Other Earths (collection)

DOG-EARED PAPERBACK OF MY LIFE Lucius Shepard

My name, Thomas Cradle, is not the most common of names, yet when I chanced upon a book written by another Thomas Cradle while looking up my work on Amazon (a pastime to which I, like many authors, am frequently given), I thought little of it, and my overriding reaction was one of concern that this new and unknown Cradle might prove the superior of the known. I became even more concerned when I learned that the book, The Tea Forest, was a contemporary fantasy, this being the genre into which my own books were slotted. Published in 2002, it was ranked 1,478,040 in Amazon sales, a fact that eased my fears somewhat. According to the reader reviews (nine of them in sum, all five stars), the book was a cult item, partly due to its quality and partly because the author had disappeared in Cambodia not long after its publication. I found it odd that I hadn’t heard of Cradle and his novel before; out of curiosity, I ordered a used copy and put the incident from mind.

The book arrived ten days later, while I was proofing my new novel, working on a screenplay based on my third novel, for which I was being paid a small fortune, and negotiating to buy a home in the Florida Keys, a property to which some of the screenplay money would be applied. The package lay on my desk unopened for several weeks, buried under papers. By the time I got around to opening it, I had forgotten what it was I ordered. My copy of the The Tea Forest turned out to be a dog-eared trade paperback, the pages crimped and highlighted in yellow marker throughout, rife with marginalia. On the cover, framed by green borders, was a murky oil painting depicting a misted swamp with an almost indistinguishable male figure slogging though waist-deep water. I looked on the spine. The publisher was Random House, also my publisher. That made it doubly odd that I hadn’t heard of the book. What the hell, I asked myself, were they doing publishing two Thomas Cradles in the same genre? And why hadn’t my editor or agent made me aware of this second Cradle?

I turned the book over and glanced at the tiny author photo, which showed a bearded, unkempt man glaring with apparent contempt at the camera. I skimmed the blurbs, the usual glowing overstatement, and read the bio:

“Thomas Cradle was born in Carboro, North Carolina in 1968. He attended the University of Virginia for two years before dropping out and has traveled widely in Asia, working as a teacher of English and martial arts. He currently lives in Phnom Penh. The Tea Forest is his first novel.”

A crawly sensation moved down my neck and spread to my shoulders. Not only did Cradle and I share a name, we had been born in the same town in the same year and had attended the same university (though I had graduated). I’d also trained in Muay Thai and Shotokan karate during high school—if not for a herniated disc, I might have pursued these interests. I had a closer look at the author photo. Lose the beard, shorten the hair, drop twenty-five pounds and six years, and he might have been my twin. The contemptuous glare alone should have made the likeness apparent.

Someone, I told myself, was playing a practical joke, someone who knew me well enough to predict my reactions. When I opened the book, something would pop out or a bad smell would be released …or perhaps it would be a good-natured joke. Kim, my girlfriend, had the wherewithal to doctor an old photograph and dummy up a fake book, but I would not have thought she possessed the requisite whimsy. I dipped into the first chapter, expecting the punchline would be revealed in the text; but after five chapters I recognized that the book could not be the instrument of a prank, and my feeling of unease returned.

The novel documented a trip down the Mekong River taken by four chance acquaintances, beginning in Stung Treng on the Cambodian-Lao border, where the four had purchased a used fishing boat, to Dong Thap Province in the extreme south of Vietnam. It was an unfinished journey fraught with misadventure and illness, infused with a noirish atmosphere of low-level criminality, and culminated with a meditation on suicide that may well have foreshadowed the author’s fate.

Judging by the wealth and authenticity of the background detail and by the precisely nuanced record of the first-person narrator’s emotional and mental life, the novel was thinly disguised autobiography; and the configuration of the narrator’s thoughts and perceptions seemed familiar, as did the style in which the novel was written: It was my style. Not the style in which I currently wrote, but the style I had demonstrated at the start of my career, prior to being told by an editor that long, elliptical sentences and dense prose would be an impediment to sales (she counseled the use of “short sentences, less navel-gazing, more plot,” advice I took to heart). Cradle Two’s novel was no mere pastiche; it was that old style perfected, carried off with greater expertise than I had ever displayed. It was as if he had become the writer I had chosen not to be.

I went to Amazon again, intending to have another look at the webpage devoted to The Tea Forest and perhaps find the author’s contact information; but I could not locate the page, and there was no evidence anywhere on the Internet of a second Thomas Cradle or his novel. I tried dozens of searches, all to no avail. I emailed the seller, Overdog Books, asking for any information they might have on the author; they denied having sold me the book. I sent them a scan of the packing slip, along with a note that accused them of being in collusion with one of my enemies, most likely another writer who, envious of my success, was mocking me. They did not respond. I riffled through the pages of the novel, half-expecting it to dematerialize along with the proof of its existence. I had often made the comment that if ever I were presented with incontrovertible evidence of the fantastic, I would quit writing and become a priest. Though I was not yet prepared to don the cassock, the book in my hands seemed evidence of the kind I had demanded.

The narrative of the The Tea Forest was episodic, heavy on the descriptive passages, many of them violent or explicitly sexual; and these episodes were strung together on a flimsy plotline that essentially consisted of a series of revelations, all leading the narrator (TC by name, thereby firmly establishing that Cradle Two had not overstrained his imagination during this portion of the creative process) to conclude that our universe and those adjoining it were interpenetrating. He likened this circumstance to countless strips of wet rice paper hung side by side in a circle and blown together by breezes that issued from every quarter of the compass, allowing even strips on opposite points of the circle to stick to each other for a moment and, in some instances, for much longer; thus, he concluded, we commonly spent portions of each day in places far stranger than we were aware (although the universes appeared virtually identical). This, he declared, explained why people in rural circumstances experienced paranormal events more often than urban dwellers: They were likely to notice unusual events, whereas city folk might mistake a ghost for a new form of advertising, or attribute the sighting of an enormous shadow in the Hudson River to chemicals in the air, or pay no attention to the fact that household objects were disappearing around them. It also might explain, I realized, why I was no longer able to unearth any record of the novel.

I had the book copied and bound and FedExed the copy to my agent. The cover letter explained how I had obtained it and asked him to find out whatever he could. He called two mornings later to congratulate me on a stroke of marketing genius, saying that The Tea Forest could be another Blair Witch and that this hoax concerning a second Thomas Cradle was a brilliant way of preparing the market for the debut of my “new” style. When I told him it wasn’t a hoax, as far as I knew, he said not to worry, he’d never tell, and declared that if Random House wouldn’t go for the book, he’d take me over to Knopf. At this juncture, I began to acknowledge that the universe might be as Cradle Two described, and, since there would be no one around to charge me with plagiarism, I saw no reason not to profit from the book; but I told him to hold off on doing anything, that I needed to think it through and, before all else, I might be traveling to Cambodia and Vietnam.

The idea for the trip was little more than a whim, inspired by my envy of Cradle Two and the lush deviance of his life, as evidenced by The Tea Forest; but over the ensuing two months, as I reread sections of the novel, committing many of them to memory, the richness of the prose infected me with Cradle Two’s obsessiveness (which, after all, was a cousin to my own), and I came to speculate that if I retraced his steps (even if they were steps taken in another universe), I might derive some vital benefit. There was a mystery here that wanted unraveling, and there was no one more qualified than I to investigate it. While I hadn’t entirely accepted his rice paper model of the universe, I believed that if his analogy held water, I might be able to perceive its operations more clearly through the simple lens of a river culture. However, one portion of the novel gave me reason for concern. The narrator, TC, had learned during the course of his journey that in one alternate universe he was a secretive figure of immense power, evil in nature, and that his innumerable analogs were, to some degree or another, men of debased character. The final section of the book suggested that he had undergone a radical transformation, and that idea was supported by a transformation in the prose. Under other circumstances, I would have perceived this to be a typical genre resolution, but Cradle Two’s sentences uncoiled like vipers waking under the reader’s eye, spitting out a black stream of venom from which the next serpent would slither, dark and supple, sleekly malformed, governed by an insidious sonority that got into my head and stained my dreams and my work for days thereafter. Eventually I convinced myself that Cradle Two’s gift alone was responsible for this dubious magic and that it had been done for dramatic effect and was in no way a reflection of reality.

The book, the actual object, became an article of my obsession. I liked touching it. The slickness of the cover; the tacky spot on the back where a clerk or prior owner had spilled something sticky or parked a wad of chewing gum; the neat yet uninspired marginalia; the handwritten inscription, “To Tracy,” and the anonymity of the dedication, “For you”; the faintly yellowed paper; the tear on page 19. All its mundane imperfections seemed proofs of its otherworldliness, that another world existed beyond the enclosure of my own, and I began carrying the book with me wherever I went, treating it as though it were a lover, fondling it, riffling its pages, fingering it while I drove, thinking about it to the point of distraction, until the idea of the trip evolved from a whim into a project I seriously considered, and then into something more. Though was ordinarily a cynical type, dismissive of any opinion arguing the thesis that life was anything other than a cruel and random process, my affair with the book persuaded me that destiny had taken a hand in my life, and I would be a fool not to heed it (I think every cynic’s brassbound principles can be as easily overthrown). And so, tentatively to begin with, yet with growing enthusiasm, I started to make plans. As a writer, I delighted in planning, in charting the course of a story, in assembling the elements of a fiction into a schematic, and I plotted the trip as though it were a novel that hewed to (but was not limited by) the picaresque flow of Cradle Two’s voyage along the Mekong. There would be a woman, of course—perhaps two or three women—and here a dash of adventure, here a time for rest and reflection, here the opportunity for misadventure, here a chance for love, and here a chance for disappointment. I laid in detail with the care of a master craftsman attempting a delicate mosaic, leaving only one portion undone: the ending. That would be produced by the alchemy of the writing or, in this instance, the traveling.

I intended to hew closely in spirit to the debauched tenor of Cradle Two/TC’s journey, and I hoped that by setting up similar conditions, I might have illuminations similar to his; but I saw no purpose in duplicating its every detail—I expected my journey to be a conflation of his experience. The lion’s share of his troubles on the trip had stemmed from his choice of boats, so rather than buying a leaky fishing craft with an unreliable engine for cheap, I arranged to have a houseboat built in Stung Treng. The cost was negligible, four thousand dollars, half up front, for a shallow-draft boat capable of sleeping four with a fully equipped galley and a new engine. Once I completed the trip, I intended to donate it to charity, a Christian act that, given the boat’s value in U.S. dollars, would allow me to take a tax write-off of several times that amount. I informed Kim that I’d be going away for six to eight weeks, roughing it (she considered any activity that occurred partially outdoors to be roughing it) on the Mekong, far from five-star hotels and haute cuisine, and that she was welcome to hook up with me in Saigon, where suitable amenities were available. However, I cautioned her that I would be attempting to recreate the mood described in The Tea Forest, and this meant I would be seeing other women. Perhaps, I suggested, she should seize the opportunity to spread her wings.

Kim, a tall, striking brunette, had an excellent mind, a background in microbiology, and a scientist’s dispassionate view of human interactions. We had discussed marriage and discussed rather more the possibility of having children, but until we reached that pass, she was comfortable with maintaining an open relationship. She told me to be careful, a reference both to safe sex and to the problems I’d had in compartmentalizing my emotional life, and gave me her blessing. I then contacted my agent and instructed him to sell The Tea Forest while I was gone. These formalities out of the way, I had little left to do except lose some weight for the trip and cultivate a beard—I thought this would help get me into character—and wait for the end of the fall monsoon.

