Other Earths Read online

  “You must be good at what you do,” I said. “To be so successful at such a young age.”

  “I’ve won awards,” she said, grinning broadly.

  “I would have thought, then, you could have found investors to bail you out.”

  “As I said, I was a mess. Certifiably a mess. Once they noticed, investors wouldn’t touch me. I’ve calmed down a great deal since, and I’m ready to have at it again.”

  She fit into the “too eager” category, yet I found her appealing. The Cambodian men burst into applause, celebrating something one of them had done or said. The light was fading on the river, the far bank darkened by cloud shadow. I asked Lucy if she understood the requirements of the position.

  “Your sign was somewhat vague,” she said. “I may be misreading it, but I assume ‘companion’ is another word for girlfriend?”

  “That’s right.”

  “May I ask a question?”

  “Go for it.”

  “Surely a man of your accomplishment must have a number of admirers. You’re not bad looking, and you obviously have money. I don’t understand why you would be in the market.”

  “It’s in the nature of an experiment,” I said. “I can assure you that you won’t be harmed or humiliated in any way.”

  “A literary experiment?”

  “You might say.”

  “You know, I didn’t intend to seek the position,” she said. “I was just . . . intrigued. But I must admit, having Thomas Cradle on my resum’ would do wonders for my self-esteem.” She had a deep drink of her gin-and-tonic. “If the position is offered, I do have two conditions. One you’ve already spoken to—I’m not into pain. Short of sea urchins and safety pins, I’m your girl. I believe you can expect me, given a modicum of compatibility, to perform my duties with relish.”

  “And the second condition?”

  “Instead of leaping into the fire, as it were, I’d prefer we took some time to become comfortable with one another. Give it a day or two. Will that be a problem?”

  “Not at all.”

  One of the Cambodian men bought us fresh drinks. He spoke no English, but Lucy chatted him up in his own tongue and then explained that his friend had received a promotion, and he would like us to join them in a toast. We complied, and, after bows and prayerful gestures all around, I asked if she had studied Cambodian.

  “I pick up languages quickly. One of my many gifts.” She gave another lopsided smile. “I do have some bad habits I should mention. I tend to run on about things. Talk too much. Just tell me to stuff it. People have been telling me that since I was a child. And I’m a vegetarian, though I have been known to eat fish. I’m picky about what I consume.”

  “My cook’s big on veggies,” I said. “Too much so for my tastes.”

  “You have a cook?”

  “A Vietnamese kid. Deng. He’s crew and cook. The pilot’s an old guy in his sixties. Lan. He speaks decent American, but he doesn’t talk to me much . . . not so far, anyway.”

  “La-de-da!” said Lucy. “Next you’ll be telling me you have your own private ocean.”

  A breeze stirred the placid surface of the river, but it had no effect on the humidity in the restaurant.

  “There’s one thing more,” Lucy said. “I’m afraid it may erase whatever good opinion you’ve formed of me, but I can’t compromise. I smoke two pipes of opium a day. One at noon, and one before sleeping. Sometimes more, if the quality’s not good.” She paused and, a glum note in her voice, said, “The quality is usually good in these parts.”

  “You have an adequate supply on hand?”

  She seemed surprised by this response, unaware that her confession had put her into the lead for the job. “I’ve enough for the week, I think.”

  “Is opium the actual reason you want to extend your trip?” I asked.

  “It’s part of it. I won’t lie to you. I recognize I’ll have to quit before I return to London. But it’s not the main reason.”

  Another backpacker, a short woman with frizzy blond hair, entered and, after peering about, approached the bartender. I signaled him to send her away. Lucy pretended not to notice.

  “Would you like to see the boat?” I asked.

  An alarmed look crossed her face, and I thought that this must be a major step for her, that despite her worldliness she was not accustomed to giving her trust so freely. But then she smiled and nodded vigorously.

  “Yes, please,” she said.

  The sun was beginning to set as I rowed out to the Undine, moored some thirty yards from shore. A high bank of solid-looking bluish gray cloud rose from the eastern horizon, its leading edge ruffled and fluted like that of an immense seashell, a godly mollusk dominating the sky; fragments of dirty pink cloud drifted beneath, resembling frayed morsels of flesh that might have been torn from the creature that once inhabited the shell, floating in an aqua medium. The river had turned slate colored, and the houseboat, with its cabin of varnished, unpainted boards and the devilish eyes painted on the bow to keep spirits at bay, looked surreal from a distance, like a new home uprooted and set adrift on a native barge, its perfect, watery reflection an impressionist trick. Lan sat cross-legged in the bow. So unchanging was his expression, his wizened features appeared carved from tawny wood, his gray thatch of hair lifting in the breeze. Deng, a cheerful, handsome teenager clad in a pair of shorts, scrambled to assist us and lashed the dinghy to the rail. He exchanged a few words in Vietnamese with Lucy and then asked if we were hungry.

