Apocalypse Hotel: A Novel (Modern Southeast Asian Literature) (6 page)

Thế was a repeater station on this information network. He was a good-looking young guy who had worked as head interpreter for many leaders. After work trips overseas, his colleagues came home with thoughts of “You go your way and I’ll go mine,” but Thế was quite contrary. He knew that his connections with those politicos helped him make his living. He’d faithfully make his rounds, visiting the big shots and their families, patiently conversing with the wives. These ladies had been naturally affectionate toward the young translator during his lightning-quick friendship visits abroad. In those countries he’d even made time to go shopping with them, deftly translating the names of sensitive products, and so it was that Thế came to be appreciated by the ladies, who in turn made sure their appreciation was sweetly and smoothly mentioned when they spoke to Mr. Head of Department and urged him to have Thế promoted. Thế rose to the rank of department head himself. At that point everyone had thought that he’d keep going higher but, all of a sudden, he submitted a request to resign from his post. He was forty-four years old at the time. Sixteen more years and he would have reached retirement age. But Thế had collected enough capital to build a large hotel instead. Of course, people who have participated in politics are rarely able to stop being politicians; all they do is to switch their political methods to literature or business or science. Thế was no exception. He had constructed a protective and supportive network and all of his connections continued to help him. The bigwigs clucked behind his back that he was a fool who had destroyed his career at the halfway point. But their women smacked their lips about Thế and didn’t consider him a fool at all: his hotel was so big, so impressive, and so luxurious.

Who knows who is foolish and who is wise in this world? The wise and the foolish alike all die. Only a few people truly know what life is, and once they know, once they’re enlightened, they don’t die. They only live out their miserable lives. I mentioned that during my years and months on the sea I read many Buddhist works. I felt sorry for the Buddha. He had reached enlightenment at thirty-five years of age (although, to tell the truth, if I was ever truly enlightened it happened this year) and for forty-five years more the Master would have to live within the world of those who would venerate him, admire him, believe in him, but maybe never actually understand him. The Master is a lonely and pitiful figure.

I reflected on this as I sipped my cup of coffee, only vaguely aware that Thế was talking to me. Suddenly, I jumped back. A woman had pushed the door open and walked into the front room, straight to the reception desk, and then found the staircase and walked upstairs. She looked like someone I knew but I couldn’t recall whom. I wondered why I’d met so many people who’d seemed familiar to me lately. My friends teased me that everywhere I went I bumped into people I knew, spoiled youngsters that I was afraid to hit in case they were actually my kids. “Never mind,” I thought. “Just let it go.” I smiled to myself and tried to concentrate on what my brother, who was more talented than others, was talking about.

He was complaining that people often mistakenly called the hotel the Ngày Tận Thế, which was actually Vietnamese for Apocalypse Now, the restaurant owned by old Đắc Tùng. He’d just lifted the name wholesale from Francis Ford Coppola’s film about America’s war in Vietnam. “That old man,” my brother was saying, “was so ignorant of politics that he had decorated the inside of restaurant with replicas of helicopter rotors, parachutes, and US combat helmets. A lot of people were responsible for perpetuating that ignorance by allowing him to do business in an atmosphere that reeked of war.” But he, Thế, was different; he was a very aware man. He had thought very hard from the beginning before he named his hotel the Apocalypse—it was certainly not Apocalypse Now. His choice of name was actually a reference to the final book of the New Testament, Book of the Revelation of Saint John the Divine, in which John of Patmos foretells the end of the world.

“If, as seems likely soon,” he said, “I don’t have permission to use foreign words for my hotel name, I’ll change it to Khải Huyền or Thiên Khải.”
²

Thế paused, looking at me as if he were cracking a joke.

“And I’m afraid that the Captain’s Studio will have to be renamed Xưởng Vẽ của Thuyền Trưởng.”
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I grinned slightly to let him know that whatever he chose was okay. Thế burst into laughter to show that he was just teasing me. At that moment, Phũ walked in.

“Dad, Uncle Đông, come to my room, right now.”

His face was pale, his lips trembling.

The two of us rushed after Phũ back to the office. He carefully locked the door, and then led us toward the bathroom. Bóp was swaying back and forth like a mannequin in the middle of the large bathroom. A length of rope, tied tight around his neck, hung from a hook on the ceiling. His face had turned a livid purple from the accumulated blood. His eyes were bulging and his tongue protruded.

