Koko

by Peter Straub

  Lieutenant Murphy finally sent Michael Poole copies of some photographs that had been taken from the room at the YMCA. These were photographs of convicted or accused serial murderers Dengler had clipped from newspapers and magazines. Ted Bundy, Juan Corona, John Wayne Gacy, Wayne Williams, David Berkowitz—over each head Dengler had drawn a flat round golden ring: a halo. They were eternity’s agents, and in my worst moments I think that Koko saw us, the members of Harry Beevers’ platoon, in that way too, as dirty angels, agents of release from one kind of eternity into another. I have work to do, Koko said in the basement room on Elizabeth Street, and that we have not heard of him or from him does not mean that his work is done or that he has stopped doing it.

  A year after Koko lost himself in Honduras, I finished the book I had been writing. My old publisher, Gladstone House, published it under the title The Secret Fire; the reviews were excellent, and the sales something less than that but at least good enough to make me self-sufficient long enough to write what I thought would be my next book, a “nonfiction novel” about M.O. Dengler and Koko. Now I know that I cannot write that book—I don’t really know what a “nonfiction novel” is; you can’t tie an eagle to a plough horse without making both of them suffer.

  But as soon as I could afford to do it I took the same flight to Tegucigalpa from which Koko escaped while Michael Poole and I were being sewn up and sedated in St. Luke’s Hospital. And with the novelist’s provisional doubt I saw, as I saw the girl he had tried to murder in Bangkok, what happened on that flight. I saw how it could have happened, and then I saw it happen.

  This is one version of how Koko came to Honduras.

  The jet is small and so old it rattles, and few North Americans are on board. The Central American passengers have black hair and brick-colored skin, they are talkative and exotic, and I think Koko would have felt immediately at home among them. He too came out of the basement, he too left the children of Ia Thuc and the Patpong girl behind him in the basement, and now another language echoes about him. I think he closes his eyes and sees a wide plaza in a small sunstruck city, then sees the plaza littered with dead and dying bodies. On the steps of the Cathedral, bodies lie sprawled and twisted, their arms outflung, the fingers curled in toward the palms, the eyes still open, staring. The sun is very near, a large white hazy disc like a halo. Abundant flies. Koko is sweating—he imagines himself sweating, standing in the center of the plaza, his skin prickling with the heat.

  When the little plane lands at Belize two people get off into a shredding dazzle of light that instantly devours them. At the back of the plane, visible to the passengers, two men in brown uniforms pitch a few suitcases out through an open bay. White cement, hard bouncing light.

  In fifteen minutes they are back in that world above the world, above clouds and rainfall, where Koko feels himself freed from gravity and near to—what? God, immortality, eternity? Perhaps all of these. When he closes his eyes he sees a broad sidewalk lined with cafés. Rows of empty white chairs fan out from white tables with colorful sun umbrellas, and waiters in black waistcoats and black trousers stand in the open doorways of the cafés. Then the music of eternity swells in his mind, and he sees bloodied corpses sprawling in the chairs, the waiters slumped dead in the doorways, blood running into the gutters and moving slowly down the pitched street.…

  He sees brown naked children, sturdy peasant children with stubby hands and broad backs, burned in a ditch.

  Images, running without gravity or coherence, on a spool of film.

  I have work to do.

  When they land at San Pedro de Sula half a dozen suddenly impatient men and women thrust their way through the aircraft, carrying woven baskets and bottles of duty-free whiskey. The men’s neckties are pulled off-center, and their faces are filmed with sweat. When they speak they growl like dogs, for they have evolved from dogs as some men have evolved from apes and others from rats and mice, still others from panthers and other feral cats, others from goats, snakes, some few from elephants and horses. Koko squints through the window at a dull white bureaucratic building, the terminal. A limp flag, half eaten by the light, droops over the building.

  Not here.

  After the pack has left the plane, a lone man carrying an orange boarding pass makes his way down the aisle to the last row of seats. He is a Honduran, a San Pedro de Sulan, in an ill-fitting tan sports jacket and a chocolate brown shirt, and his orange boarding pass means that he is a domestic passenger.

  Just before the plane begins to move again, Koko stands up, nods at the stewardess (who has ignored him throughout the flight), and walks down the length of the plane to sit beside the new passenger.

  “Buen’ dia,” the man says, and Koko smiles and nods.

  A moment later they taxi away from the white boxy bureaucratic terminal. Shaking and rattling, the plane rises up off the earth and again enters the world without time. There are twenty minutes before they will touch ground again, and sometime during that twenty minutes, perhaps at a moment when the stewardess disappears either into the toilet or the cockpit, Koko stands up and moves out into the aisle. His blood is zooming through his veins, and within himself he feels a sweet necessary urgency. Eternity is holding its breath. Koko smiles and points to the floor of the plane. He says, “Did you drop that money?” The man in the tan jacket glances up sideways at Koko, then bends forward to look down at the cabin floor. And Koko edges in beside him and puts his arms around the man’s neck and gives the head a good firm twist. There is a crack! too quiet to be heard over the engine noise, and the man’s body sags into his seat. Koko sits down beside the corpse. Now his feelings are impenetrable to me. There is that question the civilian world is forever asking combat veterans, silently or outright, How does it feel to kill someone?, but Koko’s feelings at this moment are too personal, wedded to his terrible history, and that is a darkness I cannot penetrate.