I flew to Bangkok and there took passage on the Ubon Ratchatani Express toward the Lao border, berthed in an old-fashioned sleeping car with curtained fold-down beds on both sides of the aisle. I spent a goodly portion of the evening in the bar car, which reeked of garlic and chilis and frying basil, drinking bad Thai beer, trying to acclimate myself to the heat that poured through the lowered windows. From Ubon, I traveled by bus to Stung Treng, a dismal town of about twenty-five thousand at the confluence of the Mekong, the Sesan, and the Sekong Rivers. It was a transit point for backpackers, a steady trickle of them, the majority remaining in town no more than a couple of hours, the length of time it took for the next river taxi to arrive. I had thought to pick up a companion in one of the larger Cambodian towns downriver, but as I would be trapped in Stung Treng for three days while the boat was being fitted and provisioned, I posted signs at the border, in the open-air market, and around town, advertising a cruise aboard the Undine (the name of my houseboat) in exchange for personal services. Women only. See the bartender at the Sekong Hotel.

I was heading back to the hotel, passing through the market when a mural painted on a noodle stall caught my eye. Abstract in form, a yellowish white mass of cells or chambers, spreading over the front and both sides of the stall—though crudely rendered, I had the idea that it was the depiction of microscopic life, one of those multicelled monstrosities that you become overly familiar with in Biology 101. It was such an oddity (most of the stalls were unadorned, a handful decorated with religious iconography), I stopped to look and immediately drew a gathering of young men, curious to see what had made me curious and taking the opportunity to offer themselves as guides, procurers, and so forth. The stallkeeper, an elderly Laotian man, grew annoyed with these loiterers, but I gave him a handful of Cambodian riels, enough to purchase noodles for my new pals, and asked (through the agency of an interpreter—one of the men spoke English) what the mural represented.

“He don’t know,” said the interpreter. “He say it make peaceful to look at. It make him think of Nirvana. You know Nirvana?”

“Just their first couple of albums,” I said. “Ask him who painted it.”

This question stimulated a brief exchange, and the interpreter reported that the artist had been an American. Big like me. More hair. A bad man. I asked him to inquire in what way the man had been bad, but the stallkeeper would only say (or the interpreter could only manage to interpret) that the man was “very bad.” I had only skimmed the last half of The Tea Forest, but I seemed to recall a mention of a creature like that depicted by the mural, and I suspected that the mural and the bad man who had created it might be evidence supporting Cradle Two’s theories.

That afternoon I staked out a table in the Sekong’s bar and was amazed by how many women volunteered for my inspection. Two balked at the sexual aspects of the position, and others were merely curious; but eleven were serious applicants, willing and, in some cases, eager to trade their favors for a boat ride and whatever experiences it might afford them. I rejected all but four out of hand for being too young or insufficiently attractive. The first day’s interviews yielded one maybe, a thirty-four-year-old Swedish school-teacher who was making her way around the world and had been traveling for almost five years; but she seemed to be looking for a place to rest, and rest was the last thing on my mind.

The bar was a pleasant enough space—walls of split, lacquered bamboo decorated with travel posters, Cambodian pop flowing from hidden speakers, and a river view through screen windows. A standing floor fan buzzed and whirred in one corner, yet it was so humid that the chair stuck to my back, and the smells drifting up from the water grew less enticing as the hours wore on. Late on the second day, I was almost ready to give up, when a slender, long-legged woman with dyed black hair (self-barbered, apparently, into a ragged pageboy cut), camo parachute pants, and an oft-laundered Olivia Tremor Control T-shirt approached the bar. She unshouldered her backpack and spoke to the bartender. I signaled to him that she passed muster. He pointed me out, and she came toward my table but pulled up short a couple of feet away.

“Oh, gosh!” she said. “You’re Thomas Cradle, aren’t you?”

Flattered at being recognized, I said that I was.

“This is fantastic!” She came forward again, dragging the backpack. “I shall have to tell my old boyfriend. He’s a devoted fan of yours, and he’ll be terribly impressed. Of course, that would make it necessary to speak with him again, wouldn’t it?”

She was more interesting-looking than pretty, yet pretty enough, with lively topaz eyes and one of those superprecise British accents that linger over each and every syllable, delicately tonguing the consonants, as if giving the language a blowjob.

“It’s hellish outside,” she said. “I must have a cold drink. Would you care for something?”

Her face, which I’d initially thought too young, mistaking her for a gangly teenager, had a waiflike quality; a white scar over one eyebrow and small indentations along her jaw, perhaps resulting from adolescent acne, added a decade to my estimate.

“I’ll take a Green Star, thanks,” I said. “No ice.”

“Gin for me. Tons of ice.” Her mouth, bracketed when she smiled by finely etched lines, was extraordinarily wide and expressive, appearing to have an extra hinge that enabled her crooked grin. “I’ll just fetch them, shall I?”

She brought the drinks, had a sip, closed her eyes, and sighed. Then she extended a hand, shook mine, and said, “I’m Lucy McQuillen, and I loved your last book. At least I think it’s your last.” She frowned. “Didn’t I hear that you’d stopped writing …or were giving it up or something? Not that your presence in Cambodia would refute that in any way.”

“I have got a new novel coming out next spring,” I said.

“Well, if it’s as good as the last, you’ll have my ten quid.”

“The critics will probably say it’s exactly the same as the last.”

We teetered on the brink of an awkward silence, and then she said, “Shall I tell you about myself? Would that be helpful?”

“That’s why I’m here.”

“Okay. I’m thirty-one …thirty-two next month, actually. I’ve lived in London all my life. I graduated from the Chelsea School of Design and worked at a firm in the city for a while. Five years ago I started my own firm, specializing in urban landscape design. We were doing spectacularly well for a new business …”

A foursome of prosperous-looking Cambodian men entered the bar, laughing and talking; they acknowledged us, inclining their heads and pressing their hands together in a prayerful gesture, a gesture that Lucy returned, and they took seats at a table against the back wall.

“To put it succinctly,” Lucy went on, “I’m a victim of multiculturalism. My East Indian accountant stole from me, quite a large sum, and fled to India. I couldn’t recover. It was an absolute disaster. I’m afraid I was a mess for some time thereafter. I had a little money left in personal accounts, and I started out for India, planning some pitiful revenge. I’m not certain what I had in mind. Some sort of Kaliesque scenario, I suppose. Gobbets of blood. His wife screaming in horror. Of course, I didn’t go through with it. I bypassed India completely, and I’ve been bumming around Southeast Asia for a couple of years. My money’s running low, and, to be frank, this voyage would extend my trip and give me the time and leisure to write a new business plan.”

“You must be good at what you do,” I said. “To be so successful at such a young age.”

“I’ve won awards,” she said, grinning broadly.

“I would have thought, then, you could have found investors to bail you out.”

“As I said, I was a mess. Certifiably a mess. Once they noticed, investors wouldn’t touch me. I’ve calmed down a great deal since, and I’m ready to have at it again.”

She fit into the “too eager” category, yet I found her appealing. The Cambodian men burst into applause, celebrating something one of them had done or said. The light was fading on the river, the far bank darkened by cloud shadow. I asked Lucy if she understood the requirements of the position.

“Your sign was somewhat vague,” she said. “I may be misreading it, but I assume ‘companion’ is another word for girlfriend?”

“That’s right.”

“May I ask a question?”

“Go for it.”

“Surely a man of your accomplishment must have a number of admirers. You’re not bad looking, and you obviously have money. I don’t understand why you would be in the market.”

“It’s in the nature of an experiment,” I said. “I can assure you that you won’t be harmed or humiliated in any way.”

“A literary experiment?”

“You might say.”

“You know, I didn’t intend to seek the position,” she said. “I was just …intrigued. But I must admit, having Thomas Cradle on my resum’ would do wonders for my self-esteem.” She had a deep drink of her gin-and-tonic. “If the position is offered, I do have two conditions. One you’ve already spoken to—I’m not into pain. Short of sea urchins and safety pins, I’m your girl. I believe you can expect me, given a modicum of compatibility, to perform my duties with relish.”

“And the second condition?”

“Instead of leaping into the fire, as it were, I’d prefer we took some time to become comfortable with one another. Give it a day or two. Will that be a problem?”

“Not at all.”

One of the Cambodian men bought us fresh drinks. He spoke no English, but Lucy chatted him up in his own tongue and then explained that his friend had received a promotion, and he would like us to join them in a toast. We complied, and, after bows and prayerful gestures all around, I asked if she had studied Cambodian.

“I pick up languages quickly. One of my many gifts.” She gave another lopsided smile. “I do have some bad habits I should mention. I tend to run on about things. Talk too much. Just tell me to stuff it. People have been telling me that since I was a child. And I’m a vegetarian, though I have been known to eat fish. I’m picky about what I consume.”

“My cook’s big on veggies,” I said. “Too much so for my tastes.”

“You have a cook?”

“A Vietnamese kid. Deng. He’s crew and cook. The pilot’s an old guy in his sixties. Lan. He speaks decent American, but he doesn’t talk to me much …not so far, anyway.”

“La-de-da!” said Lucy. “Next you’ll be telling me you have your own private ocean.”

A breeze stirred the placid surface of the river, but it had no effect on the humidity in the restaurant.

“There’s one thing more,” Lucy said. “I’m afraid it may erase whatever good opinion you’ve formed of me, but I can’t compromise. I smoke two pipes of opium a day. One at noon, and one before sleeping. Sometimes more, if the quality’s not good.” She paused and, a glum note in her voice, said, “The quality is usually good in these parts.”

“You have an adequate supply on hand?”

She seemed surprised by this response, unaware that her confession had put her into the lead for the job. “I’ve enough for the week, I think.”

“Is opium the actual reason you want to extend your trip?” I asked.

“It’s part of it. I won’t lie to you. I recognize I’ll have to quit before I return to London. But it’s not the main reason.”

Another backpacker, a short woman with frizzy blond hair, entered and, after peering about, approached the bartender. I signaled him to send her away. Lucy pretended not to notice.

“Would you like to see the boat?” I asked.

An alarmed look crossed her face, and I thought that this must be a major step for her, that despite her worldliness she was not accustomed to giving her trust so freely. But then she smiled and nodded vigorously.

“Yes, please,” she said.

The sun was beginning to set as I rowed out to the Undine, moored some thirty yards from shore. A high bank of solid-looking bluish gray cloud rose from the eastern horizon, its leading edge ruffled and fluted like that of an immense seashell, a godly mollusk dominating the sky; fragments of dirty pink cloud drifted beneath, resembling frayed morsels of flesh that might have been torn from the creature that once inhabited the shell, floating in an aqua medium. The river had turned slate colored, and the houseboat, with its cabin of varnished, unpainted boards and the devilish eyes painted on the bow to keep spirits at bay, looked surreal from a distance, like a new home uprooted and set adrift on a native barge, its perfect, watery reflection an impressionist trick. Lan sat cross-legged in the bow. So unchanging was his expression, his wizened features appeared carved from tawny wood, his gray thatch of hair lifting in the breeze. Deng, a cheerful, handsome teenager clad in a pair of shorts, scrambled to assist us and lashed the dinghy to the rail. He exchanged a few words in Vietnamese with Lucy and then asked if we were hungry.

The same breeze that had not had the slightest effect at the bar here drove off the mosquitoes and refreshed the air. We sat in the stern, watching the sunset spread pinks and mauves and reds across the enormous sky, staining hierarchies of cumulus that passed to the south. The lights of Stung Treng, white and yellow, beaded the dusky shore. I heard strains of music, the revving of an engine. Deng brought plates of fish and a kind of ratatouille, and we ate and talked about the French in Southeast Asia, about America’s benighted president (“A grocer’s clerk run amok,” Lucy said of him), about writing and idiot urban planners and Borneo, where she had recently been. She had an edge to her personality, this perhaps due to working with wealthy and eccentric clients, rock stars and actors and such; yet there was a softness underlying that edge, a genteel quality I responded to, possibly because it reminded me of Kim …though this quality in Lucy seemed less a product of repression.

