The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction (21 page)

“I don’t have any secrets. And I don’t have any were-snake powers.”

He laughs. “How old are you?”

“Nineteen.”

“It could still happen. You work at the grocery store overnight?”

“It’s a job.”

“Unusual, isn’t it?”

“Why? Because I’m a ‘nice young girl’?”

“Doesn’t your family mind?”

“Why are we playing Inquisitor General all of a sudden?”

“I guess I’m the curious type, too. And, well, I’ve already laid myself bare …”

I grimace. “I don’t need to be reminded.”

Ông Hiep chuckles to himself before giving me an inscrutable look. “You see, I am just a very old man who is sometimes a python. But you, my child, are a creature far more complex.”

“Ha!” I exclaim. “Prepare to be underwhelmed. My family doesn’t care if I’m out all night stocking shelves; it’s a respectable occupation, considering what most of them do. I have one older brother. He’s a small-time crook, does things like fetching the coffee and the dry-cleaning and cocaine for the mob bosses, but he dresses as if he knows the Godfather personally. My mother runs a nail salon, feeds us, and the rest of the time behaves like an overgrown child. I’m up to my ears in cousins who insist on getting married all the time, so I spend half my life suffering through their various weddings and engagement ceremonies. You probably know some of the extended family. Or you might have a third cousin or something who married one of mine.”

“That would be unlikely—to my knowledge none of my family made it out of Vietnam, and I never married or had children. Although …” He looks cagey.

“What?”

“There’s no shortage of female pythons in the jungles of Vietnam. Perhaps in my snake form I was, well, luckier.”

I grimace again.

“It’s just nature,” he says. “I notice that you didn’t mention your father. Was that on purpose?”

“It’s because he’s absent.”

“I’m sorry. Is it painful or is it something you can talk about?”

“Not painful, no. It’s the opposite of that. All right, I’ll tell you about Old Papa Tâm, but first, I need to know something: Have you ever thought about going back? To Vietnam?”

Ông Hiep looks pensive for a moment. “Thought about it, yes, but deep down I’ve always known that when I left I left for good.”

“Why?”

“Well, even if the war had ended differently I probably wouldn’t have returned, but after 1975 there was no question about it. It isn’t my home anymore. I am almost certain that my old village was destroyed, that many of the people I loved died in ways I do not wish to dwell upon. If there are any who remain, they think I have been dead for over fifty years. I would be lost in that place. What happened in Vietnam was unthinkable, Phuong. Inhuman. Something that terrible and strange changes everything in a way that makes going back impossible.”

“That’s just it!”

“It is?”

“It is. Here’s the thing: It would have been one thing if Tâm Nguyen Sr. had just walked out on us. Left my momma for another woman. Abandoned us and moved to, I don’t know, Tucson. Los Angeles. Buffalo. That, I would be able to understand. But when he left us it was to go back. He left us for Vietnam. I didn’t—I still don’t—quite believe it. My father
grew up in a country that was on fire. He helped find the limbs of a cousin who made the mistake of playing with an unexploded shell. He sacrificed everything he had to get out. He pushed his younger brother out of the way to make it onto the boat. I remember how he used to lock himself in his room on the Fourth of July because the sound of the fireworks reminded him too much of bombs. Vietnam was his nightmare. It’s easier for me to believe that you sometimes turn into a giant snake than to believe that he could want to go back.”

My eyes are starting to prickle dangerously. I suspected this might happen, but it’s too late to stop now. “He said he was going to Saigon to start a business. Everyone tried to talk him out of it. His job here paid well; he had two kids to look after and a wife who didn’t know how to use a dishwasher. They told him he was plain crazy for returning to that dark place voluntarily. No one could convince him.

“For a while we got regular, crackly phone calls and a check every month. He told us that the work—catfish exporting, or something like that—was still getting off the ground but doing well. That he would come home soon and visit. He said he had presents for me. And then after six months it all stopped. The phone calls, the money, everything. I’m sure that Momma tried. She never heard back from his business partners, never got anything useful out of the American Consulate. She dug up all her old contacts who were still living in Saigon, but none of them could tell us anything. Maybe she should have flown over there herself and started looking under stones and poking around the riverbeds. It would have been about as
effective. It’s easier than you think to vanish completely in America; imagine how easy it is to disappear in a place like Vietnam. He knew that when he left, and he still went.” I wipe my nose. “It isn’t painful for me, I told you that already. I just don’t understand it. Let’s get the check now. I think I’m done with secrets.”

