Other Earths Part 20

"Yeah, okay," I said, still dubious.

"So, are we going to move past this?"

If she was lying, she deserved a pa.s.s 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 h.o.r.n.y again?"

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

She showed me the cover of The Tea Forest The Tea Forest and said, "I'd forgotten how brilliant this was." 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 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 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 s.h.i.+fted over from an adjoining universe. Or perhaps I had been the one who s.h.i.+fted. According to Cradle Two, so many people and things were constantly s.h.i.+fting back and forth, that such distinctions scarcely mattered. 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 s.h.i.+fted over from an adjoining universe. Or perhaps I had been the one who s.h.i.+fted. According to Cradle Two, so many people and things were constantly s.h.i.+fting back and forth, that such distinctions scarcely mattered.

Picking through this snarl of possibility, I thought that Lucy and I might have s.h.i.+fted 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 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 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 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 pa.s.sage, 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 gla.s.s 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 j.a.panese 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 lat.i.tudes.

I spent five days rooted to the room, trying to deny and resist change, infrequently stepping out onto the balcony to survey the street or going into the corridor overlooking the courtyard to observe the tranquil life of the hotel. I could detect no change in my surroundings-proof of nothing, but I grew calmer nonetheless. A German couple was staying in the room on our left, two Italian girls on our right. Farther along: Room 2 was home to a pair of twenty-somethings: a thin, long-haired man with a pinched, bony face and a Canadian flag embroidered on his jeans and a gorgeous gray-eyed blonde with full b.r.e.a.s.t.s and steatopygian b.u.t.tocks. She was the palest person I had met in Cambodia, her skin whiter than the bathroom tiles (covered, as they were, by a grayish film). I never saw her leave the room, not completely. She would open the door and, without letting loose of it, as if it were all that kept her from drifting away, offer a frail, zoned, "Hi," then hover for a while, looking as though she were going to make some further comment, before fluttering her fingers and vanis.h.i.+ng inside. Once at noon, when the sunlight brightened the courtyard floor, casting a lace of shadow from a jacaranda tree onto the stone floor, she performed this ritual emergence half-nude, dressed in a tank top, her pubic hair a shade darker than that on her head, yet firmly within the blonde spectrum. It became evident that she was distressed about her boyfriend-he was overdue, probably off buying drugs (heroin or opium, I guessed), and she hoped these appearances at the door would hurry him along.

After five days Lucy tired of indulging me, of bringing me food, and coaxed me outside. I began taking walks around the immediate neighborhood, but I had no desire to explore farther afield. I had been to Phnom Penh twenty years before, and I had snapped pictures of the temples of Angkor Wat, skulls, the Killing Fields, crypts overgrown by the enormous roots of trees, and I had slept with expat girls and taxi girls, and I had partied heartily in this terrible place where death was a tourist attraction, getting kicked out of bars for fighting and out of one of the grand old colonial hotels along the river for public drunkenness. I needed no further experience of the country and was content to inhabit a few square blocks, reconciling myself to the idea that things had always changed around me, and how were you to distinguish between normal change and a change promulgated by a transition from one universe to the other? Did such a thing as normal change even exist? People, for example, were so predictable in their unpredictability. Amazing, how they could do a one-eighty on you at the drop of a hat, how their moods varied from moment to moment. Perhaps this was all due to physics, to universes like strips of rice paper blown by a breeze and touching each other, exchanging people and insects and corners of rooms for almost identical replicas; perhaps without this universal interaction people would be ultrareliable and their behavior would not defy a.n.a.lysis, and every relations.h.i.+p would be a model of logic and consistency, and peace could be negotiated, and problems, great and small alike, could be easily solved or would never have existed. Perhaps the breeze that blew the strips of rice paper together was the single consequential problem, and that problem was insoluble. I understood that what had panicked me was a fundamental condition of existence, one that a mistaken apprehension of consensus reality had caused me to overlook. I further understood that I could adapt to my recently altered perception of this condition and found consolation in the idea that I could train myself to be as blind as anyone.

