The Other Side of the World (19 page)

The villagers also showed me what they saw as a more modern way of extracting palm oil—using a large screw-press to break down the nuts, then filtering the crushed nuts and shells through a screen. After boiling the mixture, they let gravity do its job, allowing the brew to cool in a large tank so that the palm oil, lighter than water, would separate on its own and rise to the top. In the final stage, the oil was decanted into a metal tank, then re-heated in ordinary cooking pots to remove any remaining impurities.

I slept like a dead man that night, and when I woke in the morning—I was in a small tent made of fine, sepia-colored mosquito netting—Nick was sitting on a stool on the other side of the tent, drinking coffee, and talking with three elderly village men.

I joined them and they immediately began telling me what a good friend to them, and to their families, Nick had been. He'd brought them work, books, medicines, and cell phones. He'd arranged for sons and grandsons to be enrolled in secondary schools in Banjarmasin, and for daughters and granddaughters to be employed as workers and guides in resort areas.

They showed me photos of children and grandchildren, the photos taken at schools and resorts where the young people, in uniform and smiling happily, lived and worked. At the same time that they praised Nick, they also lamented the fact that young people were leaving villages like theirs, and that when their generation died these villages would disappear.

Given enterprises like ours, your villages may be gone sooner than that, I thought of saying, and Nick talked about facilities our company was developing where workers could vacation, and where they could, if they'd worked for us long-term, live out their lives.

“Just like Florida or Arizona,” I said.

Nick ignored me, but one of the men touched my hand and said that although Nick refused to take credit, what he said was true, and that these programs had been Nick's idea and no one else's.

I looked at Nick. “I sent in a few proposals, and the company's interested,” he said. “We've taken over some old hotels and hospitals and are renovating them to create what I guess could pass for low-end vacation condos. It's a modest start, but it's a start.”

“This is true,” one of the men said. “Thanks to Mister Nick,
my mother and aunt are already living in a home near Turtle Island.”

“It's not all altruism,” Nick said. “There are ways to do this that will make these places profitable.”

“How so?”

“Setting up charitable foundations and using them to process liquid assets we prefer not to have to account for in more visible ways.” He stopped. “But look—when we get back to the office I can fill you in on our CFO's plans.”

One of the men handed me a photo of his granddaughter, a girl whose face, nearly obliterated, looked like those I remembered seeing in pictures of Vietnamese children who'd been burned by napalm. The girl had been looking into a pot to see if the palm oil had risen to the top when something in the boiling oil—most likely metal shards that had flaked off the inside of the pot—exploded. On the day of the accident, Nick had arranged for the girl to be flown to a hospital in Singapore.

The girl was eight years old, and would never regain sight in her left eye, but everything else about her, the man stated, as if to reassure me—he showed me photos of her face in various stages of reconstruction—would one day return to normal.

“Saint Nick to the rescue once again,” I said.

“Just good business practice,” Nick said. “Good will breeds good workers. It's what I learned in China—the factories that treated their workers like garbage got garbage for results. The factories that treated their workers like human beings made out okay.”

“Speaking of which,” he added, handing me a manila envelope, “we've decided to treat our executives well too.”

I opened the envelope and found plane tickets, brochures, and an itinerary for ‘Crowell's Great Jungle Adventures.'

As soon as Nick explained that the company was paying for four days of R-and-R for me—they'd done the same for him after his first two months—the three men began raving about
the wonders I'd be seeing, wonders they themselves had seen rarely if at all, but about which their children and grandchildren had told them.

Nick, his arms around the shoulders of two of the men, was grinning happily, and I had to wonder: Who was this guy I'd been hanging out with on and off for nearly two decades? And I thought, too, about something Max often said: how little we ever really knew other people.

I looked at the cover of one of the brochures—a photo of two orangutans, mother and infant, and of a bird identified as a Scarlet-rumped Trogon, the smallest of its species, along with, in bold-faced print, a promise: that I would see endangered species and vanishing cultures while relaxing in a luxury hotel.

I showed the brochure to Nick.

“True?”

“You bet,” he said.

 

Once I'd seen some of what the men had told me I'd see—orangutans (astonishingly graceful), a monitor lizard (more than seven feet long), a clouded leopard (beautiful beyond beautiful) —and then rivers, jungles, rainforests, underground caves, and not only dozens of endangered species, but a fair number of species (trees, flowers, birds, animals) whose existence had been discovered only within the last decade—I was hooked, changed, transformed—whatever: you name it—and I knew my life would never be the same. And I could admit, even then, that what made the difference—what made the experience so extraordinary—had to do with what Nick talked about: the fact that this world of astonishing natural beauty would soon be gone.

There were eight of us on the tour—an elderly English couple, three middle-aged German businessmen, and two young American women (Alicia, a lawyer, and Amanda, a pediatrician) —and we sat in straightback chairs like schoolchildren,
trying to take in what our guide, Tamika, was telling us: that the island of Borneo was home to more than fifteen thousand species of flowering plants, more than three thousand species of trees, and to more than six hundred species of birds. In the past dozen years alone well over five hundred new species of animal, bird, and plant had been discovered on the island. Borneo was the only natural habitat in the world for several endangered species, the Borneo orangutan most famous among them, and Tamika passed around glossy photos of some of the others: the sun bear (the world's tiniest bear), the Sumatran rhino, the pygmy elephant, the proboscis monkey.

