The Tesseract (3 page)

Hard to kill too. Corner them with a lighter flame and they strolled through the flame, whack them with a newspaper and they laughed in your face. And—didn’t they have an incredible tolerance to radiation? Ten million times higher than every
other animal, or something close. The animal best suited to life after the bomb. Amazing, to be able to cope with atomic fallout so well and a shoe heel so badly.

Sean slid off the bed.

Seven seventeen
, four dead roaches, flattened, burst, floating in the toilet bowl, the world a better place.

The flush made Sean wince and he tapped his foot impatiently as the cistern refilled. The noise was as loud and awkward as a cough at a funeral. Noise didn’t belong in Patay. The quiet inside the hotel was so absolute that it appeared to have infected the street outside. Unprecedented in the city, cars and jeepneys laid off their horns when passing, motorbikes eased off the throttle, balut vendors didn’t bother calling out. The rest of Manila rippled with these sounds twenty-four hours a day, but not Alejandro Street. Patay existed in a cocoon of silence.

Virtual silence. Sometimes it was broken. Curious sounds, difficult to place, unnaturally amplified and confused by the vacuum around them. Trapped air in the water pipes that sounded like footsteps, barking dogs that sounded like crashing cars.

Two of the roaches didn’t make it down the U-bend. One turned out to be still alive, struggling with the surface tension and its leaking innards. Brown innards, Sean noticed, thoughtfully thumbing the sweat out of his eyebrows. So, sure enough, you are what you eat.

Back on the bed, Sean lay with his head propped up on his elbow, looking at the blood on the sheets. Inhaling, he thought to himself: Connections. The telephone, the blood-stained sheets, and the peephole. The three things came out of nowhere; they were non sequiturs. But nothing comes out of nowhere, and non sequiturs don’t exist. There had to be a connection.

Sean traced around the rusty spatter with his finger.

Start at the beginning. There had been someone staying in the room, obviously. And judging by the phone, the someone was a torturer, possibly by trade. Which, more than likely, made the person a man. So a man in a room, and a room that smelled of melted plastic. A blue haze clinging to the ceiling. A full pack of cigarettes in the ashtray, burned down to the butts.

The man was breathing that smoke, smelling that smell, when he heard the sound of screws turning, splintering the dry wood as they pushed into the door.

He sat up abruptly, cocked his head to hear better. He looked around the room with widening eyes until he pinpointed the source. Then he stood, taking care to move quietly, and padded over to the peephole. He peered through. He saw only blackness.

He’d have asked himself, what was out there that he shouldn’t see? What was passing or arriving?

Probably he’d have slipped the chain on the door to buy the hard-kick time. Carefully, because, in Patay or anywhere else, no noise carries like that of scraping metal. Then over to the bars on the window to give them a tug. No joy there, sunk deep
into the concrete, about the only things in the hotel that did the job they were meant for. Then into the bathroom to see the width of the air vent. Which was way too narrow. A macaque monkey could barely have squeezed in.

He abandoned stealth. He probably had a gun. He went to get it, put it in his hand if it wasn’t there already.

With the peephole blocked, he didn’t know how many were on the other side of his door. But he knew he was stuck in the room and there were going to be enough outside to be able to get him, gun or no gun. As a torturer, he knew exactly what that meant. He was familiar with that scene.

So that was the thing—he was familiar. He went back across to the bed, sat down, and blew his brains all over the sheets.

“A shaving accident,”
said Sean. “An unexpected menstruation. A nosebleed. A miscarriage.” His throat hurt from too much tobacco. He lit another cigarette off the stub of the last one.

Seven twenty-four
. Sean had often heard people joke about the number of blades on Swiss Army knives, how no one could ever find a use for all of them. But Sean had found a use for all his blades within the first two months of purchase, and sometimes wished the knife had a few more.

He worked as quickly as he could. He’d had to close the door in order to have something to push against while he
unscrewed the plate, and he felt exposed in the corridor. It gave him the creeps.

The steel plate was purpose-made. About the size of a playing card, around the thickness of a door key, with edges still rough from the hacksaw. Unfiled, and sharp enough to cut a finger.

