Other Earths (35 page)

Dan put on a woebegone look. “Hey, come on! You guys don’t have to go.”

But Riel was already at the door. She paused to flutter a ditsy wave. “ ’Bye, Danny,” she said.

 

The
Undine
was moored at the port facility on the Tonle Sap, a short distance from where it joined the Mekong and close by a huge multistory barge, its paint weathered to the grayish white of old bone. In years past this had housed a dance hall, a brothel by any other name, and now the top floor was home to the offices of the Cambodian Sex Workers Union and other such organizations. Womyn’s Agenda For Change, the sign above one door spelled out in English. The following morning, sitting in the stern of the
Undine
, I watched streams of taxi girls trundling along the balconies, passing in and out of rooms where their sisters had once slaved, busy being empowered, fighting the good fight against the corporate giants that sought to use them as guinea pigs to test experimental AIDS vaccines. I supposed their sisterhood boosted morale and saved lives, and I knew it was dangerous work. Lucy compared them to the Wobblies back in the 1920s and said many girls had been murdered for their efforts. Yet to my eyes they might as well have been streams of ants plucking a few last shreds of tissue off a carcass—they had no conception of the forces mounted against them, no clue how absurd and redundant a name was Womyn’s Agenda For Change.

Since my arrival in Phnom Penh, the changes (flickerings in the sky, subtle alterations in urban geography, etc.) had grown more frequent or, due to an increased sensitivity on my part, more observable. The episode with the taxi girl and the vanishing mirror was the first evidence I’d had that anyone else noticed them, though the evidence was impugned by the possible use of drugs. If the changes were observable by others, if this were other than a localized effect, and if it occurred in a place less disorderly than Phnom Penh, it would be the lead story on the news. I expected that when I reached Dong Thap the changes might be even more drastic. The prospect unnerved me, yet it held a potent allure. Like the narrator of
The Tea Forest
, I was being drawn to complete the journey and I wanted to complete it. The previous night’s incident had convinced me that I was undergoing a transformation like the one documented by Cradle Two in the novel. I had taken undue pleasure in the exercise of control over the young Khmer in the Heart of Darkness, and I wondered if the person for whom he had mistaken me could have been the alpha-Cradle, that secretive, powerful figure, the Platonic ideal of Cradles everywhere. The notion that I was evolving into such a ruthless and decisive figure was exhilarating. I had never possessed either quality in great measure, and the proportions of the man, the fear he inspired, were impressive. Yet I was being pulled in another direction as well, and that was why I had returned to the
Undine
and sat in the stern, the satellite phone in my lap, ignoring the faint, sweetish reek of sewage, gazing at the barge and at eddies in the brown water.

When I called Kim, she answered on the third ring and told me this wasn’t a good time. I asked if she had company. She was noncommittal, a sure sign that one of my colleagues, or one of hers, was lying in bed beside her. I said it was important, and she said, “Hang on.”

I pictured her slipping into a robe, soothing the ruffled sensibilities of her lover, and carrying the phone into the living room. When she spoke again, her tone was exasperated.

“You don’t call for three weeks, and now you just have to speak to me?” she said. “I got so worried I called Andy [my agent], and of course you’d called him. This is so typical of you.”

I apologized.

“Are you in trouble?” she asked. “Do you want to run off to Bali with some teenage nymph and jeopardize everything we’ve built together?”

“It’s not that.”

“Because if that’s the case, I’m sick and tired of having to coax you back. I’m ready to give you my blessing.”

“It’s not that! Okay? I want you to do me a favor. Andy was going to make copies of
The Tea Forest
. Did he send one to me?”

“I don’t know. You have a package from him. I put it with the rest of your mail.”

“That’s probably it. Could you take a look?”

While she checked, my eyes returned to the barge. A number of women were kneeling on the foredeck, painting signs for a protest, and others had gathered in the bow, listening to a speaker who was talking into a hand-held megaphone, doing a bit of consciousness-raising. Now and then her high-pitched voice blatted out and there was a squeal of feedback.

“It’s here,” Kim said. “Do you want me to express it?”

