Sugar Rain

by Paul Park

  The ceiling of the waiting room was painted to look like a circle of faces peering down over the rim of the supposed dome. Thanakar glared up at them for as long as he could stand it, and then he got to his feet and limped towards the door, vowing inwardly that he would not be made a fool of any longer. But at that moment, as if to demonstrate that this was not yet quite the case, a clerk appeared under one of the archways and beckoned to him and led him down a flight of stairs into a basement lined with concrete blocks. It was a part of the building he had never seen, and this encouraged him, until he passed a row of open doors and saw the unravelers sitting at their desks, staring off into space.

  The clerk left him in an office that seemed larger than the rest. And the man at the desk gave the impression of seniority, or at least of bulk. He took up more space than others of his kind, and his voice was soft and clear, unmuffled by his veil. “Please come in,” he said. “Please sit down.”

  Thanakar stood. The man had dyed his hair, pink on one side, orange on the other. It looked grotesque over his pale forehead.

  Thanakar’s patience had already been eroded down to nothing by the hours of waiting. But the dyed hair was too much; something bent in Thanakar, and then it broke. “Listen,” he said. “I won’t wait anymore. It doesn’t matter—I don’t care if I die here in this town, but just let me explain to you before I do, how sick of you I am. All of you. You make me sick. And I wonder, how can a man like you keep from despair? Or are you a man at all?”

  The unraveler sat back in his chair. His veil covered his nose and mouth but left his eyes uncovered. They were red, as if from weeping.

  He stared at Thanakar for a moment, and then he looked away, past him, towards a calendar on the wall. He sighed, and then he turned his plump, red hand over on a pile of papers on the desktop so that Thanakar could see a cage tattooed on his right palm and a small black beast inside of it.

  The unraveler’s voice was soft and clear. “And do you never . . . nauseate yourself?” he asked. And then he dropped his eyes and closed his hand. “We do our best with the fate God gave us,” he said. “Who can do more?”

  A philosopher, thought Thanakar bitterly. He cursed him, mentally willing him to stop, but he went on: “Besides,” he said, “you are unjust. My brothers and I have worked long hours on your behalf. We have overlooked many restrictions. Today it was to have been my pleasure to inform you that our efforts had been successful, and that your application had been approved. Now, of course, the pleasure is all gone.”

  Thanakar held his breath. Wearily the unraveler uncovered the file on his desk and removed three visa forms. He laid them out in front of him, and then he opened his stamp pad. He picked the rubber visa stamp from its cradle and reset the date and then rolled it in the ink. As Thanakar watched, he lowered it to within an inch above the paper, and then he stopped. “May I see your passport?” he asked.

  With quivering fingers, Thanakar drew out his passport and laid it on the desk. The unraveler squinted at it for a moment, and then he frowned. “Not that one,” he said.

  “What do you mean? It is my passport.”

  The unraveler frowned, and then he smiled. “Don’t you have a new one? That one is no longer valid. There has been a change of government in Charn.”

  Thanakar stared at him. Then, with a cry of rage, he leaped across the room and around the desk. The unraveler tried to twist out of his chair. But Thanakar was too quick. He forced the man back down into his seat and stood behind him with his arms locked tight around his neck, twisting his head until he felt the bones stretch to their uttermost. His cheek was close to the man’s cheek, so that he could smell his rank perfume and see a drop of sweat run down his neck under his veil.

  Thanakar could feel the fat of the man’s neck between his hands. The unraveler was fat and powerful, yet he never moved. In Thanakar’s arms his body felt completely passive, completely vulnerable and receptive. There was something sickening in the way his fat flesh yielded to the doctor’s touch; caught up in the sensuality of violence, Thanakar twisted the man’s neck still more, until he heard his soft, sweet voice. “Don’t,” said the unraveler. “Please don’t . . . hurt me.” He could easily have been saying the reverse.

