Moondogs - Alexander Yates [53]
The first thing he did was set his laptop on the crystal table. He logged on to the hotel WiFi and sent an e-mail to Alice letting her know that he’d gotten in fine, leaving out how his father had flaked and not shown at the airport. He figured it was too early to knock on the adjoining door to Howard’s suite, so he switched on the TV and scanned channels. He flipped past news in Arabic and Chinese, past two Koreans fighting with brooms before a live audience, past Englishmen arguing about Iraq before finally stopping at a soap opera in Tagalog. He left the program on as he showered, brushed his teeth and dressed. He’d never heard the language before, but there was something familiar about it—sounds and phrases that could have escaped his mother’s mouth. These were bisected by the occasional English word: a hard Tuesday, or a lilting Bas-ket-ball.
It was still barely light out by the time he’d dressed. In fact, it seemed darker. Benicio stared out the large window, watching the sun. It wasn’t rising from the distant bay, but sinking into it. He checked his bedside clock and saw a tiny pm beside the time. Whether because of exhaustion or jetlag, he’d gone and slept through his whole first day in the Philippines. And if that wasn’t annoying enough, there hadn’t been so much as a fucking peep out of his father all day. Not a phone call, not a knock on the door, not even a note saying: Welcome. Glad you’re here. Thanks for coming.
Benicio banged on his father’s door, hard. There was no answer. He tried the handle, and found it unlocked. “Dad,” he called as he pushed the door open. Still no answer. “Howard,” he called louder, adding three hard raps on the now fully open door. Nothing. The curtains were drawn and Howard’s suite was dark. A faint acrid smell hung in the air, and as Benicio’s eyes adjusted he saw that the bed was made, and empty. “That’s fine,” he said out loud. “If that’s how you want it, fine.”
Benicio shut the adjoining door. Then he opened it again. That acrid smell troubled him. He took a step into the suite and found that it wasn’t so faint at all. It was an unmistakable stink, like unclean dive gear that’s been left to sit in the sun. He walked further into the room and experienced one of those morbid fantasies that has a whole life-cycle in three or four seconds—his father was dead, he was in here rotting, Benicio was about to discover the body, he’d have to bury it, he wouldn’t have any parents, everybody would feel sorry for him. Get ahold of yourself, what an awful thing to think, who the hell cares if anybody is sorry for you, anyway? And besides, this is silly. A body would smell worse than this.
He groped along the dark wall and found a light switch. He flipped it on and stood there for a moment, shocked. His father’s suite made his own gilded room look like the servant’s quarters. It was the size of a large apartment, complete with a living room, bedroom, study, kitchenette and a tremendous balcony. The rooms were immaculately clean, save a round table in the study that the maids seemed to have gone to pains to avoid. It was strewn with papers that they must have assumed—perhaps correctly—were important. Benicio leafed through them, overturning some tented documents to reveal the source of the stink: a takeout tray of half eaten sushi that was yellow-green and festering. Once uncovered, the fish stank twice over. He had to hold the tray far away from his averted face as he dumped its contents into the toilet.
Even with the fish flushed, the suite still smelled like rot. Benicio opened the front door and jammed the deadbolt through the frame to keep it from snapping shut again. Then he opened the balcony doors, hoping that some cross breeze would help clean out the smell. There were two little chairs on the balcony and Benicio sat in one of them to wait while the air changed. A tumbler half filled with rainwater sat at the base of a chair leg and he picked it up. He imagined his father drinking from it—imagined him sitting in this same chair, looking out