“Baby?”
“You know,” she said. She pointed toward his crotch and giggled.
“Ah, I see. Makes baby grow up big and strong, yeah?”
“Yesss.”
“Let’s have a look.” He held out his hand. “I’ve seen these things a million times here but I’ve never really wanted to try it before.”
“Oh, but you will drink this one, won’t you? Because it is from me?” She passed him the bottle.
“For you, and for my baby, I’ll do it.”
It was a bottle of ruou, or rice wine, and he had drunk that on its own. But this type of ruou, which he’d seen sold at gifts shops such as those at the Cu Chi Tunnels and the Saigon National Museum, had conspicuous extras stuffed into the bottle. Usually it was a cobra, preserved in the yellowish wine as if pickled in formaldehyde, maybe with a huge black scorpion or a fistful of smaller snakes and some herbs added for good measure. Hong’s gift did have some blanched-looking herbs at the bottom, but no scorpion, and the snake coiled inside wasn’t a cobra, unless its hood was closed.
Gorch turned the bottle around slowly to see it from all angles, and held it up in front of the fluorescent ceiling light. His brows tightened. Definitely not a cobra. And maybe it was a result of the animal’s saturated tissues being distorted, but he almost questioned whether it was even a snake. He was reminded of the animal called a worm lizard, an amphisbaenian, which possessed a long pinkish body that looked segmented like an earthworm, with only a rudimentary pair of forelegs. It almost seemed this creature had such forelimbs, if withered, unless those were just bits of sloughing skin. Its eyes were bleached dull gray. It was looped in on itself within the glass, coiled around and around in a spiral as if chasing itself unto infinity.
“A dragon fetus, perhaps? Ace.” He handed her back the bottle to open. He took down a shot glass. “Are you going to drink it with me?”
“It’s a drink for men,” she told him. “I don’t have a baby.” Her smile was a mixture of carnality and passable innocence that made his stomach squirm with hunger, as if he had his own dragon fetus coiled inside him.
She filled his shot glass, and he took a tentative sip. He tried not to show his disgust lest he insult her. After all, her father had unknowingly sacrificed this elixir for his benefit. It tasted just as he had expected: crude rice wine mixed with the essence of a reptile terrarium.
“Do you like it?”
Gorch didn’t think he’d be stocking this beverage in his pub anytime soon, but he said, “A fine vintage. Cheers.” He took another sip.
He and the woman Hong were naked and stood waist deep in the sea. It was high tide, and it was perpetual dusk, the bloody fleeces of clouds strewn upon a sky like magma.
The horizon was punctuated by a number of silhouetted metal ships – or the resonance of ships that had occupied those spots eons ago, or would occupy those spots in some far future epoch – in this realm where Gorch sensed steel was as transient as shadow. Hordes of dragonflies dangled above their heads, their wings a chorus of low humming.
His left arm lay limp at his side, submerged to the elbow in the lapping water. Hong held his right hand in both of hers, to her breast. Gorch felt her brown nipples pressing erect against his forearm. She was smiling up at his face, but he was looking down at the water, if it was water. It was yellowish, a color like piss, with a tang that was sour and rotten. Not so much polluted as venomous.
A whispery touch brushed repeatedly against his submerged left hand, along with the subtlest tugging, which might only be the movement of the yellow fluid itself. Gorch was reminded of the Dai Nam Van Hien amusement park, when he had taken one of his new bargirls there as a prelude to seduction. For a fee, the park’s visitors could slip their bare feet into tubs in which fish would gently nibble away dead skin. He had tried it, though his date had been too squeamish. It had felt like this…an almost nonexistent sensation, unnerving all the same.
Hong squeezed his right hand tighter, and he raised his eyes to her slowly, as if he’d been stunned by a blow in the ring. She said, “That fat man has brought pain and drawn blood, but your hands have taken life. I can feel it.”
Fat man? Gorch blearily managed to conjure the image of a British tourist in his sixties, with a belly like a cask and a head like a clenched fist. The man had boasted of having been a wrestler in his younger days.
