The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction Page 15

  I burst into Premier K’s office, breathless. “One of the Lees was fooling around in Bidet World again. I can’t get the toilets to turn off.” They always get the credit for my best ideas.

  “What?!” The Japanese toilets are his pride and joy. Fearless Leader K charges out the door in a fury to find and throttle whichever twin he locates first, and I take the opportunity to steal a pair of his pants. He is living out of three suitcases and some boxes stacked in the corner, and while I suppose most people would find this sort of sad, it makes my task much easier. I grab a pair of khakis that look like they won’t be missed and shimmy out of the office. Naked Dumpster Grandpa is just going to have to live without underwear—unusual as the situation may be, there are still some lines I refuse to cross.

  I’m feeling fairly pleased with myself until I return to the back lot and discover that he has disappeared. For a moment I am furious, thinking that he’s run off without telling me his story, leaving me with two exploding bidets and Generalissimo K’s pants, but then he pokes his upper half—now sporting my sweatshirt—out from where he had been concealing himself. I am relieved, which should never be your reaction to seeing a half-nude septuagenarian. I come closer and throw him the balled-up khakis. He catches them, vanishes behind the dumpster, and reemerges fully clothed a minute later. I notice that he is also wearing a pair of grimy plastic slippers and wrinkle my nose. “I assume those came out of the trash?”

  He nods. “I took the liberty of rummaging while you were gone.”

  Sunrise is arriving early, in streaks, and both my shift and my duty to this old man are over. I’m smart enough to know that this is where I should abandon the shenanigans and go home to Momma before I get mixed up in something I’ll regret. But I feel intoxicated by the weirdness of the past hour. I’m not ready for it to stop just yet. “So, Mister …”

  “Hiep. Vo Van Hiep. Originally from Bac Lieu province.”

  “I’m Phuong. So, Ông Hiep from the Bac Lieu province, are you going to explain your ‘condition’ to me here, or over dinner?”

  “Dinner?”

  “Breakfast technically. But it’s dinner for me. There’s a place right down the road owned by some of my second cousins with good bún bò. Let’s go.”

  He raises an eyebrow. “You’re the first person I’ve encountered who can make an invitation sound like a threat. And do you think it’s really wise to invite out someone you’ve only just met, and under such circumstances?”

  The answer is fairly obvious but I’m not about to admit it. “My car’s out front. It’s the brown Buick that smells as bad as your garbage slippers. Wait for me there while I grab my stuff inside.”

  I WAS WRONG: THE shoes smell much worse than the Drug Deal Mobile. Thankfully, the restaurant is only five minutes away, but I drive with my head out the window anyway.

  The place is dim and smells like pork fat and dishwater. The walls are covered with old, greasy-looking photographs of familiar Vietnamese landmarks: Ha Long Bay, One-Pillar Pagoda, the post office in Saigon, the floating market. We are the only customers and take a table by the window. It’s been so long since I’ve been like this—excited, nervous, quivery, nauseous in a way that doesn’t stop me from eating—that it takes me a while to remember the name of the feeling: anticipation. I have to force myself to wait until Ông Hiep has finished half of his bowl of soup before probing. “Tell me.”

  Ông Hiep takes his time. He calls over the waiter and orders tea and I wait in squirmy silence until it comes. He props his elbows up on the table, holds the mug with both hands, and then leans forward to lightly rest his chin on the rim. “I could tell you the truth. You wouldn’t believe it and you would dismiss me as a lunatic and it would most certainly ruin the meal.” He pauses and raises one tufty white eyebrow. “It doesn’t have to be that way. We could just sit here and finish our soup, making pleasant and meaningless conversation. Afterward, you would kindly take care of the check—as I have no means of paying you—and allow me to keep these clothes. And then we would part: you, entertained by the events of this morning, I, forever grateful for your generosity, and neither of us the worse for it. It’s up to you.” He puts his mug down. “However, I fear that you are the curious type.”

  I lay my chopsticks across the top of my bowl, fold my hands, and give him a double-barreled-shotgun stare. Tommy isn’t the only one who can play Yakuza. “I want to know everything.”

  His eyes disappear into his wrinkles when he smiles. “I see. But you must remember, later, that it was you who insisted on knowing.” He looks out the window for a long moment. When he turns back to me his smile is gone. “Ach, there is no delicate way to say it. The condition that I suffer from is this: Periodically, I will transform from a man into a snake. It is something that has happened to me since my youth in Vietnam. The episodes are irregular, but on average I make the change a couple of times every month. From a handful of occasions when I awoke human again, but tangled up in a molted snakeskin, I know for certain that I take the form of a reticulated python of about fourteen feet in length—rather on the small side, considering that the adult species can grow to over twenty feet. Do you have questions or shall I just continue? Or perhaps having heard only this much you wish to leave?”

  I hold his gaze, waiting for him to crack, to laugh uproariously at his own crazy joke. But he doesn’t. His face is tired and lined and dead serious. I shake my head no. Go on.

  “It always happens like this: Sometime in the night I will suddenly be overcome with spasms, unable to make a sound. My body will twist and my bones contort, my arms cleave to my sides and my legs to each other, and my skin grows tight, and I watch helplessly as it hardens into a thousand scales. There is a terrible pulling. Then the change is complete and I am aware of nothing until I regain consciousness as a man once more, without my clothes and often in an unfamiliar place. The last time, I was discovered in the branches of an oak tree down in the Third Ward. I usually transform back into a man within ten hours, but sometimes I am the python for days before I come to. Which reminds me—what is today’s date?”

  I locate my voice, way back in my throat. “The twelfth. Thursday.”

  He reaches for his tea and drinks deeply. When he speaks again I can tell that he is trying very hard to keep his voice steady. “And the month?”

