The Cult of Loving Kindness (36 page)

One week ago, two weeks ago—when had he last come through that gate? It had been daylight then. Coming from the village, sitting with Cathartes in the university car, he had passed by acres of sweet potato fields. He had passed through the security barracks—how different it had seemed. Now black night had come. In his hospital bed in Carbontown, he had achieved a metamorphosis. Or maybe not. Maybe it was only that he had lost so much flesh. Maybe there was an essential core of death in every man and woman, covered up by layers of life. Maybe as time went on you shed each layer like a skin, until you died. Maybe it was so gradual that you didn’t notice. But with him, in one week or two weeks they had peeled away a layer, many inches thick.

One said: “He’s got a map. But I’m supposed to take him to the camp.”

“Don’t get killed.”

“The prof says there’s a truce tonight. This one—he’s the messenger.”

“Is that right? They were stealing food this afternoon.”

He was the messenger. They were ejecting him into the world, hoping that whatever rag of skin he still retained would last the night. He put his fingers on the axe blade at his waist, feeling with minute clarity the imperfections in the steel.

The guard talked. Deccan Blendish stepped through the gate. The wind brought him a hundred forest smells. Off to his right, the flooded fields.

He was the messenger. Yet it was not his plan to kill a woman in an isolated tent at five-fifteen precisely. Someone who had helped him. Someone whom already he’d betrayed. Lying in his hospital bed while Cathartes talked, he had rehearsed how he would say yes. Then he would take his money and his wallet and strike out along the path toward Cochinoor, toward Charn. He had the map. Oh, yes in Charn he had been happy, in that fellowship of scholars, and in the evenings he had walked on the embankment, eating peanuts in his waddling body, thick with layers of life. Eating peanuts through sheer loneliness and listening to the street music near the Lamont Theatre while the lights on the marquee shone green and white.

The breeze brought him a hundred dirty smells. Yet Charn was out there somewhere with its hot grease and its ginger and its peanuts, perhaps touched by a cousin of this same wind. Right now, he thought, fat lonely men were walking underneath the lights of the embankment.

And now he wanted a new plan, because he was dying. He needed a new plan, to go with his new clothes. He ran his finger up and down along the blade. “One stroke,” Cathartes said. He had to smile. He would need all the painkillers in all the world to accomplish such a thing.

“You come on. You—asshole—yeah, let’s get this over. It’s a seven-mile walk.” The guard passed him and went on down the road. Blendish followed, and in a little while a path split off into the woods.

“Asshole, this way,” said the guard. Blendish followed him into the trees.

 

Cassia woke up. She kept an image from her dream. It was the woodman standing over her in his black robe; his bright axe was raised above his head.

 

She lay back on the pillows until she could no longer feel her heart. Rael was asleep, his mouth open. Breath whistled through his lips, a comforting sound. She put her hand out to his shoulder and touched the pack of muscle there.

Now she was coming to the end. She raised herself up onto her elbow and looked at the image of Beloved Angkhdt, sitting cross-legged around the burning flame. The lamp cast a wavering shadow on the side of the tent—dog-muzzled, black, ominous. How can we give these things such power? For a moment she was Cassia again. For a moment the bishop was asleep, still sleeping in her prison cell the night before her execution. For a moment, the burden of her was gone—so beautiful, magnanimous, and full of destiny, the center of a world striving toward death, her death the spark of the new revolution. For a moment all that was like the woodman in her dream, empty, inflated with emptiness, and as she lay back on the pillow and the time ticked by, she wondered whom they had found to play the other part in the performance, to mimic the killer while she mimicked his victim. What small creature would be struggling inside the woodman’s robe?

