Other Earths Read online

  The hotel was situated in an old quarter of the city, well away from modernity of the kind I favored, and no element of the place seemed to have the least relation to the concepts of either radar or ninety-nine. The building was three stories of decrepit stone that had been worn to an indefinite salmon hue—it might originally have been orange or pink (impossible to say which)—and had green French doors that opened onto precarious balconies with ironwork railings. Faded, sagging awnings skirted that section of the block, overhanging restaurants and shops of various kinds; and parked along the curb at every hour of day or night were between ten and twenty motos, the owners of which, according to Lucy, provided the guests, mostly expats, with drugs, women, and whatever else they might want in the way of perversity. You entered through a narrow door (the glass portion painted over with indigo) and came into a dark green-as-a-twilit-jungle foyer, throttled with ferns and fleshy-leaved plants. There was never anyone behind the reception desk. You were compelled to shout, and then maybe Mama-san (the elderly Japanese woman who owned the place) would respond, or maybe not. Beyond lay a tiny courtyard where two clipped parrots squabbled on their perch. Our room was on the second floor, facing back toward the entrance, the metal number 4 turned sideways on the door. Apart from lizards clinging to the wall, its decor was purely utilitarian: a handful of wooden chairs; a writing desk that may once have had value as an antique; three double beds about which mosquito netting could be lowered, all producing ghastly groans and squeaks whenever we sat on them and playing a cacophonous avant-garde freakout each time we made love. The bathroom was also an antique, with a claw-footed bathtub, a chain-pull toilet, and venerable tile floors. Stains memorializing lizard and insect death bespotted the cream-colored walls and high ceilings. Everything smelled of cleaning agents, a good sign in those latitudes.

  I spent five days rooted to the room, trying to deny and resist change, infrequently stepping out onto the balcony to survey the street or going into the corridor overlooking the courtyard to observe the tranquil life of the hotel. I could detect no change in my surroundings—proof of nothing, but I grew calmer nonetheless. A German couple was staying in the room on our left, two Italian girls on our right. Farther along: Room 2 was home to a pair of twenty-somethings: a thin, long-haired man with a pinched, bony face and a Canadian flag embroidered on his jeans and a gorgeous gray-eyed blonde with full breasts and steatopygian buttocks. She was the palest person I had met in Cambodia, her skin whiter than the bathroom tiles (covered, as they were, by a grayish film). I never saw her leave the room, not completely. She would open the door and, without letting loose of it, as if it were all that kept her from drifting away, offer a frail, zoned, “Hi,” then hover for a while, looking as though she were going to make some further comment, before fluttering her fingers and vanishing inside. Once at noon, when the sunlight brightened the courtyard floor, casting a lace of shadow from a jacaranda tree onto the stone floor, she performed this ritual emergence half-nude, dressed in a tank top, her pubic hair a shade darker than that on her head, yet firmly within the blonde spectrum. It became evident that she was distressed about her boyfriend—he was overdue, probably off buying drugs (heroin or opium, I guessed), and she hoped these appearances at the door would hurry him along.

  After five days Lucy tired of indulging me, of bringing me food, and coaxed me outside. I began taking walks around the immediate neighborhood, but I had no desire to explore farther afield. I had been to Phnom Penh twenty years before, and I had snapped pictures of the temples of Angkor Wat, skulls, the Killing Fields, crypts overgrown by the enormous roots of trees, and I had slept with expat girls and taxi girls, and I had partied heartily in this terrible place where death was a tourist attraction, getting kicked out of bars for fighting and out of one of the grand old colonial hotels along the river for public drunkenness. I needed no further experience of the country and was content to inhabit a few square blocks, reconciling myself to the idea that things had always changed around me, and how were you to distinguish between normal change and a change promulgated by a transition from one universe to the other? Did such a thing as normal change even exist? People, for example, were so predictable in their unpredictability. Amazing, how they could do a one-eighty on you at the drop of a hat, how their moods varied from moment to moment. Perhaps this was all due to physics, to universes like strips of rice paper blown by a breeze and touching each other, exchanging people and insects and corners of rooms for almost identical replicas; perhaps without this universal interaction people would be ultrareliable and their behavior would not defy analysis, and every relationship would be a model of logic and consistency, and peace could be negotiated, and problems, great and small alike, could be easily solved or would never have existed. Perhaps the breeze that blew the strips of rice paper together was the single consequential problem, and that problem was insoluble. I understood that what had panicked me was a fundamental condition of existence, one that a mistaken apprehension of consensus reality had caused me to overlook. I further understood that I could adapt to my recently altered perception of this condition and found consolation in the idea that I could train myself to be as blind as anyone.

