Paul Theroux - Hotel Honolulu

Too impatient to argue or explain, Buddy simply issued orders. He warned Tran, his longtime bartender: "I'm recommending you for probation." Even his old friend Peewee he scolded. I assumed I would be next. I hated Buddy's dropping in, because for the time he was at the hotel, he was the boss and I the underling. The way Buddy bellowed reminded me that his lungs were rotting, and that was all I thought about, Buddy's lungs, their frailty, and how they somehow gave him the coarse, commanding voice of a chain-smoking hag.

With Pinky's skinny fingers on the handles of his chair, pushing him forward like a bulldozer, Buddy terrorized his family, threatening them, sending them on pointless errands, seeming to test their loyalty. "You owe me in a major way!" he roared to Bula. In between sucks on his oxygen, he wheezed, he gagged, he choked, making his scoldings sound more severe. No foolery, no laughter. He had become a survivor, the operation a close call, and like a man yanked back from the brink, he was frantic and incoherent. In his convalescence, this spell of drunken shouting, he was impossible.

"I want everyone in compliance, for want of a better word, at this juncture."

The muddle of his first weeks was over. Buddy continued to be assertive, but his physical condition had not improved. Indeed, for all his conviction, he appeared much weaker than before. He had monkey breath and boiled eyes, yet believed the doctor to be clairvoyant for suspecting he was covertly smoking and drinking.

"I can't understand what I'm hearing," Dr. Miyazawa said, coiling his stethoscope on his hand. "Are you sure you're doing your exercises?"

It was too late for Buddy to begin. He was too weak, and just thinking of the effort demoralized him. So he lied — lied with such indignation that the doctor doubted himself, mistaking Buddy's assertiveness for good health, even for strength.

"This is a new procedure," the doctor said. "We've had all sorts of results and we've got to watch for septicemia."

I had never witnessed such a thing. Now I knew what it meant to be reprieved. Buddy was saved, his life had a sequel. He was transformed from an ailing and uncertain man into an angry and impulsive one. He talked about marrying again, raising a new family. "Little kids everywhere you look! I got the money, I got new lungs — what's the problem?"

"What about me?" Pinky said.

"Get your sister."

Keeping everyone in suspense was more brutal than disposing of them. He behaved like a man with secrets. The boyish side of Buddy was absent, yet there was something childlike in his tyrannizing, and at his most demanding he was like a kid bellowing for candy. He was selfish, greedy, overeating again; he made no pretense of pleasing anyone but himself. I was reminded of his practical jokes, how I had concluded that such a joker is at heart a sadist.

Once Buddy saw a stripper at Foodland and invited her back to the house. Indifferent to Pinky's rage, he offered to swap sex for room and board. But he could not perform and, breathless, rang for Pinky to bring the oxygen tank. The stripper, still naked as Pinky entered Buddy's room, hurriedly dressed and left.

With a crumpled smeary face, Pinky wept as she handed over the oxygen mask, which made Buddy look like a porpoise. What could she do? By becoming a big, strange, disaffected man, whom she feared, he had broken her. He was capable of anything — and she was someone who knew the deranged possibilities of the word "anything."

Hearing him breathe, I was warned of Buddy's condition, but I did not seriously worry about his health. He would not just pull through. He would be a giant again — someone so loud, who so dominated a room, he would inevitably get his strength back. He had never stopped shouting.

He hired a driver, Chubby, and gave him Bula's bedroom. During the job interview, to Buddy's pestering questions the man had said he did not believe in God or an afterlife. "That's the best qualification for a safe driver," Buddy said. He sat beside the man in the new BMW, Pinky in the back, the oxygen tank on her lap. He banished Pinky's uncle and aunt to the tiny room under the stairs.

"I'll marry your sister!" he taunted Pinky.

His eyes bulged, he grew fatter, he began wheezing badly. And as the weeks passed the conviction in his voice was like a form of despair. The staff at the hotel worried about their jobs, but Buddy was more desperate and driven than any of the employees or any of his family. His desperation made him a terrifying visitor to the hotel.

In the past he had been predictable, as healthy people are, but now we had no idea what he would do next. I had thought that his operation, meant as a cure, had made him ill, and now it seemed to me that the operation had very nearly destroyed him.

Hearing that Buddy had recovered, his children appeared again, and now they stayed at his North Shore house for days at a time. And not just Buddy's family but Pinky's too, the odd assortment: Uncle Tony and Auntie Mariel moved from under the stairs to the garage, where they made the workbench into bunk beds; her friends the Malanuts, from way back, turned up with hammocks. Evie and Pinky's brother Bing were now cohabiting. Pinky was glad, because it removed Evie as a sexual threat, and she admitted, "He not my real brother." All of them wandered around the house, listening and gaping.

Ihe whispers were that the operation had been a failure, but that Buddy somehow managed to remain upright. He used his wheelchair less, and he had a narrow elevator installed. As it was big enough for only two people, he enjoyed trapping someone in it with him and farting in sharp trumpet blats as he ascended three floors.

Buddy was a spectacle, his illness a subject of gossip: the weakness, the medical details ("lungs fill up with water," "lungs like a sponge," "lungs leak"), the hospital visits and post-ops. The house was crowded with starers and mutterers. At first Buddy had been like someone back from a distant journey that people gaped at, but after they took a good look, he was like someone back from the dead.

He was haggard, slack-jawed, slow, with vacant watery eyes. He was often drunk. People said, "You look good," because he looked terrible, much oldei more breathless. He had choking fits, during which he turned purple and put his hands up, as if to say "I surrender." Seeing him gag, Bula looked at his father's bright bulging face and said, "At least you got good color."

"You need round-the-clock nursing care," Melveen said.

"I take care for him," Pinky said.

"Yah. Is the problem."

For it was known that Pinky had threatened to burn the house down, to kill Buddy. Her bite marks were still visible on his arm, bluer, inkier, darker than his tattoo. She had made a serious suicide attempt, overdosing with pills — it must have been serious, because everyone in the house had been inconvenienced, which it seemed was one of the intentions of suicide. Her stomach had been successfully pumped, though afterward she spoke (perhaps to spite me, perhaps to ruin business) of drowning herself in the Hotel Honolulu swimming pool.

Bula moved into the house with his three children. "My wife stay in rehab," he explained. Pinky's brother shared the downstairs room with Evie, Uncle Tony moved from the garage to the garden shed, and low froggy noises suggested he, too, had taken a new lover. Buddy knew what was happening, but it was a sign of his feebleness that he didn't care.

More quarrels erupted than usual, and at some point he was always asked

to intervene — Buddy blow-sucking on his oxygen mask, a big man struggling simply to breathe.

Because there was more of him, it was worse than seeing a small man fading away. He looked like a wounded bear, roaring and smashing his giant paw against his head.