Apocalypse Hotel: A Novel (Modern Southeast Asian Literature) (15 page)

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.
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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.

“The day you gave up working on the sea, the whole crew felt really sorry,” he said.

The two of us were standing in front of the wooden steering wheel. I gave it a spin. Like the wheel of time. Like the spinning wheel of karma.

“You know, everyone’s full of regrets,” I said. “It’s inevitable. But I ask myself over and over why should a person who is both decent and talented run into so many problems. Don’t be like me. A low-grade oil like myself always finds itself spilled into the mud.”

I told him that he could stay the night in my room; he didn’t have to worry about renting a place.

“It’s a deal. But let me go back and have one more go with that girl. I’ve gotta save up for the long days drifting at sea.”

After all of his ups and downs, he still talked easily, freely. His life debt had been paid and from now on everything he gained would be regarded as interest.

That night, the two of us sharing a room, he told me that once he’d suddenly thought of me, and that he’d asked everyone on his ship where I was and what I was doing, but nobody knew. That was the time his ship had gone through Lan Hải Bay. He’d seen a young mother and her son on a boat selling longans. The boy, about four years old, had looked up at their ship with longing in his large clear eyes. He’d seen that same look before, those same crystal clear eyes filled with the same kind of longing when he’d see me sitting in front of my easel on the ship.

The next morning, he left the hotel and returned to Hải Phòng. Nowadays it’s hard work to be a seaman. Making money had become meaningless to him; it had only had led to disaster at home—and, anyway, on land you could earn much more. Going to sea was no longer about filling his pockets. It had become instead a kind of inescapable karma. A drug he couldn’t quit. He didn’t say anything, but I could tell that he wanted to pull me back into it, get me hooked again on the narcotic of the sea. “If you come with me,” he said, “you’ll create beautiful paintings.”

In my heart of hearts, I knew he was right. But for now, I had to keep living. And my life lay in the hands of another.

The first thing I had to do was to get rid of the little poison pill. But where could I toss this kind of super-potent poison? Zoroastrians don’t dare bury their dead for fear of polluting the earth, don’t dare cremate them for fear of polluting the fire, and don’t dare dump them in a river for fear of polluting the water. It was the same with me and my pill. I couldn’t chuck it in a lake. I couldn’t bury it. Who knew if some dog or cat might come by and dig it up? I couldn’t throw it in the dump; there were always kids going through the refuse. I struggled with the question and finally decided that the best thing to do would be to throw it in the sewer. People are used to throwing disgusting and toxic objects into the sewer, even things that block the flow of the sewage system.

So I rid myself of the poison pill. But at the same time I needed to purge my guilty soul. From now on I wouldn’t allow myself any evil thoughts towards Mai Trừng. Anything evil that I might plan to do to her, even in my imagination, would fall back upon my own head.

I burned incense in repentance. I prayed that she would always meet with luck.

In the end I simply tracked her down using the address that Quốc Đài had given me. It was a colonial-era house that had been partitioned into tiny compartments in order to house who knows how many families. The decades-old wooden staircase had, over time, been the victim of various owners who only knew how to tread upon it, but never wanted to keep it up. Now it groaned and shook like an epileptic. The hallway at the top had been transformed into extra living space for the occupants of the cramped apartments. It contained oil-burning and coal-burning stoves and a basket of vegetables perched on a water dispenser.

I stopped in front of the door that some of the residents downstairs had pointed out, and knocked tentatively. The woman who greeted me was around forty years old, and wore thick eyeglasses, the exact model of an old-time schoolmarm. “Excuse me, ma’am, I’m looking for Mai Trừng.” Coming face to face with the schoolmarm, I’d instantly reverted to a schoolboy persona.

“She’s gone.”

“Excuse me, ma’am, what time will she return?”

“I’ve told you, she’s gone. For good. I have no idea if she’ll ever come back.”

“Please allow me to ask one more question, ma’am; do you happen to know where she’s gone?” My trembling, feverish voice startled her. Her blurred, pale pupils behind her glasses seemed to freeze. Then she lowered her eyes, avoiding mine.

“I’m very sorry, I don’t know,” she said.

The door closed again. I staggered back into the hallway. It was totally hopeless now. I would die. I would die an unjust death. Mai Trừng would never know that I’d tried to find her to repent, to ask forgiveness for myself and my three dead friends, for absolution for my previous plans to kill her with poison. I was almost unable to take another step. As soon as I came to the head of the stairs, my legs collapsed, and I sat down on the top step, right next to a basket of water spinach that someone had washed and then left on top of the water dispenser.

Maybe, I thought, Mai Trừng was actually in the apartment and just wanted to avoid seeing me. I was sure, from our frolicking in the waves at Bình Sơn Beach, that she knew my face. Besides, she had talked to me face to face in the Captain’s Studio. Maybe she’d caught a glimpse of me, figured that I’d searched her out to kill her, and then decided to strike first. No. I still wanted to live. My mind was totally clear, without a hint of venom in it.

