The Other Side of the World

by Jay Neugeboren

  On the evening before I flew back to Singapore, I sat outside at a waterfront café, gazing at a calm, teal-blue sea spotted here and there with fishing boats. The sunset, in striated layers of red and orange, with a stormy, turbulent purple-green bank of slow-moving clouds behind it, was, for the moment, serene. Tamika sat a few tables away, eating dinner with the Germans, and Amanda and Alicia were at a table next to them with two American men about my age they introduced as Harvard and MIT grads who were in Borneo to do post-graduate field work in archaeology. By the time they left the café, they’d paired off, Amanda holding hands with the Harvard man, Alicia with the guy from MIT, and I found myself imagining them, a few months later, getting together in Boston, strolling happily on the Common, then dining at the Harvard Faculty Club, where, perhaps, they would one day be married, and where, a year or two after this their children would be taking naps in identical bright red strollers while Amanda and Alicia and their husbands enjoyed a Sunday brunch and reminisced about their adventures in Kuching.

  But the thought of never leaving Borneo—of making arrangements that would enable me to stay in this one place forever so I could come to know it as much as I loved it—put me in mind, that last evening in Kuching, of something Max had impressed upon me when I was twelve or thirteen and was first discovering girls: That you can get to know women—what they’re like in all their loveliness and mystery—in two ways (and he was here quoting something from Seana’s novel he said she’d borrowed from Tolstoy), either by knowing and loving many women… or by knowing and loving one woman well.

  I returned to Borneo nineteen times in the next three years, and never (with the exception of visits to our production facilities) to the same place twice. Most trips were business-related, but with Nick’s cooperation (we covered for each other whenever we made our getaways), I’d usually be able to tack on a day or two and visit a place I hadn’t been to before. I was also able to go on a half-dozen extended trips—three- to five-day excursions (again, with Nick watching the store the way I did for him) where I explored places few Westerners had ever seen.

  I climbed to the top of Mount Kinabalu—at more than thirteen thousand feet, the world’s third highest island—from which, on a wickedly clear day, I saw all the way to the Philippines. I took longboats down the Kapuas, Borneo’s longest river, camped in villages that had been home less than a hundred years ago to headhunters, and went on several World Wildlife Fund tours that took me into national parks (Kutai, Gunung Mulu, Tanjung Puting) and, on Nick’s recommendation, to some of Borneo’s coastal islands, where I snorkeled, and swam alongside giant sea turtles and hammerhead sharks.

  I saw clownfish, giant sting rays, and World War Two Japanese shipwrecks shrouded in jewel-like coral. I swam close to tornado-like flurries of barracuda. I saw Sumatran rhinos and tigers, forests dense with two-hundred-foot-high flowering dipterocarp trees, and schools of migrating white sharks. I even came, eventually, to luxuriate in Borneo’s heat and humidity—to love having the sweat pour from me, and to welcome friendly leeches that made their homes on the slippery slopes of my arms and shoulders. When the spirit was willing I enjoyed nights of love and companionship with women who were as skilled as they were kind. I ate spicy meals composed of plants, insects, and animals whose identities were unknown to me, and I made my way (several times without guides) to places that had until recent years been impassable and unexplored, and all the while I was glorying in these wonders, I’d also be imagining that long before I died, everything I was seeing would be transformed utterly.

  I’d stare at a peat swamp forest, a bank of orchids, or a waterfall, and I’d imagine the peat burning, the orchids being bulldozed under, the waterfall blasted away by dynamite. I imagined forests being cut down as if by giant lawnmowers, tree trunks gliding along conveyor belts as wide as highways, then propelled past huge blade-saws that sliced them into chopsticks or slats for garden furniture. And sometimes, walking through a jungle or a heath forest, the laughter and chatter of cicadas, squirrels, or thrushes permeating the air—my senses drenched in sound, smell, and color—I’d suddenly, as if on an LSD trip gone bad, be struck blind: the world would turn stark white, all sound would vanish, and the moist silence would touch my face as if made of millions of slow-falling snowflakes. Was I even there? My breath gone and my heart pumping away at two to three times its usual rate, I’d have to lower my head below my waist, squeeze my eyes shut a half-dozen times, and press my hands against my ears as hard as I could before the terror would leave—before I’d begin to breathe again and the whiteness that had swallowed me would dissolve and give way to what was in front of me.

