The Frangipani Hotel: Fiction Page 8

  The soft spluttering of an engine in the darkness: Another motorbike was approaching. This time I was ready. I was staring up at the shadow where I knew Minh’s face was when the light came. When I saw it, I did not scream. I would tell you if I had—I am not ashamed—but I could not make a sound.

  It was my face. He had my face. The features of it—my lips, my nose, the ridge of my forehead—were lumpier, fleshier, but I knew with sickening certainty that the face I was looking up at was a replica of my own.

  “Do you like it?” He smiled and I caught a glimpse of a crooked left canine as the last of the light faded. I ran my tongue over the bumpy spot in the corner of my own mouth.

  But that wasn’t even the most frightening part. What scared me the most—what still haunts me to this day—was what happened next.

  “What is my name?” he asked quietly.

  At these words it wasn’t “Minh” but my own name that rose involuntarily to my lips, because in that moment it was no longer mine. And this response was mechanical, something that I—or whoever I was in that instant, for I had ceased to be myself—did not question. My mind was no longer my own. Nothing will ever be as profoundly terrifying as that moment. That feeling of … not of possession, but of dispossession. I can explain it to you in no other way.

  I didn’t say it—do you think I would be here now if I had? Just as the words were preparing to leave my throat, they were interrupted: My body, in one desperate, final act of defense, suddenly lurched and divested itself of my dinner. Partially digested pork intestine and bits of cabbage and rice disgorged themselves with impressive momentum and splattered all over Minh, who was looming above me. Again, I am not ashamed. I was lucky; you don’t get to be my age in this country without luck and a high tolerance for what makes others squeamish. The physical effort required for such powerful vomiting left me spent, so I could only sprawl weakly on the grass and watch, baffled, as Minh completely lost it.

  First he staggered backward, gasping for air. I understood that—the smell was overwhelmingly foul. But then he threw his head back and shrieked—a horrible, animal sound that cut through the night. He flailed and twisted and slapped at his body wildly. It looked like he was fighting off a swarm of bees, not trying to flick away bits of sick.

  “No no no no no,” he said over and over again, until his words didn’t sound like words anymore. When he threw himself down and began rolling frantically, wiping his body on the ground, I found the strength to begin dragging myself across the grass on my stomach like a serpent. Every movement was exhausting and my body was still shaking with fear, but Minh didn’t notice that I was escaping. I could see him thrashing in the darkness at the edge of my vision. As I inched along the ground my fingers touched something damp and papery—one of Minh’s little shoes that he had kicked off during his flailing fit. I clutched it in my hand and managed to pull myself up to my feet. Without really knowing why, I put the shoe into my pocket. Then I walked unsteadily back to the truck and climbed in, trying and failing twice to close the door before finally getting it shut. The key was still in the ignition.

  I didn’t want to look at him when I started the engine and the headlights came on. Couldn’t help it, though. He had torn off his blue pajama top and was scrubbing furiously at his chest with it. His hair swung in front of his face with each angry motion, or stuck to it in sweaty hanks, hiding it. I know it was probably just the poor light, but to me he looked blurry around the edges. Like the image on a cheap television. As I drove off I watched his figure in the rearview mirror grow smaller and smaller until it finally disappeared, leaving only a corner of my own face and a fading triangle of road in the glass. I wondered if somebody would stop and offer him a ride. Then, tentatively, I stretched out my neck to examine the rest of my reflection. It was not, as I had feared, Minh’s face that looked back at me from the mirror, but I was covered in a putrid mask of the now-crusting throw-up.

  I crossed into the next province. There aren’t any signs at the borders, but when you’ve been driving as long as I have you just know these things. A skinny branch of river ran alongside the road; the truck lights glanced off the surface of the water at points where the bank was sparse and so close that if you oversteered by an inch you’d be swimming. I pulled over and parked. Flexed the muscles in my thighs a couple of times. Thought that I felt like myself again, but wasn’t sure that I was entirely the self I was before. I stepped out of the truck and tested my legs again. Walked toward the water.

