Koko

by Peter Straub

  Michael heard her stamping across her dressing room. The chair creaked beneath her. She dialed a local number on her telephone. Then she slammed the receiver down so forcefully that the telephone clanged like a bell. Michael’s body began to relax and became his own body again. Judy dialed a local number again, presumably the same one. He heard her inhale, and knew that her face was rigid as a mask. The receiver clanged down once more. He heard her say “Shit.” Then she dialed a nine-digit number, probably Pat Caldwell’s. After a few suspended seconds, she began to speak in a low, choked, barely recognizable whisper.

  Michael picked up the James novel and found that he could not read it—the words seemed to have come alive, and to squirm around on the page. Michael wiped his eyes and the page cleared.

  Strether was at a party in the city garden of a sculptor named Gloriani. Brilliant beautiful people drifted through the garden, lanterns glowed. Strether was talking to a young American named Little Bilham, whom he rather cherished. Michael wished he were there in the garden, holding a glass of champagne beside Little Bilham, listening to Strether. Had other people read this book in this way, or was it just him? “What one loses, one loses, make no mistake about that,” Strether said. He could hear Judy muttering and mumbling, and her voice was that of some destructive ghost.

  He realized what he was thinking just as Judy hung up the telephone and padded across the dressing room, opened the door, and flashed through again, her head turned away from him. She went out into the upstairs hall. He heard her descending the stairs. A series of taps and rattles came from the kitchen. Whatever had happened, Poole was back in his real life. His body felt like his own real body again, not an actor’s. He closed his book and got out of bed.

  In Judy’s little dressing room, the telephone rang. Michael thought to pick it up; then he remembered that the answering machine would get it. He moved to the door of the dressing room. Then a male voice spoke.

  “The world goes backward and forward at the same time, and is there any sorrow like unto my sorrow? I will wait, I am waiting now. I need your help. The narrow path vanishes beneath my feet.”

  This voice too, it struck Michael, was the voice of a ghost.

  When he walked into the kitchen Judy backed away from the stove, where a kettle had been put on to boil, and stood with her back against the window and her arms dangling at her sides. She stared at him as if he were a savage animal who might attack her.

  If she had smiled or said anything conventional, he would at once have felt again like an actor in a role, but she did not smile or speak.

  Michael circled around the butcher block counter and leaned on its far side. Judy seemed smaller and older than the fierce wild-eyed woman who had hit him.

  “Your crazy man called.”

  Judy shook her head and walked back to the stove.

  “Seems he can’t find his way. I know what he means.”

  “Stop it.” She raised her fists.

  The kettle began to whistle. Judy put her fists down and poured hot water over instant coffee. She stirred it with short choppy strokes.

  Finally she said, “I’m not going to lose everything I have. You might have lost your mind, but I don’t have to give up everything I care about. Pat says I should just calm down, but then Pat never had to worry about anything, did she?”

  “Didn’t she?”

  “You know she didn’t.” She sipped her coffee and made a face. “I’m surprised you managed to put down your stupid book.”

  “If you thought it was stupid, why did you give it to me?”

  Her eyes flew sideways, like those of a child caught in a lie. “You give books to your little girlfriend all the time. Somebody gave that one to me. I thought it might help you settle down again.”

  He leaned on the butcher block counter and looked at her.

  “I’m not leaving this house,” she said.

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I’m not going to do without anything just because you’re sick.” Her whole face blazed at him for a moment, then shrank back into itself. “Pat was telling me about Harry the other day. She said he repelled her—she couldn’t stand the thought of his touching her. You’re that way about me.”

  “It’s the other way around. You feel that way about me.”

  “We’ve been married for fourteen years, I ought to know how I feel.”

  “I should too,” he said. “I’d tell you how I feel, how you make me feel, but you wouldn’t believe it.”

  “You should never have gone on that crazy trip,” she said. “We should have stayed at home instead of going up to Milburn with Harry. That just made things worse.”

  “You never want me to go anywhere,” he said. “You think I killed Robbie, and you want me to stay here and keep on paying for it.”

  “Forget Robbie!” she shrieked. “Forget him! He’s dead!”

  “I’ll go into therapy with you,” he said. “Are you listening to this? Both of us. Together.”

  “You know who should have therapy! You! You’re the sick one! Not me! Our marriage was fine before you went away.”

  “Went away where?” Michael turned away, left the room, and went up the stairs in silence.

  He lay in bed a long time, listening in the dark. Chinks and rattles and the opening and closing of cabinets came from the kitchen. Eventually Judy came up the stairs. To Michael’s surprise, her footsteps came toward the bedroom door. She leaned in. “I just want to say this even though I know you won’t believe it. I wanted this day to be special for you. I wanted to make it special for you.”

  “I know.”

  Even in the darkness he could see rage, disgust, and a kind of disbelief go through her body.

  “I’m going to sleep in the guest room. I’m not sure we’re married anymore, Michael.”

