Apocalypse Hotel: A Novel (Modern Southeast Asian Literature)

by Ho Anh Thai

  Later, after everything had come out, his wife had told him that, out of jealousy, she’d tried to get to Mai Trừng, but had never been successful. Each attempt ended in disaster for her. Every day the director would pace back and forth, hovering around that bewitchingly beautiful woman. His wife had seen the secretary many times. Looking at her, she would feel a sense of profound disappointment in her own appearance, and in the appearance of womankind in general. Mai Trừng had the kind of looks that filled members of the same sex with destructive impulses, the way people toiling in the mud just want to fling mud at someone wearing a white shirt and standing on the bank. Every time the director’s wife called the secretary’s phone line someone would answer and tell her that the secretary was in a private meeting with the director. But when she called to the director’s phone line, not even a ghost would answer. At first she felt the pangs of jealousy, but that soon turned into a burning hatred, slowly sapping the life out of her. After half a year she’d become squirmy and miserable as a corpse. The only way out of this pitiful situation was to act on her jealousy. This was how she thought. This was what she believed.

  One day she carried a razor blade to the office. She’d stashed it in her leather handbag, but somehow it had ended up in her pants pocket. By the time she arrived, the razor had torn through her pants and lacerated a rather sensitive area. The female workers had had to gather around and dress her wound with sterile bandages. Another time she’d requested a small bottle of concentrated sulfuric acid from the lab. She put this in her leather handbag as well. As soon as she’d stepped out of the lab, there was the sound of an explosion in her purse. Frightened out of her wits, she flung her bag was far as she could. Everything in her purse—her makeup box, her money, and the purse itself—had been torn, twisted, and warped in front of her.

  At that time Quốc Đài had no idea what was going on. He had organized a trip to meet some customers in a mountain province. It would be like a holiday trip in the middle of the heat of summer, the perfect opportunity to score with the beautiful woman. The two of them stayed in adjoining rooms in the hotel. At night, there was a knock on his door. He opened the door, but quickly rejected the duty prostitute, a woman earning her way by flinging herself at all of the guests. In the end, he’d had to give her some money to get her to leave. Still mad with desire, he walked down to Mai Trừng’s room, using the excuse that some work had come up out of the blue. Without a word of warning, he grabbed her tightly in his arms and they both fell down onto the bed. Suddenly he felt a bitter coldness between his legs, as if his instrument had suddenly transformed into a block of ice. In that flashing instant of numbness, his desire had disappeared from his body. He clutched at the painful area and curled up on the bed for a few minutes to recover. Even though the sensation he’d been struck with was freezing cold, now his whole body was soaking in sweat.

  Mai Trừng sat next to him, watching his body contract in pain, but didn’t do anything to help. She brought him a towel to wipe off his sweat.

  “I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do to help you,” she said, apologetically.

  He understood that she meant that she hadn’t been against him, that she was prepared to help, but that the problem was his own—something had malfunctioned in his vigorous tool that had never malfunctioned before with other women. He felt overwhelmed by shame. He sat next to her as if he were sitting beside a male friend. And she also sat up and leaned against him, as if she were next to a girlfriend. Then she announced, “I want to be able to work peacefully at your company for a long time. I want to tell you something that I’ve never told anyone before: Whenever anyone is planning to do anything bad to me, that person immediately meets an accident. Many times they are very dangerous accidents.”

  Quốc Đài understood very quickly. He went straight back to his room, bumping into the working girl in the hallway. This time, he asked her to come back to his room with him. Everything functioned normally. That meant that nothing had been permanently broken. It also meant that Mai Trừng had told him the truth. But how miserable for his body. She was still more beautiful than anyone, more enticing than anyone. And she was still right there in front of him every day, happy or unhappy in front of him. He had to guard himself, to gather all of his reason and intellect to rein in the stallion that was threatening to break free inside of his body. He still remembered the freezing pain running along his spine, he still remembered the agonizing block of ice between his legs.

  His wife didn’t know anything about what had happened. Husband and wife were dancing around Mai Trừng totally independent of each other. His wife didn’t think about slashing her face or throwing acid on her anymore. She only wanted to threaten her, to terrorize her mentally. Afterwards, she could sit back and wait for the secretary to quit and leave. She called the office when she knew that Quốc Đài wouldn’t be there. “Mr. Đài is here at home, and he asked me to call you and have you come over here right away to pick up some documents. Please come immediately.”

  When Mai Trừng arrived she saw that Quốc Đài’s wife was alone. She followed the woman into the living room, whereupon the wife whipped around an aerosol bottle of American anesthetic and sprayed Mai Trừng in the face. She slumped over, unconscious.

  When she regained consciousness, she found herself sitting against the wall, her arms and legs bound tightly. The jealous old woman was standing above her, holding a knife with a thin sharp blade. She wiped the blade back and forth across Mai Trừng’s face like a barber who had just learned his craft, just barely above her skin.

