Other Earths Read online

  Our fifth day on the river, Lucy scored a fresh supply of opium from a floating market, and that night, a dead-still night, hot and humid as the inside of an animal’s throat, once she had prepared a pipe, she held it out to me and said, “I believe the time is right.”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  She continued to offer the pipe, her clever face ordered by a bemused expression, like a mother forcing her infant son to try a new food, one she knows he will enjoy.

  “I’ve smoked pot,” I said. “But I don’t know about this.”

  “I promise you, you’ll have a grand old time. And it’ll help with the heat.”

  I took the pipe. “What do I do?”

  “When I light the pipe, draw gently on it. You mustn’t inhale deeply, just enough to guide the smoke.”

  It was as she said. Once guided, the smoke seemed to find its own way, plating my throat and lungs with coolness and enforcing a dizzy, drifty feeling. I lost track of what Lucy was doing, but I think she, too, smoked. We lay facing one another, and I became fascinated by the skin on her lower abdomen, pale and, due to shaving, more coarsely grained than the rest. My limbs were heavy, but I managed to extend a forefinger and touch her. The contact was so profound, I had to close my eyes in order to absorb the sensations of warmth and softness and muscularity. With effort, because I had little strength and not much volition, I succeeded in slitting my eyes, focusing on an inch of skin higher up, a tanned, curving place. My focus narrowed until I appeared to be looking at a minute fraction of her whole, a single tanned atom, and then I penetrated that atom and was immersed in a dream, something to do with a lady swimming in a pool floored by a huge white lotus, its petals lifted by gentle currents, and an anthropomorphic beast with the head of a mastiff who ate cockroaches, pinching off their heads, draining them of a minim of syrupy fluid that he chased with diamonds, grabbing a handful from a bowl at his elbow and crunching them like peanuts, a fabulous adventure that was interrupted, cut off as if the channel had been switched, and replaced by the image of a night sky into which I was ascending.

  The lights in the sky appeared scattered at first but grew brighter and increasingly unified, proving to be the visible effulgence of a single creature. It was golden-white in color and many chambered, reminding me of those spectacular, luminous phantoms that range the Mindanao Trench, frail complexities surviving at depths that would crush a man in an instant; yet it was so vast, I could not have described its shape, only that it was huge and golden-white and many chambered. Its movements were slow and oceanic, a segment of the creature lifting, as though upon a tide, and then an adjacent segment lifting as the first fell, creating a rippling effect that spread across its length and breadth. All around me, black splinters were rising toward the thing, sinister forms marked by a crookedness, like hooked thorns. Dark patches formed on its surface, composed of thousands of these splinters, and it began to shrink, its chambers collapsing one into the other like the folds of an accordion being compressed. Unnerved, I tried to slow my ascent, and as I twisted and turned, flinging myself about, I glimpsed what lay behind me: a black, depthless void picked out by a single, irregular gray shape, roughly circular and, from my perspective, about the size of a throw rug. The gray thing made me nervous. I looked away, but that did nothing to ease my anxiety, and for the duration of my dream—hours, it seemed—I continued my ascent, desperate to stop, my mind clenched with fear. When I woke near first light, my heart hammered and I was covered in sweat. I recalled the mural in Stung Treng, noting the crude resemblance it bore to the glowing creature, but a more pressing matter was foremost in my thoughts.

  I put my hand on Lucy’s throat and shook her. She felt the pressure of my grip. Her eyes fluttered open, widened; then she said, “Is this to be something new?”

  “What did you give me last night?” I asked. “It wasn’t opium.”

  “Yes, it was!”

  “I’ve never seen a record of anything like what I experienced.”

  “Not everything is written down, Tom.” She moved my hand from her throat. “You’re so very excitable. Tell me about it.”

  I summarized my evening and she said, “You may have had some sort of reaction. I doubt it will reoccur.”

  “I’m not smoking that shit again.”

  “Of course you won’t.” She sat up. “But to more pressing business. I may get my period today—I’m feeling crampy. So, if you want to get one in before the curse is upon me, this morning would be the time.”

  Lan had his work cut out for him. North of Kampong Cham, the Mekong was more than a mile wide, but massive dry-season sandbars rendered the river almost impassable. Often there was a single navigable channel and that had to be located, so we went more slowly than usual, with Deng going on ahead of the Undine in the dinghy, taking soundings. To break the monotony, we camped one night on an island where we found driftwood caught in the limbs of trees fifteen and twenty feet high, pointing up the dramatic difference in water level between the rainy season and the dry. We erected a tentlike structure of mosquito netting and lounged beneath it, drinking gin and watching a strangely monochromatic sunset bronze the western sky, resolving into a pageantry of yellows and browns. Deng cooked over an open fire on the beach, preparing a curry. As darkness closed down around us, there was an explosion of moths, nearly hiding him from view (we glimpsed him squatting by the fire, a shamanic figure occulted by flurrying wings), and when he brought the curry to us, what was supposed to be a vegetarian dish had been thickened by uncountable numbers of moths. Lucy had a nibble and declared it to be: “Not bad. They give it kind of a meaty flavor.” I had been incredibly careful about food since arriving in Asia, wanting to spare myself the misery of stomach problems, but I was hungry and stuffed myself.

