McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories

by Michael Chabon

  Bar Wardrobe, slotted above Waikiki Hula Karaoke Palace, was well named: cramped, dark, hot, varnished. Two inhabitants dwelt within. One lay slumped in a pool of mahogany light, as if shot ten seconds ago. His companion was semiobscured by gloom. Was this Bar Wardrobe? I asked, just to ask something. Her nod said, Stupid question. When would the barman be back? She blew smoke over the snorer to indicate, That’s him . Great. How could I get a drink? She shrugged. Well, how had she gotten hers? This time she deigned to answer verbally, “I have an arrangement with the management.” So I clipped a $10 bill to the till and helped myself to a Kilmagoon and soda. No sign behind the bar of a battered flute case or a pre-Meiji-period knife. The woman lit a match whose flare-up lit a face younger than her voice. Hooked nose, defiant lips, Hawaiian blood or maybe Filipina, I guessed. Birth-mark like a wine stain but my right hand brushed my left to confirm my engagement ring was in my soap bag at the hotel. Blemishes fasten memories. Don’t you look at me that way, Vulture; when did you ever turn down a little entertainment? “You are a model,” I began, “am I right? It takes one to—” She cut in. “Wanna hear funny joke?” Okay, I said. “Okay. Tall blond American marine walks into a bar in Manila, where he chooses a cute native girl. So lucky she feels! She, a trainee hairdresser in her first month in Manila, already on her way to luxury apartment in Beverly Hills or Honolulu. Not like cousins in sweatshops or worse. No way, not her. River of dollars, many drinks. You can’t get pregnant your first few times, the marine laughs, later, on her back, then her front. A medical fact, he says. Sure, a warning goes off, but she’s too drunk now to fight—stop me if you know this joke, okay?— and he does call her next weekend, and the next, and the next. ‘My boyfriend this my boyfriend that,’ she says to make the other hairdressers jealous. Three months the doctor gives her the news. You guess it yet? Pregnant as Queen Turtle. Funny, hey? Her boyfriend tells her their baby will be a beautiful Filipino-American son, okay, no problem, they move to California, okay. She weeps with joy. Good man, good father, not like her father, the fat sweaty incest pig. He promises to phone next night from base. Guess what? No call. Two weeks later an officer at the base tells her she isn’t the first girl to be duped by an American saying, ‘Hey, babe, I’m a marine, stick with me.’ She has no one to discuss pregnancy to, so she begs and borrows and spends everything on a private clinic. Keep it secret. The operation is a five-star fuckup. Half her womb gets sucked out too. She can’t stand for six months. Blood all the time. Well, this joke’s over almost. Years later the same girl, she lives in Honolulu. She does hair for rich wives. Hears their chatter about husbands, about affairs, about babies. Some days she wants cut their wrists, some days hers, some days the wrists of this world. So. Whatever line you’re to begin, don’t. All of them I heard already, okay?”

  “Do I look like a fucking marine?” I shut the door.

  “What did you do to the door?” Monday night in room 404 was no more restful than Sunday. “What did you do to the door ?” Hearing someone jibber at whatever stalks their dreams unnerves the lemon-yellow shit out of me. Wallpaper and paste is what separates our waking selves from those jibbering night stalkers. I padded down to the Coke machine at the end of the corridor, hoping to encounter Wei. All I met were black moths. Back in my room I took a round of aspirin, stripped, and watched my body in the mirror to see if I, too, was an It inhabiting a Me. The jury was out. I took the elevator up to the roof to try to see your last view, but the tiny access stairs were locked by the shiny new padlock. The replacement for the one you’d cut through. So I had to make do with sitting on the steps. Back in my room I read a story from Death in Midsummer called “Patriotism,” where a military husband and wife commit seppuku together. Sex in death and death in sex. You loved it too; you’d underlined your favorite passages. I smoked a spliff but couldn’t stop crying. Sadness is fertile and thorny and takes root in any soil.

