Koko (77 page)

The elevator stopped. They moved out into the wide cold corridor and turned toward
their rooms. Underhill already had his key in his hand—he hardly knew they were there
anymore.

Poole waited near Underhill’s back as he opened the door, expecting Maggie to do no
more than to smile or nod as she went into her own room. She walked past them, and
then stopped moving as soon as Underhill had clicked the door open. “Would you join
me for a little while, Michael?” she asked. Her voice was light
and penetrating, the sort of voice that could pass through a concrete wall in spite
of its softness. “Tim isn’t going to pay any attention to you tonight.”

Poole patted Tim’s back, told him he would see him later, and followed Maggie. She
was leaning out of her room on one leg, smiling at him with the same forced, powerfully
focused smile she had turned on George Spitalny.

Her room was no more than a long box with one of the immense floor-to-ceiling windows
at its far end. The walls were a dusty pinkish rose; there was a chair, a desk, a
double bed. Poole saw the copy of
Kitty’s Pretty Muff
on the folded coverlet.

Maggie made him laugh with a joke that was not really a joke but a sentence turned
inside out—some piece of wit that flashed in the air like the swipe of a sword and
made him think he ought to remember that way of putting things just before he forgot
it. She whirled around and grinned at him with a face so wry and lovely that it, unlike
her clever phrase, passed instantaneously into his permanent memory. She was still
talking. She sat down on the bed, Poole said something—he scarcely knew what. He could
smell a fresh, peppery odor that seemed to lift off her hair and arms.

“I wish you’d kiss me, Michael,” she said.

And so he did.

Maggie’s lips felt surpassingly cushiony, and the shock of being met with such welcoming
softness went right through his body. Her round slim arms came up and pulled his whole
leaning body toward her so that they fell back together on her bed. Her lips seemed
enormous. Michael put his arms under her back, and together they hitched themselves
further onto the bed.

At length, with real sweetness, she moved her head away from him and smiled. Her face
was as enormous as a moon. He had never seen a face like it. Maggie’s eyes were so
quick and alive they looked defensive. “Good,” she said. “You don’t look so sad anymore.
At dinner you looked wretched.”

“I was just thinking about going back to the room and reading Henry James.”

Maggie’s face floated up toward him again, and her pointed pink tongue slid into his
mouth.

Their clothes seemed to melt off their bodies, and they were clasped together like
spoons in a drawer, like ordinary lovers in an ordinary bed. Maggie’s skin was astonishingly
smooth. It had
no pores, it was all silken sheen. Her whole body seemed to expand and accept him.
He kissed the palms of her hands, crisscrossed with a thousand tiny aimless lines.
She tasted of salt and honey. He put his face deep into the smooth bend of her neck
and inhaled her: whatever she had smelled of before, now she smelled of fresh bread.

“Oh, you beautiful man,” she said.

He slid into a warm wet opening in her body that felt like home. He
was
home: Maggie almost instantly moved and trembled with an orgasm: and his entire body
felt blessed. He was
home.

Later Michael lay stunned, spent, and grateful, entwined in sleeping Maggie. It felt
like travel: like a journey to a place that was not merely a country, but country-ness
itself. Maggie Lah, the flag of her own nation, the treasure and the key to the treasure.
Michael’s happiness passed effortlessly into sleep.

He could hardly sit still, he was
certain
that today everything was going down, that today would decide the whole rest of his
life. He kept looking at the telephone, telling it to ring:
now.
He jumped up from the chair before the window and went to the telephone and touched
the receiver with his fingertips, so that if the call came at that moment he could
answer it almost before it rang.

Yesterday his telephone had rung, and when he had picked it up, not thinking, or stupidly
thinking about something else the way you always do when the really important things
happen to you, he had said hello and waited, his brain kind of on hold for a second
while the person hesitated, and after a second or two he felt himself come into focus:
all his nerves woke up because the person at the other end was still not speaking,
and that person was Koko. Oh God, what a moment. He had felt Koko’s hesitation, Koko’s
need to talk to him, and the fear that kept him from talking. It was like the moment
when you feel a firm tug on your
fishing line, and you know that something big and necessary is down there, making
up its mind. “I want to talk to you,” Harry had said, and felt the whole atmosphere
charge with excitement and need. If there had been anything wrong with his heart,
it would have blown itself out like an old tire right then. And Koko had gently, almost
unwillingly, set down his telephone—Harry could hear the need and the regret, for
at such times you hear
everything
, everything
speaks
, and had set down his own telephone with the knowledge that Koko would call again.
Now Harry was like a drug he could not resist.

And the circumstances were perfect. Michael Poole and Tim Underhill, who in Harry’s
opinion had turned out to be a pure type of fifth wheel, were safely off in the Midwest,
looking for Victor Spitalny’s high school yearbook or something—and he was here at
the center, ground zero.

Today he would lead Koko into the killing box.

He had showered and dressed in loose comfortable clothes—his only pair of jeans, a
black turtleneck sweater, black Reeboks. The handcuffs went over his belt, hidden
by the sweater. The gravity knife rested like a small cold sleeping animal in his
side pocket.

