The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction Page 16

  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.

  AT ÔNG HIEP’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 q
uickly 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.

  I’m going to have to run for it, and the desperation thrills me. Still, I cannot rush. In measured, torturously slow movements, I stand up on the sofa, ready for a giant primeval reptile to erupt out from underneath it at any second. When nothing happens I can finally exhale. I balance with my toes on the edge of the seat cushion. The elaborate plan I’ve devised is to leap as far as I can off the sofa and then sprint the rest of the way. I crouch, ready to jump. Then I panic and straighten my legs again; it has suddenly occurred to me that the dust on the ground could make me slip and fall, leaving me easy prey. I brandish my phone again, shining the light on the floorboards to gauge the danger. And that’s when I see the marks.

  I don’t know how I missed them the first time—even in the pathetic glow of the phone they are visible: huge, clumsy S-shapes rubbed away in the film on the floor. I aim the light around the base of the sofa again; the only prints in the dust there were left by feet. He isn’t under me after all. I turn the phone toward the door again and study the tracks from my vantage point on the sofa. They start in the area surrounding the clothes as a mess of indistinct squiggles and gradually become one clean, sine-wave–shaped track. I follow the sinuous line with my eyes a little farther: They lead directly to the open window. Oh, well done, you.

  I need to bury my face in my hands and shudder with both relief and fresh terror for a moment, but after that I’m ready. Running seems unwise, now that I don’t know where I should be running away from. I put one foot on the floor, and then the other, and begin to take cautious steps, pausing between each one to listen for rustling in the darkness. My phone I keep held out in front of me, like an evil-repelling amulet. When I finally put my hand on the doorknob I half-expect the creature to lash out from where it was hiding, watching me the entire time and allowing me to think I would escape. But the knob turns easily and I step outside into the smoggy Houston twilight. Because I grew up here I know not to bother gazing at the night sky, but my father never lost the habit of looking up and expecting to see stars.

  I almost let myself breathe easy. I almost lose control, dash for the car, jump in, and floor it. Luckily I restrain myself because there is something suspicious about the Drug Deal Mobile. More suspicious than usual, that is. I come a little closer to confirm it—my trash-bag window has been almost completely pushed in. It hangs from the last bits of remaining tape like a super ghetto cat flap. I found you.

  As I approach the car I am stealthy, cool. I circle up toward the driver’s side. All I want is a quick peek, a glimpse, a coil, a scale, a flickering of the tongue. I need to know for certain that he’s in there. But before I can, something—something heavy-sounding inside the Drug Deal Mobile—goes thump and I sprint away before I realize what I’m doing.

  I flee down the poorly lit street lined with dilapidated houses. I run and run, and my sneakers pound the asphalt so hard that one comes loose and falls off, and then the other. I keep running. I don’t even look down. My feet hurt at first, but after a while I can’t feel them anymore. It occurs to me that I might be transforming. I stop and examine my body, panting. No, I am still two legs, two arms, with sweat in my hair and running down into my eyes. I wipe it away roughly with a sleeve.

  “Phuong!”

  For a moment I think it’s him. For a moment I believe that when I turn around he’ll be there, and he’ll be himself again. But it’s not him. It’s Tommy.

  “Phuong! Fuck!” He grabs me by the shoulders. “What the hell are you doing here? Shit shit shit. Shit! Fuck!” He sounds like he’s malfunctioning. “You cannot be here. You just—it’s not—fuck!—this is not a good place for you, okay? Okay?” He is steering me toward the corner where his fancy little car is parked. “How did you get here? Hey!” Tommy grabs me by the biceps. “Where’s your car?” He shakes me. I shake my head.

  Tommy opens the door and shoves me inside. He studies my face. “Are you hurt?” I shake my head again and he checks to make sure that all my parts have made it in the car before shutting the door. He walks around and climbs behind the steering wheel.

  “Don’t take me home!” I blurt out suddenly. Tommy gives me a look. He uses both hands to comb his hair back and then starts the engine.

