Apocalypse Hotel: A Novel (Modern Southeast Asian Literature) (21 page)

A Dai and Ki started to run toward her, but I signaled for everyone to stand still and stay quiet. Mai Trừng’s body convulsed in waves. Convulsed in waves. Finally, her hands and feet went slack, and she lay motionless.

All of a sudden she sat straight up. She wasn’t herself any longer. She was a spirit racing upstream toward its source. We hurried after her. She ran headlong through trees and bushes, until she rammed head on into a tree trunk covered in lush green moss. She fell down, and then instantly stood up again. Then she turned left, darting toward a wall of rocks. Running past the remnants of a long-collapsed thatch hut, which was now just a cluster of rotting bamboo poles, Mai Trừng still didn’t stop. She kept running. Finally, gasping for breath, she came to a halt in a clearing overgrown with dense grass.

She groped the air in front of her with her hands, like a blind person. Mumbled something. Shivered. Shivered lightly. Stronger. Finally her whole body trembled fiercely. She collapsed to the ground, her stomach on the grass. She pinched at the air as if she were clutching something tightly.

A moment later, she started to stir. She sat up. Then she crawled to a nearby patch of earth. She prostrated herself again. And her arms stretched out again as if embracing a grave.

Ki sniffed at the air a bit. His eyes were watering. He’d discovered the place of bones. He was naturally attuned to the remains of those that had passed away.

Much later, Mai Trừng crawled up. She was no longer aware of us standing just a short distance behind her. She knelt over, clasped her hands in front of her, and prayed indistinctly. After a bit, she suddenly started speaking louder and louder: “Father, I pray to you. Mother, I pray to you. Please release me; please let me escape this fate of living just to punish evil. Twenty-six years of punishing people like this . . . it’s too long.”

The wind gusted tumultuously. Here and there, layers of grass were pressed flat as if someone were pacing back and forth, thinking deeply. There was a rustling sound in the air, like people were discussing something and giving advice.

“But, Mother, as long as this world exists, there will be evil, and there will be goodness. Exterminating wickedness is something that everyone has to do. How can you force one solitary girl like me to do it alone?”

Once again, the wind blew with fury. Mai Trừng started to tremble all over.

“Please, Mother and Father, let me go back to being a normal girl. I want to love, and to be loved, like everyone else. There is nothing wicked about those who love me. Why should they face this kind of punishment?”

The sound of wind—warm, deep, and masculine—rushed out over the clearing. As if in response, a beseeching, reedy gust of wind seemed to raise its voice in feeble objection. As quickly as the patches of grass rose up, they were pushed back down.

“Mother and Father, now I beg you to let me take you to the Bảo Sơn Pagoda. There you will be able to rest eternally in peace. Auntie Giềng is there, too. She’ll take care of you and burn incense for you regularly.”

Mai Trừng knelt with her head bowed for a long time. She was listening carefully to her parents’ words of guidance from the hereafter. Two currents of wind, continued to howl in turn—one bass toned, one high and reedy—gusting past.

“I will follow your words . . . I’ll only have true happiness when you release me from this mission . . . Oh! I knew you’d understand.”

She suddenly collapsed. Tremors wracked her body again. Something was being torn from her, wrenched out partly, pulled out little by little like a never-ending length of rope. Then, it all dashed out, flew away from her body. Finally, her glassy, dazed eyes began to return to consciousness. She slowly sat up.

“This is my father. This is my mother.”

She pointed towards two spots of flat earth, just a few meters apart from each other. They looked nothing at all like graves.

Ki rushed forward. He sniffed here and there around both spots. His tail wagged back and forth in a flurry. This was confirmation of Mai Trừng’s words.

The three of us exhumed the two graves with the tools we’d brought along. The nylon sheets in which the bones were swathed had not decayed. We rewrapped the remains of their bodies in the same nylon sheets. By the time we were finished, afternoon was giving way to night, and everyone was set on turning back. We had flashlights and A Dai had planned ahead and brought dry bamboo to use as torches.

