The Cult of Loving Kindness (35 page)

They lay immobile, side by side. They were too sore and sensitive to tolerate even the slightest movement now. Even the slightest chafing was enough to make them cry out loud. His testicles contained an emptiness that was like hunger. Their lips were sore from kissing, even after they had oiled their mouths with oil from the lamp. His tongue had a raw place along the underside.

He was as deep inside of her as he could penetrate, yet it was not enough. It was a pitiful few inches, and even though it felt like the whole world, still it was nothing. She had secrets on every square centimeter of her skin, and he could search for them his whole life and not find them. He stared into her eye. What was at the bottom of that shaft? What thoughts were in that brain, what feelings in that heart, each so separate, so immune to touch? Joined by their one small aching link, even their bodies were like grease and water. “Ah,” she said. “I can’t stand it,” and she pulled away.

It was evening. It was dark outside the tent. Light came from a single lamp beside the mats and pillows where they lay. A single fingernail of flame reached up to scratch the belly of a small bronze god, and scratch along the side of his big phallus. It was as big as his arm, almost.

He sat cross-legged, a pool of oil between his legs, a small wick floating in the pool. “Ah, God,” said Cassia. She rolled onto her back.

A little wind was tugging at the canvas of the tent. All day it had been hot. The sheets, tangled at their feet, were damp with sweat—cool now, and their bodies too were cool and dry, crusted with salt. Without touching her, Rael ran his hand along the curve of her body, several inches from her skin. He ran his hand down over her plump throat. Without touching her, he cupped each breast along its outer side, where it had flattened down from its own weight. Her stomach had sunk down. Without touching her, he stroked it. Then he ran his hand over the soft mound of her belly, the soft mound of her sex.

He changed the direction of his body, and put his cheek down on her thigh. “Ah, God,” she said, “no more.” And so he raised his head, squinting in the darkness toward the flickering flame and then beyond it. Shadows moved along the outside of the tent.

A light burned out there too, perhaps a lantern. Softly, tentatively, with his dry tongue, he licked along the outside of her thigh until she stopped him. She sank her fingers into the tangles of his hair. She clasped her fingers tight around his hair and held him still. “No more,” she said, her eyes shining in the lamplight.

She was cold. Under his lips her skin was tight and bumpy; she let go of him and then sat up, fumbling with the bedclothes, pulling the sheets around her, hiding her body for the first time that day.

There was a bowl of water by the statue of Beloved Angkhdt. She drank from it and offered it to him, but he paid no attention. Instead he pulled open the flap of the tent and crawled outside.

A basket of food had been left next to the entrance with a plate over the top of it to keep the bugs away. Rael stood up. Naked, he walked into the center of the glade. All was quiet. The embers were still warm upon a bald place in the grass. Men had slept there for the past few nights, guards for him and Cassia. Now they were gone.

Beyond, down past the burned-out village, he could hear voices. In the fig grove the soldiers of Paradise had set up their tents. He could see the glimmer of cookfires where they prepared whatever miserable roots they had collected from the forest.

Naked, he raised his right hand above his head, stretching the muscles of his back. He reached down to touch his aching sex. Someone was here, someone was lurking in the bamboo, squatting in the manzanita—he could feel them squatting there. Whoever they were, they had to be used to seeing his body. He understood the game he had to play before these people. He had to fuck their goddess, and the more the better. It was the only compensation they expected for their food and for their careful treatment. It was the only circumstance from his past life to have seeped through into their legend.

It was a strange sad game. It angered him to have to play it. On him and Cassia now, he always felt the touch of other people, the breath of other people. Sometimes at night he had gone down among the cult, and watched them play the tragedy of Abu Starbridge before an audience of soldiers. Now it was like that for him and Cassia, and it was robbing something from them now, even now in the most urgent time. This urge to be with her, this urge to touch her every minute—what was it? Surely he had felt it his whole life. But this physical hunger—was it because time was short? Maybe there was more to it than that.