  Werewolf was all sympathy when I complained about my nightmare-prone neighbor. “The Holiday Inn’s the eighty-floor fucker out by the lagoon. They insulate the walls there. Four hundred bucks a night. You’d like it. You’d sleep like a baby.” Little wonder your wife checked out early, I very nearly told him. I walked to Shore Bird Beach Broiler for the breakfast buffet and the view of bikinis in the sun. Options re: Yukio Mishima’s knife had dwindled to a pretty pathetic clutch. The police had not contacted me. In the Hawaii Times I saw that my personal ad—“Nozomu, contact me about Vulture”—had been misprinted as “Nozomi, contact me about vultures.” Jesus Vegetable Christ. I caught a bus to Honolulu Center and spent the day making inquiries at various lost-property offices in museums, malls and the bus station, wherever I could think of; consulted the owners of antique shops; considered engaging a private detective, for ten seconds, before I realized how stupid I’d sound. Real-life Maltese Falcon quests are wastes of time. You do not find a lost object in a city unless you know exactly where to locate it, in which case it isn’t really lost. The place itself got to me. Nightingale may love it here, models are paid to love Hawaii, but I wouldn’t be sorry if Oahu sinks under a tsunami and soon. Palm trees are tarantula ugly. Honolulu is concrete ugly. Waikiki is glitzy ugly. Jetloads of Westerners microwaving themselves are pink ugly. Ala Moana Center, a monstrous cuboid vagina for Japanese tourists to ejaculate yen during seven-day orgies of spending, is unthinkably ugly. Mildewed side streets where syringes roll in weedy doorways of the Polynesian poor are just ugly, but fat vacationers paying fat prices for fat fat in fat seats in fat diners by fat parking lots of fat cars by fat freeways are ugly ugly ugly ugly. Wipe them out or wipe me out.

  Nightingale called most evenings at nine. Matrimony, dear Vulture, is a political act. Don’t look at me that way. Nightingale is attracted to my assets—depleted by the purchase of Yukio Mishima’s knife— and I am aroused by hers. You Asians have always been pragmatic about this. Romantic marriage is a European fantasy, and Jesus Legal-aid Christ, we have the divorce rates to prove it. Fidelity is the smuggest elf of the love fantasy, so every evening by ten I was in Runaway Horses trying to get laid without lowering my standards too drastically. In L.A. Nightingale was shining up that Czech photographer’s zoom lens, doubtless. Why should I mind as long as she is as discreet as I am? Marriage is a public act; sex is a private one. What I mind is that my forget-me-not eyes are not what they were. What I minded was Wei’s mockery when I returned alone. What I minded is that Bar Wardrobe was locked by the time I scaled its stairs. Here’s another Big Thought, one that most men do not know they know, although Mishima says it without spelling it out: Sex is not, as cliché claims, a little death—sex is man’s fuck you! to death. When we are inside another body, death is not inside ours. Hence the absence of sex drives men to folly, lunacy or even worse.

  Friday morning exposed a chink in my week’s armored bad luck. Werewolf was perched on a hillock of angling equipment in reception, threading a fishing line. “Off fishing?” I asked, just as a galaxy-class SUV pulled up outside. Werewolf muttered, “No, it’s my line-dancing morning,” and left Wei at reception. Opportunity stuck its thumb up my ass. From a call box I got hold of Dwight Silverwind, telling him the hour of repayment was at hand, then sidled back to Hotel Aloha to watch where Wei put the key. When the call came her face went from complacency to worry in twenty seconds. Dwight can still work his magic, the fraudulent old prick. Five minutes later Wei went rushing out, carrying a document wallet and leaving reception guarded by Barney the dinosaur whose Back at . . . toy clock promised me a whole hour. One retrieved key and one deep metaphorical breath later I was in the back office, stashed with clutter from more prosperous days for Hotel Aloha. Trespasser, fretted Fear, trespasser, trespasser . Strung beads clatted as I passed into a lounge and kitchenette maintained with the minimum effort. The furnishings were bargain bin circa 1975. Fire escapes zigzagged the walls of the inner concrete courtyard. This rectangle of concrete must be where you fell. Here. Right here. Someone stepped over my grave. On the wall, a framed photograp
h held a poodle-cuddling woman in long-faded Hawaiian sunshine, perhaps at Lahaina. Mrs. Werewolf, deceased, I presume. No evidence of children, past or present. The bedroom housed an unmade bed and a dressing table hidden under bales of Angler’s Weekly and Playboy. Well, Vulture, I searched in a cupboard of hammers, saws, chisels, power tools and screws in labeled boxes but no seppuku dagger or flute case; a bestiary of purple teddies, lime rabbits and lovey-eyed dalmatians; an empty fish tank, under mattresses, between folded towels, amid dead shoes and albums of fishing trips, inside an umbrella stand and casserole dishes. Hurry, nagged Fear, hurry, hurry. Possible footsteps from reception kept worrying me. How long had Wei been gone? How long before she smelled wild goose? Should I take every key I could find and search the entire hotel? Oh, impossible, a squad of spies would need a week. Then the reception bell chimed and a wheezy voice called through, “Frank? You at home?” I froze. The outer office door creaked. Dildo! shrieked Fear, You left it ajar!

  “Frankie!”

