The Cult of Loving Kindness (12 page)

 

Back in his own room, Deccan Blendish lay down on his mat, and in a little while his nausea had subsided. He selected a tetraqualamine tablet out of his bag of pills and sat up with a glass of water to swallow it. Langur Bey had given him an herbal remedy for diarrhea, a powder of ground roots; he took a pinch of it and chewed it dry. In his own room the air was cooler. The buzzing in his ears had stopped. Yet still he felt a certain grim presentiment, and to distract himself he took his fieldbook out of his knapsack, together with some mimeographs of source material. For almost the first time since his arrival he thought about his project—about the animal he hoped to find.

 

He was a sixth-semester student only, inexperienced, and because of that, he had not yet learned to put a distance between himself and his ideas. They seemed part of him, part of the structure of his brain. His theory of the hypnogogic ape was too instinctive to express, even though the desire to express it had made him light-headed and confused. “Are you familiar with the principles of evolution?” he might have said. But Cathartes was probably a creationist of some kind, or a derivationist. Cathartes would have laughed at him—the man was an associate professor of theology, a terrifying accomplishment for one so young.

The old woman brought him rice and laid it on the table. Sitting on the side of his bed, he pulled his notebook from his bag, comparing for the hundredth time the diagrams that he had made from the skulls of various primates: views from the front, the back, the side, the top of human skulls and monkey skulls. On another page, tables of measurements and notations in his indecipherable handwriting. And then a series of engravings: skulls of the Treganu, identified by their long cranial ridge. More human skulls. And last of all: a collection of sketches of the hypnogogic ape.

After he had eaten, he put on his student’s cap and set out for the forest. He had seen monkeys in the trees along the almond path the first day he had come.

There was no method to his theory, nor had he an idea of how to prove it. It depended from the master’s chance remark. “Our predecessor,” he had said. “Which can disguise itself with lies.” The master had not been, to say the least, a trained professional in the field. Nevertheless, that day Blendish went in search of evidence. He was carrying a daypack and a small pair of binoculars. Beyond the mangrove swamp he turned off of the path, and climbed laboriously down the slope.

As he did so, he became aware for the first time of a new ailment, or, rather, an aggravation of an old one. So when he reached the stream he rolled his pant leg above his knee, revealing a discoloration of the skin along his outer thigh, and a swelling there. By that time he was familiar with most spider sores and slug bites, but this was different. He had first noticed it two days before. An area upon his right thigh as big as the ball of his thumb had turned dark red, and it was itching terribly. The swelling seemed hard, as if there were something solid underneath his skin.

Standing by the water, he shrugged his shoulders with a new resignation. He pulled out a plastic tarpaulin from the daypack, which he laid over a tussock of black grass. Then he sat down on it, arranging his body so that he could see the outside of his knee, touch the offending sore—it seemed to have grown in the past day, even in the past few hours.

Suddenly he felt light-headed. He looked up at the trees. The pool before him was a tiny thing, just a thickening of the stream, the water slow and orange and full of algae. On the far bank a clump of marshgrass stirred in the soft wind, and beyond that the forest undergrowth began again. He was sitting in the shade. The track behind him led uphill toward the almond path, and he was surrounded on all sides by tulip trees—their thin, feeble trunks overburdened by their heavy heads, so that damp masses of foliage hung almost to the ground. In one place the sun was shining on the water.

“Don’t touch it,” said a voice.

He had been scratching at the sore place on his leg. Now he pulled his hand away, embarrassed. He balled his fingers up into a fist and then released them. He looked around the pond and back uphill.

There was silence for about a minute, and then the reeds on the far bank split apart. Not twenty feet away the girl stood in a clump of grass. The reeds grew up tall around her, and she was holding them apart. Her feet and legs were bare; she had pulled her white dress up and knotted it around her waist to keep it dry. Now she stepped into the slow water, and in a moment it had risen past her shins.

Deccan Blendish was conscious of a sudden sick feeling as he watched her cross the stream, a familiar sensation when he was near a woman. This time it was given a new intensity by the weakness of his stomach. She stepped across the stream and climbed out on the bank, then checked her legs for leeches. She was looking down at him with an expression on her face—what was it? Pity, shyness, curiosity, indifference? It was impossible to tell.