  The following morning I was stricken with severe diarrhea. I blamed the moths and Deng. He kept out of my way for the next two days. On the third day, while resting in the stern, I caught sight of him on the island helping Lucy fly a kite, and then, later that afternoon, I saw him sneaking into our cabin. Thinking he might be stealing, hoping for it, in fact (I was feeling better and wanted an excuse to exercise my temper), I went inside. Lucy was sitting on the bed, leaning toward Deng, whose back was to me. He appeared to be fumbling with his shorts. I shouted, and after tossing me a terrified glance over his shoulder, he bolted for the door.

  “What the fuck’s going on?” I asked.

  “For God’s sake,” Lucy said. “Don’t act so wronged.”

  I was taken aback by her mild reaction—I had expected a denial.

  “I took pity on him,” she said. “There’s no reason for you to be upset.”

  “You felt bad, so you were going to blow him?” She frowned. “If you must know, I was going to manipulate him.”

  “A hand job? Oh, well. If I’d known that’s all it was . . . Shit. My mom used to give the paperboy hand jobs. Dad would look on and beam.”

  She gave me a defiant look.

  “Are you serious?” I asked. “You don’t see you did anything wrong?”

  We held a staring contest, and then she said, “Can you imagine being sixteen, trapped on a boat with people who’re having sex as much as we do? He was pathetic, really.”

  “So he came to you and asked for a hand job? And you said, ‘Oh, Deng, soulful child of the Third World . . . ’ ”

  “He asked for considerably more than that. I told him it was all I could manage.” She crossed her legs and gazed out at the river. “Since we’ve been going at it, I’ve had an almost ecumenical attitude toward sex. It’s not as though we’re in love, yet that’s the feeling I get when I’m in love. It makes me wonder if I’ve ever been in love.”

  “Ecumenical? You mean like you want to spread it around?”

  “That’s one way of putting it,” she said frostily.

  “I don’t want you to feel that way. I’m territorial in the extreme.”

  “Yes, I’m beginning to grasp that.” She stretched out on the
bed, placed her hand on a paperback that lay open beside her. “It won’t happen again.”

  I sat next to her on the edge of the bed. “Is that all you have to say?”

  “Do you want an apology? I apologize. I should have known it would distress you.” She waited for me to respond and then said, “Should I leave? I’d rather not, but it’s your boat. If you’re determined to view what I’ve done as a betrayal . . .”

  “No, I’m just confused.”

  “About what?”

  “About your attitude . . . and mine. I don’t understand why I’m not angrier.”

  “Look,” she said. “Do you really believe I’m seeking another sexual outlet? That I’m not getting enough? Nymphomaniacs don’t get this much.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I said, still dubious.

  “So, are we going to move past this?”

  If she was lying, she deserved a pass on the basis of poise alone. I grudgingly said, “It might take me a while.”

  “How long would you reckon ‘a while’ to be? Long enough for you to feel horny again?”

  To get her off the subject, I asked what she was reading.

  She showed me the cover of The Tea Forest and said, “I’d forgotten how brilliant this was.”

  It took me a second or two to process her remark. “You’ve read The Tea Forest? Before this trip, I mean?”

  “Didn’t I tell you?”

  “You said you’d read one of my books, but you never said which.”

  “This was the only one I could find. The clerk in the bookstore mentioned that you’d gone off writing . . . or something to that effect. I guess he wasn’t aware of your recent work.”

  I told her I was feeling queasy and, taking the satellite phone, went into the stern and called my agent. I asked if he had turned over every stone in hunting for a book called The Tea Forest by Thomas Cradle. He was concerned for my well-being and asked if I wasn’t carrying this a little too far; he told me that they had begun publicizing the hoax, and hundreds of fans (including librarians, collectors, and so forth) had written in to my website claiming to have done exhaustive searches, none yielding a result. That left me with the proposition, however preposterous, that Lucy was not of this universe . . . not this particular Lucy, at any rate. I had no idea when the current incarnation had come aboard or when she might disembark, and then I realized something that, if I hadn’t been flattered by her recognition of me at the Sekong Hotel, might have alerted me to her origin much earlier. I had grown a beard and let my hair grow long, drastically altering my appearance. It was Cradle Two whom she had recognized, probably from his author photograph, and this helped establish that she, the Lucy of the Sekong Hotel, had shifted over from an adjoining universe. Or perhaps I had been the one who shifted. According to Cradle Two, so many people and things were constantly shifting back and forth, that such distinctions scarcely mattered.