  “April.”

  He says nothing but returns to staring out the window. The rest of Houston is up now, and when trucks hurtle past on the highway the glass rattles.

  “Can you remember what it’s like?” I ask. “Afterward?”

  Ông Hiep doesn’t move, but slowly a smile begins to spread over his face, a slow, helpless smile that exposes him more than any physical nakedness ever could. “Bits. They come back to me like pieces of a dream. You couldn’t really call them memories. Just ghosts of sensations that the human body cannot know. How to taste smell, how to taste heat. Seeing the world in motion, not in colors, not in shapes. To move like a ripple over the earth. The feeling of coiling, of lengthening, of squeezing.” His smile fades.

  “The first transformation was when I was eighteen. I woke up just before dawn in my father’s banana grove, about a mile and a quarter from our house, naked and in excruciating pain. For a while I lay there, trying to remember if I had been drinking. And then it came back to me: The cramps that had wrenched me awake in the night. Voiceless screaming. Writhing. Falling from my bed to the floor, praying that the noise would wake someone. Nobody coming. Feeling my clothes come loose and slip off as my body elongated and my bones rearranged themselves. Swallowing in fear, and realizing with horror that the saliva did not stop at my throat, for I no longer had one. Alone beneath the banana trees, I remembered, and I wept. At the pain, yes, and the confusion and terror of it all. But also because even though I was set in my old flesh again, somewhere very deep inside me, something was different. I don’t know if it was something gained or lost or awakened, but it was changed regardless. At sunrise I stole home, put on my o
ld clothes, and lay in bed as I waited for the rest of the house to rise. After that first episode I began praying feverishly for hours each day.

  “You should know that my family was part of the small Catholic minority in Bac Lieu. My eldest brother was a priest. We all could recite the beginning of the book of Genesis by heart. I knew what the Bible said about the serpent: that for its cunning, God condemned it to crawl for all eternity. I didn’t know why He had cursed me with this form which He so despised, what sin I had committed to deserve such a punishment. I fasted and burned incense to my ancestors, prostrating myself before their tombs and begging for forgiveness. But two weeks later I changed again.

  “This time it did not go completely unnoticed. One of my brothers discovered thick, S-shaped tracks in the mud at the edge of one of our fields. The village was frightened; snakes of that size were rare in our part of the East, and though it was unlikely that one alone could kill a strong man, it would go after chickens, goats, dogs, even children. Three weeks passed. Four weeks. Five. I allowed myself to believe that the other nights had been nothing but vivid hallucinations. But the next time I transformed, I woke up at the edge of the forest and I was not alone: My arms and legs were wrapped tightly around the corpse of a girl. I knew her, too—she was the younger sister of a friend. She was covered in bruises; every single bone in her body had been crushed. As I cradled the poor broken girl, sobbing, I slowly became aware of a strange ache around my mouth and lower jaw, a soreness that I hadn’t felt after the other transformations. And then I realized what it meant and I threw back my head and screamed. I had been trying to eat her.

  “I fled into the forest and never returned to my village. I spent the next years wandering, begging, stealing. Trying and failing to take my own life. But I couldn’t go on despising myself forever. Eventually I stopped asking God for forgiveness.

  “Do you know that the first people of Vietnam worshipped the snake? You see, we aren’t so dissimilar, God and I—both feared and revered. But what I came to realize—what He never knew—is that freedom is this slippery form he gave me. His punishment was really His greatest gift. The warm-blooded life is nothing precious by comparison—it is made easily, brutally. He creates by ripping, splitting, by tearing life away from its mother’s belly, by dividing and then giving breath. And I am precisely the opposite, taking life away by clutching at it too tightly, returning it to the belly and making us one again, embracing it until the breath is gone.” He has been gradually tightening his grip on his mug of tea and the veins on the back of his hand bulge beneath the skin. A wild, desperate gleam appears in his eyes. “Do you believe me, Phuong?”

  His question catches me by surprise and I don’t get a chance to lie. “Yes.”

  “If you believe what I am, then you must be afraid.”

  I probably should be. But when I pause and evaluate I decide that although I’m not sure exactly what I’m feeling yet, I know it isn’t fear. “No.”

  “Are you repulsed by me?”

  “No.”

  “Not fear, not revulsion. Do you pity me then?”

  I look at his tiny white head poking out from the immense maroon cowl of my sweatshirt. I wonder if he’s been hurt before, here, in this city. Most of my family would shoot a snake on sight if it was too big to beat to death with a shovel. “No,” I say again.

  Ông Hiep releases his breath and the crazy goes out of his eyes. Other people have entered the restaurant. I’m sure most of them assume that I’m a good grandkid, probably with a high GPA, taking Pop-Pop out for breakfast. They’ll never know the real story, and this exhilarates me. I try to name this feeling, this buzzing in my blood as I sit in a nameless Vietnamese soup restaurant in north Houston, and then I realize that’s just it—it’s feeling. It’s not something I’m used to and it scares me more than anything Ông Hiep has told me.

  I try to ignore it. “How did you end up in Texas?” I ask. “But maybe tell me the abbreviated version—I have to get home soon because my mother uses the car during the day.”

  “It was back in the late fifties. Smugglers caught me in python form; I woke up in a crate in the cargo hold of a ship, about two hours away from being turned into a handbag. They let me out in Galveston and even gave me fake paperwork, they were so scared.” He laughs, remembering. “Superstition can be a useful thing.” He takes one last sip of tea, draining the mug. “I’m being rude,” he says. “I’ve hogged the entire conversation. Why don’t you tell me some of your secrets?”

  “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 unexplod
ed 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.”

  WE 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.