Travels

by Michael Crichton

  “I’m telling you,” David said.

  “What about the idea of the nurturing female?” I said.

  “Only for children,” he said. “Not for men.” He shook his head sadly. “Did you ever wish a woman would send you flowers?”

  The question caught me off guard. A woman send me flowers?

  “Sure. Send you flowers, a nice note, thanks for a lovely evening, the whole bit.”

  It seemed such a strange idea. But as I considered it, it seemed as if it would be terrific.

  “I’m telling you,” David said, “we’re the romantics. Work it out.”

  Working it out seemed to be the story of my life in the mid-1980s. In my private life, all the women I saw worked; often they were preoccupied with their work. During this period I went out with a reporter, a computer salesperson, a choreographer, and a composers’ agent. Dinner with these women tended to be a litany of their problems at work. They assumed that the details of their jobs were as interesting to me as to them.

  I was reminded of the times in the past when I had gone to dinner and monopolized the conversation with my own work problems. And, as David had said, the sex roles were now reversed. But whatever the explanation, there wasn’t much romance in those dinners. On the contrary, this new equality had some decidedly dreary aspects. I used to listen to these women and think, The only time you give your full attention is when you are talking. When I was talking, they would glance at their watches. They were all vaguely preoccupied; they were all pressed for time; they were all playing An Important Person of Affairs. Which was fine, but it wasn’t sexy: “Hey, it’s nine o’clock now, I have to hit the road at ten. Do we have time to do it, or what?”

  Practical, but not what I would have called a hot date.

  One night I was sitting in the corner of a woman’s kitchen when her roommate stormed in from a date, banging doors, shouting: “Jesus, what does a girl have to do to get laid these days?”

  This roommate was embarrassed when she saw me sitting in the kitchen, but it led to an interesting discussion. And the most interesting thing about the discussion was that the attitudes, the frustrations, the disappointments expressed, were exactly the same as for men. In exactly the same terms. There was no difference at all.

  By now I had adopted David’s view of the inherent differences between the sexes, that men were the romantics and women were the pragmatists. His view that each sex saw the other as a projection of itself. I talked about this idea all the time, particularly with women.

  I noticed that it always made women angry. They didn’t like to hear it.

  At first I thought it was because women were experiencing so much discrimination in the workplace. Women felt they were always being told they couldn’t do this, or they weren’t suited for that. Or else they were just subtly bypassed in corporate hierarchies. So women were a little raw about any notion of inherent differences between the sexes, because it sounded like the setup for justifying discrimination.

  But then, as I continued to listen to their complaints, I heard something else. I began to hear about “the way men are,” about “the way men stick together,” about “the way men are threatened by a competent woman,” about “the way men are threatened by sex.” About the way they are. About the problems they make for women because of the problems they have with intimacy or feelings or power. I heard a lot about how they act this way, and how they act that way.

  I wasn’t hearing about a particular man, or a particular job. Nothing was individualized. It was all abstract, all explained by a general theory of the way they were.

  One night I was at a dinner party. The conversation was lively and far-ranging, and not at all concerned with the sexes. It was broadly social and political. But as I listened I noticed a tendency to talk about how they don’t protect the environment, how they don’t run the government responsibly, how they don’t build quality products, how they never report the news accurately.

  The basic message was that they were ruining the world, and there was nothing we could do about it.

  “Wait a minute,” I said. “Who is this they that you keep talking about?”

  I got a lot of confused looks. Everyone else at the table knew who they were.

  “Look,” I said, “I don’t think anything is served by imagining a world of faceless villains. There isn’t any they. There’re only people like us. If a corporation is polluting and the CEO sounds uninformed on TV, the chances are he’s some guy who’s in the middle of a divorce and whose kids are on drugs and he’s got a lot on his mind, a big corporation to run, stockholders and board meetings and everybody pushing at him, and he’s tired and pressured, this pollution issue is just one of many problems, and the government changes the regulations so often nobody can be sure whether he’s breaking the law or not, and his aides aren’t as smart as he’d like them to be, and they don’t keep him as informed as he’d like to be, and maybe they even lie to him. This CEO doesn’t want to appear like a jerk on TV. He’s not happy he came off that way. But it happens, because he’s just a guy trying to do his best and his best isn’t always so hot. Who’s any different?”

