His leg hurt. He turned his face into the sun, where it showed in a cleft between two hills. It would have been restful, he thought, to live in an antinomial country, where the laws of cause and effect had been repealed, where actions had no consequences. Here, he felt chained to many deaths—Charity Starbridge, the Pentecosts. Without his attention to distinguish them, they would have escaped notice. He thought: there is a disease in my hands which pollutes everything I touch.

The little girl beside him kicked her legs. Her upper lip was covered with a small moustache of snot. She stroked it with her forefinger.

Thanakar got to his feet. It was night by the time he reached home. A policeman had come by when he was out, but the antinomial had killed him and dragged his body into the princess’s room, where he sat perched on the man’s buttocks, playing his glass flute. The princess lay listening on her stomach on the bed. The little notes penetrated the walls, and Mrs. Cassimer put her fingers in her ears. “I couldn’t keep the servants,” she said. “They left. They’re gone. Oh, sir, you can’t leave me here with them. Promise me. The chauffeur had a pet fish. They ate it.”

Smiling, he promised, and then he broke his promise almost instantly, for when the purge came back in force that night, Thanakar let himself be taken. He met the soldiers outside in the corridor, where the music of the flute was less. They didn’t search the house.

The soldiers weren’t authorized to touch him, but they had brought a young curate with them, who tied a silken rope around his wrists. Thanakar’s neighbor, a retired brigadier, stood in his doorway in shirtsleeves, his hands on his hips. “What’s this?” he asked.

“I’m being arrested.”

“Filthy pigs. What’s the charge?”

“Adultery.”

“Lucky dog,” said the brigadier. “Sign of the times. Never would have happened in my time. Just as well.

What’s the news from the front?”

They chatted about relatives until the priest pulled Thanakar away.

* * *

At nightfall, violence overtook the day’s chaos in the streets, and gangs of armed men clashed at the street corners, under a light rain. The sky burned red, as if beyond every horizon the city was consumed.