Hong went on, “You are still young and strong. You can spare a little of your youth and strength, can’t you?”
“I’m not so young,” he slurred.
“Compared to my father you are.” She tilted her face downward suddenly, and looked around them at the yellow sea rocking against their torsos. Gorch saw her gold skin turn pebbled with gooseflesh, like tiny hard scales. “He is here,” she said.
Then the tide went out, but not gradually; it was sucked back violently like a bed sheet torn away, with a roar of rushing water. At the same time, the swarms of dragonflies churning above them were all swept back as if a powerful wind had come along, though there was no powerful wind.
His lower body unveiled, Gorch lifted his left arm to find that his index finger was missing, blood sluicing from the base and diluting with the water on his skin. He contemplated his hand almost calmly, detached, turning it over and back to view it from different angles. But his gaze came to focus on something else, beyond his hand, and he looked instead to his feet and the wet sand beneath them.
Turning slowly in a circle, Hong turning with him obligingly, he saw that there was a wide groove or channel imprinted in the sand, surrounding them in a giant C. But whatever had dragged itself through the sand, coiled itself around the spot where they stood, had gone out with the tide.
Because No was the most accomplished of his bia om at English, Gorch had her accompany him in the taxi and stay at his side in the nondescript little hospital he chose, to translate. The young doctor who saw to his hand was pleasant and barefoot, having left his sandals outside his examination room. Various tools like instruments of torture soaked in a pan of what looked simply to be water, on the floor in a corner of the room. A gecko was stuck to the wall near the ceiling. Gorch instructed No to tell the man he’d lost his finger in an accident, though he knew it looked too neatly severed for that. The doctor was too polite and shy to express any doubts. Gorch had to repress his curiosity about how his wounding had been accomplished: knife, shears? The word bitten bobbed up in his mind, but that would have been too messy a result, he was sure.
Talking to No past the attentive doctor’s shoulder, as he bandaged his hand into a mitt bulky as one of his old boxing gloves, Gorch said, “I should have known something was off when she didn’t bring up money. She took what was in my wallet, but it was like an afterthought. What she wanted was to mutilate me. Got to be someone I pissed off back home, reaching out to me. I haven’t made any enemies here that I know of.”
“Mm,” was all No could contribute.
He considered his list of old enemies, and how to interpret this message from any one of them. But the dream, or vision, he’d experienced under the effects of the rice wine came back to him, not so much in a clarity of detail but as an overall impression. For no reason he was conscious of, if he had to sum up what had transpired in the vision in one word, it would be ritual. He asked No, “There isn’t any rite in Buddhism I’m unaware of, where you might take someone’s finger?”
No looked horrified by the suggestion. “No,” she said emphatically. “Not Buddhism.”
He pocketed the baggies of antibiotics and painkillers the doctor gave him, though he had no intention of taking any of the latter until he found out why this woman had taken a part of his body. He wanted his head clear. Pain he was used to working around.
Back in the reception area – a dotted trail of someone else’s dried blood leading them toward the front desk, where their waiting taxi driver flirted with a nurse – Gorch said to No, “All right, then, did that big British guy happen to mention where he was staying, whe
n you had him upstairs?”
“Oh!” No replied. “Yes...yes...he told me!”
Gorch didn’t recognize the place’s name, but No appeared familiar with it, as she was no doubt intimate with many of Vung Tau’s innumerable hotels, from before she had come to work for him. The frugal tourist had decided against one of the bigger establishments like the Sammy or the Imperial, opting instead for one of those narrow, pastel-colored structures of a half dozen floors or more, looking all the more elongated for being crushed cheek-to-jowl in the side streets off the main drag, where for under ten US dollars a night one could get a clean room and HBO with a minimum of ants.
Gorch gestured roughly for the taxi driver’s attention, surly from pain, and said to No, “Tell him that’s where we’re going. If that Brit’s still there, maybe he can tell us where to find this woman.”
No asked him warily, “Are you sure you don’t want to tell the police what she did?”
