Apocalypse Hotel: A Novel (Modern Southeast Asian Literature) Read Online Free

elongated the shadow until it took the form of a wandering spirit. The wind died back down. It was as if every sound in heaven and earth had stopped in an instant. The sound of a man’s determined footsteps could now be heard clearly. The shadow compacted into that of a robust young man.
    Suddenly, a pair of headlights blazed as a car turned onto the road. At that moment we were directly across from the shadow. As its owner’s hair caught the light, it lit up like a flame. A flame atop a bewitching face. A woman. I felt my skin crawl and my head spin. I had spent part of my life as the captain of a long-haul ship with hundreds of ports of call and thousands of love affairs behind me, but I’d never seen a woman like her. The light suddenly died. The car turned off the road. The woman shifted again into a shadow with no clear human shape.
    Cốc sidled up next to her. For an instant, I thought he was going to grab her by the shoulder. All of us liked girls, but we were exhausted after all of that nonstop partying next to that rock outcrop. Women are always able to have sex but don’t always want to. Men always want to have sex but aren’t always able. Cốc was the exception to that rule.
    “Come with us,” he ordered.
    Suddenly excited, he walked over and grabbed her. A sudden shriek: “Ah-ah-ah!” But the person screaming wasn’t the woman. It was Cốc. He’d let go of her and was clutching his lower abdomen, writhing in pain.
    The three of us ran over to him. As far as we could see, the woman had nothing to do with Cốc’s agony. She was still plodding along determinedly. Cốc was speechless, clenching his teeth in pain.
    Another car turned onto the road, its headlights illuminating the area. We saw the woman turn to look back. Her eyes glowed fearfully. As the light died, she again became a spectral shadow.
    Cốc wasn’t in pain anymore. It had stopped as suddenly as it had begun.
    “Get her!” he yelled as he took off after her.
    “What did she do?” Phũ asked.
    “What did you do?” Bóp asked. “Shoot off some fireworks in your pants?”
    “I don’t know what happened. It was a really strange pain, like a stab. It struck me just as I figured to get her down to some secluded spot near the road. But she didn’t touch me.”
    The four of us ran to the street corner. We scanned the whole intersection but couldn’t see the shadow anywhere.
    “There she is!” yelled Cốc the following night.
    He jabbed his chin toward the form of a woman gradually moving away from the shoreline and out through the breakers. Bóp and Phũ were messing around in the water and waves were crashing onto the beach. All four of us looked in the direction that Cốc had pointed to with his chin. The woman had an attractive body, but she didn’t look anything like the girl we had seen. There was nothing ghostly about her.
    “It’s really her. I recognized her right away,” Cốc said, anxious to convince us.
    I kept my feelings to myself. But I felt a need for caution. Perhaps it was just the wisdom of someone who had a dozen years on the other three. The wisdom of a seasoned traveler who wanted to prevent those boys from following their own relentless desire.
    But I was too slow. Cốc winked suggestively, then waded out onto the sandbank. Every time I remember this, I see it as the real beginning as much as the first actual death—Cốc’s death. As if coming to me from under water, I vaguely heard the woman’s words of refusal. The muttered words “It’s too dangerous . . .” floated to me. But I suppose it was difficult for her to resist Cốc, the way he boldly seized her hand while deftly steering her towards the surging waves. No prey upon which Cốc had set his sights had ever escaped.
    The watery contact between the two of them at first seemed to be quite civil, an exchange of names and ages. The lady was Trừng—Mai Trừng. It was neither a girl’s name nor a Hanoian name. No, she was an authentic