Sugar Rain

by Paul Park

  The captain stepped forward and held his palm up so that the light shone on his tattoos. “Ah, Captain,” said the voice. “I didn’t recognize you.” There came the sound of bolts being drawn back, and then the door swung inward, revealing a fat man standing in the gap. “Evening, Captain, miss,” he said. He took off his cap and stood rubbing his nose.

  “Hello, Dim. Can you let this girl inside?”

  “Don’t know why I should.”

  “On my responsibility. I’ll answer for it.”

  “That’s all very well,” said the little man. “You know the rules.”

  “It’s only a few hours, Dim. She’s got the fever. She says her mother runs the elevator up by Cosro’s Barbican. Can you let her in?”

  “Don’t want to, Captain. Doesn’t seem likely, anyway. Not unless her mother’s a man.”

  The Captain squinted. “What do you mean?”

  “Styrene Denson’s run that barbican as long as I can remember. I reckon he’s alive and well.”

  Puzzled, the captain turned around, but Rosa was too quick. The fever gave her strength; she jumped into the doorway and pushed the little man in his fat stomach so that he sprawled back against the wall. The captain swore and reached out his hand, but she was already gone, running barefoot down the corridor inside. The captain drew his pistol, but it was already too late. She was gone around a bend in the passageway, and he could hear her bare feet slapping up the first of thirty-seven flights of stairs. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “She can’t go far.”

  “I don’t see why not,” replied the little man, touching his stomach where the girl had pushed him. “We’re not chasing her.”

  “Well, maybe you should ring the alarm.”

  The little man looked up at the wall above his head, to where a red handle was connected to a frayed blue wire all covered with spiderwebs and dirt. “Hasn’t worked in my lifetime,” he said. “Not unless they fixed it recently.”

  * * *

  Princess Charity lay sleepless on her bed. She raised herself up on one elbow and looked around, half-dazed and suffocating in her airless, windowless room. In a little while she sat up against the wall and drew her knees up to her chest. At some parts of her life she had been able to sleep all day in that bed, and all night too. For weeks at a time she had been awake only for a few hours in the evening, when her maids had brought her food. Dreams had become more real than life. And this night, too, she had been drowsy. It was her last night on Earth, and she had meant to sleep it through. Already yawning, she had made dinner for herself with her own hands, sitting at the kitchen table peeling strawberries and golden oranges, eating the last of the hashish ice cream straight out of the can. But now, in bed, sleep receded from her grasp, and all the tricks that she had ever learned to coax it closer failed. She leaned her head back against the wall. She hadn’t signed the lawyer’s paper. She hadn’t even read it. She had forgotten all about it.

  A silver lamp stood on the table beside her bed, a clump of silver wildgrass, with tiny lights hidden in among its stems. She reached out to turn it on, fumbling with the switch, and then she swung her legs over the side of the bed and stood up unsteadily. The room was in a whirl around her. She caught a glimpse of her naked shoulder in the mirror hung above her washstand, a glimpse of her hand holding on to one of the carved bedposts. Though it had been months since she could smell it, she could taste the odor of her scented wallpaper in the back of her throat. It sickened her. All around her, queasy combinations of pink and gray fought queasy warfare on the walls—colors high up on the bishop’s scale of visual eroticism, mixed into horrifying patterns by a blind priest. He had lit incense and spattered her mattress with drops of holy oil. He had consecrated her bedroom as a shrine of love. A grotesquely phallic statue of Beloved Angkhdt crouched in one corner over an oil lantern. Her shelves were lined with devotional literature, and the night table was still crowded with unguents and powders, and aphrodisiacs, and strange mechanical devices. She had inherited them from her predecessor in that room, the old man’s second wife. They were neatly arranged and carefully dusted, never opened, never used.

