A drop of sweat trickled into my eye, and I wiped it away. Not even eight-thirty, and the temperature was already into the nineties. I felt a sudden upsurge of emotion and realized how much I missed Kim. Though I had tried to throw my heart in a new direction, though Lucy was an interesting woman and, without doubt, more s.e.xually adventurous than Kim, I was ready for some home cooking, and I asked Kim if she was planning to meet me in Saigon.

"If you still want me to," she said.

We discussed when she would come, at which hotel she should stay, and spent some time repairing the rift in the relationship. I was so consoled by the familiarity of her voice, so excited by the predictable promise it conveyed, I suggested that we could marry in Saigon, a suggestion she did not reject out of hand, saying we should table the matter until she arrived. I thought we both had concluded that these adventures, these dalliances no longer served a purpose-they had become interruptions in our lives, and it was time we moved on. Yet when I hung up, it was as though I had cut myself off from her. I felt a total lack of connection and regretted having mentioned marriage. I went into the bow and asked Lan if we could head south in the morning. He sat facing the river and its farther sh.o.r.e, his legs dangling over the side of the houseboat, wearing a grease-stained pink T-shirt and shorts; he pushed a shock of gray hair from his eyes and peered up at me like an old turtle, blinking, craning his stiff neck.

"Anytime," he said. "Need provisions."

"Send Deng into town."

He chuckled, showing his gapped yellow teeth. "Deng."

"What's so funny?" I asked.

"Gone. You scare him. He tells me you are a bad man. He says a bad man is unlucky for people around him."

I thought Deng's leaving probably had more to do with Lucy than with his perception of my character. "You don't believe that, do you?"

"Maybe," said Lan.

"Then why haven't you deserted?"

"No reason." He fixed his eyes on a barge loaded with crates chugging upstream, c.r.a.pping an oil slick and black fumes. "Need provisions," he said.

That afternoon, under an overcast sky, we visited a market on the outskirts of the city, a place where the pavement ended and green countryside could be seen off along the main road; the streets widened to form an open area-a square, if you will-of tapioca-colored dirt amid dilapidated buildings, none more than two stories tall. Infirm-looking, vertically compromised stalls of weathered wood were clumped alongside the buildings, pitched at eccentric angles. If you squinted and let your eyes slide out of focus, they resembled old, hobbling, gray-skirted women, some leaning together, who had paused for breath during a const.i.tutional and never stirred again. The majority of the stalls were the offices of fortune-tellers, and this was the reason for our visit: Lucy's favorite fortune-teller could be found there. Why she picked him out of all the fortune-tellers in Phnom Penh, I hadn't a clue. He offered no complicated graphs and charts to demark your fate, as did many. His method was to rub dirt into her palm to make the lines stand out and mutter abstractions about her future until she was satisfied. Perhaps appearance played a part in her choice. Iron-gray hair hair fell in tangles over his chest and shoulders, and tattoos, faded to intricate blue scratchings, wrote an illegible legend on his arms, chest, neck, and forehead. He had a wispy goatee, wore a wraparound that covered his loins, and could usually be found smoking a cigar-sized spliff, which may have accounted for his benign gaze. His colleagues, most neatly dressed in western-style clothing, free of tattoos and spliffs, gave him a wide berth.

