Koko (54 page)

“This is America,” Beevers said. “Let’s advertise. Let’s put Tim Underhill’s name
up all over town. If anybody asks about it, we can say that we’re looking for someone
who used to be in our old unit. And that way we never use Koko’s real name. I think
we’ll shake a couple of peaches out of the tree.”

The Star Limousine was actually a van with three rows of seats and a luggage rack
on the roof. Even inside the van the air was very cold, and Poole pulled his coat
tightly around himself and wished that he had packed a sweater. He felt isolated and
strange, and the country outside the windows of the van seemed as foreign as it was
familiar. He seemed to have been gone a long time.

Buttoned up against the cold, ugly row houses huddled on the desolate land on either
side of the highway. The air had already turned dark. Nobody in the van spoke, not
even the married couples.

Michael remembered seeing Robbie in a dream, holding up a lantern.

Coming home was always the same. Coming home, there was always the fear factor. Blood
and Marbles were always home. You had to make straight in the desert a highway, yet
once a little while, and then you could shake the heavens and the earth, the sea and
the dry land. Make straight in the desert, for who shall abide the day of his coming?

You came home to what was undone and rebuked you, to what had been badly or ill done,
which spat you out of its mouth, and to that which had been done which should not
have been done, which came at you with a board, a strap, a brick.

All this was in a book, even Blood and Marbles were in a book.

In this book the cave was a river where a small naked boy walked smeared with frozen
mud. (But it was a woman’s blood, it was.) He had read this book backwards and forwards.
That was one thing they said at home—
backwards and forwards.
Koko remembered buying that book because once in another life he had known the author
and soon the book revolved and grew in his hands and became a book about himself.
Koko had felt as if he were in free fall—as if someone had thrown him out of a helicopter.
His body had left itself, in familiar total fear his body had stood up and walked
out into the book in his hands.

Fear total and familiar.

He had remembered the most terrible thing in the world. This was true—there was a
most terrible thing. The most terrible thing was how his body had learned to leave
itself. It was Blood opening the bedroom door at night and sidling into the little
room. The hot wet smell of the eternal world on his body. His blond hair almost silver
in the darkness.

Are you awake?

Anyone awake could see the police cars, anyone awake could see what was happening.
Koko stood on the corner looking at the two cars pulled up before the YMCA. They expected
him to just walk in there.

It was the black man, who said,
Killin’ is a see-yun.
He had gone and told Mr. Partridge, who sat at a desk downstairs, about the room.
Mr. Partridge had walked into Koko’s room and Koko’s body had walked out of his body.

—What is the meaning of this? Mr. Partridge had said. You crazies always end up here,
don’t you have anywhere else to go?

—This is my place, not yours, Koko said.

—We’ll see about that, said Mr. Partridge, and walked out, not before taking another
long look at the walls.

The children turned and cried after him.

—You ain’t no travel agent, the black man said. You ain’t got but a one-way ticket
yourself.

Koko turned away and began walking downtown toward the subway. He carried everything
essential with him in the knapsack now, and there were always empty places.

Then he remembered that he had lost the Rearing Elephant cards, and he stopped walking
and put his hand over his stomach. Blood towered up before him, his hair silvery and
his voice flat and cold and crazy with rage.

You lost them?

His entire life seemed as heavy as an anvil he carried in his arms. He wanted to drop
the anvil. Someone else could take up the job now—after all he had done, it would
be easy for someone else to finish up. He could quit. He could turn himself in, or
he could flee.

Koko knew one thing—he could get on an airplane right now and go anywhere. For Honduras,
you went to New Orleans. He had looked it up. You went to New Orleans and there was
your plane. Bird = Freedom.

An image from the book that had so surprised him floated up into his mind, and he
saw himself as a lost child streaked with frozen mud wandering beside a cold, dirty
river in the middle of a city. Dogs and wolves turned their sharpened teeth toward
him, the door cracked open, through the frozen mud emerged the tips of fingers turning
green with putrefaction. Feelings of loss and terror swarmed at him, and Koko staggered
toward the shelter of a doorway.

The dead children held their spindly hands up before their faces.

He had no home, and he
could
quit.

Trying not to sob or at least not to show that he was sobbing, he sat down in the
doorway. On the other side of the great glass door, an empty marble hallway led toward
a row of elevators. He saw the cartoon policemen strutting around his room. He saw
the jackets on their hangers, the shirts in the drawers. (The cards on the dresser.)
Tears spilled over his cheeks. His razor, his toothbrush. Things taken away, things
lost, things raped and left dazed, dying, dead.…

Koko saw Harry Beevers in the close darkness at the back of a cave. His father whispered
his question. Harry Beevers leaned toward him with his eyes gleaming, his teeth, his
whole face shining and sweating and gleaming.
Get the fuck out of here, troop
, he said, and a bat flew out of his mouth.
Or share the glory.
In the mess on the ground on the other side of the lieutenant he saw in the narrow
beam one little outflung hand with fingers curling toward the palm. Koko’s body had
walked out of itself. Right under the stench of eternity hovered the smells of powder,
piss, shit. Beevers turned and Koko saw his long erection straining out of his trousers.
His history slammed together—he met himself, he was traveling
backwards and forwards.

He looked up from his place within the shelter of the doorway and saw a blue and white
police car roll past, followed closely by another. They had left his room. Maybe one
would be left. Maybe he could go there and talk about the lieutenant.