Her unkempt black hair was pulled back from her face; her brows were thick and dark. There was something inescapably romantic about her presence at the stream, alone with him. He was conscious of a small feeling of pleasure that was swiftly overcome by nausea.

She was looking at his leg. Now she stepped onto his plastic tarpaulin and squatted down, taking his fat knee easily between her hands. She worked the joint. She touched the sore place on his knee with a light forefinger; now it had grown even larger, but he didn’t notice it. He was conscious only of her smell as she bent over him, the smell of something edible and good to eat, some sweet kind of dessert, a spice cake or a custard caramel—her skin was dark.

“Have you brought your first-aid kit?” she asked.

She spoke the dialect of Charn better than anybody he had talked to from the village, except for Langur Bey. Just a few inches away from him, she raised her head to look into his face, and he was overpowered by the smell of her. The sickness in his stomach was more urgent now; he nodded his head weakly, and without a word she turned and rummaged in his daypack, pulling out a soft white case.

“What did you expect?” she said. “I was born up on the Caladon frontier.”

There was a pack of one-edged razor blades. She unwrapped one, sliding it out of its cardboard sheath. Then, from someplace at her waist, she produced a battered metal cigarette lighter, in whose weak flame she sterilized the blade. She gave him an inquiring look; he nodded and lay backward, supported on his elbows, and turned his face to the sky. He was concentrating on his stomach, hoping to suppress it by an extreme effort of will and by swallowing repeatedly. He didn’t even watch her when she slit the skin over the bulge upon his leg, didn’t even feel it. “There,” she said. “It’s simple. But it hurts like anything when they burst out.”

There was an insect on his thigh, perhaps two inches long. His leg was stretched out on the ground, his knee locked straight, and she was holding his leg still. He shuddered and breathed deep, but her hands upon his leg seemed to calm him, to keep him from moving. He looked down again—the insect, dark, wet, and bedraggled, seemed to be moving too, according to the rhythm of his breath. He watched one of its wings start to unfold; it was a butterfly.

 

Behind him on the slope, Rael was peering through the trees. He watched his sister bending down over the stranger’s leg. He watched her work the stranger’s knee. In his hand he gripped his broken stick of wood. He reached out and thumped it lightly on the ground. Not loud enough for them to hear; he turned and climbed back silently up to the path, perfectly silent in the complicated woods. Perfectly silent, he walked back to the village, his head cocked at an uncertain angle.

 

For several months he had been working with the bullock in the lower terraces. It was work he liked, and he was better at it than the others. By humming songs, he found he could influence the bullock’s meager thoughts, and with his hand upon its hump he found that he could guide it, for it responded to his strength.

That morning he had been working in one of the new rice fields below the village, which the new strangers had designed. That morning he had fastened chains around a teakwood log, but then he had gone away, down to the stream below the almond path, obeying an impulse that he didn’t understand. He’d left a boy working the bullock, but he’d made a mess of it. When Rael returned, the boy was gone. The log was stuck inside a hill of mud, invisible except for the chain that led to the beast’s yoke.

In the middle of the flooded field, the hot mud reached above his ankles. Opposite him, its front legs splayed apart, its big head lowered almost to the surface of the mud, the bullock stood its ground. Its heavy features were cast in an expression of distrust, of disappointment and intolerable stupidity; Rael found his broken stick was twitching in his hand, his mind full of the image of his sister Cassia, bending over the flabby stranger.

Ah, he thought. Is broke now wrongness in this town is touching all is breaking now apart.

As he bent down behind the animal to unhook the chain, the mud was slippery and disgusting around his feet, around his legs also. It gave off a hot, fermented smell; the chain was slick with it. He was humming a small sad wordless song to calm the beast, but he must have hit a bitter note, for suddenly, without warning, the bullock lurched forward with a grunt. Rael, his fingers in the chain, was pulled off-balance and slipped down into the mud; then he was up, his stick gripped in his fist. He seized the bullock by its nearer horn and yanked its head around until he was staring down into its dim-witted, bloated face. Then he was slashing at its face with all his strength, slashing at its hairless cheeks, trying to find its eyes. Tormented, it yanked free, but it was held fast by the anchored chain, and Rael was leaping around it, slashing at its eyes until it screamed.

