The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction (23 page)

But tonight, what should have happened did not. Tonight, just as the Calligrapher went to press his finger to the paper, he glanced up at the window behind the couch where the Poet was seated. At once his face went pale and he flinched violently, slashing the ink across the page and setting off a chain of physical reactions in the other two: Startled by the Calligrapher’s aberrant movement, the Guitarist snapped a string loudly. At the twang, the Poet flinched and kicked out a plump leg, knocking the vodka bottle off the table, at which point it smashed on the tile floor. The sound of the shattering reached Dien in the kitchen, where he had been in his usual position—crouched beneath the sink and rocking back and forth. The noises aroused his curiosity and he crept over to the door to peer out through the keyhole, even though his eyesight wasn’t very good. Dien had learned how to pick the lock years ago, but with only one good hand it was a laborious process. His
left arm was about six inches longer than his right, the joints misaligned and the entire limb floppy in an unsettling way, but the fingers were rigid, underdeveloped stubs, fused together at their base. “Eel-arm,” the Poet referred to it in private. Still, Dien had fared better than his two older brothers: Both were born dead, one with a small pair of extra arms on his chest that resembled the wings of a plucked chicken, and the other without eyes or nostrils.

In the living room, the Guitarist was preoccupied with his broken string and the Poet was staring at the paper on the table, troubled by the Calligrapher’s uncharacteristic mistake but also thinking that there was not much difference between the ruined painting, the ones crumpled in the corner, and the ones that hung on the wall. The disruption of their routine had made the two of them uneasy. But the Calligrapher had now recovered his composure. He rose to his feet, his face calm, showing no sign either of the alarm that had possessed him a moment ago or embarrassment because of it. His fingers drummed against his thigh as he walked down the hallway to the kitchen.

Through the keyhole, Dien saw him coming and began rocking on his heels again. He bit his tongue. The Calligrapher paused before the door and said, keeping his voice even, “
Con
, your father is coming in to get the broom now.” After waiting a few moments more, he selected one of the keys on the chain around his neck. But the instant the Calligrapher touched the doorknob, Dien released a long, hoarse scream and the Calligrapher jerked his hand back.

The Poet and the Guitarist tried not to look toward the kitchen, but the Guitarist turned his head when, a few seconds after the initial scream, they heard low groans and a thumping sound, which he guessed was the sound of Dien beating his head against a cupboard. The two men did not look at the Calligrapher when he came back into the living room without the broom. He did not resume his seat on the floor, and instead paced back and forth in front of the table, toying with a shard of broken bottle that he had picked up. Over and over and over he turned it in his inky fingers.

“Look outside and tell me what you see,” he said to the Poet without looking up from the piece of glass. Struggling to accommodate the folds of his stomach, the Poet twisted to comply. The window faced east, away from the town.

“Hills. And darkness,” said the Poet.

“Hills and darkness,” murmured the Calligrapher. And stretching beyond them was more of the same. He knew those hills, that darkness, well. They all did. They knew the jungle that lay in that darkness, knew the spiders that were the size of ripe bananas and the rain that fell in torrents heavy enough to stun men too slow to find shelter. They knew the mist that came afterward. In those wild places time worked strangely, taking the shape of tree roots, warping and splitting and doubling back on itself until it was impossible to see where it really began. Forty years ago the three were young men running through those trees. Skinny things, hip bones jutting through green uniforms, they chased an enemy they could not see, and who could not see them. Most of their time was spare,
and they spent it imagining the girls they knew from their old villages naked. At night the Guitarist would bring out the instrument he’d found in an abandoned American camp—it really couldn’t be called a guitar anymore; the soundboard was cracked, the neck wobbled, and its four remaining strings were held in place by toothpicks—and the entire troop would listen while he played and the Poet chanted along. They did not worry about the invisible enemy hearing them. The Calligrapher was regularly hired by the other soldiers for tattoos, which he applied in bluish-green pigment using fishhooks and a small hammer. He inked their skin with zodiac symbols, with names of sweethearts, with tough-sounding phrases that the Poet would make up, and sometimes with monstrous creatures from his own imagination.