  Around the corner from the hotel was a restaurant that sold fruit shakes. A young girl tended it. She stood behind a table that supported a glass display case in which there were finger bananas, papayas and several fruits I could not identify, bottled milk and various sweeteners in plastic tubs. She spent much of her day cleaning up after a puppy that wandered among a forest of table legs, sniffing for food, pausing now and again to piss and shit—thus the fecal odor that undercut the sugary smell of the place. In the darkened interior were blue wooden chairs and tables draped in checkered plastic cloths and poster ads featuring Cambodian pop stars stapled to the walls. On the fourth day after I started going out, Lucy and I were having fruit shakes when the blonde girl from the hotel wandered in, clutching a large straw bag of the sort used for shopping. She sat against the back wall, staring out at the street, where a couple of moto cowboys were attempting wheelies, the brraaap of their engines overriding the restaurant’s radio. Lucy waved to her, but the blonde gave no reaction. Her skin was faintly luminous, like ghost skin, and her expression vacant.

  “I’m going to see what’s wrong,” Lucy said.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” I said. “She wants a shake.”

  Lucy pitied me with a stare. “I’ll be back shortly.”

  She joined the blonde at her table, and they spoke together in muted voices. With their heads together, one light and one dark, they posed a yin-yang juxtaposition, and as I sipped my shake, I thought about having them both, a fleeting thought that had no more weight than would the notion of taking a shot at Cate Blanchett. One of the moto cowboys pulled up facing the restaurant and shouted—he wore what looked to be a fishing hat with a turned-up brim, the word LOVE spelled out in beads on the crown, and he appeared to aim his shout at the blonde. She paid him no mind, busy conferring with Lucy. He shrugged, spoke to someone on the sidewalk I couldn’t see, and rode off. The puppy bumped into my foot. I nudged him aside and concentrated on sucking a piece of papaya through my straw. When I looked up, Lucy had taken the blonde by an elbow and was steering her toward our table.

  “This is Riel,” Lucy said. “Riel, this is Thomas.”

  Her eyes lowered, the blonde whispered, “Hi.”

  “That’s an interesting name,” I said. “It’s spelled the same as the currency?”

  The question perplexed her, and I said, “Cambodian money. The riel? Is it spelled the same?”

  “I guess.” At Lucy’s prompting, she took a seat. “It’s French. Like Louis Riel.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “A famous Canadian. The Father of Manitoba.”

  “I didn’t know Manitoba had a father,” said Lucy pertly.

  “Tell me about him,” I said.

  “People say he was a madman,” Riel said. “He prayed obsessively. They hanged him for treas
on.”

  “And yet he fathered Manitoba.” Lucy grinned.

  “Mitch says they must have named the money over here for him, too,” Riel said.

  The counter girl, who had ignored her to this point, came over and asked if she wanted something.

  “Make her a banana shake,” Lucy said, surprising me that she would know what Riel wanted.

  I asked Riel if she was from Manitoba, and she said, “Yes. Winnipeg.” Then she asked Lucy if she could have custard apple instead of banana.

  I inquired as to who Mitch was, and Lucy said, “The ass who was with her. He ran off with their money. I told her she should stay with us until she figures out what to do.”

  This snatch of conversation summed Riel up—she saw her beauty as a type of currency and was, perhaps, mad—and summed up our relationship with her as well. It seemed Lucy had found someone more submissive than she herself was. She sent messages with her eyes saying that she wanted this to happen.

  “Yeah, sure,” I said.

  Riel greedily drank her shake, eschewing a straw. She was, if you overlooked her drug abuse, a sublime creature possessed by a serene absence.

