Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

Meanwhile, the naked rat grew fatter and sleeker. The rat was a friend. When she was not praying she was lonely, and the rat relieved her loneliness. The rat was her father and her lover. The rat was bold, and yet while he was fed, he was as content in his box as Sister Anthony was in her cell. She brought the creature food from every meal. But there was no end to a rat's hunger, and when it wanted more Sister Anthony extended

her knuckles and let the rat gnaw them until they were raw. Then she folded her skinny bleeding hands and prayed.

Sister Anthony became a wraith, ghostly and pale, her trembling limbs sticklike under her thick robes. Hunger blinded her with migraines, but she endured it, believing that she was dying from love, and love was worth it. In this weakened state her fantasies were more intense.

The naked rat was monstrous and slow and fat now, almost too big for its box.

She returned from dinner one day to find the box clawed open, the lid under the bed, the rat dead, its belly torn open, bloodied like the human organ she had always taken it to be. Nor was it over, for the cat that had killed it was still biting it and playing with it — a wicked-faced cat that reminded her of herself.

Not long after, she left the convent and returned to Hawaii, Puamana said. She had to leave the cat, but would never be without a cat of her own.

One morning at first light, quite by chance, she entered the hotel's coffee shop in a tight tube dress that rode up her thighs from the heel- and-toe motion of her wicked shoes. But you did not see a dress, you saw a body. Like a lot of Honolulu newcomers, she made it a habit to stop in after the night, superstitiously feeling safe with a routine in this strange place. She could not have known about Puamana, or else she was defiant. She was unusual in another way. At this time of day they always had a pimp with them, and they never handled money. She carried cash, and there was no sign of a pimp except perhaps the tattooed name Cobrah set off by flowers between her breasts — her dress was that skimpy. The pimpish name could have been a hammerstroke to end a story. It was her three-year-old son.

"You a cop?" she asked when I first spoke to her.

It was my intrusive questions, my unconvincing smile, my noticing details, my impartiality and confidence. She was in the keeping-secrets business, and I was a collector of secrets.

She ate alone, picking at scrambled eggs bloodied with hot sauce, and then smoked, drank coffee, and around six went somewhere to bed. She got up for work as soon as darkness fell. She was black and always wore white and in this dazzling place hardly saw any daylight.

A full week passed before I had approached her, and I did so only because she seemed relaxed. As soon as I began speaking she got impatient, as though I were wasting her time and she had important things to do, like the lawyer in whose eyes you see thoughts of billable hours, and who, even at his idlest, becomes a clock watcher in conversation, talking in quarter-hour increments.

"Would a cop tell you the truth?"

She didn't smile. She saw the logic in it, but was impatient again, that fake-weary hurry-up sigh of a bad actress.

Her name was Jasmine, and she had come here from Las Vegas. "That's a real tourist town. I don't care what they say here." She was disappointed by Honolulu and said she probably wouldn't stay much longer. There was another tattoo on her thumb, a small stark symbol.

"I don't want to talk about it," she said.

She tapped her feet and fingers and gave me that sigh again that said, Look, I'm busy.

But she wasn't busy. She was pausing over breakfast, smoking a cigarette.

"You want to talk to me?"

I smiled in a helpless friendly way instead of answering.

"Then it costs money."

As a hooker, she was paid for everything she said or did. All contact with a man had a price. And so I signed for her breakfast, buying time, and said, "I'm the manager here."

That meant something to her; I could see it in the way she kept from showing that she was impressed. I had authority over this whole establishment — bedrooms, drinks, food, the guests themselves.

And strangely, as I signed her bill and looked at the total, I instinctively looked at her body, as though comparing what I had paid with how she looked. She was big, soft, loose-fleshed, not exercised. Her skin was coarse. She had nicks and small scars on her legs, and tiny scratches on her arms, and I felt that each mark represented a separate and much larger incident. She had shadows on her body that you see on overripe supermarket fruit. And was I imagining the thumbprints?

She was unlike Puamana, whom I never thought of without seeing her welcoming posture and her big made-for-men smile, as though saying, Come to Mummy.

"Get me another cup of coffee and a pack of More Lights," Jasmine

said.

"More Lights," I said, in a croaky voice, for the absurd name, but she didn't smile or thank me for them. Any attempt at humor only made her suspicious for the way it seemed a time waster. She sneered, she challenged me, she gave little away, and when I tried to compliment her, she said, "Why shouldn't I be confident?"

I said, "How many men did you have last night?"

"I'm going," she said, and left, like that, not offended, just out of time. But the next morning she was back at five, as dawn broke, looking for breakfast and willing to talk again.

Her instinct was to find the man's weakness, whatever need he had, and to exploit it and make him pay. Her line on the street was "Want to spend a little time together?" If the man did not react, she moved on fast, no "Excuse me." If the man nodded, she offered a few seconds of friendliness, even sweet talk to him before the taxi pulled up. After that she went cold. It was just a matter of getting to the room, finishing the business, and hurrying back to the street. She was uninterested in anything else. "I'm not looking for a friend." She was indifferent about the men, hardly noticed what they were wearing. They were all the same to her; they hardly had faces; anyone with money would do. And yet I suspected that each man saw her in his own dramatic way.

The price quoted on the street was a hundred dollars, double that if you were Japanese. Once in the room, when the man was naked, as he had to be to show he wasn't a cop, more money was demanded.

"A guy yesterday made me walk three blocks to his car. I told him, 'Get a taxi!' but he wouldn't. So I made him give me an extra forty for all the walking."

The person who says "You are asking me to walk another hundred yards and therefore you will have to give me forty dollars" — that person

has the hair-splitting, get-the-boss-over-a-barrel, union mentality, in which every detail of a job is a matter for negotiation.

"That's fair," I said.

"But you don't really think so," she said.

"In my janitors' contract there's a clause that says they can't be asked to climb higher than nine feet."

"They go higher, you pay them more. That's righteous."

She understood at once. She went on to say that when the man was in the room, she'd say, "If you want more, that's going to cost you more."

And of course a naked Japanese man with his dick in his hand fished out the money and handed it over.

"Don't touch me," she said when that same man reached for her breasts. And when he touched her tattoo she stiffened and said, "Ouch! That hurt! I just got that tattoo!" — although her tattoos were several years old — and the man backed off. Then she scolded him for going soft.

Time was everything to her. At just the moment when I was most eager for her to answer, she said she had to go. A whole day passed before I could resume.