  The table got silent.

  “I don’t know about you,” I said, “but I think I’m pretty smart, and I don’t always run my own life so well. I make mistakes and screw up. I do things I regret. I say things I wish I hadn’t said. A lot of the people you see interviewed on TV have impossible jobs. It’s only a question of how badly they’ll do them. But I don’t see any grand conspiracy out there. I think people are doing the best they can.”

  The table stayed silent.

  “And what’s really wrong with making them the problem,” I said, “is that you abdicate your own responsibility. Once you say some mysterious they are in charge, then you’re able to sit back comfortably and complain about how they are doing it. But maybe they need help. Maybe they need your ideas and your support and your letters and your active participation. Because you’re not powerless, you are a participant in this world. It’s your world, too.”

  So there I was, preaching at the dinner table. I got embarrassed and shut up. But in the back of my mind, I kept thinking, There’s something else here. Some other way this is true. Something you haven’t considered.

  Back in the early 1970s, a girlfriend became exasperated with me and said, “Listen: just assume men and women are the same.”

  “How do you mean?” I said.

  “Anything you think as a man, I think as a woman. Anything you feel, I feel.”

  “No, no,” I said.

  “Yes, yes,” she said.

  “Well, for example,” I said, “men can just look at a woman and get turned on. The visual stimulus is enough for a man. But women aren’t like that.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “No. Women need more than the visual stimulus.”

  “I’ve certainly looked at a nice pair of buns in tight jeans and thought, ‘I wouldn’t mind trying that.’ ”

  I thought, This is a very masculine woman. “Maybe for you,” I said, “but for women in general, it doesn’t work that way.”

  “All my girlfriends are the same,” she said. “We’re all bun-watchers.”

  She must have a lot of perverted friends, I thought. I gave another argument. “Women aren’t turned on by pornography and men are.”

  “Oh, really?”

  We went on like this for a while. She insisted that men and women were the same in their underlying behavior, and that I had a lot of wrong ideas about differences. Back in the 1970s this was pretty extreme stuff.

  In subsequent years I forgot that conversation, but now, more than ten years later, it came back to me. It seemed useful to reconsider the whole business.

  I still thought there were differences between men and women. It was true I didn’t conceive those differences in the simplistic way I had so many years earlier. But I still thought there were differences. I wanted to know what those differences were.

  Then,
slowly, I began to ask a different question. Not what the differences were. Instead: What is the best way to think about men and women?

  And I came to a surprising conclusion.

  My old girlfriend was right.

  The best way to think about men and women is to assume there are no differences between them.

  * * *

  I had already concluded that the best way to think about disease was to imagine that you caused it. Maybe that was literally true, and maybe it wasn’t. The point was that the best strategy in dealing with your illness was to act as if you had control over it, and could change its course. That enabled you to stay in charge of your own life.

  Similarly, I now thought the best way to think about the sexes was to imagine there were no differences between them. Maybe that was true and maybe it wasn’t. But it was the best strategy.

  Because, as I saw it, the biggest problem between the sexes was the tendency to objectify the opposite sex and ultimately to become powerless before them. Both men and women did this about the opposite sex. They were this way or that way. They had this tendency. There was nothing we could do about the way they behaved.

  When I looked back, I realized that in many instances I had failed to take action with a woman because I assumed there was nothing I could do about her conduct.

  For example, whenever I lived with a woman, I knew she talked in intimate detail about our relationship with her girlfriends. I always hated that. I hated running into one of her girlfriends and thinking, This woman knows all about me. It felt like a terrible invasion of my privacy, of our privacy. But what could I do? Women talked with one another. Women had these special relationships.