Harry wandered over to his television set and switched on NBC. He jiggled his knee.
Jane Pauley and Bryant Gumble were smiling at each other, sharing some joke—in a year,
they would be pronouncing
his
name, smiling at
him
, looking at him with wonder and admiration.… They switched to the good-looking girl
who read the local news. Dark eyebrows, wet full lips, that intense sexy look,
intellectually
sexy in that New York way. Harry put his hand on his groin and leaned toward the
screen, imagining what the girl would say if she knew about him, what he was going
to do.…

He walked to his window and looked down at the wage slaves leaving his building in
groups of two and three. One girl slipped out of the building and turned toward Tenth
Avenue in the cold wind. Ring, telephone. The girl moved toward Tenth Avenue, foreshortened
by Harry’s perspective but still walking on a good pair of legs, a good ass shifting
back and forth under her coat—That Channel Four girl, Jane Hanson, a million guys
daydreamed about meeting someone like that, but when all this was over, she would
be talking about him. Before long, he would be in the studio, he would be sitting
in Rockefeller Center—the trick was not in knowing where it was, the trick was in
getting yourself invited in.
Above the world of wage slaves was a world like a big
party filled with famous people who knew each other. Once you were
invited in
, you were in the party. You finally had the family you deserved. Doors opened before
you, opportunities came your way—you were where you belonged.

When he was twenty years old, his picture had been on the cover of
Time
and
Newsweek!

Harry went into the bathroom and smoothed down his hair in front of the mirror.

He ate a cup of cherry yogurt and an old cheese danish he found in his refrigerator.
Around ten-thirty, watching CNN now, he ate a Mounds bar and a chocolate chip cookie
from the stash of goodies he kept in his desk drawer. He had this crazy yen to have
a drink, but felt nothing but contempt for a man who would take a drink before an
important mission.

Later he turned back to one of the regular networks, muted the sound, and turned his
radio to a news station.

Around twelve-thirty Harry called a restaurant, Big Wok, right across Tenth Avenue,
and asked for an order of sesame noodles and double-sautéed pork to be delivered to
his apartment.

The programs ground on, one after the other, barely distinguishable. Harry barely
tasted the Chinese food he put in his mouth.

At two-thirty he jumped up from his chair and switched on his answering machine.

The afternoon wore on. Nothing happened: a child drowned in the Harlem River, another
child was severely beaten by his stepfather and then put into the oven and burned
to death, thirty children in California claimed to have been sexually abused in nursery
school—lying little bastards, Harry thought, next day there’d be another twenty kids
yelling that their teacher had taken out their weenies or that he had taken out
his
weenie. Half of them probably wanted him to do it, they probably asked if they could
play with it. Little California girls, already wearing makeup, earrings dangling from
their pierced ears, tight little asses in their little-girl designer jeans.…

An earthquake, a fire, a train wreck, an avalanche … How many dead, altogether? A
thousand? Two thousand?

At four-thirty he could stand it no longer, checked his machine to make sure it was
still on, put on a coat and a hat, and went outside for a walk. It was a real end-of-February
day, with that dampness in the air that found its way through your clothing and went
right down into your bones. Still Harry felt liberated. Let the crazy bastard call
back! What choice did he have?

Harry was moving very quickly up Ninth Avenue, walking much faster than anyone else
on the street. Now and then he caught someone staring at him with alarm or worry on
their innocent faces and realized that he had been talking out loud to himself. “It’s
about time we talked. We have a lot to say to each other. I want to help you. This
is the whole meaning of both of our lives.”

“We need each other,” Harry said to a startled man putting a girl into a taxi at 28th
Street. “You could even call it love.”

On the corner of 30th Street he darted into a little deli and bought a Mars bar. In
the artificial warmth of the shop he felt dizzy for a moment. Sweat streamed down
his forehead. He needed to be outside, he needed to be moving! Harry thrust two quarters
at the fat man behind the register and waited, sweat pouring from his scalp, for his
change. The fat man frowned at him—the pouches under his eyes actually seemed to darken
and swell, as if they might burst—and Harry remembered that he had given the man the
exact amount, that candy bars no longer cost a dime, or fifteen cents, or whatever
he had thought—and he had actually known this, for hadn’t he given the creep the right
amount? He whirled away back out into the cold, healthy air.

You came running out of the cave, Harry said to himself.

All his life fate had sparkled just over his shoulder, singling him out as one of
the special ones who had been invited in. Why else had other people so envied and
resented him, tried to hold him back?

You came running out of the cave to find us. You’ve been trying to get back ever since.

You wanted to be a part of it.

Harry felt his blood beating, his skin heating, his whole body steaming like a healthy
young stallion’s.

You saw, you heard, you felt it, and you knew you were at the center of your life.

You need me to get back there.

Harry stopped moving on the corner of Hudson and something, a car blared at him, and
electricity coursed through his body. The long vertical sign of the White Horse Tavern
blazed in the darkness just across the street.
To get back there.

Harry remembered the electricity pouring through his body as he stood with his weapon
pointed at all those silent children the villagers from An Lat must have taken out
later through the cave’s back entrance. He remembered: in the phosphorous glare. Their
big eyes, their hands held out to him. And him there, twice
their size, an adult American male. Knowing what he knew. That he could do anything,
really anything he wanted to, at this one golden godlike point in his life. The sexual
thing blasting through him.

Let someone say it was bad—they had not been there. If your body spoke that loudly,
how could it be bad?

Sometimes a man was blessed, that was what it came down to. Sometimes a man touched
pure original
power
and felt it take over his whole body—sometimes, maybe once in your life, you knew
whole worlds were coming out of your cock because at that moment
nothing you did could be wrong.

His life was finally coming full circle. I almost laughed out loud, Harry thought,
and then did laugh out loud. He and Koko were going to go back there again, to the
hot center of their lives. When he came out of the cave this time, he was going to
come out a hero.