Free Apocalypse Hotel: A Novel (Modern Southeast Asian Literature) by Ho Anh Thai Page B

his buddies in here to demolish this green coffee shop. 9 Miss Tì had no choice but to drop the self-confident and comfortable air of a madam and climb onto the bed.
    In the end Miss Tì wouldn’t accept any money, saying it was her gift for the two young men. Of course, she agreed to let Phũ take his usual souvenir, but since she didn’t have any panties on her, she had to run to her wardrobe to grab a pair.
    Later, after Phũ died, I saw that in his wardrobe he had a Japanese carryall, the portable kind favored by officials—a souvenir of a life spent in diplomacy that would pass from father to son. Inside the case he had 101 pairs of women’s underwear. In his short nine years as a man, this fierce being had lived as much as 101 virtuous men who know but a single woman their entire lives.
    And yet it was still clear that, like those of his two friends before him, Phũ’s casket would soon be covered by wreaths of white flowers.
    Some years before, our boat had been docked at Danang Harbor for four days, and I’d gone ashore to get the security paperwork. A group of sailors, drivers, laborers, petty traders, and cyclo drivers were all gathered around reading the same newspaper, the kind that wasn’t meant for reflective and weak-nerved intellectuals. One month of reading Security would keep the faint of heart cowering inside during the day, and afraid to leave their rooms to urinate at night. 10 But reading about all of the thieves, murderers, and rapists was the kind of entertainment that could also serve as a source of hard-to-find information. Investigative news reports about a certain street filled with young female hairdressers, or a street corner where people sold aphrodisiacs and pleasure-enhancing rubbers, a particular highway shoulder where people sold weapons and spray bottles of anesthetic . . . this was the kind of information the paper’s readers could use.
    I had practiced the art of speed-reading the newspaper, and had become a voracious reader. It took me just about half an hour to devour the contents of a forty-eight-page newspaper—that is, except for the twelve pages of ads, so actually thirty-six pages, including the letters to the editor that were run so he could protect himself. When I got to the “brief news” page, my eye caught a notice that during the night (five days before) the Hoàn Kiếm District police had captured TĐP (Tạ Đắc Phú), born in 1972, residing at —— (my brother Thê’s house), and who—during a high-performance motorcycle race around the lake—had knocked over a nineteen-year old student, breaking her right leg. The write-up ended with some formulaic statements about the phenomenon of children of high-ranking families 11 —newly rich families or families with influence—who were competing in these insane motorcycle races that caused heartache throughout society. I thought that canned commentary was the end of the article, but it kept going as if to provide another bit of free info: TĐP was twenty-three this year (just in case the readers couldn’t figure that out for themselves from his year of birth) and a third-year English student at the ĐHHN (an acronym left for the readers to figure out for themselves). 12
    I rushed over to the public telephone booth. Thế answered on the other end of the line. “Oh, hey. Đông. Don’t worry, it’s all dealt with, it’s nothing. That other little kid, huh? Her leg is in a cast already. She’s gotta stay off of it for three months; it’s nothing. Phũ is back home, both him and his bike, it’s nothing.”
    It’s nothing, it’s nothing. Nothing was ever anything when Thế was dealing with it. He was able to transfer his own calmness immediately to those he was talking to, even when the family was in mourning. But though I knew he could pull the strings of some individuals in high places, I still felt uneasy about how quickly he’d been able to deal with Phũ’s arrest for racing.
    In these first