Other Earths (collection)

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.”