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

through the modern magic of a sex-change operation. Just as quickly, the rumor spread that it wasn’t a drowning; the woman had had a congenital heart disease, had stayed too long in the water, had played around too wildly, and had messed around in the water with her boyfriend—right up until the moment she bobbed up back to shore. Luckily they’d been able to pull her body out of the ocean.
    Please ignore these rumors. I was there. Now I sit here writing as if this were a clarification. And now it’s too late.
    I took the wheel for most of the drive back to Hanoi. At first Phũ drove; he’s the smoothest driver in the group. But after a while he slammed on the brakes and brought the car to a screeching halt. Cốc’s corpse, lying right across Bóp’s and my laps, bounced up. The car had come to a stop on the side of an empty road. Phũ bent his face over the steering wheel and rested his forehead in his hands.
    “Cốc was a good swimmer; he was used to the water,” he muttered.
    I didn’t push him to keep driving. We would certainly get back to Hanoi that night, but I understood that Phũ simply couldn’t drive any more. He was tormented by the memories of his friend who had just died. Once, when he and Cốc were young and had gone swimming together in the Red River, Phũ got trapped beneath a big coal barge and Cốc pulled him out. Phũ remembered the nights when Cốc had sung in his shows, when he’d performed in the beauty contests. Phũ had been the driver for the group. They were proud of each other—happy to work and play together, to see themselves as a gang.
    Then it was Bóp’s turn to reminisce. Taciturn by nature, speaking with his actions more than with his words, he surprised me when he began to talk. Just as I was about to tell him to take Phũ’s place at the wheel. Bóp recalled a story Cốc had told him the night before, when they shared a room. Two months before he had taken a calendar model back to his place and, after an easy conquest, he’d gone to the bathroom. He saw that her bra had fallen onto the bathroom floor. He’d picked it up and flung it onto the water heater. Then he forgot about it instantly. When his lady friend was struggling, bare-breasted, to get dressed so she could leave, Cốc looked frantically around the room, but he couldn’t find the bra anywhere. He went over to look in Phũ’s room, thinking that maybe Phũ had snuck in to steal it. In the end, his date had had to go home braless, her chest bared to the four winds like a disputed border region without a buffer zone. It wasn’t until last night, lying in the same room near the beach at Bình Sơn, far from Hanoi, that Cốc suddenly remembered what he’d done that day, that careless toss. He was sure that her “two-sided fortress” was still exactly where it had landed, up on the water heater—that is, unless Bóp had discovered it and hidden it away for his own purposes. Of course Bóp didn’t know a thing about it. The two of them had bet a bottle of cognac that when they returned to Hanoi, they’d find the bra still in the bathroom. They were housemates, though actually that meant only that Bóp lived in Cốc’s house—his family was in Saigon, and Cốc’s parents lived in France, having left the house to him.
    “I’m going to look on the water heater,” Bóp said to me, listlessly.
    It was clear that he was unable to take the wheel from Phũ. If I hadn’t been there, the two of them would still have been able to drive back to Hanoi. But for them to drive in their condition was extremely dangerous. I had to do it.
    Phũ got out to switch places with me, and then got into the back seat to help Bóp hold Cốc’s body. The car’s overhead light glared sharply off Cốc’s eyelids. They were covered with fine grains of sand, tiny as pinpricks. Phũ couldn’t handle it. He opened the trunk of the car, grabbed a plastic bucket, and walked over to a nearby drainage ditch.
    The sky was