While Lucy consulted her wizard and Riel dawdled at a stall that sold cheap jewelry, I walked through thin crowds along one of the market streets leading off the square and, after a bout of token haggling, bought a U.S. army-issue Colt .45 and six clips of ammo from an arms dealer. Though old, the weapon appeared to be in good working order. The dealer encouraged me to test fire it, but I was afraid that I might be reported-I had no conception of the legalities attendant upon buying a gun. I tucked the pistol into my waist, beneath my shirt, and hustled back toward the square. A block along from the arms dealer, I stopped dead in my tracks. Standing in the doorway of a building on the corner was a bearded man dressed identically to me-shorts, sandals, a black T-shirt-and with an identical (as far as I could determine from a distance of forty feet) face and build. I imagined that we wore the identical stunned expression. We locked gazes for a moment, and as I hurried toward him, he ducked into the interior of the building. I raced after him, through the door and into the midst of twenty or thirty people slurping noodles at wooden tables, nearly knocking over a waitress who carried a load of dirty dishes. Her irritation gave way to confusion. She glanced toward the kitchen, then at me, and that told me all I needed to know. I ran through the kitchen and out onto the street behind the restaurant. There was scant pedestrian traffic-some kids kicking around a soccer ball, two women talking, a man looking under the hood of a beat-up yellow Toyota-and no sign of my double. I walked along in the direction of the square, peering into doorways, my excitement draining. What could we have said to each other, anyway? We could have compared notes on Cradleness, on what it meant to be a Cradle, for all the good that would do. Possibly I could have learned something new about the delta, but nothing, I thought, that would have greatly illuminated its central mystery. It had been a strange thing to see myself, yet now, at a remove from the moment, I questioned whether he had actually been my double. A bearded man in shorts and a black T-shirt at a distance of forty feet who had fled when approached by a stranger on the run: I told myself he might have been anyone.

In my absence, the center of the square had been taken over by an elephant. It was kneeling, a heap of fresh dung close by its hindquarters, and Riel stood at its side, like a princess beside a weathered castle wall, talking to a boy in shorts, twelve or thirteen, mounted behind the animal's neck. A farmer's son, I thought, who had ridden the family tractor into town to show it off. I found a stall adjacent to Lucy's wizard that sold coffee sweetened with condensed milk and sat on a rickety folding chair and watched Riel trying to entice the boy into giving her a ride (he kept wagging his finger no, and scowling), while the elephant flexed its trunk and blinked away flies, presenting an image of stuporous discontent.

The crowds were thinner in the square than they had been on the side streets, so Riel was the object of much attention, especially from the male stallkeepers. I sipped my coffee and thought about the gun pushing against my pelvic bone, imagining it had been s.n.a.t.c.hed from the hand of a dead officer during the Vietnam conflict and wondering how many lives it had snuffed out. It had been an impulse buy, although the impulse was informed by a lifelong fear of and fascination with guns and was given a quasi-rational basis by the idea that I might need it once we reached the delta. It was a steel phallus, a social ill, all those things that left-wing politics said it was; yet its cold touch warmed me and added weight to my purpose, enabling the fantasy that my mission there was important.

Lucy finished her consultation and joined me for coffee. "It's going to rain," she said.

The clouds had gone from a nickel color to dark gray brushed with charcoal; the muggy heat and the smell of the elephant's dung had thickened. I laid an envelope on the table by Lucy's hand.

"What's this?" she asked, fingering it.

"Severance pay," I said.

She met my eyes steadily, and I thought she would object or demand an explanation; but she only looked away, her face neutral.

"So what did he tell you, your guy? What's in your stars?" I asked, breaking a silence.

"Obviously not a trip south," she said. "Oh, well. Like they say, all good things . . ."

"I hope it's been good."

She appeared to rebound. "It's been an adventure . . . and good." She grinned. "No complaints on this end."

"It's about time you went home and kick-started that career, don't you think?"

"Advice? And from someone who should know better?" she said merrily. "I shall have to reevaluate my impression of you."

"Just a thought."

The stallkeeper switched on a radio and tuned into a station playing reggae-Peter Tosh and elephants, the essence of globalization. Lucy inspected the contents of the envelope. "This is a lot of money," she said. "It's too much, really."

"I was hoping you'd see to Riel."

She nudged the envelope over to my side of the table. "I don't want to be responsible."

"I thought you fancied her."

"The lesbian thing . . . it's my exhibitionist side coming out. It works for me when the right guy is around. Otherwise . . ." She wrinkled her nose.

"Look, I'm not expecting you to spend much time on this. Give it a week or so, and try to pa.s.s her off to someone decent. That shouldn't be much of a problem. Maybe you can trick her onto a plane back to Winnipeg. If she stays here, she's bound to run into someone who'll f.u.c.k her up worse than she already is."

