Koko

by Peter Straub

  “Okay. But there’s one more thing. I want your agreement that you won’t use any of this Koko material in a work of nonfiction. You can write all the fiction you want—I don’t care about that. But I have to have the nonfiction rights to this.”

  “Sure,” Underhill said. “I couldn’t write nonfiction if I tried. And I won’t sue you if you won’t sue me.”

  “We can work together,” Beevers declared. He dragged Underhill too in for a hug and said he was on the team. “Let’s make some serious money, okay?”

  * * *

  Michael sat next to Beevers on the flight to New York. Conor was in the window seat, and Tim Underhill sat just ahead of Michael. For a long time Beevers told improbable stories about his adventures in Taipei—stories about drinking snake’s blood and having incredible sex with beautiful whores, actresses, and models. Then he leaned toward Michael and whispered. “We have to be careful with this guy, Michael. We can’t trust him, that’s the bottom line. Why do you think I’m inviting him to stay with me? I’ll be able to keep my eye on him.”

  Poole nodded wearily.

  In a voice loud enough to be overheard, Beevers said, “I want you guys to think about something. We are going to be seeing the police at some point after we get back, and that gives us a problem. How much do we tell them?”

  Underhill twisted around in his seat to look back with an interested, quizzical expression.

  “I think we should consider holding to a certain confidentiality here,” Beevers said. “We started off on this thing by wanting to find Koko ourselves, and that’s how we want to finish up. We ought to stay a step ahead of the police all the way.”

  “Okay, I guess,” Conor said.

  “I hope I have the agreement of the rest of you on this point.”

  “We’ll see,” Poole said.

  “I don’t suppose we’re exactly talking about obstruction of justice,” Underhill said.

  “I don’t care what you call it,” Beevers said. “All I’m saying is that we hold back on one or two details. Which is what the police do all the time as a matter of course. We hold back a little. And when we come up with a course of action, we keep it to ourselves.”

  “Course of action?” Conor asked. “What can we do?”

  Beevers asked them to consider a few possibilities. “For instance, we have two bits of information the police do not have. We know that Koko is Victor Spitalny, and we know that a man named Tim Underhill is in New York—or soon will be—and not back in Bangkok.”

  “You don’t want to tell the cops that we’re looking for Spitalny?” Conor asked.

  “We can play a little dumb. They can find out who is missing and who isn’t.” He gave Michael a superior little smile. “It is the other bit of information that I see being most useful to us. Spitalny used this man’s name”—he pointed at Underhill—“didn’t he? To get the reporters to come to him? I think he did, based on what we found out at Goodwood Park. So I say let’s turn the tables on him.”

  “And how would you do that, Harry?” Underhill asked.

  “In a way, Pumo gave me the idea when we all met in Washington back in November. He was talking about his girlfriend, remember?”

  “Hey, I remember,” Conor said. “He was talking to me. That little Chinese girl was driving him out of his gourd. She used to put ads in some paper for him. Signed them ‘Half Moon.’ ”

  “Très bon, très, très bon,” Beevers said.

  “You want to put ads in the Village Voice?” asked Michael.

  “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.”

  2

  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 sha
rpened 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.

  How did you come to be homeless?

  My room was appropriated for other uses by my landlord.

  And your possessions?

  I carry all I own.

  You have no job?

  I am a writer, of some small reputation.<
br />
  The owner extended a fat hand. I am Chin Wu-Fu.

  “Timothy Underhill,” Koko said, taking the man’s hand.

  Chin gestured for him to follow. They went outside, Koko shrugging on his knapsack, to bustle down the block in the cold and turn into Bayard Street. Chin Wu-Fu hustled on ahead of him, hunching his shoulders against the cold. Koko strode on behind him for two blocks, and followed him as he turned north into narrow, empty Elizabeth Street. Halfway up the block, Chin ducked through a curved archway and disappeared. He ducked back out and waved Koko in through the arch, and then ushered Koko into a small enclosed brick courtyard that smelled faintly of cooking oil. Koko saw that the court would always be sunless. Surrounded by tenement walls and fire escapes that clung like giant mantises to the dingy brown brick, the court was no more than an insulating dead space between the tenements and Elizabeth Street. It was perfect. The Chinese man in the dark suit who had admitted him to this dead still space was pulling at one of the rough doors set into the tenement’s ground level.

  We go downstairs, the owner said, and plunged into the cold darkness of the stairwell.

  Koko followed.

  At the bottom of the stairs Chin switched on a bare lightbulb and flipped through the hundreds of keys on a large ring before unlocking another door. Wordlessly, he swung it open and with a sweeping gesture motioned Koko inside.

  Koko stepped into a clammy absolute blackness. He knew instantly that this was going to be just what he needed, and in the instant before Chin Wu-Fu groped for the cord and turned on the light within, he already saw the windowless rectangular chamber, the walls of a dark flaking green, the stained mattress on the floor, the population of roaches, the rickety chair, and the rusty sink and rough toilet behind a screen. He could not talk to the police, but he could find Michael Poole and Michael Poole was a man who would understand backwards and forwards. Harry Beevers was the road backwards, and Michael Poole was the narrow lonely path leading forward out of his cell. Another bare lightbulb came dimly to life. Down beneath the surface of Elizabeth Street, he felt on his skin the wind that blew across a frozen river. Pain was an ill-u-shun.