Koko (78 page)

Exultant, Harry turned back toward his apartment.

But by six Harry felt his energy finally begin to consume itself and turn into anger
and doubt. Why was he sitting here, in the middle of this messy apartment, in these
ridiculous Action Man clothes? Who was he trying to kid? He had finally lived long
enough to be able to see what happened to his best, highest moments when their goals
were suspended. The world turned black. Harry knew this had nothing to do with Post-Traumatic
Stress Disorder or anything else undergone by weaker, shallower people than he. The
blackness was simply him, part of what had always set him apart. At such times whatever
it was that he wanted and needed and
knew he was going to get
faded away into a vaguer and vaguer future, and his whole character seemed no more
than a façade of competence and stability over a spinning chaos. Once he had been
on trial, accused of murdering civilians, and the world had come close to judging
him a madman—what had been filled with blazing Tightness was coldly evaluated as the
act of a criminal. The demons had come in very close that time, he had heard them
snicker and seen the red glitter of their eyes, felt the terror and emptiness they
brought with them.

The demons had known his secret.

If Koko called him back, the world itself was in its proper
shape: the center was the center, which was the secret, and the power of what Harry
Beevers had felt and done radiated out through the rest of his life and took him where
he had to be. Why else had Koko appeared?

Koko had appeared again in the world to give himself to Harry Beevers, he thought,
writing this sentence in his mind as he half-heartedly watched a man turned dusty
brown by makeup predict the weather for the next five days.

At ten o’clock he heard the radio repeating the same news—the earthquake, the flood,
the dead children, disaster skimming over the planet like a great black bird that
touched down with a claw here and toppled buildings with a wingbeat there, unseen,
always moving.

Half an hour later one of its great wings seemed to flap directly over his head. He
had given in and made a drink—his only one, to calm his nerves. Harry was pouring
vodka into a glass when the telephone rang, and he sloshed some of the liquid onto
the counter. He hurried into the living room just as Michael Poole identified himself.

Stay there another two days
, Harry silently said, but heard Poole’s voice telling him of arriving the next day
on a certain flight at a certain hour. Then Poole spoke of going to the police. Poole’s
voice was earnest and concerned and kindly, and in its cadences Harry Beevers could
hear the collapse of all his designs.

Later in the evening Harry got hungry, but could not stomach the thought of eating
more Chinese food. Also nauseating was the idea of Michael Poole and Tim Underhill,
both of whom had seemed to give up on sex, being with Maggie Lah—only he would really
know what to do with a girl like that. This was so funny it hurt. He went to his refrigerator,
thinking almost angrily about Maggie Lah, and found within it a couple of apples,
a few carrots, a wedge of cheese already beginning to go dry and hard.

Resentfully Harry dropped most of these things on a plate and carried it into the
living room. If nothing happened—if his instincts had been so entirely wrong—he would
have to go out to the airport and try to muzzle Poole. Maybe he could send him somewhere
else for a day or two.

Late at night Harry sat in the dark with the telephone and answering machine before
him, sipping his drink and watching the red message light on the machine. In the silver
city light coming through the window, everything looked poised. Countless times Harry
had waited like this in the jungle, not moving, the world suspended around him.

Then the telephone rang, and the message light began to blink. Harry extended his
hand and waited for the caller to identify himself. The tape switched on, and a second
of silence hissed through the speaker. Harry lifted the receiver and said, “I’m here.”

It was not until then that he knew: he heard Koko waiting for him to say more.

“Talk to me,” Harry said.

Tape hiss came through the little speaker in the answering machine.

“Backwards and forwards, isn’t that right? You wrote that? I know what you mean. I
know—you want to go back to the beginning.”

He thought he heard a soft slow intake of breath.

“This is how we’re going to do it. I want you to meet me in a certain place, a safe
place. Called Columbus Park, right on the edge of Chinatown. From there we can cross
the street and go into the Criminal Court building, where you will also be safe. I
know people there. These people trust me. They will do whatever I say. I will take
you into a private room. You’ll be able to sit down. Everything will be over. Do you
hear me?”

Hissing silence.

“But I want to be certain that I will be safe too. I want to see that you will do
what I ask you to do. So I want you to take a certain route to Columbus Park, and
I will be watching you all along this route. I want to see you follow my orders exactly.
I want to see that you do exactly what I ask you to do.”