  Even in the darkness the river didn’t look a healthy color. I stood at the bank and stripped off my filthy clothes, trying not to think about what could be in that water. Snakes, broken glass, the shit of half a dozen villages upstream. My feet were swallowed by mud the moment I entered, and each step made a sucking sound. What I hoped were tiny fish darted around my ankles. When I was in up to the thighs, I squatted down and began to wash, cupping the water in my hands and splashing it onto my body, and when that was too slow, I completely submerged myself. I scrubbed my face, feeling the scabs of dried vomit loosen and come off my skin, and ran my fingers through the gunk in my hair until it was gone. Even though the water smelled funny and left a gritty brownish residue on every inch of me, I’d never felt cleaner in my life. It was getting chilly, though, and I wanted to get out before some aquatic creature started nibbling on my cặc, so I squelched my way back to shore. I shook myself dry like a dog, spraying droplets everywhere. My clothes were too foul to put back on so I kicked them into the river, but first I took the newspaper shoe out of my pocket and cradled it in my hands. Then I set it gently down in the water and blew it away from the shore. It looked like a tiny boat bobbing into the darkness.

  I got back in the truck, naked as the day I was born and feeling just as new. It sounds crazy, but I think that at that moment, if I had decided to forget the truth about Minh, the truth about what had just happened and everything I’d seen, I could’ve done it, simply by wanting it gone. Just driven off and abandoned the memories in that little corner of the delta, and twenty years later I wouldn’t even be able to remember the name of the sick boy I’d driven once, or the reason why we never made it to Dong Thap.

  I let my fingers rest on the key for a moment before turning it with a sigh that was lost in the sound of the engine coming to life. I readjusted my rearview mirror even though I could see nothing in the heavy black night behind me.

  NOW THAT YOU’VE heard everything, you know that I chose to keep them. The nurse with the soft curves and the pointed smile. Minh and his newspaper shoes. My own face looming above me. They’re with me still. I’ve had them stored in my head this whole time and it’s like having another shark in the back of my truck, but this time I don’t know where I’m taking it. I just keep driving and hope it won’t get restless, because I’m too scared to feed it.

  THE RED VEIL

  I DON’T WANT TO BORE YOU with my own history, with the reasons that I joined the order and the chronicles of my meandering faith; that is not my purpose here. But some background is, I feel, necessary. I sought out Sister Emmanuel during the first year of my novitiate because I was considering leaving the convent. I didn’t want to approach Mother Superior for guidance: She was the classic Catholic nightmare, barking after naughty schoolboys with her ruler in hand. Sister Emmanuel was quiet, and from time to time I encountered her taking early morning walks around the garden of the Stations of the Cross. She was a stoop-backed woman with white hair and nut-brown skin crosshatched with wrinkles, and she was always wearing a kind smile and an enormous pair of dark, square sunglasses. I had never seen her without the glasses—she even wore them during Mass—and for this she had acquired secret nicknames like “Sister Kim Jong-il” and “the Terminator” from some of the younger nuns. But to me she seemed—then, at least—to be at peace. Contemplative. Diligent. Devout. In short, she was all that I wished to be, and was failing at being.

  I found her on a Saturday in the kitchen, preparing egg rolls to bring to th
e parish soup kitchen. She had her sleeves rolled up to her elbows and her hands deep in a bowl of minced meat and mushrooms and noodles. It was a bright, cold day, and the sun from the window over the sink silhouetted her dark, hunched form. She looked up when I entered the room, but I couldn’t tell if she was surprised to see me or not; her sunglasses, as usual, were perched on her nose. I tried to explain myself rationally and calmly, but there was an involuntary tremble of emotion in my voice. Sister Emmanuel said nothing during my monologue, and continued to mix the egg roll filling while listening to my presentation. But when I trailed silent, having revealed the turbulence in my mind, she removed her hands from the bowl, wiped them on a checked dishcloth, and then folded them in front of her. For the first time she smiled.

  “Would it shock you very much,” she said, “if I told you that I don’t believe in God?”

  I hadn’t known exactly what to expect, but I knew that it wasn’t this. She continued: “I want to help you, but I have no answers. All I have is a story. I’ve never told it to anyone before and I think it’s time. You may take what you like from it; look for a moral if you can. Perhaps the story will give you something, though you must be careful lest you give yourself to it instead.”