  But if I had been in a close working relationship with a man, I would have complained immediately if I found out he was talking about me with another man.

  So why couldn’t I say to a woman, “It makes me feel terrible that you talk to your girlfriend about us. I feel really betrayed, and I feel dismissed, too. Why do you take the most intimate parts of our relationship to a stranger? It makes me feel awful. You ask me to open up to you, but I know you’re going to get on the phone tomorrow and tell all to some friend. Can’t you see how that makes me feel?”

  The answer, of course, was that I could say it. I just never had, because I had thought that women were inherently different from men. And in formulating that difference, I had also objectified women. They were different. They didn’t have the same feelings I did. They were they.

  Seeing Headhunters

  I went to Borneo to see the Dyaks, the indigenous headhunters of that island. After hours of flying over trackless jungle, in progressively smaller planes, I finally landed at a small inland town called Sibu, on the banks of a broad, muddy jungle river.

  I checked into the Paradise Hotel, which proudly advertised hot and cold running water. I went out into the town and arranged to visit a Dyak village. I was told there were authentic villages, where the people still lived in the traditional longhouses, within two hours’ travel from Sibu by boat.

  I was excited to hear Dyaks were so close. I wanted to leave at once, but a boat could not be arranged until the following morning. So I was obliged to spend the rest of the day in the town.

  I walked around Sibu restlessly. The air was humid and stifling. The town was small and not very interesting. I was quickly bored. I had come to see Dyaks, and now I was stuck in this tedious little town, its streets lined by the stalls of Chinese merchants. I wandered over to an open-air market near the river. The large crowd of Chinese and Malays was dressed in shorts and tee shirts, typical Western clothes. There was not a Dyak to be seen. I was annoyed to be standing in the kind of crowd I could see any day in Singapore. I wanted to see Dyaks, damn it!

  A little girl in a white dress stared at me while she sucked her thumb. I glared at the girl; she became frightened and reached for her father’s hand. I looked at her father’s hand, then his arm.

  Starting at the elbow, the man’s arm was covered in dark-blue tattoos.

  Then, in the V-neck of his shirt, I saw more tattoos. I knew that Dyaks used tattoos for clan identification. Then I saw that the man’s earlobes were pierced and pendulous; they hung down almost to his shoulders.

  This man was a Dyak!

  I looked at the crowd at the market, and now I saw that nearly everyone had tattoos and hanging earlobes. I had been depressed about not seeing Dyaks while I was standing in a crowd of them!

  A few years earlier, during a trek in Nepal, my Sherpa guide took me to the top of a hill at a place called Ghorapani, pointed to the view and said, “The Kali-Gandaki Gorge.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. I was sweating and tired. It was cold. My feet hurt. I could hardly pay attention to this view.

  “The Kali-Gandaki Gorge,” he repeated, significantly.

  “Uh-huh,” I said.

  What I was seeing wasn’t even a gorge, it was just a big valley with snowy mountain peaks on both sides. Spectacular, but all the mountain views in Nepal are spectacular, and I was tired at the end of the day.

  “The Kali-Gandaki Gorge,” he said a third time. Like I still wasn’t getting the point.

  “Great,” I said. “When’s dinner?”

  It wasn’t until I returned home that I found out what the Kali-Gandaki Gorge is.

  The Kali-Gandaki river cuts between the peaks of Dhaulagiri to the west and Annapurna 1 to the east—respectively the sixth and tenth highest mountains in the world. Both peaks rise more than four miles above the river below, making a canyon so enormous that the eye can hardly see it for what it is. It is four times as deep as the Grand Canyon, and far wider: between the two peaks, you could roughly fit twenty Grand Canyons.

  The Kali-Gandaki Gorge is the deepest canyon in the world.

