Apocalypse Hotel: A Novel (Modern Southeast Asian Literature)

by Ho Anh Thai

  On this day a force of officials and police had been mobilized, the officials standing in the roads and the cops down in the fields. The rice was blossoming, and as the residents had set off into the fields to work they had been intercepted and stopped. In response, the whole village poured out of their houses armed with canes and sticks and shovels. From below, the police attacked the villagers with their batons until their arms were tired, and they fired into the air. Like bees swarming out of a broken hive. Stalks of young rice lay thick in the fields, squirming and writhing. People fainted. People were injured.

  “The old district chairman you saw standing up there on the bank?” one of the men said. “During the war, my auntie took care of him and hid him in her underground hideaway. And then after the war, during the time of the peasants’ agricultural quota, he let people come and take my auntie’s chickens and pigs as payment in place of agricultural tax because we were too poor and didn’t have enough paddy to hand over.”

  “And that old cop who was standing over in the field? Different guy, same story,” the other man said. “During the war, he came to our place and told us that he needed logs to line the roads for the trucks crossing this muddy area. To take out the posts, we had to dismantle our entire house. And my whole family had to move down into our shelter. But, even though they pulled our whole house apart, we were still determined to fight the Americans. Suffer now and live better afterward! Now we can see clearly. Suffer then and still suffer now! After all we did, he still lets people beat me bloody.”

  I took them to the hospital, where they were crudely bandaged. They didn’t have any money to pay, so they couldn’t stay. Knowing that they would have to walk back otherwise, I waited for them, and then I took them back close to where everything had happened and let them out. Then I turned onto another road, and drove down toward the beach of Cửa Lớn.

  I parked the car on an empty stretch of road, next to a stretch of shoreline. I would eat dinner first, and then I’d find somewhere to rest. I had some water and some bread, and gave Ki some canned food to eat first. Please forgive me, my travel mate. I knew that turning my friend into a sacrificial guinea pig wasn’t right. But, after all, how many people had given their lives for their friends? Nowadays it’s hard to find the kind of friends that are willing to lay down their lives for each other.

  And I craved life now more than ever.

  With my heart full of shame, I ate dinner silently in the night.

  Suddenly, Ki leaped into the back seat and started barking toward the rear of the car. Under the noise, I could hear some women’s voices saying something. I saw them stop a safe distance from the car, so as not to provoke the dog. Then one of them called out, “Hey, man, how about a quickie? It’s just fifty thousand đồng.”

  I tidied up my food and drinks, opened the right-side door to let Ki up into the front seat, and drove until I found somewhere more deserted. On one side, dark purple mountaintops were printed across a sky thick with stars. On the other, the rows of casuarina trees descended gradually to the sea. Phosphorescent waves shimmered in the distance.

  I had a growing sense that Mai Trừng was somewhere nearby. There was something reaching out from the peaks, from the range of mountains, from the shoreline, and from the glowing waves. Something like a guiding call. I lowered my head onto the steering wheel and, for a moment, fell into an oblivious sleep.

  The sound of Ki’s barking woke me. I spotted a group of figures laughing seductively beneath a patch of trees. Inviting voices, nothing overbearing about them, called out. A sudden craving almost overwhelmed me. Who knew if this would be the last chance in my life? Any time he can, a man will jump at the chance, because even though he always wants it, he can’t always have it.

  But in the same moment I remembered my current situation. Perhaps the next day I would find Mai Trừng. Maybe the next day I would have to confess my sins. Before a confession, one should abstain from meat, should ensure one’s body is clean and pure.

  I drove on, following a road running along the foothills. I finally found an area beneath a grove of trees that was truly deserted. Only the clicking of geckos and the chirping of crickets echoed in the night. Only then did I finally feel truly calm. I curled into a ball on the back seat. Ki sat on the front seat. Almost totally worn out, I fell straight into a dreamless sleep.

