“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 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.”
After listening to her ramble on for the better part of an hour, I was disinclined to ask further questions, and truthfully there was no need—I had proved to my satisfaction that Cradle Two’s model of the universe was accurate in some degree, and I wanted Wicked Lucy back, not this pretentious windbag. I went outside and paced the length of the Undine, sending Deng scuttering away, and tried to make sense out of what was going on, overwhelmed by feelings of helplessness brought on by my new understanding of the human condition, a condition to which I had paid lip service, yet now was forced to accept as an article of faith. “The river was change,” Cradle Two (and perhaps Cradles 3, 4, 5, ad infinitum) had written. “It flowed through the less mutable landscape, carrying change like a plague, defoliating places that once were green, greening places that once were barren, mutating the awareness of the people who dwelled along it, infecting them with a horrid inconstancy, doing so with such subtlety that few remembered those places as having ever been different.” It had been my intention to shoot straight down the Mekong to the delta and spend most of the six weeks there; but now, recalling this passage, I felt a vibration in my flesh and panicked, fearing that the vibration, my fixation on the delta, and, indeed, every thought in my head, might reflect the inconstancy cited by Cradle Two. I had begun to feel a pull, a sense of being summoned to the delta that alarmed me; I sloughed this off as being the product of an overwrought imagination, but nonetheless it troubled me. For these reasons, I decided to break the trip, as Cradle Two’s narrator had done, hoping to find stability away from the river, a spot where change occurred less frequently, and stop for a week, or perhaps longer, in what once had been the capitol of evil on earth, Phnom Penh.
In the future I expect there to be systems that will allow a boy on a bicycle, balancing a block of ice on his handlebars, to pedal directly from Phnom Penh into the heart of Manhattan, where thousands will applaud and toss coins, which will stick to his skin, covering him like the scales of a pangolin, and he will bring with him wet heat and palm shadow and a sudden, fleeting touch of coolness in the air, and there will follow the smells of moto exhaust, of a street stall selling rice porridge sweetened with cinnamon and soup whose chief ingredient is cow entrails, the dry odor of skulls at Tuol Sieng prison, marijuana smoke, all the essences of place and moment, every potential answer to the Cambodian riddle fractionated and laid out for our inspection. Until then, it will be necessary to travel, to not drink the water, to snap poorly composed pictures, to be hustled by small brown men, to get sick and rent unsatisfactory hotel rooms. I yearned for that future. I wanted to live in the illusion that persuades us that true-life experience can be obtained on the Internet. Barring that, I wanted to find lodgings as anti-Cambodian as possible, one of the big American-style hotels, an edifice that I felt would be resistant to the processes of change. Wicked Lucy, however, insisted we take a room at the Hotel Radar 99, where she had stayed on a previous visit.
The hotel was situated in an old quarter of the city, well away from modernity of the kind I favored, and no element of the place seemed to have the least relation to the concepts of either radar or ninety-nine. The building was three stories of decrepit stone that had been worn to an indefinite salmon hue—it might originally have been orange or pink (impossible to say which)—and had green French doors that opened onto precarious balconies with ironwork railings. Faded, sagging awnings skirted that section of the block, overhanging restaurants and shops of various kinds; and parked along the curb at every hour of day or night were between ten and twenty motos, the owners of which, according to Lucy, provided the guests, mostly expats, with drugs, women, and whatever else they might want in the way of perversity. You entered through a narrow door (the glass portion painted over with indigo) and came into a dark green-as-a-twilit-jungle foyer, throttled with ferns and fleshy-leaved plants. There was never anyone behind the reception desk. You were compelled to shout, and then maybe Mama-san (the elderly Japanese woman who owned the place) would respond, or maybe not. Beyond lay a tiny courtyard where two clipped parrots squabbled on their perch. Our room was on the second floor, facing back toward the entrance, the metal number 4 turned sideways on the door. Apart from lizards clinging to the wall, its decor was purely utilitarian: a handful of wooden chairs; a writing desk that may once have had value as an antique; three double beds about which mosquito netting could be lowered, all producing ghastly groans and squeaks whenever we sat on them and playing a cacophonous avant-garde freakout each time we made love. The bathroom was also an antique, with a claw-footed bathtub, a chain-pull toilet, and venerable tile floors. Stains memorializing lizard and insect death bespotted the cream-colored walls and high ceilings. Everything smelled of cleaning agents, a good sign in those latitudes.