Sugar Rain by Paul Park Page A

knuckles to his forehead. Then she remembered her new clothes.
    “What do you want?” asked the gnome.
    “Please, sir, can you take me down?”
    He didn’t answer, and Charity was afraid she had gotten the accent wrong. He shook his head and stared at her, and then he said, “That guard tell me that girl run loose up here. That girl break in. That girl you?”
    “No sir.” She took a step backwards, suddenly glad that Raksha Starbridge had come up beside her. And when he put his hand on her shoulder, she didn’t pull away. “She’s with me,” said the parson. He winked.
    Deeply suspicious, the gnome peered out at the parson’s ragged cassock, the neck of his wine bottle sticking from his pocket, his filthy hair, his broken fingernails. Then, slowly, as if unwillingly, he put his fist to his forehead and bowed low. He was powerless to do otherwise, no matter what he thought. He stepped back into the car and gave them space to enter.
    All the way down, Charity could feel the pressure of his stare itching between her shoulderblades. The elevator was a small one, paneled with exotic carvings, upholstered in green velvet. The lights had burned out, but the gnome had hung a lantern of his own devising from a hook in the ceiling; it was touching, thought Charity, how closely he still clung to his duty, even though the city was on fire and most of his masters had already run away. These positions were hereditary. No doubt the gnome had spent his whole life in that car. Perhaps he had even been born on the overstuffed banquette. He carried some priest’s crude rendition of an elevator’s button panel etched into the skin below his little finger.
    Charity had covered her own palms with paint; they felt sticky and unclean as she tightened and relaxed her fists. She thought she could understand something of the gnome’s deep disapproval, his fear of pollution, his feeling of possessiveness about his little car. She too felt polluted by the parson’s hand on her bare shoulder. When the doors opened on the ground floor, she jumped out quickly. “Please,” she said, turning back towards the gnome to apologize, but then she stopped. Without thinking, she had used the honorific appropriate to their stations, a princess and a palace servant. She stopped when she saw the look of horror on his face, but the parson was behind her and grabbed her by the arm. “Filthy slut,” he muttered. “Don’t give yourself airs.”
    Then he pulled her away through the enormous gallery at the bottom of the building. Their footsteps echoed over the empty tiles, stirring up eddies of tiny green birds. Clouds of birds migrated through the distant vaults, following constellations set into the stone, mosaic figures of the zodiac. Charity looked up with an open mouth. Wineshops, bookshops, dress shops, and delicatessens stretched around her in a circle. Many were boarded up and dark, but the lights were on in a few restaurants, and in a few of the offices priests and seminarians kept late hours, dozing over the ledgers and accounts.
    Charity stared up, entranced. “Is that the sky?” she whispered, but the parson didn’t answer. Instead, he dragged her away, onward through passageways and colonnades, through waiting rooms and mirrored halls. And finally they passed through the first gates, into a vast deserted courtyard under the open sky. It was almost morning.
    Underneath the statue of Cosro Starbridge and his nine sons, they rested in a thicket of stone legs. Charity was eager to go on. The parson lagged behind, leaning against the ankle of the youngest son.
    He hung back, out of breath, and with trembling fingers he unscrewed the top of his pint of wine. He threw his skinny head back to taste the last of it, and then he pointed forward, the bottle still in his hand. Across the yard stood an ancient gate, flanked on both sides by seated statues of Beloved Angkhdt. A quote from holy scripture was carved into the pediment between them: “Set