It took him two tries to lever himself out of the chair. Going with a rolling, stiff-ankled walk, he preceded me into the room and pointed out the possessions of other Cradles scattered willy-nilly among crates of canned goods and stacks of bottled water and beer: discarded packs, clothing, notebooks, and the usual personal items. Copies of The Tea Forest could be seen poking out from this mess, as ubiquitous as Lonely Planet guides in a backpacker hotel. I squatted and began leafing through one of the notebooks. The handwriting was an approximation of my own, and the words …The notebooks were a potential gold mine, I realized. If this one were typical of the rest, I could crib dozens of stories from them, possibly a couple of novels. It struck me anew how odd all this was, to be seeking clues to a mystery by poring over journals that you yourself had written …or if not quite you, then those so close to you in flesh and spirit, they were more than brothers. Intending to make a comment along these lines, I half-turned to the fat man and caught a blow on the head that drove splinters of light into my eyes and sent me pitching forward on my stomach into a pile of clothing. If I lost consciousness, it was for a second or two, no more. Woozy, my face planted in a smelly T-shirt, I felt him patting down my pockets, pulling out my wallet, and heard his labored wheezing. My right hand was pinned beneath me, but I was able to slide my fingers down until I could grip the Colt and, when he flipped me onto my back, I aimed the gun at the blur of his torso—my vision had gone out of whack—and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. My finger was outside the trigger guard. He grabbed the barrel, tugging and jerking at the Colt, grunting with effort, dragging me about, while I hung on doggedly, trying to fit my finger into the guard.
Everything moved slowly, as if I were trapped beneath the surface of a dream. I recall thinking what a dumb son of a bitch he was not to knock my arm aside and use his weight against me; and I had other thoughts as well, groggy, fearful thoughts, a dull wash of regrets and recriminations. And I realized I should have known from the disorderly state of the various Cradles’ possessions that the fat man was not holding them in safekeeping, that he had simply emptied their packs on the floor while going through them, and the men whose lives they represented were probably adrift in the canal …and then my finger slipped inside the guard. There was a blast of noise and heat and light, a searing pain in my hand, and two screams, one of them mine.
My eyes squeezed shut, clutching my wrist; it was all I could do at first to manage the pain. I knew the Colt had exploded, and my sole concern was the extent of my injuries. Though it bled profusely, the wound seemed minor—the explosion had sliced a chunk out of the webbing of skin between my forefinger and thumb. My ears rang, but I soon became aware of a breathy, flutelike sound and glanced at the fat man. He lay sprawled among his victims’ dirty laundry, head and shoulders propped against a crate, staring at me or, more likely, at nothing, for his eyes did not track me when I came to a knee; he continued to stare at the same point in space, whimpering softly, his pinkish complexion undercut by a pasty tone. He, too, was clutching his wrist. His hand was a ruin, the fingers missing, except for a shred of the thumb. With its scorched stumps and flaps of skin, it resembled a strange tuber excavated from the red soil of his belly. His lower abdomen was a porridge of blood and flesh, glistening and shuddering with his shallow breaths—it appeared that swollen round mass was preparing to expel an even greater abomination from a dark red cavity in which were nested coils of intestine. I’d never seen anyone’s guts before, and though it was a horrid sight, the writer in me took time to record detail. Then his sphincter let go, and revulsion overwhelmed me.
I staggered to my feet and spotted Bian frozen in the doorway, watching the fat man die with a look of consternation, as if she had no idea how to handle this new development. Dizzy, my head throbbing, I stepped over the fat man’s legs. I could do nothing for him; even had there been something, I wouldn’t have done it. Bian had retaken her chair in the front room and was fingering her 45s, the image of distraction. I sat opposite her, removed the first-aid kit from my pack, and cleaned my wound with alcohol. A thought occurred to me. I pulled out my English-Vietnamese dictionary and found the word for key.
“Danh tu?” I said, pointing to her chain. I went through several variant pronunciations before she grasped my meaning. She said something in Vietnamese and mimed plucking something from a hip pocket.
“Okay, I get.” She made a keep-cool gesture. “I get.”
I bandaged my hand, and as I secured the bandage with tape, the fat man, emerging from the safe harbor of shock, began pleading for God’s help, babbling curses, lapsing now and again into a fuming noise. Bian selected a record, fitted it onto the spindle, and his outcries were buried beneath the strings and fauxpomp of “MacArthur Park.” The music started my head to pounding, but it was preferable to hearing the fat man groan.
The sky had opened up, and rain was falling, a steady downpour that would last a while. I saw no reason to hang around. I repacked my rucksack and nodded to Bian, who responded in kind and gazed out the door, tapping a finger in time to the beat. As I walked down a weedy slope toward the park ranger’s shack, I could find in myself no hint of the profound emotion that was supposed to come with taking a life, with having violated this most sacrosanct and oft-breached of taboos, and I pondered the question of whether I would feel the same if I had killed a non-Cradle. I’d had a bond of sorts with the fat man, yet I had a minimal reaction to his death, as if the life I’d taken were mine by rights, thus negligible …though he might not be dead. Another song, “Nights In White Satin,” began to play, presumably to drown out his cries; yet I thought Bian might be unmindful of his condition and was simply luxuriating in the lush, syrupy music that she had taken refuge in during her months of enslavement. I marveled at the calmness she displayed upon exchanging captivity for freedom. Perhaps it was an Asian thing, a less narcotized appreciation of what Riel had known: Someone was always using you, and thus freedom and captivity were colors we applied to the basic human condition. Perhaps what was a clich’ in our culture bespoke a poignant truth in hers.
Writers tend to romanticize the sordid. They like to depict a junkie’s world, say, as edgy, a scraped-to-the-bone existence that permits the soul of an artist to feel life in his marrow and allows him to peer into the abyss. Many of them believe, as did Rimbaud, or at least tout the belief, that derangement of the senses can lead one to experience the sublime; but for every Rimbaud there are countless millions whose senses have been deranged to purely loutish ends, and I am inclined to wonder if le poete maudit achieved what he did in spite of drugs and debauchery, not because of them. Whatever the case, I was convinced, thanks in part to the example set by my gargantuan pod brother, that the sordid was merely sordid. I might be disagreeable and sarcastic, but my efforts to bring forth my inner Cradle had been pretty feeble: kinky sex and a smattering of mean-spirited thoughts. Those were minor flaws compared to murder and enslavement. If the trait for which the “animal” needed us had anything to do with our innate repulsiveness, that might explain why I felt its call less profoundly than the others.
It was midafternoon when I set out for the tea forest in a motor launch left by (if the fat man were to be believed) one or another returning Cradle, with the rain falling hard, drenching my clothes, and the sky as dark as dusk. Rain pattered on the launch, hissed in the reeds, and had driven to roost the birds that—so my guidebook attested—normally stalked the wetlands. I followed a meandering watercourse through marshes toward a dark jumbled line in the distance. My head was bothering me. I felt cloudy, vague, gripped by a morose detachment, and assumed I had suffered a mild concussion. Images of Kim, of Lucy and Riel (most of them erotic in nature), were swapped about in my head, as were concerns about the new novel, about my health, about what would happen now that the end of the journey was at hand, and a belated worry that Bian would report me for killing her captor. However, as I drew near the forest, a feeling of glory swept over me. I was on the brink of doing something noble and essential and demanding self-sacrifice. The feeling seemed to come from outside myself, as if—like mist—it surrounded the forest in drifts through which I was passing, emerging now and again, returning to my confused state.