Apocalypse Hotel: A Novel (Modern Southeast Asian Literature)

by Ho Anh Thai

  The clique of film directors withdrew from the scene. Next it was the turn of the music agents. I remember how his buddies would tease him about his husky, “rusted-out” voice. But the reality was that all any pop concert really needed to succeed was a famous face, a flesh-and-bone superstar (not just some special effects superstar), especially when the superstar raised his voice to sing a few songs.

  Cốc would ring me up on his cell phone. “Come over and watch me sing.”

  That night, Phũ, Bóp, and I watched Cốc from the wings so we could help him make a quick exit if need be. The audience whistled, cheered, and clapped violently as he came onstage. His program consisted of songs that hit bottom in Saigon, but had now been recycled as “retro” and become popular in the capital. Cốc waved to the audience, smiling his scornful smile, while a Saigon musician cued: “One, two; one, two, three . . .” Cốc was about to open his mouth to sing when the cell phone at his side squeaked to life. He coolly reached down and switched it off, shrugging in apology.

  An explosion of appreciative laughter burst from the audience. The easygoing band started replaying the intro. A voice with a Saigon accent began again: “One, two; one, two, three, four!” And Cốc started to sing.

  After that, we sat many a night behind the wheel of Phũ’s car, following Cốc to half a dozen fashion and music variety shows. It was all very trendy. Awkward models tried to imitate the moves and attitudes of European and American models, mimicking everything from their swaying walk to their deliberate way of moving their arms and their way of stopping and sneering at the audience. They were able to attract the interest of spectators only in a country that lacked a real entertainment industry. Naturally, during these competitions between the beautiful, the fashion models also had to partner up with superstars like Cốc. A handsome guy would escort a contestant, the pair becoming the perfect couple from the moment they stepped onstage. From day one, Cốc refused to partner with Contestant Number 5. This girl had a good figure but was slightly bucktoothed and had bad breath. Instead, Cốc chose Contestant Number 12, who hailed from a hilly region of the country. Who had a hot body. After their first promising performance in front of the judges and the audience, Cốc cuddled up to Number 12 and led her backstage by the hand so he could make his move: “Don’t go back to your place tonight. Come sleep at my place.”

  “You’re scaring me—how can you speak so shamelessly?”

  “How the fuck should I speak?”

  Number 12 was horrified. She’d never imagined that this superstar, so refined and noble on the silver screen, could talk like this. “You coming or not?” A nauseating spray of spittle burst in her face.

  “No!”

  “Do you want to be a beauty queen or just some crippled has-been?” Cốc stamped on her foot. She held in a scream. Her toes seemed about to split wide apart in her high-heeled shoes. “How about it, do you want to become a cripple, dragging yourself down the runway? Tell me!”

  “Okay, okay.”

  But as Cốc was leading her from the studio she quickly snatched her hand away and sprinted in the direction of her friends and family, who had taken the train all the way to the big city to see her. The next day Number 12 insisted that the organizers match her up with a new partner. But Cốc was perfectly capable of repelling this feeble counterattack. The two stepped back out onto the stage together. The spectators roared. “Hurray for Number 12! Hurray for the superstar Hoàng Công!” (That was Cốc’s real name.) He still maintained that disdainful attitude that drove the audience wild. Waving his hands to greet the crowd, he lowered his voice so only Number 12 could hear him say, “Tonight you won’t get away. Don’t even think of it!” Number 12 was also waving cheerfully to the crowd. As she lightly grasped his hand, she suddenly realized that Cốc had a cold razor blade concealed in his palm. “Do you want me to slash your swimsuit, one slice down the back, one up the front, right where you’re wearing that pad?”

  It was the voice of a murderer that would slice more than her bathing suit. Number 12 stumbled slightly and lost her shoe. Cốc gracefully rescued her from losing her footing altogether by supporting her elbow. The maneuver was almost totally hidden from view so that, to the audience, it just looked like Cốc was suavely escorting the young lady. Number 12 looked gratefully at Cốc and lowered her gaze with girlish coyness. “I’m on my period; aren’t you worried?”

  “No problem.”

  At the end of the second night of the pageant, Cốc hurriedly dragged Number 12 out the back door and rushed her back to his house. With another night of the contest remaining, she couldn’t risk doing anything to resist him. At three in the morning he took her back to the hotel and her bewildered friends and family.

  The next night Number 12 was crowned beauty queen.

  Afterward, she got a job working with a joint-stock corporation with French partners. Her life changed. After a time she began to brag to her friends and co-workers that she had had a close relationship with the superstar Hòang Công.

  Cốc lay low for a while at my older brother’s (Phũ’s father’s) hotel, the Apocalypse. I, Phũ’s uncle, at the age of thirty-five, was a part owner of this hotel named for the end of the world. Phũ was on the board of directors. Bóp had passed an intermediate course in cooking and thus worked as the head chef of a group of specialty cooks. Cốc worked reception, using his superstar status to attract customers and to chat with them. When the occasion called for it, he also worked as a bellboy or performed live songs. Truthfully, the guests loved this; they loved his handsome and rather cruel appearance to the point that we almost changed the name of the hotel from the Apocalypse to the Hoàng Công Hotel.

  The four of us arrived at Bình Sơn around midday. It was the beginning of the afternoon so we all tramped down to the beach, eager to start our vacation. I have been both a ship’s captain and a bookworm, so what I witnessed there shouldn’t have been that hard for me to grasp. I understand the vicious cycle into which human beings have inserted themselves. They destroy the environment by making holes in the ozone layer. The ultraviolet radiation leaking through the hole in the ozone makes the earth warmer. So everyone goes to the beach. In droves. They spend a day wrestling with the ocean waves. As night falls, they retreat to the citadels of their hotels and guesthouses or wander the twilit streets. Meanwhile the exhausted ocean lies there limp, panting out its dying breath like a virgin girl after being gang-raped. Now the ladies who deal in “powder and perfume” emerge to earn their living. Frankly, though, there is no powder evident. What there is for the most part is the salt and fish sauce stench of fisherwomen who no longer fish, the smell of the drought-stricken countryside, and the smell of the wet-nurse’s milk. “Child, stay at home, mother must go work,” is the lullaby the girls croon to their brats. And over all of it, knitting it together somehow, is the pervasive stench of cheap perfume.

  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 pray
er 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.