By Di Li

He looked at the new receptionist with an unpleasant feeling. She asked him too many questions with the stiff face of an amateur waiter.

"Please register your name!"

"Andy Phuc."

Her hands stopped short on the computer. He could see beads of sweat on her white forehead, even though the temperature in the room was only 18 degrees. All of a sudden, his anger dispelled. He said:

"I’m awfully sorry. Maybe this is your first day working here, so you think I’m an ordinary customer."

The girl was so confused that she knocked over the glass of water on the desk, which made her more panic-stricken.

"Being a customer is not ordinary at all, you know!"

"Yes, I’m sorry. I’m a new-comer."

"Never give an excuse for your inexperience, you see" – He looked at the girl’s face with contentment, witnessing her fear with great interest – "You’re beautiful, but it is not the reason for your perpetual presence here. OK., my time is limited; I can’t stand here arguing with you. Give me the room key now."

The poor girl was still looking for something in the computer. She should have become complacent, so she had not found what she needed. Her blushing face looked at him curiously.

"Room 13?"

"What a fool!" – This time he got angry – "My hotel hasn’t got a room 13. Get My Ha now!"

A girl in the same red uniform popped up as if she was automatically controlled. She was as beautiful as the receptionist. The girl with the name My Ha was startled on seeing him.

"Your arrival is not in accordance with today’s schedule."

"What damned schedule! Why do I have to play golf on Sunday?" – he said, kicking his bag.

"Mr Andy Phuc’s room is on the fourth floor, number 1014" – My Ha said and then she turned to him – "I’m sorry. Today we’ve got one sick staffer, so Mai Lan has to do instead. She should have been trained for one week for this position."

"All right. What a nuisance! Give me the room key."

Mai Lan quickly looked at the manager. She seemed ready to burst into tears.

"But.... that room is already occupied."

This time My Ha really was confused. As an experienced manager of the reception section, she was quick-witted, saying in a low voice:

"Is it Room 1012?"

"Today the hotel is fully booked, so there are not any more rooms."

"Mr Phuc" – My Ha spoke haltingly – "Mai Lan is not familiar with the situation. All the rooms are occupied. Can you use the staff’s room?"

It was high noon by then. Very hot at that. All the guests had retreated to their rooms after light meals before they playing golf. The waiting lounge was deserted and only three people were present to solve the problem. Andy Phuc, the second largest shareholder of the Thien Duong Golf Club, was busy playing with the mole on his left cheek. It was a sign of rage, very clear to the staff.

"Do you think that Andy Phuc has come here after travelling over forty kilometres only to stay in that dirty and messy room and then play golf outside in the baking sun?"

The two beautiful faces became distorted. Mai Lan’s enamel-white complexion had at first blushed, then quickly paled and was now a deep violet colour. Andy Phuc found it very interesting to behold the change. Suddenly he became cheerful:

"Don’t do it again. Andy has never pardoned anyone twice, you know!" he said, picking up the bag of golf clubs from the sofa nearby and pulling on a pair of cleats. The two girls were whispering to each other at the counter and periodically glancing over at him.

At that moment, three men came down to the lounge with their bags in-hand. He walked over to shake hands and spoke with them in Cantonese. These were his first trading partners. The night before, at dinner, they had joyfully agreed to bet on the 18-hole golf course.

Andy Phuc was at par 4. With a distance of 350 yards, he needed two strokes to reach the green. After nine holes, the Hong Kong players were nine strokes behind him and they would have to pay after losing, with mildly gloomy faces. He shrugged his shoulders. It was commonly acknowledged that those who could not contain their emotions while gambling could be easily beaten at negotiations. He screwed up his eyes to follow the plummeting ball. The girl caddying for him had to hold her breath to observe him, but she couldn’t seem to hold in a coughing fit right as he started to hit the ball. He gave her an unpleasant look. The girl continued to release a string of tantalising coughs. He handed the club to girl and raised his chin towards the golf cart.

"Number 3!"

The girl quickly ran to the cart to look for club No. 3 and cleaned it.