"All right. I'll do my best for her, but . . . I'll do my best."

I took her hand, letting my fingers mix with hers. "I'm going to be in London next spring. I'll give you a call, see how you're doing."

"I'm likely to be busy," she said after a pause. "But, yes. Do call, please."

We held hands for ten or fifteen seconds, reestablishing the limits of our limited affection, and then Lucy said, "Oh, my gosh. Look what she's doing now."

Riel had stepped around to the front of the elephant, facing it, and was dancing, a slow, eloquent, seductive temple-girl dance, arms raised above her head, hips swaying, as if trying to charm the beast. The elephant appeared unaffected, but everyone in the square had stopped what they were doing to watch. A livid stroke of lightning fractured the eastern sky, its witchy shape holding against the sullen moil of clouds, and was followed by a peal of thunder that rolled across green fields into the city. As it pa.s.sed, the sky flickered, the clouds shifted in their conformation; but such phenomena had grown so commonplace, I would not have noticed except that it added a mysterious accent to the scene.

"Do you think she's in any danger?" Lucy asked.

"From the elephant? Probably not," I said. "The boy seems calm."

"We should fetch her, anyway. It's time we went back." She tucked the envelope into her bag, yet made no move to stand. "Whatever comes, I think we've helped her."

"We provided a place where she didn't have to worry about survival. But I don't think we can claim to have helped."

"What should we have done? Put her in a clinic? She wouldn't last a day. We're not her parents . . . and it's not as if she cares a fig about us. She'd be off in a flash if something better happened along."

"Maybe something better will come along. That's why I gave you the money."

Lucy acknowledged this gloomily.

"She may care about us more than you think," I said. "Her attachment to the world is flimsy, but we became her world for a few weeks. Flimsy or not, she formed an attachment."

"Isolate one moment, if you can, when she demonstrated genuine affection."

"That little speech she gave at the Heart of Darkness. I . . ."

"I knew you'd bring that up."

"I realize it was done for shock value. But it was inspired by a kernel of affection."

Lucy's fortune-teller scurried out from his stall and made a playful run at Riel-his shoulders were hunched and arms dangling, as though he were pretending to be a monkey tempted by a piece of fruit yet afraid to touch it. She continued to dance, and he wove a path about her, feinting, lunging at her, and scooting away; whenever he came near, he scattered some sort of powder at her feet. The scene held a curious potency, like a picture on a card, the representation of an archetype in a Cambodian Tarot, an image that seemed easily interpretable at first glance, but then, in the way of many Asian scenes, came to seem an impenetrable riddle: the wizard scuttling forward and retreating and the mystery void girl, the blonde sacrifice, lost in abandon, in holy, slow dementia, dancing before the ma.s.sive, dim-witted, iconic beast. Lucy mentioned again that we should be going. Another peal of thunder, an erratic rumbling, hinted at something souring in the darkened belly of the sky. Vendors hastened to cover their merchandise, unrolling cloths and makeshift awnings. A sprinkle of rain fell, yet still we sat there.

