by Paul Park
What is it? thought Thanakar. What is it about me? He turned and walked away, spurning the receipt that the boy thrust at him. His boots struck an uneven rhythm on the floor as he crossed the room and pushed through the low door into the courtyard. Outside the raindrops danced and spattered on the flagstones, while the horses in their stalls licked up the sugar and scraped the scum from each other’s backs with the sharp edges of their beaks, standing head to tail in the rain.
The ostlers were bringing straw. One saw him and made the gestures of respect, but Thanakar turned aside and limped up the small covered stairwell that led to his quarters on the second floor. At the top he rested, ducking his head, for the ceiling in the corridor was very low. He leaned his head against the doorframe. From along the corridor there came a sound that tore his heart, the sound of a girl crying.
* * *
When Charity Starbridge was a little girl, she had played on the soccer team at Starbridge Dayschools. She had been a good runner, graceful and strong, stronger than most girls, and sometimes after school she would practice by herself in the playground. She would run as fast as she could, back and forth across the deserted field, the silver ball floating in front of her—she never seemed to kick it. She would be dressed in silver spandex, her black hair wild around her face, and sometimes Thanakar and Abu, her brother, would stand out on the balcony of the Upper School, watching her practice on the playground below them. Thanakar’s leg had never let him run like that.
In his hotel on the frontier Thanakar thought, She’s dead. Why think of her? One night he got up from his bed, and limped over to the window of his hotel room, and watched the streetlights shining in the rain. They shone on the statue of Argon Starbridge in the middle of the square, shone on the façade of the stone customs house. He watched the wire fence gleaming in the rain. By day Thanakar’s mind was a strong citadel, but at night his thoughts rioted and raised rebellions. God curse all Starbridges; the priests of Charn had murdered everything he loved, and yet, and yet. Those palaces had been his home. It was not welcome news to hear of their destruction.
At night he found it hard to sleep. And in the morning—every morning for three weeks in the last part of October—Thanakar went to the customs house. Every morning the unravelers granted him an interview. Even in those tempestuous days, when their antechambers were packed with supplicants, they never seemed to have anything to do. They sat in their cubicles surrounded by stacks of unread documents, their eyes fixed upon nothing, as if contemplating some ideal vision of bureaucracy, infinitely removed from mundane paperwork. Their desktops were crowded with the tools of their profession—silent telephones, broken calculators, pens with no ink. Always they exuded an impression of lassitude and deepest melancholy, their soft, slow speech punctuated by silences and dismal sighs.
This melancholy was deceptive, thought Thanakar, because at some moments, deep beneath the surface, they seemed full of glee. They took care to end each interview with some words of optimism, some hint that no matter how insuperable the barriers might appear, some forward progress might be possible, given time. This was the essential part of their power, thought Thanakar later. He would meet supplicants who, even after forty interviews, were still hopeful. Thanakar himself, against his own better judgment, found himself seduced by an illusion of progress: After the first few visits, no further mention was made of Mrs. Cassimer’s and Jenny’s missing passports. It was as if that hurdle had been crossed. Instead, he pursued the unravelers in new and hopeful directions. They listed the addresses of people he might stay with in Caladon City. They speculated on his chances of finding a job. But always there was some new obstacle. Once Thanakar arrived to find that his file had been mislaid. Thanakar asked himself what his file could possibly consist of, since no one, at least in his presence, had ever done so much as write down his name. Nevertheless, that day they had had to start everything again.
Or once, after a long interview, the unraveler had implied that he was finally satisfied, and that all the doctor would have to do was show up the next morning to pick up his visa. Some inner wariness prevented Thanakar from celebrating; he had seen other supplicants come back from the customs house triumphant and boastful, and take exaggerated leave of everybody in the hotel, only to reappear at breakfast a few days later. Sure enough, Thanakar arrived at the customs house the next morning to find that the unraveler in charge of his case had been transferred.
