Other Earths (33 page)

“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,
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 assisted.”

“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
when she went down on her, a lengthy symphony with prolonged, hushed spaces 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 reinstituted 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 sex, 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, wishing 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 appetite. 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 fucked, although stoned, never as active as Lucy, she gave it her all. I asked her if heroin didn’t muffle the sexual 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 attitudes toward sex, 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 orgasms. 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 passage from
The Tea Forest
before having sex with Riel. The passage 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 relationship. 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 class of man. You want to fuck 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 fucking 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 passage 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
, 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 practitioners 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 bumming 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 assault 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 illustration; 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 assholes. 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 shit 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 bloody 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 Japanese 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 shirts and gold watches and Italian shoes who eyed Riel made me uneasy. I wasn’t disturbed by the possibility of her straying—my attitude 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 pushing 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 space; 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-shirt 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.