Sugar Rain

by Paul Park

  “Then you’ll stay.”

  “No.”

  A spasm of annoyance passed over the face of Freedom Love; then he was calm again. He motioned to the stranger. “And you? What about you?”

  “I think I’ll stay,” the man responded, staring down at his feet.

  “Speak to me,” said Freedom Love. “Look at me when you speak to me.”

  “I think I’ll stay,” the man repeated, raising his face.

  Freedom Love gave him a long, contemptuous look, and then he nodded. “I wish that it were otherwise,” he said. “We have many like you; few like her.” He glanced at his wristwatch and then shook his wrist. His voice was sulky as he turned away: “You all have duties to attend to, I believe.”

  Charity avoided Varana in the crowd as the hall emptied out. Once in the street, she walked through to the lake and turned onto the beach, moving swiftly and purposefully, as if there were someplace to go down there. But when she heard the stranger’s footsteps behind her in the sand, she turned to face him, furious.

  “I’m sorry,” he began, but she interrupted him. She said, “You have decided. You have decided what you are.”

  “What do you mean?”

  She made an impatient gesture with her hand. “Tell me you weren’t listening,” she said. “A man is what he does. Not what he thinks or what he feels. Not a family or a name. Judge men by their uses—weren’t you listening? Freedom Love! He may be a liar, but he’s not a fool.”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t understand.”

  Again she made a gesture with her hand. “You’re like my brother, the way you apologize. Listen—you’re a coward, like my brother. But even he was a hero at the end.”

  “I want to be like him in all things,” said the stranger humbly, looking at his shoes.

  Again Charity interrupted, too angry to listen. “When I first met you, I felt sorry for you. Because you had no mind. Because so many things that go towards making up a person had been stolen from you—your face, your memory, your past. Your name. But now I envy you. Don’t you understand? You have been given a new chance. So many people, they wake up in the morning cursing God because they haven’t changed. They’re locked up inside their characters; by the time they’re grown, the traits of their personality are like heavy stones, impossible to budge. They’re like the bars of a cage. But you are different. That cage is unlocked for you. The memories that made you cowardly and foolish have disappeared. A man is what he does. If you want to be brave now, you can be. You can be loyal to your friends. You are free.”

  The stranger had been looking at his shoes, but now he turned to her. “Why are you so angry?” he asked.

  “Don’t you understand?” she said. “It’s a long way. It’s a long way in the dark.”

  * * *

  He gave them warmer clothes. With relief, she moved out into the darkness beyond his lantern, onto the dark beach. She stepped out of the dress she’d been arrested in and put on her new Dogon dress. Over it she put a black cotton jacket, and on her feet new rope-soled shoes. She wadded her old clothes into a ball and handed it to Freedom Love when she went back.

  He gave them blankets and flashlights and a bag of food. “It’s all that I can spare,” he said. “You’ll lose weight, but you’ll live. It’s only eleven days. Look here.” He showed them on the map that he had drawn for them. “This way. The second tunnel and then back. It will bring you up just twenty miles from the Caladonian frontier. The way is marked. And there’ll be water, too. You cross water here and here.”

  She folded up the map and put it in the inside pocket of her coat. “Thank you,” she said.

  “Angkhdt tells us to share everything we have,” responded Freedom Love, scratching his lip.

  He was standing on the pier holding a lantern. Varana had not come to see them off. But seven people from the town were there, and some of the Dogon too, for Freedom Love had lent them Gudrun Sarkis to ferry them across the lake.

  The boat was pulled up on the sand, and the Dogon stood around it, talking. Gudrun Sarkis was already there, looking nervous and unhappy. He was stowing six long fishing spears aboard the boat while his companions spoke to him. Once Charity heard the only word of their language that she had learned: onandaga. Onan meant “face,” dag meant “milk” or “whey,” and a was the ending for all feminine nouns.

  Freedom Love frowned. “They are a superstitious lot,” he said. “They think she is some kind of devil. But she is a mortal woman, just like you.” He took his wallet from his robe and removed from it a tiny glassine envelope filled with yellow powder. “If you meet her, give her this and she will let you pass,” he said. “It is heroin. I have heard she has a . . . partiality.”