  “I was working just now,” he says as he navigates the dark streets with an ease that betrays how well he knows this part of the city. “And we saw this little delinquent-looking kid come running like hell down the street.” He is staring hard through the windshield at nothing in particular now. “They told me to go take care of it and sent me outside. Do you get it, Phuong? Do you get what that means? Do you get what could have happened?” He takes his hand off the wheel and purposefully brushes the bottom of his jacket back just enough for me to see the grip of the handgun. When he is satisfied that I understand, he continues: “This is the kind of place when, at a certain time of night, if you’re where you shouldn’t be, you disappear.” We’re getting back on the 610 loop now. “Can you tell me what you were doing there?”

  I look at my lap and shake my head.

  “Okay,” Tommy says. “I get it. I have my secrets, you have yours. But you’re going to have to promise me that you won’t go back.”

  “I won’t.”

  “That’s good enough for me. So if we aren’t going home, where should we go?”

  “Can we just drive? Around?”

  “At least until one of us gets a better idea.”

  The night is really beginning now. The nine-to-fivers are back at home already; the only ones out at this time are the ones who have run away from that life. Somewhere in Houston neon lights are going on. Mr. Kwon stands in his grocery store kingdom and looks out the window. Momma is falling asleep alone. My fat cousin Dumpling’s bride lays out her wedding dress for tomorrow. Her great-aunt with liver cancer continues breathing. Something that used to be a man twines in the seat of an old, abandoned car. Some gangsters wonder where one of their own has gone off to. My older brother and I drive.

  We drive around the warehouses by the water. We drive through the dark parts of the city and watch couples stumbling out of nightclubs in each other’s arms and prostitutes slinking in the shadows, looking for arms that need someone to hold. We drive too fast down deserted expanses of the freeway and I let my right arm hang out of the window, cupping the night and the wind in my fingers while lights that are not stars twinkle all around me. Usually I would be able to pretend it’s beautiful. But tonight it’s not enough to distract me anymore. As we circle endlessly on 610, all I can think of is how much the highway resembles a snake coiling around the entire city.

  ONE-FINGER

  THE VERY SMALL CITY lay tucked among the green-gray folds of the central highlands. At night, were one to observe it from above and from a distance, the gently pulsing lights of the town would resemble a luminescent mold spreading over the hills. The people who inhabited this particular region of the country, high above the steamy reach of the Mekong but still far from the bitter northern winter, were tempered by their climate. They share
d most of their lives with a perpetual, damp chill—the kind of bleak and persistent cold that never quite reaches the bone but instead lodges somewhere just beneath the skin from September through April.

  But this particular December night was colder than it should have been. Breath turned pale before it left the mouth and lingered on in a white cloud even after its maker had walked away. The streets were mostly deserted, and those still outside hurried home quickly, eager to escape from the biting wind. It was so unnaturally chilly that the Guitarist, perched on a wooden stool in the Calligrapher’s living room, was wearing a wool glove over his strumming hand, which slowed his already clumsy playing considerably. The Poet had arrived early and claimed the couch—he reclined, keeping both hands warm in the pockets of his tweed jacket and feeling lucky that his particular role did not require him to remove them. Perhaps the Calligrapher did not feel the cold, for he sat on the tile floor facing his two friends, his legs folded underneath the low table before him. Shriveled and arthritic though he was, the Calligrapher was never still. Even at rest he was possessed by a manic, rodentlike energy, always twitching something, drumming his fingers, gnawing on the inside of his cheek. Even in his sleep his hands would play with the keys he wore on a long chain around his neck. He was jiggling his knee now, knocking it against the tabletop from below. The objects crowding the table’s surface—a pot of ink, a bottle of crude Vietnamese vodka, half empty, a single shot glass, and a stack of white paper—trembled with each movement.

  The canny observer might detect that brushes were absent from the table, but also that the Calligrapher’s left hand was stained black to varying degrees—the index finger dyed past its bony knuckle, the pad of the thumb colored a darkness that would never wash away, and the outer side of the palm marked with coin-sized splotches. The discoloration of the hand gave the impression that it was in the process of rotting.