He widened his stance, directed his club at the ball and hit it away. The ball fell into the sand trap. A player from Hong Kong raced by in a golf cart, shouting, "It’s a Duck hook!" He was starting to sweat, so he jumped on the cart and darted away, leaving the girl standing with her mouth wide-open. Andy Phuc pulled out the sand wedge club and quickly walked into the trap. He knew it was the trap that might make him lose. He needed something to excite him, so he thought about Mai Lan’s frightened face and felt the club grow light as a feather. Only five minutes before, he had hit a spectacular stroke at the 8th hole, when the hole was near the edge of the green. Now he knew he was destined to fail, but the face of the receptionist appeared dimly in his mind. She was utterly terrified, with eyes that entreated him. He dragged a half-smile from his lips, "You’ll see me after the match, girl!" Then he gave the ball a slight push from behind the hole. The ball automatically rolled back and slipped into the hole again as if it had been programmed by remote control. All eyes were on him with great surprise, as if they had been magically charmed. He was never the loser. Andy Phuc smacked the ball vehemently with the club and sand flew everywhere. He looked at the ball, which was fading into the distance. It was not heading towards the green. On the contrary, as it flew through the air it turned in the opposite direction, as if it was being pushed by an invisible hand.

He swiftly drove the cart off the asphalt path to race after the ball. He began sweating through his expensive cotton pullover. It was difficult to understand what happened. Only beginners acted that way. He felt so tense. He again thought of her. Whenever he was about to lose, he would think of her and be able to turn the tables.

***

In court, all three witnesses confirmed that that night he had been present at the birthday cocktail party of a certain gentleman. All those present at the party, all his friends and acquaintances, confirmed that Andy Phuc was a respectable businessman who was desired by hundreds of women, so there was no reason for him to violate a girl, one of his maids, who was not so very special.

The girl was standing in the plaintiff box, her eyes shining with both hatred and fear. He found it interesting; it put him in high spirits. He gave so smooth an explanation at the trial that the judge seemed to resent the girl for her brazen slander. Unfortunately, all her injuries had healed while she decided whether to lodge her accusation against him.

While he was defending himself in court, he lightly caressed the scar on his neck where she had scratched him with her fingernails in self-defence. During her struggle against him, her eyes looked desperate and fearful. He used his knees to part her two thin legs, while one of his hands brushed aside her weak fingers and the other tore at her shirt. The girl’s face looked so pained. But he knew very clearly that with her very soft body, he had lost his ability to stop himself.

The ball should have dropped in the bushes. He drove the cart down the slope, its wheels rolling over dried leaves, making a crackling sound. He jumped down from the cart. The ball was around somewhere. His back was soaked with sweat. He regretted having left the girl behind, as he could have stayed put on the cart while the girl was out searching for the ball. The ball seemed to have the trick of making itself invisible. He still felt tense. This unpleasant feeling, which had disappeared after forty years, was now emerging like a chronic disease. Noisy children could almost be heard, faintly in the distance.

"You, Andy Andy bastard!"

Being frightened, he kept silent, since he knew he was a half-caste boy. The other immigrant children had the right to ill-treat him because they had their big fathers behind them. One afternoon, he caught a wild cat on the way to school. He tied the animal to a tree and tortured it. In the end, he dropped a big brick onto the cat, making the animal jump to and fro to avoid it. The cat did this several times, until it was dead tired. Then the brick fell right on the animal’s back, killing it immediately, without a sound. To his surprise, a big crowd of children were standing behind him, showing their contempt and fear. A black boy, much bigger than him, said:

"Eh, you, sick bastard!"

He jumped on the crowd as if he had just been injected with adrenaline and his adversary had fallen down like the cat. Since then, he knew the secret of the victor: he should be more daring because sometimes the strong man can’t win against the foolhardy man. And Andy Phuc had been turned into a sick man who had made all the Vietnamese immigrants in the state fear him. The wildcat, his first victim, had made Andy Phuc an addict. Soon he had to increase his dose of the drug as his addiction became worse. One day a little girl who saw him pass by had turned away, mumbling, "Sick bastard!"