  She looked across at herself in the mirror above her washstand, the outlines of her famished body, her dark hair. Mesmerized by her reflection, she walked towards it from across the room, wondering, as her face came into focus, at what point, at what moment she had departed from beauty, for she had been a beautiful child. When she was a child, she had been able to make a silence just by walking into a room. Now, sitting down to stare at herself in the spotted surface of the glass, she wondered at what moment that had changed. There must have been a single instant, she thought, when misery and disappointment had broken through the surface of her features, changing not their shape but their significance. It couldn’t have been long ago. She had been born in spring, and spring was not half gone. She remembered her wedding party when she was just a girl, the day she had married the old man. Then she had been beautiful, in her white dress. And she remembered her friends and schoolmates crowding around to say goodbye, young girls, and boys in their first uniforms. “We will meet again in Paradise,” they had said, loudly coached by the deaf parson who had performed the ceremony. Except for one—she remembered her cousin Thanakar, with his long hair and his long face, limping through the crowd. “It’s a goddamned shame,” he had said, scowling, and when the priest had reached out to restrain him, Thanakar had pushed the deaf man’s hand away, his face twisted up with loathing. He was the only one whom she had seen again.

  On a table next to the washstand stood vats and jars of makeup—eyeliner and mascara, vermilion, and aromatic powders wrapped in leaves. Idly, she mixed some colors on her palette, wondering if she could draw some beauty back into her face. She had always been skillful with her hands. She raised her brush up to her eyelid and then hesitated, staring at her face in the mirror. What had gone wrong? Nose, ear, lips, cheek, skin—everything was perfect. Nothing had changed. And yet, something had been added that had ruined it all. In her eye, perhaps. In the center, in the bottom of her eye, there lurked some poisonous new thing.

  She put down her brush and unscrewed one of the jars. Long before, her mother had gone home to Paradise. And the night before she left, she had put some makeup on her face, in a style that had occurred to her in a dream. She had not wanted to arrive in Paradise dressed out of fashion, to be laughed at by all her friends that had gone before. She was a vain woman. And the night before she died, she had put silver makeup on her cheeks, emphasizing the ridges of the bone. When Charity and Abu, her young daughter and her son, had come to say goodbye, they had run to her and put their arms around her neck, and she had pulled away, ever so slightly. Smiling, she had pulled away. She had not wanted them to spoil her makeup, but Charity had reached out to kiss her on the cheek, and had come away with silver pigment on her lips.

  Now Charity opened a jar of the same color and mixed it experimentally on her palm. And then she stopped and turned her head, because the door behind her had opened partway, and it was as if a gust of hot wind had come in from the darkened antechamber, and she could feel the temperature of the air around her rise a little bit. At the same time she was conscious of a noise, a sound of roaring, labored breathing. Rubbing the ball of pigment into a puddle in the center of her palm, Charity touched almost unconsciously the tiny lion’s head tattooed below her index finger, the symbol of immunity from fear. She turned her head.

  A young woman stood in the doorway, Charity’s own age, or perhaps a little younger. Her black hair was matted and tangled, and she wore a long ragged dress of yellow nylon. She had loosened the bodice from around her neck to give herself air. Her skin was flushed and dark.

  They stared at each other for a moment, and then the girl dropped her eyes. She bowed her head and made the obligatory gestures of respect, pressing the knuckles of her right hand up against her forehead.

  Princess Charity crossed her arms over her chest. She was wearing a robe of purple sp
idersilk, and she pulled it up around her shoulders. Some silver pigment had come off on the collar; irritated, she turned to clean her hands with cotton wool and cold cream, and then she pulled her collar down to clean the spot, rubbing gently at the spidery material. “Who are you?” she asked, not looking up. “How did you get in?”

  “Please, ma’am, the door was open.” The girl’s voice was harsh and full of breath. “They’ve all run away. They nailed a notice to your door. Pink. Moral contamination.”

  “And you’re not afraid?” asked Charity, smiling gently, rubbing at the spot. She looked up. The girl was pretty, she decided. Again she wiped her hands and smoothed the collar back from her shoulder, arranging a fold of material over the damp patch.

  “No, ma’am. I’m not afraid. I’d come to see what they had done to you.”

  Charity looked up at her. “Who are you?” she asked.

  Rosa paused to wipe her lips with a corner of her shawl. Her other hand moved restlessly around her body, touching, scratching. “I do the laundry for this floor,” she said. “Used to. These four apartments.”