When no words came from Koko, Harry said, “Tomorrow afternoon at ten minutes to three,
I want you to start on Bowery, across from the north end of Confucius Plaza. Enter
an arcade in the middle of the block between Canal and Bayard and walk through the
arcade to Elizabeth Street. Turn left and go to Bayard Street. Walk west on Bayard
until you come to Mulberry Street. Across the street is Columbus Park. Go across and
enter the park. Go down the path and sit on the first bench. In exactly two minutes
I will enter the park from the southern end and join you on the bench. Then it will
all be over.”

Harry took a deep breath. He could feel his whole upper body sweating into the turtleneck.
He wanted to say something else—something like
we both need to do this
—but the other end of the line clicked down, and the dial tone began.

Harry sat for a long time in the dark. Then he switched on the desk lamp and called
the Tenth Precinct. Without giving his
name, he left a message for Lieutenant Murphy that Timothy Underhill would be arriving
at La Guardia airport at two o’clock the next afternoon on a Republic flight from
Milwaukee.

That night he lay awake in bed a long time, indifferent to sleep.

Crime and death surrounded the elephant, crime and death were the atmosphere through
which he moved, the air he pulled into his lungs through his long grey trunk. And
this is one thing Koko knew: though you move through the city the jungle stares at
you, every step. There is no jungle but the jungle, and it grows beneath the sidewalks,
behind the windows, on the other sides of the doors. Birds cry out in the midst of
traffic.

If he could have gone up to the old lady on West End Avenue, she would have dressed
him in fine clothes and tamed him by easing his heart. But Pilophage the Doorman had
turned him away, and the mad beasts had growled and shown their teeth, and his heart
had not been eased.

The door opened, and—

The door opened, and Blood the Butcher slid into the room. Here was the demon Misfortune,
and with the demon came the wire-haired bat, Fear.

Koko sat alone in his room, his cell, his egg, his cave. The light burned, and the
egg the cell the cave caged all the light and reflected it from wall to wall, let
none escape for Koko needed it every bit.

Flames jumped from the floor of Koko’s room but did not sear him. Dead children clustered
round him, crying out, and the others cried out from the walls. Their mouths open,
their elbows pressed close to their sides. The children exhaled the reeking breath
of lions, for they lived in the cave as he lived in the cave, backwards and forwards.

The door opened, and—

A fire sprang up and a wind sprang up.

Spare my life
, a child cried out in bat language.

Pilophage the General posed for his portrait before Justinen, the painter. The General
looked grand and good, with his plumed hat beneath his arm. The Lieutenant stood in
the dark cave, not
good or grand, with his surfboard out before him. His shovel. And the girl in the
alley off Phat Pong Road looked at him and knew.

Do you want to know what’s dark?

The Devil’s arsehole is dark. Koko went into the cave and into the Devil’s arsehole
and there met the Lieutenant, Harry Beevers, his surfboard his shovel his weapon out
before him, being fingered, being fluted, being shot—shooting. You want a piece of
this? The Lieutenant with his cock sticking out and his eyes glowing. Then the Devil
closed his nose and closed his eyes and stuck his fingers in his ears and eternity
came in a thunderclap, eternity happened all at once, backwards and forwards. The
woman crawled up from Nicaragua and gave birth and died in a black cloud, naked and
covered in frozen mud.

At the thought of Harry Beevers the children quailed and threw their arms around each
other, and their stink doubled and redoubled.

Good afternoon, gentlemen, and welcome to the Devil’s Arse-hole. It is presently no
time no date no year. You will presently take yourself to the Bowery Arcade, and there
you will once again face the elephant.

And when Babar went to bed he could not sleep. Discord and misfortune had come to
Celesteville. Outside Babar’s window demons chattered. When Pilophage the General
opened his massy mouth, snakes and bats flew out.

We have turned every one to his own way, every one to his own way.

Tapitor, Capoulosse, Barbacol. Podular. Pilophage. Justinen. Doulamor. Poutifor. Sturdy
Hatchibombitar, whom the stunned child within Babar the King had loved best, with
his red shirt and checked cap, his sturdy shoulders and broad back—the street sweeper,
a man of no ambition but to keep the streets clean, a kind man, honest, sweeping and
sweeping away the filth.