Around the corner from the hotel was a restaurant that sold fruit shakes. A young girl tended it. She stood behind a table that supported a gla.s.s display case in which there were finger bananas, papayas and several fruits I could not identify, bottled milk and various sweeteners in plastic tubs. She spent much of her day cleaning up after a puppy that wandered among a forest of table legs, sniffing for food, pausing now and again to p.i.s.s and s.h.i.+t-thus the fecal odor that undercut the sugary smell of the place. In the darkened interior were blue wooden chairs and tables draped in checkered plastic cloths and poster ads featuring Cambodian pop stars stapled to the walls. On the fourth day after I started going out, Lucy and I were having fruit shakes when the blonde girl from the hotel wandered in, clutching a large straw bag of the sort used for shopping. She sat against the back wall, staring out at the street, where a couple of moto cowboys were attempting wheelies, the brraaap brraaap of their engines overriding the restaurant's radio. Lucy waved to her, but the blonde gave no reaction. Her skin was faintly luminous, like ghost skin, and her expression vacant. of their engines overriding the restaurant's radio. Lucy waved to her, but the blonde gave no reaction. Her skin was faintly luminous, like ghost skin, and her expression vacant.

"I'm going to see what's wrong," Lucy said.

"Nothing's wrong," I said. "She wants a shake."

Lucy pitied me with a stare. "I'll be back shortly."

She joined the blonde at her table, and they spoke together in muted voices. With their heads together, one light and one dark, they posed a yin-yang juxtaposition, and as I sipped my shake, I thought about having them both, a fleeting thought that had no more weight than would the notion of taking a shot at Cate Blanchett. One of the moto cowboys pulled up facing the restaurant and shouted-he wore what looked to be a fis.h.i.+ng hat with a turned-up brim, the word LOVE spelled out in beads on the crown, and he appeared to aim his shout at the blonde. She paid him no mind, busy conferring with Lucy. He shrugged, spoke to someone on the sidewalk I couldn't see, and rode off. The puppy b.u.mped into my foot. I nudged him aside and concentrated on sucking a piece of papaya through my straw. When I looked up, Lucy had taken the blonde by an elbow and was steering her toward our table.

"This is Riel," Lucy said. "Riel, this is Thomas."

Her eyes lowered, the blonde whispered, "Hi."

"That's an interesting name," I said. "It's spelled the same as the currency?"

The question perplexed her, and I said, "Cambodian money. The riel? Is it spelled the same?"

"I guess." At Lucy's prompting, she took a seat. "It's French. Like Louis Riel."

"Who?" I asked.

"A famous Canadian. The Father of Manitoba."

"I didn't know Manitoba had a father," said Lucy pertly.

"Tell me about him," I said.

"People say he was a madman," Riel said. "He prayed obsessively. They hanged him for treason."

"And yet he fathered Manitoba." Lucy grinned.

"Mitch says they must have named the money over here for him, too," Riel said.

The counter girl, who had ignored her to this point, came over and asked if she wanted something.

"Make her a banana shake," Lucy said, surprising me that she would know what Riel wanted.

I asked Riel if she was from Manitoba, and she said, "Yes. Winnipeg." Then she asked Lucy if she could have custard apple instead of banana.

I inquired as to who Mitch was, and Lucy said, "The a.s.s who was with her. He ran off with their money. I told her she should stay with us until she figures out what to do."

This s.n.a.t.c.h of conversation summed Riel up-she saw her beauty as a type of currency and was, perhaps, mad-and summed up our relations.h.i.+p with her as well. It seemed Lucy had found someone more submissive than she herself was. She sent messages with her eyes saying that she wanted this to happen.

"Yeah, sure," I said.

Riel greedily drank her shake, eschewing a straw. She was, if you overlooked her drug abuse, a sublime creature possessed by a serene absence.

Once she finished her shake, Lucy went off with her, saying that they were going to "get something" for Riel. I went back to the hotel and read and stared out the window. The sky was almost cloudless, a few puffs drifting high, but then it flickered, the entire blue expanse appearing to wink out, like a television image undergoing a momentary loss of power, and a large cloud roughly resembling a canoe appeared in the lower sky; the roofline above which it floated also seemed different, though I couldn't have told you how. But the canoe-shaped cloud . . . I was certain it had not been there seconds before. I expected another flicker, and when none came, I was relieved; and yet I felt again that that summoning toward the south. A longing pervaded me, a desire to be on the move, and that longing intensified, faded, intensified . . . It was as if, having risen to the bait of The Tea Forest, The Tea Forest, something was tugging gently on the line, trying to set the hook deep before reeling me in. something was tugging gently on the line, trying to set the hook deep before reeling me in.