Koko stood up and hugged himself tight. In his room would be one man to whom he could
talk, and this thought was like an unaccustomed substance in his blood. Once he talked,
everything would be different and he would be free, for after he talked the man would
understand
backwards and forwards.

For the space of several seconds Koko saw himself as if from a great distance, a man
standing in a doorway with his arms wrapped around himself because he was oppressed
by a great
grief. Flat, even daylight, the light of ordinary reality, lay over everything before
him. During these seconds Koko saw his own terror, and what he saw both astonished
and frightened him deeply. He could go back and say: I made a mistake. No demons or
angels surrounded him; the drama of supernatural redemption in which he had been so
long enfolded had fled away down the long street crowded with taxicabs, and he was
an ordinary man, out in the cold by himself.

He was trembling, but he was not crying anymore, anymore. Then he remembered the face
of the girl in Tina Pumo’s living room, and the face suggested to him the one neighborhood
in all the city where he might feel most at home.

He would carry the anvil a little further, and see what happened.

And when he left the subway at Canal Street his whole body told him that he had been
right. The subway had taken him someplace absolutely out of America. He was in an
Asian world again. Even the smells were at once subtler and denser.

Koko had to force himself to walk slowly and breathe normally. With a pounding heart
he passed beneath a sign in Chinese characters and turned south into Mulberry Street.
It seemed to him that he was hungry as he had not been in a week. The last meal he
could actually remember eating had been served by a stewardess.

Suddenly Koko was so attacked by hunger that he could have opened his mouth and let
slide into him every store, every brick, every blaring yellow sign, every teapot and
chopstick, every duck and eel, and every man and woman on the street along with the
stop signs and traffic lights and mailboxes and telephone booths.

He paused only long enough to buy a
Times
, a
Post
, and a
Village Voice
at a newsstand before turning into the first restaurant where a row of ducks the
color of buckwheat honey hung above pots of brown soup and white sticky porridge.

When the food came, the world melted, time melted, and as he ate he was back in the
times when he had lived within the elephant and every time he drew breath he drew
in the elephant.

In the papers today a bus driver had won nearly two million dollars in something called
Lotto. A ten-year-old boy named Alton Cedarquist had been thrown off a roof in a part
of town called Inwood. A block of buildings in the Bronx had burned down. In Angola,
a man named Jonas Savimbi posed with an ugly Swedish machine gun and promised to fight
through eternity; in Nicaragua, a priest and two nuns had been killed and beheaded
in a tiny
village. Backward and forward, yes indeedy. In Honduras, the government of the United
States had claimed two hundred acres of land as a training site—it used to be theirs
and now it was ours. We issued the usual heartfelt promises that one day soon it would
be theirs again. In the meantime our mouths were open and two hundred acres had disappeared
down our throats. Koko could smell the grease in which weapons were packed; he could
hear the sound of crunching boots, of hands slapping the stocks of rifles.

The lords of the earth turned to him with a question on their faces.

But the real estate pages, in which he had hoped to find a good cheap room for rent,
were written in code, most of which he did not understand, and showed almost no rentals
at all in Chinatown. The only space available down here appeared to be a two-bedroom
apartment at Confucius Plaza, at a price so high that at first he thought it must
be a misprint.

Anything more?
the waiter asked in Cantonese, the language in which Koko had ordered his meal.

I have finished, thank you
, Koko said, and the waiter scribbled on a slip, tore it off and placed it on the
table beside his plate. A grease spot instantly blossomed in the center of the green
piece of paper.

Koko watched the grease spot swell out another two centimeters in diameter. He counted
out money and placed it on the table. He looked up at the waiter, who was moving slowly
toward the back of the restaurant.

They took my home from me
, he said.

The waiter turned around and blinked.

I have no home now.

The waiter nodded.

Where is your home?

My home is in Hong Kong
, the waiter said.

Do you know of some place where I might live?

The waiter shook his head. Then he said,
You should live with your own kind.
He turned his back on Koko and proceeded to the front of the restaurant, where he
leaned on the cash register and in a loud complaining whine began to speak to another
man.

Koko flipped over to the back page of the
Village Voice
and found himself reading the words, at first as meaningless as the code in the real
estate ads,
TWIDDLE: UR BEAST I EVER SCENE, PAIN IS ILL-U-SHUN. SURVE-LIVE. LUMINOUS DIAL.
Beneath this one was another addressed to the universe at large and perhaps one other
like himself, whirling loose within it.
A STIFLED DROWSY UNIMPASSIONED GRIEF. WEYOUI MUST FIND THAT WHICH WAS LOST.
Koko felt his tension breaking deep within him, just as if this ad really had been
placed for him by someone who knew and understood him.

But in the meantime the other man at the front of the restaurant, more prosperous
and managerial than the waiter, was looking at him with a cocked head and a light
in his eye that only the promise of money could have put there. Koko folded his paper
and stood up to approach him. He already knew that he had found a room for himself.

There came the customary formalities, including the customary expressions of surprise
at Koko’s facility with Cantonese.

I have a great love for all things Chinese
, Koko said.
It is a great shame that my purse is not as large as my heart.

The avaricious gleam in the restaurant owner’s eye suffered a slight diminution.

But I will happily give a fair price for whatever you may be good enough to make available
to me, and you will also earn my everlasting gratitude.