The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction (10 page)

The nurse did not appear admonished like she should have been. In fact, her face broke out into a rather toothy and unladylike grin. “Older Brother, you’re
fun
,” she said. “But you’re wrong—there
are
some things worse than wicked girls.” Her smile stretched a centimeter wider. “And they’re more dangerous than you can imagine. So you’d better be careful should you encounter one of them.” As I released the brake, she called out one last time, “Remember!” and then she was out of sight.

The boy remained motionless for the first hour of driving, hugging his knees with only his mop of hair visible. He coughed periodically, so I knew he wasn’t dead yet. Traffic ebbed away quickly after we left the city; once we crossed the second river it was just us, the occasional motorbike, and out in the paddy the distant figures of either scarecrows or skinny farmers—you really can’t tell the difference, since they both wear tattered clothes and conical hats.

After another forty-five minutes I couldn’t stand it anymore. I need some noise when I’m in the truck—it doesn’t have a radio, and when you spend hours driving in silence through fields that are indistinguishable from one another you
start going out of your mind. You begin to wonder if you’re even moving, out in the middle of all that soundless green. Times when I’m passengerless I’ll just tell stories to the truck and imagine that the rumbling of the engine is it talking back because I need it, else I won’t know I’m still alive. Of course I remembered what the nurse had said, about speaking to him, but there are only two kinds of people, those who can ignore their mosquito bites and those who scratch, and it’s the quiet that makes me itchy.

“Little Brother…,” I started, unsure whether or not I had chosen the proper term of address, for I really couldn’t tell his age at all. Minh slowly adjusted himself so that he was facing me but kept his head resting on his knees. I continued, “Are you hungry? I’ve got some leftover meat and greens in the tin down there. It’s a little cold now, but you can have it if you want …”

I didn’t think it was possible, but at the suggestion of food Minh looked even more ill. Immediately his face went lichen-colored and he looked at the container as if it were about to explode. “Okay! It’s okay! I was just offering!” It was clear that a topic change was in order, and since there was really no need for tact—the boy was dying, after all—I asked him: “So what’s the matter with you then?”

For the first time Minh smiled. Even his smile looked painful. “Is it not obvious? I am dying.”

His voice caught me off guard: He spoke clearly and strangely formally, with a clipped northern accent that you rarely heard around these parts of the delta. “Erm. Yes. But
why
are you dying? Did the doctors tell you what it was?” I kicked myself for having forgotten to ask the nurse if it was catching or not.

“My current body is simply too sick to continue living. So now I am dying.”

“Yes, but … Oh never mind.” Something was apparently wrong with the boy’s head as well. He probably had some new disease, from America or Europe. But I’ve never had a sickness I couldn’t cure with the proper amount of rice wine, so I wasn’t that worried. The minutes passed slowly and silence returned, gloating.

Desperate, I tried again. “What was the hospital like?”

To my surprise he raised his entire head when he replied. “Filthy. Vile. Foul. There were no healthy people to talk to and I was always hungry.” The very memory of the place caused Minh to relapse; he dropped his head back between his knees and released five coughs—short, hoarse barks—in quick succession.

I figured that that would be the end of our conversation, and that Minh would go back to silence, preserving his last dregs of energy. So I was taken aback when, after a few moments, his face reappeared. We were heading southwest, and in the orangey light of the setting sun he even looked slightly healthier. “Older Brother,” he asked me, “have you been a deliveryman long?”

“Almost twenty years,” I said. Even though he’d caught me off guard I attempted a clumsy lure: “So I must have been at the job before you were even born, right?”

Minh didn’t fall for it and instead went on as if he hadn’t heard the question. “Will you tell me about it?”

I slowed the truck down a little. “The years on the road? There isn’t much to tell, and what there is isn’t interesting…,” I began, and cleared my throat.

Minh looked at me blankly. “Why would you say that, when you are smiling and it is plain that you have been waiting this whole time to talk about yourself?”

I almost swerved off the road, hearing those words coming from someone who was my junior. But there was no impudence in his voice. He sounded genuinely puzzled. When he saw the shock on my face he said, “I now understand; it was self-deprecation meant to ease me into your story. Continue.”