It seemed as though Mai Trừng had transformed into a whole new girl. I drove her back to Cửa Lớn. Passing through a stretch of quiet forest, she suddenly told me to stop the car. She ran to the edge of the road, which was blossoming all over with multihued wildflowers. She bent over to search among the clusters, bushes, and beds of flowers. All of them were sporting their most flamboyant, most brazen colors.

At last, she held a bouquet up to her chest as she skipped back to the car with the skip of a girl who’d just become a young woman. Her hair bounced impishly in the morning sunlight. Her face was radiant, innocent, and natural. Her whole just-grown woman’s body was suffused with the scent of wildflowers. She swayed lithely along with the rhythm of her skipping.

“These flowers are for you,” she said simply, as if she knew I’d accept them. From the whole bank of dazzling flowers, she’d only chosen those with petite stems and tiny petals. Pale lavender. Pale yellow. Pale pink. And, more than anything else, flowers of pure, innocent white. They were all wildflowers, the kind of flowers whose namelessness moved people to compassion.

As we entered the Cửa Lớn area, I drove the car along the line of casuarina trees dividing the road and the sea. Mai Trừng remembered that it was the fourteenth, and that the next day was the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month: Lost Souls Day. On the fifteenth she had to help the old bonze with the festival, which all the wandering, homeless spirits depended upon. She would pour porridge into small funnels of rolled banyan leaves and then place them all around the temple garden. The forsaken spirits have one full meal each year on the fifteenth day of the seventh lunar month. But, for the abandoned souls still living across this mortal world, there would be no special day of alms giving. On what day would they be remembered? How many people remembered that these poor souls were still living—living precarious lives?

We hadn’t reached the end of the wall of casuarinas. I started suddenly, and slammed on the brakes. A familiar figure was among the mix of people on the beach. I jumped out of the car, but once I was out I slowed my pace, pretending to be taking a leisurely stroll past the beachgoers. I’d just seen a woman who I’d thought looked like Yên Thanh. Or was it really her? If she saw me, would she quickly slip away?

I didn’t want to see her for revenge. Vengeance would just create, in turn, a cyclical chain of more hatred. Hatred would burn up the insides of whoever was holding it. I just wanted to see her face to face, to talk with her. What has she found? What has she lost? Has she been peaceful and happy, or not?

But Yên Thanh had vanished from sight. Maybe that was an answer in itself.

We drove to Giềng’s house first.

What’s happened here? An atmosphere of mourning lay over the small dwelling. A few local villagers were running back and forth. A woman tore a length into three white strips and wrapped them around the heads of each of Giềng’s three children. In the middle of the room was a poorly wrought wooden coffin. The crude carpentry had left the wood chipped, scarred, and warped.

People were preparing Giềng’s funeral procession.

Her death had caught everyone by surprise. Like a freak accident. Like an idiotic chunk of rock falling out of the sky and thudding down on her head. Giềng had complained of a pain in her stomach. Only after the pain was much worse did she allow herself to be carried to the hospital on a motorcycle. The doctors gave her a cursory examination, diagnosed her with an infected gall bladder, and announced that she needed an operation. They told her family to carry her outside on a stretcher, and go off to buy blood for transfusions and to pay the hospital fees. But what family did she have? Just a twelve-year-old son, two younger children, and an old neighbor lady that was helping them out.

The amount of money they needed to collect would buy more than a few hundred kilograms of rice. But in the city it would just cover one party with halfway-decent specialty food for a few people. For farmers like Giềng’s family, the fee represented an unheard-of sum of money. The neighbor and Giềng’s son lay her down under a clump of trees hidden by the back gate of the hospital. The only thing left to do was to hope that she’d gradually recover, and then take her home. The hopeless can only wait for a miracle. But the pain just got worse and worse. It wasn’t her gall bladder at all. It was a simple illness that required a simple but timely operation: appendicitis. But during this era of the market economy, where the principle “you have to pay to play” prevails, the “have-nots” are afforded only one right—the right to die. Giềng thrashed about and screamed in pain. She squeezed her son’s hand as if she were trying to transmit her pain and suffering through it, and into him. Then her grip began to slacken. It slowly loosened. And then she released his hand completely.

