Other Earths (collection)

The rain stopped at dusk, and mosquitoes came out in force. I hoped that my faith in malaria medication was not misplaced. With darkness, a salting of stars showed through the canopy, yet their light was insufficient to reveal my neighbor in his tree. I could tell he was still there by the sound of his curses and mosquito-killing slaps. I grew sleepy and had to struggle to keep awake; then, after a couple of hours, I began to cramp, and that woke me up. I asked how much longer we had to wait.

“Don’t know,” the man said. “I thought it would be coming earlier, but maybe it won’t be coming at all. Maybe it’s done with us.”

Irritated, I said, “Why the hell won’t you tell me what’s going on?”

“I don’t know what’s going on. I’ve got some ideas, but they’re pretty damn crazy. You seem stable, a lot more so than most of the pitiful bastards left out here. What I was hoping was for you to give me your take on things and see if it lines up with mine. I don’t want to predispose you to thinking about it one way of the other. Okay?”

“The fat guy, he said he thought that whatever it is—the animal, he called it. He thought the animal wanted our help because the Cradles were badasses.”

“Could be. Though I wouldn’t say badass. Just plain bad. Rotten.” I heard him shifting about. “Wait and see, all right? It shouldn’t be much longer.”

I spent the next hour or thereabouts hydrating and rubbing cramps out of my legs. One night of this, I told myself, was all I was going to take. The cramps abated, and I began to feel better. However, my mind still wasn’t right. I alternated between alertness and periods during which my thoughts wandered away from the forest, wishing I had never left home, wishing Kim was there to steady me with her cool rationality, wishing that we could make a real family and have babies, wondering if I would see her again, not because I felt imperiled and believed I might not survive the tea forest but because of my commitment-phobic character and faithless heart. It was in the midst of this reverie that the man in the tree beside me said, “Here it comes.”

I could see no sign of “it,” only darkness and dim stars, and asked in which direction he was looking and what he saw.

“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.