“Why would I want to do that, if I might have to kill this little sheila when I find her?”
No’s eyes widened, but she nodded quickly. “Oh. Okay.”
Crowded beside No in the back of the toy-like taxi, Gorch was almost tempted to dull himself with some of those painkillers. The doctor’s numbing injections had already worn off, and steady waves of pain were telegraphed up the lines of his nerves. In addition, he realized he was experiencing phantom signals from his absent index finger. At least, that’s what he took it to be, this whispery sensation of brushing caresses, and an odd subtle tugging, as if he had inserted his missing finger through a hole in a wall, and on the other side little fish were nibbling at it.
He even dozed, for what was probably only several minutes, but long enough for him to find himself standing on a damp beach, though the ocean itself had drawn back so far that the water might as well have all poured off the curve of the world. Above him he heard a chorus of low humming, and he looked up expecting to see swarms of dragonflies. Instead, dangling overhead – suspended upside-down by their feet, via ropes that vanished into the fiery sky – were countless young girls in virgin white ao dai costumes like students, their arms crossed on their chests. Their long hair hung down in black flags, their eyes closed and mouths gaping wide – from which came the humming chorus, a wordless chanting, lips unmoving. Gorch saw what appeared to be a pinkish tentacle emerge from the mouth of a girl in the far distance, whip around searchingly as if probing the air, then withdraw into the girl’s throat out of sight. Transfixed with fear, Gorch continued watching as the single limb reappeared from the mouth of another girl in the middle distance, closer now, again thrashing in the air for a moment before it was sucked back inside its host. This time he had noticed that the thing appeared vaguely segmented, like an earthworm. And then, in a flash, the appendage or rubbery body shot from the mouth of a girl hanging directly above him, seeming to lash around for him blindly. Gorch held up a four-fingered hand to shield his face, and cried out.
He opened his eyes to find No shaking his shoulder. Her expression told him she wished she was anywhere right now but beside him, even working the cheap hotels again. “Are you all right, anh?” she asked him.
Gorch sat up straighter. “How much longer?”
“We’re almost there.”
Just as the taxi was about to turn into the mouth of a shadowed corridor of interchangeable hotels, they came to a snarl in traffic. Pedestrians had gathered on the broad sidewalk, craning their necks, chattering and pointing. Diligently nudging his way through, palming his horn to urge onlookers aside, the taxi driver said something over his shoulder to No.
Gorch began to ask what was happening, but when he gazed out his passenger’s window he understood. The first thing he saw was a pool of blood on the pavement, standing as thick and tacky as a bucket of spilled nail polish, already congealing under the sun. As they continued to crawl forward, he saw the source of the blood. A motorbike, now lying on its side in the gutter, had been struck by a truck overloaded with red bricks, apparently as the bike rider had been turning out of this side street to join the main road’s traffic. Gorch had seen other accidents in his time living in Vietnam; they were inevitable in a country choked with motorbikes. The recent law requiring riders to wear helmets hadn’t saved this victim: the truck had run directly across her head, splitting her helmet into hinged halves, and her skull identically inside it. In contrast, her body was mostly untouched, her schoolgirl’s white ao dai almost pristine. The young girl lay on her back with her head in the wide corona of blood. Someone, maybe one of the city’s many Catholics, had crossed the student’s arms onto her chest.
A hard shiver went through Gorch. The dream he had snapped awake from only a few minutes earlier came back to him like a punch to the stomach that he hadn’t tightened up in time to lessen. He looked away from the poor girl, resisting a deep down yawn of nausea, and the taxi managed to get the knot of chaos behind it and enter the chasm of hotels.
They pulled up in front of a tall, oblong hotel with its ground floor open to the street, at the top of a flight of steps. Gorch and No disembarked, while the taxi driver settled back to wait for them. No must have seen Gorch was feeling queasy, either from his careful step or his grayish complexion, because she put a hand on his arm. “You okay, anh?” she asked him again.