He lumbered in a circle, to give the squatting audience a complete view.

Cassia had made him angry. “Do you remember, do you remember?” she had said. She had described her tower bedroom in old Charn. She had described her prison cell. She had described their climb up to the Temple of St. Basilon. She had described their journey to the crossroads where Mr. Sarnath found them, where they had been born into the world. And all these words had meant nothing to him, nor did they bring back a single image. Nor did it ignite a single feeling except anger when she said, “You were with me there.” Her eyes would be far away, full of the reflection of that time, and as always he was like a beggar at her feast because it was all dark to him, and every single moment of it was dark. He would make love to her until she cried out, and even then part of her was rutting in her tower chamber with a stranger who had been himself.

He went back to the bucket at the entrance to the tent. It was made of silver, carved in a geometric pattern. Everything they gave her was made of silver now, and they were always given the best food, more than they could eat while the rest went hungry.

He lifted the cover and let the steam escape. They had found some rice somewhere, and cooked it with a sweet potato. He thrust his hand down into the wet, hot grains. “Food,” he said. The lamp inside the tent was burning brighter, and he could see Cassia through the mosquito net, kneeling by the statue.

“In the wind now coming in the dark,” he said. “Is a tree leaf flutter now.” He breathed the cool and pungent air. In the distance he could hear the river, the wind stirring the trees. Bugs in the grass.

He cocked his head. Competing now with the night sounds, he could hear chanting from inside the tent, part of the song cycle of prayer that Cassia now offered daily to the little god. “Come out,” he said, but he could see her sit back on her heels, her head bowed low. He pushed the net aside and crawled back into the tent, wanting to disturb her.

“Rice,” he said, but she was saying words that made no sense:

“Nutmeg from the Orient,
Candied ginger will I bring you.
Topaz, diamonds, and quartz,
From the mines at Ranakpore,
From the turbaned Negro’s toil,
From the fabled mountainside,
From the bottom of the sea,
Pearls as big as plover’s eggs.
I will bring a bag of pearls,
Enough to spell my name out on the ground,
And I will spell it ANGKHDT,
And you will say my name,
And you will say my name out loud.”

He put the bucket down beside her. He scooped out a dollop of the rice onto the plate and started eating. She had lit some incense, and she had sprinkled some powder on the lamp to make it burn up bright.

“Tonight is the last night,” she said.

The food stuck in his throat. There was no moisture in it. It was dry as sand. “I don’t say it to hurt you,” she went on. “But it is the truth.”

She sang another song while he lay back upon the pillows, chewing slowly. Then he cleared his mouth. “Go,” he said. “Is going through the trees. Foot and foot and foot, in the wild run.”

“No,” said Cassia.

“No,” repeated Rael.

“I can’t be what I am not,” she said.

In the bucket was a silver spoon. She took a spoonful of the rice and swallowed it. “This is drugged to make us sleep,” she said.

In fact, after just a few mouthfuls a lethargy was spreading over his body. He picked up a glass ewer from the floor. It was full of water, and he drank it dry.

“Don’t let us be apart tonight,” she said. “I know this is hard for you.”

There was a bronze crown between the statue’s feet. Cassia poked the stick of incense through the tines and left it balanced, so that the column of smoke divided around the muzzle of dog-headed Angkhdt. She had the spoon in her right hand, and with her left she reached out to touch Rael’s leg. “Don’t let us be apart,” she said.

And so he put his arms around her. He stripped away the sheet from her soft body, and after an hour they made love again, softly and sleepily as the drug took hold. At different times, each one was asleep, but the other was so gentle that it didn’t matter.

Soldiers took him to a shower in the courtyard. He stood in it and watched the cold water bead on his body while they took his clothes away to burn them. He could tell that they were frightened. They didn’t let him use a towel. They just turned off the water. He stood on a slotted wooden platform in the courtyard and let the dark air dry him. He lifted up his hand, examining it in the light of a single naked bulb, which was set into a corner of the yard.