  I crouched down looking for a hiding place. “What you doing to yourself in there? It’ll make you go blind. Ain’t that why you bought Miss Slitty?” I scuttled under the table and beseeched the god of farce to do me this one favor but banged my head on a leg. “Frankie?” I heard heavy breathing. I saw his legs lumber by, close enough to touch. A bottle was opened, a glass filled. A magazine opened. A chuckle. “Thanks, Frankie, don’t mind if I do.” If he sat down now, he’d have a clear sight of me crouching here. My knee was killing me. Sixty seconds scraped by. Sixty more passed by before I suspected he might have gone.

  Wei was in a royal bitch of a mood when I got back from lunch. “Those Immigration fatheads! Just after you left this morning, I get a call saying there’s an inconsistency has been found with my green card extension, so present yourself immediately and ask for Olly Schmidt. No, no, it won’t wait, immediately means now, so off I run and guess what happens when after fifty goddamn minutes my number finally flashes up? There is no Schmidt in Immigration! A Sampson, a Silvestri, a Stein, but no Schmidt. No one knows a thing about why I had to go there! Fatheads!” American bureaucracy for you, I sympathized, then steered the subject to the nocturnal disturbances on the fourth floor. Wei just frowned. “What shouting? I sleep like a baby in this place.” Then what about her trip to the Coke machine the other night? Wei just gave me an Are you crazy? look. “I sleep like a baby in this place.”

  Nightingale called to check exactly when my plane got back to Yerbas Buenas, and to ask what I’d like for my welcome-back dinner. For an eternity of three or five seconds I contemplated telling her to marry someone who loves her back. “Peppered steak.” I came to my senses, realizing there are several reasons why this information might be useful, one of whom might be Czech. “Your mozzarella salad, and you, my angel.” Jesus Gold-digging Christ, I thought to myself climbing into the shower, what a catch I am. Brutal truth was, if Yukio Mishima’s dagger failed to materialize, I have nowhere to fall but Nightingale’s money. If she knew that, she’d call the wedding off. “I don’t do cheap,” she says. I can’t afford to see her go. I don’t do cheap, either. Fears of financial insecurity wrecked my shower. But what I saw on the bathroom mirror as I climbed out, finger-written in letters not yet steamed over, turned my warm skin cold:

  Who? When? Dripping, I wrapped a towel around me, unlocked the door and looked down the buzzing corridor. Who, me? said the Coke machine. The elevator was climbing from 1F upward, not 4F down. Werewolf? Too subtle. Who else has a key? Wei? A joke? A threat? Who? A skeleton key? A cleaner? Another guest with a muddled-up key? The nocturnal shouter? But why that message? Back in the bathroom, the mirror letters were fading. Had they really been so clear? Isn’t it more likely that room 404’s previous occupant had drawn them on? Quarter-convinced by this, I dressed and wandered out for some air, for want of any other plan. Wei, far from hiding a triumphant smirk, was watching Will and Grace on a mini TV. Ten P.M. I wanted to speak to someone who knows me. Nightingale? Women attribute emotional calls to a guilty conscience. Jesus Null-and-void Christ, I miss you, Vulture. I found myself on a bridge over the Lunalilo Freeway, watching the lights in Pearl Harbor. Depression turns outdoors indoors. Dying in here.

  Werewolf was at reception by the time I’d eaten and wandered back to Hotel Aloha. The scarlet carnation in the semen-cloudy vase had rotted to tampon maroon. My last-but-one night, so I had little to lose by getting out your photo and telling Werewolf I had a couple of questions. My hairy hotelier squinted. “So that Jap’s why you’re hanging around like a wedged turd. Well, ain’t got nothing to say about him, ’cept I wish to sweet God he’d ended his misery in someone else’s hotel. The paperwork he cost me! The favors I had to call in to hush it up.” My request that Werewolf hand over those possessions which he’d “forgotten” to give to the police produced a row of browned fangs. “What’re you saying?” Theft from a suicide is still theft is what I’m saying; that I knew about the knife; that I wanted it back. Werewolf chose a lookey here, asshole voice. “If I had anything belonging to that faggoty half-Jap”—he flicked your photo and I fought an urge to ram a pencil up his nostril and through his brain—“I’d probably drop it down the nearest sewer.” I held his gaze but explained that your relatives would pay a reasonable sum for the knife’s safe return. It has no monetary value, but it was a family heirloom. Werewolf went all oh? “A ‘family heirloom’? Well, bless my bleeding heart, that changes everything. Then I’d definitely drop it down the nearest sewer. Will you tell Faggoty Jap’s relatives that from me, during this dark and difficult time?”