“It’s for protection,” he reasoned to a sergeant who had seemed distraught upon finding a five-headed bat on his back instead of the Buddha he had commissioned.

“It will make you a fierce warrior,” he said of an inking on a biceps that appeared to be half stork, half tortoise.

The effectiveness of that particular tattoo was to remain untested, for the troop never actually took part in combat. They tramped through the hills for almost three years, keeping their weapons loaded and their packs as dry as possible, ready to sacrifice themselves when the time came, but they somehow managed to miss every battle. They would follow orders to move camp only to hear on the radio a week later that an unplanned skirmish had taken place shortly after they’d left, or else they would arrive too late and resign themselves to picking
through what remained. When the war ended and they emerged unscathed from the jungle, they were told that they were fortunate.

And here they were, the lucky ones, sitting in the Calligrapher’s living room forty years later, in various stages of physical decay. They were not heroes then. They were nothing now. The Calligrapher stopped playing with the piece of glass and placed it on the table. With his mouth set in a grim line that twitched at its edges, he stepped carefully around the pool of spilled vodka and walked to the couch—the Poet, alarmed, shrank away from his friend as best as his waistless figure could manage—reached around behind it, and then threw the window wide open. The Poet and the Guitarist gasped in unison. And then they shivered as the cold found them.

“Hills and darkness,” the Calligrapher repeated again, as he surveyed the landscape before him. Silence fell, and they all realized that Dien had stopped having his fit in the kitchen. The Poet also noticed, dismayed, that his breath was now visible, and the Guitarist switched glove hands again. The Calligrapher stood before the window for a long, quiet minute before returning to his old spot on the floor. The others watched him with trepidation, their teeth chattering, and wondered why his weren’t.

“We are very old friends, aren’t we?” the Calligrapher said, eyeing the two of them with something that wasn’t reassuring enough to be termed a smile. “Very old, very good friends?”

The Guitarist gave what could have been either a shiver or
a nod, but it must have been good enough for the Calligrapher, for he continued: “We are linked to one another by our memories, by our craft, by our secrets … I would do anything for either of you, anything that you asked. And I would do it no matter the sacrifice required. For you are my only family.” He was back to knee-jiggling with a vengeance.

The Guitarist huddled on his wooden stool in mute bewilderment, but the Poet, who was better at dealing with words, spoke up: “Enough. We don’t understand what it is you’re on about. Are you satisfied?”

“I don’t need you to understand, just to listen,” said the Calligrapher. He placed the lid firmly on his pot of ink. “Though we have done nothing especially strange this evening, it appears that the strangeness has finally discovered us. Tonight I must tell you a story. A short story, but one that I have tried to keep a secret for a long time. If in the past I accidentally revealed pieces of it, it was done with these,” he said, holding up his left hand and letting the splotchy fingers wave like the tendrils of a tide-pool–dwelling creature. “But I will not be using them to speak anymore.” Still keeping the hand aloft, the Calligrapher turned to the Guitarist. “Begin with E minor. You won’t need your broken B string. In fact, it will probably sound better without it.” A long pause. And then, impatiently: “What are you waiting for?” The very confused Guitarist adjusted the instrument on his knee. “The story takes place in E minor, G, and F,” the Calligrapher continued. “But I can’t tell you the tune. Change chords when it
feels right. There might be an A minor as well, if the story ends the way I hope it will. I can’t know for certain, because you control a third of the telling. We are all following each other.”

Next, he looked over at the Poet and grinned wickedly. “But for the moment all
you
are going to do is sit on your hands.” The Calligrapher shushed him when he tried to protest. “If not, you’ll try to close the window!” he reasoned.

“But the window
should
be closed! Something might come in!”

“That’s exactly what I’m trying to avoid by leaving it open. Now do as I say before I come over there and force your hands under your great fat bottom myself.” The Poet looked offended but obeyed, wiggling until his hands were underneath his thighs. Satisfied, the Calligrapher finally dropped his own stained left hand, and the Guitarist, though he was unaware that it was a cue, played an E minor chord as it fell. Behind the kitchen door, Dien’s fingers shook as he inserted a skinny piece of wire into the lock and began coaxing it open.

