Other Earths (collection)

“Thomas Cradle was born in Carboro, North Carolina in 1968. He attended the University of Virginia for two years before dropping out and has traveled widely in Asia, working as a teacher of English and martial arts. He currently lives in Phnom Penh. The Tea Forest is his first novel.”

A crawly sensation moved down my neck and spread to my shoulders. Not only did Cradle and I share a name, we had been born in the same town in the same year and had attended the same university (though I had graduated). I’d also trained in Muay Thai and Shotokan karate during high school—if not for a herniated disc, I might have pursued these interests. I had a closer look at the author photo. Lose the beard, shorten the hair, drop twenty-five pounds and six years, and he might have been my twin. The contemptuous glare alone should have made the likeness apparent.

Someone, I told myself, was playing a practical joke, someone who knew me well enough to predict my reactions. When I opened the book, something would pop out or a bad smell would be released …or perhaps it would be a good-natured joke. Kim, my girlfriend, had the wherewithal to doctor an old photograph and dummy up a fake book, but I would not have thought she possessed the requisite whimsy. I dipped into the first chapter, expecting the punchline would be revealed in the text; but after five chapters I recognized that the book could not be the instrument of a prank, and my feeling of unease returned.

The novel documented a trip down the Mekong River taken by four chance acquaintances, beginning in Stung Treng on the Cambodian-Lao border, where the four had purchased a used fishing boat, to Dong Thap Province in the extreme south of Vietnam. It was an unfinished journey fraught with misadventure and illness, infused with a noirish atmosphere of low-level criminality, and culminated with a meditation on suicide that may well have foreshadowed the author’s fate.

Judging by the wealth and authenticity of the background detail and by the precisely nuanced record of the first-person narrator’s emotional and mental life, the novel was thinly disguised autobiography; and the configuration of the narrator’s thoughts and perceptions seemed familiar, as did the style in which the novel was written: It was my style. Not the style in which I currently wrote, but the style I had demonstrated at the start of my career, prior to being told by an editor that long, elliptical sentences and dense prose would be an impediment to sales (she counseled the use of “short sentences, less navel-gazing, more plot,” advice I took to heart). Cradle Two’s novel was no mere pastiche; it was that old style perfected, carried off with greater expertise than I had ever displayed. It was as if he had become the writer I had chosen not to be.

I went to Amazon again, intending to have another look at the webpage devoted to The Tea Forest and perhaps find the author’s contact information; but I could not locate the page, and there was no evidence anywhere on the Internet of a second Thomas Cradle or his novel. I tried dozens of searches, all to no avail. I emailed the seller, Overdog Books, asking for any information they might have on the author; they denied having sold me the book. I sent them a scan of the packing slip, along with a note that accused them of being in collusion with one of my enemies, most likely another writer who, envious of my success, was mocking me. They did not respond. I riffled through the pages of the novel, half-expecting it to dematerialize along with the proof of its existence. I had often made the comment that if ever I were presented with incontrovertible evidence of the fantastic, I would quit writing and become a priest. Though I was not yet prepared to don the cassock, the book in my hands seemed evidence of the kind I had demanded.