He had kept his wallet when they took his pants. He had kept his spectacles, his mealcard, his wristwatch, and his student ID. When the shower stopped, they were arranged on the bench next to his new clothes. Even the currency was there.

He put on his spectacles and arranged his belongings in the pockets of his new pants. They were made of comfortable black cotton, loose and light; he admired the fabric as he dressed himself. The pads of his fingers seemed unnaturally sensitive as he buttoned up his shirt and put the hood around his neck. The pads of his feet seemed unnaturally sensitive as he slipped on a pair of rope-soled shoes. The axe hung from a loop in his belt.

“You in there. You finished?”

He was finished. He caught a glimpse of himself in a broken triangle of mirrored glass, set into the stucco of the wall. He caught a glimpse of himself in the face of the guard who opened the wooden door and stood aside to let him pass. It was different; he could feel the difference just by putting on the clothes. The clothes made him understand how to walk and where to put his hands. The costume made it just a little more real—the black hood around his neck, the axe in his belt. The costume told the audience that the performance had begun. Now suddenly, the gathering man had stepped onstage—his shaved head, his pockmarked face stripped to the bone, his eyes red with broken blood vessels, his teeth too heavy for his mouth. He was the incarnation of dark death, his flesh seething with parasites, and he could see it in the guard’s disgust, the way he lifted up his hand.

But this new sharpness to his senses, this was not part of the costume. It was not part of the act. They took him out and put him into a car with plastic seats and an electric motor. An intolerable hum was rising from the gearbox. Deccan Blendish put his fingers into his ears. When the soldier let the brake out, they moved slowly down the roadbed, and the metal wheels were screaming on the crushed volcanic stones. He could feel it in the inside of his ear, and it was as if the inside of his ear was a house with separate chambers, and in each chamber lived a sound, and he could move back and forth up the corridors, opening doors and closing them, mixing sounds in any combination: the squeal of the metal on the rock. The muttered questions of one soldier in the seat behind him. The responses of the other.

Those were the big rooms. But there were numerous small cubbyholes and closets; as the car headed down the roadbed toward the gate, he rushed back and forth. In one room, a row of boxes, and each contained a single insect. There to his left, an owl in the woods. The crack of a branch. He dug his fingers tight into his ears. And then he was moving backward down the corridor toward the cellar door. He leaned his cheek against it. Inside, the whisper of his lungs. The thumping of his heart upon the cellar steps. Down below, a scurrying in the blackest dark.

Or his eyes. It was true—the circle had contracted. The parasites had closed out the periphery. But in that circle everything was clear. It was as if he were inhabiting a world of darkness, a world that nevertheless contained a single spotlight. Whatever that light touched, stood out with a painful starkness.

He looked into the woods on either side of the descending road. Electric lanterns shone at intervals, hung from branches or else perched on top of poles. And when the spotlight hit them there was a reaction. The compass of his vision filled with brittle, crystalline, prismatic patterns, spreading out into the leaves.

But when they drove up to the fence he couldn’t tolerate it. He put his head down on the plastic dashboard. He pulled his hood around his face. He made a space of darkness for his eyes. In it he began to see what it might mean to be the gathering man, and to be walking backward down the path toward death. In that space of darkness he could feel himself receding from the world. The strings which held him to the world were snapping one by one, and these last strings, the five strings of his senses, were stretching and aching and twisting now. He didn’t have to look. Even without looking he could smell the beery sentries at their watch. He knew the brands that they were drinking. He could tell their ages.

The car scraped to a halt and he could hear through the plug of his fingertips and through his thumping heartbeat the murmured conversation. “What the fuck is this?” they asked. And a little later: “I can’t believe this shit.” They pulled him from his seat, stood him up straight, and stripped his hood away.

The razorwire fence, electrified and sparking gently, cast a long bright shadow of intersecting lines. At intervals concrete towers rose through the trees; he stood between the guardtowers of the gate. He looked through into the blessed darkness on the other side.