Other Earths (38 page)

Everything moved slowly, as if I were trapped beneath the surface of a dream. I recall thinking what a dumb son of a bitch he was not to knock my arm aside and use his weight against me; and I had other thoughts as well, groggy, fearful thoughts, a dull wash of regrets and recriminations. And I realized I should have known from the disorderly state of the various Cradles’ possessions that the fat man was not holding them in safekeeping, that he had simply emptied their packs on the floor while going through them, and the men whose lives they represented were probably adrift in the canal . . . and then my finger slipped inside the guard. There was a blast of noise and heat and light, a searing pain in my hand, and two screams, one of them mine.

My eyes squeezed shut, clutching my wrist; it was all I could do at first to manage the pain. I knew the Colt had exploded, and my sole concern was the extent of my injuries. Though it bled profusely, the wound seemed minor—the explosion had sliced a chunk out of the webbing of skin between my forefinger and thumb. My ears rang, but I soon became aware of a breathy, flutelike sound and glanced at the fat man. He lay sprawled among his victims’ dirty laundry, head and shoulders propped against a crate, staring at me or, more likely, at nothing, for his eyes did not track me when I came to a knee; he continued to stare at the same point in space, whimpering softly, his pinkish complexion undercut by a pasty tone. He, too, was clutching his wrist. His hand was a ruin, the fingers missing, except for a shred of the thumb. With its scorched stumps and flaps of skin, it resembled a strange tuber excavated from the red soil of his belly. His lower abdomen was a porridge of blood and flesh, glistening and shuddering with his shallow breaths—it appeared that swollen round mass was preparing to expel an even greater abomination from a dark red cavity in which were nested coils of intestine. I’d never seen anyone’s guts before, and though it was a horrid sight, the writer in me took time to record detail. Then his sphincter let go, and revulsion overwhelmed me.

I staggered to my feet and spotted Bian frozen in the doorway, watching the fat man die with a look of consternation, as if she had no idea how to handle this new development. Dizzy, my head throbbing, I stepped over the fat man’s legs. I could do nothing for him; even had there been something, I wouldn’t have done it. Bian had retaken her chair in the front room and was fingering her 45s, the image of distraction. I sat opposite her, removed the first-aid kit from my pack, and cleaned my wound with alcohol. A thought occurred to me. I pulled out my English-Vietnamese dictionary and found the word for key.

“
Danh tu?
” I said, pointing to her chain. I went through several variant pronunciations before she grasped my meaning. She said something in Vietnamese and mimed plucking something from a hip pocket.

“Okay, I get.” She made a keep-cool gesture. “I get.”

I bandaged my hand, and as I secured the bandage with tape, the fat man, emerging from the safe harbor of shock, began pleading for God’s help, babbling curses, lapsing now and again into a fuming noise. Bian selected a record, fitted it onto the spindle, and his outcries were buried beneath the strings and fauxpomp of “MacArthur Park.” The music started my head to pounding, but it was preferable to hearing the fat man groan.

The sky had opened up, and rain was falling, a steady downpour that would last a while. I saw no reason to hang around. I repacked my rucksack and nodded to Bian, who responded in kind and gazed out the door, tapping a finger in time to the beat. As I walked down a weedy slope toward the park ranger’s shack, I could find in myself no hint of the profound emotion that was supposed to come with taking a life, with having violated this most sacrosanct and oft-breached of taboos, and I pondered the question of whether I would feel the same if I had killed a non-Cradle. I’d had a bond of sorts with the fat man, yet I had a minimal reaction to his death, as if the life I’d taken were mine by rights, thus negligible . . . though he might not be dead. Another song, “Nights In White Satin,” began to play, presumably to drown out his cries; yet I thought Bian might be unmindful of his condition and was simply luxuriating in the lush, syrupy music that she had taken refuge in during her months of enslavement. I marveled at the calmness she displayed upon exchanging captivity for freedom. Perhaps it was an Asian thing, a less narcotized appreciation of what Riel had known: Someone was always using you, and thus freedom and captivity were colors we applied to the basic human condition. Perhaps what was a clich’ in our culture bespoke a poignant truth in hers.

