At the verge of the forest, I cut the motor and glided in, catching hold of a trunk to stop myself. The melaleuca tea trees (there must have been thousands, their lovely fan-shaped crowns thick with leaves, extending as far as the eye could see) were between twenty and thirty feet high, and I estimated the depth of the water to be about four feet, lapping gently at the trunks. They cast an ashen shade and formed a canopy that shielded me from the worst of the rain. A smell of decomposition fouled the air—I wrapped a T-shirt about the lower half of my face to reduce the stench. Peering through the gloom, I spotted other boats, all empty, and bodies floating here and there, bulking up from the dark gray water, their shirts ballooned taut with gasses. The trees segmented my view, offering avenues of sight that were in every direction more or less the same, as if I were trapped in some sort of prison maze.
I restarted the motor and had gone approximately two hundred yards into the forest when I noticed a thinning of the trees ahead and a paling of the light that might signal a clearing; but I could not discern its extent or anything else about it. The bodies that islanded the water near the boundary of the forest were absent here, and this gave me; pause. I cut the engine again and surveyed the area, I could discern no particular menace, yet I had an apprehension of menace and reacted to every sound, jerking my head this way and that. Unable to shake the feeling, I decided a retreat was in order. I swung the boat around and was about to restart the engine, when I spotted a gaunt, bearded man sitting in the crotch of a tree.
At first I wasn’t sure the figure was not a deformity of the wood, for his hair and clothing were as gray as the bark of the tree, and his skin, too, held a grayish cast; but then he lifted his hand in a feeble salute. He was lashed in place by an intricately knotted system of rags that allowed him a limited range of motion. His features were those of a Cradle, yet whereas the Cradles I had met with previously were of the same approximate age as me, he appeared older, though this might have been the result of ill usage. “How’s it going?” he asked. His voice, too, was feeble, a scratchy croak. I asked why he had lashed himself to the tree.
“If I were you I’d do the same,” he said. “Unless you’re just going to turn around and leave.”
I let the boat come to rest against the trunk of a tree close to his.
“Seems a waste,” he said. “Coming all this way and then not sticking around for the show.”
“What show?”
He made an elaborate gesture, like a magician introducing a trick. “I don’t believe I could do it justice. It’s something you have to see for yourself.” He worked at something caught in his teeth. “I think this’ll be my last night. I need to get back to Phnom Penh.”
Nonplussed, I asked why he hadn’t gone farther into the forest.
“I’m not a big believer in an afterlife.”
“So you’re saying the ones who continue on past this point, they die?”
“Questions of life and death are always open to interpretation. But yeah …that’s what I’m saying. There’s two or three hundred of us left in the forest. Some cross over every day. They’re half-crazy from being here, from eating bugs and diseased birds. Stuff that makes your insides itch. They finally snap.” He glanced toward the clearing. “It’s due to start up again. You’d better find something to tie yourself up with. What I did was strip clothes off the corpses.”
“I’ve got something.”
I secured the launch to the trunk. The crotch of the melaleuca was no more than a foot above water level and, once I had made myself as comfortable as possible, I removed the coil of rope from my pack. The man advised me to fashion knots that would be difficult to untie and, when I asked why, he replied that I might be tempted to untie them. His affable manner seemed sincere, but we were no more than fifteen feet apart, and my visit with the fat man had made me wary. I kept the knots loose. Once settled, I asked the man how long he had been in the forest.
“This’ll be my fifth night,” he said. “I was going to stay longer, but I’m almost out of food, and my underwear’s starting to mildew. I want to leave while I’m still strong enough to top off that fat fuck in Phu Tho.”
“I wouldn’t worry about him.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“I dealt with him,” I said, wanting to give the impression of being a dangerous man.
“He tried something with you?”
“I didn’t give him the opportunity.”
I asked if he lived in Phnom Penh, and as the light faded, he told me he operated a small business that offered tours catering to adventure travelers interested in experiencing Cambodia off the beaten path. He went into detail about the business, and although his delivery was smooth, it seemed a rehearsed speech, a story manufactured to cover a more sinister function. I let on that I was also a businessman but left the nature of the business unclear. Our conversation stalled out—it was as if we knew that we had few surprises for the other.
The rain stopped at dusk, and mosquitoes came out in force. I hoped that my faith in malaria medication was not misplaced. With darkness, a salting of stars showed through the canopy, yet their light was insufficient to reveal my neighbor in his tree. I could tell he was still there by the sound of his curses and mosquito-killing slaps. I grew sleepy and had to struggle to keep awake; then, after a couple of hours, I began to cramp, and that woke me up. I asked how much longer we had to wait.
“Don’t know,” the man said. “I thought it would be coming earlier, but maybe it won’t be coming at all. Maybe it’s done with us.”
Irritated, I said, “Why the hell won’t you tell me what’s going on?”
“I don’t know what’s going on. I’ve got some ideas, but they’re pretty damn crazy. You seem stable, a lot more so than most of the pitiful bastards left out here. What I was hoping was for you to give me your take on things and see if it lines up with mine. I don’t want to predispose you to thinking about it one way of the other. Okay?”
“The fat guy, he said he thought that whatever it is—the animal, he called it. He thought the animal wanted our help because the Cradles were badasses.”
“Could be. Though I wouldn’t say badass. Just plain bad. Rotten.” I heard him shifting about. “Wait and see, all right? It shouldn’t be much longer.”
I spent the next hour or thereabouts hydrating and rubbing cramps out of my legs. One night of this, I told myself, was all I was going to take. The cramps abated, and I began to feel better. However, my mind still wasn’t right. I alternated between alertness and periods during which my thoughts wandered away from the forest, wishing I had never left home, wishing Kim was there to steady me with her cool rationality, wishing that we could make a real family and have babies, wondering if I would see her again, not because I felt imperiled and believed I might not survive the tea forest but because of my commitment-phobic character and faithless heart. It was in the midst of this reverie that the man in the tree beside me said, “Here it comes.”