“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.