by Paul Park
“But we are good men, aren’t we? We do our best. We treat them kindly.”
“And if we were bad men and treated them cruelly, what defense could they have? That’s the point. What law restrains us? I have seen my own father knock a servant’s teeth out with his fist.”
“He must have been provoked.”
“He was not provoked at all,” exclaimed Thanakar, irritated by his friend’s lack of imagination. “He was a cruel man. Maybe not always, but after a lifetime in the army. It’s the life we lead. You know that for every two like us there are twenty like him. They think God himself gave them their tattoos.”
“Then I’m thankful to be unfit for military service. You should be too.”
“I should be. Do you know where we’re going?”
“I’m following you.”
They were walking arm in arm, because they had walked too far for the doctor’s bad leg. He stopped for a moment under a streetlamp in the small deserted street, to take his weight off it, to lean on Abu’s shoulder. Looking up into his face, he thought he saw some resemblance there to the prince’s sister. Seeing her fifteen days before, at the commissar’s dinner, he was surprised that brother and sister could be so unalike. Under the streetlamp, he took pleasure in reconstructing the memory of her features from her brother’s face. Prince Abu was balding, fat, sweet, ineffectual, sweating heavily even in the cold night, his eyes bright and rebellious under folds of unhealthy skin, as if they were held prisoner in his face. Again, his lips were fat, but under them his teeth were white and delicate, like pearls hidden in a flapping purse.
In his sister, it was as if the barriers of flesh were stripped away, and Thanakar could imagine that their skulls would look the same. Their teeth, their eyes were similar.
“Why are you looking at me?” asked Abu, smiling.
“Do you mind if we wait here for a minute?”
“If you like.”
In a way, her eyes were like her husband’s too. Perhaps that’s what bound the three of them together in that strange house, the lack of harmony between their faces and their eyes. She was a perfect example of her class, docile and submissive. It was part of the obligation of her name always to speak pleasantly. But even though by law and custom she was forbidden ever to make any bitter judgment or any harsh remark, yet her eyes complained. The brightness, the bitterness in them combined with the perfection of her manners to make a tension that seemed sexual.
“What are you thinking about?” asked Abu.
“Your sister.”
“Did you like her?”
“In a way.”
“I wish you could have married her. She is just your age.”
Since meeting her at dinner, Thanakar, too, had speculated what it would have been like if she had married him and not the old commissar. Their families were connected; it would have been a likely match, if not for his leg. He would have been a prince and married her, and his children would have inherited his house and income. He would have broken down the barriers of the courtesy that she had learned in school, and in time she would have become a free woman, capable of loving. It was a stupid fantasy, without detail in his mind, because as always his leg wouldn’t permit him to limp over the first if. His child would never wear his clothes. For this reason, he thought, it was too much to expect him to forget what small privileges he had. Abu could shake beggars by the hand, drink from polluted cups. What did he care?
Abu laughed. “How stern you look.”
“Shall we go?”
They walked away into the dark beyond the streetlamp, and at the end of a long alleyway they found a makeshift barricade of garbage and concrete, lined at the top with barbed wire and sheets of corrugated iron. They walked along it till it joined another, higher wall, and at the gate a wide, vacant face, shiny in the light of an acetylene lantern on a pole, looked out at them through a hole punched in the wall. It looked a long time out of bulging, expressionless eyes, motionless, unresponsive to inquiry, entreaty, threats, silence. Framed in the square hole, it seemed less a human face than a picture on a wall. It seemed deaf and blind. But Abu laughed, and at once the face changed, its lips twisting into a silent grin, revealing long antinomial teeth. That was all; there was no more movement, but from behind the wall came a shuffling and a banging, and the gate swung open on wire hinges. A man stood in the gap, gigantic and muscular, dressed only in a pair of cotton breeches, roughened to look like leather. Unlike the gatekeeper’s, his face was animate. And he spoke, too. Sound bubbled on his lips, nonsense syllables set to a frothy tune, as if he were laughing to music. With his palms, he beat a loud, complicated rhythm on his thighs and his chest, finishing with a roll across his belly, which he distended for the purpose. “In!” he shouted, in rhythm with the slaps. “In! In! In! In! In!” He stepped aside.