"Snake country. That is what my daddy called Vietnam whenever he'd had a few, referring not only to his service in the delta, but to the country at large. He'd reach a garrulous stage in his drunk and deliver himself of some b.l.o.o.d.y, doleful tale, staring into his gla.s.s as if relating his wartime experiences to gnats that had drowned in a half-inch of Jim Beam. I think these stories were intended as self-justification, explaining in advance why he was probably going to kick the c.r.a.p out of me later on, capping off his evening with a spot of exercise; but I heard them not as apology or warnings about the world's savagery-they had for me the windy lilt of pirate stories, and I loved to hear him lying his a.s.s off, boasting of his prowess with a fifty-millimeter machine gun, blowing away gooks from the stern of a swift boat, dealing death while his comrades were shot to pieces around him . . . and, oh, watching them die had ripped the heart from his chest-the survivor's guilt he felt, the nightly visitations from torn, shattered corpses. Yet he couldn't help that he had been made of sterner stuff than they, and, when you got right down to it, he had relished his days in Vietnam. He had been called, he said, and not by love of country. If he had it to do over, he wouldn't so much as step on a bug for a country that hadn't done squat for him. No, he was convinced that he had been summoned to an unguessable purpose that he could never put a name to, that had nothing to do with war. That was the sole element of his narrative that rang true, the part about being summoned, and this was likely due to the fact that I could relate to such a summons. He hated the Vietnamese, but he was a natural-born hater, and I doubt now that he ever went to Vietnam. He showed me no mementos or photos of him and his buddies, and the stories lacked detail, though as the years wore on, he added detail (whether his memory improved or he was polishing a fictional history, his stories caused me to become fixated on guns and violence, and this led me to do a crime that earned me a nickel in the prison camp at Butner). His war record was the only thing he took pride in, yet it may all have been a drunken fantasy. 'The G.o.dd.a.m.n gooks make wine out of snake's blood,' he muttered once before pa.s.sing out, and the conjuration of that image, red-like-pomegranate wine that beaded on the lip of a gla.s.s in a yellow-claw hand, the drops congealing thick as liquefied Jell-O, sliding down the throat in clots, slimy and narcotic-that said it all for me about snake country.

"Unlike my daddy, who came with guns blazing and the ace of death in his eye, I had the s.h.i.ts when I entered Vietnam, and several degrees of fever. I lay in the bottom of the boat, trying to hold in my guts, and avoided looking at the sky, which was playing its usual tricks, only with greater frequency-to look at it intensified my fever. We had some trouble at the border post. The Vietnamese run a tighter ship than does Cambodia, and since we didn't have enough money for a respectable bribe, the officials threatened to confiscate our boat; but then Jordan helped them get an overloaded pick-up unstuck from a muddy ditch, and after that they were all smiles and stamped our pa.s.sports and waved us through into a portion of the Mekong renowned for its whirlpools. We were cautioned that much larger craft than ours had been sucked under, but we negotiated this treacherous stretch without incident and, below the town of Chau Doc, entered an area known as the Nine Dragons, where the river split into nine major channels, and there were as well minor channels, islands, and a maze of man-made ca.n.a.ls spider-webbing an enormous area. At a riverside gas station, we received directions to the Kinh Dong Tien, the ca.n.a.l that would carry us toward the tea forest.

"The boating life on the ca.n.a.ls was more lively than we had yet encountered, even in the vicinity of Phnom Penh, and was so dense that signs on the riverbank directed traffic, warning when not to pa.s.s on the left and such. There were mobile floating rice mills, boats loaded with construction supplies, with coconuts, plumbing fixtures, furniture, watermelons, and so forth, and the banks were crowded with shacks, and beyond them were fields reeking of DDT. People stared open-mouthed at us and laughed at our wretched condition-covered with insect bites and sores, putting along in that wreck of a boat, the rudder held on with adhesive tape, the engine sputtering. Some of them, moved by charitable impulse, offered a.s.sistance, and others offered produce and drinking water, but I was in no mood to accept their charity. My fever had worsened, and the spiritual darkness that afflicted me had deepened to the point that I saw everything through a lens of distaste and loathing. Every smile seemed mocking, every friendly gesture masked an inimical intent, and I wanted nothing to do with this infestation of small brown people who swarmed over the delta, polluting it with their pesticides, with their s.h.i.tting, squalling babies, and their brute insignificance. 'You don't go hunting termites with a rifle,' Daddy once told me. 'You poison their f.u.c.king nest.' Recalling that comment, I thought maybe he had gone to Vietnam after all . . ."

Not long after the events described in this pa.s.sage, Cradle Two's narrator (and, I would guess, Cradle Two himself) grew too ill go on, or, as the narrator implies, he used illness as an excuse for quitting because his fear of what lay ahead came to outweigh the pull he felt to complete the journey. After being treated at a local clinic, he recuperated in Phnom Penh and there wrote the ending to the book, claiming to be in mental communion with a multiplicity of Thomas Cradles, several of whom managed to enter the tea forest; yet even if you accepted this to be true, it was not a true resolution-he lost contact with the various Cradles once they pa.s.sed beyond the edge of the forest, and so he contrived an ending based on clues and extrapolation.