  “How many times have you slept together?” she demanded. “Try to remember exactly how many times. How many times in his office, how many times in a hotel room, how many times in your friends’ beds. Did he ever thrust one into your side to make you smile wearily and then do it. . . .” She ranted on as if possessed. Then she announced that she was going to slash Mai Trừng’s face, to give her one cut that would make her remember this moment for her whole life. She brought the razor-like blade up close to her eyes, staring at it and praising its sharpness. Then she slowly pressed the steel up against the other woman’s face.

  The knife suddenly snapped down into the floor, penetrating the tile and sending up a spark. The old lady twisted it up, yanking it out of the ground. Her left hand was clutching at her right hand, which had become as stiff as wood. The knife was still clutched tightly in her curled-up hand that had seemingly turned to stone. She wailed from the pain. She tossed herself about, praying to heaven. She writhed and shook as if in a fit of epilepsy. She prayed, screaming that she knew that it was her fault, and she begged heaven and earth to forgive her. She would abstain from meat and sex to repent.

  Nothing worked. Her arm was still frozen in pain. Mai Trừng was still tied tightly on the floor. At this point Quốc Đài came home. Since nobody had opened the door when he’d rung the bell repeatedly, he’d had to climb the back gate to get into the house. He was terrified to find Mai Trừng tied up on one side and his wife in the throes of pain on the other. He saw the knife that had been frozen in her hand. He understood right away how to free his wife. He ran over to release Mai Trừng first, his mouth begging his dear wife for forgiveness. As soon as the ropes were released all the way, his wife was able to sit up. He pulled the knife out of his wife’s hand and her whole arm suddenly softened, and she could stretch it out again. A moment later the pain stopped.

  Having escaped disaster, Quốc Đài’s wife collapsed, sobbing. “I pray on your life; I know my sin now. From now on I won’t dare do anything to harm you. Please find it in your heart to forgive me.”

  It was a moment of contrition as sacred as any, but it lasted only a second. People’s lives are an interminable chaos and disorder of possibilities. As Quốc Đài stood there, he still had to make an effort to control his lust so that he wouldn’t rush headlong and grab Mai Trừng. His wife still had to make an effort to control her jealousy so she would stop trying to find ways to se
cretly harm her. Both of them, in their ways, had intended to hunt her down. But after what had happened, neither dared do anything to her anymore. A week later, after returning from a business trip to Saigon, Mai Trừng submitted her resignation. Quốc Đài asked her where she was going but she wouldn’t say. Although feeling a slight regret over the chance he’d lost, he felt like a weight had been lifted. His wife positively fluttered with joy. She burned incense in gratitude—because now she didn’t have to hold back anymore, didn’t have to be anxious or fearful, and didn’t have to become a vegetarian.

  Heaven and earth themselves sent that woman here to punish this sinful world.

  SIX

  T hen, venom, to thy work.

  But Mai Trừng was no longer the object of these words. Now I had become the object. It’s true I had intended to poison her. A buttonsized poison pill, wrapped in a layer of nylon, always nestled in my pants pocket. But those who live by the sword die by the sword. With someone like Mai Trừng, such a saying wasn’t a cliché, but was absolutely true. It was an immediate reality. I would die from poison. I might even die from my very own little pill. I had chosen my own death and didn’t even know it. Just like Cốc, Bóp, and Phũ. They’d all chosen their own deaths for themselves.

  I went into the hotel’s karaoke room. A group of men and some hostesses were cuddling up to each other, taking turns holding the microphone and screaming out, “If I die tomorrow, will you be sad?” The mournful line came out sounding cheerful. Even I almost smiled at it. What a stupid line. Go off and die; your own true love, your other half, will head straight off to sing karaoke with another own true love. Stupidity. Karaoke is just an entertaining trick made for people that want the instant gratification of transcendence; only real singers have the right to hold the microphone and sing. Our voice always sounds good to our own ears, but for others, it’s a cruel torture of their eardrums. The great, idiotic invention of the Japanese. Kawabata’s dead, Akira Kurosawa seems dead, Kitarō seems dead, and the remnants of their cultural inheritance have devolved into diversions like this karaoke, a house of culture whose foundation is crumbling and sinking because it was accidentally built on a marsh. Electronics, computers, commerce and trade, a boggy culture, and an educational system that catered to the ignorant vulgarities of the nouveau riche all combined to create this rape of the musical arts.

  But I’m also dying. Dying people and decomposing cultural paradigms understand each other easily. I took a microphone and sang along with the group of people: “Keep on loving, love like never before, / Love like a fool, love like the hour’s late / . . . / The world is just the two of us, the scent of perfume, the clouds in the great sky, the distant heavens.” A kind of entertainment that skillfully seduces with its constant exuberance.

  Yet that’s what a dying person needs.