Summoning courage, the cousins stepped over the concrete threshold onto a kind of platform set into the top of the barricade. A number of men and women were standing around or sitting, wild, savage-looking, scantily dressed. But as usual with antinomials, there was no sense of menace about them as a group. Thanakar, as he entered, felt that he had interrupted nothing. The chairs were not set in any kind of order, nor was there any focus of activity—no cards, tables, bottles, food, fire, conversation, nothing to make a newcomer feel either uncomfortable or welcome. One woman with tangled hair and a long gaunt face was singing to herself, music with no words, only inarticulate combinations of vowels. Nobody seemed to listen. Each one seemed imprisoned in a separate world. Thanakar noticed with no particular sensation of alarm that they all carried weapons, cruel knives, or quivers full of arrows. One man was fixing an old gun. Thanakar thought: that they even have a wall and a barricade, that they even think to protect themselves, shows how they have changed. The way they sit together shows how they have not.
No one took any notice. The antinomials seemed lost in their own occupations, whether it was stamping on the floor, or staring at nothing, or making a single repetitive motion of their hand and wrist. Still, Abu and Thanakar passed through them warily, as if through a ward of prisoners. There was no reason to fear them. These people were not slaves to passion, or violence, or even comprehension. Yet physically, they were powerful and gigantic; the light shone along their shoulders and the long muscles of their backs. And though some looked ill and hungry, none looked weak. Besides, they had rejected reason, and there was no telling when one might reach out his long arm. It didn’t happen. Abu and Thanakar walked through, and though some looked up and stared at them, most never raised their heads.
The prince had been there once before, drunk. He scarcely remembered. But still, it was easy to find the way without asking questions, because the platform shelved into the open air, out from under a crude canopy. Standing on the edge, they looked from a great height over an abandoned railway yard, left from the days when freight trains used to run down to the docks through webs of tunnels under the city. People lived in there, a whole subterranean world. And here too: in abandoned boxcars and among rusted sidings, the antinomials had made their homes, though most preferred possessionless lives in the huge, ramshackle warehouses that fingered the yard—urban resonances of the cold communal halls they had left so long ago.
A spidery ladder led from the platform down into the yard. There was a spring wind off the river, smelling of mud and dirty water. It made the ladder tremble. Thanakar’s feet rang each steel step. It was very dark. Paradise was sunk into some clouds. And from down below, there were no strong sources of light, only glimmering lanterns and small fires. They climbed down past the mouth of one of the railway tunnels, 100 feet from upper lip to lower. Far inside, they saw a red glow, and shadows leaping on the walls. Some long-forgotten civic pride, left over from another season, had decorated the tunnel’s mouth with colossal seated statues of Angkhdt the God of Industry, one on either side. The brick was crumbling away, but you could still recognize the outlines of the great dogs’ heads, their snouts ten feet long. Th
e ladder wound down between them.
At the ladder’s end, Abu and Thanakar stood in the dark between the railway tracks. “What are we doing here?” asked the doctor.
“No biting,” answered Abu. “Still I wish we had a flashlight . . . if I were a slave to wishing, that is.”
They both laughed, and Abu uncorked his bottle. “Give me some,” demanded Thanakar.
“Just a taste. It’s very strong if you’re not used to it. Even if you are.”
“Just a taste.” The doctor held out his hand, and Abu passed the bottle. “Don’t get drunk,” he cautioned. “I can’t carry you back up.”
The doctor drank, gurgled and coughed. “My God, that’s horrible,” he said, as soon as he could speak. “What’s in it?”
The prince took the bottle back and drank a long, meditative swallow. He held the liquor in his mouth, as if trying to analyze the taste. “I want to walk,” he said, taking the doctor’s arm. He shook the bottle in his other hand, to hear how much was left.
They walked down towards the river, stumbling in silence between the railroad tracks. When Abu spoke, his voice was soft and serious. “I’ve often asked myself. I think it must be distilled from a mixture of the illusions it creates. It doesn’t remind you of anything else, and it leaves no aftertaste. That is because it takes away your judgment and your memory. It’s very thick, and so it makes your mind unclear. And it burns your throat. Sometimes, when you’ve drunk too much, it’s as if there were a fire all around you. You can feel it underneath your skin. I don’t know. They say it’s made from blood.”
