The Tesseract Read Free Page B

would be history. The hotel would be marginally less strange.
    He stared at the tiny useless circle, but stayed on the bed. Not about to get paranoid, beaten by sun on a harbor wall and a few hours’ waiting in a weird hotel. If it hadn’t bothered him last night, it wasn’t going to bother him now. And anyway, it wasn’t like peepholes were such a lot of use. You hear someone at the door, you go to check who it is, you don’t want to see them, what do you do? Not answer? Chances are they heard you as you walked across the room, so you can’t pretend you’reout. And if it’s trouble, the best you can do is slip the chain on the lock. Which buys as much time as one hard kick.
    The cigarette was down to the filter. Sean watched the red glow eat into the butt for a couple of seconds; then he stubbed it out.
    Nine past seven , nine minutes since he last looked at his watch. Nine times sixty seconds, easy, ten times sixty minus sixty equals five hundred and forty seconds, just under one-sixth of the time before the mestizo turned up, assuming he was on time, which meant there were fifty-one times sixty seconds to go, which was…
    A cockroach zipped across the carpet like a miniature skateboard.
    The rats and mosquitoes had packed their bags and checked out. With a citywide network of slums on the doorstep, there was no sense in hunting for food scraps or skin here. A parasite could afford to be choosy. But the cockroaches had decided that the hotel still had something to offer. They’d stuck around, multiplied like crazy, seething in the gap between the mattress base and the floor, slipping through the vent of the long-dead air-con unit. Completely indifferent to everything, happy in a pile of shit. Hard to find a creature that cared for the company of cockroaches, hard to find a cockroach that cared.
    Hard to kill too. Corner them with a lighter flame and they strolled through the flame, whack them with a newspaper and they laughed in your face. And—didn’t they have an incredible tolerance to radiation? Ten million times higher than everyother animal, or something close. The animal best suited to life after the bomb. Amazing, to be able to cope with atomic fallout so well and a shoe heel so badly.
    Sean slid off the bed.
    Seven seventeen , four dead roaches, flattened, burst, floating in the toilet bowl, the world a better place.
    The flush made Sean wince and he tapped his foot impatiently as the cistern refilled. The noise was as loud and awkward as a cough at a funeral. Noise didn’t belong in Patay. The quiet inside the hotel was so absolute that it appeared to have infected the street outside. Unprecedented in the city, cars and jeepneys laid off their horns when passing, motorbikes eased off the throttle, balut vendors didn’t bother calling out. The rest of Manila rippled with these sounds twenty-four hours a day, but not Alejandro Street. Patay existed in a cocoon of silence.
    Virtual silence. Sometimes it was broken. Curious sounds, difficult to place, unnaturally amplified and confused by the vacuum around them. Trapped air in the water pipes that sounded like footsteps, barking dogs that sounded like crashing cars.
    Two of the roaches didn’t make it down the U-bend. One turned out to be still alive, struggling with the surface tension and its leaking innards. Brown innards, Sean noticed, thoughtfully thumbing the sweat out of his eyebrows. So, sure enough, you are what you eat.

Clarity, maybe.
    Back on the bed, Sean lay with his head propped up on his elbow, looking at the blood on the sheets. Inhaling, he thought to himself: Connections. The telephone, the blood-stained sheets, and the peephole. The three things came out of nowhere; they were non sequiturs. But nothing comes out of nowhere, and non sequiturs don’t exist. There had to be a connection.
    Sean traced around the rusty spatter with his finger.
    Start at the beginning. There had been someone staying in the room, obviously. And judging by