Sugar Rain

by Paul Park

  Every time when they had stopped, Charity had portioned out some of her small store of food, plastic rice cakes, sugar pills, and aspirin. The woman had accepted water but had spurned the rest. “Food for pigs,” she had said. Now she reached out her hand towards the four transparent squares that Charity had put out on a level rock. She picked one up between her finger and her thumb. She closed her eyes and placed it in her mouth and chewed on it for a while before she spat it out. She spat it out and made a face. “Aah,” she cried. “Biter, biting. No.” And then she jumped up to her feet. “I,” she cried. “But I.”

  Lying against the tunnel wall, wrapped in her blanket, Charity groped in the dust and found a sharp-edged piece of rock. Antinomials ate meat, it was well known. Occasionally in the darkness they had heard the scurry of a rodent or a bat. Once while playing, the woman had put up her flute. Holding it poised, her fingers still over the holes, she had turned her head to listen to the noise of something moving outside the circle of the fire. “I smell life,” she had said.

  This time the woman snatched her flashlight from the floor and ran away into the dark. Charity sat up with the fire for a while, and then she fell asleep.

  In time she became familiar with the many songs of wanting, the hunger songs that were the heart of antinomial life. And in time she put together the woman’s story, words and music.

  “This love not mine,” the woman said. “This place. Brother, no, nor sister. Oh my sister, when I am so child. So child in River Rang, river and I small. No more. Now black so hard, in this hard stone is dark.”

  “This is,” she said once, sitting near the fire, relaxed, almost coherent. “River running, in my mind. Now is. Now. Right now. Ice on the water, and the red rock cliff.”

  Sometimes her words almost made sense. “Water,” she said, and then she blew a melody that Charity had come to recognize: the name song of the River Rang, the only name the woman knew. There the antinomials had lived, far to the north and west of Charn. A cult of atheists and revolutionaries had fled up there into a wilderness of mountains. They had no law, no faith, no love, no learning. In the end they were sustained by pride alone.

  And as the webs of culture and tradition loosened and let go, whole families of concepts had disappeared out of their language. Single words had become isolated. Ideas receded from each other, farther and farther, as all the ways of joining them were lost. But because the mind is devious, and because there are ideals that never, ever can be reached, a new language had grown up to reinforce the old. It was a language not of words but of music, of melody and tone. It was a way of making language personal, so that every antinomial could speak a different one, yet still could understand each other. Words remained, simple nouns and verbs, each one suspended in a web of music.

  For generations they had lived alone, harsh and isolated lives, hunting in the snow. But in the first weeks of spring, the thirty-first bishop of Charn had sent an army. When Charity was a little girl, the soldiers had crossed the river by the Anzas Bridge, and they had burned the towns and villages, and erected rows of gallows on the hilltops. The survivors they had dragged to Charn in chains, and some were locked away up on the Mountain of Redemption, and some escaped into the city’s slums. There they had joined with others who had come south by themselves, and they had lived together, persecuted and despised, eating garbage, pigeons, rats, mixing with adventists, flagellants, Brothers of Unrest, playing their music in abandoned warehouses next to the abandoned docks. Many had been born there, half-breeds of various kinds. But there were others who were old enough to remember; Charity’s companion was gray-haired, and her face was seamed and scarred. When the soldiers crossed the bridge, she had been almost grown. Fiercely, with great bitterness, she played the music on her flute. Charity lay on her back, staring up at the shadows of the firelight on the rock surface of the roof.

  After they slept, they went on. In the tunnels there was neither night nor day. The only clocks were in their bodies. Charity was hungry. She was tasting dirt in her mouth, and the water was all gone. But from far away they had heard a roaring sound and the wind whistling in their ears. They came out on a ledge above a stream.

  Charity shined her torch across to the opposite wall, where a waterfall was boiling through a cleft in the rock. She let the light play on the surface of the current, and followed it along the floor of an enormous cavern. “Look,” she said. “Look, there’s the bridge.”

