The Other Side of the World

by Jay Neugeboren

  “Being able to delegate authority the way you do has never been my strong suit,” Nick said when we were having a late-night drink early in my fourth week on the job. “It was one of the reasons I quit football. I did my part, but could I count on the other ten guys to do theirs?”

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  “Sometimes?” he said. “Not good enough—never good enough. But I’m getting at something else, Charlie—something I’ve been thinking about since you got here: that this is probably the main difference between us.”

  “There are differences?” I said.

  “I’m being serious,” he snapped, and glared at me as if daring me to say more. “What I figured out,” he continued, “is that you trust people, and I don’t mean only in the office—trusting people to do what you tell them to—but you really trust others, and you always have.”

  “Probably,” I said.

  “I don’t.”

  Although I was tempted to talk about why this might be so—the differences between my father and his, for starters—I remained silent. Still, he was right about my feeling easy about relying on others when I needed to know things: how much oil we shipped, or how much we promised to ship, and in what condition; which parts of a contract were already agreed to, and which parts needed to be amended; which billing charges from shipping firms were accurate, and which were padded; which reports on productivity were reliable, and which ones were full of shit; which government officials were trolling for gifts, and which budget lines to use for the gifts, and which lines for new equipment, parts, or repairs, and who to rely on to make sure the stuff was really needed; and if we ordered equipment, parts, or repairs, who were the best people to make things happen in the most cost-effective way. And—shades of Joe Wancyzk—I had an assistant I depended on to follow exchange rates so that, when the dollar fell, we could take advantage and get more bang for our buck by ordering stuff from the States.

  Then Nick started in on how everybody at the office liked me—and how this was a difference between us too: that I was the original nice guy the way I’d always been. People may have respected him, and been grateful to him, but they didn’t like him the way they liked me. We were both good with people, he said, especially with the Chinese, who made up most of our firm, high and low, the same way they made up most of Singapore. The Chinese had enormous respect for people who worked hard—there was nothing, other than being old, they admired more—but what he’d realized was that he and I were successful with them for opposite reasons.

  “You’re good because, same as me, you work hard, learn fast, and are good at what you do,” he said, “but also because, as I was saying before, you trust people. Me—I’m good with them because I don’t.”

  “Do you really still think of me as being the original nice guy?” I asked.

  “You bet.”

  “But nice guys finish last,” I said.

  “Nice guys finish last,” he repeated. “I like that—one of your old man’s sayings?”

  “It’s from Leo Durocher—the Brooklyn Dodgers’ manager when Max was growing up.”

  “‘Lippy’ Durocher, right? And wasn’t he married to an actress?”

  “Laraine Day,” I said, but didn’t offer any more information, though I was remembering that I used to like hearing my father quote Durocher because it seemed out of character for him to admire a guy who hung out with gangsters. Despite what a nice guy my father always seemed to be, he could be tough-minded too, I wanted to tell Nick, and the instant I thought of doing so, I felt a distinct tumbling in my stomach and realized that what I really was hoping for by quoting Durocher was to gain Nick’s approval—to show him that, like my father, I wasn’t quite the pushover he took me for.

  “Well, when it comes to that stuff, you already know what I think, right?” he said, a hand on my shoulder.

  “If you want to win in this world you have to be ruthless,” I said, quoting one of his own lines back to him.

  “You got it,” Nick said. “Ruthless for sure. And mean—mean like the real you, Charlie boy, right?”

  “You never know,” I said.

  On weekends, we usually partied in Nick’s apartment, and either used The Good Book, or hooked up with Nick’s friends—American, Dutch, and Japanese mostly—who brought a rich variety of women, food, booze, and drugs with them. But late on a Friday afternoon two weeks before our trip to Borneo, Nick told me I was on my own for the weekend because he had ‘family obligations’ to attend to.

  What this meant, I assumed—he actually seemed to be bragging about it, as if he wanted to impress me—had to do with what Jin-gen alluded to: that he was involved with the daughter of a wealthy Chinese family, and in order to keep the relationship going he had to play the respectful suitor to the young woman’s family, especially to the father and grandfather.

  That first time he told me I’d be on my own for the weekend, I went down to The Sling Shot and looked through The Good Book. But women in the book, like women in my bed, were already starting to seem as bland as the rest of the city. Not because they weren’t charming and beautiful, but because I began to see few differences between them other than variations in the obvious—height, weight, sexual tricks—and because I knew that no matter what they did with me and for me, it wouldn’t be that different from what I’d experienced before, or would experience the next time, or the time after that—and because I also knew they’d never be able to give me what I’d had with Jin-gen. Or perhaps, it occurred to me, my sex life and love life after Jin-gen—because of Jin-gen?—had gone into early retirement.

  So I stayed in my apartment the first weekend Nick and I didn’t hang out together, leaving only to bring in food and to get in a workout at the club, and once I got through a few hours of mild restlessness, I found that it was okay being alone, and more than okay. Being by myself also reminded me of what life had been like in Northampton when Max was between wives or girlfriends—when it was just the two of us, and he’d be gone teaching, or out for dinner, and I’d have the entire house to myself, and of how I’d fix myself a snack, camp out in his office, and plop down in his wide-armed easy chair with a book. These were also times I’d have friends over, and we’d put on music, smoke pot, sample Max’s liquor supply, and mess around. As good as times with my friends were, though, I found that I preferred being by myself even if—no small thing—it was only to put on one of the porno videos we were passing around, and whack off to it.

