrowth was full of larger beasts, and they were fearful and conniving too, dissolving into darkness when he turned his eyes to them. And maybe it was because they knew he was dying, and already he was living as a guest in this strange world. And maybe they knew that although one part of him was weaker by the moment, another part of him was stronger, a dangerous erratic part, the woodman, the gathering man. Now he was holding the axe in his hand, and he was chipping at the bark of the downed log.

  “Asshole,” c
ame the voice of the guard, brilliant and piercing. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  The guard was coming back now, his lantern wandering through the trees. “Come on,” he said. “I don’t want to be all night.”

  No, thought Blendish, not all night. It was not safe. Not here—this was the lair of the hypnogogic ape, who could alter the perceptions of its predators, its prey. This was the lair of the hypnogogic ape, from whom all men and women had inherited that piece of darkness at their core. When the gods came down to mix their golden blood with the polluted earth, this was the result—this bulging net of darkness, this forest of deceit. All around him, the hypnogogic ape was chattering in the bush just out of earshot. It was grinning in the bush just out of sight. Dark shapes scurried away from the guard’s approaching step.

  Deccan Blendish got up, his axe in his right hand. And with his left he grabbed hold of the guard’s sleeve, making the lantern waver, making long patterns of light spin around them. He peered up into the guard’s face, and so great was the power of his expectation that he actually saw the mocking worried cheeks and little eyes of the hypnogogic ape, as if they had been copied from his drawing onto the guard’s blank face.

  “I’ve got you,” he whispered. “Now I’ve got you.” But he was premature. The guard dropped the lantern and stepped back.

  “You goddamned lunatic,” he said. And then he was moving backward up the path as Blendish came toward him. The lantern, cocked under a bush, shed only a steep angle of light, and so the guard disappeared as though he’d stepped out of the world as Deccan Blendish stumbled up the path, his axe held out, his mind empty as an open hand. It wasn’t until he had gone too far, until he had reached the noiseless river, until he was standing on the riverbank that a thought began to coalesce and he grabbed hold of it. Cathartes has done this, he thought. Cathartes has destroyed me. Big-penised Cathartes, and the girl.