  The stranger was standing with his hands in his pockets. He looked ill and frightened, and in the lantern light the scars stood out all over his pale forehead and his cheeks. The hair grew in patches on his jaw, a result of the uneven skin grafts there. The Dogon brewed a stuff called raxshi, and he smelled as if he had been drinking it. “I try to emulate your brother in all things,” he had said when she asked him.

  He bent down to wash his face in the lakewater. Gudrun Sarkis stepped into the boat. He was setting lanterns fore and aft, in metal brackets atop poles. The townsfolk had all moved away except for Freedom Love and the Dogon, who were waiting for his signal to push the boat adrift.

  Charity stepped aboard and sat down in the bow. She held her hand out to the stranger, and he followed her and sat down next to her, avoiding her eyes.

  On the pier Freedom Love turned around and walked towards the town. He didn’t say goodbye, didn’t look back as the Dogon pushed the boat along its groove of sand and out into the water. But Gudrun Sarkis raised his paddle in the air, and the people on the shore responded, crying out as if in mourning as he backed water and then swung the boat around.

  There were other paddles in the bow. Charity took one and gave the other to the stranger, who held it in his lap. “Like this,” she said encouragingly, dipping hers into the water.

  “Do I have to?”

  “Come on,” she said. “I want to get away from here as fast as possible.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “The entrance to the tunnel. I don’t know. But Gudrun Sarkis knows. Don’t you, Sarkis?”

  “Ma,” came a coarse voice from the back of the boat.

  The stranger tried a few halfhearted strokes and then gave up. “Do I have to?” he whined. “I feel so awful.”

  Charity smiled. “Come on, don’t be lazy. I think you must have been a priest in your past life. Does that sound right? Lord Chrism must have found you in the temple.”

  Charity stroked steadily. Gradually the shore lights started to recede. “Thank God for that,” she said. “I hated that place. Freedom Love! There’s no freedom there, and no love either, that I saw.”

  “He saved our lives.”

  “For reasons of his own. He wanted converts. I never asked him to interfere.”

  “Nevertheless, it doesn’t change the fact.”

  Charity burst out laughing. “You are a priest. I knew it. Where else would Chrism Demiurge have found you?”

  “Believe me, I’ve considered it,” the stranger said. “But aren’t there some physical differences? Besides, there would be something left. Some special knowledge, something.

  “I seem to know a lot of numbers,” he continued after a pause. “I can see them in my mind, big numbers, and they seem to mean something. Sometimes I can see them in my dreams.”

  “What are they like—your dreams?” asked Charity.

  “Unsettling. They are full of people I don’t recognize, places I don’t remember. But sometimes I know that it’s important. How can I tell? I wake up with an empty feeling. I could be dreaming about my father or my mother, my wife or my children, and I’d never know.”

  From time to time the light from their lanterns would catch on something overhead, a low part of the roof, a stalactite or a ma
ss of sculpture. They were in a complicated area of currents and crosscurrents. In places the water was as sheer and shiny as black glass. In others it had a stippled texture, and the boat swung back and forth. Charity guessed that the lake had narrowed suddenly. According to the map, the way they were to take rose from above a waterfall, where the river drained out of the lake. Already she could see a hint of shoreline to her left, black against a darker black.

  “Tell me,” said the stranger. “What was your brother like when he was young?”

  “Fat,” responded Charity. With her paddle, she cut long strokes in the water, though her arms were beginning to get tired.

  “That was all you remember?”

  “No. But he was . . . very fat,” she said. “I didn’t like my brother much when we were children.”

  “And later?”

  A lock of Charity’s hair had fallen down over her eye. She pushed it back before she spoke. “He was my only friend. He and my cousin Thanakar. After my marriage, they were my only friends.”

  “I didn’t know you were married.”

  Before replying, Charity tried to summon up her husband’s face out of the darkness ahead of her, without success. Yet she remembered him so well; her mind was full of memory, but the image wouldn’t come clear. It was the opposite of the stranger’s dreams.