I had been wise not to emulate Cradle Two's journey to the letter, I realized. As I've mentioned, the lifestyle he was forced to adopt due to lack of funds left him p.r.o.ne to disease and injury, whereas I, traveling in comfort aboard the Undine Undine, had maintained my health. I had no doubt that I would see journey's end; but now that I was on the final leg, I debated whether or not I wanted to see it. The spiritual darkness remarked on by Cradle Two's narrator had descended upon me in full, though it might be more accurate to say that my social veneer had been worn away by the pa.s.sage along the river and my dark nature revealed. I understood my essential character to be cold and grasping, violent and cowardly, courageous enough should my welfare demand it, yet terrified of everything, and I was, for the most part, comfortable with that recognition. (All men possessed these qualities, although I-and, I a.s.sumed, my fellow Cradles-must have them in spades.) When Kim called, presumably to report on her reading of The Tea Forest The Tea Forest, I refused to answer. She rang and rang, calling every half hour; I switched off the satellite phone, not wishing to be distracted from steeping in my own poisonous spirit, basking amid thoughts that uncoiled lazily, turgidly, like serpents waking from a long sleep . . . like Cradle Two's ornate sentences. Yet as my bleakness grew, so did my fear. I wanted to retreat from the delta, to return to my old secure life. The fear was due in large measure to what I saw whenever I set foot out of the cabin. As we drew near Phu Tho, the hamlet that served as the jumping-off place for the tea forest, the changes that twitched and reconfigured the clouds, that caused mirrors to vanish from walls and rooftops to a.s.sume new outlines, became constant, and I felt myself to be the only solid thing in the landscape. It was like watching time-lapse photography. A village glided past, and I saw tin roofs rippling with change, acquiring rust, brightening with strips of new tin, dimpling with dents that would the next second be smoothed out, and a group of people coming from their houses to stare and wave would shift in number and alignment, vanishing and reappearing, wearing shabbier or more splendid clothes, and the sky would darken with running clouds, lighten and clear, the clouds then reoccurring, a.s.suming different shapes, and the green of the fields would vary from a pale yellow-green to a deep viridian, and every shade in between; and Lan at his post in the prow, he would change, too, his skull narrowing and elongating, stubble sprouting from his chin, one leg withering, a cane materializing by his hand-yet before long he was hale once again. I sequestered myself in the cabin, doing my best to ignore disappearing pots and suddenly manifesting piles of dirty clothing. I had nothing to guide me through this leg of the journey-I had gone farther along the path than Cradle Two, and his novel made no mention of this phenomenon. On half a dozen occasions, I was on the verge of ordering Deng to turn the boat and make for Phnom Penh, but I persevered, though my heart fluttered in my chest, itself registering (or so I feared) the process of change as we slipped back and forth between universes, approaching an unearthly nexus. And then, less than five miles from Phu Tho, either the changes ceased or they became un.o.bservable. We had reached a place where all things flowed into one, the calm at the heart of the storm.

Phu Tho itself was unremarkable, a collection of small concrete-block houses, painted in pastel shades, gathered about a landing and a ranger station (a mosquito-infested tin hut) where you gained admission to the national park beyond, a wetlands that contained the tea forest. But the ca.n.a.l and its embankment in the vicinity of Phu Tho was a graveyard of boats: motor launches, rafts, dinghies, sailboats of every size, barges. Thousands had been dragged onto land and an uncountable number of others scuttled-in order to clear a channel, I conjectured, though that reason no longer applied, for the channel had been blocked with submerged and partially submerged craft, and our progress was halted more than a mile from the hamlet. To reach it, I would have to pick my way on foot across the drowned hulks of a myriad boats.