  The same breeze that had not had the slightest effect at the bar here drove off the mosquitoes and refreshed the air. We sat in the stern, watching the sunset spread pinks and mauves and reds across the enormous sky, staining hierarchies of cumulus that passed to the south. The lights of Stung Treng, white and yellow, beaded the dusky shore. I heard strains of music, the revving of an engine. Deng brought plates of fish and a kind of ratatouille, and we ate and talked about the French in Southeast Asia, about America’s benighted president (“A grocer’s clerk run amok,” Lucy said of him), about writing and idiot urban planners and Borneo, where she had recently been. She had an edge to her personality, this perhaps due to working with wealthy and eccentric clients, rock stars and actors and such; yet there was a softness underlying that edge, a genteel quality I responded to, possibly because it reminded me of Kim . . . though this quality in Lucy seemed less a product of repression.

  Deng took our plates, and Lucy asked if I had anyone back in the States, a wife or girlfriend. I told her about Kim and said she might meet me in Saigon.

  “I suppose that’s where I would leave you,” she said. “Assuming you deem me suitable.” Her mouth thinned. “I probably shouldn’t put this out there, because whenever I show enthusiasm, you become reticent. But this is so wonderful.” Lucy’s gesture embraced the world as seen from the deck of the Undine. “In order to get rid of me, you may have to throw me overboard.” She sat forward in the deck chair. “What are you thinking about?”

  I saw no reason to delay—the prospect of spending another day at the Sekong was not an engaging one. “Welcome aboard,” I said.

  “Oh, gosh!” She pushed up from the chair and gave me a peck on the lips. “That’s marvelous. Thanks so much.”

  We went inside, and I showed her the shower, the galley, and the king-size bed; then I left her to wash up and stood looking out over the river, listening to the loopy cries of lizards, alerted now and again by the plop of a fish. Night had swallowed all but the lights on the shore, and I could no longer make out Lan in the bow. Deng sat on the roof, legs dangling, reading a comic by lantern light. I felt on the brink of something ineluctable and strange, and I suspected it had to do more with Lucy than with the voyage. Kim’s caution notwithstanding, I anticipated losing a piece of my soul to this forthright, tomboyish, opium woman. When I went back down, I found her on the bed, her legs stretched out, toweling her hair, wearing only a pair of panties. It looked as if two-thirds of her length were in her legs. Bikini
lines demarked her small, pale breasts. A brass box of some antiquity rested on the sheets beside her.

  She came out from beneath the towel and caught me staring. “I know,” she said. “I’m revoltingly thin. I look better when I’ve put on five or six pounds, but I can’t keep weight on when I’m traveling.”

  “You know that’s bullshit,” I said. “You look great. Beautiful.”

  “I’m scarcely beautiful, but I do have good legs. At least so I’ve been told.” She stared at her legs, pursed her lips as if reappraising them; then she said, “I came all the way from Vientiane today, and I’m exhausted. So if you don’t mind, I’ll indulge my filthy habit earlier than usual this evening.” She patted the box. “It’s awfully bright in here. Can something be done?”

  I joined her on the bed, switched on a reading lamp, and cut the overheads.

  “Much better,” she said.

  She opened the box, removed a long pipe of wood and brass, and unwrapped yellowish paper from a pressed cake of black opium.

  “I’ll be completely useless once I’ve smoked,” she said. “However, you may touch me if you like. I enjoy being touched when I’m high.”

  I asked if she would be aware of what was going on. “Mmm-hmm. I may act as though I’m not, but I know.”

  “Where do you like to be touched?”

  “Wherever you wish. My breasts, my ass.” She glanced up from her preparations. “My pussy. Go lightly there, if you will. Too much stimulation confuses things in here.” She tapped her temple.

  She pinched off a fragment of opium and began rolling it into a pellet, frowning in concentration; her hands and wrists were fully illuminated, but the rest of her body was sheathed in dimness; she might have been a trim young witch up to no good purpose, drenched in the shadow cast by her spell, preparing a special poison that required a measure of light for efficacy. She plumped the pillows, making a nest, and lay on her side.

  “Kiss, please,” she said.

  Her lips parted and her tongue flirted with mine. She settled into the pillows and lit the pipe, her cheeks hollowing as she sucked in smoke. She relit the pipe three times, and after the last time, she could barely hold it. After watching her drowse a minute, I stripped off my clothes and lay facing her, caressing her hip, tasting the chewy plug of a nipple. Her eyes were slitted, and I couldn’t tell if she was focusing on me, yet when my erection prodded her thigh, she made an approving noise. I slipped a hand under her panties, rested the heel of it on her pubic bone, thatched with dark hair, and let the weight of one finger come down onto her labia. The intimacy of the touch seemed to distress her, so I reluctantly withdrew the finger, but I continued to touch her intimately. Holding her that way became torture.