Deng took our plates, and Lucy asked if I had anyone back in the States, a wife or girlfriend. I told her about Kim and said she might meet me in Saigon.

“I suppose that’s where I would leave you,” she said. “Assuming you deem me suitable.” Her mouth thinned. “I probably shouldn’t put this out there, because whenever I show enthusiasm, you become reticent. But this is so wonderful.” Lucy’s gesture embraced the world as seen from the deck of the Undine. “In order to get rid of me, you may have to throw me overboard.” She sat forward in the deck chair. “What are you thinking about?”

I saw no reason to delay—the prospect of spending another day at the Sekong was not an engaging one. “Welcome aboard,” I said.

“Oh, gosh!” She pushed up from the chair and gave me a peck on the lips. “That’s marvelous. Thanks so much.”

We went inside, and I showed her the shower, the galley, and the king-size bed; then I left her to wash up and stood looking out over the river, listening to the loopy cries of lizards, alerted now and again by the plop of a fish. Night had swallowed all but the lights on the shore, and I could no longer make out Lan in the bow. Deng sat on the roof, legs dangling, reading a comic by lantern light. I felt on the brink of something ineluctable and strange, and I suspected it had to do more with Lucy than with the voyage. Kim’s caution notwithstanding, I anticipated losing a piece of my soul to this forthright, tomboyish, opium woman. When I went back down, I found her on the bed, her legs stretched out, toweling her hair, wearing only a pair of panties. It looked as if two-thirds of her length were in her legs. Bikini lines demarked her small, pale breasts. A brass box of some antiquity rested on the sheets beside her.

She came out from beneath the towel and caught me staring. “I know,” she said. “I’m revoltingly thin. I look better when I’ve put on five or six pounds, but I can’t keep weight on when I’m traveling.”

“You know that’s bullshit,” I said. “You look great. Beautiful.”

“I’m scarcely beautiful, but I do have good legs. At least so I’ve been told.” She stared at her legs, pursed her lips as if reappraising them; then she said, “I came all the way from Vientiane today, and I’m exhausted. So if you don’t mind, I’ll indulge my filthy habit earlier than usual this evening.” She patted the box. “It’s awfully bright in here. Can something be done?”

I joined her on the bed, switched on a reading lamp, and cut the overheads.

“Much better,” she said.

She opened the box, removed a long pipe of wood and brass, and unwrapped yellowish paper from a pressed cake of black opium.

“I’ll be completely useless once I’ve smoked,” she said. “However, you may touch me if you like. I enjoy being touched when I’m high.”

I asked if she would be aware of what was going on. “Mmm-hmm. I may act as though I’m not, but I know.”

“Where do you like to be touched?”

“Wherever you wish. My breasts, my ass.” She glanced up from her preparations. “My pussy. Go lightly there, if you will. Too much stimulation confuses things in here.” She tapped her temple.

She pinched off a fragment of opium and began rolling it into a pellet, frowning in concentration; her hands and wrists were fully illuminated, but the rest of her body was sheathed in dimness; she might have been a trim young witch up to no good purpose, drenched in the shadow cast by her spell, preparing a special poison that required a measure of light for efficacy. She plumped the pillows, making a nest, and lay on her side.

“Kiss, please,” she said.

Her lips parted and her tongue flirted with mine. She settled into the pillows and lit the pipe, her cheeks hollowing as she sucked in smoke. She relit the pipe three times, and after the last time, she could barely hold it. After watching her drowse a minute, I stripped off my clothes and lay facing her, caressing her hip, tasting the chewy plug of a nipple. Her eyes were slitted, and I couldn’t tell if she was focusing on me, yet when my erection prodded her thigh, she made an approving noise. I slipped a hand under her panties, rested the heel of it on her pubic bone, thatched with dark hair, and let the weight of one finger come down onto her labia. The intimacy of the touch seemed to distress her, so I reluctantly withdrew the finger, but I continued to touch her intimately. Holding her that way became torture.

“Lucy?” I whispered.

She didn’t appear to be at home. Her breathing was shallow; a faint sheen of sweat polished her brow. I had no choice but to relieve the torment as best I could.

I hadn’t thought that I could take such pleasure from fondling a nearly comatose woman. The thought that she was submitting to me had been exciting. I had walled off such practices from my sexual life, yet I now found myself imagining variations on the act, and I believed that Lucy would be a willing partner to my fantasies. The woman I’d met in the bar had, over the course of a few hours, been transformed into a practicing submissive. I had known other women to exhibit a manner markedly different from that they later presented, women who, upon feeling secure in the situation, had changed as abruptly as Lucy. But Cradle Two’s rice-paper model was in my head, people shunting back and forth between universes without realizing it, and I thought if I could see those women now, I would view their sudden transformation in a new light, and I speculated that this Lucy might not be the same who had climbed into the dinghy with me. One way or another, I had presumed her to be a normal, bright woman who had survived a shattering blow, but it was evident that she had picked up a kink or two along the road to recovery.

In the morning I woke to a drowned gray light, the cabin windows spotted with rain. Lucy was sitting up in bed, inspecting her stomach.

“I’m all sticky,” she said, and gave me a sly smile. “You were wicked, weren’t you?”

“Don’t you remember?”

She gave the matter some study, screwing up her face, as might a child, into a mask of exaggerated perplexity. “It’s a little hazy. I definitely remember you touching me.” She scooted down beneath the sheets, snuggling close. “It made for a decent icebreaker, don’t you think? There’ll be less reason for nerves when we make love.”

“Now you mention it, I doubt there’ll be any.” I clasped my hands behind my neck. “Last night was surprising to me.”

“A sophisticate like you? I wouldn’t have believed it possible to surprise you.”

I caught her by the hair and pulled her head away from my chest, irritated by the remark. Judging by her calm face, she didn’t mind the rough treatment, and I tightened my grip.

“I wasn’t mocking you,” she said. “I’m your admirer. Honest. Cross my heart and spit on the pope.”

I released her, astonished by the behavior she had brought out in me. She flung a leg across my waist, rubbing against me, letting me feel the heated damp of her.

“Would you care to see another of my tricks?” she asked.

“What do you have?”

“Oh, I’ve got scads.” She folded her arms on my chest, rested her chin upon them, and gazed at me soberly. “You’d be surprised, I mean really, really …really surprised, how wicked I can be.”

Travel has always served to inspire me, as it has many writers, as it apparently did my alter ego; yet the farther we proceeded down the Mekong, the more I came to realize that there was a blighted sameness to the world and its various cultures. Strip away their trappings and you found that every tribe was moved by the same passions, and this was true not only in the present but also, I suspected, in ages past. Erase from your mind the images of the kings and exotic courtesans and maniacal monks that people the legends of Southeast Asia, and look to a patch of ground away from the temples and palaces of Angkor Wat—there you will find the average planetary citizen, a child eating the Khmer equivalent of a Happy Meal and longing for the invention of television.

The landscape, too, bored me. Like every river, the Mekong was a mighty water dragon, its scales shifting in hue from blue to green to brown, sometimes overflowing its banks, and along the shore were floating markets, assemblies of weathered gray shanties resting upon leaky bottoms that were not much different from shacks on the Mississippi or huts along the Nile or the disastrous slums of Quito spilling into the Guayas, fouling it with their wastes …and so I did not delight, as travelers will, in the scenting of an unfamiliar odor, because I suspected it to be the register of spoilage, and I derived no great pleasure from the dull green uniformity sliding past or in the sentinel presence of coconut palms, their fronds drooping against a yellow morning sky, or the toil of farmers (though one morning, when we passed a village where people were washing their cows in the river, I felt a twinge of interest, remarking on the possible linkage between this practice and the Saturday morning ritual of washing one’s car in a suburban driveway). Neither did I have the urge to scribble excitedly in my journal about the quaint old fart who sold Lucy a bauble in a floating market and told a story in pidgin English about demons and witches, oh my! Nor did I, as might an ecotourist in his blog for true believers, fly my aquatic mammal flag at half-mast and rant about the plight of the Irrawaddy dolphins (yet another dying species) that surfaced from muddy pools near the town of Kratie. And I did not exult, like some daft birder, in the soaring river terns and kingfishers that dive-bombed the waters farther south. I was solely interested in Lucy, and my interest in her was limited.

Within a week we had developed an extensive sexual vocabulary, and though it stopped short of sea urchins and safety pins, we were depraved in our invention—that was how I might have characterized it before embarking upon the relationship, though I came to hold a more liberated view. Depravity always incorporates obsession, but our obsession had a scholarly air. We were less possessed lovers than anthropologists studying one another’s culture, and because we made no emotional commitment, our passion manifested as a scientific voyeurism that allowed us to explore the scope of actual perversity with greater freedom than would have been the case if our hearts were at risk. We approached each other with coolness and calculation. “Do you like this?” one of us would ask, and if the answer was no, we would move on without injured feelings to a new pleasurable possibility. Apart from badinage, we talked rarely, and when not physically involved, we went away from each other, she to craft her business plan, sketching and writing lists, and I to sit in the stern and indulge in a bout of self-loathing and meditate on passages from The Tea Forest that reflected upon my situation. Five days on the Mekong had worked a change in me that I could not comprehend except in terms of Cradle Two’s novel. Indeed, I lost much of the urge to comprehend it, satisfied to brood and fuck my way south. I felt something festering inside me, some old bitterness metastasizing, sprouting black claws that dug into my vitals, encouraging me to lash out; yet I had no suitable target. I yelled at Deng on occasion, at Lan less frequently (I had grown to appreciate his indifference to me); but these were petty irritations that didn’t qualify for a full release, and so I lashed out against myself.

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.

Picking through this snarl of possibility, I thought that Lucy and I might have shifted many times during the previous two weeks and that the Lucy of the Sekong might not be the Lucy of this moment—The Tea Forest must exist in more than one universe—and it occurred to me that the novel presented a means of crudely defining the situation. Every hour or so for the remainder of the day, I asked Lucy a question pertaining to The Tea Forest. She answered each to my satisfaction, which proved nothing; but the next morning, while she trimmed her toenails in the stern, I asked if she found the ending anticlimactic, and she said crossly, “Are you mad? You know I haven’t had time to read it.”

“The ending?” I asked. “You haven’t read the ending?”

“I haven’t even begun the book! Must I repeat that information every half-hour?”

Two hours later I asked her a variation on the question, and she replied that the ending had been her favorite part of the novel and followed this by saying that it would have been out of character for TC to complete the journey. He was a coward, and his cowardice was its own resolution. To end the book any other way would have been dramatically false and artistically dishonest. I (Cradle Two) was a modernist author, she said, prowling at the edges of the genre, and had I taken TC into the tea forest, I would have had to lapse into full-blown fantasy, something she doubted I could write well. She went on to dismiss much of postmodernism as having “an overengineered archness” and, except for a few exemplary authors, being a refuge for those writers whose “disregard for traditional narrative (was) an attempt to disguise either their laziness or their inability to master it.” She concluded with a none-too-brief lecture on cleverness as a literary eidolon, a quality “too frequently given the stamp of genius during this postmillennial slump.”