We arrived at our stopping point in early morning, when drifts of whitish fog lay over all, ghosting the forest of prows and masts emerging from the water and the wreckage of crushed and capsized hulls spilling over the sh.o.r.e as if a tsunami had driven them to ruin. The majority (like the Undine Undine) were adorned with painted eyes to drive away evil spirits, and these could be seen peering at us through the gauzy cover, seeming to blink as the fog thickened and thinned-it was an eerie and disconcerting sight, its effect amplified by the funereal silence that held sway, accented by the slop of the tide against the houseboat, an unsavory sound that reminded me in its erratic rhythm of an injured cur licking a wound. The people we had talked to along the ca.n.a.ls would surely have told us of this obstruction, and it followed, then, that Phu Tho, this Phu Tho, must be a singular place designed to mark journey's end for every Thomas Cradle (excepting those who failed to complete their journeys), and that in other Phu Thos, life went on as always, the ca.n.a.l busy with its usual traffic, and that I was, despite Lan's presence, for all intents and purposes, alone.

I packed a rucksack with a change of clothes, protein bars, water, the gun, binoculars, a coiled length of rope, the Colt, a first-aid kit, an English-Vietnamese pocket dictionary, repellent, and my dog-eared copy of Cradle Two's novel, thinking that his ruminations about the tea forest might be of value. Lan was waiting on deck, dour as ever; before I could instruct him, he said, "I stay here three days. Then I go. Bring police." Phu Tho spooked him, though you couldn't have determined this from his expression. I felt oddly sentimental about leaving him behind, and as I began my trek to sh.o.r.e, negotiating a path of slippery, tilted decks and slick hulls, tightroping along submerged railings, I speculated about his past and why he had stuck it out with me. I decided that it must have to do with habits cultivated during the Vietnam conflict-he may have been an army scout or ARVN and thus had developed a love-hate relationship with Americans. Before long, however, the exigencies of the crossing demanded my full attention. Twice I had to retrace my steps and seek a new route, and once, when I was up to my neck in water, I nudged something soft, and a bloated, eyeless face emerged from the murk and bobbed to the surface. I kicked the body away in revulsion, but I had the impression that the face had belonged to a man of about my size and weight. This was more than a graveyard for boats. I imagined that many more Cradles might be asleep in that deep.

A third of the way to sh.o.r.e, I stopped to rest atop the roof of a sunken launch. The sun was high, showing intermittently between leaden clouds; the fog had burned off, and though the heat was intense, I was grateful for it. I felt a chill that could not be explained by my immersion in water. The stillness and the silence, the corpse I had disturbed, the regatta of dead ships, looking more ruinous absent its ghostly dress and stretching, I saw now, for miles along the ca.n.a.l, a veritable boat holocaust: It was such a surreal scene, its scope so tremendous, I quailed before it; yet as always something drove me on. I was around fifty, sixty yards from sh.o.r.e, taking another rest, when music kicked in from one of the houses. It carried faintly across the water, but I could make out Little Richard telling Miss Molly it was all right to ball. The song finished, and after an interval, Sly Stone's "Everyday People" began to play. That sunny jingle served to heighten Phu Tho's desolate air. I wiped sweat from my eyes and scanned the houses, trying to find the source of the music. No people, no dogs or pigs or chickens. Banana fronds lifted in a breeze, but no movement otherwise. I took a look through my binoculars. On the faade of a pale green house was a mural like the one I'd seen in Stung Treng, and again in Phnom Penh, depicting a yellowish, many-chambered form. The next song was Neal Diamond's "Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon." Whoever was selecting the music had begun to p.i.s.s me off.