  Even without the light it would have been visible, a span of stone that crossed the cavern at its narrowest point. The roof of the cavern had pricked up into the open air, and dim light shone down from above. The water poured from a deep fissure in the roof and fell into a pool, and mixed there with the light of day. The bridge rose through a cloud of vapor, while the water thundered underneath it.

  Charity walked down along the ledge. “Look,” she said. But then she stopped. The woman hadn’t followed her. She was standing with her hands to her head, holding her head as if in pain, and then she was scrambling down another slope, up to her ankles in loose sand and scree. She was heading for the water, shouting and crying, banging her flute against the stones, until finally she tripped and slid down into a small pool, out of the main current which the backwater had filled with scum and floating wood, and bottles and tin cans. There she wept and wailed, kneeling in the water while Charity looked on, unable to understand until she caught the music in the woman’s cry. Then she took the map out of her jacket and turned her light on it and studied it until she found the cave, and found the river rushing through it, and followed it with her finger up into the world, and up through many permutations north and west, to the map’s edge and then beyond, the names unreeling in her memory, for she had won prizes in geography at school: Poldan, Visser, Medong, Koo, a dozen tributaries and a thousand miles, up to its farthest source, the River Rang.

  * * *

  In Caladon the psychiatric arts were highly prized. On the Monday of his third week in the city, on the morning of November 45th, Thanakar took Jenny Pentecost from their hotel, and together they walked down the Street of the Harmonious Mind, searching for a block of offices that looked inviting.

  Unlike Charn, Caladon was a city of straight lines and low buildings. By law, no structure could exceed four stories, that being the tallest height that Argon Starbridge, the present king’s great-uncle, could climb to without throwing up. He had been afflicted with a rare condition of the inner ear, which made him sensitive to air pressure. When he was crowned king, he had had all high buildings in the city truncated or demolished, citing some scriptural authority. As a result, the city had a sprawling, relaxed air. During the winter many houses had collapsed from the weight of snow on their flat roofs, and by the eighth phase of spring they had not yet been rebuilt, so that even in the center of the city there were open spaces, not precisely parks, but pleasing nonetheless.

  At least they pleased Thanakar Starbridge as he walked along the street: The accumulating rain had covered everything, as if in dusty layers of new paint. People walked leisurely under their umbrellas, and it seemed to Thanakar that they lacked the desperation of the citizens of Charn, the wild fanaticism, the public drunkenness and frenzy. In their clothes and in their houses, he noticed fewer excesses of rich and poor.

  In Caladon the worst of times had already gone past; the countryside was richer than the stony hills of Charn, less eroded, less exposed. North of the city, under long plastic awnings, the first corn of the season was already grown—tiny, bitter husks, but it was food. In Caladon, though distribution was a government monopoly, technology at least was in the hands of private merchants, and even in the darkest winter they had managed to produce something—strange hybrids grown in caves under electric lights.

  In every way it was a richer city. The Street of the Harmonious Mind was lined with prosperous buildings faced with marble and white brick. On Mondays and on Thursdays the street was closed to traffic, and the doctors were available for unscheduled consulta
tions. As Thanakar and Jenny studied the directories, the pavements behind them were crowded with people seeking appointments. Some were making a great show of their ailments, twitching and shouting, and striking themselves on the face. Others were gagged, or led along by keepers, and a few spectacular cases were dragged by in wheeled cages.

  In Charn, reflected Thanakar, people were too poor to be insane, too poor and too afraid. But here the citizens seemed proud of it; it was proof of their leisure and prosperity, for treatment was not cheap.

  “Fifteen dollars,” said the nurse, before Thanakar had even taken off his gloves. He had chosen Dr. Caramel out of a list of ten in the lobby of a building that seemed less pretentious than the others they had passed. The other nine were all psychic abortionists and electrotherapists; by contrast, the specialty of Dr. Caramel—cerebral massage—seemed benign.