  I woke up abruptly, just before dawn, to the ringing of pagoda bells. It was the sound of one large bell and several smaller ones. The harmonic effect was uproarious and anxious, like resounding words of warning. The sound of the bells flowed out, over, and down from the mountain’s summit, scattered across the surrounding shores, and fell and shattered upon on the ground’s surface like crystal shards. The air was filled with clanging, clinking, clattering fragments of sound.

  Was the bell announcing the coming of the apocalypse? I asked myself.

  It was almost as if I couldn’t let myself up back into the waking world. I couldn’t open my eyes. Maybe I was truly exhausted. I wouldn’t make it in time to repent. I’d fallen into a devastated world. The tolling of the bells swelled around me, showering crystalline splinters onto the earth. I felt myself losing my grip on consciousness, and passed out.

  “Hello, sir? Sir, are you awake? Whatcha doing sleeping here? You should just go check into a guesthouse.”

  It was a young kid’s voice. It kept calling me, perhaps half a dozen times, until I finally managed to come around a bit. At first, I thought I was still dreaming. I was at the foot of a small mountain. What’s more, I was lying on my back, looking up, and I could see the side of the mountain and a glittering green pine forest. A single pagoda sat upon the summit. A few groups of tourists had left the beach early and were working their way along a scenic trail leading to the temple. Out above the ocean, the sun had begun to rise. A discolored, bruised sun, like an omen of impending catastrophe.

  I sat up, fully awake. A boy in a straw hat stood next to the car. His body was festooned with necklaces, bracelets, and earrings made of seashells and hundreds of keys hung on strings. In his hands he was carrying bags of dried squid and fish—the wares he’d come out to sell. His face was dark and lined, simple yet strange. His brown eyes were crystal clear. Oh, god, another pair of brown eyes like my own. Even stranger: as the boy approached the car, Ki didn’t react at all—didn’t even bark. It was almost as if Ki recognized him. As if he knew he was harmless.

  “Hey, kid, this is still Cửa Lớn, right?” I asked him, rubbing my eyes.

  “Where else would it be if it wasn’t Cửa Lớn?”

  “What’s that pagoda up on the mountain?”

  “That’s Bảo Sơn Mountain. The pagoda up there is called Bảo Sơn Pagoda.”

  He laughed like a schoolboy.

  I stepped out of the car, turning my face up to look at the mountain, suddenly filled with respect. I felt my heart tremble slightly. Then I looked back out toward the ocean. The beach was smooth and pearly white. The nervous waves retreated into the far distance.

  “Do you know where Ms. Giềng’s place is?” I asked.

  The boy pretended to struggle for a moment, shoving some packets of dried fish into his shoulder bag.

  “Follow me,” he announced, without looking at me.

  “Is there somewhere to leave the car?”

  “Drive the car out toward the beach. There’s parking there.”

  The boy sat in the back seat. I drove the car down to the beach and left it in front of a seaside guesthouse. With that taken care of, the two of us walked back through the casuarina trees. As we walked, he always stayed a few steps behind me. I tried to go slowly and wait for him to catch up, but he’d just slow down to stay behind. His eyes drilled holes in my back.

  “So who are you and how do you know Ms. Giềng?” he asked suddenly.

  I turned around. His eyes flashed.

  “Are you my father?” he asked.

  His voice sounded feverish.

  My heart skipped a beat. On to
p of everything, what new absurdity was this? I used to be someone who had sown his fair share of wild oats. But not here. Yet it tore my heart to know that I could do nothing for this child.

  “I’m looking for Miss Trừng,” I said. “I heard she’s staying with Ms. Giềng.”

  The boy bowed his head. When he spoke, his voice was dry and cold and full of hopelessness. “Auntie Giềng is my mother. Miss Trừng’s up at the temple.”

  As I walked up the mountain, every step felt incredibly heavy. The boy confessed that he’d been hoping against hope that I was his father and that I’d returned to reclaim my family. Just like his father in his daydreams, I’d shown up driving my own car, and with a German shepherd guard dog.

