Other Earths (collection)

I told her I was feeling queasy and, taking the satellite phone, went into the stern and called my agent. I asked if he had turned over every stone in hunting for a book called The Tea Forest by Thomas Cradle. He was concerned for my well-being and asked if I wasn’t carrying this a little too far; he told me that they had begun publicizing the hoax, and hundreds of fans (including librarians, collectors, and so forth) had written in to my website claiming to have done exhaustive searches, none yielding a result. That left me with the proposition, however preposterous, that Lucy was not of this universe …not this particular Lucy, at any rate. I had no idea when the current incarnation had come aboard or when she might disembark, and then I realized something that, if I hadn’t been flattered by her recognition of me at the Sekong Hotel, might have alerted me to her origin much earlier. I had grown a beard and let my hair grow long, drastically altering my appearance. It was Cradle Two whom she had recognized, probably from his author photograph, and this helped establish that she, the Lucy of the Sekong Hotel, had shifted over from an adjoining universe. Or perhaps I had been the one who shifted. According to Cradle Two, so many people and things were constantly shifting back and forth, that such distinctions scarcely mattered.

Picking through this snarl of possibility, I thought that Lucy and I might have shifted many times during the previous two weeks and that the Lucy of the Sekong might not be the Lucy of this moment—The Tea Forest must exist in more than one universe—and it occurred to me that the novel presented a means of crudely defining the situation. Every hour or so for the remainder of the day, I asked Lucy a question pertaining to The Tea Forest. She answered each to my satisfaction, which proved nothing; but the next morning, while she trimmed her toenails in the stern, I asked if she found the ending anticlimactic, and she said crossly, “Are you mad? You know I haven’t had time to read it.”

“The ending?” I asked. “You haven’t read the ending?”

“I haven’t even begun the book! Must I repeat that information every half-hour?”

Two hours later I asked her a variation on the question, and she replied that the ending had been her favorite part of the novel and followed this by saying that it would have been out of character for TC to complete the journey. He was a coward, and his cowardice was its own resolution. To end the book any other way would have been dramatically false and artistically dishonest. I (Cradle Two) was a modernist author, she said, prowling at the edges of the genre, and had I taken TC into the tea forest, I would have had to lapse into full-blown fantasy, something she doubted I could write well. She went on to dismiss much of postmodernism as having “an overengineered archness” and, except for a few exemplary authors, being a refuge for those writers whose “disregard for traditional narrative (was) an attempt to disguise either their laziness or their inability to master it.” She concluded with a none-too-brief lecture on cleverness as a literary eidolon, a quality “too frequently given the stamp of genius during this postmillennial slump.”