The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction Read online

  Once, the Poet had been the handsomest of the three, but now his bloated body strained against the seams of his jacket and his belly was almost indistinguishable from the couch cushions. The Guitarist was neither as shriveled as the Calligrapher nor swollen like the Poet. He had a drooping mustache and a mole on his chin from which several long white hairs sprouted.

  There was no place for forced cordiality in the Calligrapher’s living room. The three knew one another far too well; they had been meeting like this for too many years. The Guitarist and the Poet did not bother knocking anymore. They had ceased to observe common courtesies like leaving their shoes at the front door, and they no longer asked about wives or children, for their wives were all dead and their children all gone, the exception being the Calligrapher’s son Dien, who was locked inside the kitchen every week during their gatherings because he was, as the Calligrapher put it, “shy,” though the Poet and Guitarist and most of the Calligrapher’s neighbors knew the real reasons.

  Not once in two decades had the couch cushions been aired. The family altar stood neglected in the corner, bearing dusty photographs of the Calligrapher’s late wife and an assortment of other ancestors. The only objects in the room that received regular cleaning were the framed paintings on the wall. There were about fifteen in total, ranging from envelope-sized to nearly five feet in diameter, each covered in abstract-looking black smears and accompanied by explanatory plaques with descriptions like “Pine Grove at Dawn,” or “Woman in the Mist,” or “Buffalo at the Foot of the Mountain.” Supposedly the titles were also written in hidden Chinese characters within the paintings. All of them were signed at the bottom left corner, not with a name, but with a fingerprint.

  The responsible finger was currently pointed in an accusatory manner in the Guitarist’s direction.

  “You! You lost the beat again!” The Calligrapher crumpled the page in front of him with his non-inky fist and threw it to the corner of the room with the other wadded-up paintings that he had rejected earlier in the evening. “How am I supposed to paint when you keep rhythm like a … like a … like …” He turned and looked expectantly at the Poet.

  The Poet lifted his head from its resting place atop his multiple chins and thought for a moment. Taking advantage of the pause, the Guitarist removed the glove from his right hand and put it on his very cold left one.

  “Like the way Old Nhan dances?” the Poet eventually supplied. Old Nhan was the Calligrapher’s one-legged neighbor. Land mine, 1972. The accident was only ever spoken of indirectly.

  “Exactly!” snorted the Calligrapher. “Now, have we finished with our mistakes?”

  The Guitarist bobbed his head, but the Poet adopted a melancholy countenance and sighed. “Is one ever finished with one’s mistakes?” he asked. Then, pleased with the line, he pulled a pencil and small, leather-bound notebook from his tweed jacket and wrote it down. Meanwhile, the Calligrapher had uncapped the vodka on the table and poured out four shots in swift succession. The first he drank. The second he gave to the Guitarist. The Poet took the third. And the final glass of vodka was emptied straight into the pot of ink. The Calligrapher gave it several good stirs with his pinky, then tapped the droplets off on the rim of the pot and licked the residue from his finger. The Guitarist switched glove hands again and readied his instrument. The Poet tucked his notebook back into his tweed jacket and sat up straighter. Painstakingly, the Calligrapher selected a piece of paper from the stack in front of him. First he inspected both sides, flipping it, examining the way the light hit its surface, bringing the sheet to his nose and sniffing it several times. Finally satisfied, he dipped his finger into the inkpot—the index finger this time—and drew it out slowly. There was a collective inhalation.