  Picking through this snarl of possibility, I thought that Lucy and I might have shifted many times during the previous two weeks and that the Lucy of the Sekong might not be the Lucy of this moment—The Tea Forest must exist in more than one universe—and it occurred to me that the novel presented a means of crudely defining the situation. Every hour or so for the remainder of the day, I asked Lucy a question pertaining to The Tea Forest. She answered each to my satisfaction, which proved nothing; but the next morning, while she trimmed her toenails in the stern, I asked if she found the ending anticlimactic, and she said crossly, “Are you mad? You know I haven’t had time to read it.”

  “The ending?” I asked. “You haven’t read the ending?”

  “I haven’t even begun the book! Must I repeat that information every half-hour?”

  Two hours later I asked her a variation on the question, and she replied that the ending had been her favorite part of the novel and followed this by saying that it would have been out of character for TC to complete the journey. He was a coward, and his cowardice was its own resolution. To end the book any other way would have been dramatically false and artistically dishonest. I (Cradle Two) was a modernist author, she said, prowling at the edges of the genre, and had I taken TC into the tea forest, I would have had to lapse into full-blown fantasy, something she doubted I could write well. She went on to dismiss much of postmodernism as having “an overengineered archness” and, except for a few exemplary authors, being a refuge for those writers whose “disregard for traditional narrative (was) an attempt to disguise either their laziness or their inability to master it.” She concluded with a none-too-brief lecture on cleverness as a literary eidolon, a quality “too frequently given the stamp of genius during this postmillennial slump.”

  After listening to her ramble on for the better part of an hour, I was disinclined to ask further questions, and truthfully there was no need—I had proved to my satisfaction that Cradle Two’s model of the universe was accurate in some degree, and I wanted Wicked Lucy back, not this pretentious windbag. I went outside and paced the length of the Undine, sending Deng scuttering away, and tried to make sense out of what was going on, overwhelmed by feelings of helplessness brought on by my new understanding of the human condition, a condition to which I had paid lip service, yet now was forced to accept as an article of faith. “The river was change,” Cradle Two (and perhaps Cradles 3, 4, 5, ad infinitum) had written. “It flowed through the less mutable landscape, carrying change like a plague, defoliating places that once were green, greening places that once were barren, mutating the awareness of the people who dwelled along it, infecting them with a horrid inconstancy, doing so with such subtlety that few remembered those places as having ever been different.” It had been my intention to shoot straight down the Mekong to the delta and spend most of the six weeks there; but now, recalling this passage, I felt a vibration in my flesh and panicked, fearing that the vibration, my fixation on the delta, and, indeed, every thought in my head, might reflect the inconstancy cited by Cradle Two. I had begun to feel a pull, a sense of being summoned to the delta that alarmed me; I sloughed this off as being the product of an overwrought imagination, but nonetheless it troubled me. For these reasons, I decided to break the trip, as Cradle Two’s narrator had done, hoping to find stability away from the river, a spot where change occurred less frequently, and stop for a week, or perhaps longer, in what once had been the capitol of evil on earth, Phnom Penh.

  In the future I expect there to be systems that will allow a boy on a bicycle, balancing a block of ice on his handlebars, to pedal directly from Phnom Penh into the heart of Manhattan, where thousands will applaud and toss coins, which will stick to his skin, covering him like the scales of a pangolin, and he will bring with him wet heat and palm shadow and a sudden, fleeting touch of coolness in the air, and there will follow the smells of moto exhaust, of a street stall selling rice porridge sweetened with cinnamon and soup whose chief ingredient is cow entrails, the dry odor of skulls at Tuol Sieng prison, marijuana smoke, all the essences of place and moment, every potential answer to the Cambodian riddle fractionated and laid out for our inspection. Until then, it will be necessary to travel, to not drink the water, to snap poorly composed pictures, to be hustled by small brown men, to get sick and rent unsatisfactory hotel rooms. I yearned for that future. I wanted to live in the illusion that persuades us that true-life experience can be obtained on the Internet. Barring that, I wanted to find lodgings as anti-Cambodian as possible, one of the big American-style hotels, an edifice that I felt would be resistant to the processes of change. Wicked Lucy, however, insisted we take a room at the Hotel Radar 99, where she had stayed on a previous visit.