by Peter Straub
The elevator stopped. They moved out into the wide cold corridor and turned toward their rooms. Underhill already had his key in his hand—he hardly knew they were there anymore.
Poole waited near Underhill’s back as he opened the door, expecting Maggie to do no more than to smile or nod as she went into her own room. She walked past them, and then stopped moving as soon as Underhill had clicked the door open. “Would you join me for a little while, Michael?” she asked. Her voice was light and penetrating, the sort of voice that could pass through a concrete wall in spite of its softness. “Tim isn’t going to pay any attention to you tonight.”
Poole patted Tim’s back, told him he would see him later, and followed Maggie. She was leaning out of her room on one leg, smiling at him with the same forced, powerfully focused smile she had turned on George Spitalny.
Her room was no more than a long box with one of the immense floor-to-ceiling windows at its far end. The walls were a dusty pinkish rose; there was a chair, a desk, a double bed. Poole saw the copy of Kitty’s Pretty Muff on the folded coverlet.
Maggie made him laugh with a joke that was not really a joke but a sentence turned inside out—some piece of wit that flashed in the air like the swipe of a sword and made him think he ought to remember that way of putting things just before he forgot it. She whirled around and grinned at him with a face so wry and lovely that it, unlike her clever phrase, passed instantaneously into his permanent memory. She was still talking. She sat down on the bed, Poole said something—he scarcely knew what. He could smell a fresh, peppery odor that seemed to lift off her hair and arms.
“I wish you’d kiss me, Michael,” she said.
And so he did.
Maggie’s lips felt surpassingly cushiony, and the shock of being met with such welcoming softness went right through his body. Her round slim arms came up and pulled his whole leaning body toward her so that they fell back together on her bed. Her lips seemed enormous. Michael put his arms under her back, and together they hitched themselves further onto the bed.
At length, with real sweetness, she moved her head away from him and smiled. Her face was as enormous as a moon. He had never seen a face like it. Maggie’s eyes were so quick and alive they looked defensive. “Good,” she said. “You don’t look so sad anymore. At dinner you looked wretched.”
“I was just thinking about going back to the room and reading Henry James.”
Maggie’s face floated up toward him again, and her pointed pink tongue slid into his mouth.
Their clothes seemed to melt off their bodies, and they were clasped together like spoons in a drawer, like ordinary lovers in an ordinary bed. Maggie’s skin was astonishingly smooth. It had no pores, it was all silken sheen. Her whole body seemed to expand and accept him. He kissed the palms of her hands, crisscrossed with a thousand tiny aimless lines. She tasted of salt and honey. He put his face deep into the smooth bend of her neck and inhaled her: whatever she had smelled of before, now she smelled of fresh bread.
“Oh, you beautiful man,” she said.
He slid into a warm wet opening in her body that felt like home. He was home: Maggie almost instantly moved and trembled with an orgasm: and his entire body felt blessed. He was home.
Later Michael lay stunned, spent, and grateful, entwined in sleeping Maggie. It felt like travel: like a journey to a place that was not merely a country, but country-ness itself. Maggie Lah, the flag of her own nation, the treasure and the key to the treasure. Michael’s happiness passed effortlessly into sleep.
1
He could hardly sit still, he was certain that today everything was going down, that today would decide the whole rest of his life. He kept looking at the telephone, telling it to ring: now. He jumped up from the chair before the window and went to the telephone and touched the receiver with his fingertips, so that if the call came at that moment he could answer it almost before it rang.
Yesterday his telephone had rung, and when he had picked it up, not thinking, or stupidly thinking about something else the way you always do when the really important things happen to you, he had said hello and waited, his brain kind of on hold for a second while the person hesitated, and after a second or two he felt himself come into focus: all his nerves woke up because the person at the other end was still not speaking, and that person was Koko. Oh God, what a moment. He had felt Koko’s hesitation, Koko’s need to talk to him, and the fear that kept him from talking. It was like the moment when you feel a firm tug on your fishing line, and you know that something big and necessary is down there, making up its mind. “I want to talk to you,” Harry had said, and felt the whole atmosphere charge with excitement and need. If there had been anything wrong with his heart, it would have blown itself out like an old tire right then. And Koko had gently, almost unwillingly, set down his telephone—Harry could hear the need and the regret, for at such times you hear everything, everything speaks, and had set down his own telephone with the knowledge that Koko would call again. Now Harry was like a drug he could not resist.
And the circumstances were perfect. Michael Poole and Tim Underhill, who in Harry’s opinion had turned out to be a pure type of fifth wheel, were safely off in the Midwest, looking for Victor Spitalny’s high school yearbook or something—and he was here at the center, ground zero.
Today he would lead Koko into the killing box.
He had showered and dressed in loose comfortable clothes—his only pair of jeans, a black turtleneck sweater, black Reeboks. The handcuffs went over his belt, hidden by the sweater. The gravity knife rested like a small cold sleeping animal in his side pocket.