After listening to her ramble on for the better part of an hour, I was disinclined to ask further questions, and truthfully there was no need—I had proved to my satisfaction that Cradle Two’s model of the universe was accurate in some degree, and I wanted Wicked Lucy back, not this pretentious windbag. I went outside and paced the length of the Undine, sending Deng scuttering away, and tried to make sense out of what was going on, overwhelmed by feelings of helplessness brought on by my new understanding of the human condition, a condition to which I had paid lip service, yet now was forced to accept as an article of faith. “The river was change,” Cradle Two (and perhaps Cradles 3, 4, 5, ad infinitum) had written. “It flowed through the less mutable landscape, carrying change like a plague, defoliating places that once were green, greening places that once were barren, mutating the awareness of the people who dwelled along it, infecting them with a horrid inconstancy, doing so with such subtlety that few remembered those places as having ever been different.” It had been my intention to shoot straight down the Mekong to the delta and spend most of the six weeks there; but now, recalling this passage, I felt a vibration in my flesh and panicked, fearing that the vibration, my fixation on the delta, and, indeed, every thought in my head, might reflect the inconstancy cited by Cradle Two. I had begun to feel a pull, a sense of being summoned to the delta that alarmed me; I sloughed this off as being the product of an overwrought imagination, but nonetheless it troubled me. For these reasons, I decided to break the trip, as Cradle Two’s narrator had done, hoping to find stability away from the river, a spot where change occurred less frequently, and stop for a week, or perhaps longer, in what once had been the capitol of evil on earth, Phnom Penh.

In the future I expect there to be systems that will allow a boy on a bicycle, balancing a block of ice on his handlebars, to pedal directly from Phnom Penh into the heart of Manhattan, where thousands will applaud and toss coins, which will stick to his skin, covering him like the scales of a pangolin, and he will bring with him wet heat and palm shadow and a sudden, fleeting touch of coolness in the air, and there will follow the smells of moto exhaust, of a street stall selling rice porridge sweetened with cinnamon and soup whose chief ingredient is cow entrails, the dry odor of skulls at Tuol Sieng prison, marijuana smoke, all the essences of place and moment, every potential answer to the Cambodian riddle fractionated and laid out for our inspection. Until then, it will be necessary to travel, to not drink the water, to snap poorly composed pictures, to be hustled by small brown men, to get sick and rent unsatisfactory hotel rooms. I yearned for that future. I wanted to live in the illusion that persuades us that true-life experience can be obtained on the Internet. Barring that, I wanted to find lodgings as anti-Cambodian as possible, one of the big American-style hotels, an edifice that I felt would be resistant to the processes of change. Wicked Lucy, however, insisted we take a room at the Hotel Radar 99, where she had stayed on a previous visit.

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 treason.”

“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 night 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.

As we strolled along Street 51 one night, after a late supper at a grand old colonial hotel on the riverfront near Wat Phnom hill, we happened upon a blue wall bearing the painted silhouette of a girl flying a kite, a Beardsley-like illustration; beside it were the words

HEART OF DARKNESS BAR. In addition, there was a painting on the door very much like the mural on the market stall in Stung Treng. I wanted to check the place out, intrigued by the mural, by the name of the bar and the juxtaposed irony of the sign, but Lucy said it was dangerous, that the Coconut Gang hung out there, and someone had recently been murdered on the premises.

“What’s a Coconut Gang?” I asked.

“Rich assholes. Khmer punks and their bodyguards. Please! Let’s go somewhere else.”

“All I want is to have a quick look.”

“This is no place to play tourist.”

“I’m not playing at anything. I’m a writer. I can use shit like this.”

“Yes, I imagine being shot could prove an invaluable resource. Silly me.”

“Nothing like that’s going to happen.”

“Do you have the slightest idea of where you are? Haven’t you noticed this is a hostile environment? They don’t care if you’re a bloody writer. They don’t discriminate to that degree. To them, you’re simply an idiot American poking his nose in where it’s not wanted.”

A smattering of Cambodians had paused in their promenade to kibbitz, amused by our argument. Feeling exposed, I said, “All right. Fine …whatever. Let’s just go, okay?”

Lucy looked around. “Where’s Riel?”

We found her in the entryway of the club, staring at a stuffed green adder in a bottle and being stared at by two security men. Mounted on walls throughout the main room were dozens of bottles, some containing snakes, other objects less readily identifiable, and bizarre floral arrangements, someone’s flawed conception of the Japanese form. Riel evaded Lucy’s attempt to corral her and went deeper into the club, which was also a misconception, an Asian version of a western bar with a big dance floor and booths but with the details, the accents, all wrong. The dance floor was packed with Cambodian men and taxi girls and young expats working out to “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” As we proceeded through the club, every couple of feet we crossed into a zone dominated by a new perfume or cologne.

We located a niche in the crowd at the bar, and when the harried bartender deigned to notice us, we ordered drinks. The clamor and the loud music oppressed me, and the young Khmer men in body-hugging silk shirts and gold watches and Italian shoes who eyed Riel made me uneasy. I wasn’t disturbed by the possibility of her straying—my attitude toward her was devoid of possessiveness—but I presumed she might be a source of trouble; though the place did not seem dangerous, just another drunken revel in postmillennial Southeast Asia, expressing the relief Asians felt on having survived the worst life had to offer, or so they believed …or so I thought they believed. I realize now that it was the same party, more or less, that has been going on for as long as there have been party people.

One drink, I estimated, would be the limit of my tolerance for the Heart of Darkness; but a college-age American kid pushing through the press, Dan Something, muscular and patchily bearded, a frat type on holiday, was brought up short by the sight of Riel. He struck up a shouted conversation with her, bought her a second drink, and invited us to join him and his friends in one of the many private rooms that opened off the main space; there we could talk more comfortably. Riel turned him down, but Marilyn Manson’s “Tainted Love” started to play, a song that made me want to break things, particularly Marilyn Manson, and I accepted.

Inside the private room (black walls; furnished with a grouping of easy chairs and a sofa; centered by a coffee table upon which lay a pack of cigarettes, cigarette papers, and a heap of marijuana), Dan introduced us to Sean, a hulking, three-hundred pound, shaven-headed version of himself, his lap occupied by a teenage taxi girl in T-shirt and knock-off designer jeans, tiny as a pet monkey by comparison, and Mike, also accessorized by a taxi girl, a lean, saturnine guy with evil-Elvis sideburns, multiple facial piercings, and tats, the most prominent being a full sleeve on his right arm, a gaudy jungle scene that was home to tigers, temples, and fantastic lizards. Dan, Riel, Lucy, and I squeezed onto the sofa; I was all but pushed out of the conversation, and had to lean forward to see what was happening at the opposite end, where Dan had isolated Riel, sitting between her and Lucy. Air conditioning iced the room, and the din of the dance floor was reduced to a thumping rumor.

Dan and Sean (Sean was a little man’s name—in a perfect world, he would have been named Lothar) had recently arrived from Thailand and spoke rapturously of Khao San Road, the backpacker street in Bangkok. This identified them, if they had not already been so identified, as a familiar species of idiot. Khao San was a strip of guesthouses, internet caf’s, bars, tattoo joints, travel agents, etc., where each night, indulging in the distillation of the backpacker experience, hundreds of drunken expats assembled to gobble deep fried scorpions and buy sarongs and wooden bracelets at the stalls lining the street, and—their faces growing solemn—to swap stories about the spiritual insights they had received while whizzing past some temple or another in a VIP bus. They had hooked up with Mike, a college bud, in Phnom Penh. He had been in-country for less than three weeks yet talked about Cambodia with the jaded air of a long-term resident. I guessed him to be the brains of the outfit.

Dan held forth at some length about his hour-and-a-half tour of the Killing Fields, explaining to the ever-so-blitzed Riel (she had added three drinks and the better part of two joints to her chemical constituency) how it had been majorly depressing, yet life affirming and life changing. The Cambodian people were awe-some, and his respect for them was so heartfelt, I mean like totally, that he managed to work up a tear, a trick that foretold a future in show biz and may have achieved the desired response among the inebriated breeding stock back in Champaign-Urbana, where he attended school, inducing them to roll over and spread, overborne by the sensitive depths of his soul; but it zipped right past Riel. Listening to him gave me a feeling of superiority, and I could have kept on listening for quite some time; but Lucy was unhappy, pinched between me and Dan, and I thought it appropriate to drop a roach into the conversational soup.

Leaning forward, I asked, “Why don’t you have a taxi girl like your pals here?”

Dimly, Dan seemed to perceive this as a threat to his ambitions toward Riel. A notch appeared in his brow, and he squinted at me meanly. Then inspiration struck, perhaps an illumination akin to his moral awakening at the Killing Fields. He acquired an expression of noble forbearance and said, “I don’t do whores.”

Sean loosed a doltish chuckle; the faces of the taxi girls went blank.

“Seriously,” Dan said, addressing first me, then Riel. “I revere women too much to want to just use their bodies.”

“Shit, man,” Mike said, and he burst out laughing. This set everyone to laughing, with the exception of Riel. Our laughter drowned out Dan’s earnest protests, and once it had subsided, Mike confided to us that Dan’s girl had fled the room. “She was one psycho bitch,” he said. “One second she’s grabbing his junk, the next she’s talking a fucking mile a minute, pointing at shit.”

“What was she pointing to?” Lucy asked.

“Fuck if I know. I was too wasted, and she was talking Cambodian, anyway.”

Lucy inquired of the taxi girls in Khmer and, following a back-and-forth, gave her report. “She said the room was different.”

“Huh?” said Sean.

“That’s what they told me.”

“I like being used,” Riel said out of the blue.

This alerted even Dan, who had been sulking.

“It makes me feel, you know …” Riel spaced on the thought.

“How does it make you feel?” asked Mike.

Riel deliberated and said at last, “When Tom comes inside me, it’s like I’m being venerated.” She turned her calm face to me. “I wish you’d come in me without a rubber, so when I walk around I could feel it running down my thigh. It’d be like a reminder of what you felt. Of what I felt.” She looked to Lucy. “You know what I mean? Isn’t it that way for you?”

Lucy’s head twitched—it might have been a nod—and she compressed her lips. The college boys stared at me in wonderment. They had, I thought, taken me for a relative or some kind of neutered loser. The taxi girls were transfixed, hanging on Riel’s every word.

“It’s because I’m beautiful, I feel that way, I think. Mitch always told me I was beautiful. Lately he wasn’t being honest, but he believed it once upon a time. Now, with you guys …” She smiled at Lucy and me. “I’m this exotic country you’ve traveled to. Like Cambodia. I’m a lot like Cambodia. The land of beautiful women.” She waved at the taxi girls. “You’re absolutely perfect. You are. You’ve got these perfect titties. So firm, I don’t have to touch them to know.”

Sean’s girl blushed; he gaped at Riel.

“Mine are too soft.” She glanced at her breasts. “Don’t you think?”

Lucy and I answered at the same time, her saying, “No,” and me saying, “They’re fine.”

This, the implication that the three of us were in a relationship, provoked Mike to say delightedly, “Fuck!”

“Could I have another drink?” asked Riel, and, turning to Dan: “Maybe you could bring me a drink?”

He hesitated, but Mike said, “Yeah, get us all one, man,” and he went off with our drink order; the door opening allowed a gust of music inside.

Lucy started to speak, but Riel cut in line and said to me, “Mitch wanted to sell me to other men, but I wouldn’t let him. I wonder if that’s why he left.”

“Beats me,” I said.

“You wouldn’t sell me, would you, Tom?”

I had a pretty fair buzz going, but nevertheless I noted that this was another disturbing resonance between my life and The Tea Forest. “There’s no need,” I said. “I’m rich.”