  Michael lay awake with his eyes closed another half hour, then gave up, switched on his light, and picked up the Henry James novel. The book was a perfect little garden glimpsed far down at the bottom of a landfill. Seagulls screeched over the landfill’s great mountains of garbage, rats prowled through it, and right at the bottom, safe within the page, men and women clothed in an intellectual radiance moved in a beautiful, inexorable dance. Poole went cautiously down the hills of garbage toward the perfect garden, but it receded backward with every step he took.

  5

  He woke to the sounds of Judy showering. A few minutes later she came into the bedroom wrapped in a long pink towel. “Well,” she said, “I have to go to work. Are you still going to insist on going to New York this morning?”

  “I have to,” he said.

  She took a dress from the closet and shook her head, as if at some hopeless case. “I imagine that you won’t have time to go to either your office or the hospital this morning, then.”

  “I might drop in at the hospital.”

  “You might drop in at the hospital and then drive to New York.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I hope you remember what I said last night.” She tore the dress off the hanger and slammed through the door to the dressing room.

  Michael got out of bed. He felt tired and depressed, but he did not feel like an actor or that he had been placed in an unfamiliar body. Both the body and the unhappiness were his own. He decided to bring Stacy Talbot another book, and searched his shelves until he found an old underlined copy of Wuthering Heights.

  Before he left home he went down into his basement to open a trunk where he had placed a few things after Robbie’s death. He had not told Judy that he was doing this, because Judy had insisted that they give away or destroy everything their son had owned. The trunk was an awkward relic from the days when Michael’s parents had taken cruises, and Michael and Judy had filled it with books and clothes when they had moved to Westerholm. Michael knelt down before the open trunk. Here was a baseball, a short-sleeve shirt with a pattern of horses, a worn green Dimetrodon and a whole set of smaller plastic dinosaurs. At the bottom of the
se things were two books, Babar and Babar the King. Poole took out the books and closed the trunk.

  1

  An hour and a half later, driving as if on automatic pilot toward Manhattan, Michael finally noticed the worn old Riverside Edition of Wuthering Heights on the other seat and realized that he had held it in his hand during the whole of his visit to the hospital. Like glasses their owner searches for while wearing, the book had become transparent and weightless. Now, as if to make up for its earlier tact, the novel seemed denser than a brick, nearly heavy enough to tilt the car on its springs. At first he felt like pitching the book out the window, then like pulling up at a gas station and calling Murphy to tell him that he could not make the line-up. Beevers and Linklater could identify Victor Spitalny, Maggie would say that he was the man who had tried to kill her, and that would be that.

  His next thought was that he needed something to fill up his day with reality, and driving to New York to attend a line-up was as good as anything else.

  * * *

  He put the car in a garage on University Place and walked to the precinct house. The weather had brightened in the past few days, and though the temperature was still under forty, warmth had begun to awaken within the air. On both sides of the narrow Greenwich Village streets, people of the generation just younger than Poole’s walked coatless, smiling, looking as if they had been released from prison.

  His idea of police stations had been formed by movies, and the flat modern façade surprised him when he came upon it. Lieutenant Murphy’s precinct building looked like a grade school. Only the steel letters on the pale façade and the police cars drawn up before it declared the identity of the building.

  The interior was another surprise. Instead of a tall desk and a bald veteran frowning down, Poole first saw an American flag beside a case of awards, then a uniformed young man, leaning toward him from the other side of an open window.

  “I’m supposed to meet Lieutenant Murphy for a line-up at eleven,” he said.

  The young man disappeared from the window; a buzzer went off. Poole opened the door beside the window, and the young man looked up from a clipboard. “The others are on the second floor. I’ll get someone to take you up.” Behind him plainclothes officers glanced at Poole, then away. There was an impression of busyness, conversation, male company. It reminded Poole of the doctors’ lounge at St. Bart’s.

  Another, even younger, policeman in uniform led Poole down a corridor hung with bulletin boards. The second policeman was breathing loudly through his mouth. He had a lazy, fleshy, unintelligent face, olive skin, and a fat neck. He would not meet Poole’s eyes. “Up da stairs,” he said when they arrived at a staircase. Then he labored up beside Poole and slouched off through another school corridor. Soon he stopped at a door marked B.

  Poole opened the door, and Beevers said, “My man.” He was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed over his chest, talking to a small round-faced Chinese woman. Poole greeted Beevers and said hello to Maggie, whom he had met two or three times at Saigon. A little ironic breeze seemed to blow about her, separating her from Harry Beevers. She shook his hand with a surprisingly firm, competent grip. One side of her face dimpled in a lopsided smile. She was extraordinarily pretty—the impression of her intelligence had momentarily filtered out her good looks.

  “It’s nice of you to come in all the way from Westchester County,” she said in a flat accentless voice that sounded almost English in the precision of its consonants.

  “He had to join all us plebs in the dirty city,” Beevers said.

  Poole thanked Maggie, ignored Beevers, and sat down at a board room table beside Conor. Conor said, “Hey.” The resemblance to a grade school persisted. Room B was like a classroom without a teacher’s desk. Directly before Michael and Conor, on the other side of the room, was a long green blackboard. Beevers went on saying something about film rights.

  “Are you okay, Mikey?” Conor asked. “You look kinda down.”

  Poole saw the copy of Wuthering Heights on the passenger seat of his car.

