Other Earths (collection)

“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?”

It was a dreary prospect that Cradle Two painted, one I chose to deny. Unlike him, I had performed a redemptive act by saving the man—that signaled hope for improvement, surely—and I believed that, with Kim’s help, I could shape a world that would contain more than my ego and ambition. I would learn to make do with life’s pleasures no matter how illegitimate they were. And if I thought too much about the forest, why then I could write about it. The Tea Forest need not be a stand-alone book. A sequel might be in order, one that further explored the nature of the animal; perhaps a trilogy, a spiritual odyssey with a well-defined and exalting ending. I smelled awards, large advances. Small things, yet they delighted me.