With a finger, Riel broke the circle of moisture her glass had made on the table. “I don’t guess it matters. Someone’s always using you.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake! I am fed up with your dreary pronouncements!” Lucy put the back of one hand against her brow, a move suitable to an actress in a silent film, and imitated Riel’s fey voice: “It’s all so morbidly banal!” She dropped the impersonation and said angrily, “If you reduced your drug intake, you might have a sunnier outlook.”

Unruffled, Riel said, “You’re not where I am yet. You’ll have to increase your drug intake to catch up.”

Sean and Mike glanced at each other. I could almost see a word balloon with two downward spikes above their heads, saying in thought italics: This is way cool! The taxi girls lost interest and idly fondled their new best friends; but their interest was restored when Riel asked Mike if he planned to have sex with his girl there in the room.

“If you’ll have sex with Tom and Lucy,” he said.

“No,” I said.

“Why not, man? We’re all friends.”

“Little orgy action. Yeah,” said Sean, and had a toke off a joint that his taxi girl held to his lips.

“You haven’t even introduced us to your dates,” I said to Mike. “That’s not very friendly.”

“Hey, fuck yourself, dude,” said Sean, suddenly gone surly, no doubt due to some critical level of THC having been surpassed.

Mike said, “Oh-oh! You don’t want to be getting Sean upset. My man’s third team All American. He’s a beast.”

Sean glared at him. “Fuck you, too.”

“Really?” I leaned back and crossed my legs. “What position do you play? No, let me guess. You’re an offensive lineman, right?”

Lucy put a cautioning hand on my knee.

“Nose guard,” said Sean, unmindful of the emphasis I’d placed on the word offensive.

Riel started singing, a breathy, wordless tune that drew everyone’s notice, and then broke it off to say, “Your friend’s been gone a long time.”

“It’s nuts out there,” said Mike. “He’s probably still trying to get served.”

“Or hooking up with another whore.” Sean extended a hand to Mike, who slapped him five but did so listlessly, as though out of obligation.

The door flew inward, and a diminutive Cambodian, one of the gold watch/silk shirt crowd, with a high polish to his hair and an inconsequential mustache, burst into the room, along with the pumping beat of a Madonna song. He shouted at the taxi girls. Behind him was an older man whose eyes ranged the room. Lucy caught at my hand. The taxi girls, too, shouted; their shrill voices mixed incoherently with that of the younger man. Sean dumped his taxi girl onto the floor and stood, his face a beefy caricature of disdain. The older man produced an automatic pistol from behind his back, aimed it at Sean, and spoke to him sharply in Khmer.

“Get down!” Lucy said. “He’s telling you to get on your knees!”

Looking dumfounded, Sean obeyed. The taxi girl scrambled up, confronting the young man. They both began to yell, and then he punched her flush in the face, knocking her to the floor. Sean said something, I wasn’t sure what. The older man butt-ended him, and he slumped across the taxi girl’s legs. She sat against the wall, dazed and bleeding from the mouth. The other taxi girl was still shouting, but the shouts seemed remote, as did the sight of Mike frozen in his chair. The shock I had felt when the incident began had evolved into the kind of fright that grips you when your car spins out of control on an icy road; everything slowed to a crawl. Lucy sheltering against my arm, Riel gazing with mild interest at the gun, Sean moaning and clutching his head—all that was in focus, remarkably clear, yet it was like a child’s puzzle with a very few pieces that I couldn’t solve. I had the knowledge that whatever was going to happen would happen, and I would die in that little icy black room with Madonna woodling about love and a hooting, arm-waving, hip-shaking crowd attempting to cover up the unappetizing facts of their existence with celebration.

The young man (he couldn’t have been more than eighteen or nineteen) strode to the center of the room. I was half-hidden behind Lucy, pressed back into the cushions, and until then I don’t think he had been able to see me unimpeded. He did not look my way at first—he plainly wanted to strut, to bask in his dominance; but when his eyes fell on me, his prideful expression dissolved. He put his hands together, fingers and palms touching as if in prayer, and inclined his head and jabbered in Khmer.

Bewildered, Lucy said, “He’s apologizing to you. He’s begging you not to tell his father and asking your forgiveness.”

I gawked at her.

“Say something,” she said sotto voce. “Act in control.”

It had been years since I smoked, but I needed a cigarette to marshal my wits. I reached for the pack on the table and lit one. “How can I forgive him when this animal is holding a gun on us? Ask him that.”

Lucy spoke to the young man, and he snapped at the bodyguard, who lowered the gun and withdrew. The young man then reassumed his prayerful posture.

“Tell him he can go,” I said. “If he leaves immediately, I won’t tell his father.”

She relayed the message, and the young man backed toward the door, bowing all the while.

“Wait!” I said, and Lucy echoed me in Khmer.

The young man stopped, holding his pose. I let him stew in his own juices, and his hands began to tremble—his fright increased my spirits more than was natural.

“Tell him to take care of our bill before he goes,” I said. “And have them turn the music down.”

“Jesus fuck!” Mike said once he had gone. “I thought we were dead! What the fuck just happened?”

Sean struggled up into a sitting position. His taxi girl tried to minister to him, but he brushed her away.

“Shit!” said Mike, and then repeated the word.

The other taxi girl kneeled beside her friend and mopped blood from her mouth and chin.

Lucy, regaining her poise and said to me, “He must have mistaken you for someone else.”

“Who the fuck are you, guy?” Mike asked. “Some kind of fucking …?” His imagination failed him and he said again, “Shit!”

“Tom’s a hero,” said Riel, smiling goofily.

“Apparently so.” Lucy picked up her drink and saluted me with an ironic toast. “A hero to villains, at any rate. Could there be something you haven’t told us?”

With a groan, Sean heaved up from the floor and flopped into the chair—he was one unhappy nose guard. “That guy like to bust my fucking skull.”

“Have a drink,” said Mike.

The volume of the music was cut in half. I asked Riel to close the door, and, reaching out languidly, she pushed it shut, putting an end to Madonna. I butted my cigarette, yet it had tasted good, and I lit another. The smoke was hitting me like opium fumes, making my head swim. “Maybe we should go.”

“Oh, do you think so?” asked Lucy nastily. “We might as well stay now. What more could happen?”

“I’d like to have my drink,” said Riel. “Where’s …you know, your friend?”

“Dan,” said Mike. “Yeah, where the fuck is he?” The taxi girls went to hover beside their men. Lucy’s eyes pried at me, trying to see whatever it was she had overlooked in me. She knew something wasn’t kosher. I was on my third cigarette when Dan reentered, carrying a tray of drinks.

“You missed out, man,” said Mike. “Tom saved our fucking ass.”

He delivered an exaggerated play by play of the assault and my “heroics,” and Sean, pressing an iced drink to his head, provided color commentary. “That was one cold dude, man” and “I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about” were exemplary of his contribution. In response to this last, I asked Lucy what had been the young Khmer’s problem.

“He accused Nary …” She indicated Sean’s girl. “Of giving the third girl—the one who left—drugs.”

“Why? Because she freaked out about the room?”

Lucy spoke to the girls and then said, “The girl has a fondness for Ecstasy. Dith, the young guy, had forbidden her to use any more. They have a relationship, though I can’t quite gather what it is, and he believed that these two slipped her some in a drink. They claim she just started behaving oddly. She said a mirror vanished off the wall.”

“Crazy bitch,” said Dan.

“Let’s go.” I stood, followed in short order by Lucy. “You coming, Riel?”

She held up a forefinger, addressed herself to her drink, and chugged it in two swallows.

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?”

“Advice? And from someone who should know better?” she said merrily. “I shall have to reevaluate my impression of you.”

“Just a thought.”

The stallkeeper switched on a radio and tuned into a station playing reggae—Peter Tosh and elephants, the essence of globalization. Lucy inspected the contents of the envelope. “This is a lot of money,” she said. “It’s too much, really.”

“I was hoping you’d see to Riel.”

She nudged the envelope over to my side of the table. “I don’t want to be responsible.”

“I thought you fancied her.”

“The lesbian thing …it’s my exhibitionist side coming out. It works for me when the right guy is around. Otherwise …” She wrinkled her nose.

“Look, I’m not expecting you to spend much time on this. Give it a week or so, and try to pass her off to someone decent. That shouldn’t be much of a problem. Maybe you can trick her onto a plane back to Winnipeg. If she stays here, she’s bound to run into someone who’ll fuck her up worse than she already is.”

“All right. I’ll do my best for her, but …I’ll do my best.”

I took her hand, letting my fingers mix with hers. “I’m going to be in London next spring. I’ll give you a call, see how you’re doing.”

“I’m likely to be busy,” she said after a pause. “But, yes. Do call, please.”

We held hands for ten or fifteen seconds, reestablishing the limits of our limited affection, and then Lucy said, “Oh, my gosh. Look what she’s doing now.”

Riel had stepped around to the front of the elephant, facing it, and was dancing, a slow, eloquent, seductive temple-girl dance, arms raised above her head, hips swaying, as if trying to charm the beast. The elephant appeared unaffected, but everyone in the square had stopped what they were doing to watch. A livid stroke of lightning fractured the eastern sky, its witchy shape holding against the sullen moil of clouds, and was followed by a peal of thunder that rolled across green fields into the city. As it passed, the sky flickered, the clouds shifted in their conformation; but such phenomena had grown so commonplace, I would not have noticed except that it added a mysterious accent to the scene.

“Do you think she’s in any danger?” Lucy asked.

“From the elephant? Probably not,” I said. “The boy seems calm.”

“We should fetch her, anyway. It’s time we went back.” She tucked the envelope into her bag, yet made no move to stand. “Whatever comes, I think we’ve helped her.”

“We provided a place where she didn’t have to worry about survival. But I don’t think we can claim to have helped.”

“What should we have done? Put her in a clinic? She wouldn’t last a day. We’re not her parents …and it’s not as if she cares a fig about us. She’d be off in a flash if something better happened along.”

“Maybe something better will come along. That’s why I gave you the money.”

Lucy acknowledged this gloomily.

“She may care about us more than you think,” I said. “Her attachment to the world is flimsy, but we became her world for a few weeks. Flimsy or not, she formed an attachment.”

“Isolate one moment, if you can, when she demonstrated genuine affection.”

“That little speech she gave at the Heart of Darkness. I …”

“I knew you’d bring that up.”

“I realize it was done for shock value. But it was inspired by a kernel of affection.”

Lucy’s fortune-teller scurried out from his stall and made a playful run at Riel—his shoulders were hunched and arms dangling, as though he were pretending to be a monkey tempted by a piece of fruit yet afraid to touch it. She continued to dance, and he wove a path about her, feinting, lunging at her, and scooting away; whenever he came near, he scattered some sort of powder at her feet. The scene held a curious potency, like a picture on a card, the representation of an archetype in a Cambodian Tarot, an image that seemed easily interpretable at first glance, but then, in the way of many Asian scenes, came to seem an impenetrable riddle: the wizard scuttling forward and retreating and the mystery void girl, the blonde sacrifice, lost in abandon, in holy, slow dementia, dancing before the massive, dim-witted, iconic beast. Lucy mentioned again that we should be going. Another peal of thunder, an erratic rumbling, hinted at something souring in the darkened belly of the sky. Vendors hastened to cover their merchandise, unrolling cloths and makeshift awnings. A sprinkle of rain fell, yet still we sat there.