  The last time he’d seen his father, he confided, he’d just turned four. Now he couldn’t even remember his father’s face. His parents met when his mother found a job breaking rock at the construction site on Bút Mountain. After the war, his mother had been demobilized and was unemployed. She’d only finished secondary school, and so had had to work in construction. His father was the contractor. They lived together side by side in Giềng’s small thatched-roof home. In five years, Giềng gave birth to three children: first two sons, one now twelve and the other ten; and then a daughter, who’d just turned eight. During those five years, her man had wandered in and out, but they continued to live together, though they never performed the marriage rites. He confessed that he already had a wife and kids in his home village up in the north country. Giềng accepted her life, accepted the labor of raising her children. She felt joyful, at least, to have them. Many of her former unit-mates had neither husbands nor children. Just six months after the birth of her third child, her daughter, the construction team succeeded in totally leveling Bút Mountain. From that day forward, she never heard from him again.

  “Recently, I ran away from home. I went north by train to try and find the village of Keo,” the boy said.

  “You what? How the hell did you manage that?” I stared at him, flabbergasted. He was twelve years old, just a baby.

  “I found the village, and asked everyone. I even asked the village chairman. But nobody in the village had ever heard of anyone from there named Quế, and there wasn’t anyone that had gone off to work as a contractor down at Bút Mountain. I wandered around that village for two days. People fed me and finally everyone pitched in five hundred or a thousand đồng to buy me a return train ticket.”

  His voice choked. But his eyes remained dry. Such children have no tears.

  We arrived at the entrance of the pagoda. It wasn’t a large temple, but it had all three parts: the upper, middle, and lower shrines. Its true blessing was its stunning position on the mountain. Beneath it, the ocean stretched off into the distance, its surface tremulous.

  I stood hidden behind a cluster of đại trees and wild peonies. I told the child to go call Mai Trừng, but not to tell her that someone was looking for her, only that he needed her for some small errand.

  Soon Mai Trừng walked out from somewhere behind the pagoda. When she saw me, she stood transfixed in recognition. A look of pleasure flashed through her eyes. Seeing that look, I became a bit more confident. But the expression on her face quickly transformed into one of anxiety. It was clear that she wasn’t worrying for herself, but for me. It was the same look she’d had every time before, with every other man, as if she wanted to say, Don’t come near, it’s too dangerous.

  I worried that she’d run away at once. So I fell to my knees.

  “I’m here to repent. I don’t dare think anything evil about you anymore.”

  Ship captains never kneel—even when faced with sea monsters and hurricanes. But when you’re repenting and begging forgiveness, kneeling is required.

  Mai Trừng rushed over and pulled me back to my feet.

  “If your heart is free of all evil, you have no need to worry. And neither do I.”

  The boy stood stupefied for a moment, staring at this strange scene. When he saw me stand up, he immediately slipped away.

  “I was afraid that I’d killed you, too,” Mai Trừng added. She looked like she’d just unloaded a heavy burden.

  Pure life force seemed to suddenly flow into me, filling my empty and exhausted body. Suddenly I was awakened to see that the entire pagoda and all of the trees were covered with gold from the sunlight. And the sun, the sun shone brilliantly, without a hint of its previous bruised, livid appearance. My ears, buzzing just moments before, registered the sounds of birds singing all around.

  “I must repent as well. Because of me, many people have died,” Mai Trừng said. She guided me along a hidden trail behind the pagoda.

  “But they were evil people, people who were going to hurt you,” I said in surprise.

  We sat down together on a block of stone that was flat as a chessboard.

  “I know, I know. But I can’t bear always having to watch, to witness, them being punished so viciously right in front of my face. No matter who they are, I still pity them. I fled up here so that I wouldn’t cause any more deaths.”

  “So are you going to become a nun?”

  “How could I ever be a nun? I came here to stay with Giềng. Every day Giềng gathers water from the well and carries it on her shoulders back up the mountain to the pagoda. I asked to come up here and volunteer my own labor. The elder nun who lives here was happy to accept the help. So I found somewhere to hide from humanity.”