The boats close in to the hamlet were relatively undamaged, still afloat, and this made the going easier. I scrambled ash.o.r.e to the tune of "Low Rider" and rested on an overturned dinghy, the moisture steaming out of my clothing. I took the gun from my pack, tucked it into my waist, and headed for the pale green house, walking across a patch of mucky ground bristling with weeds and, apart from b.u.t.terflies and some unseen buzzing insects, devoid of life. The vibe I received from Phu Tho was not so much one of abandonment (though it clearly had been abandoned), but of its impermanence, of the tautness to which its colors and shape were stretched over an inscrutable frame. It was as if at any moment my foot would punch through the rice paper illusion of earth into the void below; yet I had a firm confidence that this would not happen, that its frailty, its temporality, was something I simply hadn't noticed before but that had always been there to notice-frailty was an essential condition of life-and that I noticed it now spoke to the fact that I had come to a place less distant (in some incomprehensible way) from the source of the feeling. This was a complex and improbable understanding to have reached in the s.p.a.ce of a hundred-foot walk, with music blasting and all the while worrying about what was inside the house and whether it had been wise to swim in water as foul as that in the vicinity of the hamlet; yet reach it I did, for all the benefit it bestowed.

The song faded, and the put-put put-put of a generator surfaced from the funk, the singer advising his listeners to take a little trip, take a little trip with him, and an enormous man stepped from the door. He was well over three hundred pounds (closer to four, I reckoned), and stood a full head taller than I, clad in shorts and sandals and a collarless, sweat-stained shirt sewn of flour sacking. His arms and legs were speckled with inflamed insect bites, and his complexion was a sunburned pink, burst capillaries reddening his cheeks and nose; but for these variances, his bearded face, couched in an amused expression, was the porcine equivalent of my own. of a generator surfaced from the funk, the singer advising his listeners to take a little trip, take a little trip with him, and an enormous man stepped from the door. He was well over three hundred pounds (closer to four, I reckoned), and stood a full head taller than I, clad in shorts and sandals and a collarless, sweat-stained shirt sewn of flour sacking. His arms and legs were speckled with inflamed insect bites, and his complexion was a sunburned pink, burst capillaries reddening his cheeks and nose; but for these variances, his bearded face, couched in an amused expression, was the porcine equivalent of my own.

"You're late to the party, cuz," he said in a voice rougher than mine, a smoker's voice with a country tw.a.n.g.

I was slow to respond, daunted by him.

"Better come on in," he said. "Looks like you could use a sit-down."

The floors of the house were of packed dirt carpeted with straw mats, and the mats were filthy with fruit rinds, empty bottles, crumbs, magazines (p.o.r.n and celebrity rags), and all manner of paper trash. Center-folds were taped to the walls. A bare, queen-sized mattress took up one end of the room; at the opposite end was a mildewed easy chair without legs and two card tables with folding chairs arranged beside them; a small TV-DVD player sat on one of the tables, DVDs scattered around it, and there was also a record player of the sort high school girls used to own in the sixties to play 45s. Sitting by the record player, holding a stack of 45s in her lap, was a slim, worn-looking Vietnamese woman of about thirty wearing a print smock. The man introduced her as Bian, but he didn't bother to introduce himself. He wedged himself into the easy chair-it was a tight fit-and sighed expansively. The sigh seemed to enrich the sickening organic staleness that prevailed in the house, and I pictured the individual molecules of the scent as having the man's pinkish coloration and blobby shape.

"Want a beer?" He spoke to Bian in Vietnamese. "She'll bring us a couple."

She went into the back room, a thin silver chain attached to her ankle slithering behind her, anch.o.r.ed to a stone half-buried in the floor. The man saw me staring at it and said, rather unnecessarily, "I didn't keep her on a leash, the b.i.t.c.h would be gone."

"No doubt," I said.

Bian brought the beers and stationed herself once again by the record player-taped to the wall above her head, like a dream she was having, an airbrushed redhead with pendulous b.r.e.a.s.t.s gazed at a p.o.r.n star's erection delightedly and with a trace of wild surmise, as if it were just the bestest thing ever.

My initial take on the fat man, that he might be the powerful Ur-Cradle, had waned. He was a gargantuan redneck idiot, and my astonishment at his presence, at having this sorry proof of what I had previously only supposed, was neutralized by his enslavement of Bian and his repellent physical condition. On the face of things, he was a step or three farther along the path to the true Cradle than I was, a distillation of the Cradle essence. I didn't trust him, and I let my beer sit untasted. Yet at the same time I had a sympathetic reaction to him, as if I understood the deficits that had contributed to his character.