Miss Azimuth had given her a wristwatch. It lay beside her pillow, the hands at ten to four. More than enough time. She lay back. And to compose her mind, she ran it through an exercise that her father had taught her in the happy days. First with her eyes open, then with her eyes closed, she tried to reconstruct the face of a person she had known. She tried to fill her mind with it and to exclude all else, and to rebuild as if from the skull outward, layer by layer, the skin, the cheekbones, the complexion, and the eyes, nose, ears of Palam Bey, of Mayadonna Bey, of her old teacher Langur Bey. And of her father, Mr. Sarnath. The point was to allow no trace of sentiment to pollute memory—these were not images, these were not judgments of men. These were the men themselves, as close as she could come now they were dead, and she was careful to exclude any regret, any pleasure, any sadness, any sense even of recognition as she rebuilt Mr. Sarnath’s long-ridged head, his long nose, his dry eyes. The point was to allow a thought to grow inside that head, a product of that brain which would be separate from her thoughts.

Her imagination faltered. She was full of warm, soft feelings of regret. She was sleepy now, drifting toward sleep again, and as her thoughts started to tumble in slow motion away from her control she felt something change, a chasm open up, because somewhere on the other side of her mind now the bishop was stirring. The image in her mind was no longer Mr. Sarnath, but some other old man with tattooed hands, a golden robe, a shrunken scavenger face—so different.

“Ah,” she murmured. Cold, perhaps, she rolled away off of the pillow, and put her head on Rael’s shoulder. Though it was not quite Rael anymore. Though his face and smell and body were the same, her last thought as she fell into sleep was that he had changed and the bed had changed and everything had changed, and at last it was the bishop’s wild unnamed lover lying by her side.

 

Deccan Blendish sat beside the forest path two miles away. The guard had gone on ahead. Blendish could see his lantern shining in the trees; he had no need of it. He had stopped to rest. He sat on a log, and with his axe he chopped at the bark. He looked from side to side, because all around him creatures lurked now in the dark periphery of his cramped eyes. He thought to surprise them by quick erratic changes in his line of sight. It did no good; they were too fast. The wood was full of questing life, of seething darkness. Thick heavy branches hung above him—masses of slick leaves, their undersides gleaming with reflected starlight. Clusters of white locusts or of roaches, two or three hundred of them in a trembling ball were packed into a crack between the branches. And all he had to do was look at them to make them disappear, to make them explode into a winged flurry too fast for him to follow. A luna moth slid through the air, ghostly, transparent, swooping down toward him; it was gone. Tarsiers and bats whistled around him; he knew they were there. The undergrowth was full of larger beasts, and they were fearful and conniving too, dissolving into darkness when he turned his eyes to them. And maybe it was because they knew he was dying, and already he was living as a guest in this strange world. And maybe they knew that although one part of him was weaker by the moment, another part of him was stronger, a dangerous erratic part, the woodman, the gathering man. Now he was holding the axe in his hand, and he was chipping at the bark of the downed log.

 

“Asshole,” came the voice of the guard, brilliant and piercing. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

The guard was coming back now, his lantern wandering through the trees. “Come on,” he said. “I don’t want to be all night.”

No, thought Blendish, not all night. It was not safe. Not here—this was the lair of the hypnogogic ape, who could alter the perceptions of its predators, its prey. This was the lair of the hypnogogic ape, from whom all men and women had inherited that piece of darkness at their core. When the gods came down to mix their golden blood with the polluted earth, this was the result—this bulging net of darkness, this forest of deceit. All around him, the hypnogogic ape was chattering in the bush just out of earshot. It was grinning in the bush just out of sight. Dark shapes scurried away from the guard’s approaching step.

Deccan Blendish got up, his axe in his right hand. And with his left he grabbed hold of the guard’s sleeve, making the lantern waver, making long patterns of light spin around them. He peered up into the guard’s face, and so great was the power of his expectation that he actually saw the mocking worried cheeks and little eyes of the hypnogogic ape, as if they had been copied from his drawing onto the guard’s blank face.

“I’ve got you,” he whispered. “Now I’ve got you.” But he was premature. The guard dropped the lantern and stepped back.

“You goddamned lunatic,” he said. And then he was moving backward up the path as Blendish came toward him. The lantern, cocked under a bush, shed only a steep angle of light, and so the guard disappeared as though he’d stepped out of the world as Deccan Blendish stumbled up the path, his axe held out, his mind empty as an open hand. It wasn’t until he had gone too far, until he had reached the noiseless river, until he was standing on the riverbank that a thought began to coalesce and he grabbed hold of it. Cathartes has done this, he thought. Cathartes has destroyed me. Big-penised Cathartes, and the girl.

