The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction (22 page)

I’m going to have to run for it, and the desperation thrills me. Still, I cannot rush. In measured, torturously slow movements, I stand up on the sofa, ready for a giant primeval reptile to erupt out from underneath it at any second. When nothing happens I can finally exhale. I balance with my toes on the edge of the seat cushion. The elaborate plan I’ve devised is to leap as far as I can off the sofa and then sprint the rest of the way. I crouch, ready to jump. Then I panic and straighten my legs again; it has suddenly occurred to me that the dust on the ground could make me slip and fall, leaving me easy prey. I
brandish my phone again, shining the light on the floorboards to gauge the danger. And that’s when I see the marks.

I don’t know how I missed them the first time—even in the pathetic glow of the phone they are visible: huge, clumsy S-shapes rubbed away in the film on the floor. I aim the light around the base of the sofa again; the only prints in the dust there were left by feet. He isn’t under me after all. I turn the phone toward the door again and study the tracks from my vantage point on the sofa. They start in the area surrounding the clothes as a mess of indistinct squiggles and gradually become one clean, sine-wave–shaped track. I follow the sinuous line with my eyes a little farther: They lead directly to the open window. Oh, well done, you.

I need to bury my face in my hands and shudder with both relief and fresh terror for a moment, but after that I’m ready. Running seems unwise, now that I don’t know where I should be running away from. I put one foot on the floor, and then the other, and begin to take cautious steps, pausing between each one to listen for rustling in the darkness. My phone I keep held out in front of me, like an evil-repelling amulet. When I finally put my hand on the doorknob I half-expect the creature to lash out from where it was hiding, watching me the entire time and allowing me to think I would escape. But the knob turns easily and I step outside into the smoggy Houston twilight. Because I grew up here I know not to bother gazing at the night sky, but my father never lost the habit of looking up and expecting to see stars.

I almost let myself breathe easy. I almost lose control, dash
for the car, jump in, and floor it. Luckily I restrain myself because there is something suspicious about the Drug Deal Mobile. More suspicious than usual, that is. I come a little closer to confirm it—my trash-bag window has been almost completely pushed in. It hangs from the last bits of remaining tape like a super ghetto cat flap. I found you.

As I approach the car I am stealthy, cool. I circle up toward the driver’s side. All I want is a quick peek, a glimpse, a coil, a scale, a flickering of the tongue. I need to know for certain that he’s in there. But before I can, something—something heavy-sounding inside the Drug Deal Mobile—goes thump and I sprint away before I realize what I’m doing.

I flee down the poorly lit street lined with dilapidated houses. I run and run, and my sneakers pound the asphalt so hard that one comes loose and falls off, and then the other. I keep running. I don’t even look down. My feet hurt at first, but after a while I can’t feel them anymore. It occurs to me that I might be transforming. I stop and examine my body, panting. No, I am still two legs, two arms, with sweat in my hair and running down into my eyes. I wipe it away roughly with a sleeve.

“Phuong!”

For a moment I think it’s him. For a moment I believe that when I turn around he’ll be there, and he’ll be himself again. But it’s not him. It’s Tommy.

“Phuong! Fuck!” He grabs me by the shoulders. “What the hell are you doing here? Shit shit shit. Shit! Fuck!” He sounds
like he’s malfunctioning. “You cannot be here. You just—it’s not—fuck!—this is not a good place for you, okay? Okay?” He is steering me toward the corner where his fancy little car is parked. “How did you get here? Hey!” Tommy grabs me by the biceps. “Where’s your car?” He shakes me. I shake my head.

Tommy opens the door and shoves me inside. He studies my face. “Are you hurt?” I shake my head again and he checks to make sure that all my parts have made it in the car before shutting the door. He walks around and climbs behind the steering wheel.

“Don’t take me home!” I blurt out suddenly. Tommy gives me a look. He uses both hands to comb his hair back and then starts the engine.