I asked where he had gotten the beer, and he said, "Some of the boys hijacked supply barges to get here. h.e.l.l, with what's on them barges, a man could survive for years. I been here must be four, five months and I hardly put a dent in it."

"By 'the boys,' you mean men like us? Thomas Cradles?"

"Yeah." He groped for something on the floor beside his chair, found it-a rag-and mopped sweat from his face. "Not all of them look like us. I guess their daddies slept with somebody different. But they all got the same name, least the ones I talked to did. Most push on through without stopping, they're so d.a.m.n eager to get into the tea forest."

"Apparently you weren't that eager."

"Look at me." He indicated his ma.s.sive belly. "A man my size, I'm lucky I made it this far, what with the heat and all. I was about half dead when I got here. Took me a while to recover, and by the time I did, the urge wasn't on me no more. That was strange, you know, 'cause I was flat-out desperate to get here. But hey, maybe the animal can't use fat junkies. Anyhow, I figured me and Bian would squat a while and make a home for the boys. You know, give them a place to rest up, drink a few beers . . . get laid." He shifted about in his chair, raising a dust. "Speaking of which, twenty bucks'll buy you a ride on Bian. She might not look it, but she got a whole lot of move in that skinny a.s.s."

Bian cast a forlorn glance my way.

"I'll pa.s.s," I said. "What can you tell me about the tea forest?"

"Probably nothing you don't know. Some boys been coming back through lately, ones that didn't make it all the way to wherever. They're saying the animal don't need us no more. Whatever use it had for us, it's about over with . . . Least that's the feeling they got."

"The animal?"

"Man, you don't know much, do you? The animal. The creature-feature. It's painted on the wall outside. You telling me you never seen it before?"

I told him what I had seen, the murals, the creature in my opium dream, and that I had sworn off drugs for fear of seeing it again.

"Well, there's your problem, dude," he said, and gave a sodden laugh. "I mean, s.h.i.t! How you expect to pierce the veil of Maya, you don't use drugs? You sure you're a Cradle? 'Cause from what I can make out, most of us stayed stoned the whole d.a.m.n trip."

It was in my mind to tell him that if he was any example, most of us were serious f.u.c.k-ups; but instead I asked what he thought was going on.

" 'Pears we all see it a little different," he said. "This one ol' boy, he told me he figured what we saw wasn't exactly what was happening. It was like a symbol or a . . . I don't know. Something."

"A metaphor?"

He didn't appear familiar with the word, but he said, "Yeah . . . like that. Everyone I've talked to pretty much agrees the animal needs us to protect it from something." His brow furrowed. "Those splinters you saw when you were high? I reckon they're like these stick figures I saw. Every time I did up, I'd see them standing around parts of the animal, guarding it like. f.u.c.king weird, man. Scared the s.h.i.t out of me. But I kept on seeing them 'cause I couldn't do without ol' Aunt Hazel."

The reference eluded me.

"Heroin," he said. "I had a monster habit. First week after I kicked, it was like I caught the superflu." He had a swallow of beer, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. "Now the next question you're going to ask is, How come it chose us? Everybody's got a theory. Some I've heard are f.u.c.king insane, but they all boil down to basically the same thing. Something about us Cradle boys is pure bada.s.s."

His prideful grin told me that he was satisfied with this explanation and would be unlikely to have anything more intelligent to say on the subject. "You said some of them came back? Are they still here?"

He shook his head. "They couldn't get shut of this place fast enough. If you're after another opinion . . . way I hear it, some boys are still wandering around the fringe of the forest. They didn't feel the urge strong enough, I guess. Or they were too weak and gave out. You could talk to them. The ones that come back used park boats, so getting to the forest ain't nothing."

Bian said something in Vietnamese, and the man said, "She wants to know if you're going to f.u.c.k her."

"I don't think so," I said.