At the cusp of the night he heard outside his window the wingbeats not of birds, as
at first it seemed, but of dark terrible creatures
twice the size of bats. These creatures had come out of the earth in order to find
him, and they would torment themselves at the window for a long time before wheeling
away and returning to the earth. No other person would see or hear them, for no other
person could. Harry himself had never seen them. The position of his bed in the little
alcove beside the bathroom did not give him a view of the window. Harry lay in the
dark for a long time, listening to the feathery, insistent sound of the wings. Eventually
the din began to lessen. One by one the creatures flew back to their hole in the earth,
where they huddled together squeaking and biting, dreamily licking the drops of blood
from one another’s bodies. Harry listened in the dark as their number shrank to a
final two or three that actually thumped against the glass in their desperation. Eventually
these too flapped off. Morning was only a few hours away.

He finally slept an hour or two, and when he woke up he faced the old problem of the
reality of the creatures. In the light of morning it was too easy to dismiss them
as imaginary. On the nights they came, four or five nights since he had been out of
uniform, they were real. He would have seen them, he had known, if he had dared to
look.

But they had failed again, and at nine he got out of bed feeling both tired and invigorated.
He showered carefully and long, scrubbing and soaping and fondling, sliding his hand
up and down the shaft of his penis, cupping his balls, rubbing and pulling.

He dressed in the same jeans and sweater he had worn the previous day, but beneath
the sweater wore a fresh shirt, stiff with starch.

When he looked at himself in the mirror beside his bed, he thought he looked like
a commando—like a Green Beret. He drank two cups of coffee and remembered how he had
felt on certain mornings in Camp Crandall before going out on patrol. The bitter coffee,
the weight of the automatic pistol on his hip. On some of those mornings his heart
had felt as hard and tight as a walnut, his skin had tingled, it had seemed to him
that he saw and heard like an eagle. The colors of the tents, the red dust in the
roadway, the wire glinting on the perimeter. The slight hazy dullness of the air.
Beneath all the other odors of men and machinery had been a live green scent, delicate
and sharp as the edge of a razor. For Harry, this had been the basic smell of Vietnam.
In Ia Thuc he had grabbed an old woman’s shoulder and pulled her harshly toward him,
shouting some question he could not recall, and beneath the
coarse smell of wood smoke the green razor of this scent had sliced out toward him
from her body.

If a woman smelled like that, Harry thought, she’d put a hook in you that you’d never
get out.

He drank another cup of coffee on the fold-out couch and tried to visualize in sequence
every action that would bring him together with Koko in the Bowery Arcade. At one
forty-five he would take a cab to the northeast corner of Bowery and Canal. It would
then be about two o’clock and Lieutenant Murphy and two or three uniformed policemen
would just be meeting the Republic flight from Milwaukee at La Guardia. In Chinatown
the day would be cold, grey, wintry, and few people would be on the street. Harry
planned to walk across Bowery and station himself on the wide traffic island just
north of Confucius Plaza for a fast look at the block containing the arcade. He visualized
the long block, the tiled façades of the restaurants with their plate-glass windows.
A few men and women moving quickly in heavy coats. If Spitalny had decided to conceal
himself in a doorway or behind a restaurant window, Harry would see him, and immediately
disappear into Confucius Plaza and wait for Spitalny to panic when he realized that
something had gone wrong. When Spitalny came out of hiding, Harry could follow him
and finish him off as soon as they were alone. If he did not see Spitalny waiting
to ambush him—and he did not think he would—Harry planned to recross Bowery and make
a quick pass through the arcade just to make sure that the staircase had not been
closed or blocked. If anything unusual were going on in the arcade, he would have
to follow Spitalny out onto Elizabeth Street and get up close behind him before he
got to Bayard Street. Elizabeth Street was Harry’s fallback—few restaurants, gloomy
tenements. But if everything went as he imagined it would, Harry planned to go back
across Bowery and conceal himself among the trees and benches at the base of Confucius
Plaza. There he would wait until fifteen minutes before the time he had given Koko—until
twenty-five to three—then he would cross Bowery one final time, make a final pass
through the arcade to see that all was clear at the Elizabeth Street end, and then
wait for Koko on the staircase.