“I was working just now,” he says as he navigates the dark streets with an ease that betrays how well he knows this part of the city. “And we saw this little delinquent-looking kid come running like hell down the street.” He is staring hard through the windshield at nothing in particular now. “They told me to go take care of it and sent me outside. Do you get it, Phuong? Do you get what that means? Do you get what could have happened?” He takes his hand off the wheel and purposefully brushes the bottom of his jacket back just enough for me to see the grip of the handgun. When he is satisfied that I understand, he continues: “This is the kind of place when, at a certain time of night, if you’re where you shouldn’t be, you disappear.” We’re getting back on the 610 loop now. “Can you tell me what you were doing there?”

I look at my lap and shake my head.

“Okay,” Tommy says. “I get it. I have my secrets, you have yours. But you’re going to have to promise me that you won’t go back.”

“I won’t.”

“That’s good enough for me. So if we aren’t going home, where should we go?”

“Can we just drive? Around?”

“At least until one of us gets a better idea.”

The night is really beginning now. The nine-to-fivers are back at home already; the only ones out at this time are the ones who have run away from that life. Somewhere in Houston neon lights are going on. Mr. Kwon stands in his grocery store kingdom and looks out the window. Momma is falling asleep alone. My fat cousin Dumpling’s bride lays out her wedding dress for tomorrow. Her great-aunt with liver cancer continues breathing. Something that used to be a man twines in the seat of an old, abandoned car. Some gangsters wonder where one of their own has gone off to. My older brother and I drive.

We drive around the warehouses by the water. We drive through the dark parts of the city and watch couples stumbling out of nightclubs in each other’s arms and prostitutes slinking in the shadows, looking for arms that need someone to hold. We drive too fast down deserted expanses of the freeway and I let my right arm hang out of the window, cupping the night and the wind in my fingers while lights that are not
stars twinkle all around me. Usually I would be able to pretend it’s beautiful. But tonight it’s not enough to distract me anymore. As we circle endlessly on 610, all I can think of is how much the highway resembles a snake coiling around the entire city.

T
HE VERY SMALL CITY
lay tucked among the green-gray folds of the central highlands. At night, were one to observe it from above and from a distance, the gently pulsing lights of the town would resemble a luminescent mold spreading over the hills. The people who inhabited this particular region of the country, high above the steamy reach of the Mekong but still far from the bitter northern winter, were tempered by their climate. They shared most of their lives with a perpetual, damp chill—the kind of bleak and persistent cold that never quite reaches the bone but instead lodges somewhere just beneath the skin from September through April.

But this particular December night was colder than it should have been. Breath turned pale before it left the mouth and lingered on in a white cloud even after its maker had walked away. The streets were mostly deserted, and those still outside hurried home quickly, eager to escape from the biting
wind. It was so unnaturally chilly that the Guitarist, perched on a wooden stool in the Calligrapher’s living room, was wearing a wool glove over his strumming hand, which slowed his already clumsy playing considerably. The Poet had arrived early and claimed the couch—he reclined, keeping both hands warm in the pockets of his tweed jacket and feeling lucky that his particular role did not require him to remove them. Perhaps the Calligrapher did not feel the cold, for he sat on the tile floor facing his two friends, his legs folded underneath the low table before him. Shriveled and arthritic though he was, the Calligrapher was never still. Even at rest he was possessed by a manic, rodentlike energy, always twitching something, drumming his fingers, gnawing on the inside of his cheek. Even in his sleep his hands would play with the keys he wore on a long chain around his neck. He was jiggling his knee now, knocking it against the tabletop from below. The objects crowding the table’s surface—a pot of ink, a bottle of crude Vietnamese vodka, half empty, a single shot glass, and a stack of white paper—trembled with each movement.

The canny observer might detect that brushes were absent from the table, but also that the Calligrapher’s left hand was stained black to varying degrees—the index finger dyed past its bony knuckle, the pad of the thumb colored a darkness that would never wash away, and the outer side of the palm marked with coin-sized splotches. The discoloration of the hand gave the impression that it was in the process of rotting.

Once, the Poet had been the handsomest of the three, but now his bloated body strained against the seams of his jacket
and his belly was almost indistinguishable from the couch cushions. The Guitarist was neither as shriveled as the Calligrapher nor swollen like the Poet. He had a drooping mustache and a mole on his chin from which several long white hairs sprouted.