  Now, up until this point all of the usual elements were aligned; the scene that followed should have been the one that played out every week. What came before—the banter, the crumpled paintings, the berating of the Guitarist—was all part of the routine. Once the vodka was half gone they did not make errors. The Calligrapher and the Guitarist should have moved their fingers simultaneously, the Calligrapher making sooty dabs on the paper while the Guitarist began to pluck his strings. Gradually, through a symbiosis that none of them had ever understood, a melody would emerge as the streaks of ink began to take form, the song and the painting inspiring each other. And then the Poet, listening and watching, would be moved to verse. They believed that it was this union of the three—the music, the painting, the words—that, like the blending of the finest strains of tea, could produce art in its most perfect form. Though, truthfully, the three men were barely artists. The Guitarist was the Electrician all the other days of the week, and the Poet had only ever published some of his racier poems and short stories in the lower-class magazines in Hanoi. The Calligrapher had never sold any of his paintings, but he had never tried to sell them, either. The three of them cared only about the process that took place when they gathered in the Calligrapher’s living room, this collective act of organic creation. It had been this way since the late seventies, when they had begun their meetings because they were unable to give up the bond they had shared as soldiers. Art had replaced war as their act of communion.

  But tonight, what should have happened did not. Tonight, just as the Calligrapher went to press his finger to the paper, he glanced up at the window behind the couch where the Poet was seated. At once his face went pale and he flinched violently, slashing the ink across the page and setting off a chain of physical reactions in the other two: Startled by the Calligrapher’s aberrant movement, the Guitarist snapped a string loudly. At the twang, the Poet flinched and kicked out a plump leg, knocking the vodka bottle off the table, at which point it smashed on the tile floor. The sound of the shattering reached Dien in the kitchen, where he had been in his usual position—crouched beneath the sink and rocking back and forth. The noises aroused his curiosity and he crept over to the door to peer out through the keyhole, even though his eyesight wasn’t very good. Dien had learned how to pick the lock years ago, but with only one good hand it was a laborious process. His left arm was about six inches longer than his right, the joints misaligned and the entire limb floppy in an unsettling way, but the fingers were rigid, underdeveloped stubs, fused together at their base. “Eel-arm,” the Poet referred to it in private. Still, Dien had fared better than his two older brothers: Both were born dead, one with a small pair of extra arms on his chest that resembled the wings of a plucked chicken, and the other without eyes or nostrils.

  In the living room, the Guitarist was preoccupied with his broken string and the Poet was staring at the paper on the table, troubled by the Calligrapher’s uncharacteristic mistake but also thinking that there was not much difference between the ruined painting, the ones crumpled in the corner, and the ones that hung on the wall. The disruption of their routine had made the two of them uneasy. But the Calligrapher had now recovered his composure. He rose to his feet, his face calm, showing no sign either of the alarm that had possessed him a moment ago or embarrassment because of it. His fingers drummed against his thigh as he walked down the hallway to the kitchen.

  Through the keyhole, Dien saw him coming and began rocking on his heels again. He bit his tongue. The Calligrapher paused before the door and said, keeping his voice even, “Con, your father is coming in to get the broom now.” After waiting a few moments more, he selected one of the keys on the chain around his neck. But the instant the Calligrapher touched the doorknob, Dien released a long, hoarse scream and the Calligrapher jerked his hand back.

  The Poet and the Guitarist tried not to look toward the kitchen, but the Guitarist turned his head when, a few seconds after the initial scream, they heard low groans and a thumping sound, which he guessed was the sound of Dien beating his head against a cupboard. The two men did not look at the Calligrapher when he came back into the living room without the broom. He did not resume his seat on the floor, and instead paced back and forth in front of the table, toying with
a shard of broken bottle that he had picked up. Over and over and over he turned it in his inky fingers.

  “Look outside and tell me what you see,” he said to the Poet without looking up from the piece of glass. Struggling to accommodate the folds of his stomach, the Poet twisted to comply. The window faced east, away from the town.

  “Hills. And darkness,” said the Poet.