  Thanakar raised his head. The papers on the desk were spattered with ink where the unraveler had dropped his rubber stamp. The stamp had fallen on one of the blank forms and then rolled over, leaving a printed image. Thanakar recognized it. It was no visa stamp. It was an image popular in all those northern lands. It was the beast with seven heads, symbolic of the seven kinds of loneliness, and underneath, the endless knot of the unravelers.

  For a minute and a half Thanakar did nothing, only tightened his grip, and though his brain was moving, he was not thinking. He was staring at the endless knot, following each complicated strand until it found itself again. He bent the man’s neck back until he heard a groaning noise deep in the bone. “Tell me,” he said. “Who guards the border here?”

  The unraveler still had not made the least resistance. His arms still rested on his chair, and Thanakar could see that his muscles were completely loose. “We have not the power . . . some people . . . ascribe to us,” he admitted, finally.

  “You have no power to grant visas, am I right?” asked Thanakar.

  “We have the power to deny,” admitted the unraveler.

  “Then tell me, who guards the border here?”

  The unraveler said nothing. Thanakar could see the sweat run down under his veil, streaking the powder on his neck.

  Later, as he waited in the darkness of the square, Thanakar wondered why the man had made no effort to stop him when he left. He had not moved when Thanakar released him. Only he had touched his neck and whispered, “Please. Do not tell the others. Please.”

  There was a bell on the desk in front of him. He had not rung it, though Thanakar had walked all the way up through the building thinking he would hear it ring. But the soldiers in the porch were friendly as he came into the open air; they were laughing and chewing kaya gum, happy because there was a break in the weather. The flags outside the customs house were flapping in the new salt air: the red swine of Caladon, the silver dog’s head, and the endless knot. The mist had broken, and there were traces of a sunset. Thanakar felt his heart lifting as he limped down the steps. Later that night, standing in the darkness with his knapsack on his back, with Jenny’s fingers clamped so tightly around his thumb that she was hurting him, with Mrs. Cassimer beside him bitching underneath her breath, still he felt easy in his heart.

  In front of him across the square, the gate shone in the night, a tangle of glowing wire stretched taut against the darkness, green and violet, and deep black-red. Near it, five soldiers stood talking. Thanakar could see the glow of their cigarettes and hear the mutter of their voices. From time to time one word would stand out clear against the rest, the resolution of a story or a joke.

  One of the soldiers was telling a story. Thanakar could see the gesticulations of his hands and hear the sounds of laughter. Another soldier squatted down. He took his cap off and rubbed his head, and threw back his head so that he could laugh more easily. That was when Thanakar knew that it was going to be all right. Mrs. Cassimer had settled down to silence, and Jenny was quiet too, holding his hand as they walked forward towards the gate.

  The soldiers paid no notice. One stood away from the rest, lighting a cigarette. In the quiet air there were still some remnants of rain, and as the soldier brought the match up to his mouth and shook it out, the flame caught at some lingering phosphorescence near his hand.

  Thanakar could smell the acrid marijuana smoke as he came opposite the barricade. He nodded to the soldier, and the soldier nodded back, a barely perceptible movement of his head. “Good evening,” he said, in a harsh, flat, northern voice. And as the travelers crossed over, it seemed to Thanakar that even those small words could hold some promise in them, like a seed.

  Part Four:

  Charn

&n
bsp; WHEN CHARITY STARBRIDGE WAS A LITTLE GIRL, she had had a nurse named Mrs. Greer, a hard, melancholy woman with a fondness for punishment. Justly despised by little Charity, the nurse had terrified her brother, who never once could summon up the courage to defy her. That had been before he was given the tattoo of the golden sun, but even so he was a prince of Charn and head of the family after their father died. Mrs. Greer had no authority to punish him, and yet he let himself be punished with a fatalism that had infuriated his little sister. Even worse, he had allowed her to be punished, had allowed her to be locked into her bedroom, when all he would have had to do was walk in and release her. Who could have refused him? It was pure spinelessness, and it hurt Charity more than the punishment itself. Those nights she would lie on her bed, and she would beat with a spoon upon the solid silver water pipes that joined her room with her brother’s on the floor below: “Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you,” in the Starbridge code.