Harry wandered over to his television set and switched on NBC. He jiggled his knee. Jane Pauley and Bryant Gumble were smiling at each other, sharing some joke—in a year, they would be pronouncing his name, smiling at him, looking at him with wonder and admiration.… They switched to the good-looking girl who read the local news. Dark eyebrows, wet full lips, that intense sexy look, intellectually sexy in that New York way. Harry put his hand on his groin and leaned toward the screen, imagining what the girl would say if she knew about him, what he was going to do.…
He walked to his window and looked down at the wage slaves leaving his building in groups of two and three. One girl slipped out of the building and turned toward Tenth Avenue in the cold wind. Ring, telephone. The girl moved toward Tenth Avenue, foreshortened by Harry’s perspective but still walking on a good pair of legs, a good ass shifting back and forth under her coat—That Channel Four girl, Jane Hanson, a million guys daydreamed about meeting someone like that, but when all this was over, she would be talking about him. Before long, he would be in the studio, he would be sitting in Rockefeller Center—the trick was not in knowing where it was, the trick was in getting yourself invited in. Above the world of wage slaves was a world like a big party filled with famous people who knew each other. Once you were invited in, you were in the party. You finally had the family you deserved. Doors opened before you, opportunities came your way—you were where you belonged.
When he was twenty years old, his picture had been on the cover of Time and Newsweek!
Harry went into the bathroom and smoothed down his hair in front of the mirror.
He ate a cup of cherry yogurt and an old cheese danish he found in his refrigerator. Around ten-thirty, watching CNN now, he ate a Mounds bar and a chocolate chip cookie from the stash of goodies he kept in his desk drawer. He had this crazy yen to have a drink, but felt nothing but contempt for a man who would take a drink before an important mission.
Later he turned back to one of the regular networks, muted the sound, and turned his radio to a news station.
Around twelve-thirty Harry called a restaurant, Big Wok, right across Tenth Avenue, and asked for an order of sesame noodles and double-sautéed pork to be delivered to his apartment.
The programs ground on, one after the other, barely distinguishable. Harry barely tasted the Chinese food he put in his mouth.
At two-thirty he jumped up from his chair and switched on his answering machine.
The afternoon wore on. Nothing happened: a child drowned in the Harlem River, another child was severely beaten by his stepfather and then put into the oven and burned to death, thirty children in California claimed to have been sexually abused in nursery school—lying little bastards, Harry thought, next day there’d be another twenty kids yelling that their teacher had taken out their weenies or that he had taken out his weenie. Half of them probably wanted him to do it, they probably asked if they could play with it. Little California girls, already wearing makeup, earrings dangling from their pierced ears, tight little asses in their little-girl designer jeans.…
An earthquake, a fire, a train wreck, an avalanche … How many dead, altogether? A thousand? Two thousand?
At four-thirty he could stand it no longer, checked his machine to make sure it was still on, put on a coat and a hat, and went outside for a walk. It was a real end-of-February day, with that dampness in the air that found its way through your clothing and went right down into your bones. Still Harry felt liberated. Let the crazy bastard call back! What choice did he have?
Harry was moving very quickly up Ninth Avenue, walking much faster than anyone else on the street. Now and then he caught someone staring at him with alarm or worry on their innocent faces and realized that he had been talking out loud to himself. “It’s about time we talked. We have a lot to say to each other. I want to help you. This is the whole meaning of both of our lives.”
“We need each other,” Harry said to a startled man putting a girl into a taxi at 28th Street. “You could even call it love.”
On the corner of 30th Street he darted into a little deli and bought a Mars bar. In the artificial warmth of the shop he felt dizzy for a moment. Sweat streamed down his forehead. He needed to be outside, he needed to be moving! Harry thrust two quarters at the fat man behind the register and waited, sweat pouring from his scalp, for his change. The fat man frowned at him—the pouches under his eyes actually seemed to darken and swell, as if they might burst—and Harry remembered that he had given the man the exact amount, that candy bars no longer cost a dime, or fifteen cents, or whatever he had thought—and he had actually known this, for hadn’t he given the creep the right amount? He whirled away back out into the cold, healthy air.
You came running out of the cave, Harry said to himself.
All his life fate had sparkled just over his shoulder, singling him out as one of the special ones who had been invited in. Why else had other people so envied and resented him, tried to hold him back?
You came running out of the cave to find us. You’ve been trying to get back ever since.
You wanted to be a part of it.
Harry felt his blood beating, his skin heating, his whole body steaming like a healthy young stallion’s.
You saw, you heard, you felt it, and you knew you were at the center of your life.
You need me to get back there.
Harry stopped moving on the corner of Hudson and something, a car blared at him, and electricity coursed through his body. The long vertical sign of the White Horse Tavern blazed in the darkness just across the street. To get back there.
Harry remembered the electricity pouring through his body as he stood with his weapon pointed at all those silent children the villagers from An Lat must have taken out later through the cave’s back entrance. He remembered: in the phosphorous glare. Their big eyes, their hands held out to him. And him there, twice their size, an adult American male. Knowing what he knew. That he could do anything, really anything he wanted to, at this one golden godlike point in his life. The sexual thing blasting through him.
Let someone say it was bad—they had not been there. If your body spoke that loudly, how could it be bad?
Sometimes a man was blessed, that was what it came down to. Sometimes a man touched pure original power and felt it take over his whole body—sometimes, maybe once in your life, you knew whole worlds were coming out of your cock because at that moment nothing you did could be wrong.
His life was finally coming full circle. I almost laughed out loud, Harry thought, and then did laugh out loud. He and Koko were going to go back there again, to the hot center of their lives. When he came out of the cave this time, he was going to come out a hero.
Exultant, Harry turned back toward his apartment.
2
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 b
egan 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.