  In one of Max’s jokes that would sometimes come to mind while I played with myself, a rebbe asks the boys in his Bar Mitzvah class how they like their girls best—in the flesh or in their dreams—and coaxes them all, except for little Moishe, into raising their hands and admitting they prefer their girls in the flesh. ‘And you, Moishe?’ the rebbe asks. ‘Oh rebbe,’ Moishe says, ‘you meet a much better class of girls in your dreams.’

  This proved as true for me in Singapore as it had in Northampton, since what turned out to be most pleasurable that first weekend I was on my own was, simply, being on my own: fixing myself a favorite sandwich—roast-beef, mustard, and horseradish—and tall drinks—ice-cold sparkling water with half-limes during the day, and another sandwich and vodka tonics with half-limes in the evening—and sitting in the living room, the air-conditioning turned on full blast, and reading. And before sleep, I’d dream about women I’d known, and women I wished I’d known, and, for sure, about women—Jin-gen first in line—I’d lost. And during these hours it would occasionally occur to me that maybe I was my father’s son, after all.

  Kalimantan, the Indonesian part of Borneo, made up three-quarters of an island that was itself the third largest island in the world (after Greenland and New Guinea, and not counting Australia and Antarctica), and once we’d left the South China Sea behind, our plane headed inland for a makeshift landing field near a new plantation we were developing. Although Borneo had several mountainous regions, most of the island was made up of peat forests and lowland rain forests,
and from the sky these forests were astonishing—so many shades and textures of green that I found myself wondering if native peoples there had as many names for the color green as Eskimos did for snow.

  Then, as we approached the plantation—“Here it comes, buddy, your first sight of our brave new world,” Nick said—the forests ended, and a vast treeless landscape came into view, and the instant it did, I felt as if someone had whacked me across the chest the way Jin-gen said Nick had whacked Joe Wanczyk. In the moment—I was trying to stand, but Nick pressed down hard on my arm to keep me where I was—all I could think of was getting my breath back, and of how a dozen years before—the memory, bouncing off the plane’s wing, came in a flash of white sunlight—I’d felt the same thing when I’d first entered a giant redwood forest in Northern California, except that instead of standing on the ground and being surrounded by two-thousand-year-old, three-hundred-foot-high trees, I was in the sky looking down at something equally awe-inspiring.

  It was as if the far rim of the rainforest over which we’d passed had been the edge of a cliff from which we were now dropping down into a world that, as far as I could see, was an endless expanse of mud that was spotted here and there with small fires and dismembered parts of trees. Batallions of orange, red, silver, and yellow earth movers, tractors, wood shredders, and dump trucks moved steadily along the ground, tearing the remaining trees and bushes from their roots while hundreds of men, like infantry, followed, but instead of rifles and machine guns, they carried chainsaws, and were slicing up and dragging trees that had been uprooted or chopped down. Our plane banked to the left, leveled out, and we headed for a landing strip edged with orange cones. At the end of the strip, a group of men stood waiting next to a pale red fire truck.

  Other than foliage on shrub-like trees that lay on the ground, there was no green anywhere. “They’ve done a good job,” Nick said. “Clear-cut the whole fucking thing in eleven days. Amazing, don’t you think? We’ve got seven square miles of trees coming in next week from which we’ll start getting oil in three years. The fuckers grow like weeds with thyroid conditions.”

  Small fires were burning everywhere—the cut-up trees laying on the ground looked like chunks of amputated limbs and torsos—and the roar of our engines close to the ground drowning out the sounds of their machines, the men, most wearing wide-brimmed sombrero-like hats, stopped work to watch our plane, and waved as if truly happy to see us.

  “We got all the big stuff out a few weeks ago,” Nick said. “Tens of thousands of board feet of good lumber. What you’re looking at now is just mop-up. Amazing resources here, Charlie—half the world’s tropical timber comes from this one fucking island, did you know that? Every time somebody somewhere puts a toothpick between his teeth, it’s better than two-toone the toothpick comes from Borneo, and when—”

  “Stop,” I said.

  “Why—you going to turn bleeding heart environmentalist on me? Do me a favor and stop being Mister Nice Guy for a change—and remember what we taught you: that palm oil has more uses than petroleum, that it’s a renewable biofuel that can be with us forever, and after we—”

  “Give me a break,” I said. “I mean, you’re used to it, but I’ve never been here before—never seen anything like this place. It’s a shock to the system, so back off.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said. “It’s just that I get excited whenever I see one of our places—the amazing fucking speed with which we can change things! But hey—shocked the hell out of me too once upon a time. Like I was looking at an ocean of mud that was going to become the biggest fucking set of football fields in creation.”

  “Enough,” I said. “I asked you to cool it.”