There was no place for forced cordiality in the Calligrapher’s living room. The three knew one another far too well; they had been meeting like this for too many years. The Guitarist and the Poet did not bother knocking anymore. They had ceased to observe common courtesies like leaving their shoes at the front door, and they no longer asked about wives or children, for their wives were all dead and their children all gone, the exception being the Calligrapher’s son Dien, who was locked inside the kitchen every week during their gatherings because he was, as the Calligrapher put it, “shy,” though the Poet and Guitarist and most of the Calligrapher’s neighbors knew the real reasons.

Not once in two decades had the couch cushions been aired. The family altar stood neglected in the corner, bearing dusty photographs of the Calligrapher’s late wife and an assortment of other ancestors. The only objects in the room that received regular cleaning were the framed paintings on the wall. There were about fifteen in total, ranging from envelope-sized to nearly five feet in diameter, each covered in abstract-looking black smears and accompanied by explanatory plaques with descriptions like “Pine Grove at Dawn,” or “Woman in the Mist,” or “Buffalo at the Foot of the Mountain.” Supposedly the titles were also written in hidden Chinese
characters within the paintings. All of them were signed at the bottom left corner, not with a name, but with a fingerprint.

The responsible finger was currently pointed in an accusatory manner in the Guitarist’s direction.

“You! You lost the beat again!” The Calligrapher crumpled the page in front of him with his non-inky fist and threw it to the corner of the room with the other wadded-up paintings that he had rejected earlier in the evening. “How am I supposed to paint when you keep rhythm like a … like a … like …” He turned and looked expectantly at the Poet.

The Poet lifted his head from its resting place atop his multiple chins and thought for a moment. Taking advantage of the pause, the Guitarist removed the glove from his right hand and put it on his very cold left one.

“Like the way Old Nhan dances?” the Poet eventually supplied. Old Nhan was the Calligrapher’s one-legged neighbor. Land mine, 1972. The accident was only ever spoken of indirectly.

“Exactly!” snorted the Calligrapher. “Now, have we finished with our mistakes?”

The Guitarist bobbed his head, but the Poet adopted a melancholy countenance and sighed. “Is one ever finished with one’s mistakes?” he asked. Then, pleased with the line, he pulled a pencil and small, leather-bound notebook from his tweed jacket and wrote it down. Meanwhile, the Calligrapher had uncapped the vodka on the table and poured out four shots in swift succession. The first he drank. The second he
gave to the Guitarist. The Poet took the third. And the final glass of vodka was emptied straight into the pot of ink. The Calligrapher gave it several good stirs with his pinky, then tapped the droplets off on the rim of the pot and licked the residue from his finger. The Guitarist switched glove hands again and readied his instrument. The Poet tucked his notebook back into his tweed jacket and sat up straighter. Painstakingly, the Calligrapher selected a piece of paper from the stack in front of him. First he inspected both sides, flipping it, examining the way the light hit its surface, bringing the sheet to his nose and sniffing it several times. Finally satisfied, he dipped his finger into the inkpot—the index finger this time—and drew it out slowly. There was a collective inhalation.

Now, up until this point all of the usual elements were aligned; the scene that followed should have been the one that played out every week. What came before—the banter, the crumpled paintings, the berating of the Guitarist—was all part of the routine. Once the vodka was half gone they did not make errors. The Calligrapher and the Guitarist should have moved their fingers simultaneously, the Calligrapher making sooty dabs on the paper while the Guitarist began to pluck his strings. Gradually, through a symbiosis that none of them had ever understood, a melody would emerge as the streaks of ink began to take form, the song and the painting inspiring each other. And then the Poet, listening and watching, would be moved to verse. They believed that it was this union of the three—the music, the painting, the words—that, like the blending of the finest strains of tea, could produce art in its
most perfect form. Though, truthfully, the three men were barely artists. The Guitarist was the Electrician all the other days of the week, and the Poet had only ever published some of his racier poems and short stories in the lower-class magazines in Hanoi. The Calligrapher had never sold any of his paintings, but he had never tried to sell them, either. The three of them cared only about the process that took place when they gathered in the Calligrapher’s living room, this collective act of organic creation. It had been this way since the late seventies, when they had begun their meetings because they were unable to give up the bond they had shared as soldiers. Art had replaced war as their act of communion.