“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?”