He nodded brusquely, gestured for her to climb the stairs. They did so, stepping into a little reception area that from the street had appeared as dark as a grotto. Now that its contents came clear, it presented them with another knot of chaos.
Heavy wooden chairs, ornate and lacquered, were arrayed along the side walls, the reception desk at the far end of the room. A wall-mounted TV played a Chinese costume drama dubbed into Vietnamese, Journey to the West, with an actor in makeup as Sun Wukong the Monkey King. A granite staircase swept up in a curve to the second floor. And at the foot of these stairs, a group of people had gathered, speaking noisily all at once in agitation. They stood around a bulky white mass heaped on the floor.
When the people – the couple who owned the hotel, their grown son, and several hotel guests – noticed Gorch and No, they whipped around looking nervous, as if they might be blamed for what had occurred. The hotel owners pointed at the hulk on the floor and babbled to No.
Gorch stepped past them all and stood directly over the dead man. As if overseeing the scene with celestial amusement, the trickster Monkey King let out a wild cackle.
It was the British tourist in his sixties, the former wrestler. Staring up past Gorch, he lay on his back naked, his immense hard belly a white-haired boulder. Vomit was slick on his jowls and the front of his chest. The vomit smelled like the venomous yellow sea in Gorch’s vision.
The index finger of his left hand was missing. Lifting his eyes, Gorch saw drops of blood on the granite stairs, blood smears on the banister. He turned to face No. “Did he fall down the stairs, or was it a heart attack?”
No relayed this question to the hotel owners. The couple spoke simultaneously, both of them dramatically gesticulating. Facing her boss again, No explained, “He fell down the last steps. Maybe it was a heart attack, but maybe he hit his head. He was chasing a girl who ran down the steps before him.”
“Yeah. The little witch should’ve used more of her potion than she gave me, to subdue this big pommy.” Then Gorch jerked around to face out the open front of the hotel toward the street. He heard the continuous drone of motorbikes from the long, sinuous coastal road. “I’ll be stuffed,” he hissed. Then, despite his lingering queasiness, he was bolting across the reception area, down the hotel’s front steps, past the tiny waiting taxi, and down the shadowy side street toward the sunny and open main drag.
When he reached the mouth of the narrow street, huffing, the dead girl was on a litter being loaded into the back of a truck. Gorch caught a glimpse of her lolling head, the red gape of her face. She didn’t need a face for Gorch to know her. Either Hong had been even younger than he’d guessed, or had dressed as a student to excit
e the old lecher, or had donned her snowy ao dai as a disguise to fade into the masses.
Policemen in green uniforms and military caps had appeared on the scene, talking to witnesses. So far, the Honda still lay neglected against the curb. Gorch skidded to a stop beside it, intending to crouch down and open the seat compartment, but he found that it already lay open.
Several articles that had been stored inside the compartment had spilled into the street. A plastic poncho, for those sudden drilling rainstorms that came out of nowhere, and a student’s book bag that had in turn spilled some of its contents. Glass shards sparkled wetly.
Gorch snatched up the bag and dumped its remaining contents onto the street. Having noticed his actions, a policeman called out. Gorch ignored him. In a stream of rice wine, at his feet tumbled more shards, a few blanched herbs, and two bloodless index fingers looking like some kind of wrinkled worm, glistening from having been submerged in ruou.
Gorch peered into the bag again, but found nothing more. He hunkered by the bike, leaned in low to peek under it, didn’t see anything there. The policeman had come close, speaking to him sharply, but Gorch still acted as though he were deaf.
Finally he spotted something. A thin wet smear like a snail trail. It led from where the book bag had been ejected from the bike, to an opening in the curb for draining rainwater into the sewer.
Straightening up, but finding himself unsteady on his feet – close to blacking out from pain and blood loss and more than that – Gorch experienced a renewal of those phantom signals from his absent index finger. A whispery sensation of brushing caresses, and an odd subtle tugging, as if he had inserted his missing finger through a hole in a wall, and on the other side little fish were nibbling at it.
The Endless Fall and Other Weird Fictions Page 11