“I want you to read it.”

“Thomas, I don’t have the time.”

“Please. Read it . . . as soon as possible. I can’t talk to you about what’s happening until you’ve read it.”

There was a silence, and then she said, “Andy told me you were developing some worrisome obsessions about the book.”

“You know I’m a . . .”

“Just a second.”

A man said something in the background; after that I heard nothing. When Kim came back on, she said with anger in her voice, “You have my undivided attention.”

“Sorry.”

“It’s not important. You were saying?”

I’d lost the thread, and it took me a second to pick it up.

“I’m not the kind of guy who’s likely to lose it,” I said. “You know that.”

“Are you doing a lot of drugs?”

“Did Andy say he thought I was?”

“Not in so many words, but . . . yeah.”

“Well, I’m not. There are some strange correspondences, very strange, between the book and what’s going on here. I need another point of view.”

“All right. I’ll read it Wednesday night. I can’t until then. Tomorrow’s a nightmare.”

A drop of sweat trickled into my eye, and I wiped it away. Not even eight-thirty, and the temperature was already into the nineties. I felt a sudden upsurge of emotion and realized how much I missed Kim. Though I had tried to throw my heart in a new direction, though Lucy was an interesting woman and, without doubt, more sexually adventurous than Kim, I was ready for some home cooking, and I asked Kim if she was planning to meet me in Saigon.

“If you still want me to,” she said.

We discussed when she would come, at which hotel she should stay, and spent some time repairing the rift in the relationship. I was so consoled by the familiarity of her voice, so excited by the predictable promise it conveyed, I suggested that we could marry in Saigon, a suggestion she did not reject out of hand, saying we should table the matter until she arrived. I thought we both had concluded that these adventures, these dalliances no longer served a purpose—they had become interruptions in our lives, and it was time we moved on. Yet when I hung up, it was as though I had cut myself off from her. I felt a total lack of connection and regretted having mentioned marriage. I went into the bow and asked Lan if we could head south in the morning. He sat facing the river and its farther shore, his legs dangling over the side of the houseboat, wearing a grease-stained pink T-shirt and shorts; he pushed a shock of gray hair from his eyes and peered up at me like an old turtle, blinking, craning his stiff neck.

“Anytime,” he said. “Need provisions.”

“Send Deng into town.”

He chuckled, showing his gapped yellow teeth. “Deng.”

“What’s so funny?” I asked.

“Gone. You scare him. He tells me you are a bad man. He says a bad man is unlucky for people around him.”

I thought Deng’s leaving probably had more to do with Lucy than with his perception of my character. “You don’t believe that, do you?”

“Maybe,” said Lan.

“Then why haven’t you deserted?”

“No reason.” He fixed his eyes on a barge loaded with crates chugging upstream, crapping an oil slick and black fumes. “Need provisions,” he said.

 

That afternoon, under an overcast sky, we visited a market on the outskirts of the city, a place where the pavement ended and green countryside could be seen off along the main road; the streets widened to form an open area—a square, if you will—of tapioca-colored dirt amid dilapidated buildings, none more than two stories tall. Infirm-looking, vertically compromised stalls of weathered wood were clumped alongside the buildings, pitched at eccentric angles. If you squinted and let your eyes slide out of focus, they resembled old, hobbling, gray-skirted women, some leaning together, who had paused for breath during a constitutional and never stirred again. The majority of the stalls were the offices of fortune-tellers, and this was the reason for our visit: Lucy’s favorite fortune-teller could be found there. Why she picked him out of all the fortune-tellers in Phnom Penh, I hadn’t a clue. He offered no complicated graphs and charts to demark your fate, as did many. His method was to rub dirt into her palm to make the lines stand out and mutter abstractions about her future until she was satisfied. Perhaps appearance played a part in her choice. Iron-gray hair hair fell in tangles over his chest and shoulders, and tattoos, faded to intricate blue scratchings, wrote an illegible legend on his arms, chest, neck, and forehead. He had a wispy goatee, wore a wraparound that covered his loins, and could usually be found smoking a cigar-sized spliff, which may have accounted for his benign gaze. His colleagues, most neatly dressed in western-style clothing, free of tattoos and spliffs, gave him a wide berth.