W
E BUY TIME IN
the parking lot outside the restaurant. He shuffles his feet and I jangle my keys, and in a creepy way it reminds me of that awkward moment at the end of a first date when you don’t know whether to kiss or hug or shake hands and leave quickly. Not that I’ve been on a lot of dates—most guys aren’t too keen on taking out girls who look like their younger brothers.

I can’t leave him, now that we know what we do about each other.

“Do you need a ride home?” I ask Ông Hiep.

“I feel like I’ve already pushed your generosity far enough, and didn’t you say that you need to get the car to your mother?”

I remember the conversation from breakfast last night. If Momma can forget that she sees her daughter every morning, then her daughter can easily forget to come home. I take my cellphone out of my pocket and turn it off. “No,” I say.

He gives me a long look. “Thank you,” he finally says, and reaches for the car door.

“Wait—lose those nasty shoes before you get in.” Then I have a better idea. “On second thought, give them to me.”

We get on the freeway and I weave around the lanes until I’m in front of somebody’s big shiny Ford pickup. I haven’t played highway basketball in a while but I’m pretty sure I’ll make the shot—it’s not too windy and the slippers are the perfect weight. Tommy and I used to do this all the time, back in his early days of physics nerd-dom. He was so strategic about it, so sure that his theories of aerodynamics and trajectory algorithms and whatnot meant that he couldn’t lose, but he always did anyway. I hold the slippers out the window with my left hand, as high as I can. From the dashboard, my grandparents, great-grandma, and hologram Jesus watch me disapprovingly.

“It’s not going to work!” says Ông Hiep. He has to yell over the sound of the wind beating against the garbage-bag–covered window.

“You just watch!” I release the shoes and the wind takes them. One flies crooked and I see it tumbling around over near the railing. But the other goes straight back and skims the top of the Ford as it comes roaring up behind us. I switch lanes and slow down. “Check it! Check it! Is it on the ground?”

Ông Hiep swivels in his seat to look out the back window. “I don’t see the other shoe anywhere,” he admits.

“Louder!”

“I don’t see it!”

“Yes! I got it in the truck bed! Told you I could!”

He chuckles at first but lets his laughter fade into something like long, broken sighs. “This is what your life is, isn’t it? Games. You’re just playing.”

“I can’t hear you!”

“Playing! All you do is play!”

“Yes,” I say softly, not bothering to yell because I know he can read it on my lips.

A
T
Ô
NG
H
IEP
’
S INSTRUCTION
I get off 610 somewhere around the northeast side and then spend forty minutes lost in the Fifth Ward while he tries to remember the directions to his house. We pass through neighborhoods where gentrification has been poking its nose around, and neighborhoods that still look like the ancestral homeland of the Drug Deal Mobile. Eventually we find a road he knows and follow it to a scabby collection of boxy one-story houses by the train tracks. Ông Hiep points to one that looks like it used to be painted blue. “There.”

I lock the car, even though the street is mostly deserted. Only a mother and her chubby toddler sit on their porch next door and watch us. “Ah, good,” Ông Hiep says quietly. “I worry each time that I’ve eaten Mrs. Alvarez’s baby. Good morning, Ana!” he calls out, and Mrs. Alvarez nods. He turns back to me. “I suppose, then, that this is where we part ways.”

No, no, no, not yet. “Let me wash my hands inside first. I can’t believe I touched those shoes without gloves. I probably have hep C.” I push past him and scamper up the porch steps. “Hey, your door’s unlocked …”

No one has been here in a very long time. There are cobwebs in the corners, and it’s dark and smells like microbes. I
cross the room and open a window to let some air in. “Ông Hiep, when was the last—when did you—”

“Forty-five days,” he says from the doorway. “The longest it’s been yet. I’m afraid that, honest though I’ve been, there is something I haven’t told you, Phuong.” He steps inside and walks over to sit on the only furniture in the room, a high, old-fashioned sofa, leaving prints in the dust with his bare feet. I come and sit down next to him. He places his hand over mine and I realize it’s the first time we’ve touched. His skin is cool and dry and surprisingly smooth.