“Blood?”
“But I don’t believe it. If it were, how could I drink it?”
They had reached a line of boxcars, pulled up on an old siding. In the doorway of each one burned a small lantern. People squatted, talking. As they passed, one stood up and shouted to them in a harsh voice.
“Biters,” whispered Abu. “Wine sellers and pimps. Take no notice.”
“Come!” shouted the biter.
“Ssh, take no notice,” repeated Abu. And then, “What a snob I am,” he said, laughing. Possessed of a sudden impulse, he walked over to the car. It was arranged as a kind of store, disorganized, but clean: bins of vegetables, tools, clothes. Bottles of liquor. The man who had called to them stood in the doorway, scowling down at them. The atheist’s cross and circle was branded on his forehead, and on his cheek, too, the scars persisted where he had been cut. He had been arrested more than once.
“Yes?” asked Abu. “What do you want?”
The man glared at him. Then, with a jerky dismissive motion, as if he hated them, he gestured towards the wares in his shop. The gesture included a ferocious young woman sitting on a packing crate.
“What is this?” asked Abu, pointing to one of the liquor bottles.
The man’s scowl deepened. “Wine,” he said sulkily.
“What’s it made out of?”
The man stared at him. “Wine!” he shouted. “Wine!” He kicked the bottle with his toe.
“But what’s it made out of?” asked Thanakar, smiling. “You made it yourself, didn’t you?”
The biter pulled his lips back to show his teeth, heavy and carnivorous, and gleaming white. He pressed his fists to both sides of his forehead and squatted down in the boxcar door until his face was level with theirs. They could hear a rumble of anger, deep in his huge chest. “Wine,” he said, carefully and slowly. “It’s made from wine.”
Abu pulled the doctor by the elbow, and they backed away into the dark. “I hope you’ll be satisfied with that,” the prince remarked as they turned away. “I don’t think you’ll get a better answer.” From the boxcar behind them came a roar of rage, and then a bottle hurtled past their heads, missing them narrowly, crashing up ahead.
“Wine,” remarked Abu.
“Unpredictable fellow,” commented Thanakar, taking the prince’s arm.
“Yes. It’s not fair. The biters have a hard life. The others hate them because they have no pride. Yet without biters, the rest would starve.”
The cousins walked on, reaching an area of the yard where there was more light. They saw antinomials hurrying and ambling in the same direction, down towards the river where a crowd was forming on the bank. Upstream, the monstrous skeleton of the harbor bridge stretched into the darkness, for the suburbs on the other bank were all abandoned. Nearer, a row of docks stuck out into the mud. Because of the Paradise tides, the river had completely disappeared. Where it had been, the mud was dozens of feet thick.
Where the crowd was, the embankment overlooked a platform slung on steel wires between two docks. In normal times it must have floated on the surface of the water, but now it hung suspended, fifteen feet above the mud. A bonfire burned on it, but besides that it was empty, though crowds of people sat and stood on the concrete embankment and on the docks on either side.
“We’re early,” said Abu. “I thought we’d be too late.” They reached the embankment, and he sat down happily and kicked his feet over the edge.
“I wish we had brought something to sit on,” said Thanakar, looking dubiously at the dirty ground.
“Oh well.”
A ladder hung from the underside of the platform down to someplace hidden in the mud, and as Thanakar sat down, some people climbed up from below and sat down by the fire. Abu scanned their faces, but they were far away and hard to recognize, until a huge golden cat leapt from the lap of one and sauntered carelessly across the stage to where a man was fiddling with the fire.
Thanakar looked around. The antinomials were completely silent, standing or sitting cross-legged, or hugging their knees. No one seemed part of any group. Again, there were no conversations, though some people hummed lazily to themselves. Yet they must have lived together their whole lives. Suffering and war, hunger and despair still had not given them a thing in common. In a crowd, their coldness and their isolation seemed uncanny.