  Charity Starbridge stood up. Again she crossed her arms over her breasts. “Yes,” the girl continued. “I turned you in. I did my duty as a citizen, and I hope they hang you for it. Look what they have done to me.”

  “It serves you right,” said the princess softly. “It was no business of yours.”

  Rosa wiped her face with her shawl. Sweat ran down from underneath her hair and along the insides of her arms. She stripped the shawl from around her shoulders, wadded it up into a ball and rubbed her neck with it, and then she threw it into a corner of the room. “Oh, God,” she moaned. “I’m burning.” She reached out to catch hold of one of the bedposts, and then she leaned against it.

  Princess Charity stood looking at her for a moment. Then she bent to rummage in a small refrigerator beside her washstand, pouring bottled water into a glass. “Here,” she said, standing up and taking a few steps across the room. The girl reached out and took the glass and drank the water down. She held the glass against her head. “Oh, God,” she moaned. “I ran up all the way. I thought my heart would burst.”

  Princess Charity gave her the bottle and took back the glass. Rosa drank. From the bedpost hung a linen towel; she pulled it down and poured water over it with shaking fingers, and then she held it up against her face. “Oh, God, I’m sorry,” she cried. “I never would have told them if I had known.”

  “What’s done is done,” murmured the princess. Confronted with weakness, she felt strong. “Never mind,” she said. “It doesn’t matter. Only tell me, why did you do it? Was I so cruel a mistress?”

  “Oh, ma’am, how could you be cruel? I worked here for a thousand days, and I never even saw you. But your husband, he was kind to me. He once gave me a dollar and a half.”

  “Ah. So it was for his sake.”

  “No. It was for my sake. Oh, ma’am, I hope they hang you. Don’t you understand? I washed your sheets a thousand times. It was my fate, and I was true to it. Was it too much to ask the same of you?”

  The princess put the glass down on her washstand. She rubbed her hands together, her fingers stroking the marks of all her obligations: courage, kindness, modesty. She stroked the golden ball and chain tattooed on the lap of skin under her thumb, the mark of marital fidelity.

  Rosa had collapsed against the bedpost, gasping, out of breath. The princess went to her and took the bottle and the towel, and with her own hands she wiped the sweat from the girl’s face. Rosa submitted and suffered Charity to lead her to the bed, where she sat down. “I feel so tired,” she said. “I ran up all those stairs.”

  “Hush,” murmured the princess. “It’s the fever. You may lie here for a little while. But first tell me, what was the stain you found? On my bedsheet. A bloodstain, was it not?”

  “Part of it. I know what it was. I’m not a child.”

  “No, but a bloodstain. Didn’t that mean anything to you? I was married more than twenty months—two thousand four hundred and one days. My husband never touched me. Look at my hands. I have other obligations, too. Fertility—look—and love. I thought you might have understood. You might have pitied me.”

  She had been fussing with the girl while she was speaking, stroking her down onto the bed, stroking her hair. But now Rosa started up. “Pity you?” she cried. “God in heaven, pity you? You must be insane. Even now, when they have filled my blood with poison and charted my soul’s flight to Chandra Sere. Pity you, is that why I came all this way? No, I wanted to see what they would do to you. I hoped they’d hang you. They’ve been hanging Starbridges, I hear. I’ve seen posters for your lover in the streets. But not you. No luck. I know already. They’re sending you back.”

  “Yes,” said the princess. “They come tomorrow morning.” She spoke gently, softly, but the girl pulled away and buried her face in the pillow. “It’s not fair,” she sobbed.

  Charity reached out to touch her hair. “Never mind,” she said. “Not many of us believe in Paradise anymore, or in hell either.”

  The girl turned towards her, her lips pulled back. “You don’t even believe it! You work us like slaves—who gave you the right if God does not exist? Hypocrite! Don’t touch me.” Delirious, she made the sign of the unclean, pressing the heel of her hand against her nose. But she didn’t have the strength to pull away; she collapsed against the pillow. The silk turned yellow where her cheek touched it, seared by the heat of her skin.