“For the past several years I have been making the change far more frequently, and remaining in my snake form for increasingly prolonged stretches of time. I have come to accept—in fact, I always suspected it—that someday, someday very soon, I am going to transform one final time. And when I do I will not be turning back. Wait, don’t say anything yet.”

I am yawning, not trying to speak, but I don’t correct him.

“I will certainly be captured or killed sooner or later.” He pauses and then suddenly bursts out laughing. “I didn’t mean for that to sound quite so martyrly,” he says when he has collected himself. “It’s just a fact. They will catch me. It’s already remarkable—and more than a little disconcerting—that I have survived for so long. I am either a very clever python or this is a very unobservant city.”

Careful not to move my hand from under his, I wiggle to a more comfortable position on the sofa. Ông Hiep doesn’t seem to notice. He continues: “If I’m lucky, I will be discovered and Animal Control will be called in before I kill or injure somebody,
and I will be able to live out the rest of my reptilian years in a zoo somewhere. Or perhaps I will promptly meet my end beneath the tires of some behemoth truck.”

I have adjusted myself so that my head is on the armrest now, and I don’t see any harm in closing my eyes for a moment. “I’m still listening,” I murmur. I feel the cushions shift as Ông Hiep stands up.

He tucks my arm at my side and releases my hand. “I’m glad I had the chance to meet you, Phuong,” he says. “I wish that it had happened earlier, and under different circumstances. But I hope that today will be the last time we cross paths. I don’t want to consider the possibility of what would happen should you encounter me in my other form. You are quite small.”

“I’m going to miss you, Ông Hiep,” I say, only semi-aware of the words that leave my mouth. “And I don’t ever miss people.”

“Perhaps it’s time you started to, Phuong. I know it’s frightening, but perhaps it’s time you changed.”

“Ông Hiep, would I make a good python?” I ask through another yawn.

“Hmm. I think you would be a different sort of snake. Something small. Something fast. Something poisonous. Something good at disguising itself.”

Sleep is coming quickly now, laying itself heavy on my bones, dulling my brain, but my voice continues on without its consent: “I’ll never be able to talk about what happened today. Not with anyone. Because they wouldn’t believe it.” It feels
like I’m telling myself my own bedtime story. “They would think it was something twisted. Something bad. Even though there’s nothing wrong with us. Nothing wrong at all. But they’d think it was just because I’m a girl, even if I don’t look like one. And just because you’re an old man.”

“It’s funny,” he says, and it’s the last thing I hear before I fall asleep, “but sometimes I wonder if I am actually a man, or if I’m a snake who is just pretending all the other times.”

A
CHILLY BREEZE THROUGH
the open window wakes me hours later. My mouth tastes crusty and disgusting and my lips are all dry. I blink slowly, adjusting my eyes to the darkness. Darkness? I pat my pockets to find my phone and turn it on. Quarter to eight already. “Ông Hiep?” I call softly first, then louder when I hear no answer. I hold up my phone, shining the weak, bluish light from the screen around the room: emptiness and dust and there, in the corner, a large, dark mass that wasn’t there earlier. I bite my lip and extend my arm with the phone a little farther. As my eyes make sense of the shadows, the large mass reveals itself to be folds of fabric—my Texas A&M sweatshirt and Mr. Kwon’s khakis, in a heap on the ground.

I swallow, hard, and then sit as still as I can, listening. Where are you? I can barely hear over the sound of my own heartbeat. Where are you hiding? There’s nothing in the room except the sofa.

Oh God, the sofa. I quickly yank my legs up off the ground
and curl into a ball against the armrest, holding myself as tightly as I can. When my pulse has calmed down I lean as far out from the sofa as I dare, trying to see beneath it. There are about eight inches between the frame and the floor. Plenty of space. I can’t see anything scaly in the blackness but I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. What I do know is that I’d prefer not to stick my head underneath to find out. I return to the fetal position and squeeze my cellphone. Who would I call? The police? Momma? I’m not even sure exactly where I am.

I’m all out of tricks. Rigging toilets and throwing shoes can’t help me now. And it was my own decision, by the dumpster, that brought me down this path and deposited me here, in a dark house with a creature that doesn’t need to see to find me. I remember now how back at the restaurant he offered me the choice to walk away. To not know. But there was no choice, really. I wanted this. I was looking for this place, this knowledge, this feeling, the whole time.