  She frowned. It was as if she could remember every feature, but couldn’t structure them into a face. “He was a kind old man,” she said, and then instantly she saw him in her mind. It was as if the image had been liberated by the words; she remembered a drawing that Thanakar had made, a pencil sketch on the flap of an envelope. It was a caricature, but in her mind, Charity shaved away the excess, until she saw her husband’s smiling gray face, his melancholy eyes.

  “He was an army officer,” she said. “Three times my age—it was the custom in my family. He died on the Serpentine Ridge, fighting the Caladonians. Murdered before the battle, that’s what I heard. He was too old to be a soldier.”

  “You don’t sound as if you cared.”

  “But I did,” said Charity, staring ahead. “He was always kind to me. But there was nothing he could do.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Charity shrugged. “Spring is not the season for sentimental marriages. That is something Chrism Demiurge once said. The weather is too harsh. ‘Sterility breeds violence,’ he said. Besides, the women in my family were like slaves. It was the custom. We were like slaves, except there was no work for us to do. No, it was different—my mother and myself, they treated us like patients. Mental patients. And if our doctors were considerate and kind, what difference could that make?”

  She paddled strenuously for a few strokes, and then she stopped. “Of course I cared,” she said. “My brother was arrested at just the same time, and my cousin. Two of them are dead, and the third, I don’t know. I suppose he is dead, too. But whatever happens, what could be worse than all that waiting? All that waiting to do nothing. I’m glad to be out in the fresh air.”

  Dubiously the stranger looked around the boat. To his left he saw waves hitting a shelf of rock, making a low, scraping sound. The lamplight shone on a white froth of water, and something gleaming deep beneath the surface. “Did you see your brother when he was in prison?” he asked.

  “No. In my own house I was a prisoner as much as he. More than he, for it was not my choice. Yet I escaped—do you understand? That’s why I find it hard to forgive him, even now. He didn’t have to die. He could have stopped them just by lifting up his hand.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Don’t you? Because he chose the luxury of dying in a prison he had made himself, he is a hero and a saint. Other people cling to life—you, me. Don’t we deserve some credit? What we do is harder, after all.”

  “You are jealous,” said the stranger.

  “No. It’s just that I was a victim far too long to value it in other people. A man should stand up for himself, especially him, a Starbridge and a prince of Charn. That’s what I tried to tell him at the end.”

  “So you did see him.”

  “Yes. One time. Didn’t you hear the story? Even I heard it: how a washerwoman broke past the soldiers at the very end, as they took him to his place of martyrdom. She jumped into his truck as they were driving him along the Street of Seven Sins.”

  The stranger stared at her, astonished. “That was you?”

  “That was me.”

  “I heard the story twenty times,” said the stranger. “My guards in prison told it to me. It was a woman of the starving class. She fell at his feet to worship him, and he raised her up and kissed her on both cheeks, and comforted her. And when the soldiers were dragging her away, he said, ‘Don’t be afraid. Among a hundred thousand, I will know you. And when I see you in the land of Paradise, I will kiss you on the lips.’ It is a famous story.”

  “It is a lie. He was stinking drunk,” said Charity. “You could smell the liquor on his breath,” she said, tears in her eyes. “He had a mask on his face and silver gauntlets on his hands, and they had put him in a cage. I told him to stand up, to stand up like a man. He had fallen down and was leaning on his side, and I told him to stand up. Because a man has a duty to his family and his friends, and to whoever loves him.”

  “He was dying. You are very harsh.”

  “It’s not what I said, it’s what I thought,” continued Charity, tears in her eyes. “It’s what I should have said. He was my brother.”

  “And didn’t he say anything at all?”