  That’s what it is.

  I’d like to go back and see it sometime.

  Life on the Astral Plane

  The phenomenon of trance mediumship had interested me for some years. Broadly speaking, a medium is someone who goes into an altered state of consciousness and then delivers material not otherwise available to him or her.

  Some mediums become only lightly dissociated and retain their characteristic personalities, although they may claim to speak for a spirit guide or someone from “the other side.” Other mediums enter a deep trance, during which they appear to be taken over entirely by a new personality that has a different name, voice, gestures, and pattern of speech. These mediums are said, in popular parlance, to be “channeling” the personality that takes over.

  A century ago, mediums usually claimed to channel dead figures of greater or lesser eminence. Modern mediums are more likely to claim they channel extraterrestrials, or disembodied entities from the future, or individuals who have been reincarnated many times throughout history. So the phenomenon of channeling seems to be influenced by the broader social context in which it appears; indeed, historical studies suggest that channeling becomes prominent during times of social upheaval, and toward the end of each century. As we approach the end of our own century, it is perhaps no surprise that channeling should once more become controversial, and widely discussed.

  In any case, I was eager to witness this phenomenon firsthand, but I had no opportunity until 1981, when I heard that “Dr. Kilarney” was in town. Dr. Kilarney was a nineteenth-century Irish physician channeled by a woman from Utah. I had never heard of Dr. Kilarney, but I quickly arranged a private session. It was pretty expensive, and the man I talked to on the telephone seemed very concerned about how he would be paid. It gave me a funny feeling. Nevertheless, I arranged a session the following day.

  The medium turned out to be a short, slovenly woman wearing jeans and a sweatshirt. She was staying in a little house in Torrance, California. She seemed edgy, and hovered near her husband, a big, hulking fellow. They both wore a lot of Indian turquoise jewelry. I gave them my money, and then was led into a tiny back bedroom. The woman sat on an unmade bed, closed her eyes, took a few deep breaths,
opened her eyes, and said, “Begorrah, and how might you be on this fine day, my son?” in a corny Irish accent.

  I had spent many months in Ireland, shooting a movie, so I’d heard a lot of Irish accents. Dr. Kilarney’s accent immediately struck me as fake. And her vocabulary was entirely contemporary, even though the Irish still use a lot of nineteenth-century slang in their speech. All in all, Dr. Kilarney sounded like someone from Utah pretending to be Irish.

  So the persona of Dr. Kilarney wasn’t convincing at all. On the other hand, the medium was clearly transformed. Her posture was erect, her eyes were bright, and her gestures were strong and direct. She had a very different energy, and the energy didn’t waver. It remained exactly the same. But the information channeled wasn’t very satisfactory. I was advised to be tolerant of my girlfriend, to meditate regularly, to work hard at my writing, and to take more vitamin C. I was also advised to do a series of rebirthing sessions with the woman’s husband, and was handed a schedule of fees as I departed.

  Thus my first personal experience with a trance medium left me entirely unconvinced. If there was anything to this phenomenon, I hadn’t seen it.

  In 1982 I attended a session with Ramtha, an entity channeled by a woman named J. Z. Knight. At this time Ramtha was already famous. The medium sank her head onto her chest for a few moments, and when she looked up, she was evidently different: her voice was deeper and stronger; she was tremendously vigorous and went around the room, giving advice confidently to the fifty people there. Again I was impressed by the powerful, direct manner of the medium, but this time the information seemed direct and clear as well.

  I was already persuaded that psychic readings were possible, so the idea that someone might do fifty psychic readings in succession, for a whole roomful of people, didn’t strike me as inconceivable. But Ramtha’s energy was not the same as the energy of the psychics I had seen. Most psychics were shy, passive, or diffident. Ramtha acted like a member of the Joint Chiefs—you felt a tremendously commanding presence before you. And in the end you remembered that commanding presence long after you had forgotten exactly what was said.