Winter 2007 (18 page)

Chapter Twelve

Cliff burns across the Port
Orange Bridge. It’s not yet full dark when he reaches the Celeste, but the Vacancy
sign has been lit. Across the way, with its strings of lights bobbing in the
wind and clusters of balloons and people milling everywhere, the used car lot
might be a tourist attraction, a carnival without rides. He pulls up to the
motel office and spots Bazit standing at the window, his arms folded. Bazit
must see him, but he remains motionless, secure—Cliff thinks—with
his hole card. He jumps out, heads for the door and, as he’s about to open it,
feels something hard prod his back.

“You stop there,” says Au
Yong, stepping back from him. She’s training a small silver hangun on him and
scowling fiercely. Cliff’s right hand sneaks toward the .45, but Bazit emerges
from the office and steers him into the shadows, where he pats him down. On
discovering the .45, he makes a disapproving noise.

“I want to see Marley,”
Cliff says.

“You will see her,” Bazit
says. “In due course.”

Au Young says something in
Cantonese; Bazit responds in kind, then addresses Cliff in English, “My wife
says for such a negligible man, you have a very powerful weapon.”

“Fuck your wife,” Cliff
says. “I want to see Marley now.”

Bazit continues patting him
down, but does not check under his balls. “You will see her,” he says. “And
when you do, let me assure you, she will be unharmed. She is resting. Shalin is
with her.”

“You tell that bitch, if
she…”

Bazit slaps him across the
face. “I apologize, sir, for striking you. But you mustn’t call my daughter a
bitch or say anything abusive to my wife.”

Again, he speaks to Au Yong
in Cantonese—she looks at Cliff, spits on the grass, and goes into the
office.

“This way, please.” Bazit
gestures with the .45, indicating that Cliff should precede him toward the rear
of the motel, toward Bungalow Eleven. “Don’t worry about your car. It will be
taken care of.”

As he moves along the
overgrown path that winds back among palmettos, Number Eleven swelling in his
vision, Cliff’s throat goes dry and he feels a weakness in his knees, as might
a condemned prisoner on first glimpsing the execution chamber. “Come on, man,”
he says. “Let me see Marley.”

“I hope you will find your
accommodations suitable,” says Bazit. “At the Celeste, we encourage criticism.
If you have any to offer, you’ll find a card for that purpose on the night
table. Please feel free to write down your thoughts.”

At the entrance to Number
Eleven, he unlocks the door and urges Cliff inside. “There’s a light switch on
the wall to your left. Is there anything else I can do before I bid you
goodnight?”

Cliff opens the door and
steps in. Of the hundred questions he needs answered, only one occurs to him.
“Was it your father who did the special effects for
Sword Of The Black Demon
?”

“No, sir. It was not.”
Bazit smiles and closes the door.

Cliff switches on the
overhead and discovers that the lights of Bungalow Eleven are blue. It doesn’t
look as bad as he imagined. No dried blood, no spikes on the walls. No bone
fragments or ceilings that open to reveal enormous teeth. He tries the door.
Locked from without—it appears to be reinforced. He fends off panic and
goes straight to work, dropping his shorts and unpeeling the tape that holds
the package. The entrance to the room is a narrow alcove, perfect for his
purposes. He tapes a shotgun shell to the back of the door, the ignition button
facing out. Then he tapes a thumbtack to the wall slightly less than head-high,
the point sticking through the tape, aligning it so that the door will strike
it when opened. He has to use the string to sight the job, but he’s confident
that he’s managed it. The bathroom door slides back into the wall, so it’s no
good to him. He searches for a hidden entrance. Discovering none, he tapes the
second shell to the front door, a foot-and-a-half lower than the first, and
lines it up with a second thumbtack.

An easy chair occupies one
corner of the room. He drags it around, angles it so that it faces the door,
and sits down. Booby-trapping the door has taken it out of him. He thinks that
the adrenaline rush wearing off is partly to blame for his fatigue, but he’s
surprised how calm he feels. He’s afraid—he can almost touch his fear,
it’s so palpable—but overlying it, suppressing it, is a veneer of
tranquility that’s equally palpable. He supposes that this is what some men
feel in combat, a calmness that permits them to function at a high level.