In that moment of panic, I was still conscious enough to find a knife from Phũ’s drawer in the office. I cut the rope while Thế grabbed him and laid him down on a long couch. He pressed Phũ’s cold hands and thoroughly examined the chilled body.

“He’s been dead a long time already,” he said, and released Bóp’s stiff hands, letting them flop onto the couch.

Phũ told us that the two of them had just been planning how they would approach that girl’s house. He was going to remain outside and keep watch while Bóp went inside to do the deed by himself. Phũ had jokingly told Bóp to remember to put on a diaper or else he wouldn’t be able to escape with soaked shorts. Phũ had then left the room for about thirty minutes so that Bóp could finish his business. When he returned, he found his friend hanging there in the bathroom.

Now Bóp lay motionless on the couch. Phũ closed his friend’s eyes. His shorts were totally soaked and smelled of chestnuts.

“Okay, now we’ve got to figure out how we’re going to get Bóp out of here,” Thế announced. He was always the first one to return to reality. Dead people, from any angle, were still dead, and the cause could be figured out later. He certainly didn’t want trouble with the authorities and he wanted the fact that someone had died in the hotel known even less. If it came out, then “Doomsday” would truly be a fitting name for the hotel.

But it was also impossible to take Bóp back to Cốc’s house, where his buddy’s ashes still resided. The neighborhood around there had been in an uproar as a result of Cốc’s death. The only option was to entrust the body to the hospital mortuary, covered with an iron lid. Those iron lids that had thwarted the ardent attempts of all the rats outside.

Thế went to call the hospital director on the phone. He called Bóp’s mother and father in Saigon. It was always essential for Thế to do the proper thing. He took on the responsibility of making all the arrangements for the grief-stricken relatives. “Uncle Đông and Phũ can take the body down on the earliest flight,” he said into the telephone. “Yes, I know that his parents and siblings can’t come up here right now.”
Click
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The hardest work still remained: somehow we had to get Bóp’s body out of the hotel. Naturally, we couldn’t just go past reception like a guest checking out. Nor could we carry the body out the back door for all the workers there to see. I found a cardboard refrigerator box in the storehouse. The three of us stuffed the 88-kilogram body into the box. We had to put him into a sitting position, bending him upright so that he could fit into the box. Then we put the box onto a pushcart and Phũ pushed him out the back door. I brought a minibus around and we put everything and everyone in it and drove to the back gate of the hospital.

But once we’d gotten the refrigerator container into the mortuary, we had a problem. The body was determined to remain in a sitting position, stubbornly refusing to settle prone on the table. It was as if, in the last moment of his life, Bóp had become ashamed of his wet, sticky shorts. The body was already cold, already stiff, and already curled up. Nobody could get it into the coffin. I suddenly remembered something. I had some experience with this kind of death. I drove the van back to the hotel, grabbed a few bottles of vodka, and then searched the kitchen for a bit of ginger, a thermos of boiled water, and a bucket. When I got back, we placed Bóp on a granite-topped table. He sat there, still leaning over and curled up. The three of us, covering our noses with handkerchiefs to block the death stink of the morgue, used the vodka and the hot ginger water to rub down his joints. After that we could pull his arms and legs loose and get the body to lie on its back. His two hands were pushed down as if hiding something on his stomach. His legs, which had been so beautiful, were twisted and arched inwards. Even so, we were finally able to dump his body into the coffin.

Phũ and I got on the airplane quite early. The metal coffin was quietly brought on board by the airline staff. We boarded early, but the seat next to us already had a passenger in it: an old man around retirement age who seemed content and relaxed. The old man strained his eyes slightly when a stewardess, pinching her nose shut, hurriedly ran through the rows of seats which were still only partially filled, and sprayed the air with some kind of deodorant that smelled like the hospital. The man clicked his tongue and complained how nowadays that’s the way it was: passengers had to board planes that weren’t really cleaned, only deodorized and air-conditioned.

We were sitting right next to the flight attendants’ galley. A group of pretty boys were grab-assing with some willing young ladies. A lady with her hands clasped in front of her was standing before a small bowl of incense with a tray of airline food in front of it. Her protective spirits were flying for free. The pretty young gentlemen and willing young gentlewomen put on serious faces while the lady softly recited her prayers and made her offerings. As soon as she finished, she squeaked out a final shrill note and the whole group broke into raucous laughter. One hoodlum took the chance to jump in and ask the spirits to help him get his hands on the nice breasts of a virtuous girl.

