The Other Side of the World (21 page)

As soon as we were in Bako, though, my mind stopped working and my senses took over. “What I trust Bako will prove to you,” Tamika had announced on our way across the Sarawak River, “is that you do not have to die to enter paradise,” and to demonstrate that this was so, she took us further inland to some of her favorite places: into a cave nearly a mile long that had marvelous chambers within chambers, extraordinary calcite formations, and several recently discovered wall paintings—stick figures of men, women, and birds whose meaning and date of creation were not yet known. We moved along trails that brought us to beaches of pristine white sand, and then up a mountainside to a rainforest canopy where we crossed, single file, along a catwalk suspended several hundred feet above ground, and where I felt as if I were floating through a world whose very beauty seemed an intimation of its imminent demise.

Thick mists came and went so that lakes and waterfalls, distant low-lying hills, and beaches below, were, by turns, invisible, or suddenly, magically revealed, and all the while a multitude of birds—small, large, strange—would fly by, adding splashes of bright, unexpected color to the moody greens and browns of the forests. We swam, we clambered up small ridges, and we gathered herbs, fruit, ferns, and bamboo shoots from which we prepared our midday meal. Tamika was especially delighted when, while we'd stopped for a late-afternoon snack near some
swampy lowlands, a proboscis monkey suddenly appeared and moved toward us. Unlike silver-tailed monkeys or pig-tailed macaques, she said, proboscis monkeys rarely approached human beings. There were only about a hundred and fifty of them left in the world (they existed nowhere but in Borneo), and we laughed when she explained the obvious: that they received their names because of their large noses, which noses resembled nothing other than a man's private appendage. The larger the nose, Tamika said, the more attractive the male was to the females.

What seemed weird was that a woman so outrageously beautiful could seem in these moments to be the Malaysian equivalent of a Girl Scout guide. She was such a pleasant source of detailed information, and so without airs or condescension in the dispensing of the information, that by my last day in Bako I was amazed to realize I'd stopped thinking of her as a woman, or even of what might be going on with her, Amanda, and Alicia, but simply as the person who'd introduced me to a place more sublime and glorious than any I'd ever expected to see in this life.

I saw flying lizards and flying lemurs, green-crested lizards, small-clawed otters, hairy-nosed otters, and whip snakes. I hiked alongside underground rivers, explored caves whose caverns opened to plateaus of brush and scrub that were home to birds and flowers of astonishing color and beauty—owls and kingfishers, heath forests and antplants, pepper gardens and hibiscus and swamp vegetation and—our rare good luck—a single flowering rafflesia, the world's largest flower (the one we came upon was nearly three feet across and Tamika estimated it would weigh in at nearly fifteen pounds). It had red-orange, lobe-like petals that gave off an awful stench, like that of a rotting carcass, and though it had taken most of a year to transform itself from bud to flower, Tamika said, it would probably be gone by sunset the next day. And when, back in my suite at the end of each day,
I'd reflect on what I'd seen, I'd find myself thinking that were I to stay in Borneo—or in this one part of Borneo—for the rest of my life, I'd never see everything there was to see, and never grow tired of seeing again what I'd already seen.

On the evening before I flew back to Singapore, I sat outside at a waterfront café, gazing at a calm, teal-blue sea spotted here and there with fishing boats. The sunset, in striated layers of red and orange, with a stormy, turbulent purple-green bank of slow-moving clouds behind it, was, for the moment, serene. Tamika sat a few tables away, eating dinner with the Germans, and Amanda and Alicia were at a table next to them with two American men about my age they introduced as Harvard and MIT grads who were in Borneo to do post-graduate field work in archaeology. By the time they left the café, they'd paired off, Amanda holding hands with the Harvard man, Alicia with the guy from MIT, and I found myself imagining them, a few months later, getting together in Boston, strolling happily on the Common, then dining at the Harvard Faculty Club, where, perhaps, they would one day be married, and where, a year or two after this their children would be taking naps in identical bright red strollers while Amanda and Alicia and their husbands enjoyed a Sunday brunch and reminisced about their adventures in Kuching.

But the thought of never leaving Borneo—of making arrangements that would enable me to stay in this one place forever so I could come to know it as much as I loved it—put me in mind, that last evening in Kuching, of something Max had impressed upon me when I was twelve or thirteen and was first discovering girls: That you can get to know women—what they're like in all their loveliness and mystery—in two ways (and he was here quoting something from Seana's novel he said she'd borrowed from Tolstoy), either by knowing and loving many women… or by knowing and loving one woman well.

I returned to Borneo nineteen times in the next three years, and never (with the exception of visits to our production facilities) to the same place twice. Most trips were business-related, but with Nick's cooperation (we covered for each other whenever we made our getaways), I'd usually be able to tack on a day or two and visit a place I hadn't been to before. I was also able to go on a half-dozen extended trips—three- to five-day excursions (again, with Nick watching the store the way I did for him) where I explored places few Westerners had ever seen.

I climbed to the top of Mount Kinabalu—at more than thirteen thousand feet, the world's third highest island—from which, on a wickedly clear day, I saw all the way to the Philippines. I took longboats down the Kapuas, Borneo's longest river, camped in villages that had been home less than a hundred years ago to headhunters, and went on several World Wildlife Fund tours that took me into national parks (Kutai, Gunung Mulu, Tanjung Puting) and, on Nick's recommendation, to some of Borneo's coastal islands, where I snorkeled, and swam alongside giant sea turtles and hammerhead sharks.