The blue light, which
annoyed him at first, has come to be soothing, so much so that he finds himself
getting sleepy, and he thinks that the Vacancy sign may have had a similar
effect when he stared at it from the used car lot. He wants to stay alert and
he looks around the room, hoping to see something that will divert him. The
windows are covered by sheets of hard plastic dyed to resemble shades. Except
for them, everything in Number Eleven is blue. The toilet, the rugs, the bed
table coated in blue paint. The sheets on the bed are blue satin, like the
witch queen’s sheets in the movie. That bothers him, but not sufficiently to
worry about it. He tries to estimate how long he’s been here. Maybe thirty,
forty minutes…The sheets seem to ripple with the reflected light, gleams
flowing along them as if they’re gently rippling, and he passes the time by
watching them course the length of the bed.

He thinks this could be it,
the sum of the Palaniappans’ vengeance—they’ve finished with their games,
and in the morning they’ll reunite him and Marley. They appear to know
everything about him, where he is at any given moment…all that. Perhaps they
know he’s basically decent and that he didn’t intend to injure Isabel. That
thought planes into others about Isabel, and those in turn plane into memories
of the movie they made together. He can’t recall its name, but it’s right on
the tip of his tongue. Devil Something. Something Sword. She flirted brazenly
with him on the set, but there was an untutored quality to her brazen-ness, as
if she didn’t have much experience with men and knew no other way to achieve
her ends. He recalls seeing her off the set, in a Manila hotel, room service on
white linen, high windows that opened onto a balcony, how she danced so
erotically he thought his cock would explode, but once he was inside her, that
part of him calmed down and he could go all night. It’s a wonder he didn’t
notice she loved him, because all these years later he sees it with absolute
clarity. She would lie beside him, stroking his chest, gazing into his eyes,
waiting for him to reciprocate. He thought she was trying to impress him with
her devotion, to trap a rich American for her husband, and, while that might
have been true, he failed to recognize the deeper truth that underscored her
actions. It’s the same with Marley, and he understands that, at least in the
beginning, he treated her with equal deference, dealing with her as one might a
sexy puppy that was eager to bounce and play. It was convenient to feel that
way, because it absolved him of responsibility for her feelings.

Other memories obtain from
that initial one, and he becomes lost, living in a dream of Isabel, and when a
point of blue light begins to expand in mid-air, right in front of him, he
thinks it’s part of the movie he’s replaying, part of the dream, and watches
from a dreamlike distance as it expands further, unfolds and grows plump in all
the right places, evolving into the spitting image of Isabel as she was in
The
Black Devil’s Sword
or whatever, blue skin, black nipples, lithe and curvy,
her secret hair barbered into exotic shapes, and she’s dancing for him, only
this dance is different from the one she used to do, more aggressive, almost
angry, though he knows Isabel didn’t have an angry bone in her body…it’s as
though she has no bones at all, her movements are so sinuous and supple,
bending backwards to trail her hair along the floor, then straightening with a
weaving motion, hips and breasts swaying, a sheen of sweat upon her body as she
flings her fingers out at him, like the queen…in the movie…when she danced…

Cliff feels pain, not an
awful pain, but pain like he’s never felt before, as if an organ of which he
has been unaware, a special organ tucked away beneath the tightly packed fruits
of heart, liver, spleen, kidneys, and intestines, insulated by their flesh, has
been opened and is spilling its substance. It’s not a stabbing pain, neither an
ache nor a twinge, not the raw pain that comes from a open wound or a burning
such as eventuates from an ulcer; but though comparably mild, not yet severe
enough to combat his arousal, it’s the worst pain he has known. A sick,
emptying feeling is the closest he can come to articulating it, but not even
that says it. He understands now that this is no movie and that something vital
is leaking out, being drawn from his body in surges, in trickles and sudden
gushes, conjured forth by blue fingers that tease, tempt, and coax. He tries to
relieve the pain by twisting in the chair, by screaming, but he’s denied the
consolation of movement—he cannot convulse or writhe or kick, and when he
attempts to scream, a scratchy whisper is all he can muster. It’s not that he’s
being restrained, but rather it seems that as the level of that vital essence
lowers, he’s become immobilized, his will shriveled to the point that he no
longer desires to move, he no longer cares to do anything other than to suffer
in silence, to stare helplessly at the beautiful blue witch with full breasts
and half-moon hips, sweat glistening on her thighs and belly, who is both the
emblem and purveyor of his pain.

