Other Earths

Anxiety floored the superficial nonchalance of his tone. He still held the pistol, though not aiming it at me. I told him to find his own boat—there were plenty around.

“I don’t have the will to leave,” he said. “And if I don’t leave, that thing’s going to get me.” He offered me the pistol. “You have to help me. I won’t try anything.” He laughed weakly. “The shape I’m in, it wouldn’t matter if I did.”

I knew he had been playing me, that his every word and action had been designed toward this end; but he had saved my life. I took the gun and told him to bind his hands as tightly as he could manage. When this was done, I helped him down from the tree and into the boat. He was frail, his skin loose on his bones, and I guessed that he had lied to me, that he had been in the forest far longer than five nights. I checked his bonds, settled him into the bow, and climbed in. The man seemed greatly relieved. He pressed his fists to his forehead, as if fighting back tears. When he had recovered, he asked what I thought about things now that I had seen the show. I summarized my reactions and he nodded.

“You didn’t carry out the metaphor as far as I did,” he said. “But yeah, that pretty much says it.”

I asked him to explain what he meant by carrying out the metaphor.

“If you accept that our bad character is what makes us useful to it …or at least is symptomatic of the quality that makes us useful. Our psychic reek or something.” He broke off, apparently searching for the right words. “You saw that gray, swarming thing? How it seemed reluctant to come near the part that was treated? Coated, as you said.”

“Yeah. So?”

“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.

The sun was up and the air steamy, baking the weeds and the little houses, when we came to Phu Tho. A putrid stench proceeded from the pale green house where the fat Cradle had died, and the innumerable ruined and stranded boats looked almost festive in the morning light, like the remnants of a regatta at which too good a time had been had by all. We had reached the banks of the canal when I remembered something. I told the man to wait, that I had left certain of my possessions in the fat man’s house. He sank to the grass, grateful to have a rest. I walked back to the house and peeked in the door. Bian had fled and taken her records. I tied my T-shirt about my nose and mouth to cut the smell and steeled myself. It promised to be a disgusting business, retrieving the notebooks of my dead brothers, but I had my career to think of.

NINE ALTERNATE ALTERNATE HISTORIES Benjamin Rosenbaum

1. The point of convergence. If any given event may have two subtly different alternate causes, perhaps both may obtain. If history books from two alternate timelines that arrive at the same place have different reasons to tell the same lies, convergence is possible, maybe inevitable.

2. The point of convergence, theological. Perhaps we evolved from apes, from shambling lichen molds, were molded out of corn after the destruction of our elder mud siblings, coalesced out of wishes, lost our way in the unused back service hallways of the fifth floor of a metadepartment store in the dreamlands and took the wrong elevator, were created by a loving god, were trapped here by an evil demiurge, were banished here to unlearn false ideas, are dreams in the mind of the Red King, made up this game and forgot we were playing it. Or all these at once, and this is the point of convergence, the point at which the histories become indistinguishable, and, as of today, it no longer matters what story we tell.

3. The point of divergence, personal. It’s raining now in Freie Strasse. Without moving my head, I see five hundred new white explosions every instant: rain-drops punishing the dark sidewalk, the dark street, five hundred tiny fists, and then five hundred more. Had I left Starbucks fifteen minutes ago, I would be at the office now. Dry.