“Snake country. That is what my daddy called Vietnam whenever he’d had a few, referring not only to his service in the delta, but to the country at large. He’d reach a garrulous stage in his drunk and deliver himself of some bloody, doleful tale, staring into his glass as if relating his wartime experiences to gnats that had drowned in a half-inch of Jim Beam. I think these stories were intended as self-justification, explaining in advance why he was probably going to kick the crap out of me later on, capping off his evening with a spot of exercise; but I heard them not as apology or warnings about the world’s savagery—they had for me the windy lilt of pirate stories, and I loved to hear him lying his ass off, boasting of his prowess with a fifty-millimeter machine gun, blowing away gooks from the stern of a swift boat, dealing death while his comrades were shot to pieces around him …and, oh, watching them die had ripped the heart from his chest—the survivor’s guilt he felt, the nightly visitations from torn, shattered corpses. Yet he couldn’t help that he had been made of sterner stuff than they, and, when you got right down to it, he had relished his days in Vietnam. He had been called, he said, and not by love of country. If he had it to do over, he wouldn’t so much as step on a bug for a country that hadn’t done squat for him. No, he was convinced that he had been summoned to an unguessable purpose that he could never put a name to, that had nothing to do with war. That was the sole element of his narrative that rang true, the part about being summoned, and this was likely due to the fact that I could relate to such a summons. He hated the Vietnamese, but he was a natural-born hater, and I doubt now that he ever went to Vietnam. He showed me no mementos or photos of him and his buddies, and the stories lacked detail, though as the years wore on, he added detail (whether his memory improved or he was polishing a fictional history, his stories caused me to become fixated on guns and violence, and this led me to do a crime that earned me a nickel in the prison camp at Butner). His war record was the only thing he took pride in, yet it may all have been a drunken fantasy. ‘The goddamn gooks make wine out of snake’s blood,’ he muttered once before passing out, and the conjuration of that image, red-like-pomegranate wine that beaded on the lip of a glass in a yellow-claw hand, the drops congealing thick as liquefied Jell-O, sliding down the throat in clots, slimy and narcotic—that said it all for me about snake country.

“Unlike my daddy, who came with guns blazing and the ace of death in his eye, I had the shits when I entered Vietnam, and several degrees of fever. I lay in the bottom of the boat, trying to hold in my guts, and avoided looking at the sky, which was playing its usual tricks, only with greater frequency—to look at it intensified my fever. We had some trouble at the border post. The Vietnamese run a tighter ship than does Cambodia, and since we didn’t have enough money for a respectable bribe, the officials threatened to confiscate our boat; but then Jordan helped them get an overloaded pick-up unstuck from a muddy ditch, and after that they were all smiles and stamped our passports and waved us through into a portion of the Mekong renowned for its whirlpools. We were cautioned that much larger craft than ours had been sucked under, but we negotiated this treacherous stretch without incident and, below the town of Chau Doc, entered an area known as the Nine Dragons, where the river split into nine major channels, and there were as well minor channels, islands, and a maze of man-made canals spider-webbing an enormous area. At a riverside gas station, we received directions to the Kinh Dong Tien, the canal that would carry us toward the tea forest.

“The boating life on the canals was more lively than we had yet encountered, even in the vicinity of Phnom Penh, and was so dense that signs on the riverbank directed traffic, warning when not to pass on the left and such. There were mobile floating rice mills, boats loaded with construction supplies, with coconuts, plumbing fixtures, furniture, watermelons, and so forth, and the banks were crowded with shacks, and beyond them were fields reeking of DDT. People stared open-mouthed at us and laughed at our wretched condition—covered with insect bites and sores, putting along in that wreck of a boat, the rudder held on with adhesive tape, the engine sputtering. Some of them, moved by charitable impulse, offered assistance, and others offered produce and drinking water, but I was in no mood to accept their charity. My fever had worsened, and the spiritual darkness that afflicted me had deepened to the point that I saw everything through a lens of distaste and loathing. Every smile seemed mocking, every friendly gesture masked an inimical intent, and I wanted nothing to do with this infestation of small brown people who swarmed over the delta, polluting it with their pesticides, with their shitting, squalling babies, and their brute insignificance. ‘You don’t go hunting termites with a rifle,’ Daddy once told me. ‘You poison their fucking nest.’ Recalling that comment, I thought maybe he had gone to Vietnam after all …”

Not long after the events described in this passage, Cradle Two’s narrator (and, I would guess, Cradle Two himself) grew too ill go on, or, as the narrator implies, he used illness as an excuse for quitting because his fear of what lay ahead came to outweigh the pull he felt to complete the journey. After being treated at a local clinic, he recuperated in Phnom Penh and there wrote the ending to the book, claiming to be in mental communion with a multiplicity of Thomas Cradles, several of whom managed to enter the tea forest; yet even if you accepted this to be true, it was not a true resolution—he lost contact with the various Cradles once they passed beyond the edge of the forest, and so he contrived an ending based on clues and extrapolation.

I had been wise not to emulate Cradle Two’s journey to the letter, I realized. As I’ve mentioned, the lifestyle he was forced to adopt due to lack of funds left him prone to disease and injury, whereas I, traveling in comfort aboard the Undine, had maintained my health. I had no doubt that I would see journey’s end; but now that I was on the final leg, I debated whether or not I wanted to see it. The spiritual darkness remarked on by Cradle Two’s narrator had descended upon me in full, though it might be more accurate to say that my social veneer had been worn away by the passage along the river and my dark nature revealed. I understood my essential character to be cold and grasping, violent and cowardly, courageous enough should my welfare demand it, yet terrified of everything, and I was, for the most part, comfortable with that recognition. (All men possessed these qualities, although I—and, I assumed, my fellow Cradles—must have them in spades.) When Kim called, presumably to report on her reading of The Tea Forest, I refused to answer. She rang and rang, calling every half hour; I switched off the satellite phone, not wishing to be distracted from steeping in my own poisonous spirit, basking amid thoughts that uncoiled lazily, turgidly, like serpents waking from a long sleep …like Cradle Two’s ornate sentences. Yet as my bleakness grew, so did my fear. I wanted to retreat from the delta, to return to my old secure life. The fear was due in large measure to what I saw whenever I set foot out of the cabin. As we drew near Phu Tho, the hamlet that served as the jumping-off place for the tea forest, the changes that twitched and reconfigured the clouds, that caused mirrors to vanish from walls and rooftops to assume new outlines, became constant, and I felt myself to be the only solid thing in the landscape. It was like watching time-lapse photography. A village glided past, and I saw tin roofs rippling with change, acquiring rust, brightening with strips of new tin, dimpling with dents that would the next second be smoothed out, and a group of people coming from their houses to stare and wave would shift in number and alignment, vanishing and reappearing, wearing shabbier or more splendid clothes, and the sky would darken with running clouds, lighten and clear, the clouds then reoccurring, assuming different shapes, and the green of the fields would vary from a pale yellow-green to a deep viridian, and every shade in between; and Lan at his post in the prow, he would change, too, his skull narrowing and elongating, stubble sprouting from his chin, one leg withering, a cane materializing by his hand—yet before long he was hale once again. I sequestered myself in the cabin, doing my best to ignore disappearing pots and suddenly manifesting piles of dirty clothing. I had nothing to guide me through this leg of the journey—I had gone farther along the path than Cradle Two, and his novel made no mention of this phenomenon. On half a dozen occasions, I was on the verge of ordering Deng to turn the boat and make for Phnom Penh, but I persevered, though my heart fluttered in my chest, itself registering (or so I feared) the process of change as we slipped back and forth between universes, approaching an unearthly nexus. And then, less than five miles from Phu Tho, either the changes ceased or they became unobservable. We had reached a place where all things flowed into one, the calm at the heart of the storm.

Phu Tho itself was unremarkable, a collection of small concrete-block houses, painted in pastel shades, gathered about a landing and a ranger station (a mosquito-infested tin hut) where you gained admission to the national park beyond, a wetlands that contained the tea forest. But the canal and its embankment in the vicinity of Phu Tho was a graveyard of boats: motor launches, rafts, dinghies, sailboats of every size, barges. Thousands had been dragged onto land and an uncountable number of others scuttled—in order to clear a channel, I conjectured, though that reason no longer applied, for the channel had been blocked with submerged and partially submerged craft, and our progress was halted more than a mile from the hamlet. To reach it, I would have to pick my way on foot across the drowned hulks of a myriad boats.

We arrived at our stopping point in early morning, when drifts of whitish fog lay over all, ghosting the forest of prows and masts emerging from the water and the wreckage of crushed and capsized hulls spilling over the shore as if a tsunami had driven them to ruin. The majority (like the Undine) were adorned with painted eyes to drive away evil spirits, and these could be seen peering at us through the gauzy cover, seeming to blink as the fog thickened and thinned—it was an eerie and disconcerting sight, its effect amplified by the funereal silence that held sway, accented by the slop of the tide against the houseboat, an unsavory sound that reminded me in its erratic rhythm of an injured cur licking a wound. The people we had talked to along the canals would surely have told us of this obstruction, and it followed, then, that Phu Tho, this Phu Tho, must be a singular place designed to mark journey’s end for every Thomas Cradle (excepting those who failed to complete their journeys), and that in other Phu Thos, life went on as always, the canal busy with its usual traffic, and that I was, despite Lan’s presence, for all intents and purposes, alone.

I packed a rucksack with a change of clothes, protein bars, water, the gun, binoculars, a coiled length of rope, the Colt, a first-aid kit, an English-Vietnamese pocket dictionary, repellent, and my dog-eared copy of Cradle Two’s novel, thinking that his ruminations about the tea forest might be of value. Lan was waiting on deck, dour as ever; before I could instruct him, he said, “I stay here three days. Then I go. Bring police.” Phu Tho spooked him, though you couldn’t have determined this from his expression. I felt oddly sentimental about leaving him behind, and as I began my trek to shore, negotiating a path of slippery, tilted decks and slick hulls, tightroping along submerged railings, I speculated about his past and why he had stuck it out with me. I decided that it must have to do with habits cultivated during the Vietnam conflict—he may have been an army scout or ARVN and thus had developed a love-hate relationship with Americans. Before long, however, the exigencies of the crossing demanded my full attention. Twice I had to retrace my steps and seek a new route, and once, when I was up to my neck in water, I nudged something soft, and a bloated, eyeless face emerged from the murk and bobbed to the surface. I kicked the body away in revulsion, but I had the impression that the face had belonged to a man of about my size and weight. This was more than a graveyard for boats. I imagined that many more Cradles might be asleep in that deep.

A third of the way to shore, I stopped to rest atop the roof of a sunken launch. The sun was high, showing intermittently between leaden clouds; the fog had burned off, and though the heat was intense, I was grateful for it. I felt a chill that could not be explained by my immersion in water. The stillness and the silence, the corpse I had disturbed, the regatta of dead ships, looking more ruinous absent its ghostly dress and stretching, I saw now, for miles along the canal, a veritable boat holocaust: It was such a surreal scene, its scope so tremendous, I quailed before it; yet as always something drove me on. I was around fifty, sixty yards from shore, taking another rest, when music kicked in from one of the houses. It carried faintly across the water, but I could make out Little Richard telling Miss Molly it was all right to ball. The song finished, and after an interval, Sly Stone’s “Everyday People” began to play. That sunny jingle served to heighten Phu Tho’s desolate air. I wiped sweat from my eyes and scanned the houses, trying to find the source of the music. No people, no dogs or pigs or chickens. Banana fronds lifted in a breeze, but no movement otherwise. I took a look through my binoculars. On the fa¸ade of a pale green house was a mural like the one I’d seen in Stung Treng, and again in Phnom Penh, depicting a yellowish, many-chambered form. The next song was Neal Diamond’s “Girl, You’ll Be a Woman Soon.” Whoever was selecting the music had begun to piss me off.