Yet even so, despite these setbacks, there were intimations of progress. On each unraveler’s desk stood a number of rubber stamps, including one large, important-looking one with a metal faceplate bearing the Caladonian coat of arms. Though never actually stated, it was implied that this stamp was the coveted visa—multiple entries, six months. On Thanakar’s first visit the unraveler had touched it with her forefinger. On his seventh, the unraveler had actually picked it up and weighed it in his hand before replacing it with a sigh in its little metal stand. And on his seventeenth, the man had reached for it forcefully, only to hesitate at the last minute, think better of it, lean back in his chair.
During Thanakar’s twenty-seventh interview, the man mentioned for the first time another set of documents. This man was unusually tall, even for an unraveler, and he was dressed in a dilapidated uniform of yellow gauze. His veil was wrapped closely around his face, so closely that the cloth over his mouth was alternately convex and concave as he blew in and out.
Thanakar had seen him several times before. Most he couldn’t tell apart, but this one had a distinguishing eccentricity of speech: a kind of stammer, and a habit of qualifying everything he said, so that often the sense of it was lost, mislaid in a fog of vagueness. “I-I don’t know if you know,” he said. “At least, at least I hope you do. But there have been questions asked. There have been . . . inquiries.”
“Yes?” prompted Thanakar.
“Well, it has been noticed that you have not yet submitted certain documents, which may or may not be needed, at-at least not at this time.”
“What documents?”
“They—they still may not be necessary,” demurred the unraveler. “Not yet. Nevertheless, I have heard rumors . . .”
“What documents?” asked Thanakar between his teeth.
“C-certificates of health. Witnessed by a licensed physician.”
“I am a physician,” answered Thanakar. “Give me these certificates, and I will fill them out.”
“D-don’t misunderstand me. I am not sure these documents exist, in triplicate, or otherwise. The question is, are you licensed to practice? In Caladon?”
“Licensed? My father was a prince of Charn. God help me, what do you want from me?”
“I understand,” said the unraveler. “Don’t misunderstand me. You are an eminent man. Eminent. At least, I myself have never heard of you. And I am not talking about you anyway. But your companions, that is something else.”
At last Thanakar understood where the conversation was heading. He sat back and put his fingers to his forehead.
“Now,” continued the unraveler. “I will take your word for it. We trust you, you see. We can see you are in perfect health,” he said, glancing down towards Thanakar’s crippled knee.
He had laid Thanakar’s passport and letter of safe conduct out before him on his desk, together with three blank pieces of paper that Thanakar had come to recognize as visa forms. These he aligned with great solemnity. And then he picked the stamp up from its cradle and frowned at it. With his other hand he flicked open the top of his stamp pad. “Now,” he said. “Mrs.-Mrs. Cassimer. Your . . . housekeeper.”
“She is in good health.”
“Fine. Excellent. And your daughter?”
For more than a minute Thanakar looked at him and then turned away. The unraveler closed his stamp pad with a sigh. “At least now you appreciate the difficulties,” he said softly. “Although we try to be of service.”
“She has a mental condition,” said Thanakar at last.
“Yes. W
e had heard rumors, you see. But never mind, mental illness is not unknown in Caladon, as you’ll soon see. And in your case, it may not be significant. Perhaps we can waive these restrictions in your case, if . . . if in fact they do exist. Perhaps we can make an exception in the case of such an eminent physician, whose father was a prince of Charn. I will talk to my superior. If you could come back tomorrow . . .”
This conversation was the lowest point in Thanakar’s negotiations with the unravelers, and after it was over, he stood in the rain underneath the statue of Argon Starbridge with his heart full of hatred and misgivings. It was evening and the barbed-wire barricade gave off a sullen glow. At the Caladon Gate a single soldier warmed his hands over a fire in an old oil drum, while a woman sat at his feet against a pile of bricks, smoking a cigarette. Along one wall of the customs house someone had put up a canvas shelter, and a few men sat at tables underneath it, playing dice by the light of paper lanterns, while nearby two children argued over a wicker ball.