  Exactly what the dying need. Sick of it already, I dropped the microphone and left the room without looking at anyone. A shadow followed after me. I shivered with a touch of fear. I stopped in my tracks, but heard the steps keep coming. One step, two, three. Using a martial arts move, I stepped smoothly to the side and then spun around.

  I was face to face with the head engineer. That year, when his ship had been caught in a sudden storm, his whole crew, knowing his wife had been unfaithful to him, had cursed him as a Jonah.1 In fact, he really had been so distracted by the situation that he had left a flashlight next to the compass, causing it to indicate the wrong direction.

  We came together and embraced.

  He slapped me on the back, and then stepped backward. “Wait here, we’ll meet again in around an hour.” He winked like a sailor. “I’ve already paid my money,” he said, “and I’ve already got an appointment with a young lady in the karaoke room and I already rented a room. One shouldn’t break one’s word to women, right? Or do you want to come along?” I told him to rest at ease; I would wait for him in the Captain’s Studio on the second floor. I also let him know that he didn’t have to come back in exactly one hour; he should feel free to draw out the work—both its stages and its frequency—if he so desired.2

  I walked up to the Captain’s Studio. Ki was curled under the altar next to Cốc’s urn. I was moved by that display of loyalty. The dead are dead. Pain and suffering are only for the survivors. I led the dog into the elevator and out onto the top floor. It was dusk. The purple sky seemed graceful, as if it was meant as a consolation for us two miserable beings. Few artists could accurately capture the pale purple color of a sky like that. It was perhaps the most relaxing time of the day. The streets, packed to the curbs with traffic all day, have just emptied; just temporarily settled down for a suspended instant, before it would explode into a swirl of frantic amusement. It’s no fun to suffer so much and witness so much death, but it’s useful in understanding everything going on under the roofs of those houses, in those streets. I don’t trust people who’ve never had to witness a death. You have to witness it to the end, to hold the dead in your arms, to lay the shroud over the corpse. Only those people can see the truth of life, can understand people—understand living. Understanding death, I became calm and confident as I observed everyone who didn’t. That’s when I saw that I had to live.

  I had to live.

  Just an hour before, I had been despondently letting myself be carried downstream toward death. I saw that I was dying, and I was ready to wait for the dose of poison from wherever it would come.

  Now I wanted to live. Even if I had to lie mournfully, day after day, in front of the souls of the dead like Ki did. Even if I had to suffer, I still knew that it was luck enough to be born a human.

  I suddenly felt the desire to live more than ever before.

  I led Ki back down to the Captain’s Studio. The head engineer was walking casually through the room, looking at the paintings of the ocean. He was seeing again all the different moods of the sea he had ever witnessed. He was seeing again the paintings he’d seen in my quarters on the ship. It was as if he were meeting his old friends.

  He told me that he’d desperately wanted to see me, and had rushed back over. He hadn’t expected that he’d find a room just like one on the ship. He spoke about what had happened, about the day that the ship had sunk and only he and I had survived. He’d been washed up on a different island. There wasn’t a single person there to save him, and not a single thing to eat. Luckily for him, two days later a large ship passed by the island. People saw him take off his shirt and wave it around and had taken him back to Hải Phòng. Arriving home, he’d caught his wife and daughter living with two gigolos of about equal age, one couple to a room, going in and out casually, as if nothing were out of the ordinary. He’d grabbed a knife and chased the two guys and his wife around helter-skelter. His rage was redoubled by the fact that it was exactly this state of affairs that had angered the sea, sinking their ship and drowning all his mates. He chased his daughter with the knife as well. His house had leaked from the roof down.3 He choked with fury that his own lineage had given life to something so stupid and immoral.

  Anxiously, I wove in a quick question about how his wife and child were now.

  “How are they?” he repeated. He said his wife didn’t dare show her face back at his house. He’d heard somewhere that she’d become a kind of high-class escort for foreign sailors, and she’d then married a businessman from Hong Kong. That was the last he’d heard. He bragged that in the end he’d tricked some peasant student into marrying his daughter. Ironically, before she got married she’d had so many abortions that she’d become barren, and now that she had a husband who wants children, she can’t get pregnant. It had been two years and her stomach was still as flat as rice paper.

  I asked him what he was doing now.

  “What am I doing?” he repeated. Again, he said he was born to work on the sea. The sea is easy to understand; it’s sincere and it’s generous. When he went to sea, he never got seasick. It was only when he came ashore that he would be overcome with nausea, a kind of landsickness
. The ground under his feet would undulate as if being rocked by waves. Looking at other people, he would just see faces that looked like distorted gray shapes, as if they’d been clumsily molded into a mass of lead. Even his only daughter didn’t look anything like a human. But at least it seemed his family had settled down for now. His debt to nature had been paid off. He was ready to return to the ocean. Today he’d come to Hanoi to kill a day; two days later his ship would weigh anchor.