Mai Trừng wrapped lengths of white cloth around both of our heads. The only people at the funeral procession were some old neighbors, looking skeletal and hobbled, as if they themselves were the spirits. Heavy, slick soil peeked out here and there along the sand road. The soil made popping and sucking noises as it settled from the previous day’s rain. After a long drought, yesterday the sky had suddenly opened up. The grave had been dug beforehand, and was now waterlogged. When the bearers released the coffin, it floated up. They had to bail all the water out before they could lower the coffin back into the grave.

The funeral lacked the traditional clarinet and drum funerary music. The bonze was old and feeble; she couldn’t descend the mountain. She sat up in the pagoda, beating the gong and chanting prayers for the departed soul. Then she struck the big bell and all the small bells throughout the temple. The sound, like a shattered mountain of sharp crystal shards, poured down into lowlands, filling them, and becoming a kind of tomb for the soul that had died such a sudden and unjust death. That is how it is for the poor everywhere. They live their whole lives in restless apprehension, with no source of security; knowing their lives could end at any moment from some disaster, from a jagged bit of glass infecting their foot, from any kind of unforeseen calamity from which those who are better off could easily recover.

After the funeral, everyone went home. Her son was sitting by himself. I sat down next to him. Twelve years old, and now forced to be the head of the family. He still had two younger siblings to feed and educate. He didn’t have the right to sit and ask himself, What do I do? He was only allowed to stand up and just keep going, to jump headfirst back into the flow of life in order to make a living for his family. Where was his father? Was he affected? Did he shudder and did his eyes flutter?
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Did he stumble and fall on that day? And how about me? Did I ever shudder and blink my eyes? My friends liked to say that I had children scattered all around. Men who wander so much, across the seas, across the world, all have had such meaningless liaisons.

“It was just mom’s appendix. If we’d had money, she wouldn’t have died,” the boy said suddenly. His voice was dry and sharp. “People told us that the hospital was busy treating someone from the beach with heart pain. The people at the beach have money.”

Producing another link in the chain of hatred. Nurturing another link in the chain of hatred. Villagers in Cửa Lớn would run out to block the roads to the beach, stopping the tourists, forcing cars to detour a few extra kilometers to get around them. Sometimes they also surged out onto the beach and tried and stop the tourists down there. Angry at the fish, but taking it out on the chopping board. Resentment toward some was dumped on the heads of others. Hatred fueled a vicious circle.

“They just saved the swimmers. The swimmers had money,” the boy kept mumbling.

There wasn’t anything I could do for him now. The dreadful deaths I’d witnessed, the anguish I’d had to bear, the times I’d been betrayed, been deceived . . . it was all meaningless, it was nothing compared to the unbearable misery existing in the mind, and on the shoulders, of this young man.

The next day, we helped the bonze with the Lost Souls Day ceremonies.

The three children wearing white mourning headbands also climbed up the temple to volunteer their services.
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Crowds of beachgoers clambered up the hill to the temple. There were faces of those filled with curiosity, just sightseeing.
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There were sincere faces, sincere for the moment. There were faces dark and credulous, tormented by ignorance. They’d come to the temple to burn incense, to listen to the prayers and chants, to give donations, and then to ask for blessings from heaven. They strolled around the temple garden, stuck joss sticks everywhere, and wedged in a prayer—wishing for nothing but their own desires, nothing but the good life. If they had one house, then they wanted to build three. Turn one million into four hundred million, four hundred times.

I vaguely heard a line of prayer to that effect. Demanding four hundred times as much, what else could he be doing besides planning a robbery? In reality, there are thieves who, before every job, very sincerely go to the church, temple, or pagoda to ask for blessings. And after they’ve done the deed, they return to express their thankfulness and confess their sins.

Mai Trừng and I walked around the temple’s lush garden with the boy and Ki. We tucked banyan-leaf funnels of porridge among the tree roots, in their nooks and crannies, in the rattan bushes and the wild pineapples, and in the cracks of rocks. The forsaken spirits had their full meal right away. Beggars came and gathered up the porridge, drinking it right out of the banyan leaves, and some of the tourists carelessly kicked over the funnels.