A man stood on the platform and raised his hands. As a request for silence, it was unnecessary, yet even so it seemed to signal the beginning of something. He climbed back down the ladder into the mud, and after a while another man stood up and stepped into the center of the stage. In the glare of the bonfire, he seemed unnaturally tall and thin, and he carried a silver trumpet in his hands. He stood polishing it and smiling, and Thanakar could see the gleam of his teeth. Then he put it to his lips and blew a silver note. It lingered, and when it died away, he blew another, piercingly high. It seemed impossible for a man to have lungs that big, or else it was as if he had found a way of releasing the sound into the air without having to press it with his breath, as if in the metal of the warehouses and the great, gray bridge he had found a resonance, for the sound echoed all around them. Another note, low and deep. Thanakar was reminded of the Banaree fireworks above the fairgrounds, sending single, unmixed colors up to wash the sky.
Another note, pure and high, aching and limitless. At the end, the slightest modulation, just a tightening of the tone.
After that, he was silent for at least a minute while he inspected the bell of the instrument and smiled into the crowd. Then he played again, quiet and tentative, wisps of notes and melodies that went off nowhere. But out of each he collected something that he seemed to like, as if he were gathering threads into his hand, combing them out, rejecting some, twisting the rest together. For out of single notes and phrases the music acquired bulk, direction, tension. It stretched on and on.
Finally the trumpeter paused, his cheeks distended and sweaty. Bending back, he raised his trumpet to the sky and blew out a dirty spray of notes, full of double tones and squeaks. Then he was finished. Turning his back on the silent audience, he returned to his place and sat down, pulling his cloak around him, hiding his face in his hands.
“I’ve heard him before,” remarked the prince. “That last part is his signature. The song of himself. I remember it.”
“Clearly a neurotic type. Pass the wine.”
Abu gave the doctor
a curious look, but said nothing. Thanakar didn’t care. He wanted to feel the liquor’s kick. He wanted to feel as if a hole had been drilled in the top of his head and the liquor dribbled in, soaking some parts and not others. He wanted to feel it.
Musicians played, women and men. When they were finished, they wandered around the stage or climbed back down the ladder out of sight. After a long time, the platform was empty, save for two seated figures, one on either side, and the huge, pacing, golden cat. One rose to his feet and stalked to the center of the stage. He raised his arms, and his cloak slid away from his shoulders. He was naked underneath. He raised his hands in a lazy gesture, to scratch behind his neck, to pull the hair back from his face.
Thanakar recognized the boy that they had come to see. He stood casually, legs spread apart, hands on his hips. As Abu had said, he was handsome, with clean hard limbs and a delicate face, neither brutal nor empty like most in that crowd. Thanakar saw the first flickers of drunkenness in the color of the boy’s skin. It seemed ruddy and alive. And perhaps there was more to it than illusion, because for the first time the crowd seemed to be reacting, too, though the boy had done nothing yet. But people around them had lumbered to their feet, and some called out. They were staring at the dancer intently, as men might look into a fire, which has motion and energy even in stasis. For Thanakar, the drug had lit a fire under the dancer’s skin, so that when he started, with a lazy swirl of arms around his head, it seemed even after his arm had passed that Thanakar could see a burning trail behind it.
Thanakar stretched out his leg and looked around. Things had not changed since he was a child. Still he sat while others danced, his bad leg aching. He swallowed some drink and looked over at the prince’s face, as he stared at the stage with childlike absorption. It seemed unfair to envy him. Yet Thanakar could see why the prince was more at ease here than in any other part of the city. He resembled these people; he stared as they did, part of what they saw.
Thanakar took another sip to help him concentrate, because again he had lost himself, his thoughts vanishing to nothing. Why couldn’t he stare like that? The dancer somersaulted through the air, surrounded by a wheel of light, and the crowd moved and stamped. People cried out. The dancer was standing on his hands, his legs bent over almost to his head, tendrils of light coiling around him; it was incredible. Thanakar looked up at the sky, pursuing fantasies of loneliness. He felt there was a secret to loneliness, an attraction that only he out of all that crowd had failed to understand.