  The pyramid of mirror letters in 404 had faded away. Logic administered bromides: staying in a hotel where you died just two weeks ago, searching for another suicide’s blade, wedding just around the corner . . . little wonder I was this wired up. I hadn’t— haven’t—gotten over what you did. Disbelief was my first reaction. You’d just closed a deal worth as much as Princess Diana’s damaged diamond Rolex, second hand forever twitching on 8:17. More than the telegraph pole James Dean drove into. Mishima’s knife would make us both wealthy for two or three years. You were the newest member of a balloonist’s syndicate. Please, not a suicide. But the policewoman talked me through the coroner’s verdict: the message on your mirror, going down going down going down, confirmed as yours by the state graphologist, to your prints on the wire cutter used to access the roof, ten other proofs, left little room for doubt. Nervous collapse? Compounded by your Mishima complex? But no. Doubt grows into counterfact in the tiniest crack.

  “Give it back!” Percussive, savage, desperate. My limbs were sticky from sleeping in clothes. The shouter had been quiet for a few nights. I thought he’d left. “Give it back!” I called back, “Who are you? Are you okay?” No answer. I listened, I listened, I listened. I got up, crept outside and pressed my ear against 403. Silence. Against 405. Silence. Lights off in both rooms. On not quite a whim, I crept up to Wei’s room and pressed my ear against her room. Her breathing? Or my own? Why did I feel that sense of being watched? Hotel Aloha has no CCTV. A black moth hinged its wings. Uneasy, I went back to my room and turned on the TV with the sound right down.

  Saturday evening’s Runaway Horses was fuggy with laughter, booming reggae and Asian-American youth in bloom. In my last clean Gucci shirt I took the very last seat at the bar and Shingo slid me my nearly last Sapporo in Waikiki. This time tomorrow, I’d be back in Yerbas Buenas with a business to try to rebuild. The Yukio Mishima Knife Book would be a bad passage in a disastrous chapter, but the main narrative would go on. A woman right by me cleared her throat and said, “I never thought you were marine. You’re too stick-insect. They’d throw you out.” Well, thank you very much, I smiled at the Filipina from Bar Wardrobe. She stepped over my irony. “I drank too many the other day, okay? Spoke too many too. What you learned, shush, is secret, please.” Therapeutic to spill your guts occasionally, I assured her, and promised I’d never repeat a word. But my silence could be bought only by her name. Grace,
she told me, and Grace took my Sapporo Black so I ordered another. Some loud Aussies across the bar shot me looks: rebuttees, I guessed. “So you live on Oahu?” asked Grace. “You a businessman or a tourist or what?” I surrendered to the seductive quasi-truth and told her I run a special business, one that never advertises, which obtains singular artifacts that are otherwise unobtainable. Grace was sharp. She asked how we got clients. Introduction only, I told her, unable to resist giving her a business card. She read, “ ‘What You Do Not Know You Want.’ That all?” I nodded, and told her I was on Oahu trying to locate a historic weapon for a wealthy client. Grace was fascinated. “Is all legal, your business?” I told her, “If we exercise discretion, the question doesn’t apply.” My codealer, I explained, had apparently entrusted this item to the ex-owner of Runaway Horses. . . . “Who,” Grace filled in the blank, “is Runaway Barman now. Is hilarious joke, yes?” Hilarious, yes.

  “Death isn’t some faraway land, okay, at the end of time,” Grace insisted several bottles later. I had no inkling how we got onto the subject. “Death is the white lines down the highway, okay, in your cutlery drawer, okay, in bottles in bathroom cabinets, inside cells of your body. Death, hey, we’re made of the stuff. Death is the pond; we the living are the fish. So to answer your question, yes, of course, the dead are everywhere, and yes, they watch us. Like TV. When we interest them.” Women love being asked if they are clairvoyant, so I did so. “Men always ask that,” frowned Grace, “but intuition is just seeing and listening, is not being blind because it does not agree with culture or fashion or desires. Intuition is not mystical.” Believing that the dead swarm around the living sounded pretty mystical to me, I suggested, if not morbid. “Buying and selling suicide weapons of your Japanese writer is not morbid?” Yes, Vulture, loose lips sink ships, but I haven’t wanted a woman as much as I wanted Grace since you-know-when. “Such a knife will only attract devil’s eye, no? Is obvious!” I said, Would she consider continuing our discussion in a less public venue? “Okay, sure, I consider.” But when I got back from the bathroom, Jesus Mary Poppins Christ, her bar stool was straining under a German as big as a grizzly. Gone, shrugged Shingo. Sorry . I ordered a last beer to show those smirking Australians but dealt the bar a series of vicious toe pokes and hoped that Grace intuited each one.