  But one night, towards midnight, after an impassioned round of signaling, she heard a message coming back to her, very slow at first, hard to distinguish, because her brother wasn’t as proficient in the code as she was. He was slow with languages; that night she had cursed his stupidity and listened with her ear against the pipe. But in a little while the beat grew stronger, and she had had to run to get a pencil and write down the message on the wall, so that she could remember:

  How can it fill me, unless I offer it

  an empty cup? Ah sister,

  it is in surrender that we taste our

  lives.

  These words stayed with her all the time that she was growing up. When the mark of the pencil finally faded from the plaster, she retraced the lines in ink. Later, after she had married the old man and moved upstairs, she had painted them in her new bedroom, on the wall above the statue of Immortal Angkhdt. There she had used an alphabet of her own invention. She had drawn a gathering of horses on the wall, and each one was a different letter, distinguished by a variant position of its legs, the curl of its neck or horns or tail, or a new color.

  She would lie in bed and smoke hashish and watch the letters stampede towards her on the wall. It was an alphabet known only to herself, and that was appropriate, because by that time the words had taken on a private meaning that she could not have explained to anyone.

  “This is my empty cup.” For her the words had no real meaning. It was like a prayer that monks repeat in temples. But on the day of her brother’s execution, perhaps then she understood for the first time. She heard the words as if for the first time when she was kneeling in the Street of Seven Sins, watching the pickup truck recede into the distance. She dragged herself into the gutter, where she lay in the shelter of a cardboard box.

  That was the way Mrs. Soapwood found her, later, after the sun was down. “Pretty,” said Mr. Taprobane. “Pretty skin.” Crablike, he was moving up the center of the street, scavenging for food among the garbage left by the departing crowd while his mistress waited in the shadow of the wall. He was a twisted little man, the line of his shoulders set at right angles to his pelvis, and he moved sideways with his shoulder to the ground, now on four limbs, now on two. He had a green hat on his head, and he sang to himself under his breath as he combed through the mud. “Pretty skin,” he crooned.

  Charity had dragged herself to the side of the road, where she lay propped up on the curb. Mr. Taprobane squatted above her, and he lifted her head up by her hair and pulled it back so that he could see her cheek. “Pretty,” he said, and then he staggered back, for she had put her hand into the middle of his face and pushed him away. He grunted and fell down in the mud, while Mrs. Soapwood laughed.

  Laughing, she stepped out of the shadow of a doorway. Uncovering a lantern, she raised it high above her head. Blinded in all directions except one, the light cut sharply across the road. It cut Charity in two, shining in her eyes.

  “Taprobane!” laughed Mrs. Soapwood. “Come here—that’s enough. Find me something I can use.”

  “You said garbage,” answered Mr. Taprobane, rubbing his nose; he sat lopsided in the mud. “She’s garbage right enough. Look at her clothes.”

  “But she’s alive!”

  “Not for long,” contested Mr. Taprobane. He rose up on his hands and feet and scuttled sideways to the curb, where his mistress was standing with her lantern.

  Charity had been asleep when Mr. Taprobane first touched her. In her weakened state, she was not careful. “Cripple,” she said softly, using a language of abuse reserved strictly for the highest classes. “Mental, moral, psychic cripple. Your ugliness is symptomatic. Your damnation is assured.”

  Like most Starbridge curses, this one was a quote from holy scripture. It was a story known to everyone, Great Angkhdt’s chastisement of the leper, and Charity recited it in an exhausted voice. Nevertheless, it had an impact. Mr. Taprobane jumped back still further and made a sign against the evil eye. Mrs. Soapwood kept on laughing. “God rescue me!” she cried. “Where did you learn that?”

  She was a bulky woman, muffled in a woolen cloak, already six months pregnant by that time. She owned a brothel in the river ward, but even so she was kindhearted. It would have been hard for her in any case to walk away and leave someone to die of hunger in the street, harder to leave a woman, a young and pretty woman, a woman who had made her laugh. Besides, she was already considering the possibilities of a woman who could mimic Starbridge manners. Such a woman might be quite popular with certain types of men, if she were dressed in the right clothes.