How do you respond to something like that? I certainly didn’t know. After a long, awkward minute, Minh saved me the trouble of stammering out some sort of response. “I gather from your silence that I have caused you to be embarrassed and I apologize. Please say something. Hearing your voice lends me strength.”

I shrugged. “Well, I’m flattered, I guess. What would you like me to tell you about?”

“I want you to give me your life story, beginning with your birth and ending here, in this truck. Tell it however you will, but omit as little as possible. I will not interrupt you.”

“I suppose I can do that.” I took a deep breath and began. “I was born in Ca Mau.” I looked at him out of the corner of my eye. His face was cast with weirdly shaped shadows from
the sunset behind him, and his profile had gone hazy at the edges in its light. He was staring dead ahead with his mouth dangling open, which I found mildly unsettling. I turned my attention back to the road and kept talking, more as a way to forget about my odd passenger than to fulfill his request.

“It feels strange to be the one speaking. Usually the people riding with me only want to talk about themselves and their big plans for when they get to the city or get away from it. When they speak to me it’s like me speaking to my truck. I wouldn’t think that a person getting ready to die would want to hear someone else’s life story. A dying man tells his own stories to anyone and everyone on the off chance that later on, one of them will remember he existed. A dying man shouldn’t have time to listen to a man like me. But you’re not like the others, are you?” I looked over at him again but he had not moved. “I honestly can’t tell if you’re bored or if you’re gobbling up every word out of my mouth. Maybe you’re just too sick to talk anymore.” Still no reaction. He was being true to his word about not interrupting me. “I was the fourth of seven children. It’s fitting that I’m the middle child—the three older siblings went off one by one to work in Saigon, the youngest three stayed in Ca Mau and took care of our parents, and I’ve spent my life driving back and forth between the two.”

When we drove through Tan An, I was six years old and having my legs caned for stealing mangoes from a neighbor’s tree.

Waiting for the My Tho ferry I was fourteen and as a joke dumped a pot of water on a female classmate. The thin fabric
of her white school uniform turned translucent and exposed her tiny breasts.

Crossing into Ben Tre I was nineteen and marrying her.

Leaving it I was almost twenty-five and driving down the highway with a shark in the back of my truck.

I was talking so much that I didn’t realize how late it had gotten. And how dark. Three motorbikes passed us in streaks of yellow light and briefly lit up the coconut trees lining the highway. I could smell a river in the near distance.

“Minh—” I stopped and coughed. My voice was hoarse, probably from speaking for too long. I tried again. “Minh, let’s stop for a minute. I … I feel … tired. All of a sudden.”

I pulled the truck over and stepped onto the road. And then, without warning, both my legs gave out. I held myself up on the door until, to my surprise, Minh himself came over and took my weight on one of his shoulders. I worried that I was hurting him but had no choice but to lean against him. He walked me over toward the trees and lowered me onto the ground because I could no longer stand.

“I don’t know what’s wrong,” I said, rubbing my legs. “Out of nowhere I went all—” I was interrupted by a dry coughing fit that lasted over a minute. “I went all weak. Why am I so dizzy?”

His voice from the shadows: “You were sitting for several hours. It is normal.”

Perhaps it was because he had been silent for so long, but his voice sounded lower to me. In any case I couldn’t respond because I was coughing again.

Minh stood on the shoulder of the road instead of on the grass. It was probably for the best—the ground had muddy patches and his shoes were made of newspaper. “Driving is difficult work, Older Brother. Your life has been a hard one. It’s time to rest now.”

“Strange way to put it, but—
cough
—you’re—
cough cough
—right.”

“Older Brother, I know everything else about you, but you still have not told me your name.”

I remembered the words of the nurse again and hesitated. Lucky I did, for just then a motorbike drove by and its headlight illuminated the two of us. And in that sudden instant of light I saw that something about Minh had changed. When we left Saigon, the boy’s cheeks had been sunken, his eyes hollow, his skin gray and drooping. But somehow, miraculously, the face was now full and fresh. His eyes had become bright and alert; the dark rings beneath them had vanished. He looked like an entirely different person. I jerked away from him.