Honest Toil was standing on the dike. Honest Toil was there. He came splashing down across the mud. “Oh, no, no, no,” he said, just as Rael took one last swipe at the beast’s head.

 

After she had cut the insect from his leg, the girl retreated to the far edge of the tarpaulin where she sat hugging her knees. He thought she was embarrassed to have touched him, embarrassed to have come so close—now she was shy. She hugged her knees, watching Blendish as he cleaned out his leg with hydrogen peroxide. Living here with only her brother to keep her company, perhaps—he thought—she did not understand his pockmarked ugliness. He carefully repacked his box of medications. He took off his spectacles and wiped them, and then returned them to his sweaty nose.

 

“I was born on the frontier,” she said. “Is that where you’re from?”

“I’m from the city.”

“Ah.”

She raised her head up from her knees. “I can remember Cochinoor,” she said. “That is the city, isn’t it? Sarnath took a job there in the post office, when my brother and I were children. I remember the main street. We were living in a room.”

Blendish also remembered Cochinoor, a stinking lumber town where he had drunk some of the water that had made him sick. “I am from Charn,” he said.

“Ah.”

In this syllable he thought he could detect a tone of longing and regret. “Ah,” she said, “why did you come?”

Suddenly, he didn’t know. Suddenly, his mind was back in Charn, and he was loitering there on the riverfront, and he imagined it as she might see it. He imagined standing on the waterfront, watching the lights come on across the river, listening to the street musicians underneath the trees, drinking beer and eating peanuts with the smell of all the food-stands in his nostrils; here in the forest, he had eaten practically nothing but lentils for a month. Lentils and pounded yam.

The girl was staring at him, hugging her knees, and it occurred to him with a sick nervous rush that he could use her interest. There was something in her face, and it occurred to him that if he chose the right sequence of words and acts, then he could touch her there upon that plastic tarpaulin, she would let him and be glad. If he could make her taste some of that beer, smell some of that ginger sambal—it was possible; he looked at her and then he dropped his eyes.

“I’m studying a kind of ape,” he said unhappily. “I wonder, have you ever seen any large apes down here?” An idiotic question, and he felt her gaze slide past him momentarily toward the marshgrass. Then she looked back.

“Apes,” she said.

Her head was small, her neck was long and brown. There was a string around the bottom of her throat, a medallion on a string. “What’s that?” he asked, at random. She put her hand up to her throat.

“It’s my lucky coin.”

It was a small copper medallion. “Let me see.”

She looked at him. Then she shifted her position and moved toward him, leaning forward so that once again he could smell the sweetness of her skin. Her skin was smooth and sweet like custard, and the top of her dress had slipped open an inch or so. Again, Blendish felt a sudden rush of nausea. He told himself: This is the moment. This is the moment, and it will not come again. Panicked, he reached out his hand. But instead of touching, as he meant to do, her cheek under her ear, instead of brushing back a strand of hair out of her eyes, instead of reaching out to stroke her shoulder, instead of stroking, as he meant to do, the heart-breaking distension of her breast, he allowed himself to be deflected at the final instant, and at the final instant he grabbed at the medallion as if at an amulet—something to save him from irrevocable shame. He wanted to preserve the moment when she had not yet rejected him, even if by doing so he risked and ruined everything. And he was risking it and ruining it, he could tell. Already by the time his fingers touched the metal, something had changed. He was chafing the copper medallion between his fingers, thinking something had changed—what was it? She still sat as before, still inside the circle of his reach. Her face still kept its serious look, as if she still took him seriously. Something had changed, and perhaps it was just wishful thinking; he clutched at the medallion, feeling in his heart and in his belly a mixture of relief, nausea, and regret, while his mind repeated dumbly: Abu Starbridge, Abu Starbridge. The reverse side of the medallion was engraved with a mark he recognized: the shining sun in splendor, the mark of Abu Starbridge.