Other Earths (collection)

“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.