  “Lucy?” I whispered.

  She didn’t appear to be at home. Her breathing was shallow; a faint sheen of sweat polished her brow. I had no choice but to relieve the torment as best I could.

  I hadn’t thought that I could take such pleasure from fondling a nearly comatose woman. The thought that she was submitting to me had been exciting. I had walled off such practices from my sexual life, yet I now found myself imagining variations on the act, and I believed that Lucy would be a willing partner to my fantasies. The woman I’d met in the bar had, over the course of a few hours, been transformed into a practicing submissive. I had known other women to exhibit a manner markedly different from that they later presented, women who, upon feeling secure in the situation, had changed as abruptly as Lucy. But Cradle Two’s rice-paper model was in my head, people shunting back and forth between universes without realizing it, and I thought if I could see those women now, I would view their sudden transformation in a new light, and I speculated that this Lucy might not be the same who had climbed into the dinghy with me. One way or another, I had presumed her to be a normal, bright woman who had survived a shattering blow, but it was evident that she had picked up a kink or two along the road to recovery.

  In the morning I woke to a drowned gray light, the cabin windows spotted with rain. Lucy was sitting up in bed, inspecting her stomach.

  “I’m all sticky,” she said, and gave me a sly smile. “You were wicked, weren’t you?”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  She gave the matter some study, screwing up her face, as might a child, into a mask of exaggerated perplexity. “It’s a little hazy. I definitely remember you touching me.” She scooted down beneath the sheets, snuggling close. “It made for a decent icebreaker, don’t you think? There’ll be less reason for nerves when we make love.”

  “Now you mention it, I doubt there’ll be any.” I clasped my hands behind my neck. “Last night was surprising to me.”

  “A sophisticate like you? I wouldn’t have believed it possible to surprise you.”

  I caught her by the hair and pulled her head away from my chest, irritated by the remark. Judging by her calm face, she didn’t mind the rough treatment, and I tightened my grip.

  “I wasn’t mocking you,” she said. “I’m your admirer. Honest. Cross my heart and spit on the pope.”

  I released her, astonished by the behavior she had brought out in me. She flung a leg across my waist, rubbing against me, letting me feel the heated damp of her.

  “Would you care to see another of my tricks?” she asked.

  “What do you have?”

  “Oh, I’ve got scads.” She folded her arms on my chest, rested her chin upon them, and gazed at me soberly. “You’d be surprised, I mean really, really . . . really surprised, how wicked I can be.”

  Travel has always served to inspire me, as it has many writers, as it apparently did my alter ego; yet the farther we proceeded down the Mekong, the more I came to realize that there was a blighted sameness to the world and its various cultures. Strip away their trappings and you found that every tribe was moved by the same passions, and this was true not only in the present but also, I suspected, in ages past. Erase from your mind the images of the kings and exotic courtesans and maniacal monks that people the legends of Southeast Asia, and look to a patch of ground away from the temples and palaces of Angkor Wat—there you will find the average planetary citizen, a child eating the Khmer equivalent of a Happy Meal and longing for the invention of television.

  The landscape, too, bored me. Like every river, the Mekong was a mighty water dragon, its scales shifting in hue from blue to green to brown, sometimes overflowing its banks, and along the shore were floating markets, assemblies of weathered gray shanties resting upon leaky bottoms that were not much different from shacks on the Mississippi or huts along the Nile or the disastrous slums of Quito spilling into the Guayas, fouling it with their wastes . . . and so I did not delight, as travelers will, in the scenting of an unfamiliar odor, because I suspected it to be the register of spoilage, and I derived no great pleasure from the dull green uniformity sliding past or in the sentinel presence of coconut palms, their fronds drooping against a yellow morning sky, or the toil of farmers (though one morning, when we passed a village where people were washing their cows in the river, I felt a twinge of interest, remarking on the possible linkage between this practice and the Saturday morning ritual of washing one’s car in a suburban driveway). Neither did I have the urge to scribble excitedly in my journal about the quaint old fart who sold Lucy a bauble in a floating market and told a story in pidgin English about demons and witches, oh my! Nor did I, as might an ecotourist in his blog for true believers, fly my aquatic mammal flag at half-mast and rant about the plight of the Irrawaddy dolphins (yet another dying species) that surfaced from muddy pools near the town of Kratie. And I did not exult, like some daft birder, in the soaring river terns and kingfishers that dive-bombed the waters farther south. I was solely interested in Lucy, and my interest in her was limited.