The pedestal of the statue was painted gray and daubed with adventist grafitti, proclaiming the second coming of Immortal Angkhdt. Underneath, some dissident had painted the red hand, symbol of the Desecration League, and though subsequent zealots had smeared the place with mud, it was still visible. It was a small hand, a child’s hand, beautifully rendered, the five fingers long and delicate, the thumb stiff and decisive.
The beauty of the drawing made it ambiguous as a symbol of revolt, thought Thanakar. He remembered talking to the unraveler. “She has a mental condition,” he had said. It was the first time he had said so; standing in the rain, he wondered whether he believed it. Surely the vagaries of Jenny’s life, the strangeness of the last few weeks, the violence and perversion she had seen in Charn did much to explain the peculiarity of her behavior. Her parents had been dead less than a month. These days she hardly spoke, but what was that? She had always been a quiet child. In Charn, when she was his patient, Thanakar had first been drawn to her because he sensed she was a misfit like himself, branded like him with the sign of God’s contempt, the birthmark on her cheek, his crippled leg. And now they had another bond: They were alone and far from home. Abu and Charity, her mother and her father—the priests of Charn had murdered everyone that they had ever cared about. Now it touched him more than he could ever say, that she seemed to have accepted him in an alliance against all the world. That morning she had sat upon his lap, crying uncontrollably, her fingers locked around his neck.
He reached out to touch the painted picture of the child’s hand. But there was more to it, he thought. It was not just sadness; there are a hundred reasons to be sad. But at times it was as if some outside force had become part of her, and the strangest evidence of that was the way that she had learned to draw. Since they had been in the hotel, she had sat at her table all day, every day, and up into the night. She had covered hundreds of pages with her drawings, so that every morning Mrs. Cassimer had gone out shopping for more paper and new pencils.
She had begun naturally enough, sketching geometric symbols on the backs of envelopes and menus. Soon she was turning out the wastebaskets for paper to draw on, and she had broken Thanakar’s silver fountain pen by throwing it against the wall. That had been the second morning in the hotel; she had cried and cried until he had come back with a ream of typewriter paper and some colored pencils. By midnight she had covered five hundred sheets with circles and crosses, scribbling all day with a dark scowl on her face.
In the days since then she had made tremendous progress. Now she would spend hours on a single drawing before crumpling it up and throwing it across the room. When finally she lay asleep, curled up tight in a corner of her bed, Thanakar would gather them up. He would uncrumple them and spread them out, staring at them in amazement as every day they grew more competent and more complex.
And it was not just their sophistication that made him get up from his chair and go into her room, and sit down to watch her as she slept. It was their subject matter—tapirs and watercats and centipedes and naked apes, creatures she never, ever could have seen, even in photographs. She drew mountain villages in the snow, and fields of summer flowers, and portraits of old men in uniform. “Where have you seen such things?” he asked, but by that time she wasn’t speaking. Only once she climbed up into his lap and put her arms around his neck and put her lips next to his ear. Yet even then he could barely hear her when she whispered, “In my mind.”
A beggar came out from an alleyway and ambled towards him across the square. Thanakar pulled his hat over his eyes and turned to go.
He walked back over the uneven stones, and back to his hotel. Mrs. Cassimer was waiting for him at the threshold of his suite. She had her finger to her lips. “Hush,” she said. “The girl’s asleep.” But when she saw the doctor’s clothes, sodden in the lamplight, gleaming faintly from the phosphorescent rain, she found it impossible to keep quiet. “Look at you,” she said. “Oh, sir, how can you? Where is your umbrella? You must have stood out in the rain for hours to get so wet. Give me your coat—I swear to God, it’s as if you were a little boy again. No respect for anybody else’s feelings.”
A constant diet of unpleasant surprises had turned Mrs. Cassimer into a shrew. It was a way she had when she was worried: “Look at you! I swear to God, your own mother used to say you had the weakest mind in your entire postal code. ‘Mentally weak,’ she used to say. Mind you, she was one to talk. But it takes one to know one, as the rapist told the judge.”