Early the next morning, the little girl, a Vietnamese-American, was found lying in a junkyard half naked in a pool of blood, on the threshold of death. He fled to another state in the West where he invested all his money in the stock market and hit the jackpot.

Yet, only she had the guts to accuse him in court.

But Andy Phuc won anyway. He seemed submerged in a gigantic bottomless well. He was only a transparent shadow and could not be reached. To lie in hiding, he had plunged himself ever deeper into the well. So safe, and so solid.

He walked to and fro, kicking aside dead leaves to search for the ball, but in vain. He stopped, thinking hard. He was so familiar with this golf course that -even blindfolded- he could pinpoint every hole on the course. So losing the ball was extremely irresponsible. All of a sudden, the sky darkened. The wind was blowing hard. He was very surprised. Suddenly, the entire golf course was deserted; all the players and service people had disappeared, leaving a seemingly dead golf course before his eyes. He found it strange. But it could not have happened that fast if everyone had just retreated to their room when it had started to look like rain. He was confused. Then, as if he was driven by internal forces, he became determined to look for the ball by any means, even if it meant he was left alone there. He was walking along the bushes when he saw something white wedged between a concrete slab and a circular structure.

He was delirious with joy. From here to the green, he only needed to push the ball, whereas other normal players needed two strokes. The concrete slab was very heavy, covering almost the entire structure. He knew what it was. When the golf complex was being built, the workers had refused to do any building work in this area because they said that it was an ancient well, which had been there for a thousand years. And, they explained further, there could be something terrible in that well. They feared being killed if they touched the well. For this reason, the chairman of the management board agreed to reserve this area. But Andy Phuc did not agree, so he came and carried a concrete slab to cover the mouth of the well. The workers seemed to take courage and they carried on construction in the area.

Now the ball was stuck between the concrete slab and the well’s mouth. He kneeled down to make it easier to raise the concrete slab. But it still sat immobile, without moving. He tried for the second time but in vain. The golf course behind his back was completely silent and the sky was getting ever darker. He tried to move the concrete slab again and this time it budged slightly and then slid to one side. He lost his balance and fell down into the well. He was falling quickly down the well. It was pitch dark all around him as if he was in vacuum. Then he was plunged into freezing cold water. He tried to shout, but his voice seemed trapped inside the well and it could not get out. He was engulfed in complete darkness. There was nobody around. Everyone had gone to their rooms. It was possible he would die and disintegrate in that bottomless depth.

Getting desperate, Andy Phuc found that the water under his feet was beginning to move. Something very strange was starting to rise above the water and was facing him. He could not see anything because it was so dark, but through his fear he could sense that something had just appeared. It was a face, not a human face, not an animal face, not a devil face, but a face able to multiply into a hundred other faces. They had separated and merged again. They were female faces and finally those horrible eyes were clearly formed before him. Those were her eyes. Suddenly, he could see the eyes opening wide and growing large and mirror-like so that he could see himself reflected inside them, a distorted face with frightened eyes. At that moment, an object began falling down into the well. As soon as he recognised that it was the concrete slab, he fainted in sheer terror.

Something soft and light was brushing his face and he regained consciousness. He was lying on the mattress in Room 1014, his room, and Mai Lan was bending over him. Seeing his eyes open, she exclaimed joyfully:

"Yes, he’s come to himself!"

"What has happened to me?"

"You hit the ball against a tree and the ball bounced back and hit your forehead, knocking you unconscious!"

"No, I fell into a well!"

Mai Lan looked confused and worried. She turned to the other people in surprise and then bent down to look at him again.

"No, it’s not true. You were found lying on the ground."

The girl’s eyes were opened wide. They seemed as dark as the inside of the well and so reflective that he could see himself inside them, his distorted face. He screamed and fainted again.

From then on, whenever Andy Phuc met a woman, he tried to avoid her eyes, for fear that he would see himself in those eyes, those extremely frightening eyes. (VNS)

 Translated by MANH CHUONG