  Once she finished her shake, Lucy went off with her, saying that they were going to “get something” for Riel. I went back to the hotel and read and stared out the window. The sky was almost cloudless, a few puffs drifting high, but then it flickered, the entire blue expanse appearing to wink out, like a television image undergoing a momentary loss of power, and a large cloud roughly resembling a canoe appeared in the lower sky; the roofline above which it floated also seemed different, though I couldn’t have told you how. But the canoe-shaped cloud . . . I was certain it had not been there seconds before. I expected another flicker, and when none came, I was relieved; and yet I felt again that that summoning toward the south. A longing pervaded me, a desire to be on the move, and that longing intensified, faded, intensified . . . It was as if, having risen to the bait of The Tea Forest, something was tugging gently on the line, trying to set the hook deep before reeling me in.

  After an hour the women returned and went into the bathroom, where they remained for twenty-five minutes. When they emerged, Riel was topless and wobbly. A trickle of blood ran down her arm—it might have been a scarlet accessory designed to contrast with her milky skin. With an arm about her waist, Lucy helped her to lie on the bed next to ours, cleaned away the blood, and wrangled off her jeans. Riel fell into a light sleep. Lucy started to disrobe.

  “What was all that in the bathroom?” I asked, putting down my book.

  “She had trouble getting a vein.” Lucy skinned out of her panties. “I assisted.”

  “And now?”

  She put a finger to her lips and stretched out beside Riel and began to caress her. This male fantasy held no particular appeal for me in the abstract, yet now I was captivated by Lucy’s tenderness and thoroughness. She left no area of Riel’s skin unexplored, licking and rubbing against her with the delicacy of a cat. The bed played an oriental music of squeaks and sproings when she went down on her, a lengthy symphony with prolonged, hushed spaces between the notes, reflecting discrete movements of Lucy’s fingers and tongue. They achieved a simultaneous climax, Lucy digging between her own legs with her left hand, letting forth a gasp, and Riel, becoming active at the end, crying out while holding Lucy’s head in place.

  Lucy wiped her mouth dry on the sheet. She crossed to the bed upon which I lay and took my hand, saying she wanted to watch me make love to Riel. I needed no urging, but her eagerness made me self-conscious and briefly reinstituted a morality that viewed the world through prim spectacles and characterized such behavior as degenerate and vile. I said something to the effect that I didn’t know or I wasn’t sure, a delaying action; but Lucy pressed a condom into my hand.

  “Hurry,” she said. “While she’s still wet.”

  I liked how Riel, a sleepy heroin girl, would coast in sex, gliding, billowing, alone on her white ocean when I was joined to her. That first time, though, when she gazed up at me with Chinese eyes, those gray irises and shrunken pupils gazing out from a beautiful porcelain mask, old eyes weary of something, perhaps of everything, she seemed the embodiment of a Zen wisdom—by sinking to the bottom of the world, surrendering herself to its flood, she had gained infinite knowledge through the rejection of knowledge. I turned her onto her stomach in order to avoid her eyes, wishing to remain ignorant of whatever she might know about me in her Buddha ignorance, and soon roused a clanking, violent music from the bed.

  Riel was all about appetite. When she ate, she ate wholeheartedly, and when she drank, she drank singlemindedly, and when she was inspired to talk, she talked a blue streak, and when she fucked, although stoned, never as active as Lucy, she gave it her all. I asked her if heroin didn’t muffle the sexual drive, and she said, “Yes . . . but once you get started, it’s kind of cool.” She and Lucy and I deployed our bodies in every possible permutation, and over the span of several days, I learned there was a qualitative difference between their addictions, one that defined their drugs of choice. Compared to Lucy’s elaborate ritual with the pipe, Riel’s affair with the needle had a decidedly American character (stick it in and get off). This distinction carried over into their attitudes toward sex, and I was led to generalize that whereas opium women might prefer to grill thin slices of your heart, skewering each with a toothpick, devouring it over a period of years, heroin girls will, if given the chance, swallow it in three quick bites. Riel became increasingly needy—needy for food, alcohol, drugs, and orgasms. I could empathize with her boyfriend. Had we been alone together, I would have dumped her myself. Beauty is not sufficient compensation for a demanding nature. But with Lucy to share the load, her demands were acceptable.

