Other Earths (31 page)

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.

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.