  Within a week we had developed an extensive sexual vocabulary, and though it stopped short of sea urchins and safety pins, we were depraved in our invention—that was how I might have characterized it before embarking upon the rela
tionship, though I came to hold a more liberated view. Depravity always incorporates obsession, but our obsession had a scholarly air. We were less possessed lovers than anthropologists studying one another’s culture, and because we made no emotional commitment, our passion manifested as a scientific voyeurism that allowed us to explore the scope of actual perversity with greater freedom than would have been the case if our hearts were at risk. We approached each other with coolness and calculation. “Do you like this?” one of us would ask, and if the answer was no, we would move on without injured feelings to a new pleasurable possibility. Apart from badinage, we talked rarely, and when not physically involved, we went away from each other, she to craft her business plan, sketching and writing lists, and I to sit in the stern and indulge in a bout of self-loathing and meditate on passages from The Tea Forest that reflected upon my situation. Five days on the Mekong had worked a change in me that I could not comprehend except in terms of Cradle Two’s novel. Indeed, I lost much of the urge to comprehend it, satisfied to brood and fuck my way south. I felt something festering inside me, some old bitterness metastasizing, sprouting black claws that dug into my vitals, encouraging me to lash out; yet I had no suitable target. I yelled at Deng on occasion, at Lan less frequently (I had grown to appreciate his indifference to me); but these were petty irritations that didn’t qualify for a full release, and so I lashed out against myself.

  Of my many failings, the most galling was that I had wasted my gifts on genre fiction. I could have achieved much more, I believed, had I not gone for the easy money but, like Cradle Two, had been faithful to my muse. Typically, I didn’t count myself to blame but assigned blame to the editors and agents who had counseled me, to the marketers and bean counters who had delimited me, and to the people with whom I had surrounded myself—wives and girl-friends, my fans, my friends. They had dragged me down to their level, seduced me into becoming a populist. I saw them in my mind’s eye overflowing the chambers of my life, the many rooms of my mansion, all the rooms in fantasy and science fiction, all the crowded, half-imaginary party rooms clotted with people who didn’t know how to party, who failed miserably at it and frowned at those few who could and did, and yearned with their whole hearts to lose control, yet lacked the necessary passionate disposition; all the corridors of convention hotels packed with damaged, overstuffed women, their breasts cantilevered and contoured into shelf-like projections upon which you could rest your beer glass, women who chirped about Wicca, the Tarot, and the Goddess and took the part of concubine or altar-slut in their online role-playing games; all the semibeautiful, equally damaged, semi-professional women who believed they themselves were goddesses and concealed dangerous vibrators powered by rats’ brains in their purses and believed that heaven could be ascended to from the tenth floor of the Hyatt Regency in Boston, yet rejected permanent residence there as being unrealistic; all the mad, portly men with their bald heads and beards and their eyeballs in their trouser pockets, whose wives caught cancer from living with them; all the dull hustlers who blogged ceaselessly and had MacGyvered a career out of two ounces of talent, a jackknife, and a predilection for wearing funny hats, and humped the legs of their idols, who blogged ceaselessly and wore the latest fashion in emperor’s new clothes and talked about Art as if he were a personal friend they had met through networking, networking, networking, building a fan base one reader at a time; all the lesser fantasists with their fantasies of one day becoming a famous corpse like Andre Breton and whose latest publications came to us courtesy of Squalling Hammertoe Woo Hoo Press and who squeezed out pretentious drivel from the jerk-off rags wadded into their skulls that one or two Internet critics had declared works of genius, remarking on their verisimilitude, saying how much they smelled like stale ejaculate, so raw and potent, the stuff of life itself; all the ultrasuccessful commercial novelists (I numbered myself among them) whose arrogance cast shadows more substantial than anything they had written and could afford, literally, to treat people like dirt; all the great men and women of the field (certain of them, anyway), the lifetime achievers who, in effect, pursed their lips as if about to say “Percy” or “piquant” when in public, fostering the impression that they squeezed their asscheeks together extra hard to produce work of such unsurpassed grandiloquence . . . Many of these people were my friends and, as a group, when judged against the entirety of the human mob, were no pettier, no more disagreeable or daft or reprehensible. We all have such thoughts; we find solace in diminishing those close to us, though usually not with so much relish. And while I kept on vilifying them, spewing my venom, I recognized they were not to blame for my deficiencies and that I was the worst of them all. I had all their faults, their neuroses, their foibles, and then some—I knew myself to be a borderline personality with sociopathic tendencies, subject to emotional and moral disconnects, yet lacking the conviction of a true sociopath. The longer I contemplated the notion, the more persuaded I was to embrace the opinion espoused in The Tea Forest that Thomas Cradles everywhere were men of debased character. The peculiar thing was, I no longer took this judgment for an insult.