  I discovered that a threesome required more drama to sustain it than did a twosome, and at first we manufactured drama. Games became the order of the day. Often Lucy and Riel would get high, leaving me to orchestrate these exercises. I enjoyed having two women, limp as dolls, whom I could exploit however I chose. When that became boring, I let Lucy take the lead. One afternoon she insisted I read a passage from The Tea Forest before having sex with Riel. The passage involved Cradle Two’s narrator speaking to a German girl he had picked up in a Phnom Penh bar during the break in his trip. He had just finished helping her fix and was dictating the terms of their relationship. In speaking the lines, I felt an absolute conviction, as if my voice and Cradle Two’s had merged:

  “ ‘If you have to puke again,’ I said, ‘go outside, okay?’

  “The girl tried to focus, but she gave it up; her head lolled, and an arm slipped off the sofa, her fingers trailing in the vomit.

  “ ‘I’m not your pimp,’ I told her. ‘I’m not going to be your pimp. What I’m going to do is use you to attract a certain class of man. You want to fuck for money, okay, I’ll pay you. Don’t let the men I set you up with pay you. You’ll probably have to do two or three tricks. For now, though, I’ll be the only one fucking you. I need to make sure you can do the things they like. I’ll keep you in dope and give you a place to live. I’ll regulate your drugs . . . that way you won’t get too big a habit. You have to learn to manage your habit. You can’t do that, you’re on your own.’ ”

  Prior to this, I had, of course, recognized the resonance between the addition of Riel to our union and Cradle Two’s novel—indeed, I had done little other than recognize such resonances since beginning the trip. More to the point, reading the passage brought home to me how much of the veneer of the civilized man had worn off. I was a long walk from becoming an unregenerate criminal like the narrator of The Tea Forest, and perhaps I would never achieve that level of criminality; but I was headed down the path he had trod. At one point I considered calling Kim and making a stab at redemption, hoping that her rational voice would reorient me; but Lucy and Riel stared at me with dull opiated expectancy from a nipple-to-nipple embrace, and I decided that the call could wait.

  We started going out at n
ight into the neon-braided streets of central Phnom Penh, putting on one-act plays in the thick, hothouse air, treating that city of a million souls as if its mad traffic and buzzing motos, its brutal history and doleful present, were merely a backdrop for our entertainments. We, or rather Lucy and Riel, sought out fortune-tellers, those who lined the riverbank by day, when the parks were thronged with tai chi practitioners and tourists and badminton players, and by night, when the poor gathered with their children to squat along the embankment eating boiled eggs and fried beetles, and the prosperous fortune-tellers with fancy booths at Wat Phnom, their altars adorned with strings of Christmas tree lights, candles, incense, and bowls of fruit, and cluttered with porcelain sages, Ramayana monkeys, Buddhas with holographic halos sheltering beneath gilt parasols . . . A more generous writer might have inferred that this profusion of seers and charlatans was but a veneer masking the rich spiritual life of the populace, always in communion with the city of ghosts that interpenetrated with and cast a pall over the city of blood and stone; and yet it meant nothing to me, or, to be accurate, it might someday provide the background detail for a story, and if a host of sad phantoms had materialized before me, creatures with bleak, negative eyes and bodies of lacy ectoplasm, I would have taken due notice and then done my best to ignore them, being consumed by other mysteries. We shooed away beautiful lady-boys and Cambodian kids with dyed Mohawks who were trying to prove something by bumming cigarettes from Americans, and we discouraged the taxi girls who came at platoon strength from alley mouths and bars, girls in their teens and maybe younger, chirping slogans from the hookers’ English phrase book and then retreating in sullen disarray, chiding one another in singsong Khmer for being too aggressive or not aggressive enough. We disregarded the entreaties of ragged amputees and blind men with bowls, and we ate hallucinatory food from stalls, bugs and guts and whatnot, and inspected vendors’ wares—the arms dealers were of especial interest to me. They commonly operated on street corners (some nights, in certain quarters, there seemed to be one on almost every corner) and offered a wide selection of hand-guns and ammo, the odd assault weapon—hardly surprising in a country where you could, I’d been told, blow away a cow with a rocket launcher for a fee of two hundred dollars, less if you were prepared to haggle. I saw in them the future of my own country, where death was celebrated with equal enthusiasm, although candy-coated by Technicolor and video games and television news. When the coating finally wore off, as it threatened to do, there we would all be, in Cambodia.