“These are monsters, not human beings,” the old man said to me. “Watch, now they’ll get into some kind of superstitious nonsense themselves. And they should be scared,” he said. “I’m very scared of flying these domestic airlines. Only when we’re back on the ground will I believe that I might actually survive. Once before, we were about forty minutes into a flight when the cabin suddenly became as hot as a furnace. Westerners were sweating through their shirts and vomiting all around me. I looked out the window and saw the Red River again beneath the plane. Apparently the airplane had had mechanical problems and we had already turned back around. Later I heard that the ventilation system wasn’t working and if the plane had kept flying then everyone would have burned to death. And that’s not all! One time I was flying to Saigon with a high-level delegation. The plane had had its preparatory maintenance a few days before; nevertheless it circled the runway once, and then circled again a few times before it could finally lower its landing gear. After the big shot who headed the delegation came back from that trip, he decided that if he had to go somewhere, he would make sure that it was on a plane with a foreign pilot. He had been appealing people to use domestic products, but his own life had to be guaranteed by foreign pilots and foreign medicine.”

I didn’t want to talk. I pretended to be staring intently at a newspaper, but really I couldn’t read a word. Phũ’s face was scowling as if he were looking into another world. But the old man wouldn’t stop bending our ears. “I’m suspicious of these newly purchased airplanes,” he said. “It’s clear that they just made them look good; they’ve obviously been only cosmetically refurbished—dressed up to look new, and then sold at an attractive price. They’re better than old planes, but not as good as new ones. The developing countries are the garbage piles of the developed world, where they cast off their discarded things. The only ones who benefit from the deals they make are the ones who sign the contracts. People think that these airplanes have a lifespan of decades. Then one of them suddenly dies mid-flight. It’s no wonder people are superstitious. And the only thing that one can do on one of these planes is pray it won’t fall out of the sky.”

It was as if the old man were obsessed with death and kept speaking about it to calm himself down. In spite of all his talk of death, his face remained calm and emotionless. He was someone who liked to talk just to please his mouth; he just liked to scare other people. I wanted to tell him that on this flight he was traveling with a corpse. But at that point Phũ made me move to another row. The flight was pretty much empty, with everyone sitting a few rows apart.

At the airport, Bóp’s corpse was picked up to be taken to the place where the funeral would be held. Again, bouquets of white flowers. Bóp’s father lifted the shroud over the body to see the face of his child. He cried as he held his face. Tarzan man, 185 centimeters tall, 88 kilograms; his face had been made up carefully so he looked like he was sleeping. “Father will follow you, Son,” he cried. “Why didn’t you try to wait for me?”

A band played the traditional eight-tone music with all the traditional instruments, glittering like a military band. The music surged, each line rising to greater and greater levels of rousing elation: “Heart in prison, heart in prison / I love you, love for a thousand autumns . . . / Don’t listen to the things the girls say, / Don’t listen to the things the girls say, / Don’t listen to the things the girls say.” Northern funerals always had heartrending songs. Such music was meant for the living people taking part in the funeral ceremonies. The funerals here in the South had nothing but cheerful tunes. Happy songs so that the departed would leave peacefully, with an untroubled mind. Or was it the reverse: Sad music for the dead; happy music for the living?

That night Phũ and I drove through the streets of Saigon on a custom Prawn 750-cc motorcycle as bulky as a scorpion. Phũ remembered that Cốc’s dog was at home by itself, and that it might not have anyone to look after it for the next two days. He ran to the telephone booth on the street and called Hanoi to ask one of the guys from the hotel kitchen staff to go to Cốc’s house to feed the dog. Cốc’s dog and Bóp didn’t used to get along. Sometimes Bóp would get excited and attempt to choke the dog. But after Cốc died, Bóp had brought his ashes home, and put them up on the altar, and the dog had been stricken with panic and confusion. Every day, when Bóp would light the incense, it would lie beneath the altar and sadly hang its head, its eyes brimming with tears. Bóp was touched by its display of loyalty and they began to live together in peace. No more strangling. Now that both of its masters were dead, how could the dog bear to go on living?