  “Hills and darkness,” murmured the Calligrapher. And stretching beyond them was more of the same. He knew those hills, that darkness, well. They all did. They knew the jungle that lay in that darkness, knew the spiders that were the size of ripe bananas and the rain that fell in torrents heavy enough to stun men too slow to find shelter. They knew the mist that came afterward. In those wild places time worked strangely, taking the shape of tree roots, warping and splitting and doubling back on itself until it was impossible to see where it really began. Forty years ago the three were young men running through those trees. Skinny things, hip bones jutting through green uniforms, they chased an enemy they could not see, and who could not see them. Most of their time was spare, and they spent it imagining the girls they knew from their old villages naked. At night the Guitarist would bring out the instrument he’d found in an abandoned American camp—it really couldn’t be called a guitar anymore; the soundboard was cracked, the neck wobbled, and its four remaining strings were held in place by toothpicks—and the entire troop would listen while he played and the Poet chanted along. They did not worry about the invisible enemy hearing them. The Calligrapher was regularly hired by the other soldiers for tattoos, which he applied in bluish-green pigment using fishhooks and a small hammer. He inked their skin with zodiac symbols, with names of sweethearts, with tough-sounding phrases that the Poet would make up, and sometimes with monstrous creatures from his own imagination.

  “It’s for protection,” he reasoned to a sergeant who had seemed distraught upon finding a five-headed bat on his back instead of the Buddha he had commissioned.

  “It will make you a fierce warrior,” he said of an inking on a biceps that appeared to be half stork, half tortoise.

  The effectiveness of that particular tattoo was to remain untested, for the troop never actually took part in combat. They tramped through the hills for almost three years, keeping their weapons loaded and their packs as dry as possible, ready to sacrifice themselves when the time came, but they somehow managed to miss every battle. They would follow orders to move camp only to hear on the radio a week later that an unplanned skirmish had taken place shortly after they’d left, or else they would arrive too late and resign themselves to picking through what remained. When the war ended and they emerged unscathed from the jungle, they were told that they were fortunate.

  And here they were, the lucky ones, sitting in the Calligrapher’s living room forty years later, in various stages of physical decay. They were not heroes then. They were nothing now. The Calligrapher stopped playing with the piece of glass and placed it on the table. With his mouth set in a grim line that twitched at its edges, he stepped carefully around the pool of spilled vodka and walked to the couch—the Poet, alarmed, shrank away from his friend as best as his waistless figure could manage—reached around behind it, and then threw the window wide open. The Poet and the Guitarist gasped in unison. And then they shivered as the cold found them.

  “Hills and darkness,” the Calligrapher repeated again, as he surveyed the landscape before him. Silence fell, and they all realized that Dien had stopped having his fit in the kitchen. The Poet also noticed, dismayed, that his breath was now visible, and the Guitarist switched glove hands again. The Calligrapher stood before the window for a long, quiet minute before returning to his old spot on the floor. The others watched him with trepidation, their teeth chattering, and wondered why his weren’t.

  “We are very old friends, aren’t we?” the Calligrapher said, eyeing the two of them with something that wasn’t reassuring enough to be termed a smile. “Very old, very good friends?”

  The Guitarist gave what could have been either a shiver or a nod, but it must have been good enough for the Calligrapher, for he continued: “We are linked to one another by our memories, by our craft, by our secrets … I would do anything for either of you, anything that you asked. And I would do it no matter the sacrifice required. For you are my only family.” He was back to knee-jiggling with a vengeance.

  The Guitarist huddled on his wooden stool in mute bewilderment, but the Poet, who was better at dealing with words, spoke up: “Enough. We don’t understand what it is you’re on about. Are you satisfied?”

  “I don’t need you to understand, just to listen,” said the Calligrapher. He placed the lid firmly on his pot of ink. “Though we have done nothing especially strange this evening, it appears that the strangeness has finally discovered us. Tonight I must tell you a story. A short story, but one that I have tried to keep a secret for a long time. If in the past I accidentally revealed pieces of it, it was done with these,” he said, holding up his left hand and letting the splotchy fingers wave like the tendrils of a tide-pool–dwelling creature. “But I will not be using them to speak anymore.” Still keeping the hand aloft, the Calligrapher turned to the Guitarist. “Begin with E minor. You won’t need your broken B string. In fact, it will probably sound better without it.” A long pause. And then, impatiently: “What are you waiting for?” The very confused Guitarist adjusted the instrument on his knee. “The story takes place in E minor, G, and F,” the Calligrapher continued. “But I can’t tell you the tune. Change chords when it feels right. There might be an A minor as well, if the story ends the way I hope it will. I can’t know for certain, because you control a third of the telling. We are all following each other.”

