Apocalypse Hotel: A Novel (Modern Southeast Asian Literature) (3 page)

Entering a patch of casuarina trees, across a tall sand dune, Cốc whistled over to us

“Look over there—a beautiful tribal dance.”

At first glance I couldn’t make out anything, only some baskets of dried squid and yellow-thread fish and some cans of beer, beneath flickering lamplights. Vendors were servicing a thin scatter of customers strolling on the beach. They had crumpled bits of paper in front of their wares and had set them on fire as offerings to drive away evil spirits. That night prayers were in high demand.

Behind the rock outcrop, a collective burnt-offering ceremony seemed to be taking place. A tribal dance, just as Cốc had said. Women with blank faces, bodies twitching, and their legs, like compasses, open to exactly 25 degrees. The dance of the whores. They were burning sheets of paper and shaking the quivering flames in front of that singular point of entry that constituted the sole source of capital for their particular business, and which defies the laws of economics by pulling profit out of a deficit. The flame quavered like a drawn-out line of
cải lương
folk opera, then suddenly leaped up, stretching as if fueled by a prayer answered by an indifferent god. The flames hung in the air, as if dancing coquettishly, and then a sincere prayer rang out, begging mother earth for mercy. New slips of paper replaced those that had burned up. The flames burned with brilliant reds and yellows, quivering and flaring up from their sources; the women reached into the heavens, gesturing toward themselves and praying for the things they’d left behind at home. For some it was a husband and a neglected child waiting for food and medicine to be brought back home to them. For others it was a family from which they had been driven away because of their loose lifestyle or carnality. They prayed for everything to change; they begged the heavens and earth and their families and all their one-night stands; they evoked all the strict moral regulation of society. The flames flared up and died down, closed tightly into parabolas, and a few dozen such flames outlined the outcrop like a mass offering, a collective fire dance. The dancers’ legs held their 25-degree gap while the dancers planted their feet but swayed their bodies in time with the rhythm of the flames’ movement—expertly, as if they’d already stood there for a thousand years.

The four of us flocked to the beach, running straight up behind the rock outcropping. The fires from the offerings were bright enough to introduce the products. They didn’t look too bad at all. Their appearances depended on the consumers’ aesthetic choice. Of course, the Gang of Four didn’t need to haggle. The Gang of Four were relatively savvy guys and didn’t need to waste any effort struggling to accept the situation. We were ready to go. Our performance behind the head-high boulders would all at once assure us of the situation’s aesthetic character, prove an aspect of popular culture, and promise us order and safety.

The ocean was still shuddering with light, dying, heaving in the distance.

Then it was time for us, exhausted and content, to get back on the road to the hotel. The road crossed through a sparse forest of casuarina trees. At this time of night the forest was a meeting place for innumerable couples. Couples were standing, shaking the trees clean. Couples were sitting, making the treetops quiver with their struggles. Couples were lying down, writhing among the buried roots. Wherever you stepped, you had to pay attention so as to avoid trampling right over the chaotic shapes on the sandy ground.

Crossing the forest, we turned onto a small deserted road. The tiny shadow of an old man fell across the road in front of us. Only the shadow. A wind rushed in and elongated the shadow until it took the form of a wandering spirit. The wind died back down. It was as if every sound in heaven and earth had stopped in an instant. The sound of a man’s determined footsteps could now be heard clearly. The shadow compacted into that of a robust young man.

Suddenly, a pair of headlights blazed as a car turned onto the road. At that moment we were directly across from the shadow. As its owner’s hair caught the light, it lit up like a flame. A flame atop a bewitching face. A woman. I felt my skin crawl and my head spin. I had spent part of my life as the captain of a long-haul ship with hundreds of ports of call and thousands of love affairs behind me, but I’d never seen a woman like her. The light suddenly died. The car turned off the road. The woman shifted again into a shadow with no clear human shape.

Cốc sidled up next to her. For an instant, I thought he was going to grab her by the shoulder. All of us liked girls, but we were exhausted after all of that nonstop partying next to that rock outcrop. Women are always able to have sex but don’t always want to. Men always want to have sex but aren’t always able. Cốc was the exception to that rule.

“Come with us,” he ordered.