The boats close in to the hamlet were relatively undamaged, still afloat, and this made the going easier. I scrambled ashore to the tune of “Low Rider” and rested on an overturned dinghy, the moisture steaming out of my clothing. I took the gun from my pack, tucked it into my waist, and headed for the pale green house, walking across a patch of mucky ground bristling with weeds and, apart from butterflies and some unseen buzzing insects, devoid of life. The vibe I received from Phu Tho was not so much one of abandonment (though it clearly had been abandoned), but of its impermanence, of the tautness to which its colors and shape were stretched over an inscrutable frame. It was as if at any moment my foot would punch through the rice paper illusion of earth into the void below; yet I had a firm confidence that this would not happen, that its frailty, its temporality, was something I simply hadn’t noticed before but that had always been there to notice—frailty was an essential condition of life—and that I noticed it now spoke to the fact that I had come to a place less distant (in some incomprehensible way) from the source of the feeling. This was a complex and improbable understanding to have reached in the space of a hundred-foot walk, with music blasting and all the while worrying about what was inside the house and whether it had been wise to swim in water as foul as that in the vicinity of the hamlet; yet reach it I did, for all the benefit it bestowed.

The song faded, and the put-put of a generator surfaced from the funk, the singer advising his listeners to take a little trip, take a little trip with him, and an enormous man stepped from the door. He was well over three hundred pounds (closer to four, I reckoned), and stood a full head taller than I, clad in shorts and sandals and a collarless, sweat-stained shirt sewn of flour sacking. His arms and legs were speckled with inflamed insect bites, and his complexion was a sunburned pink, burst capillaries reddening his cheeks and nose; but for these variances, his bearded face, couched in an amused expression, was the porcine equivalent of my own.

“You’re late to the party, cuz,” he said in a voice rougher than mine, a smoker’s voice with a country twang.

I was slow to respond, daunted by him.

“Better come on in,” he said. “Looks like you could use a sit-down.”

The floors of the house were of packed dirt carpeted with straw mats, and the mats were filthy with fruit rinds, empty bottles, crumbs, magazines (porn and celebrity rags), and all manner of paper trash. Center-folds were taped to the walls. A bare, queen-sized mattress took up one end of the room; at the opposite end was a mildewed easy chair without legs and two card tables with folding chairs arranged beside them; a small TV-DVD player sat on one of the tables, DVDs scattered around it, and there was also a record player of the sort high school girls used to own in the sixties to play 45s. Sitting by the record player, holding a stack of 45s in her lap, was a slim, worn-looking Vietnamese woman of about thirty wearing a print smock. The man introduced her as Bian, but he didn’t bother to introduce himself. He wedged himself into the easy chair—it was a tight fit—and sighed expansively. The sigh seemed to enrich the sickening organic staleness that prevailed in the house, and I pictured the individual molecules of the scent as having the man’s pinkish coloration and blobby shape.

“Want a beer?” He spoke to Bian in Vietnamese. “She’ll bring us a couple.”

She went into the back room, a thin silver chain attached to her ankle slithering behind her, anchored to a stone half-buried in the floor. The man saw me staring at it and said, rather unnecessarily, “I didn’t keep her on a leash, the bitch would be gone.”

“No doubt,” I said.

Bian brought the beers and stationed herself once again by the record player—taped to the wall above her head, like a dream she was having, an airbrushed redhead with pendulous breasts gazed at a porn star’s erection delightedly and with a trace of wild surmise, as if it were just the bestest thing ever.

My initial take on the fat man, that he might be the powerful Ur-Cradle, had waned. He was a gargantuan redneck idiot, and my astonishment at his presence, at having this sorry proof of what I had previously only supposed, was neutralized by his enslavement of Bian and his repellent physical condition. On the face of things, he was a step or three farther along the path to the true Cradle than I was, a distillation of the Cradle essence. I didn’t trust him, and I let my beer sit untasted. Yet at the same time I had a sympathetic reaction to him, as if I understood the deficits that had contributed to his character.

I asked where he had gotten the beer, and he said, “Some of the boys hijacked supply barges to get here. Hell, with what’s on them barges, a man could survive for years. I been here must be four, five months and I hardly put a dent in it.”

“By ‘the boys,’ you mean men like us? Thomas Cradles?”

“Yeah.” He groped for something on the floor beside his chair, found it—a rag—and mopped sweat from his face. “Not all of them look like us. I guess their daddies slept with somebody different. But they all got the same name, least the ones I talked to did. Most push on through without stopping, they’re so damn eager to get into the tea forest.”

“Apparently you weren’t that eager.”

“Look at me.” He indicated his massive belly. “A man my size, I’m lucky I made it this far, what with the heat and all. I was about half dead when I got here. Took me a while to recover, and by the time I did, the urge wasn’t on me no more. That was strange, you know, ’cause I was flat-out desperate to get here. But hey, maybe the animal can’t use fat junkies. Anyhow, I figured me and Bian would squat a while and make a home for the boys. You know, give them a place to rest up, drink a few beers …get laid.” He shifted about in his chair, raising a dust. “Speaking of which, twenty bucks’ll buy you a ride on Bian. She might not look it, but she got a whole lot of move in that skinny ass.”

Bian cast a forlorn glance my way.

“I’ll pass,” I said. “What can you tell me about the tea forest?”

“Probably nothing you don’t know. Some boys been coming back through lately, ones that didn’t make it all the way to wherever. They’re saying the animal don’t need us no more. Whatever use it had for us, it’s about over with …Least that’s the feeling they got.”

“The animal?”

“Man, you don’t know much, do you? The animal. The creature-feature. It’s painted on the wall outside. You telling me you never seen it before?”

I told him what I had seen, the murals, the creature in my opium dream, and that I had sworn off drugs for fear of seeing it again.

“Well, there’s your problem, dude,” he said, and gave a sodden laugh. “I mean, shit! How you expect to pierce the veil of Maya, you don’t use drugs? You sure you’re a Cradle? ’Cause from what I can make out, most of us stayed stoned the whole damn trip.”

It was in my mind to tell him that if he was any example, most of us were serious fuck-ups; but instead I asked what he thought was going on.

“ ’Pears we all see it a little different,” he said. “This one ol’ boy, he told me he figured what we saw wasn’t exactly what was happening. It was like a symbol or a …I don’t know. Something.”

“A metaphor?”

He didn’t appear familiar with the word, but he said, “Yeah …like that. Everyone I’ve talked to pretty much agrees the animal needs us to protect it from something.” His brow furrowed. “Those splinters you saw when you were high? I reckon they’re like these stick figures I saw. Every time I did up, I’d see them standing around parts of the animal, guarding it like. Fucking weird, man. Scared the shit out of me. But I kept on seeing them ’cause I couldn’t do without ol’ Aunt Hazel.”

The reference eluded me.

“Heroin,” he said. “I had a monster habit. First week after I kicked, it was like I caught the superflu.” He had a swallow of beer, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Now the next question you’re going to ask is, How come it chose us? Everybody’s got a theory. Some I’ve heard are fucking insane, but they all boil down to basically the same thing. Something about us Cradle boys is pure badass.”

His prideful grin told me that he was satisfied with this explanation and would be unlikely to have anything more intelligent to say on the subject. “You said some of them came back? Are they still here?”

He shook his head. “They couldn’t get shut of this place fast enough. If you’re after another opinion …way I hear it, some boys are still wandering around the fringe of the forest. They didn’t feel the urge strong enough, I guess. Or they were too weak and gave out. You could talk to them. The ones that come back used park boats, so getting to the forest ain’t nothing.”

Bian said something in Vietnamese, and the man said, “She wants to know if you’re going to fuck her.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

He relayed this information to Bian, who appeared relieved. “You can always change your mind. Bian don’t care. She’s a regular scout …ain’t you, darling?” He reached out and chucked her under the chin. “You don’t know what you’re missing. She’s got a real educated pussy.” He settled back in the chair and gave me a canny look. “I bet you’re a writer.”

Surprised, I said, “Yeah,” and asked how he knew.

“I didn’t know. Us Cradles tend to be literary types more often than not. And seems like the boys who ain’t interested in Bian are mostly writers …though there’s been a couple like to wore her out. But what I was getting at, seeing how you’re a writer, maybe you can make sense of their scribbles. I got a whole bunch of their notebooks.”

“You have their journals?”

“Journals …notebooks. Whatever. I got a bunch. The boys that stop in, they figure they’re going to need food and water more than anything else. They buy provisions and leave their stuff for me to hold. If you want to check it out, it’s in the back room there.”

It took him two tries to lever himself out of the chair. Going with a rolling, stiff-ankled walk, he preceded me into the room and pointed out the possessions of other Cradles scattered willy-nilly among crates of canned goods and stacks of bottled water and beer: discarded packs, clothing, notebooks, and the usual personal items. Copies of The Tea Forest could be seen poking out from this mess, as ubiquitous as Lonely Planet guides in a backpacker hotel. I squatted and began leafing through one of the notebooks. The handwriting was an approximation of my own, and the words …The notebooks were a potential gold mine, I realized. If this one were typical of the rest, I could crib dozens of stories from them, possibly a couple of novels. It struck me anew how odd all this was, to be seeking clues to a mystery by poring over journals that you yourself had written …or if not quite you, then those so close to you in flesh and spirit, they were more than brothers. Intending to make a comment along these lines, I half-turned to the fat man and caught a blow on the head that drove splinters of light into my eyes and sent me pitching forward on my stomach into a pile of clothing. If I lost consciousness, it was for a second or two, no more. Woozy, my face planted in a smelly T-shirt, I felt him patting down my pockets, pulling out my wallet, and heard his labored wheezing. My right hand was pinned beneath me, but I was able to slide my fingers down until I could grip the Colt and, when he flipped me onto my back, I aimed the gun at the blur of his torso—my vision had gone out of whack—and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. My finger was outside the trigger guard. He grabbed the barrel, tugging and jerking at the Colt, grunting with effort, dragging me about, while I hung on doggedly, trying to fit my finger into the guard.

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.

“Don’t you feel that?” he asked.

“Feel what?”

The next moment I experienced a drowsy, stoned sensation, as if I had taken a Valium and knocked back a drink or two. The sensation did not intensify but rather seemed to serve as a platform for a feeling of groggy awe. I saw nothing awe-inspiring in my immediate surrounding, but I noticed that the darkness was not so deep as before (I could just make out my neighbor in his tree), and then I realized that this increased luminosity, which I had assumed was due to a thinning of mist overhead, was being generated from every quarter, even from under the water—a faint golden-white radiance was visible beneath the surface. The light continued to brighten at a rapid rate. In the direction of the clearing, the trees stood out sharply against a curdled mass of incandescence and cast shadows across the water. I began to have some inner ear discomfort, as if the air pressure were undergoing rapid changes, but nothing could have greatly diminished my concentration on the matter at hand. It appeared the forest was a bubble of reality encysted in light—light streamed from above, from below, from all the compass points—and, as its magnitude increased, we were about to be engulfed by our confining medium, by the fierce light that burned in the clearing, a weak point in the walls of the bubble that threatened to collapse. Filamentous shapes that might have been many-jointed limbs materialized there and then faded from view; bulkier forms also emerged, vanishing before I could fully grasp their outlines or guess at their function …and then, on my left, I heard a splashing and spotted someone slogging through the chest-deep water, moving toward the clearing at an angle that would bring him to within twenty or twenty-five feet of my tree, reminding me of the man portrayed on the cover of The Tea Forest. As the figure came abreast of the tree, I saw it was not a man but a woman wearing a rag of a shirt that did little to hide her breasts and with hair hanging in wet strings across features that, although decidedly feminine, bore the distinct Cradle stamp. She passed without catching sight of me.