After an hour the women returned and went into the bathroom, where they remained for twenty-five minutes. When they emerged, Riel was topless and wobbly. A trickle of blood ran down her arm-it might have been a scarlet accessory designed to contrast with her milky skin. With an arm about her waist, Lucy helped her to lie on the bed next to ours, cleaned away the blood, and wrangled off her jeans. Riel fell into a light sleep. Lucy started to disrobe.

"What was all that in the bathroom?" I asked, putting down my book.

"She had trouble getting a vein." Lucy skinned out of her panties. "I a.s.sisted."

"And now?"

She put a finger to her lips and stretched out beside Riel and began to caress her. This male fantasy held no particular appeal for me in the abstract, yet now I was captivated by Lucy's tenderness and thoroughness. She left no area of Riel's skin unexplored, licking and rubbing against her with the delicacy of a cat. The bed played an oriental music of squeaks and sproings sproings when she went down on her, a lengthy symphony with prolonged, hushed s.p.a.ces between the notes, reflecting discrete movements of Lucy's fingers and tongue. They achieved a simultaneous climax, Lucy digging between her own legs with her left hand, letting forth a gasp, and Riel, becoming active at the end, crying out while holding Lucy's head in place. when she went down on her, a lengthy symphony with prolonged, hushed s.p.a.ces between the notes, reflecting discrete movements of Lucy's fingers and tongue. They achieved a simultaneous climax, Lucy digging between her own legs with her left hand, letting forth a gasp, and Riel, becoming active at the end, crying out while holding Lucy's head in place.

Lucy wiped her mouth dry on the sheet. She crossed to the bed upon which I lay and took my hand, saying she wanted to watch me make love to Riel. I needed no urging, but her eagerness made me self-conscious and briefly reinst.i.tuted a morality that viewed the world through prim spectacles and characterized such behavior as degenerate and vile. I said something to the effect that I didn't know or I wasn't sure, a delaying action; but Lucy pressed a condom into my hand.

"Hurry," she said. "While she's still wet."

I liked how Riel, a sleepy heroin girl, would coast in s.e.x, gliding, billowing, alone on her white ocean when I was joined to her. That first time, though, when she gazed up at me with Chinese eyes, those gray irises and shrunken pupils gazing out from a beautiful porcelain mask, old eyes weary of something, perhaps of everything, she seemed the embodiment of a Zen wisdom-by sinking to the bottom of the world, surrendering herself to its flood, she had gained infinite knowledge through the rejection of knowledge. I turned her onto her stomach in order to avoid her eyes, wis.h.i.+ng to remain ignorant of whatever she might know about me in her Buddha ignorance, and soon roused a clanking, violent music from the bed.

Riel was all about appet.i.te. When she ate, she ate wholeheartedly, and when she drank, she drank singlemindedly, and when she was inspired to talk, she talked a blue streak, and when she f.u.c.ked, although stoned, never as active as Lucy, she gave it her all. I asked her if heroin didn't m.u.f.fle the s.e.xual drive, and she said, "Yes . . . but once you get started, it's kind of cool." She and Lucy and I deployed our bodies in every possible permutation, and over the span of several days, I learned there was a qualitative difference between their addictions, one that defined their drugs of choice. Compared to Lucy's elaborate ritual with the pipe, Riel's affair with the needle had a decidedly American character (stick it in and get off). This distinction carried over into their att.i.tudes toward s.e.x, and I was led to generalize that whereas opium women might prefer to grill thin slices of your heart, skewering each with a toothpick, devouring it over a period of years, heroin girls will, if given the chance, swallow it in three quick bites. Riel became increasingly needy-needy for food, alcohol, drugs, and o.r.g.a.s.ms. I could empathize with her boyfriend. Had we been alone together, I would have dumped her myself. Beauty is not sufficient compensation for a demanding nature. But with Lucy to share the load, her demands were acceptable.