  Beevers glared down at them. “Use the brains God gave you, man! Of course the man is down. He had to leave a beautiful town where the air is clean and they don’t even have sidewalks, they have hedges, and spend hours on a stinking highway. Where he came from, Conor, they have partridges and pheasants instead of pigeons. They have Airedales and deer instead of rats. Wouldn’t you be down? Give the man some understanding.”

  “Hey, I’m from South Norwalk,” Conor said. “We don’t have pigeons either. We got seagulls.”

  “Garbage birds,” Beevers said.

  “Calm down, Harry,” Poole said.

  “We can still come out of this okay,” Beevers said. “We just don’t say any more than we have to.”

  “So what happened?” Conor whispered to Michael.

  “A patient died this morning.”

  “A kid?”

  Michael nodded. “A little girl.” He felt impelled to speak her name. “Named Stacy Talbot.” The act of putting his loss into these specific words had an unexpected and nearly physical effect on him. His grief did not shrink, but became more concrete: Stacy’s death took physical form as a leaden casketlike form located deep in his chest. He, Michael Poole, was intact and whole around this dense, leaden weight within him. He realized that Conor was the first person to whom he had spoken of her death.

  Stacy had been feverish and exhausted when he had last seen her. The lights had hurt her eyes; her usual gallantry was at low ebb. But she had seemed interested in his little fund of stories, and had held his hand and told him that she loved the beginning of Jane Eyre, especially the first sentence.

  Poole opened the book to read the sentence. “There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”

  Stacy was grinning at him.

  This morning one of the nurses had tried to head him off as he walked past their station, but he had barely noticed her. He had been intent on some words Sam Stein had spoken to him in the first-floor corridor. Stein, who had evaded responsibility for a surgical error with a combination of cowardice and superiority Michael found repulsive, had said that he was sorry his medical group had not made more progress with Michael’s “boys”—the other doctors of his own group practice. Stein was assuming that Michael would be familiar with the background of this remark, but Michael could fill it in with informed guesswork. Stein’s own “boys” were building a new medical center in Westerholm, and wanted to make it the most important in the county. To do that they needed a good pediatric practice. Michael himself was the stumbling block to the effective union of their practices, and in his grumpy, conceited way Stein had been asking him to spare him the trouble and implied insult of having to go after a second-rung pediatric group. A brand new facility like the one Stein was planning would draw about fifty percent of all the new people in Westerholm, and maybe a quarter of the houses in Westerholm changed hands every year. Michael’s partners had been talking things over with Stein while he had been gone.

  Michael had sailed past the gesturing nurse, the germ of a brilliant idea beginning to form in his mind, and opened the door to Stacy’s room.

  He strode into a room where a bald middle-aged man with a grey moustache and a double chin lay asleep with an IV in his arm and the Wall Street Journal open on his chest. The man did not awaken and wink at him like an actor in a farce, he slept on noiselessly, but Michael felt a change in his inner weather like the sudden hot airlessness that precedes a tornado. He ducked outside and checked the number of the room. Of course it was the right room. He ducked back again and looked at the drugged tycoon. This time he even recognized him. The man was a housing contractor named Pohlmann whose teenage children went to Judy’s school and whose imitation chateau with a red tile roof and a five-car garage was located a mile and a half from Poole’s own house. Michael backed out of Pohlmann’s room.

  For an instant only he became aware of the soft old green book in his hand, and it weighed twen
ty or thirty pounds. He saw the nurse watching him as she spoke into her telephone. He knew what had happened as soon as he saw her eyes. He knew it by the way she put down her telephone. But he walked up to the station and said, “Where is she?”

  “I was afraid you didn’t know, Doctor,” the nurse had said. He had felt as if he were in an elevator falling through a long shaft, just falling and falling.

  “I’m sorry, man,” Conor said. “Must remind you of your own kid.”

  “The man is a doctor, Conor,” Beevers said. “He sees things like this all the time. The man knows how to be detached.”

  Detached was just how Dr. Poole felt, though not at all as Beevers imagined.

  “Speaking of the man,” Beevers said.

  Lieutenant Murphy’s big aggressive-looking head appeared in the meshed window set into the door. He grinned at them through the window, his mouth set around a pipe, and opened the door.

  “Glad you could all make it,” he said. “Sorry I’m a little late.” He looked like an athletic college professor in a tweed jacket and fawn trousers. “We’re all set for the line-up and we will be going down there in a minute, but I wanted to talk to you about some things before we do that.”

  Beevers caught Poole’s eye and coughed into his fist.

  Murphy sat opposite them. He took the pipe from his mouth and held it balanced in his fingertips as if offering it for inspection. It was a big curved black sandblasted Peterson, with a tarnished silver band around the top of the neck. A plug of grey tobacco filled the bowl. “We didn’t really have a chance to speak to each other up in Milburn, though there were some things I was curious about, and at the time it looked as if we had this case pretty well sewn up.” He looked at each of them in turn. “I was happy about that, and I guess it showed. But this wasn’t an ordinary case, not by a long shot, not even an ordinary murder case, if there is such an animal. There have been some changes since then.”