  I told her what had happened to Cốc at Bình Sơn Beach. She told me that she still remembered his eyes. She still remembered how, when she was trapped among the men, only I had tried to stop the dangerous game, but had been unable to. After Cốc’s death, she’d run, terrified, back to Hanoi. The day before that, she’d killed another man the same way. She didn’t dare return home. She fled to the Apocalypse Hotel to hide, covered herself in makeup, making herself ugly to hide her identity, and even occasionally wearing a wig. She was afraid that we’d hunt her down. But, unpredictably, she met me in the hotel, right there in the Captain’s Studio. So she had to leave the hotel and return home. She’d prayed that the creator of those paintings wouldn’t die because of her. But she had been totally unaware of the subsequent deaths of Bóp and Phũ. In Saigon she was vaguely aware of a motorbike accident behind her one day. At the time she was caught up in other problems, so she didn’t dare turn back to look. She’d just sped away.

  And now she found out that other people had perished out of her sight, died as a result of evil thoughts that had only just surfaced in their consciousness; thoughts that had not become actions.

  That day, I told Mai Trừng about my floating life of ups and downs at sea. She told me her own story. And we were like two lost souls drifting on the ocean. Ships sunk. Our vessels wrecked. Both clinging to one life preserver. Both washed up onto a deserted island. There was nothing we could do but lean on each other. Depend upon each other.

  Auntie Miên had taken Mai Trừng to Hanoi when she was fifteen months old. A young woman of twenty-seven who’d had her left leg amputated, who had to walk on crutches, had journeyed to Hanoi with a knapsack on her back and a baby girl in her arms. Nobody, looking upon this sad sight, could avoid feeling pity. It would be years before Miên finally would be able to obtain a prosthetic leg, and make walking and standing on her own much easier. Meanwhile, her best friends helped her, giving her a few ration stamps for sugar, milk, and food to raise the baby.

  And she was an exceptionally beautiful baby. Just like a fairy that, because of some karmic debt, had been sent down in human form. At primary school, her teachers and friends loved her. Nobody ever got tired of looking at her. But, while some people love beauty, it drives others mad. There are people born with a taste for blood; their arms and legs itch with the desire to stab and slash at others. There are people who see a blank canvas and must deface it. In her primary school class there was such a child. She was thin and shriveled like a worm-eaten gourd. Her bulging irises were completely surrounded b
y her white eyeballs, and everywhere she looked she saw suspicion and wickedness. She never had a kind thought for Mai Trừng. One day, as the students were heading out to recess, Mai Trừng saw her elbowing her way toward the front of the class and stepped aside to let her through. The girl passed by and then stopped, turned around, and demanded to know why Mai Trừng hadn’t just gone ahead. Mai Trừng stood there silently, saying nothing. The girl announced that from then on Mai Trừng would be her servant and that every day when school got out, she’d have to carry her books home for her, and only then could she go home herself. After school, Mai Trừng had to struggle with arms full of the girl’s books. When they got to the gate of the school the girl criticized her, asking why she was holding the book bag so incompetently. Then she grabbed Mai Trừng by the hair and pulled her fist back to hit her.

  Before she had a chance to land her punch, she collapsed—her eyes glazing, her mouth frothing.

  The other schoolchildren saw everything. If not, Mai Trừng would have been in real trouble, since people would have thought she’d attacked the girl.

  That day, when Mai Trừng went home, she told Miên what had happened, and said she wanted to visit her friend, make sure the girl was okay. Miên suggested that she invite her other classmates to go along with her. The whole class entered the girl’s bedroom, where she lay sick and docile. But when Mai Trừng entered the girl sprang up. She grabbed a knife and an orange that were sitting next to the bed, and tried to fling both into Mai Trừng’s face. Instead, the knife and the orange clattered to the floor as the girl doubled over with a shriek of pain and frustration. Nobody suspected that Mai Trừng could have caused whatever was afflicting the girl. People just thought that she’d had some kind of nervous breakdown.