 

Writers tend to romanticize the sordid. They like to depict a junkie’s world, say, as edgy, a scraped-to-the-bone existence that permits the soul of an artist to feel life in his marrow and allows him to peer into the abyss. Many of them believe, as did Rimbaud, or at least tout the belief, that derangement of the senses can lead one to experience the sublime; but for every Rimbaud there are countless millions whose senses have been deranged to purely loutish ends, and I am inclined to wonder if
le poete maudit
achieved what he did in spite of drugs and debauchery, not because of them. Whatever the case, I was convinced, thanks in part to the example set by my gargantuan pod brother, that the sordid was merely sordid. I might be disagreeable and sarcastic, but my efforts to bring forth my inner Cradle had been pretty feeble: kinky sex and a smattering of mean-spirited thoughts. Those were minor flaws compared to murder and enslavement. If the trait for which the “animal” needed us had anything to do with our innate repulsiveness, that might explain why I felt its call less profoundly than the others.

It was midafternoon when I set out for the tea forest in a motor launch left by (if the fat man were to be believed) one or another returning Cradle, with the rain falling hard, drenching my clothes, and the sky as dark as dusk. Rain pattered on the launch, hissed in the reeds, and had driven to roost the birds that—so my guidebook attested—normally stalked the wetlands. I followed a meandering watercourse through marshes toward a dark jumbled line in the distance. My head was bothering me. I felt cloudy, vague, gripped by a morose detachment, and assumed I had suffered a mild concussion. Images of Kim, of Lucy and Riel (most of them erotic in nature), were swapped about in my head, as were concerns about the new novel, about my health, about what would happen now that the end of the journey was at hand, and a belated worry that Bian would report me for killing her captor. However, as I drew near the forest, a feeling of glory swept over me. I was on the brink of doing something noble and essential and demanding self-sacrifice. The feeling seemed to come from outside myself, as if—like mist—it surrounded the forest in drifts through which I was passing, emerging now and again, returning to my confused state.

At the verge of the forest, I cut the motor and glided in, catching hold of a trunk to stop myself. The melaleuca tea trees (there must have been thousands, their lovely fan-shaped crowns thick with leaves, extending as far as the eye could see) were between twenty and thirty feet high, and I estimated the depth of the water to be about four feet, lapping gently at the trunks. They cast an ashen shade and formed a canopy that shielded me from the worst of the rain. A smell of decomposition fouled the air—I wrapped a T-shirt about the lower half of my face to reduce the stench. Peering through the gloom, I spotted other boats, all empty, and bodies floating here and there, bulking up from the dark gray water, their shirts ballooned taut with gasses. The trees segmented my view, offering avenues of sight that were in every direction more or less the same, as if I were trapped in some sort of prison maze.

I restarted the motor and had gone approximately two hundred yards into the forest when I noticed a thinning of the trees ahead and a paling of the light that might signal a clearing; but I could not discern its extent or anything else about it. The bodies that islanded the water near the boundary of the forest were absent here, and this gave me; pause. I cut the engine again and surveyed the area, I could discern no particular menace, yet I had an apprehension of menace and reacted to every sound, jerking my head this way and that. Unable to shake the feeling, I decided a retreat was in order. I swung the boat around and was about to restart the engine, when I spotted a gaunt, bearded man sitting in the crotch of a tree.

At first I wasn’t sure the figure was not a deformity of the wood, for his hair and clothing were as gray as the bark of the tree, and his skin, too, held a grayish cast; but then he lifted his hand in a feeble salute. He was lashed in place by an intricately knotted system of rags that allowed him a limited range of motion. His features were those of a Cradle, yet whereas the Cradles I had met with previously were of the same approximate age as me, he appeared older, though this might have been the result of ill usage. “How’s it going?” he asked. His voice, too, was feeble, a scratchy croak. I asked why he had lashed himself to the tree.

“If I were you I’d do the same,” he said. “Unless you’re just going to turn around and leave.”

I let the boat come to rest against the trunk of a tree close to his.

