Other Earths (collection)

“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.