  And as she told it to me she began to roll the filling in paper-thin wrappers, her voice rising and falling with the movements of her hands.

  I WILL START at the very beginning—the beginning we all were taught as children.

  Thousands of years ago, a dragon prince and a fairy spirit fell in love. They married, and the fairy bore one hundred eggs, which hatched into one hundred beautiful children. However, the dragon lived beneath the sea, while the fairy’s home was in the mountains, and they could not be together. Fifty of the children went to live with their mother in the high hills of the North, and fifty of the children went south to the coast, where they learned to fish and make boats while their father watched over them from his palace beneath the waves. These children were the first people of Vietnam.

  There is a place very close to the center of my country where the green fingers of the southern mountains almost touch the sea. The water there used to be the loveliest in all of the country—warm, clear, and teeming with fish. The buildings of the fishing hamlet by the bay were painted pink and green and turquoise, and the crumbling remains of a Cham temple overlooked it all from the hills. On the outskirts, where the town began to give way to jungle, in a yellow, colonial house, Vu Nguyen’s wife was giving birth. Huong came from a long line of beautiful and tempestuous women, and she thrashed and let out long, guttural screams while Mrs. Dang, the midwife, tried to calm her. Vu was pacing out by a bamboo grove in the yard, trying to ignore the sounds from inside and occasionally looking up at the rainclouds curdling in the sky. It was the beginning of the monsoon season.

  Eventually, there was silence from the house. Vu drew in a long breath, looked up at the dark sky, exhaled, then turned and went in. He came across Mrs. Dang first; she was in the kitchen making a pot of tea, and Vu blanched when he saw that she had not washed her hands. He was a very slight man, and at the sight of her fingers and forearms stained with red he almost fell over.

  “Anh Vu, congratulations! I’ll bring you a chicken for supper.” In addition to being the local midwife, Mrs. Dang bred noisy brown chickens that were always escaping from their pen and running loose in the streets. “Now go in and see your children!” She grinned at him with betel-nut–stained teeth.

  “My children?”

  “Ai-ya!” Mrs. Dang exclaimed, striking her forehead with her hand and accidentally smearing it with red. “How stupid—I spoiled the surprise!”

  Vu rushed into the bedroom, where he found Huong and his surprise. His wife’s hair was matted and sweaty, and she had a cigarette in her mouth and two little bundles in her arms. Twins. Timidly, he approached their little trinity.

  “They’re girls, Vu,” said Huong, exhaling a gray ribbon of smoke. “I know that’s not what you wanted. And there’s two of them.”

  Vu came over and sat on the edge of the bed, carefully avoiding the soils from the birth on the sheets. The babies were awake and blinking their eyes—blue eyes in dark faces. Milky blue eyes, like those of Siamese cats. Outside, the distant rainstorm rumbled. Vu shuddered.

  He named the girls Vi and Nhi.

  UNLIKE OTHER CHILDREN’S, Nhi’s and Vi’s eyes never changed to brown. People whispered that it was from the French blood on their mother’s side, and that there was a strain of the French madness in them, too. They were such strange children, strange and quiet. As infants they rarely cried, and when relatives and well-wishers came by to congratulate Vu and Huong, they didn’t like to linger too long after they met the girls. There was something deeply unsettling about their identical, silent blue stares.

  Even as they grew older they never really spoke to anyone except each other. Huong took to locking herself in the bedroom most days with a bottle of rice spirits or occasionally one of her lovers, and Vu, resigned to the fact that he had lost his wife, devoted himself to his job as a civil servant. The twins were left to themselves. They would play in the forest, around the ruins on the hill, or go down to the beach and catch and torture crabs. Sometimes they fought with each other, kicking and biting savagely, not out of anger but boredom. They would alternate which one of them would win.

  They began to disappear for days at a time, returning to the yellow house hungry and dirty and with secrets. If they encountered their mother on one of her rare excursions from the bedroom, she would immediately stick them both into the bath.