  In addition, Thanakar had hoped, from the name, that Dr. Caramel might prove to be a woman. But in this he was disappointed. After he had paid the nurse, he and Jenny were shown into a comfortable waiting room, and after a suspiciously short time, they were joined by a short, balding, middle-aged man in a white suit. He shook them gravely by the hand and peered with mild curiosity at their tattoos.

  “Charnish,” he said at last.

  The nurse had given Thanakar a card to fill out while he waited. It had requested information of a general and harmless nature. Dr. Caramel took it and glanced at the top line. “You are a doctor,” he remarked.

  “A surgeon.”

  “Hmm. Charnish medicine is very backward, I’ve been told.”

  “In some ways.”

  Dr. Caramel turned the little card between his fingers and glanced at the back of it, which was blank. “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  Thanakar looked at the floor. “May we speak privately?”

  “Of course.” The little man clapped his hands, and when the nurse appeared, he instructed her to take the child to an inner room where there were games and juice. Nevertheless Jenny kept her grip on Thanakar’s finger, squeezing it until it hurt. Thanakar had to slide his finger from her tiny grasp.

  “Go with her,” he said. “I’ll be right here.” But he turned his face away, so that he would not have to watch her expression as she went out the door. In fact, there is nothing wrong with her, he thought. It is not so strange, to be unhappy.

  He had brought a sheaf of Jenny’s drawings, and he laid them out along a table in the center of the room. Dr. Caramel stood behind his shoulder. “You are very talented,” he said.

  “They are hers.”

  “Incredible.” Dr. Caramel picked up one of the drawings, a pen-and-ink sketch of a skull, seen from the side. The bone was cut away behind the ear, to reveal a tangled web of brains. “Incredible,” he repeated. He brought the drawing over to the window, where the light was stronger. A small desk was there; he rummaged in the drawer for a magnifying glass, then drew it out.

  “Incredible,” he said for the third time. The detail of the drawing seemed to progress towards some microscopic infinity, halted only by the failure of the human eye. Under the glass the tangle of brains spread apart into its component strands. As the doctor’s eye adjusted to the fineness of the drawing, they were revealed first as a labyrinth of corridors and then as lines of little rooms, rooms without doors, each one with a prisoner inside. Some were squatting in the corners, shackled to the walls; some sat reading on their beds; some paced back and forth. Some spoke together secretly, through holes scratched in the walls. Some slept.

  Dr. Caramel sat down in an armchair and held the paper to his eye. Thanakar approached him from the table, carrying more drawings. “She calls that ‘The Prison-Mind,’ ” he said. “Look at this.”

  He showed Dr. Caramel another drawing, similar to the first. Again a human skull was cut away behind the ear. But this time the brains took the shape not of corridors and hallways but of tunnels and caves. The bone of the skull itself was drawn to resemble rock in some places, masonry in others. The socket of the eye, the nose, the jaw seemed built out of rotting brick, carved into the surface of a hill. Farther back, where the skull was cut away, the rock was permeated with a maze of holes: caves, tunnels, rivers, islands, waterfalls, a whole subterranean world.

  Another drawing, this one in brown pencil, highlighted in red: again, a human skull. The eye was still in its socket, the teeth in its mouth. Through a crack behind the ear the brain showed puffy and convoluted, a mass of tissue caught in a net of blood.

  The brain had receded from the back of the skull. There at the opening for the spinal column, an enormous insect had dug out a cavity for itself. With sharp mandibles and claws it was tearing down the wall of tissue that enclosed it.

  “Here,” said Thanakar. He handed Dr. Caramel the last of the sketches, a pencil drawing of the insect itself, huge, blind, and hairy, with long, segmented legs. Under it, in childish letters which contrasted strangely with the beauty of the sketch, was printed: THE FLEA.

  “What are her symptoms?” asked Dr. Caramel.

  Thanakar was staring out the window. In an antiseptic courtyard, a tree with no leaves on it was reflected in a rectangular pool. “She has no symptoms,” he said. “But there is something about these drawings that breaks my heart.”

  “Tell me,” said the doctor gently.