I saw clownfish, giant sting rays, and World War Two Japanese shipwrecks shrouded in jewel-like coral. I swam close to tornado-like flurries of barracuda. I saw Sumatran rhinos and tigers, forests dense with two-hundred-foot-high flowering dipterocarp trees, and schools of migrating white sharks. I even came, eventually, to luxuriate in Borneo's heat and humidity—to love having the sweat pour from me, and to welcome friendly leeches that made their homes on the slippery slopes of my arms and shoulders. When the spirit was willing I enjoyed nights of love and companionship with women who were as skilled as they were kind. I ate spicy meals composed of plants, insects, and animals whose identities were unknown to me, and I made my way (several times without guides) to places that had until recent years been impassable and unexplored, and all the while
I was glorying in these wonders, I'd also be imagining that long before I died, everything I was seeing would be transformed utterly.

I'd stare at a peat swamp forest, a bank of orchids, or a waterfall, and I'd imagine the peat burning, the orchids being bulldozed under, the waterfall blasted away by dynamite. I imagined forests being cut down as if by giant lawnmowers, tree trunks gliding along conveyor belts as wide as highways, then propelled past huge blade-saws that sliced them into chopsticks or slats for garden furniture. And sometimes, walking through a jungle or a heath forest, the laughter and chatter of cicadas, squirrels, or thrushes permeating the air—my senses drenched in sound, smell, and color—I'd suddenly, as if on an LSD trip gone bad, be struck blind: the world would turn stark white, all sound would vanish, and the moist silence would touch my face as if made of millions of slow-falling snowflakes.
Was I even there?
My breath gone and my heart pumping away at two to three times its usual rate, I'd have to lower my head below my waist, squeeze my eyes shut a half-dozen times, and press my hands against my ears as hard as I could before the terror would leave—before I'd begin to breathe again and the whiteness that had swallowed me would dissolve and give way to what was in front of me.

When I visited our production facilities, I'd see multiples of what I'd seen on my first trip: peat swamps and montane forests burning and turning the sky black with smoke—clouds of it so vast they could, I knew, be seen from outer space as if they were floating continents. I saw remnants of Borneo's primeval rainforests ravaged by earth movers and chainsaws so that, when the machines left, it was as if the forests had never existed. I saw swarms of birds—red-crested, orange-breasted, green-billed, white-tailed, gray-feathered—careening wildly in circles as they searched for resting places—homes—now gone forever. I saw mouse deer and palm civets, Asian elephants and pygmy elephants, orangutans and packs of monkeys foraging in
the garbage of company encampments, or wandering like lost, drunken souls across scorched, barren earth. And, truth be told, all the while, trip after trip, the pain and sadness I felt for what was being destroyed was at least equalled by exhilaration and joy—by the thrill that came from watching the dying of a world that would never be with us again.

 

But such thoughts came to me only when I was in Borneo. When I was in Singapore, I worked hard and played hard—ten-to twelve-hour days at the office, parties until dawn, and happy in my apartment, just me, on weekends while Nick was courting one of his new ladies.

I met two or three of them a year, and they all came from prosperous Chinese families, and they were all attractive, poised, well-educated, and well-mannered. They all fell in love with Nick, and once they reached a point where they believed they could not live without him, and told him so—that he was the sun, moon, and stars to them, that they hoped to marry him, to bear his children, and to live with him forever—he would dump them.

They came to me the way other young women had gone to him. But the women who'd gone to Nick, like Jin-gen, had mostly been poor women from the Chinese countryside who'd come to Hong Kong or Singapore in search of better lives for themselves and for the families they'd left behind. The women who came to me were wealthy women who'd been raised in cities like Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taipei, and though Nick didn't take money from them and give it to women he was helping (Tamika was right about him being no Robin Hood), he took what was decidedly more valuable.

As he'd once bragged when we were at UMass and he was plowing the twin daughters
and
the wife of a local Polish farmer, he could charm thorns from a rose when he wanted to, and once these upper-class Chinese women fell in love with him
and introduced him to their families, and once their families accepted him, Nick was out of there. And after he'd taken their virtue, they were, in the eyes of their community—fathers and grandfathers especially—forever disgraced.

“Who will marry me now?” Lo-chin asked. “Tell me, please, Mister Charles—who will ever,
ever
marry me now?”

Lo-chin was the first to come to me, and with a question I'd hear again and again (she appeared at my apartment on a Saturday morning, disguised, to avoid her family's watchfulness, in a house-cleaner's uniform), but when I told Nick about her visit, he laughed.

“Hey—she took her chances the same as I did.”

“But that's not so,” I said. “It's not a level playing field, Nick.”

“There are no level playing fields,” he said.

“But can't you at least talk with her?”

“Look, Charlie,” he said. “The only thing talking with me will do is to raise false hopes. Best is to let things lie, and for Lo-chin to come up with a story. So maybe she tells her mother she wasn't telling the truth about our intimacy—that she thought it would please her mother to believe that though she may have lost her cherry, she'd soon become the bride of the man who'd taken it.”

“But we're talking about a young woman's
life
, Nick,” I said. “I don't get it.”

“But that's why I'm explaining things to you, Charlie,” he said. “Because sometimes you see the world through those rose-colored, small-town glasses of yours. Because these Chinese families are more puritanical than our own born-again Christians. Because if they believe their daughter's slept with a man, they assume—and usually demand—that the man become her husband. But that's Chinese dealing with Chinese, and what Lo-chin can tell the old lady—it's worked before—is that I turned out to be just another greedy American. She can say I promised to marry her, sure, but that I said she had to give me what I wanted
first, and so she fibbed about me compromising her honor to please the old lady—so the old lady would believe she'd soon be the mother of a bride—but at the last minute, see, Lo-chin had the courage to just say no.”