I leaned my forehead against the wooden handrail, and then I stared up at the basket of water spinach sitting on the water dispenser. A single green vegetable worm was contorting itself as it slowly climbed up the stems of the spinach. That worm would contaminate that whole family’s bowl of broth. They would eat it all anyway, impassively, never knowing. All of life is full of these tiny poisons that build up, bit by bit. As soon as I had this thought, I was filled with revulsion. I lifted up the stem and flicked the worm off. It fell, squirming, onto one of the wooden steps.

“Young man.”

The schoolmarm had been standing behind me. She’d witnessed the scene of me plucking the stem of water spinach and flicking the worm off. I quickly dropped the stem back into the basket, and turned to look up at her. Maybe it was the pain and total hopelessness reflected in my face that made her tremble slightly.

“Why don’t you come inside, son? Come in for a bit.”

Limping slightly, she led me along the hallway and into her apartment. She poured me some tea. The yellow-green tea helped shake me back into a more composed state.

“So, what’s your relationship to her?”

“We’re friends, ma’am.”

“Friend” is a word we use when we want to delicately avoid using words like “lover” or “mistress.” The schoolmarm seemed to think that I was just being subtle; but that wasn’t what I was trying to express.

“And the two of you have had some kind of falling out? You just need to talk about it. It doesn’t help to clomp around sulking like this.”

Her words caught me off guard. Apparently I looked the part of a depressed and remorseful lover, and she felt the need to sympathize and offer me advice. I sat quietly, not daring to lie to her.

“I’ve noticed that she’s been different lately, and seems sad, but when I ask her what’s the matter, she just changes the subject and tells me that nothing’s wrong. I’d guessed that she’d had a row with her boyfriend. It’s a simple thing to deal with; you just need to find a way to compromise with each other. It’s not so bad that she should quit work and run off like this.”

As she spoke, her eyes had filled with tears. She took off her glasses and wiped the condensation off.

“Please, ma’am, where did she run off to? I’ll go find her and bring her back.”

“Yes. That’s it. If you really love each other, that’s what you have to do. She didn’t tell me where else she was going, but I know first she’ll go to visit her aunt in the Central Region, around Cửa Lớn Beach.”

She dabbed the corner of her eye with tissue, then continued. “Actually, we’re not really related by blood. But I’ve raised her for all of her twenty-six years. And then one day she just started crying for my forgiveness and telling me that she had to leave.”

And so she began telling me the whole story. It was a story that began during her days along the Ho Chi Minh Trail. She, Mai Trừng's mother, and the woman presently living near Cửa Lớn were three “sisters” living and working together in a three-person unit on what, in those days, was known as Station M8.

The three women had been assigned to keep watch over a storehouse of military supplies. The storehouse was actually a wide cave, but any stranger standing directly in front of it would have had a hard time discovering the entrance. The Northern army’s vehicles would regularly pass by this area, but the enemy’s scouts would also probe the region, so mines were scattered around the cave in case the foe broke through. Not that discovering the cave would be an easy matter. Having been on the battlefield for more than two years, the three women were highly experienced. Every regulation for maintaining their cover was observed very strictly. They “walked without a trail, cooked without smoke, and spoke without noise.” Many times groups of scouts had rustled by, working their way through the bush where the three were in hiding, and were totally convinced that this was pristine, primitive jungle, without a single Viet Cong around. The war was a great deception, the enemy fooled and diverted over and over, until they realized they’d lost everything.

Each night, in the evening chill, the three had huddled around the small fire telling humorous stories from their home villages. Miên was the oldest, twenty-six years old, from a village she called Plop Bridge. In the region where she’d grown up, people would sit on a bridge over the local pond as they “liberated” their bowels. As a result, the precocious fish below learned to wait patiently to take turns feeding. In that same village there was a story about the “buy nine, get one free” deal. A woman carried a basket of sweet potatoes down to wash in the pond. As she cleaned them, she chatted with a man purging his digestive tract over the edge of the nearby bridge. There had clearly been nine tubers when she’d lowered the basket down into the water, but when she scooped them back out there were now ten.

The two younger girls had fallen over with laughter at Miên’s story. Giềng and Hoa were both twenty years old. Giềng told stories from her hometown in central Vietnam: the land of the “grubs.” If someone years later ever made an effort to collect her humorous tales about the people in her region, he would be able to write a huge book. They were the kind of colorful stories that soldiers tell, the kind of stories that form the staple of soldiers’ psychological nourishment. They were stories by soldiers, for soldiers, and because of soldiers. Mixed up with these thousands of tales were counterfeits, added after the fact. They were stories that people of central Vietnam told themselves or that other people told about them. The one they liked best was about an old man in central Vietnam who’d asked a soldier, “What do you call your fathers
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up there in the North?”