Other Earths

across its length and breadth. All around me, black splinters were rising toward the thing, sinister forms marked by a crookedness, like hooked thorns. Dark patches formed on its surface, composed of thousands of these splinters, and it began to shrink, its chambers collapsing one into the other like the folds of an accordion being compressed. Unnerved, I tried to slow my ascent, and as I twisted and turned, flinging myself about, I glimpsed what lay behind me: a black, depthless void picked out by a single, irregular gray shape, roughly circular and, from my perspective, about the size of a throw rug. The gray thing made me nervous. I looked away, but that did nothing to ease my anxiety, and for the duration of my dream—hours, it seemed—I continued my ascent, desperate to stop, my mind clenched with fear. When I woke near first light, my heart hammered and I was covered in sweat. I recalled the mural in Stung Treng, noting the crude resemblance it bore to the glowing creature, but a more pressing matter was foremost in my thoughts.

I put my hand on Lucy’s throat and shook her. She felt the pressure of my grip. Her eyes fluttered open, widened; then she said, “Is this to be something new?”

“What did you give me last night?” I asked. “It wasn’t opium.”

“Yes, it was!”

“I’ve never seen a record of anything like what I experienced.”

“Not everything is written down, Tom.” She moved my hand from her throat. “You’re so very excitable. Tell me about it.”

I summarized my evening and she said, “You may have had some sort of reaction. I doubt it will reoccur.”

“I’m not smoking that shit again.”

“Of course you won’t.” She sat up. “But to more pressing business. I may get my period today—I’m feeling crampy. So, if you want to get one in before the curse is upon me, this morning would be the time.”

Lan had his work cut out for him. North of Kampong Cham, the Mekong was more than a mile wide, but massive dry-season sandbars rendered the river almost impassable. Often there was a single navigable channel and that had to be located, so we went more slowly than usual, with Deng going on ahead of the Undine in the dinghy, taking soundings. To break the monotony, we camped one night on an island where we found driftwood caught in the limbs of trees fifteen and twenty feet high, pointing up the dramatic difference in water level between the rainy season and the dry. We erected a tentlike structure of mosquito netting and lounged beneath it, drinking gin and watching a strangely monochromatic sunset bronze the western sky, resolving into a pageantry of yellows and browns. Deng cooked over an open fire on the beach, preparing a curry. As darkness closed down around us, there was an explosion of moths, nearly hiding him from view (we glimpsed him squatting by the fire, a shamanic figure occulted by flurrying wings), and when he brought the curry to us, what was supposed to be a vegetarian dish had been thickened by uncountable numbers of moths. Lucy had a nibble and declared it to be: “Not bad. They give it kind of a meaty flavor.” I had been incredibly careful about food since arriving in Asia, wanting to spare myself the misery of stomach problems, but I was hungry and stuffed myself.

The following morning I was stricken with severe diarrhea. I blamed the moths and Deng. He kept out of my way for the next two days. On the third day, while resting in the stern, I caught sight of him on the island helping Lucy fly a kite, and then, later that afternoon, I saw him sneaking into our cabin. Thinking he might be stealing, hoping for it, in fact (I was feeling better and wanted an excuse to exercise my temper), I went inside. Lucy was sitting on the bed, leaning toward Deng, whose back was to me. He appeared to be fumbling with his shorts. I shouted, and after tossing me a terrified glance over his shoulder, he bolted for the door.

“What the fuck’s going on?” I asked.

“For God’s sake,” Lucy said. “Don’t act so wronged.”

I was taken aback by her mild reaction—I had expected a denial.

“I took pity on him,” she said. “There’s no reason for you to be upset.”

“You felt bad, so you were going to blow him?” She frowned. “If you must know, I was going to manipulate him.”

“A hand job? Oh, well. If I’d known that’s all it was …Shit. My mom used to give the paperboy hand jobs. Dad would look on and beam.”

She gave me a defiant look.

“Are you serious?” I asked. “You don’t see you did anything wrong?”

We held a staring contest, and then she said, “Can you imagine being sixteen, trapped on a boat with people who’re having sex as much as we do? He was pathetic, really.”

“So he came to you and asked for a hand job? And you said, ‘Oh, Deng, soulful child of the Third World …’ ”

“He asked for considerably more than that. I told him it was all I could manage.” She crossed her legs and gazed out at the river. “Since we’ve been going at it, I’ve had an almost ecumenical attitude toward sex. It’s not as though we’re in love, yet that’s the feeling I get when I’m in love. It makes me wonder if I’ve ever been in love.”

“Ecumenical? You mean like you want to spread it around?”

“That’s one way of putting it,” she said frostily.

“I don’t want you to feel that way. I’m territorial in the extreme.”

“Yes, I’m beginning to grasp that.” She stretched out on the bed, placed her hand on a paperback that lay open beside her. “It won’t happen again.”

I sat next to her on the edge of the bed. “Is that all you have to say?”

“Do you want an apology? I apologize. I should have known it would distress you.” She waited for me to respond and then said, “Should I leave? I’d rather not, but it’s your boat. If you’re determined to view what I’ve done as a betrayal …”

“No, I’m just confused.”

“About what?”

“About your attitude …and mine. I don’t understand why I’m not angrier.”

“Look,” she said. “Do you really believe I’m seeking another sexual outlet? That I’m not getting enough? Nymphomaniacs don’t get this much.”

“Yeah, okay,” I said, still dubious.

“So, are we going to move past this?”

If she was lying, she deserved a pass on the basis of poise alone. I grudgingly said, “It might take me a while.”

“How long would you reckon ‘a while’ to be? Long enough for you to feel horny again?”

To get her off the subject, I asked what she was reading.

She showed me the cover of The Tea Forest and said, “I’d forgotten how brilliant this was.”

It took me a second or two to process her remark. “You’ve read The Tea Forest? Before this trip, I mean?”

“Didn’t I tell you?”

“You said you’d read one of my books, but you never said which.”

“This was the only one I could find. The clerk in the bookstore mentioned that you’d gone off writing …or something to that effect. I guess he wasn’t aware of your recent work.”

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