“Is something wrong, Older Brother?”

Everything was wrong. His face, my body, whatever was happening to us. I tried to stand but my legs were still not my own and my head swam. I started crawling away from Minh on my hands and knees instead, and for the first time he laughed.

He let me make it a couple of yards before he walked carefully over, feeling for dry spots before putting a foot down. He kicked me onto my back with one newspaper-clad foot. Even in the dark I could tell that he had grown larger, his chest and shoulders broader.

“Now, will you tell me your name or do I need to search the truck for your license and find it that way?”

The soft spluttering of an engine in the darkness: Another motorbike was approaching. This time I was ready. I was staring up at the shadow where I knew Minh’s face was when the light came. When I saw it, I did not scream. I would tell you if I had—I am not ashamed—but I could not make a sound.

It was my face. He had my face. The features of it—my lips, my nose, the ridge of my forehead—were lumpier, fleshier, but I knew with sickening certainty that the face I was looking up at was a replica of my own.

“Do you like it?” He smiled and I caught a glimpse of a crooked left canine as the last of the light faded. I ran my tongue over the bumpy spot in the corner of my own mouth.

But that wasn’t even the most frightening part. What scared me the most—what still haunts me to this day—was what happened next.

“What is my name?” he asked quietly.

At these words it wasn’t “Minh” but
my own name
that rose involuntarily to my lips, because in that moment it was no longer mine. And this response was mechanical, something that I—or whoever I was in that instant, for I had ceased to be myself—did not question. My mind was no longer my own. Nothing will ever be as profoundly terrifying as that moment. That feeling of … not of possession, but of dispossession. I can explain it to you in no other way.

I didn’t say it—do you think I would be here now if I had? Just as the words were preparing to leave my throat, they were
interrupted: My body, in one desperate, final act of defense, suddenly lurched and divested itself of my dinner. Partially digested pork intestine and bits of cabbage and rice disgorged themselves with impressive momentum and splattered all over Minh, who was looming above me. Again, I am not ashamed. I was lucky; you don’t get to be my age in this country without luck and a high tolerance for what makes others squeamish. The physical effort required for such powerful vomiting left me spent, so I could only sprawl weakly on the grass and watch, baffled, as Minh completely lost it.

First he staggered backward, gasping for air. I understood that—the smell was overwhelmingly foul. But then he threw his head back and shrieked—a horrible, animal sound that cut through the night. He flailed and twisted and slapped at his body wildly. It looked like he was fighting off a swarm of bees, not trying to flick away bits of sick.

“No no no no no,” he said over and over again, until his words didn’t sound like words anymore. When he threw himself down and began rolling frantically, wiping his body on the ground, I found the strength to begin dragging myself across the grass on my stomach like a serpent. Every movement was exhausting and my body was still shaking with fear, but Minh didn’t notice that I was escaping. I could see him thrashing in the darkness at the edge of my vision. As I inched along the ground my fingers touched something damp and papery—one of Minh’s little shoes that he had kicked off during his flailing fit. I clutched it in my hand and managed to pull myself up to my feet. Without really knowing why, I put the shoe into my
pocket. Then I walked unsteadily back to the truck and climbed in, trying and failing twice to close the door before finally getting it shut. The key was still in the ignition.

I didn’t want to look at him when I started the engine and the headlights came on. Couldn’t help it, though. He had torn off his blue pajama top and was scrubbing furiously at his chest with it. His hair swung in front of his face with each angry motion, or stuck to it in sweaty hanks, hiding it. I know it was probably just the poor light, but to me he looked blurry around the edges. Like the image on a cheap television. As I drove off I watched his figure in the rearview mirror grow smaller and smaller until it finally disappeared, leaving only a corner of my own face and a fading triangle of road in the glass. I wondered if somebody would stop and offer him a ride. Then, tentatively, I stretched out my neck to examine the rest of my reflection. It was not, as I had feared, Minh’s face that looked back at me from the mirror, but I was covered in a putrid mask of the now-crusting throw-up.