Suddenly excited, he walked over and grabbed her. A sudden shriek: “Ah-ah-ah!” But the person screaming wasn’t the woman. It was Cốc. He’d let go of her and was clutching his lower abdomen, writhing in pain.

The three of us ran over to him. As far as we could see, the woman had nothing to do with Cốc’s agony. She was still plodding along determinedly. Cốc was speechless, clenching his teeth in pain.

Another car turned onto the road, its headlights illuminating the area. We saw the woman turn to look back. Her eyes glowed fearfully. As the light died, she again became a spectral shadow.

Cốc wasn’t in pain anymore. It had stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

“Get her!” he yelled as he took off after her.

“What did she do?” Phũ asked.

“What did you do?” Bóp asked. “Shoot off some fireworks in your pants?”

“I don’t know what happened. It was a really strange pain, like a stab. It struck me just as I figured to get her down to some secluded spot near the road. But she didn’t touch me.”

The four of us ran to the street corner. We scanned the whole intersection but couldn’t see the shadow anywhere.

“There she is!” yelled Cốc the following night.

He jabbed his chin toward the form of a woman gradually moving away from the shoreline and out through the breakers. Bóp and Phũ were messing around in the water and waves were crashing onto the beach. All four of us looked in the direction that Cốc had pointed to with his chin. The woman had an attractive body, but she didn’t look anything like the girl we had seen. There was nothing ghostly about her.

“It’s really her. I recognized her right away,” Cốc said, anxious to convince us.

I kept my feelings to myself. But I felt a need for caution. Perhaps it was just the wisdom of someone who had a dozen years on the other three. The wisdom of a seasoned traveler who wanted to prevent those boys from following their own relentless desire.

But I was too slow. Cốc winked suggestively, then waded out onto the sandbank. Every time I remember this, I see it as the real beginning as much as the first actual death—Cốc’s death. As if coming to me from under water, I vaguely heard the woman’s words of refusal. The muttered words “It’s too dangerous . . .” floated to me. But I suppose it was difficult for her to resist Cốc, the way he boldly seized her hand while deftly steering her towards the surging waves. No prey upon which Cốc had set his sights had ever escaped.

The watery contact between the two of them at first seemed to be quite civil, an exchange of names and ages. The lady was Trừng—Mai Trừng. It was neither a girl’s name nor a Hanoian name. No, she was an authentic Hanoian, she insisted, come out here for work. Actually, neither Cốc nor the woman had said their ages out loud, but with my sea captain’s eyes, and a lifetime’s experience, I could tell that Mai Trừng was about twenty-six years old, a few years older than the other guys. But the other guys were already flirting away—calling her
em
, little sister, and themselves
anh
, big brother. Then, without any signal, the boys stopped frolicking and began closing in on her. First Cốc grabbed Mai Trừng’s hand. Jumping past a wave, he gradually pulled her toward Phũ. She bobbed up and over another wave, tumbled over, and landed in Bóp’s arms. When she finally reached my hand, we had created a circle around her in the water. I read in her eyes a word of supplication, an image of terror just before death. I quickly pulled my hand away. Me. Someone whose eyes have been filled with treachery and hatred. Someone who had swallowed the death of his own child in silence. The truth was, at that moment, I’d suddenly felt that everything had lost its excitement. I led the woman back to Cốc, broke up the circle, and swam farther out. Nobody called after me. The circle had quickly become a triangle. The woman was being passed from one corner to the other like a ball. She finally came to rest in Cốc’s arms. With every surge of the waves, he was lifting and lowering her.

I began to sense the dangerous undercurrent of all the joking around. In the water, submerged to her neck, she was being held tightly between Cốc’s legs, so that she couldn’t struggle or call for help. The other two were acting as his accomplices. As lookouts. As fenders-off of the people frolicking amorously in the waves around them. From the way that Cốc was moving, it was clear that he’d managed to slip his bathing suit down around his knees. Another wave lifted up the two bodies, their legs intertwined, his hands frantically trying to pull off her drawers.

I had a clear premonition of something very bad. I was sure of it. But at the same time I knew it was too late to do anything about it.