  Let us say: he hears the dead man’s soul rushing out of the body beside him, and it is a confused, unhappy soul, startled by its release.

  Or let us say: Koko looks straight through the roof of the airplane and sees his father seated in glory on a golden throne, nodding down at him with stern approval.

  Or: he instantly feels the dead man’s being, his essence, slip into his own body through his eyes or his mouth or the opening at the end of his penis and it is as if Koko has eaten the man, for thoughts and memories flare within Koko’s mind, and Koko sees a family and recognizes his brother, his sister:

  he sees a little whitewashed house on a dirt lane with a rusty car before it,

  he smells tortillas frying on a blackened griddle.…

  Enough.

  Koko removes the orange boarding pass from the man’s pocket and replaces it with his own. Then he reaches into the man’s jacket and tweezes out his wallet. His fingers open the wallet, he is curious to know who he is now, who it is that he has eaten and now lives within him; he reads his new name. Finally he places over the dead man’s face a magazine from the pouch before him and folds his hands in his lap. Now the dead man is sleeping, and the stewardess will not bother to shake him until everyone else is off the plane.

  And then the plane begins to make its descent toward the tiny airport at La Cieba—

  In a little while we will get to La Cieba.

  Imagine that we are not in Central America, but in Vietnam. It is the rainy season, and inside the tents at Camp Crandall the green metal lockers shine with condensation. Sweet marijuana smoke hangs in the air, along with the music we are listening to. Spanky Burrage, now a drug rehabilitation counselor in California, is playing tapes on his big Sony reel-to-reel recorder, purchased in Saigon, the city not the restaurant, at a very good cost. In a large green holdall at the foot of Spanky’s cot are thirty or forty reels of music recorded by friends of his in Little Rock, Arkansas. These are nearly all jazz tapes, and hand-lettered labels on the cardboard boxes identify who is on each tape: Ellington, Basie, Parker, Rollins, Coltrane, Clifford Brown, P
eterson, Tatum, Hodges, Webster …

  This is the brothers’ tent, and in here music is always playing. M.O. Dengler and I are admitted here because we love jazz, but in truth Dengler, who is more or less loved by every soldier in camp, would be welcome here even if he thought that Lawrence Welk led a great jazz band.

  The music sounds different here than it would back in the world: it has different things to say here, and so we must listen to it very carefully.

  Spanky Burrage knows his tapes very well. He has the exact location of the beginning of virtually every song memorized, so that he can find any selection just by running the tape backwards or forwards. Therefore his memory allows him to play long sequences of the same song performed by different musicians. Spanky enjoys doing this. He will play an Art Tatum version of “The Sunny Side of the Street,” then one by Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins; “Indiana” by Stan Getz, then a version with the same chords but another melody by Charlie Parker called “Donna Lee”; “April in Paris” by Count Basie, then by Thelonious Monk; sometimes five versions of “Stardust” in a row, six of “How High the Moon,” a dozen blues, everybody going to the same well but returning with different water.

  Spanky always came back to Duke Ellington and Charlie Parker. And I sat in front of the speakers of the Sony beside M.O. Dengler maybe twenty times while Spanky followed Duke Ellington’s “Koko” with the Charlie Parker song that had the same name. Same name—

  “—but oh so different,” Spanky says. And he whips the tape through the reels until the desired number comes up on the counter without his bothering to look at it, and drawing on a long cigarette rolled from Si Van Vo’s finest, he pushes STOP and then PLAY.

  In Vietnam, this is what we hear. The Ellington “Koko” first.

  It is a music of threat, and it is world-music, meaning that a world is held within it. Long ominous notes on a baritone saxophone counterpoint blasts from trombones. A lurching, swaying, uneasy melody begins in the saxophone section. From the darkness two trombones whoop and shake, going wa waaa wa waa like human voices on the perimeter of speech. These are noises that jump right out of the speakers and come toward you like a crazy father in the middle of the night. The piano utters nightmarish chords which are half-submerged in the cacophony of the band, and at the end Jimmy Blanton’s bass pads through the band like a burglar, like a sapper crawling toward our perimeter. It did not occur to us that there might be something deliberately theatrical, even comic, in all this menace.

  “Okay,” Spanky says, “the Bird.” He snaps off the Ellington reel, snaps on the Parker. Spanky Burrage reveres the Bird, Charlie Parker. He threads the tape, advances to the correct number, but again he hardly has to look at the counter. Spanky knows when “Koko” has been reached. STOP. PLAY.

  We are instantly in another world, one as threatening but far newer—a world that is still being mapped. This “Koko” was recorded in 1945, five years after the Ellington, and Modernism has finally come to jazz. The Parker “Koko” is based on the song “Cherokee,” written by the English bandleader Ray Noble, though you would never know this unless you happen to recognize the harmonic pattern.

  It begins with improvised passages of great complexity and urgency, and finally comes to a theme fragment, which is a brusque abstraction of “Cherokee,” as unsentimental as a Picasso portrait of Dora Maar or a paragraph by Gertrude Stein. This is not the music of collective statement like the Ellington piece, but fiercely individual. After the abstraction of the theme is played, Parker begins. All through the first chorus has been a sense of impendingness, and it is for this that we have been prepared so efficiently.

  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 mi
litia 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.