  She put her lantern down. Squatting with difficulty, she rummaged underneath her stomach and pulled out some bread wrapped in a sequined cloth and a tin bottle full of wine. She put them down on the concrete curbstone, then searched in her pocket for a cigarette. Deep in the crevice of the lining, she found a small and dirty one, bent into the shape of a beckoning finger. She drew it out. “Let’s take a look at you,” she said.

  * * *

  Mrs. Soapwood’s hotel was on the Python Road, about a mile away. It was a tall, narrow building made of wood. The recent fires had burned whole blocks along that road, though because of freakish winds the south side of the street had not been touched. But on the north side, not one house in fifty was still standing; Mrs. Soapwood’s hotel rose out of a block of smoking ruins. Formerly one of a row, it had survived because the firemen, frequent guests, had blown the houses up on either side. A week after the fire, the hotel was still surrounded by a perpetual mist, which leaked out of the piles of blackened rubbish and the drifting rain. The smoke rose in a curl around the house, and the sign out front creaked in the wind. Though burned and seared, the painting on it was still visible—a black bird with a flower in its mouth.

  Charity Starbridge lived at this hotel for most of a month after the bishop’s council was dissolved, after the change of government. This was during the worst part of the terror, when January First was speaker of the National Assembly, and the Rebel Angels and the Desecration League held rallies in the streets. They broke into the houses and filled the jails with Starbridges, with sympathizers and collaborators. During the month of November, in the eighth phase of spring, as many as a hundred prisoners were burned alive each day in Durbar Square, or buried alive in dungeons underneath the city.

  Captains of the League came regularly to the house of the black bird, but Charity escaped their notice, for a time. She worked in the stables behind the house and in the kitchen, and she washed the sheets and swept the stairs. She slept on a mattress in the laundry room and went to bed early every night before the gentlemen came. She never left the house, except in the mornings when it was still dark, and she would wash herself next to the outhouse in the greasy morning rain. Then she would go back and work all day, changing the beds, scrubbing the landings, scouring the pots, working hard for two reasons at least. She wanted to make herself indispensable to Mrs. Soapwood. She tried to satisfy the woman, so that she would never think to put her to another, more distasteful labor. But more than that, she foun
d a comfort in the work. She remembered a loose line of holy scripture—“God created work to be the consolation of the poor.” And it was true, at least for her, for working was a new activity, and it soothed her mind and wore her out, so that she could fall exhausted into sleep each night.

  She polished the metal plates and saucers until the scratches on them started to resolve. She was fascinated by her own productivity. Also, she felt happy to be useful to the other women in the house, because that month she had some friends for the first time since her marriage. There was Arabel, who had a constant cold, and Licorice, tall and dark, and then Charity’s favorite, Marcelline, who was practically her own age. She especially would seek Charity out, in the morning when the gentlemen had left, and she would lie on Charity’s bed to watch her do the ironing.

  Charity wore rubber gloves most of the day, and only took them off in privacy, where she could retouch the greasepaint on her palms and cover them with powder. Among prostitutes it was bad manners to talk about the past; most of the women in the house wore gloves, though of a more expensive kind. But Marcelline was too young to have completely lost her sense of wonder. “Are you a cannibal?” she asked one day, when she had surprised Charity without her gloves. Then she blushed, because it sounded so stupid. But in Charn, in those days, only antinomials had no tattoos.

  “No,” said Charity, frowning. She put her gloves back on. She was ironing a pleated shirt and was not sure how to do it. “I am from another country,” she said.

  “Where?”

  “South of here.”

  “Where?” asked Marcelline, and after that she would come every day to hear Charity’s stories. And Charity would tell her stories about the country she was from, south, where the land was rich and it was summer all year round. She told Marcelline about the farm her father owned, and the catbirds, and the elephants, and the wild dogs. She told Marcelline about her seven brothers and her sisters and her mother, who was very fat.