The incoming wave that broke over the couple hadn’t even had the time to dissipate into foam when Cốc suddenly shot out of the water so straight and so high that I could see I had guessed correctly about his swimsuit being down around his knees. He didn’t let out a sound. He squirmed and twisted and trashed violently back and forth, like a hooked shark.

I dove into the water and rushed toward him. The girl’s face was stamped with an expression of pure horror. Cốc’s eyes had widened grotesquely and were bulging in their sockets; his naked body was writhing desperately. I had enough presence of mind to pull his shorts back up before the two other guys carried him back up onto the beach.

“Someone’s drowned!” A dense horde streamed out of the water and swarmed onto the shore, like ants gathering around a dead bluebottle fly. Phũ was trying to pull Cốc up onto the sand so he could get the water out of his lungs. But Bóp stopped him. Seeing the absolute blankness in Cốc’s eyes, he figured that Cốc had just ejaculated prematurely. Bóp had his own personal experience with this problem. I thought there were two possibilities: either Bóp was correct or Cốc had been struck with the kind of seizure we call a sudden bad wind, which had grabbed him right at the moment of ecstasy.

Cốc lay on his back on the sandy shore. His hips and pelvis arched up and then down, whipping against the sand over and over like a fish in its death convulsions. We chased away the human ants that were swarming uselessly all over the place, opening up an exit through them. Phũ slung our friend over his shoulder and ran to the emergency aid station near the shore.

Before half an hour went by, the ants from the beach had spread the story of the drowning. But the sex of the drowned person had been changed. A man had been turned into a woman more quickly than through the modern magic of a sex-change operation. Just as quickly, the rumor spread that it wasn’t a drowning; the woman had had a congenital heart disease, had stayed too long in the water, had played around too wildly, and had messed around in the water with her boyfriend—right up until the moment she bobbed up back to shore. Luckily they’d been able to pull her body out of the ocean.

Please ignore these rumors. I was there. Now I sit here writing as if this were a clarification. And now it’s too late.

I took the wheel for most of the drive back to Hanoi. At first Phũ drove; he’s the smoothest driver in the group. But after a while he slammed on the brakes and brought the car to a screeching halt. Cốc’s corpse, lying right across Bóp’s and my laps, bounced up. The car had come to a stop on the side of an empty road. Phũ bent his face over the steering wheel and rested his forehead in his hands.

“Cốc was a good swimmer; he was used to the water,” he muttered.

I didn’t push him to keep driving. We would certainly get back to Hanoi that night, but I understood that Phũ simply couldn’t drive any more. He was tormented by the memories of his friend who had just died. Once, when he and Cốc were young and had gone swimming together in the Red River, Phũ got trapped beneath a big coal barge and Cốc pulled him out. Phũ remembered the nights when Cốc had sung in his shows, when he’d performed in the beauty contests. Phũ had been the driver for the group. They were proud of each other—happy to work and play together, to see themselves as a gang.

Then it was Bóp’s turn to reminisce. Taciturn by nature, speaking with his actions more than with his words, he surprised me when he began to talk. Just as I was about to tell him to take Phũ’s place at the wheel. Bóp recalled a story Cốc had told him the night before, when they shared a room. Two months before he had taken a calendar model back to his place and, after an easy conquest, he’d gone to the bathroom. He saw that her bra had fallen onto the bathroom floor. He’d picked it up and flung it onto the water heater. Then he forgot about it instantly. When his lady friend was struggling, bare-breasted, to get dressed so she could leave, Cốc looked frantically around the room, but he couldn’t find the bra anywhere. He went over to look in Phũ’s room, thinking that maybe Phũ had snuck in to steal it. In the end, his date had had to go home braless, her chest bared to the four winds like a disputed border region without a buffer zone. It wasn’t until last night, lying in the same room near the beach at Bình Sơn, far from Hanoi, that Cốc suddenly remembered what he’d done that day, that careless toss. He was sure that her “two-sided fortress” was still exactly where it had landed, up on the water heater—that is, unless Bóp had discovered it and hidden it away for his own purposes. Of course Bóp didn’t know a thing about it. The two of them had bet a bottle of cognac that when they returned to Hanoi, they’d find the bra still in the bathroom. They were housemates, though actually that meant only that Bóp lived in Cốc’s house—his family was in Saigon, and Cốc’s parents lived in France, having left the house to him.