  Next, he looked over at the Poet and grinned wickedly. “But for the moment all you are going to do is sit on your hands.” The Calligrapher shushed him when he tried to protest. “If not, you’ll try to close the window!” he reasoned.

  “But the window should be closed! Something might come in!”

  “That’s exactly what I’m trying to avoid by leaving it open. Now do as I say before I come over there and force your hands under your great fat bottom myself.” The Poet looked offended but obeyed, wiggling until his hands were underneath his thighs. Satisfied, the Calligrapher finally dropped his own stained left hand, and the Guitarist, though he was unaware that it was a cue, played an E minor chord as it fell. Behind the kitchen door, Dien’s fingers shook as he inserted a skinny piece of wire into the lock and began coaxing it open.

  “Bear in mind that I am working in an unfamiliar medium,” began the Calligrapher. “My stories are painted, not spoken, and usually only spirits can loosen my tongue. But”—he gestured to the broken bottle on the floor—“tonight our other, very old, very good friend has fallen, so we must carry on without him as best we can.” On his stool in the corner, the Guitarist changed from E minor to F and strummed slowly.

  “We are all of us old and soft and mostly useless now, but I want you to try and picture the place about ninety-five miles north of here that they now call Empty Mountain. It was foggy and green and indistinguishable from the other mountains that surrounded it until the Americans sprayed it with their chemicals and the forest went dead. Think. Think! Yes, you see it clearly, even though four decades have passed since the three of us were stationed on its southeastern slope. We would have barely known each other, having just come out of the training camp. We were eager, but mostly we were young. Young and terrified. That is the part you may have forgotten. Remember it now.

  “The night our story takes place was, like tonight, inauspiciously cold. Any of us could have been assigned to lookout, but that particular evening the watch fell to me. Though I was no more than ten or fifteen yards away from the camp where you and the others slept, the tents were only just visible in the insufficient moonlight. I stood alone at the point where jungle became deep jungle, my gun pointing at the shadows and shaking in my hands.”

  A
t this point the wind outside began blowing ever so slightly harder. The short bristly hairs on the back of the Poet’s neck prickled. The Guitarist shuddered and began to alternate chords, picking four beats in G, four beats in E minor, then back again.

  “I stared into that darkness and waited for something to emerge from it. I must have looked at it too long, too intently, too expectantly. What came out was something that I summoned myself. In the early hours of the morning, when my fear had still not abated but my eyes were beginning to droop, something in the jungle made a noise. A clicking. Soft, but distinctly non-animal in origin. A monkey, I told myself anyway. It must be a monkey. It grew louder, and it was coming from somewhere to my left. A cricket then; a very large cricket, I thought, but my trigger finger was twitching despite myself. Then the sound was coming from directly in front of me, and I saw a glimpse of something white and shapeless, flashing for a single instant out in the trees …”

  The Calligrapher’s voice trailed off, and for the first time in what felt like years he went completely still. His mouth when he spoke again barely seemed to move. “I fired.”

  At that very instant there was a single, sharp rap at the front door. The Guitarist came down hard on his E string, but it didn’t break. For perhaps the third or fourth time this evening the Poet felt a pang of worry in his gut, for he knew that the Calligrapher never had guests apart from himself and the Guitarist.

  But the Calligrapher just went on. “It was a single shot. I fired it without thinking. My eyes may even have been closed, for there was really no difference between the darkness of the jungle and the inside of my eyelids. I could hear perfectly, though. And after the crack of my gun, the fearful clicking stopped, and from the jungle I heard the sound of someone sighing.”