  When I visited our production facilities, I’d see multiples of what I’d seen on my first trip: peat swamps and montane forests burning and turning the sky black with smoke—clouds of it so vast they could, I knew, be seen from outer space as if they were floating continents. I saw remnants of Borneo’s primeval rainforests ravaged by earth movers and chainsaws so that, when the machines left, it was as if the forests had never existed. I saw swarms of birds—red-crested, orange-breasted, green-billed, white-tailed, gray-feathered—careening wildly in circles as they searched for resting places—homes—now gone forever. I saw mouse deer and palm civets, Asian elephants and pygmy elephants, orangutans and packs of monkeys foraging in the garbage of company encampments, or wandering like lost, drunken souls across scorched, barren earth. And, truth be told, all the while, trip after trip, the pain and sadness I felt for what was being destroyed was at least equalled by exhilaration and joy—by the thrill that came from watching the dying of a world that would never be with us again.

  But such thoughts came to me only when I was in Borneo. When I was in Singapore, I worked hard and played hard—ten-to twelve-hour days at the office, parties until dawn, and happy in my apartment, just me, on weekends while Nick was courting one of his new ladies.

  I met two or three of them a year, and they all came from prosperous Chinese families, and they were all attractive, poised, well-educated, and well-mannered. They all fell in love with Nick, and once they reached a point where they believed they could not live without him, and told him so—that he was the sun, moon, and stars to them, that they hoped to marry him, to bear his children, and to live with him forever—he would dump them.

  They came to me the way other young women had gone to him. But the women who’d gone to Nick, like Jin-gen, had mostly been poor women from the Chinese countryside who’d come to Hong Kong or Singapore in search of better lives for themselves and for the families they’d left behind. The women who came to me were wealthy women who’d been raised in cities like Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Taipei, and though Nick didn’t take money from them and give it to women he was helping (Tamika was right about him being no Robin Hood), he took what was decidedly more valuable.

  As he’d once bragged when we were at UMass and he was plowing the twin daughters and the wife of a local Polish farmer, he could charm thorns from a rose when he wanted to, and once these upper-class Chinese women fell in love with him and introduced him to their families, and once their families accepted him, Nick was out of there. And after he’d taken their virtue, they were, in the eyes of their community—fathers and grandfathers especially—forever disgraced.

  “Who will marry me now?” Lo-chin asked. “Tell me, please, Mister Charles—who will ever, ever marry me now?”

  Lo-chin was the first to come to me, and with a question I’d hear again and again (she appeared at my apartment on a Saturday morning, disguised, to avoid her family’s watchfulness, in a house-cleaner’s uniform), but when I told Nick about her visit, he laughed.

  “Hey—she took her chances the same as I did.”

  “But that’s not so,” I said. “It’s not a level playing field, Nick.”

  “There are no level playing fields,” he said.

  “But can’t you at least talk with her?”

  “Look, Charlie,” he said. “The only thing talking wi
th me will do is to raise false hopes. Best is to let things lie, and for Lo-chin to come up with a story. So maybe she tells her mother she wasn’t telling the truth about our intimacy—that she thought it would please her mother to believe that though she may have lost her cherry, she’d soon become the bride of the man who’d taken it.”

  “But we’re talking about a young woman’s life, Nick,” I said. “I don’t get it.”

  “But that’s why I’m explaining things to you, Charlie,” he said. “Because sometimes you see the world through those rose-colored, small-town glasses of yours. Because these Chinese families are more puritanical than our own born-again Christians. Because if they believe their daughter’s slept with a man, they assume—and usually demand—that the man become her husband. But that’s Chinese dealing with Chinese, and what Lo-chin can tell the old lady—it’s worked before—is that I turned out to be just another greedy American. She can say I promised to marry her, sure, but that I said she had to give me what I wanted first, and so she fibbed about me compromising her honor to please the old lady—so the old lady would believe she’d soon be the mother of a bride—but at the last minute, see, Lo-chin had the courage to just say no.”