  “Chim con—my baby birds,” she would mutter. “Chim, why can’t you be good?” Then she would go off to find soap and leave them in the tub for hours, and when she remembered them they were gone again.

  ONE SUNNY AFTERNOON, Vi went looking for Mrs. Dang. She found her out in the chicken pen holding a brown clay jar in one hand.

  “Which one are you?” said Mrs. Dang, narrowing her beady black eyes at Vi.

  “Nhi,” lied Vi.

  “Eh,” said Mrs. Dang, and took a swig from the jar. “I knew it—you’re the skinnier one. How old are you now?”

  “Eight.” This was true.

  “Ai-ya! How time flies! What is it you want, precious?” In addition to being the local midwife and chicken breeder, Mrs. Dang peddled home remedies and medicine she got at half price from a relative in the Saigon black market.

  “Huong is having the same sickness as last time.” They never called her “mother.”

  “Again, eh? Take a bottle of my special tea from the counter in the kitchen. But first, watch how I get my dinner.” With a serpentine strike of her hand, Mrs. Dang caught a chicken by the neck and shoved its beak into the jar, forcing it to drink. After a minute it stopped struggling. “It’s drunk,” Mrs. Dang said, placing the chicken on the ground and then taking a quick swig for herself from the jar. The creature staggered sideways. “So it won’t feel a thing.” She stroked its head and then, with practiced swiftness, wrung its neck.

  Vi left when Mrs. Dang began plucking it. She took a brown glass bottle of dark liquid from inside and walked back toward the dirt road. Nhi was waiting for her by the gate and wordlessly joined her. They took turns holding the bottle on the way home.

  Huong was curled up on the bedroom floor, smoking, with the curtains drawn. There was a broken vase next to her, and a bloody clump of black hair was stuck to the wall. When Nhi and Vi opened the door to the room they recoiled at the sight. Their mother’s face was obscured by the clouds of cigarette smoke, and her bathrobe had fallen open.

  “Chim? Is that you?” She struggled to sit up and tuck her breasts inside the robe. The room stank. “Bring that here, Chim con. Your mẹ’s head hurts very much.” There was an oozing bald patch on her scalp.

  The twins inched closer, Vi holding the bottle out toward their mother. Huong stretched out her arm to take it, but then suddenly pitched forward and grabbed Nhi’s ankle instead. Both girls froze. Huong�
��s grip tightened and her nails dug into her daughter’s skin, making her wince. Then Huong’s head flopped down and her hold went slack. Nhi dropped the bottle on the wooden floor, where it bounced but did not break and then rolled toward the bed. Without lifting her head, Huong began to grope around for the bottle, her pale hand scuttling across the floorboards, and when her girls fled from the room she did not notice.

  The next morning, Mrs. Dang decided to pay a visit to their house, a plucked chicken tucked under her arm as a present. No one answered her knocks, so she opened the door and went in. She wrinkled her nose at the odor that greeted her, and followed it to the bedroom. When she pushed open the door, her face froze and she dropped the chicken: Huong was lying dead in a puddle of vomit on the floor. Mrs. Dang shuffled over and picked up the empty bottle near her. Her eyes grew wide. After she had calmed herself down she retrieved the chicken, went outside, and tossed the bottle deep into the bamboo thicket at the far end of the backyard. Only then did she go out into the street and begin wailing for help.

  IT TOOK ME ALMOST a full minute to realize that Sister Emmanuel had stopped speaking. The egg rolls lay finished in rows on the tabletop; the old nun’s hands were still. Through the window I could see that the sun was now red and bobbing on the edge of the horizon.

  “That seems like more than enough, doesn’t it?” she finally said. She paused, and then something that could have been a smile twisted her mouth and she continued, gesturing at the egg rolls, “They’ll never be able to eat all of these.” She started to cover them with aluminum foil. Because I could not find anything to say, I took the mixing bowl over to the sink and began to rinse it. My fingers felt clumsy and stiff.

  “When do you fry them?” I asked eventually.

  “Later,” said Sister Emmanuel. “They’re much better served hot.” There was a pause before she added, “On Thursday I will need to make another batch for the parish potluck.” She left the kitchen without another word.