I discovered that a threesome required more drama to sustain it than did a twosome, and at first we manufactured drama. Games became the order of the day. Often Lucy and Riel would get high, leaving me to orchestrate these exercises. I enjoyed having two women, limp as dolls, whom I could exploit however I chose. When that became boring, I let Lucy take the lead. One afternoon she insisted I read a pa.s.sage from The Tea Forest The Tea Forest before having s.e.x with Riel. The pa.s.sage involved Cradle Two's narrator speaking to a German girl he had picked up in a Phnom Penh bar during the break in his trip. He had just finished helping her fix and was dictating the terms of their relations.h.i.+p. In speaking the lines, I felt an absolute conviction, as if my voice and Cradle Two's had merged: before having s.e.x with Riel. The pa.s.sage involved Cradle Two's narrator speaking to a German girl he had picked up in a Phnom Penh bar during the break in his trip. He had just finished helping her fix and was dictating the terms of their relations.h.i.+p. In speaking the lines, I felt an absolute conviction, as if my voice and Cradle Two's had merged:

" 'If you have to puke again,' I said, 'go outside, okay?'

"The girl tried to focus, but she gave it up; her head lolled, and an arm slipped off the sofa, her fingers trailing in the vomit.

" 'I'm not your pimp,' I told her. 'I'm not going to be your pimp. What I'm going to do is use you to attract a certain cla.s.s of man. You want to f.u.c.k for money, okay, I'll pay you. Don't let the men I set you up with pay you. You'll probably have to do two or three tricks. For now, though, I'll be the only one f.u.c.king you. I need to make sure you can do the things they like. I'll keep you in dope and give you a place to live. I'll regulate your drugs . . . that way you won't get too big a habit. You have to learn to manage your habit. You can't do that, you're on your own.' "

Prior to this, I had, of course, recognized the resonance between the addition of Riel to our union and Cradle Two's novel-indeed, I had done little other than recognize such resonances since beginning the trip. More to the point, reading the pa.s.sage brought home to me how much of the veneer of the civilized man had worn off. I was a long walk from becoming an unregenerate criminal like the narrator of The Tea Forest The Tea Forest, and perhaps I would never achieve that level of criminality; but I was headed down the path he had trod. At one point I considered calling Kim and making a stab at redemption, hoping that her rational voice would reorient me; but Lucy and Riel stared at me with dull opiated expectancy from a nipple-to-nipple embrace, and I decided that the call could wait.

We started going out at night into the neon-braided streets of central Phnom Penh, putting on one-act plays in the thick, hothouse air, treating that city of a million souls as if its mad traffic and buzzing motos, its brutal history and doleful present, were merely a backdrop for our entertainments. We, or rather Lucy and Riel, sought out fortune-tellers, those who lined the riverbank by day, when the parks were thronged with tai chi pract.i.tioners and tourists and badminton players, and by night, when the poor gathered with their children to squat along the embankment eating boiled eggs and fried beetles, and the prosperous fortune-tellers with fancy booths at Wat Phnom, their altars adorned with strings of Christmas tree lights, candles, incense, and bowls of fruit, and cluttered with porcelain sages, Ramayana monkeys, Buddhas with holographic halos sheltering beneath gilt parasols . . . A more generous writer might have inferred that this profusion of seers and charlatans was but a veneer masking the rich spiritual life of the populace, always in communion with the city of ghosts that interpenetrated with and cast a pall over the city of blood and stone; and yet it meant nothing to me, or, to be accurate, it might someday provide the background detail for a story, and if a host of sad phantoms had materialized before me, creatures with bleak, negative eyes and bodies of lacy ectoplasm, I would have taken due notice and then done my best to ignore them, being consumed by other mysteries. We shooed away beautiful lady-boys and Cambodian kids with dyed Mohawks who were trying to prove something by b.u.mming cigarettes from Americans, and we discouraged the taxi girls who came at platoon strength from alley mouths and bars, girls in their teens and maybe younger, chirping slogans from the hookers' English phrase book and then retreating in sullen disarray, chiding one another in singsong Khmer for being too aggressive or not aggressive enough. We disregarded the entreaties of ragged amputees and blind men with bowls, and we ate hallucinatory food from stalls, bugs and guts and whatnot, and inspected vendors' wares-the arms dealers were of especial interest to me. They commonly operated on street corners (some nights, in certain quarters, there seemed to be one on almost every corner) and offered a wide selection of hand-guns and ammo, the odd a.s.sault weapon-hardly surprising in a country where you could, I'd been told, blow away a cow with a rocket launcher for a fee of two hundred dollars, less if you were prepared to haggle. I saw in them the future of my own country, where death was celebrated with equal enthusiasm, although candy-coated by Technicolor and video games and television news. When the coating finally wore off, as it threatened to do, there we would all be, in Cambodia.