Its purpose had ended. Sean closed his door behind him and made as if he were about to chuck it onto the bed, but instead he threw it at the wall. A flash of anger had hit him as he’d pulled back his hand, irritation at having been beaten by the sun after all. The steel plate spun toward the rotten plasterboard and sank in like a throwing knife.

Immediately an alarm sounded. An urgent buzzing that filled the room, breaking on and off without rhythm.

At first Sean was too surprised to react. Then he lunged forward and pulled the plate out. He thought he must have severed a wire, triggering an arcane fire-warning system.

The alarm continued to sound. The wires had to be rejoined, quickly, before the shaven-headed receptionist came to investigate. But seconds later, clawing rubble from the hole he’d just punched, Sean saw that there were no wires. The walls were hollow. No brickwork, just wooden slats and the smell of trapped air. And bizarrely, the buzzing seemed to have become even more urgent. The rhythm
was less regular and the gaps between the buzzes were shorter.

He dithered, stupidly tugging at the torn wallpaper, then realized that if there were no wires, the steel plate was irrelevant. In which case, there actually
was
a fire. Sean swore and darted back across his room to his bag, imagining the speed at which flames would rip through the old hotel.

He stopped as he passed his bedside table.

It was the phone. The
phone
was ringing.

“
Aaaaah…Hello
, Sean.”

Sean gripped the receiver hard. He told himself: No time for shock.

Keeping his voice steady, catching his breath between words, he said, “Don Pepe! Hi!
Kumusta po kayon?
”

Don Pepe made a sucking sound. He was chewing a matchstick, as he always did. His matchstick was one of his weapons. Ask him a question and he’d suck his fucking matchstick, always making you wait for the answer.

“
Kumusta ka
, Don Pepe,” Sean repeated, in an attempt to cut the mind game off before it started, but the sucking continued. Don Pepe wouldn’t speak until he was ready.

“Well, Sean,” he eventually said. “Eeeeh, I’m okay,
lang.
How about you?”

“I’m fine. Okay,
din po
.”

“Okay,
din
…” Suck. “You like the hotel?”

Sean smoothed down the damp cotton of his shirt. “It’s quiet.”

“Yes, quiet. But you know, Sean, I made a mistake. Last year the hotel was,
ano
, a bery good hotel. But now my associate tells me it is palling down already. This was my mistake. I thought it was still a good hotel.”

“Oh, you didn’t know,” said Sean, hardly able to keep the disbelief out of his voice. “Really.”

“
Talaga. Pero
, if we are meeting in only tirty-pibe minutes, eeeh, it’s already too late to change,
di ba?
”

“Well…Maybe it’s not too late. We could meet in a bar. We could meet in…” Sean paused to think of somewhere public and open. “We could meet in the Penguin Bar. I could get to Ermita in half an hour. It would be easy.
Madeli po.
”

This time the sucking lasted for at least twenty seconds. Sean gripped the receiver a little more tightly each time the smack of a lip crackled down the phone line. He was determined not to be the one to break the silence. But when his knuckles were the color of his teeth, he heard himself saying, “Maybe we should just meet in the hotel, Don Pepe.”

“Yes,” said Don Pepe. “Let’s just meet in the hotel. I think it will be easier, and we will have the pribacy to talk.”

“Yes.”

“So anyway, aaaah, I was really teleponing to let you know, I will be,
ano
, a little bit late por our meeting.”

“Late?”

“Yes.”

“Uh, okay…How late?”

“Maybe pipteen minutes. One quarter ob an hour. That’s
ayos?
”

“
Ayos na.
No problem,
po.
”

“Okay, so, aaaah, eeeeh, good. See you then.”

“
Sige, po.
”

“
Sige.
”

Don Pepe put the phone down.

The dial tone sounded for six or seven seconds; then the line went dead.

Sean struggled
with himself. He was trying to neaten the hole he’d made, trying to pat the wallpaper back over the gap. It wasn’t possible. His hands were shaking too much. They contradicted themselves, the fingers feeling fat and clumsy, the steady tremble feeling tentative and delicate. Helpless, he found he was only adding to the rips. In a burst of frustration he tore off a strip clean down to the skirting board.

“I’m losing,” Sean said, stepping away from the spreading disaster area.