  Charity waited, and in a little while she reached over and wiped Rosa’s face again. “I think you think my life must be more pleasant than it is,” she said, touching the girl’s hair. She couldn’t keep her hands away. She was fascinated by the girl’s beauty. The two of them were similar in every part, only the girl was beautiful. I lost my beauty with my freedom, thought Charity. It is freedom that illuminates a face.

  She was sitting next to Rosa on the bed, her back to the door. Someone staggered in; she jumped up and pulled her robe around her, and turned her face away. A man crouched in the doorway, leaning up against the frame. He held up his hand. “Don’t worry, ma’am. Don’t worry. I won’t bother you. I won’t even look.” He pointed to the bed. “It’s her, ma’am. It’s her I want.”

  He was a renegade parson, his voice full of alcohol, his red robes torn, his face dry and spotted, his nose broken and red. His scalp showed in strips through his lank hair. “Don’t let me disturb you,” he said. “It’s her I’ve come for.”

  At the sound of his voice, the girl sat up. She stared at him in horror for a moment and then sank back onto the pillows. “Don’t come near me,” she warned. “God damn you, can’t you let me go?”

  The parson cringed against the doorframe, smiling nervously, picking at his lips. “I’ve come to fetch her,” he said. “I’ve come to take her home.”

  The girl pointed at him from the bed. “Don’t come any closer,” she commanded. “Drunken pig! Eunuch! Can’t you let me alone?”

  “Oh, Rosa, how can you say such things?” whined the parson. “After everything I’ve done for you. I followed you halfway across the city tonight, just to bring you home.”

  “Don’t you understand?” cried the girl. “I’m dying. You’ve gotten all you’re going to get from me.”

  “Rosa, how can you talk like that? After I’ve cared for you all these months. Fed you and kept you. Don’t you trust me yet? Look, I have medicine for you.” He stepped towards her into the room, holding out a little package of aluminum foil.

  “Please, ma’am,” cried Rosa. “Don’t let him touch me. Don’t let him come any closer.”

  Princess Charity stepped forward into the light. The parson turned to face her, bowing humbly. “Excuse me—I’m sorry. I don’t mean to disturb you. Raksha Starbridge is my name, formerly in holy orders. Eleven months ago I found this girl abandoned in the street and took her in. She’s been like a daughter to me.”

  “Daughter?” cried Rosa. “Lecherous pig!”
>
  “Don’t listen to her, ma’am. It’s the fever talking. The fever’s in her brain. If it weren’t for me, she would have starved to death.” He had opened up the foil package, and he rubbed some of the red powder it contained into his gums. And as he twisted the foil back up, he paused to wink heavily. “And would you believe it? When I met her, her palms were naked as a baby’s.”

  He had the face of someone who drinks more than he eats, his eyes bloodshot, his cheeks covered with scars and broken blood vessels. On the bed behind him, Rosa had started to cry.

  “Yes, ma’am,” continued the parson. “I can see she fooled you with all her spiritual talk. She’s got no right to talk like that. Her mother was an atheist. An antinomial whore. She didn’t even have a name until I gave her one. Rosamundi, like the flower. When I met her, she could hardly talk. Just a few words and bits of songs. She was singing in the streets for pennies. Now look at her—everything she is, I taught her. I taught her how to work. Every morning I drew those tattoos on fresh. Oil pencil. She used to beg me to make them permanent. But I’m not such a fool.”

  He was a mendicant preacher, a Starbridge who had lost his destiny. Expelled from his congregation, he lived by his wits among the common people, saying mass for a dollar or a bottle of wine, healing the sick, telling fortunes. And among the common people he had found something to love. Now he turned and sat down on the bed. “Oh, Rosa,” he said. “Isn’t it better to tell the truth, now that it can’t hurt you anymore? There—don’t cry. You don’t really think I’d let them send my little girl to hell?”

  She looked up at him, tears running down her face. But her cheeks were so hot, they evaporated before they were halfway down. She pulled her bodice down to show where the priest had marked her, the horned circle on her shoulder, the sign of Chandra Sere. “You’re too late,” she said. “I’m on my way. One or two hours, not more. I saw him cast the spell.”