Smiling sheepishly, Thanakar gave her his overcoat. “Please, Mrs. Cassimer,” he said, “could you make me some tea?”
“Tea! You think I’ve got nothing better to do than make you tea? You come in here, soaked to the bone, and the first thing you can think to do is give me orders.”
The doctor put his fingers to his eyes. “Please, Mrs. Cassimer,” he said. “Just do it, please. I’ve had a difficult day.”
“Oh, and I suppose you think it’s been a party here,” cried Mrs. Cassimer, furious now. And she would have said a good deal more, only at that moment Jenny woke up, and Thanakar could hear her thin, even whining from across the hall. He motioned for Mrs. Cassimer to be silent and then walked across to Jenny’s bedroom.
When she saw him, she stopped crying and sat up in bed. Her face was smudged with ink where she had rubbed it with her inky fingers. And the inside of her mouth, too, was dark with ink, for she had been sucking on her thumb.
Thanakar stood in the doorway with his finger on the light switch. She sat up in bed staring at him, the patterns of ink on her face mixing with her freckles and the birthmark underneath her ear. Around her the bed and floor were littered with discarded drawings. From where he stood, Thanakar could see the same pattern endlessly repeated, a round black smudge in the center of each paper, with six jointed legs.
Thanakar kicked through them as he limped across the floor. He brushed them aside as he sat down. He put his hand, palm up, open on the coverlet, and waited. And in a little while she uncurled from the corner of the bed, where she had sat hugging her knees, and came close to him. She was as timid as an animal. But finally she came and sat by him and put her arms around his neck.
“Why is she—why is she yelling?” she asked at last, whispering, with her lips pressed up against his ear. From where they sat, they could hear Mrs. Cassimer grumbling to herself and moving things around back in another room.
Thanakar smoothed the little girl’s hair back from her forehead. “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “It’s because she is afraid.”
There was a piece of paper laid out on her pillow. It seemed to be the finished drawing for which all the rest were merely sketches: a large, careful drawing of an insect, minutely detailed, its hairy legs carefully articulated. It was blind. It had sharp claws, and a sharp, heavy, long proboscis, for taking blood.
“What is that?” asked Thanakar gently, stroking back the little girl’s brown hair, his hand moving over the crest of her skull.
“A fle
a,” said the voice inside his ear.
“And where have you seen such a thing?”
“I never saw it,” said the little girl. “I felt it—there. There where your hand is now.” His hand was resting on the back of her head, where her skull swelled out behind her ear.
* * *
Once when Charity Starbridge was a little girl, she had set fire to her brother’s house of dolls. Returning unexpectedly from school, Thanakar and Abu had caught her with the match still in her hand. Thanakar would always remember the look of passion and betrayal in her eyes, when Abu summoned servants to take her to her room while he assessed the damage. He remembered her squirming in her housekeeper’s grip, her eyes on fire, while his friend turned to him and smiled apologetically.
Thanakar remembered. Later, at her wedding, it had infuriated him to see a drugged, complacent look in eyes that once had burned so bright. Later, much later, that squirming girl had almost disappeared. Standing in his hotel room on the square, watching the border lights make patterns on the walls, Thanakar remembered her lying asleep, curled up away from him, her foot making a small kicking motion at the end of the bed.
At night he found it difficult to sleep. Instead he would stand alone at the window of his room, staring at the customs house across the square.
On the morning of October 99th, the unravelers kept him waiting for the first time. He sat on a bench in the large, empty, circular chamber that made up the heart of the customs house. The ceiling had been painted to look like the inside of a dome, and Thanakar sat staring up at it, cursing inwardly. Yet he was encouraged, too, because that day there was something different in the atmosphere of the place. It seemed colder, and the air had a crispness it had lacked before. Soldiers had come down out of the hills during the night; he had passed their horses stabled in the square, and in the customs building he could feel their presence. He could hear the sharp crack of their boot heels in the corridors, and occasionally the sound of hurried voices. In the porch he had passed soldiers making a game of who could spit the longest, until the stones were spattered with the black juice of their snuff.