While Lucy consulted her wizard and Riel dawdled at a stall that sold cheap jewelry, I walked through thin crowds along one of the market streets leading off the square and, after a bout of token haggling, bought a U.S. army-issue Colt .45 and six clips of ammo from an arms dealer. Though old, the weapon appeared to be in good working order. The dealer encouraged me to test fire it, but I was afraid that I might be reported—I had no conception of the legalities attendant upon buying a gun. I tucked the pistol into my waist, beneath my shirt, and hustled back toward the square. A block along from the arms dealer, I stopped dead in my tracks. Standing in the doorway of a building on the corner was a bearded man dressed identically to me—shorts, sandals, a black T-shirt—and with an identical (as far as I could determine from a distance of forty feet) face and build. I imagined that we wore the identical stunned expression. We locked gazes for a moment, and as I hurried toward him, he ducked into the interior of the building. I raced after him, through the door and into the midst of twenty or thirty people slurping noodles at wooden tables, nearly knocking over a waitress who carried a load of dirty dishes. Her irritation gave way to confusion. She glanced toward the kitchen, then at me, and that told me all I needed to know. I ran through the kitchen and out onto the street behind the restaurant. There was scant pedestrian traffic—some kids kicking around a soccer ball, two women talking, a man looking under the hood of a beat-up yellow Toyota—and no sign of my double. I walked along in the direction of the square, peering into doorways, my excitement draining. What could we have said to each other, anyway? We could have compared notes on Cradleness, on what it meant to be a Cradle, for all the good that would do. Possibly I could have learned something new about the delta, but nothing, I thought, that would have greatly illuminated its central mystery. It had been a strange thing to see myself, yet now, at a remove from the moment, I questioned whether he had actually been my double. A bearded man in shorts and a black T-shirt at a distance of forty feet who had fled when approached by a stranger on the run: I told myself he might have been anyone.

In my absence, the center of the square had been taken over by an elephant. It was kneeling, a heap of fresh dung close by its hindquarters, and Riel stood at its side, like a princess beside a weathered castle wall, talking to a boy in shorts, twelve or thirteen, mounted behind the animal’s neck. A farmer’s son, I thought, who had ridden the family tractor into town to show it off. I found a stall adjacent to Lucy’s wizard that sold coffee sweetened with condensed milk and sat on a rickety folding chair and watched Riel trying to entice the boy into giving her a ride (he kept wagging his finger no, and scowling), while the elephant flexed its trunk and blinked away flies, presenting an image of stuporous discontent.

The crowds were thinner in the square than they had been on the side streets, so Riel was the object of much attention, especially from the male stallkeepers. I sipped my coffee and thought about the gun pushing against my pelvic bone, imagining it had been snatched from the hand of a dead officer during the Vietnam conflict and wondering how many lives it had snuffed out. It had been an impulse buy, although the impulse was informed by a lifelong fear of and fascination with guns and was given a quasi-rational basis by the idea that I might need it once we reached the delta. It was a steel phallus, a social ill, all those things that left-wing politics said it was; yet its cold touch warmed me and added weight to my purpose, enabling the fantasy that my mission there was important.

Lucy finished her consultation and joined me for coffee. “It’s going to rain,” she said.

The clouds had gone from a nickel color to dark gray brushed with charcoal; the muggy heat and the smell of the elephant’s dung had thickened. I laid an envelope on the table by Lucy’s hand.

“What’s this?” she asked, fingering it.

“Severance pay,” I said.

She met my eyes steadily, and I thought she would object or demand an explanation; but she only looked away, her face neutral.

“So what did he tell you, your guy? What’s in your stars?” I asked, breaking a silence.

“Obviously not a trip south,” she said. “Oh, well. Like they say, all good things . . .”

“I hope it’s been good.”

She appeared to rebound. “It’s been an adventure . . . and good.” She grinned. “No complaints on this end.”

“It’s about time you went home and kick-started that career, don’t you think?”