Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

"The stupid key chain was just like Brett's, one of those McDonald's dinosaurs."

"It's a velociraptor, Dad!" Brett said. Another pedantic juvenile.

Within a few days, the nick on Glen's shin became infected. But it didn't hurt. "It just feels a little tingly." He used the Neosporin he had

brought from home. That was another thing about Hawaii. The same tube of Neosporin would have cost him almost twice as much here. Within a week his wound looked like decayed fruit and he was running a fever. The fever subsided after he dosed himself with aspirin, but his lower leg was badly swollen.

"I'm not covered by my medical plan here," he told his wife when she said he should see a doctor.

His leg grew worse. He could hardly walk. His temperature rose again. He reluctantly went to the hospital, dreading the expense, and was asked whether he was allergic to any antibiotics. He said no and was given large doses of an antibiotic that brought on nausea and dizziness and made his flesh creep with a kind of skin disease that gave him large welts all over his body. Various other treatments were applied — heavily sedated, he was scarcely aware of them; Alice was in charge now — but the leg infection worsened, and his foot was purple with gangrene. He lay in the hospital bed as though in a trap, observing a succession of sudden decisions. "We'll have to operate." The leg was amputated just above the knee. "You're lucky to be alive."

A month later — a two-week vacation had become six weeks — he was on his way back to St. Louis. He was one of those wheelchair passengers who boarded the plane first and got off last and often blocked the aisle. On the plane he noticed that Brett no longer had the dinosaur key chain on his belt loop. Glen could not bear to ask his son if he had lost the thing and whether he cared.

His boss at the shoe store was sympathetic: "It's just plain bad luck." And, seeming to console Glen, he stated the obvious — that a shoe salesman was always on his feet or kneeling when fitting the shoes. Glen was forty. He had a young child. The boss went on to say that he could take a leave of absence but that he would not be paid. "Maybe you could apply for workers' comp." Glen said he would be getting a prosthesis, virtually a new leg. Now the boss reminded Glen that the store sold mostly sports shoes. "A wooden leg would send the wrong message."

The man quickly apologized when Glen turned on him, raging, but at home the expression "wooden leg" kept invading his thoughts, taunting him. And the new leg was not wooden at all, but metal and plastic. It even flexed, and there was a new shoe on the end. He tried it out using crutches.

"Here comes Long John Silver!" his friends said. "Get yourself a parrot! 'Arrrgh, Jim, me lad!'"

Glen knew they didn't mean to hurt him with their mockery. They were being hearty. They told him every wooden-leg joke imaginable. They believed that if they made crass jokes about his disability, he would be encouraged to do the same. But Glen went home and wept. He didn't go back to work. Even Alice failed to lift his spirits, but she was hearty too. Seeing his tears, she said, "You're just feeling sorry for yourself," which was true, but so what? No one else seemed to care. Why was it that everyone seemed to think that brutal mockery was a cure for such a loss?

"I'm too old to learn how to walk," Glen said in defiance.

"Well, at least I'm not a cripple," Alice said, wounding him again. She returned to her old job as a legal secretary, the job she had left to raise Brett. Now Glen, who was home, could look after him.

Brett complained to his mother that Glen hit him. Glen admitted it. Brett was selfish and frivolous and ungrateful, like that horrible little boy in Honolulu who had demanded that Glen risk his life to find his key chain.

Seeming to fear Glen for his depression and futility, Alice stayed away from him for most of the day, calling only to speak to Brett.

"Mummy's stuck at work again, honey." She developed another life outside the house, not just her work at the law firm, where she was liked, but her small investments in the stock market that were appreciating; the man who was giving her investment advice, a young paralegal, became her lover.

Glen was possessed by the delusion that the plastic and metal leg strapped to his stump was the only part of his body that worked; the rest of him was faulty. He was very angry, and the loss of his leg was also the loss of his potency. His head ached, his stump gave him pain, and he could not shop. He wanted to hit his wife, but his child would do — that would hurt her. One day he succeeded in injuring Brett — gave him a nosebleed — and that night Alice moved out, "for Brett's sake," and took out a temporary restraining order on him. It happened so quickly that Glen was impressed by the way Alice had organized it. But then he discovered she was living with Milton, the paralegal, and he despised her. She told him what she had done.

There was no worse, no more demoralizing taunt than someone telling you the truth. Glen Cornelius wondered whether he should kill himself. He drank instead and his drinking helped, but he knew his life was over in this wolfish world.

"This sort of thing happens a lot," Hobart Flail said. "Most people don't know that.

Ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma ma, the Chinese stammeringly say, and if the pitch and tone of each ma are right, the meaning of the apparent repetition is, "Does Mother scold the horses, or will the horses scold Mother?"

This sentence often murmured through my mind when I saw Madam Ma, who scolded the horses and everyone else. She objected to Rose's being around, and so I was more familiar with Madam Ma than I wanted to be. The woman was a resident of the hotel, and the residents were mostly pests, like members of an unhappy household, contributing nothing but conflict, always claiming privileges, and forever blaming the family.

I did not need this woman to tell me my daughter was a monkey. I loved Rose for her antics. I knew she was a monkey in the way she hooked her fingers on a chair and swung herself into the seat, where she knelt instead of sat. Reaching for a candle, she would snatch the flame with a fat-fingered monkey pinch. But she was not only a monkey. Once she said, "Why does the fire of a candle always go up and never down?" and she waited for the answer.

"Don't play with that!" Madam Ma said on the day of the candle question, and the old woman startled Rose with her wicked white mask and twisted scolding lips. Her face was like a formal portrait of Edith Sitwell, but when I mentioned this my staff just stared at me. Rose stumbled and fell to the floor, the result of being scared by Madam Ma, who said, "Serves you right," in a harsh gloating voice as my little daughter sobbed.

Madam Ma was the worst of Rose's critics, and the slightest sound from the child had the older woman going expressively silent and rigid. Finding the child with her disapproving face, her eyes like dark bulbs, Madam Ma gave a theatrical, haughty snort. She was a haole; she had been married to a Chinese man named Ma; she had a column in the Honolulu Advertiser.

"She pupule, but she a guest," Sweetie said. Never mind that the guest was crazy, my wife knew the protocol: Madam Ma had been a resident of room 504 for a number of years, from long before my time. The Chinese man Ma had long since left her. She had a hapa son, Chip, whom she adored and mentioned often in her three-dot column, which was full of plugs and boasts and practical advice and mentions of restaurant openings and celebrity sightings. She wrote endlessly of food but could not cook.

She went to every party, she knew everyone's name, she was a repository of postwar island history, and the history was mainly scandalous.