What prompted me to attempt her rescue, I can’t say. Perhaps a fragment of valorous principle surfaced from the recesses of my brain and sparked sufficiently to disrupt my increasingly beatific mood. More likely, it was the desire to learn what it would be like to (essentially) fuck myself—would I prove to be a screamer or make little moans? Or perhaps it was the beatific mood itself that provided motivation, for it seemed to embody the concept of sacrifice, of giving oneself over to a higher purpose. I undid the knots that bound me to the tree and jumped down and went splashing after her. She heard me and wheeled about, and we stared at one another. The light had grown so intense that she was nearly cast in silhouette. Dirt was smeared across her brow and cheeks and neck. She had a wild, termagant look.

“I won’t hurt you,” I said, hoping to gentle her. “I promise. Okay?”

Her expression softened.

“Okay?” I came a step forward. “I want to help. You understand?”

She brought her right hand up from beneath the water and lunged toward me, slashing at my throat with a knife. She had me cold, though I saw it at the last second and tried to duck …but she must have slipped. She fell sideways, and I toppled backward. The next I knew, we were both floundering in the water. I locked onto her right wrist, and we grappled, managing to stand. Turned toward the source of that uncanny light, she hissed at me. Droplets of water beaded her hair and skin. They glowed like weird, translucent gems, making her face seem barbarous and feral. Her naked breasts, asway in the struggle, were emblems of savagery. She kneed me and clawed and, whenever our heads came together, she snapped at my cheek, my lip; but I gained the advantage and drew back my fist to finish her …and slipped. I went under, completely submerged, and swallowed a mouthful of that stew of filth and decomposition. When I bobbed back up, I found her standing above me, poised to deliver a killing stroke. And then there was a flat detonation, blam, like a door slamming in an empty room. Blood sprayed from her elbow, and she was spun to the side. She staggered and screamed and clutched her arm, staring up into the tree to which the gaunt man was secured—he was aiming a snub-nosed pistol. Cradling her arm, the woman began to plough her way toward the clearing, hurrying now, glancing back every so often. I clung to a trunk and watched her go. The man made some comment, but my ears were still blocked by the changes in air pressure, and I was too disoriented to care what he said.

The forest brightened further, and the light around me gained the unearthly luster favored by artists of the late Italian Renaissance that you sometimes get when the afternoon sun breaks through storm clouds, and the break widens and holds, and it appears that everything in the landscape has become a radiant source and is releasing a rich, spectral energy. Close by what I presumed to be the edge of the clearing, the trees—both their crowns and trunks—had gone transparent, as if they were being irradiated, shifted out of existence. As the woman approached these trees, a tiny dark figure incised against the body of light, she suddenly attenuated and came apart, dissolving into a particulate mass that flew toward the center of the light. I could see her for the longest time, dwindling and dwindling, and this caused me to realize that I had no idea of the perspective involved. I had known it was vast, but now I recognized it to be cosmically vast. I was gazing into the depths of a creature that might well envelop galaxies and minnows, black holes, Chomolungma, earth and air and absence, all things, in the same way it enveloped the tea forest, seeming to have created it out of its substance, nurturing it as an oyster does a pearl. And this led me to a supposition that would explain the purpose of my journey: Like pearls, the Cradles were necessary to its health …and it may have been that the whole of mankind was necessary to cure it of or protect it from a variety of disorders; but for this particular disorder, only Cradles would serve.

I did not reach this conclusion at once but over the course of an interminable night, watching other deracinated Cradles—twenty or more—cross the drowned forest to meet their fate, repeating the transition that the woman had made. The druggy reverence I had earlier felt reinstituted itself, though not as strongly as before, and I felt a compulsion to join them, to sacrifice my life in hopes of some undefined reward, a notion allied with that now-familiar sense of glorious promise. I believe my fight with the woman, however, had put me out of that head enough so that I was able to resist—or else, having nearly run out of Cradles, the thing, the animal, God, the All, whatever you wished to call it, needed survivors to breed and replenish its medicine cabinet (giving the Biblical instruction “Be fruitful and multiply” a new spin) and thus had dialed back the urgency of its summons.

Toward dawn, the light dimmed, and I was able to see deeper into the thing. I noticed what might have been cellular walls within it and more of the ephemeral, limblike structures that I had previously observed. At one point I saw what appeared to be a grayish cloud fluttering above a dark object—it looked as if one of the lesser internal structures had been coated with something, for nowhere else did I see a hint of darkness, and there was an unevenness of coloration that suggested erosion or careless application. The fluttering of the cloud had something of an animal character—agitated, frustrated—that brought to mind the approach-avoidance behavior of a mouse to a trap baited with cheese, sensing danger yet lusting after the morsel. I recalled my opiated vision aboard the Undine , the gray patch that had been chasing after the luminous void-dweller, and I thought the coating must be the blood and bones of countless Cradles reduced to a shield that protected it from the depredations of the cloud. Soon it passed from view, seeming to circulate away, as though the creature were shifting or an internal tide were carrying it off.

A deep blue sky pricked with stars showed among the leaves overhead, the last of the light faded, and I continued to squat neck-deep in the water, staring after it, trying to find some accommodation between what I thought I had known of the world and what I had seen. While I was not a religious man, I was dismayed to have learned that the religious impulse was nothing more than a twitch of evolutionary biology. I could place no other interpretation on the event that I had witnessed. The parallels to the peak Christian experience were inescapable. I was dazed and frightened, more so than I had been in the presence of the creature. My fear had been suppressed by the concomitant feelings of awe and glory, and though I knew it had not truly gone anywhere, that it still enclosed all I saw and would ever see, now that it was no longer visible, I feared it would return …and yet I was plagued by another feeling, less potent but no less palpable. I felt bereft by its absence and longed to see it again. These emotions gradually ebbed, and I became eager to put that oppressive place behind me. I splashed over to the tree where I had tied up the boat and began fumbling with the line.

“Hey, brother,” said the man in the tree adjacent to mine. “Take me with you.”

Anxiety floored the superficial nonchalance of his tone. He still held the pistol, though not aiming it at me. I told him to find his own boat—there were plenty around.

“I don’t have the will to leave,” he said. “And if I don’t leave, that thing’s going to get me.” He offered me the pistol. “You have to help me. I won’t try anything.” He laughed weakly. “The shape I’m in, it wouldn’t matter if I did.”

I knew he had been playing me, that his every word and action had been designed toward this end; but he had saved my life. I took the gun and told him to bind his hands as tightly as he could manage. When this was done, I helped him down from the tree and into the boat. He was frail, his skin loose on his bones, and I guessed that he had lied to me, that he had been in the forest far longer than five nights. I checked his bonds, settled him into the bow, and climbed in. The man seemed greatly relieved. He pressed his fists to his forehead, as if fighting back tears. When he had recovered, he asked what I thought about things now that I had seen the show. I summarized my reactions and he nodded.

“You didn’t carry out the metaphor as far as I did,” he said. “But yeah, that pretty much says it.”

I asked him to explain what he meant by carrying out the metaphor.

“If you accept that our bad character is what makes us useful to it …or at least is symptomatic of the quality that makes us useful. Our psychic reek or something.” He broke off, apparently searching for the right words. “You saw that gray, swarming thing? How it seemed reluctant to come near the part that was treated? Coated, as you said.”

“Yeah. So?”

“Well, given that we were the element holding off the gray thing, and that our one outstanding characteristic is our essential crumminess, my idea is that the animal used us for repellent.”

I stared at him.

“You know,” he said. “Like mosquito repellent. Shark repellent.”

“I got it.”

“It’s just a theory.” He obviously assumed that I disagreed with him and became a bit defensive. “I realize it trivializes us even more than how you figured it.”

I unscrewed the gas cap and peered inside the tank—we had enough fuel for the return trip.

The man chuckled and said, “It’s kind of funny when you think about it, you know.”

All journeys end in disappointment if for no other reason than that they end. Life disappoints us. Love fails to last. This has always been so, but the disappointment I felt at the end of my journey may relate more to a condition of our age of video games and event movies. To have come all this way and found only God—there should have been pirates, explosions, cities in ruins, armies slinking from the field of battle, not merely this doleful scene with a handful of Cradles and a glowing bug.

A better writer than I, the author of The Tea Forest, once said, “After you understand everything, all that’s left to do is to forget it.” I doubted my understanding was complete, but I saw his point. I could return home and lash myself to a tree and never leave again; I could make babies with Kim and subsume my comprehension of the world, the universe, in the trivial bustle of life. Perhaps I would be successful in this, but I knew I’d have to work at it, and I worried that the images I retained from my night in the forest would fatally weaken my resolution.

During the ride back, the man became boastful. I empathized with this—it gave you a heady feeling to have abandoned God, to have left Him in His Holy Swamp, trolling for Cradles, and though you knew this wasn’t actually the case, that He was still big in your life, you had to go with that feeling in order to maintain some dignity. When we reached Phnom Penh, the man said, I’d be treated like a king. Anything I wanted, be it women, drugs, or money, he’d see I got more than my share, a never-ending bout of decadent pleasures. Could he be, I wondered, the Ur-Cradle, the evil genius at the center of an Asiatic empire, the crime lord before whom lesser crime lords quailed? It was possible. Evil required no real genius, only power, a lack of conscience, and an acquisitive nature such as I had seen at work in the tea forest. Men were, indeed, made in Its Image …at least writers and criminals were. Whatever, I planned to put the man ashore at the nearest inhabited village and then head for Saigon and, hopefully, Kim.

Another passage from The Tea Forest occurred to me:

“…He had tried to make an architectural statement of his life after the tea forest, to isolate a geometric volume of air within a confine whose firm foundations and soaring walls and sculptural conceits reflected an internal ideal, a refinement of function, a purity of intent. Though partially successful in this, though he had buried his memories of the forest beneath the process of his art, he became aware that the task was impossible. One journey begat another. Even if you were to remain in a single place, the mind traveled. His resolves would fray, and, eventually, everything he had accomplished and accumulated—the swan of leaded crystal keeping watch from the windowsill, the books, the Indonesian shadow puppets that haunted his study, the women, his friends, the framed Tibetan paintings, the madras curtains that gaudily colored the bedroom light, his habit of taking morning tea and reading the Post at Damrey’s stall in the Russian Market, the very idea of having possessions and being possessed—these things would ultimately become meaningless, and he would escape the prison he had fashioned of them into the larger yet no less confining prison of his nature, and he would begin to wonder, What now? When would the monster next appear and for what purpose? How could he, who had been granted the opportunity to understand so much, know so little?”

It was a dreary prospect that Cradle Two painted, one I chose to deny. Unlike him, I had performed a redemptive act by saving the man—that signaled hope for improvement, surely—and I believed that, with Kim’s help, I could shape a world that would contain more than my ego and ambition. I would learn to make do with life’s pleasures no matter how illegitimate they were. And if I thought too much about the forest, why then I could write about it. The Tea Forest need not be a stand-alone book. A sequel might be in order, one that further explored the nature of the animal; perhaps a trilogy, a spiritual odyssey with a well-defined and exalting ending. I smelled awards, large advances. Small things, yet they delighted me.

The sun was up and the air steamy, baking the weeds and the little houses, when we came to Phu Tho. A putrid stench proceeded from the pale green house where the fat Cradle had died, and the innumerable ruined and stranded boats looked almost festive in the morning light, like the remnants of a regatta at which too good a time had been had by all. We had reached the banks of the canal when I remembered something. I told the man to wait, that I had left certain of my possessions in the fat man’s house. He sank to the grass, grateful to have a rest. I walked back to the house and peeked in the door. Bian had fled and taken her records. I tied my T-shirt about my nose and mouth to cut the smell and steeled myself. It promised to be a disgusting business, retrieving the notebooks of my dead brothers, but I had my career to think of.