His vision clouds, his eyes
are failing or perhaps they are occluded by a pale exhaust, a cloud-like shadow
of the thing draining from him, for he glimpses furtive shapes and vague
lusters within the cloud; but they are unimportant—the one wish he
sustains, the one issue left upon which he can opine, is that she be done with
him, and he knows that she is nearly done. His being flickers like a shape on a
silent screen, luminous and frail. But then she dwindles, she folds in upon
herself, shrinking to a point of blue light, and is gone. Her absence restores
to him an inch of will, an ounce of sensitivity, yet he’s not grateful. Why has
she left him capable of feeling only a numb horror and his own hollowness? He
wants to call her back, but has no voice. In frustration, he strains against
his unreal bonds, causing his head to wobble and fall, and sits staring at his
feet. Sluggish, simple thoughts hang like drool from the mouth of whatever dead
process formed them, the final products of his mental life.

After a while, an eon, a
second, he realizes that the pain has diminished, his vitality is returning,
and manages to lift his head when he hears a click and sees the door being
cautiously opened. A woman with frizzy blond hair peeks in. He knows
her—not her name, but he knows her and has the urge to warn her against
something.

“Cliff!” she says, relief
in her voice, and starts toward him, bursting through the door.

Two explosions, two blasts
of fire, splinter the wood and fling her against the wall, painting it with a
shrapnel of blood, hair, scraps of flesh and bone. She flops onto the floor, an
almost unrecognizable wreckage, face torn away, waist all but severed, blood
pooling wide as a table around her. But Cliff recognizes her. He remembers her
name, and he begins to remember who she was and why she was here and what
happened to her. He remembers nights and days, he remembers laughter, the taste
of her mouth, and he wants to turn from this grisly sight, from the burnt eye
and the gristly tendons and the thick reddish black syrup they’re steeping in.
He wants to yell until his throat is raw, until blood sprays from his mouth; he
wants to shake his head back and forth like a madman until his neck breaks; he
wants very badly to die.

From outside comes the
sound of voices, questioning voices, muted voices, and then a scream. Cliff
understands now how this will end. The police, a murder trial, and a
confinement followed by an execution. As Marley recedes from life, from the
world, he is re-entering it, reclaiming his senses, his memories, and he
struggles against this restoration, trying with all his might to die, trying to
avoid an emptiness greater than death, but with every passing moment he
increases, he grows steadier and more complete in his understanding. He
understands that the law of karma has been fully applied. He understands the
careless iniquity of humankind and the path that has led him to this terrible
blue room. With understanding comes further increase, further renewal, yet
nonetheless he continues to try and vomit out the remnant scrapings of his soul
before Shalin returns to gloat, before one more drop of torment can be exacted,
before his memories become so poignant they can pierce the deadest heart. He
yearns for oblivion, and then thinks that death may not offer it, that in death
he may find worse than Shalin, a life of exquisite torment. That in mind, he
forces himself to look again at Marley’s disfigured face, hoping to discover in
that mask of ruptured sinews and blackened tissue, with here and there a patch
of skull, and, where her neck was, amidst the gore, the blue tip of an artery
dandling like a blossom from a flap of scorched skin….hoping to discover an
out, a means of egress, a crevice into which he can scurry and hide from the
light of his own unpitying judgment. He forces himself to drink in the sight of
her death; he forces himself and forces himself, denying the instinct to turn
away; he forces himself to note every insult to her flesh, every fray and
tatter, every internal vileness; he forces himself past the borders of
revulsion, past the fear-and-trembling into deserts of thought, the wastes
where the oldest monsters howl in the absence; he forces himself to persevere,
to continue searching for a key to this door-less prison until thick strands of
saliva braid his lips and his hands have ceased to shake and cracked saints
mutter prayers for the damned and blood rises in clouds of light from the
floor, and in a pocket of electric quiet he begins to hear the voice of her
accusatory thoughts, to respond to them, defending himself by arguing that it
was she who originally forced herself on him, and how could he have anticipated
any of this, how can she blame him? You should have known, she tells him, you
should have fucking known that someone like you, a jerk with a trivial
intelligence and the morals of a cabbage and a blithe disregard for everything
but his own pleasure, must have broken some hearts and stepped on some backs. You
should have known. Yeah, he says, but all that’s changed. I’ve changed. With a
last glimmer of self-perception, he realizes this slippage is the start of
slide that will never end, the opening into a hell less certain than the one
that waits upon the other side of life. He feels an unquiet exultation, a giddy
merriment that makes him dizzy and, if not happy, then content in part, knowing
that when they come for him, the official mourners, the takers under, the
guardians of the public safety, those who command the cold violence of the law,
they’ll find him looking into death’s bad eye, into the ruined face of love,
into the nothing-lasts-forever, smiling bleakly, blankly…