  “That’s absurd.”

  “Probably. But you’re the guy with the vivid imagination—a chip off the old block, right?—so whatever cock-and-bull story you come up with that does the job for Lo-chin will be fine by me.”

  As I expected, Lo-chin was horrified by the idea of deceiving her mother by claiming she’d previously deceived her, and when, a few months later, I went to Nick on behalf of another woman who’d come to me, Nick suggested that if I cared so much about these women, maybe I should marry one of them.

  We were partying in Jan Martens’ apartment (Jan was a young cousin of the guy I’d met on my first trip to our palm oil plantations), and Nick and I were both pretty wasted when I mentioned to him that Lin-fan, the woman he’d been with for two or three months, had visited me and declared she was going to kill herself if she lost Nick.

  “Is that a threat or a promise?” Nick asked, and added that Lin-fan was full of it—that he’d been straight with her from the beginning about his intentions, or—to be more exact—his lack of intentions.

  “You really get off on this, don’t you?” I said.

  Nick gestured to the party going on around us. “Get off on what—on having a good time, on spreading the wealth?”

  “On being cruel,” I said.

  “Cruel?!” He jabbed me in the chest. “Don’t make me laugh, buddy. Cruel in order to be kind, maybe—because I gave these women the best times of their lives. I gave them memories to cherish during the long years that lie in wait after their families marry them off to some rich Chinese dodo, and after—”

  “If!” I said.

  “If?”

  “If the families can find someone to marry them now that you’ve gotten what you want.”

  “That’s holier-than-thou bullshit I can live without,” he said, “because the truth—and you came halfway around the world to prove it—is that money, even more than our precious palm oil, is the universal lubricant. Money buys everything in this life, Charlie, in case you hadn’t heard, and these people have more money than God. Like I’ve been saying, China’s the future, baby, so sign up early.”

  A woman who’d been nuzzling me was now stroking me along the inside of my thigh. I grabbed her hand, crushed it closed. She drew closer, whispered that she liked rough sex too, and that I could take her home whenever I wanted.

  “And anyway, I’m not the marrying kind,” Nick said. “I tried it once, remember? And what’d I get for it?”

  “A wife and a son.”

  “Well, you got that right,” he said, and roared with laughter. “You really got that right, Charlie boy.”

  “Goddamn it, Nick—I told you before never to call me Charlie boy,” I said, and found myself taking a wild swing at him. But I was so drunk, I missed completely, lost my balance, and flopped back down onto the couch.

  Then, as if he’d scripted the scene ahead of time, a woman I hadn’t noticed before stood above us, said she was Yue-ming’s sister and was here to thank Nick for what he’d done for Yue-ming, who’d been working as an au pair in Massachusetts—in Marblehead—and who’d just sent news that she was engaged to marry a nephew of the family she’d been working for.

  “See what I mean?” Nick said.

  “I give up,” I said, and slumped down deeper into the couch.

  “Yue-ming will take her husband’s faith,” the young woman stated. “Her new name will be Sarah—Sarah Kaplan, once she is married—and she wanted me to bring you the happy news.”

  Bowing courteously, the woman started to back away, but Nick reached out, grabbed her hand.

  “And you’d like to go to her wedding, right?”

  The woman nodded.

  “Of course,” Nick said. “So write down your info before you leave and give it to me, and I’ll see that it happens.”

  The woman nodded, bowed again, and left.

  Chuckling to himself, Nick repeated the name ‘Sarah Kaplan’ a few times, then draped an arm around my shoulder. “Oh you Jews, you Jews—when it comes to money, you can always smell the future, can’t you?”

  “Look who’s talking, all these rich Chinese women you go after.”

  “Think about it for a second, though,” he said. “If it was money I was after, I could have staked my claim back when you and I were feasting on horny Jewish sorority chicks from Brookline and Longmeadow—JAPs, not Chinese, in those days…”

  “Forget it.”