  “There wasn’t time before the soldiers threw me out. But yes, he said one thing. He said, ‘This is my empty cup.’ ”

  The stranger looked at her, baffled, and she wondered if she wanted to explain to him about the poem and the silver pipes. But before she could make up her mind, she heard a grunt from Gudrun Sarkis; he pulled upon his paddle, and the boat slid in a circle. Simultaneously there came a shout out of the darkness to their left, a challenge and a curse. And then a flare went up, dousing that low shore with silver light. Charity could see a dozen men standing naked and motionless among the rocks. The nearest was not fifty feet away. He was squatting by the water’s edge, a flare gun in his hand.

  “Onandaga,” cried Gudrun Sarkis. Paddling furiously, he swung the boat out into deeper water, pausing only to extinguish the lantern above his head. Charity reached up to do likewise, knocking the wick with the end of her paddle. The stranger was stroking steadily, tiredness forgotten. Though in fact the men on the shore were more eerie than threatening—they stood motionless as the flare settled above them, grazing the cavern ceiling, making massive shadows on the water.

  The men were armed with spears and long arrows and short bows, and they made no motion as the boat drew out of range. But the man on the water’s edge reloaded his flare gun. He shot it off again as the light glimmered away: a silver bead that seemed to rise so slowly before it shattered on the surface of the dark. The flare gun made no noise, only a soft puff that was lost in the creak of the boat, the slap of the paddles and the stranger’s panicked whine.

  But as the boat sped away, the man on the shore tilted his hand. He let the muzzle of his gun slip down a few inches, so that the third flare he fired burst not above himself, but above the boat, beyond her bow. It lit up the water for the space of forty yards.

  Dead ahead, there was an obstruction in the water. It towered up above the boat, an enormous mass of painted stone carved in the shape of a woman’s head. It was half sunk in the water; the lake had risen almost to the woman’s eyes. She stared out over its surface, her eyes white and empty. She wore a great stone headdress in her thick stone hair, a crown and diadem in the fashion of the old kings of Charn.

  “Onandaga,” whispered Gudrun Sarkis as the boat drifted to a halt. Charity took her paddle out of the water. There was no sound anywhere, except water dripping from the paddle blade, and the puff of the flare gun as the man behind them fired again.

  This time he lit the wat
er back the way they had come, and revealed five boats drawn up motionless in a line. They were long and very low in the water. Seven men were standing up in each, serene, attenuated figures, dark-skinned, but with their chests and faces painted white. They too were armed with spears.

  Noiselessly Sarkis turned the boat towards shore. There, on an outcropping of rock, stood the White-Faced Woman, black-haired and dressed in black, with an onyx ring through one nostril.

  So much blackness only accentuated the sick pallor of her skin, the changing color of her eyes. “Her eyes,” croaked Gudrun Sarkis. Throwing down his paddle and snatching up a spear, he bounded to his feet. As quick as thought, he aimed the spear and flung it, but at the very end his throw was spoiled by the force of a single arrow passing through his chest. His arm wavered. The spear clattered on the rocks beside the White-Faced Woman’s foot, and then Gudrun Sarkis fell over backwards into the water without even a cry, as the boat drifted in towards land. Charity stood up, but he had disappeared. Deep below the surface, he left a trail of phosphorescence.

  The boat rocked gently in the water. As they drifted in towards shore the stranger hid his face, but Charity was curious. Varana had told her about the White-Faced Woman’s eyes, how they shone in the darkness. It was a lie; as the light faded above her, Charity could see nothing. Then someone lit a torch behind the rocks, a softer, reddish glow, full of soot and smoke. Soon there was a row of moving torches: wadded cotton dipped in kerosene, carried on the end of spears. Holding torches, the men gathered in around the White-Faced Woman, and by the flickering torchlight Charity could see what Varana had meant.

  As the boat drifted up the narrow beach, Charity watched the woman’s face and saw her eyes change color. At first she thought it was a trick, a figment of the smoky light, but the woman was not ten feet away as the boat grunted to rest. Charity could see her clearly. Her eyes, which had seemed black at first, took on a reddish tinge, spreading from the pupil. Then they seemed to lighten to a nauseating pink, then lost color altogether. But then flecks of yellow appeared and spread into a pool; her eyes flashed yellow for an instant, until they were polluted by a mist of violet darkening to black—a full circle of unnatural shades.