As we strolled along Street 51 one night, after a late supper at a grand old colonial hotel on the riverfront near Wat Phnom hill, we happened upon a blue wall bearing the painted silhouette of a girl flying a kite, a Beardsley-like ill.u.s.tration; beside it were the words HEART OF DARKNESS BAR. In addition, there was a painting on the door very much like the mural on the market stall in Stung Treng. I wanted to check the place out, intrigued by the mural, by the name of the bar and the juxtaposed irony of the sign, but Lucy said it was dangerous, that the Coconut Gang hung out there, and someone had recently been murdered on the premises.

"What's a Coconut Gang?" I asked.

"Rich a.s.sholes. Khmer punks and their bodyguards. Please! Let's go somewhere else."

"All I want is to have a quick look."

"This is no place to play tourist."

"I'm not playing at anything. I'm a writer. I can use s.h.i.+t like this."

"Yes, I imagine being shot could prove an invaluable resource. Silly me."

"Nothing like that's going to happen."

"Do you have the slightest idea of where you are? Haven't you noticed this is a hostile environment? They don't care if you're a b.l.o.o.d.y writer. They don't discriminate to that degree. To them, you're simply an idiot American poking his nose in where it's not wanted."

A smattering of Cambodians had paused in their promenade to kibbitz, amused by our argument. Feeling exposed, I said, "All right. Fine . . . whatever. Let's just go, okay?"

Lucy looked around. "Where's Riel?"

We found her in the entryway of the club, staring at a stuffed green adder in a bottle and being stared at by two security men. Mounted on walls throughout the main room were dozens of bottles, some containing snakes, other objects less readily identifiable, and bizarre floral arrangements, someone's flawed conception of the j.a.panese form. Riel evaded Lucy's attempt to corral her and went deeper into the club, which was also a misconception, an Asian version of a western bar with a big dance floor and booths but with the details, the accents, all wrong. The dance floor was packed with Cambodian men and taxi girls and young expats working out to "Smells Like Teen Spirit." As we proceeded through the club, every couple of feet we crossed into a zone dominated by a new perfume or cologne.

We located a niche in the crowd at the bar, and when the harried bartender deigned to notice us, we ordered drinks. The clamor and the loud music oppressed me, and the young Khmer men in body-hugging silk s.h.i.+rts and gold watches and Italian shoes who eyed Riel made me uneasy. I wasn't disturbed by the possibility of her straying-my att.i.tude toward her was devoid of possessiveness-but I presumed she might be a source of trouble; though the place did not seem dangerous, just another drunken revel in postmillennial Southeast Asia, expressing the relief Asians felt on having survived the worst life had to offer, or so they believed . . . or so I thought they believed. I realize now that it was the same party, more or less, that has been going on for as long as there have been party people.

One drink, I estimated, would be the limit of my tolerance for the Heart of Darkness; but a college-age American kid pus.h.i.+ng through the press, Dan Something, muscular and patchily bearded, a frat type on holiday, was brought up short by the sight of Riel. He struck up a shouted conversation with her, bought her a second drink, and invited us to join him and his friends in one of the many private rooms that opened off the main s.p.a.ce; there we could talk more comfortably. Riel turned him down, but Marilyn Manson's "Tainted Love" started to play, a song that made me want to break things, particularly Marilyn Manson, and I accepted.

