Koko (87 page)

For Charlie Parker begins
singing
at once, almost magically at one with his instrument, the harmonies of the song,
and his imagination. He is overflowing, and he deliberately stutters at the
beginning of a phrase, and the phrase says
I have work to do.
He immediately says it again, but more passionately, so that this time it is
I have WORK to do.
All through the long first section of his solo, he plays with absolute fluency over
a tense and unrelenting rhythm.

Then an astonishing thing happens. When Parker reaches the bridge of the song, all
that open-throated singing against threat is resolved in a dazzle of imaginative glory.
Parker changes the beat around so that he actually seems to accelerate, and all the
urgency is engulfed in the grace of his thoughts, which have become Mozartean and
are filled with great calm and beauty.

What Charlie Parker does on the bridge of “Cherokee” reminds me of Henry James’s dream—the
one I told Michael about in the hospital. A figure battered at his bedroom door. Terrified,
James held the door closed against the figure. Impendingness, threat. In his dream,
James does an extraordinary thing. He turns on his attacker and forces open the door
in a burst of daring. The figure has already fled, is only a diminishing spot in the
distance. It is a dream of elation and triumph, of glory.

That was what we listened to in the dripping tent in the year 1968 in Vietnam, M.O.
Dengler and Spanky Burrage and I. You could say … we heard fear dissolved by mastery.

You see, I remember the old M.O. Dengler. I remember the man we loved. In the basement
of the tenement on Elizabeth Street, if I had been faced with the choice of killing
him or letting him go, unless killing him was the only way I could save my own life,
I would have let him go. He wanted to give himself up.
He wanted to give himself up
, and if Harry Beevers had not betrayed him, he would have come in closer to our moral
world. I believe this because I must believe it, and because I know that Koko could
easily have killed all three of us down in his basement room. He chose not to. He
had come close enough to our world to let us live. That is why Michael and I have
matching scars that have turned us into brothers—the scars are the sign that Koko
chose to let us live. He had work to do,
work
to do, and maybe that work was to—

I cannot say it yet.

Six months to the day after our release from the basement, Harry Beevers checked into
a grand new hotel that had just opened in Times Square: one of those new hotels with
an atrium lobby and a waterfall. He was given the suite he requested, rode up in the
glass bubble of the elevator, tipped the bellman who had carried his suitcase with
a ten-dollar bill, locked his door, opened
the suitcase and drank from the quart of vodka that was one of the two objects inside
it, undressed, lay down on his bed, masturbated, removed from the suitcase the .38
Police Special which was the other object he had carried from his apartment, put its
barrel against his temple, and pulled the trigger. He died four hours later. A playing
card was found on the sheet beside his head; I think the force of the bullet knocked
the card out of his mouth. His life had become useless to him, and he threw it away.

Harry opened the door and stepped back to let the dark figure enter. He had no job,
little money, and his imagination had failed him. His illusions were all the imagination
he had—a ferocious poverty.

Perhaps in despair like Harry’s, Koko once opened the door, stepped back, and let
the figure enter.

Michael Poole commutes to the Bronx every day, where he practices what he calls “front-line
medicine” in a storefront. Maggie is taking courses at NYU, but although she has the
unmistakable air of a person with a goal, she will not speak about what she plans
to do. Michael and Maggie seem very happy. Last year we built a new loft for them
on the floor above Tina’s old loft, where Vinh and Helen and I now live. I lead a
regular, moderate life in the midst of these people, and sometimes at six o’clock
I walk downstairs to have a single drink with Jimmy, Maggie’s brother, who works behind
Saigon’s bar. Jimmy is a wicked character, and now that I know so few wicked characters
and am no longer one myself, I rather cherish him.