No question, but spoken out loud it sounded like a revelation.

For a few moments, Patay was in perspective. He had arranged to meet a man in a hotel, and the man was coming. Past that, nothing had happened, nothing had gone wrong. During those moments, the furniture was teak. Beneath the grime, the lamp fittings and curtain rings were brass. The headboard on the bed was handcarved, a relief of coconut trees and fishermen and
nipa
huts. He was standing in faded splendor.

Then his vision clouded. Teak was a crime and fishermen
were poor. Arranged to meet a man whose name was a black joke, told quietly in bars around Manila.
Don Pepe’s prayer before he sleeps? Forgive me Father, for I am sin.
If Don Pepe slept at all.

Dropping to his knees, Sean grabbed his overnight bag and jerked open the zipper. A change of clothes spilled onto the carpet, followed by a pair of sunglasses he never wore and a fresh pack of cigarettes.

“Come on,” Sean hissed. He gave the bag a shake. A toothbrush joined the pile, then a single AA battery, then a spare magazine. He paused to put the magazine to the side before shaking the bag again. A ballpoint pen, some coins, a loose shell, a flashlight, another AA battery, and a charm.

A charm only because Sean said it was. It didn’t have the credentials of a Buddha’s head or a crystal skull. It was just a passport photo of a girl, stuck to a small piece of card so she wouldn’t bend. Easy for her to bend, rattling around in Sean’s bag. In many ways, it would have been better to keep her in his wallet. But wallets, one was always hearing, weren’t safe in Manila. Pickpockets, razors, guns, badges. Only two days ago, Sean had heard about a Japanese tourist held up by a couple of cops near Roxas Boulevard.

A face that would have launched a thousand ships? Probably not, but that was okay. Dunkirk launched a thousand ships; launching a thousand ships was nothing to shout about.
Enigmatic smile? No, and that was okay too. Enigmatic smiles were hype, good for nothing but messing with your head. This girl you could trust. Honest, solemn, especially in the eyes. Eyebrows raised a little. Could have been about to ask a question or to hear one answered.

Exhaling, Sean lay back across the carpet, resting the photo on his chest. He noticed the room was big enough so that—should you happen to be lying on the floor—the ceiling was about all you could see. A flat beige plane above, fading to darkness in his peripheral vision. A flat plane above, might be a plain below. A desert, with cracks as dried up riverbeds.

Calm stole into Sean’s solar plexus, radiating from the girl’s point of contact. In five minutes, she’d be easing down his limbs, reaching up his neck. He came close to smiling. At this rate, sleep was in the cards. Seemed like a funny idea, having a nap when the mestizo’s Mercedes was weaving through the streets toward him.

Keeping pace with the girl’s progress across his body, the desert fleshed itself out. Water marks were shadows on the dunes, blistered paint was scrubland. From the dunes to the scrublands, an indistinct line of dots made the tracks of a camel train. Were the remnants of the spiderweb a mirage, or was it the other way around? Sean was finding it increasingly hard to tell.

A waste, he reflected, all those temazepams last night. Sat up for hours, frigging around with those weak little pills, when he could have been drifting over some corner of the Sahara. Crazy, not to have thought of it.

But forget last night. What about ten minutes ago?

Or was it fifteen?

Whatever. Ten, fifteen, he’d been a headless chicken. Punching the wall, freaking out. This time, Sean had to smile. He could picture the expression he must have made when the phone had started ringing. Jaw dropping, pulse jumping.

All okay now, thanks to his charm, his beta-blocker angel.

One day, he hoped to meet the girl in person. He’d see her in a street or something, and he’d walk up and introduce himself. Tell her all about the tough times she’d helped him through. The way she had of relaxing him, coaxing him out of trouble. He’d thank her, very politely but also genuinely, with warmth and feeling. Then he’d say good-bye, and they’d go and live their separate lives.

Poignant. The daydream could put a lump in his throat. Especially because it was a dream that would never come true. Sean didn’t know the girl’s name and address, or even her nationality. Since he had found her, abandoned on the floor of a passport-photo booth in Le Havre harbor, clues had been thin on the ground.

Sean continued his aerial scan. Over to his right, a network of parched tributaries. Over to his left…What was that? A meteor crater?