  “That’s what my old man told me to do, by the way,” Nick went on. “Much as he hated Jews—envied them, you ask me—he was never too proud to take their money—told me to do the same. But I came out here instead, and I stayed. Why?” He gestured to the party going on around us. “Because life is good here, Charlie. You see that, right?”

  “Yes. Sometimes…”

  “You were always a fast learner.”

  “But you set me up,” I said. “I see that too.”

  “You didn’t need much help. I did like your spunk, though—the way you tried to haul off on me to protect the honor of a lady.”

  “But why, Nick? Why do you do it?’

  “Do what?”

  “Make them fall in love with you.”

  “Ah—a question I’ve asked myself many times.”

  “And the answer?”

  He cupped his chin in his hand, furrowed his brow. Then: “That’s right.”

  “What’s right?”

  “Yes.”

  “But…”

  The woman who’d said I could take her home had slipped her hand inside my shirt and was pinching my nipples.

  “You shouldn’t disappoint the lady,” Nick said, “and I’ll see you Monday morning at the office.”

  He stood, started to wander off, then turned back. “So why do I do it?” he asked. “Okay. That’s an easy one, since there’s only one true answer, same as always: because I can.”

  Drunk as I was, it occurred to me, and not for the first time, that like a kid idolizing a star ballplayer—or my father’s students idolizing him—I looked up to Nick not because I admired him and what he did, but because I wanted to be him: I wanted to be able to say and do what I wanted when I wanted to. What sheer freedom—and power—that would be! To be free, as Nick preached, of the usual burdens and responsibilities most people lived with most of the time. To do what you wanted when you wanted simply because you could…

  The woman’s hand was resting lightly on my stomach, her fingers moving south, and I grabbed her wrist, yanked her hand away, stood up, stumbled to the bathroom, put my finger down my throat, and puked big-time into the toilet.

  After I’d flushed, and gone to the sink and washed, I looked up. In the mirror, I saw that Nick was leaning against the door, grinning.

  “Vintage Hemingway,” he said.

  “Vintag
e what?”

  “Hemingway,” he said.

  “Meaning?”

  “Ask your old man—he’s the expert on stuff like that. But in Papa’s world-view, see, whenever someone has to face the truth—or death—and can’t do it—whenever a guy sees that his life’s come to shit—whenever he lies to himself and sees himself for the coward he truly is—he goes and pukes. Same crap, story after story. Trouble was that—like you, brother—Hemingway was too earnest, right?”

  Pleased with his word-play, Nick grinned more broadly. “But like I said, if you don’t believe me, you can ask your old man.”

  After a while I stopped going to Nick when his women came to me. And after a while I stopped hanging out with him after work and on weekends. He went his way and I went mine pretty much, and what this meant was that I spent what free time I had either in Borneo or figuring out how to get there.

  When I was in Borneo, no matter where—in a luxury hotel, a village hut, or camping out on a beach—I was happy. My life there seemed as rich and beautiful as the trees, flowers, mountains, meadows, lakes, caves, and rivers I was discovering—and as doomed as the forests, fields, birds, and animals that were fast disappearing. In Borneo, my senses were alive in ways they’d never been before, yet at the same time I’d sometimes feel as if I weren’t there at all: as if I didn’t exist, and never had. High on a mountain, or in the thick of a rainforest, I’d feel so exhilarated—so comforted—that I didn’t care if I lived or died, or if I ever returned home.

  Slowly, slowly, even at the office, feelings generated when I was in Borneo, or alone in my apartment on weekends, began to push aside the part of me Nick had been preying on. The fact that someone else with my education and smarts could have done what I was doing—that I was both dispensable and interchangeable—this realization not only filled me with joy, but enabled me to give up any morsel of rage I might have had toward what our company was doing. I came to take pleasure from the long hours spent at the office and at our palm oil plantations precisely because it was true that if I didn’t do what I was doing, someone else would. And there was this too: the more time I spent in Borneo, the smaller Nick became.