  “In a minute,” he said, grabbing me by the shoulders and pulling me to him as if he were going to whack my forehead with his. “Only first you give your shit-eating conscience a rest and listen up.”

  “Whatever you say, boss.”

  “And I don’t need your smart-ass condescension either, because when it comes to what’s happening here, you don’t know shit. Because, in case the news didn’t reach you, what goes on here is going on all over the planet, buddy—in the Amazon, in China, in Malaysia, in Kansas, in Alaska—you name it—and when haven’t we been raping the world? Answer me that. But we come first is what I believe, even if you don’t and probably never will, and what I’ve come to realize is that the really good news, see, is just that—that we get to see the changes up close and personal.”

  “Lucky us.”

  “Lucky us is right,” he said, letting me go and opening the cabin door. He waved to the people who were waiting for us, then turned back to me, and when he spoke this time his voice shifted, and he talked easily, as if nothing in the world was bothering him.

  “So look,” he said, “I know what you’re thinking—sure—because believe it or not, I felt the same when I first got here, but then one day I got to remembering those time-lapse films we used to watch in college, where plants came out of the ground, grew, blossomed, and died in three or four seconds—or where the sun rose and set and a whole day had come and gone before you could blink, and it dawned on me that what was happening here was pretty much the same thing.”

  “I don’t understand a word you’re saying.”

  “Remember when you, me, and Trish got trashed doing mushrooms,” he went on as if I hadn’t said a word, “and I got hold of this grad assistant to give us a private show of a bunch of those films?”

  “I remember,” I said.

  “So lucky us is right,” he said again, “because think about it for a minute, Charlie—really think about it: what happens invisibly most of the time in most of the world, or what takes years and years, we—you and me, babe—we have the good fortune—the privilege—of seeing it happen right in front of our eyes in real time.”

  “And if we didn’t do it, somebody else would, is that it?” I asked.

  “Not at all—oh not at all!—and you can bet your sweet life on that,” he said, and he did so in such a condescending way—laughing at me as if I were some kind of fool—that, and not for the first time, I felt ready to kill the guy.

  Then he was walking down the steps, shaking hands, and pointing to me, and as soon as he did, four of the five men, all Asian, bowed their heads in greeting. The other man—a Dutchman named Hans Martens I’d learn a few minutes later—gave me a broad grin and a thumbs up.

  During the day we tramped around the property, Nick and the Asians (three Chinese, one Japanese) explaining what would be required once the land was cleared and new trees delivered: water, fertilizer, herbicides, drainage canals—how many workers, what equipment, and so on. After lunch, sitting inside a large tent, cool-water air-conditioners plugged into generators and roaring away—the heat and humidity were at least as bad as in Singapore, but with the additional perk of angry squadrons of hungry, flying insects—we went over figures and schedules, made lists of what we needed, and talked about vendors and costs. Nick handled financial negotiations, and he was good at it the way he’d been good at poker (he once claimed he’d earned his entire tuition, the year after he quit football and lost his scholarship, from poker). For the first hour and a half, palm oil was never even mentioned. The talk was about family, food, women, weather, travel, mutual acquaintances—and just when I was about to remind Nick why we were there, he acted as if he’d just remembered. He reached into his briefcase, took out four envelopes, one of which he handed to each of the Asians (Hans worked for us) as if presenting them with honorary degrees. After this, we got down to business and were able to sign off on agreements—mostly arranged beforehand in Singapore—in less than two hours.

  My primary responsibility was to see that the palm oil seedlings arrived on time and in good shape, and I passed out copies of agreements and contracts I’d prepared, along with scheduling and contact information, all of which, to my surprise, evoked enormous gratitude, along with gifts, about which Nick had warned me, and which I’d been told I couldn’t r
efuse: a Montblanc fountain pen, a monogrammed silver money clip, jade cuff links, and a black and white flowered kimono whose silk was as soft as a baby’s skin.

  In the evening our hosts prepared a feast for us—wild boar roasted slowly in a deep pit—along with bottle after bottle of splendid French and Spanish wine. Nick and I slept in separate tents that night, three men armed with machine guns standing guard until morning (Nick was carrying the bulk of the month’s payroll, in cash, in the larger of his two suitcases), and after breakfast in the morning—savagely bitter coffee, and mushy rolls with sticky-sweet jam—we said our good-byes, flew off over a small mountain range, and set down a half hour later on a runway covered with a glossy olive-drab substance, located adjacent to the site of one of our larger industrial plantations.

  Nick and the foreman who welcomed us—an articulate dark-skinned man I gauged to be in his forties, though his skin was so smooth he might have been ten to fifteen years older—from one of the indigenous tribes (“I am your original wild man of Borneo,” he announced when Nick introduced us)—gave me a tour of the facility. The foreman’s name was Saul—his mother had named him for an Englishman she said was Saul’s father—and he was about my height, close to six feet, but weighed a good twenty pounds more, most of it solid muscle. The heat was unbearable here too—I felt as if I were living inside an open-air furnace—and several young women accompanied us wherever we went, fanning us with large fans that looked as if they were made of starched banana-yellow burlap, and regularly handing us wet washcloths and canteens of sweet, tea-flavored water.