Inside the private room (black walls; furnished with a grouping of easy chairs and a sofa; centered by a coffee table upon which lay a pack of cigarettes, cigarette papers, and a heap of marijuana), Dan introduced us to Sean, a hulking, three-hundred pound, shaven-headed version of himself, his lap occupied by a teenage taxi girl in T-s.h.i.+rt and knock-off designer jeans, tiny as a pet monkey by comparison, and Mike, also accessorized by a taxi girl, a lean, saturnine guy with evil-Elvis sideburns, multiple facial piercings, and tats, the most prominent being a full sleeve on his right arm, a gaudy jungle scene that was home to tigers, temples, and fantastic lizards. Dan, Riel, Lucy, and I squeezed onto the sofa; I was all but pushed out of the conversation, and had to lean forward to see what was happening at the opposite end, where Dan had isolated Riel, sitting between her and Lucy. Air conditioning iced the room, and the din of the dance floor was reduced to a thumping rumor.

Dan and Sean (Sean was a little man's name-in a perfect world, he would have been named Lothar) had recently arrived from Thailand and spoke rapturously of Khao San Road, the backpacker street in Bangkok. This identified them, if they had not already been so identified, as a familiar species of idiot. Khao San was a strip of guesthouses, internet caf's, bars, tattoo joints, travel agents, etc., where each night, indulging in the distillation of the backpacker experience, hundreds of drunken expats a.s.sembled to gobble deep fried scorpions and buy sarongs and wooden bracelets at the stalls lining the street, and-their faces growing solemn-to swap stories about the spiritual insights they had received while whizzing past some temple or another in a VIP bus. They had hooked up with Mike, a college bud, in Phnom Penh. He had been in-country for less than three weeks yet talked about Cambodia with the jaded air of a long-term resident. I guessed him to be the brains of the outfit.

Dan held forth at some length about his hour-and-a-half tour of the Killing Fields, explaining to the ever-so-blitzed Riel (she had added three drinks and the better part of two joints to her chemical const.i.tuency) how it had been majorly depressing, yet life affirming and life changing. The Cambodian people were awe-some, and his respect for them was so heartfelt, I mean like totally, that he managed to work up a tear, a trick that foretold a future in show biz and may have achieved the desired response among the inebriated breeding stock back in Champaign-Urbana, where he attended school, inducing them to roll over and spread, overborne by the sensitive depths of his soul; but it zipped right past Riel. Listening to him gave me a feeling of superiority, and I could have kept on listening for quite some time; but Lucy was unhappy, pinched between me and Dan, and I thought it appropriate to drop a roach into the conversational soup.

Leaning forward, I asked, "Why don't you have a taxi girl like your pals here?"

Dimly, Dan seemed to perceive this as a threat to his ambitions toward Riel. A notch appeared in his brow, and he squinted at me meanly. Then inspiration struck, perhaps an illumination akin to his moral awakening at the Killing Fields. He acquired an expression of n.o.ble forbearance and said, "I don't do wh.o.r.es."

Sean loosed a doltish chuckle; the faces of the taxi girls went blank.

"Seriously," Dan said, addressing first me, then Riel. "I revere women too much to want to just use their bodies."

"s.h.i.+t, man," Mike said, and he burst out laughing. This set everyone to laughing, with the exception of Riel. Our laughter drowned out Dan's earnest protests, and once it had subsided, Mike confided to us that Dan's girl had fled the room. "She was one psycho b.i.t.c.h," he said. "One second she's grabbing his junk, the next she's talking a f.u.c.king mile a minute, pointing at s.h.i.+t."

"What was she pointing to?" Lucy asked.

"f.u.c.k if I know. I was too wasted, and she was talking Cambodian, anyway."

Lucy inquired of the taxi girls in Khmer and, following a back-and-forth, gave her report. "She said the room was different."

"Huh?" said Sean.

"That's what they told me."

"I like being used," Riel said out of the blue.

This alerted even Dan, who had been sulking.

"It makes me feel, you know . . ." Riel s.p.a.ced on the thought.

"How does does it make you feel?" asked Mike. it make you feel?" asked Mike.

Riel deliberated and said at last, "When Tom comes inside me, it's like I'm being venerated." She turned her calm face to me. "I wish you'd come in me without a rubber, so when I walk around I could feel it running down my thigh. It'd be like a reminder of what you felt. Of what I felt." She looked to Lucy. "You know what I mean? Isn't it that way for you?"