He was at the river, and in time he reached the camp. He walked through the camp among the fig trees, and no one challenged him. He was the gathering man; they were expecting him. The soldiers of Paradise were waiting in their tents, and they were lying sleepless. They were listening to his tread. He found the glade, and the glade’s edge. Aching, tired, and in need of medication, he squatted down among the undergrowth to wait.

 

Rael woke up with an urge to urinate. Cassia was sleeping with her face against his arm. Her mouth was open, her cheek and lips pushed out of shape against his arm. The pillow under her was damp. A strand of hair was stuck along her teeth. And when he tried to take his arm away she grunted in her sleep and said something he couldn’t understand. Then she turned her face away onto the other side.

 

He looked for a while at the sweet curve of her skull, her black tangle of curls, the semicircular indentations that her curls had left upon her cheek. He put his hand out, almost touching her. But her slumber barely covered her; even now she was muttering, and a crease had appeared between her eyebrows. He didn’t want to wake her, and so he sat up instead, suddenly grateful that the night had passed without danger, grateful for the small grey light which seeped into the tent through the triangular opening. It had all been nonsense, and all Cassia’s fear had been nonsense, part of the world of nightmares that had put that crease between her brows—almost he woke her then. But his bladder was full. He thought that if he emptied it, then he could wake her in a different way, at least if their sore bodies would allow it. They were free now—that he knew. It was the tenth day, and the myth that had held them captive for a time was dissolving in the light. It had been her dream, and now this was his—to make love and then to go away. To take some food and go together. To travel northward to that high place in the mountains where the snow was on the crest. Where the cooling wind would bring you a stray wisp of sound.

The air was thin in that sparse landscape, and it was far away from this wet forest and these tangled thoughts, this dense articulation which had kept them separate and dark, which had hampered them and pricked them. These words to which they had surrendered such importance—in the accumulating light he could see a path through to the end of them.

How could they have thought that these words meant something? How could they have given in to them? How could they have let themselves surrender to temptation, when the earth was full of empty spaces? He crawled out of the tent. There was a white mist on the ground. The sky was white.

He walked over to the edge of the glade. Again he could sense people around him, squatting in the bushes, waiting for him. As he became aware of them, he became aware also of himself, the movements of his body. He yawned, he stretched, he rubbed his arms in the cool air, and midway through each motion it acquired a small exaggeration, a small untruth. He spread his legs and leaned into a bush to urinate, aware of people near him; he closed his eyes. The act seemed to require concentration; he could feel himself frowning, and the spray just begun when he heard a sound behind him, so gentle, not a smash or a bang but just a sudden intake of breath, as of someone suddenly awakened. With part of his mind he had been waiting for it all along.

Many things happened at once. He turned, and saw a shadow slip out of the tent and into the bamboo. A chatter of automatic rifle fire, then silence. He could feel the urine on his leg. And he was running toward the tent, again aware of every movement, every step, because there were people around him in the bushes and the mist. Brother Longo was there, suddenly, and the old puppet crow woman, and the priest. Mama Jobe was there, and then some soldiers. And they weren’t doing anything except just standing there. They didn’t go inside the tent. They left that for him.

The statue of Angkhdt had been kicked over, and the oil was soaking through the canvas floor. Cassia lay on her back, in a tangle of bedsheets. Her eyes were open, and a strand of hair was caught between her teeth. And she was full of life—her eyes were open and her mouth was smiling and making silent words. She reached out one arm toward him and he stumbled down across her body, and he was grabbing her and holding her as she struggled for words. Her lips were by his ear. She had one arm around his neck, but with the other she was holding a wad of cloth against her belly—at first when he saw the yellow stain spread through her fingers he thought maybe it was the spilt oil, and then maybe it was some of his own urine which he could still feel on his leg, and then maybe when there seemed so much of it he knew it was her amber-colored blood, and it was leaking out of her.