I think Koko wanted to go to Honduras—I think Central America called to him, perhaps
because of Rosita Orosco, perhaps because he imagined that there he could find his
death. It would not be difficult to find a way to die in Honduras. And perhaps that
is what happened, and for two years Koko has lain in a hurriedly dug grave, shot by
the police or a gang of thieves or the militia or a drunken farmer or a frightened
boy with a gun. He had work to do, and it is possible that the work was to find his
own death. Maybe this time the mob caught him, pulled him to pieces, and scattered
his body in a greasy field.

STOP.

PLAY.

I flew to New Orleans and went to the counter where the man calling himself Roberto
Ortiz had bought a one-way ticket to Tegucigalpa. I bought a ticket to Tegucigalpa.
Two hours later, I boarded the little plane and three hours after that we touched
down in Belize. Heat rolled in through the hatch when the few
passengers bound for Belize left the cabin. When the men in brown uniforms opened
the back of the plane to take out a few pieces of luggage, hard flat light struck
the white concrete and bounced straight into the cabin. The plane was sealed again,
and we flew to San Pedro de Sula, where I saw the boxy white terminal with its dispirited
flag. Hondurans with orange boarding passes joined the flight. We went up in the air
again and almost as quickly came down again at La Cieba.

I pulled my overnight bag off the rack and moved forward in the cabin. The indifferent
stewardess swung open the hatch, and I walked down a movable staircase into the world
that Koko had chosen. Heat, dust, motionless light. Across the tarmac stood a low
building, up on a platform like a loading dock, that could have been a bar or a failed
inn, of unpainted grey boards. This was the terminal. Koko had walked across this
tarmac toward the terminal, and I walked toward it and climbed the wooden steps to
pass through the building.

The dark-haired girls in the blue airlines uniform sat on packing cases, their handsome
legs thrust out before them. Koko too walked past these lounging girls. A uniformed
boy soldier holding a rifle nearly as tall as himself barely glanced at him, his boredom
too profound to be shaken by a white North American male. He did not even glance at
my boarding pass. His contempt for
gringos
is unshakable, we are invisible to him. I wonder: does Koko turn around now, and
what does he see? Angels, demons, elephants in hats? I think he sees a vast and promising
emptiness in which he might again begin to heal. As soon as I walked past the boy
soldier, I was in the rear section of the terminal, and after a few steps I came to
a door, opened it, and was in the terminal proper.

We were in a long, hot, crowded space. Every seat was filled, fat brown mothers and
fat brown babies everywhere. Latino men in broad-brimmed hats stood at the dusty bar,
a few empty-eyed young soldiers yawned and stretched, a couple of pink North Americans
looked up, looked away. We are not there anymore, we have disappeared.

Before me in both space and time, Koko passes through the entrance of Goloson Airport
and returns to the strong direct sunlight. He blinks; he smiles. Sunglasses? No, not
yet, his departure has been too hurried for sunglasses. I remove mine, which have
round black lenses the size of quarters, from my shirt pocket and hook the ends of
the wire temples around my ears. In darkened tones, I can see what Koko saw—the landscape
that claimed him.
He walks away from the terminal easily, loosely, not looking back. He does not know
that at the distance of a year and then some I am watching his confident step take
him down the narrow country road. Before us is a flat foreshortened landscape, a no-place,
very green and very hot. A series of low, sparsely wooded hills rises up from the
plain less than a mile distant. I think of Charlie Parker leaning as if into an embrace
into the conditions that surrounded him; I think of the fat old Henry James throwing
open the door and rushing forward; I wish I could flood my pages with the complicated
joy of these images. The long, nearly leafless branches of the jacaranda trees droop
in the punishing heat. It is the forest of no-place, of no significance in itself:
simply the forest that grows on the low hills, and toward which the small lean figure
is moving, a step now at a time.

PETER STRAUB

Peter Straub is the
New York Times
bestselling author of more than a dozen novels including, most recently,
A Dark Matter.
Two of his novels,
Lost Boy Lost Girl
and
In the Night Room
, are winners of the Bram Stoker Award. He lives in New York City.

www.peterstraub.net