“Seems a waste,” he said. “Coming all this way and then not sticking around for the show.”

“What show?”

He made an elaborate gesture, like a magician introducing a trick. “I don’t believe I could do it justice. It’s something you have to see for yourself.” He worked at something caught in his teeth. “I think this’ll be my last night. I need to get back to Phnom Penh.”

Nonplussed, I asked why he hadn’t gone farther into the forest.

“I’m not a big believer in an afterlife.”

“So you’re saying the ones who continue on past this point, they die?”

“Questions of life and death are always open to interpretation. But yeah . . . that’s what I’m saying. There’s two or three hundred of us left in the forest. Some cross over every day. They’re half-crazy from being here, from eating bugs and diseased birds. Stuff that makes your insides itch. They finally snap.” He glanced toward the clearing. “It’s due to start up again. You’d better find something to tie yourself up with. What I did was strip clothes off the corpses.”

“I’ve got something.”

I secured the launch to the trunk. The crotch of the melaleuca was no more than a foot above water level and, once I had made myself as comfortable as possible, I removed the coil of rope from my pack. The man advised me to fashion knots that would be difficult to untie and, when I asked why, he replied that I might be tempted to untie them. His affable manner seemed sincere, but we were no more than fifteen feet apart, and my visit with the fat man had made me wary. I kept the knots loose. Once settled, I asked the man how long he had been in the forest.

“This’ll be my fifth night,” he said. “I was going to stay longer, but I’m almost out of food, and my underwear’s starting to mildew. I want to leave while I’m still strong enough to top off that fat fuck in Phu Tho.”

“I wouldn’t worry about him.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“I dealt with him,” I said, wanting to give the impression of being a dangerous man.

“He tried something with you?”

“I didn’t give him the opportunity.”

I asked if he lived in Phnom Penh, and as the light faded, he told me he operated a small business that offered tours catering to adventure travelers interested in experiencing Cambodia off the beaten path. He went into detail about the business, and although his delivery was smooth, it seemed a rehearsed speech, a story manufactured to cover a more sinister function. I let on that I was also a businessman but left the nature of the business unclear. Our conversation stalled out—it was as if we knew that we had few surprises for the other.

The rain stopped at dusk, and mosquitoes came out in force. I hoped that my faith in malaria medication was not misplaced. With darkness, a salting of stars showed through the canopy, yet their light was insufficient to reveal my neighbor in his tree. I could tell he was still there by the sound of his curses and mosquito-killing slaps. I grew sleepy and had to struggle to keep awake; then, after a couple of hours, I began to cramp, and that woke me up. I asked how much longer we had to wait.

“Don’t know,” the man said. “I thought it would be coming earlier, but maybe it won’t be coming at all. Maybe it’s done with us.”

Irritated, I said, “Why the hell won’t you tell me what’s going on?”

“I don’t know what’s going on. I’ve got some ideas, but they’re pretty damn crazy. You seem stable, a lot more so than most of the pitiful bastards left out here. What I was hoping was for you to give me your take on things and see if it lines up with mine. I don’t want to predispose you to thinking about it one way of the other. Okay?”

“The fat guy, he said he thought that whatever it is—the animal, he called it. He thought the animal wanted our help because the Cradles were badasses.”

“Could be. Though I wouldn’t say badass. Just plain bad. Rotten.” I heard him shifting about. “Wait and see, all right? It shouldn’t be much longer.”

I spent the next hour or thereabouts hydrating and rubbing cramps out of my legs. One night of this, I told myself, was all I was going to take. The cramps abated, and I began to feel better. However, my mind still wasn’t right. I alternated between alertness and periods during which my thoughts wandered away from the forest, wishing I had never left home, wishing Kim was there to steady me with her cool rationality, wishing that we could make a real family and have babies, wondering if I would see her again, not because I felt imperiled and believed I might not survive the tea forest but because of my commitment-phobic character and faithless heart. It was in the midst of this reverie that the man in the tree beside me said, “Here it comes.”

I could see no sign of “it,” only darkness and dim stars, and asked in which direction he was looking and what he saw.