  “She does not speak. She has a kind of sadness that seems morbid to me—you understand, I don’t have much experience with children. She is my adopted daughter. I took her from a house of prostitution in my city. Her situation there was beyond words, but it was not for long. Nevertheless, perhaps there are some wounds that can’t be healed. I had hoped it was enough just to be kind.”

  Dr. Caramel made a cage out of his fingers and knocked it thoughtfully against his lips. “Kindness is meaningless outside a program of therapy,” he said. “And I’ve never heard of a mental problem that was not physical at bottom. This”—he tapped the drawings in his lap—“this is the key.”

  But Thanakar kept on speaking, as if he hadn’t heard. “She came from a poor family. An only child; her father once was in the guild of carpenters and clowns. Nevertheless, I can’t pretend they were incapable of love. There are worse things than poverty. Her parents died in prison. Is that enough to kill someone with sadness? The human heart is such a mystery.”

  Thanakar was staring out the window. It had begun to rain again—soft, slow drips which disturbed the surface of the pool. He said, “I took her from a house of prostitution. They had dressed her as a priestess in the shrine of Angkhdt. Yet it was a long time ago. Ten weeks. Life is hard for many people—why can’t she forget about these things? I have been kind to her.”

  “Kindness means nothing,” repeated Dr. Caramel. “Look at this.” He tapped the drawing of the flea.

  “I cannot think that she is mad,” said Thanakar. “What is normal, in these circumstances? It is more healthy to forget, for a wound to heal and show no trace. But there are wounds that bleed and bleed.”

  Dr. Caramel was embarrassed by this talk. “There is always some physical manifestation,” he said, rising from his chair. “I would like to examine the young lady, if I could.”

  “She has terrible dreams,” continued Thanakar, but then he stopped. Dr. Caramel had clapped his hands again, and in a moment the nurse brought Jenny in. She seemed subdued. She came to stand next to Thanakar near the window, but did not look at him. And when Dr. Caramel approached her, she let him touch her. She bent her head forward so that Dr. Caramel could examine the back of her skull; he had a tiny flashlight in one hand, and with the other he pulled the hair back from her neck, stroking it against the grain. He had put on a pair of glasses, and his mouth was partly open. His lips were taut. “Aha,” he said. “Aha, I thought so. Look. I told you.”

  He had combed her hair back from the nape of her neck, revealing sad, pink skin. Just where her spinal column met her skull, there was a little mark.

  “Look,” said Dr. Caramel. “That’s whe
re it entered in.”

  * * *

  Thanakar took her away. In his pocket he carried Dr. Caramel’s surgical diagram, drawn on tracing paper over one of Jenny’s sketches. He had proposed making a small incision in the skull, wide enough for his fingers. He had proposed reaching in to see if he could grab hold of one of the insect’s legs. Or if the disease had progressed, and the flea had burrowed out of reach into the corridors of Jenny’s mind, he proposed tempting it out with sugar-coated tweezers.

  The next morning Thanakar took Jenny to another doctor. “I’m glad you came to me,” said Marcel Paraclete. “In this city you will find a scandalous number of incompetents and quacks. I pity the poor invalid who finds himself in any waiting room but mine.”

  At least that’s what Thanakar thought he said. It was hard to tell. He was dressed in a suit of plastic overalls from head to foot, and his voice was muffled under a mask of plastic gauze that covered his whole face. His waiting room was a cubicle of white tile, without windows or furniture. He had observed them through the skylight, and then told them through a speaking tube to proceed into an inner office, where he greeted them. He motioned them to chairs, and then sat down at his desk.

  On a table stood an array of surgical gloves and facemasks, under a sign that read, For Your Own Protection. Dr. Paraclete indicated the display with plastic fingers, but Thanakar shook his head. “It is . . . premature,” he said, looking around the room. The office did not seem particularly clean, though it stank of disinfectant. There were stacks of books and papers everywhere, and dust on the carpet near where Thanakar and Jenny sat.

  Inside the plastic suit, the doctor shrugged. “Contagion is a subtle thing,” he mumbled.