“Bear in mind that I am working in an unfamiliar medium,” began the Calligrapher. “My stories are painted, not spoken, and usually only spirits can loosen my tongue. But”—he gestured to the broken bottle on the floor—“tonight our other, very old, very good friend has fallen, so we must carry on without him as best we can.” On his stool in the corner, the Guitarist changed from E minor to F and strummed slowly.

“We are all of us old and soft and mostly useless now, but I want you to try and picture the place about ninety-five miles
north of here that they now call Empty Mountain. It was foggy and green and indistinguishable from the other mountains that surrounded it until the Americans sprayed it with their chemicals and the forest went dead. Think. Think! Yes, you see it clearly, even though four decades have passed since the three of us were stationed on its southeastern slope. We would have barely known each other, having just come out of the training camp. We were eager, but mostly we were young. Young and terrified. That is the part you may have forgotten. Remember it now.

“The night our story takes place was, like tonight, inauspiciously cold. Any of us could have been assigned to lookout, but that particular evening the watch fell to me. Though I was no more than ten or fifteen yards away from the camp where you and the others slept, the tents were only just visible in the insufficient moonlight. I stood alone at the point where jungle became deep jungle, my gun pointing at the shadows and shaking in my hands.”

At this point the wind outside began blowing ever so slightly harder. The short bristly hairs on the back of the Poet’s neck prickled. The Guitarist shuddered and began to alternate chords, picking four beats in G, four beats in E minor, then back again.

“I stared into that darkness and waited for something to emerge from it. I must have looked at it too long, too intently, too expectantly. What came out was something that I summoned myself. In the early hours of the morning, when my fear had still not abated but my eyes were beginning to droop,
something in the jungle made a noise. A clicking. Soft, but distinctly non-animal in origin.
A monkey
, I told myself anyway.
It must be a monkey
. It grew louder, and it was coming from somewhere to my left.
A cricket then; a very large cricket
, I thought, but my trigger finger was twitching despite myself. Then the sound was coming from directly in front of me, and I saw a glimpse of something white and shapeless, flashing for a single instant out in the trees …”

The Calligrapher’s voice trailed off, and for the first time in what felt like years he went completely still. His mouth when he spoke again barely seemed to move. “I fired.”

At that very instant there was a single, sharp rap at the front door. The Guitarist came down hard on his E string, but it didn’t break. For perhaps the third or fourth time this evening the Poet felt a pang of worry in his gut, for he knew that the Calligrapher never had guests apart from himself and the Guitarist.

But the Calligrapher just went on. “It was a single shot. I fired it without thinking. My eyes may even have been closed, for there was really no difference between the darkness of the jungle and the inside of my eyelids. I could hear perfectly, though. And after the crack of my gun, the fearful clicking stopped, and from the jungle I heard the sound of someone sighing.”

There was another knock at the door.

“Aren’t you going to see who it is?” asked the Poet.

“Ignore it,” said the Calligrapher. “We must finish the story.”

“Damn the story and answer your door!” the Poet blustered, but he remained sitting on his hands on the couch.

The Calligrapher’s face was serene. “It is not necessary. I am perfectly aware of who is knocking, and you will be, too, if you stop interrupting me. Pay no attention to the door. There is no door. We are in the jungle and we are twenty-three years old and it is colder than we could have ever imagined. Out of fear I shot a bullet into the shadows and out of stupidity I decided to follow it. The sigh was a human one, I was certain, and every bit of me trembled as I felt my way through the dark to where I thought the sound had come from. E minor and F now … Good.

“I didn’t notice the dying girl until she was practically underneath my feet, though at that point I wasn’t yet aware that she was a girl—there was only enough moonlight to tell that what I had been about to stumble over was a pair of pale legs, not to whom they belonged. It sighed once more. I counted to one hundred and then, having convinced myself that I was being brave, put my gun away and grabbed hold of the ankles. They were cold and without pulse and, I assumed, attached to a body that was thoroughly dead. With heavy steps I began making my way out of the forest, dragging my find behind me. I didn’t look back at it once; I kept my head up and my eyes fixed on the distant point where I knew camp was.