Other Earths (collection)

The landscape, too, bored me. Like every river, the Mekong was a mighty water dragon, its scales shifting in hue from blue to green to brown, sometimes overflowing its banks, and along the shore were floating markets, assemblies of weathered gray shanties resting upon leaky bottoms that were not much different from shacks on the Mississippi or huts along the Nile or the disastrous slums of Quito spilling into the Guayas, fouling it with their wastes …and so I did not delight, as travelers will, in the scenting of an unfamiliar odor, because I suspected it to be the register of spoilage, and I derived no great pleasure from the dull green uniformity sliding past or in the sentinel presence of coconut palms, their fronds drooping against a yellow morning sky, or the toil of farmers (though one morning, when we passed a village where people were washing their cows in the river, I felt a twinge of interest, remarking on the possible linkage between this practice and the Saturday morning ritual of washing one’s car in a suburban driveway). Neither did I have the urge to scribble excitedly in my journal about the quaint old fart who sold Lucy a bauble in a floating market and told a story in pidgin English about demons and witches, oh my! Nor did I, as might an ecotourist in his blog for true believers, fly my aquatic mammal flag at half-mast and rant about the plight of the Irrawaddy dolphins (yet another dying species) that surfaced from muddy pools near the town of Kratie. And I did not exult, like some daft birder, in the soaring river terns and kingfishers that dive-bombed the waters farther south. I was solely interested in Lucy, and my interest in her was limited.

Within a week we had developed an extensive sexual vocabulary, and though it stopped short of sea urchins and safety pins, we were depraved in our invention—that was how I might have characterized it before embarking upon the relationship, though I came to hold a more liberated view. Depravity always incorporates obsession, but our obsession had a scholarly air. We were less possessed lovers than anthropologists studying one another’s culture, and because we made no emotional commitment, our passion manifested as a scientific voyeurism that allowed us to explore the scope of actual perversity with greater freedom than would have been the case if our hearts were at risk. We approached each other with coolness and calculation. “Do you like this?” one of us would ask, and if the answer was no, we would move on without injured feelings to a new pleasurable possibility. Apart from badinage, we talked rarely, and when not physically involved, we went away from each other, she to craft her business plan, sketching and writing lists, and I to sit in the stern and indulge in a bout of self-loathing and meditate on passages from The Tea Forest that reflected upon my situation. Five days on the Mekong had worked a change in me that I could not comprehend except in terms of Cradle Two’s novel. Indeed, I lost much of the urge to comprehend it, satisfied to brood and fuck my way south. I felt something festering inside me, some old bitterness metastasizing, sprouting black claws that dug into my vitals, encouraging me to lash out; yet I had no suitable target. I yelled at Deng on occasion, at Lan less frequently (I had grown to appreciate his indifference to me); but these were petty irritations that didn’t qualify for a full release, and so I lashed out against myself.