The Tesseract Read Free

McDonald’s security guard had obligingly lowered his stockless shotgun and held the door open. Or obligingly held the door open and lowered his stockless shotgun. Either way, one blast of the scorched air and Sean had spun on his heels and marched back inside.
    But cool as it was in McDonald’s, after a couple of hours Sean could feel the edges of his mind starting to fray. It wasn’t the obsessive wiping and washing and ashtray removing so much as the sprawling children’s party that had commandeered half the seating area. Overweight rich kids with sulky faces and stripy sailor shirts, shouting at their nannies. No more than eight or nine, most of them, and already groomed for a life in politics. Why did this tubby elite choose to celebrate in a hamburger joint, Sean had wondered as he burst aballoon that had been bounced into his face. The sound made a dozen adult heads turn, and had one of the minders reaching under his
barong tagalog
to the bulge in his waistband. So, time to go.
    Armed with a milkshake, Sean had left the McDonald’s and walked to the waterfront, where he’d hoped he might kill time in the company of a cool sea breeze. But there was no cool sea breeze. There was an executive-bathroom hand-drier blowing down his neck. The milkshake had turned to chocolate soup before it was even a quarter finished, the bench he’d chosen was like leaning against an oven door, and the sparse canopies of the palm trees had offered nothing more than a rumor of shade.
    Yet somehow, Sean had managed to stick it out until four. He couldn’t remember much about how the time had passed; he was simply glad that it had. Ships and water were good for distracting a head that needed to be distracted. Good for a blink and a mild frown, and a glance at a watch that said half an hour had swept by. Sean’s only clear memory of the afternoon was standing on the harbor wall and looking down at the beached jellyfish and acres of floating refuse. Like little islands, he’d thought, watching the polystyrene chips and plastic bags that bobbed in the swell. The two archipelagos beneath me. One too big to think about, and the other too big to see.
    Back in his room , some of the wetter stains on the street began to glow red as the sun dropped from the sky. Dropped, because the sun didn’t sink in these parts. At six-fifteen, theelastic that kept it suspended started to stretch, and at six-thirty the elastic snapped. Then you had just ten minutes as the orange ellipse plummeted out of view, and the next thing you knew it was night. You had to watch out for that in Manila. Ten minutes to catch a cab to the right side of town if you were on the wrong side.
    “Like now, for example,” Sean murmured as the red puddles blackened and disappeared. Miles from Ermita or any place he knew, holed up in a hotel that didn’t know it was a hotel, or had forgotten.
    No other guests. No air-con or even a fan. No lobby. Just a chair and a desk and a man downstairs, with his T-shirt always rolled up to his chest and a belly like a brown boulder. A man who usually had a sweat-soaked cigarette tucked between his right ear and the stubble of his shaved head. A man who kept one hand permanently out of view and never returned Sean’s smile, simply slid his key toward him with a flick of the fingers.
    What sort of hotel had no other guests? Walking down the corridor, through flickering pools of light where there were bulbs instead of hanging wires, Sean had noticed the quiet with growing confusion. He’d also seen open doors, and through them, rooms without beds. Sometimes rooms without walls. Only a few wooden slats, the guts of the walls, or the bones. And past the bones, the neighboring room, equally bare and broken.
    Everything weird was the bottom line, and Sean had reached it quickly. Within an hour of his arrival, everything weird; every corner, every noise, every object.
    The telephone, sitting on his arthritic bedside table. Itdidn’t work. Of