Our tour group was staying at a five-star Hilton Hotel in Kuching (which called itself ‘the cleanest city in Malaysia'), and my executive suite, on the fifteenth floor, had a magnificent view through floor-to-ceiling windows of the Sarawak River. The high-tech work station was as well-appointed as my office in Singapore, and the bathroom, done in cool shades of gold-flecked marble, had a bidet, a whirlpool, a stereo system, a large flat-screen TV, and a computer-fax console. The hotel itself was an easy hour away by mini-van and boat from Bako National Park.

Tamika, a breathtakingly beautiful woman who appeared to be in her early thirties, and who was several inches taller than I was—at least six-one or six-two—wore crisp, freshly starched khakis like those American forest rangers wore. Her skin was light tan, her eyes green, her hair a deep brown and braided down her back, and her smile, enhanced by dimples in each cheek, enchanting.

“This woman is surely one of the island's natural wonders,” I whispered to Alicia, “though I'm curious: do you think she's an endangered species too?”

“She's one of a kind, for sure,” Alicia replied, “but not endangered.”

“I've never seen anyone quite like her,” I said.

“It's why we're here,” Alicia said.

On the boat ride across the Sarawak River, Tamika had been warm and friendly, asking us about ourselves, where we were from, why we were there, and what we'd done before coming to the Far East. And of course it turned out she knew Nick, and thought the world of him.

“You know Nick,” I said.

“Oh yes.”

“Well, who doesn't know Nick,” I said.

“He told me you would be coming,” she said, “and he warned me about you—about how charming, intelligent, and curious you were—curious about the world, not
curieux
in the way the French use the word. He said you were anything but odd or strange.”

“Thanks.”

“Nick is a good man, you know.”

“So I've been told.”

She laughed. “You are on good terms with him, yes?”

“He's not only my best friend,” I answered, “but he seems to be my only friend.”

“Then you are a most lucky young man. Nick has performed more good deeds for people than I could ever count.”

“A veritable Robin Hood of the Far East.”

“Robin Hood?”

“Robbing from the rich and giving to the poor.”

“Oh not at all.” She laughed again, her hand resting on mine. “Nick takes care of
numéro uno
first, last, and always. You may count on that.”

“Did you know him in Singapore?”

“Yes. And in Hong Kong before that. And I visited his family in Maine.”

“You visited Lorenzo and Eugenia?!” I said, taken aback not only by the fact that she had visited them, but by the news, yet
again, of how seemingly generous Nick had been to yet another Asian woman.

“Yes, and Nick's wife Trish—his former wife—and their child, Gabe, who certainly is a curious young man. It was through Nick that I found work in Maine—in Brooklin, not far from Trish and from Nick's parents. I had one of your twelve month work visas, which also came with an additional month for travel.”

The Englishman was holding forth about the number of times he'd been in Borneo, the hikes he'd been on, the headhunters he'd known, the animals he'd killed, and the sights he'd seen. Tamika turned away from him and listened to the Germans talk about the shipping company they worked for—one based in Jakarta, registered in Liberia—and asked if they knew Nick, and if they'd ever transported palm oil for our company.

“It is possible,” one of them said, and inquired of the other two, but neither of them recognized Nick's name or the name of our company.

“Perhaps,” I suggested, “Nick hasn't helped them the way he's helped you and your friends—women in need, yes?”

“Give it a rest,” Tamika said.

“It's why I'm here,” I said. “To give it a rest.”

“Exactly,” Tamika said. “And what I think is that you should try to be a bit less cynical, for I am beginning to fear that what Nick said about you—how exhausted—how
disillusioned
you have become—is true. So: if I can be of service in
your
time of need, you will let me know, of course, yes?”

Even though her breath was on my cheek, and I could smell the sweetness of her skin—a light, lemon-thyme fragrance—there seemed nothing flirtatious about her. Her directness, in fact, seemed as strange—as
curious
—as it was genuine, and this quality—the ability to be friendly without inviting more than friendship—unsettled me, since it was a quality I'd rarely encountered in women, especially beautiful women.

Bako was the oldest national park in Borneo, Tamika informed us, and with an area of about forty square miles, it was also one of the smallest. It possessed the widest range of climate zones of any of Borneo's parks—seven discrete and complete ecosystems—and thus was home to virtually every type of vegetation found on the island. But before we started on our visit—we were sitting on benches just outside the park's entrance—Tamika said that since she had, the day before, learned something about each of us, she thought it only fair that we should know a little about her.

Here's what she told us: Though born and raised in a nearby Bidayuh village, she'd travelled extensively. She'd been a scholarship student at Saint Anne's Catholic Girls School in Kuala Lumpur before going on to study in both Paris and New York City. In New York she'd interned at the Central Park Zoo for six months, and in Paris had studied animal behaviorism at
Université Pierre et Marie Curie
. She'd also worked and studied in Hong Kong, Singapore, and more recently, in Maine, where she'd spent fifteen months as a carpenter's apprentice in a boatyard that built racing boats.

She talked about endangered species less famous than orangutans, bearded pigs, or clouded leopards (plants, trees, flowers, and birds I'd never heard of), passed around more photos, then asked if any of us knew why species such as these were more in danger now than they'd been for Borneo's entire known history.