Koko

‘I brought you a new book,’ he said, and put it on her table. Then he sat down next to her and gently took her hand in his.

Stacy’s dehydrated skin emanated heat. Michael could see each brown spike of her eyebrows propped against a pad of red flesh. All of her hair had fallen out, and she wore a brilliantly colored knit cap that made her look vaguely Middle Eastern.

‘Do you think Emmaline Grangerford had cancer?’ she asked him. ‘I suppose not, actually. I keep hoping I’ll read a book some day that has someone like me in it, but I never do.’

‘You’re not exactly an ordinary kid,’ Michael said.

‘Sometimes I think all of this stuff couldn’t really be happening to me – I think I must have just made it all up, and I’m really lying in my bed at home, doing a spectacular job of staying out of school.’

He opened her folder and skimmed through the dry account of her ongoing catastrophe.

‘They found a new one.’

‘So I see.’

‘I guess I’ll get another dent in my head.’ She tried to smile sideways at him, but failed. ‘I sort of like going to the CAT-scan, though. It’s tremendous travel. Past the nurses’ station! All the way down the hall! A ride on the elevator!’

‘Must be highly stimulating.’

‘I get faint all over and have to lie down for days and days.’

‘And women clothed in white minister to your every need.’

‘Unfortunately.’

Then her eyes widened, and for a moment she closed her hot fingers over his. When she relaxed, she said, ‘This is the moment when one of my aunts always tells me that she’ll pray for me.’

Michael smiled and held her hand tightly.

‘At times like that I think that whoever is in charge of listening to prayers must be really sick of hearing my name.’

‘I’ll see if I can get one of the nurses to take you out of your room once in a while. You seem to enjoy elevator travel.’

For a second Stacy looked almost hopeful.

‘I wanted to tell you that I’m going to be doing some traveling myself,’ Michael said. ‘Toward the end of January I’ll be going away for two or three weeks.’ Stacy’s face settled back into the mask of illness. ‘I’m going to Singapore. Maybe Bangkok, too.’

‘Alone?’

‘With a couple of other people.’

‘Very mysterious. I guess I ought to thank you for giving me plenty of warning.’

‘I’ll send you a thousand postcards of men waving snakes in the air and elephants crossing against rickshaw traffic.’

‘Swell. I visit the elevator, and you visit Singapore. Don’t bother.’

‘I’ll bother if I want to.’

‘Don’t do me any favors.’ She turned her head away from him. ‘I mean it. Don’t bother.’

Michael had the feeling that this had happened before, in just this same way. He leaned forward and stroked her forehead. Her face contorted. ‘I’m sorry you’re angry with me, but I’ll see you again next week and we can talk about it some more.’

‘How could you know what I feel? I’m so stupid. You don’t have any idea about what goes on inside me.’

‘Believe it or not, I have some idea,’ he said.

‘Ever see a CAT-scan from the inside, Dr Poole?’

Michael stood up. When he bent over to kiss her, she turned her head away.

She was crying when he left the room. Michael stopped at the nurses’ station before escaping the hospital.

3

That evening Poole called the other men about the charter flight. Conor said, ‘Wild, sign me up, man.’ Harry Beevers said, ‘Outstanding. I was wondering when you were going to come through for us.’ Tina Pumo said, ‘You know what my answer is, Mike. Somebody’s got to mind the store.’

‘You just became my wife’s hero,’ Michael said. ‘Well, anyhow…would you mind trying to find Tim Underhill’s address for us? His paperback publisher is Gladstone House – somebody there ought to know it.’

They agreed to have a drink together before the trip.

4

One night the following week, Michael Poole drove slowly home from New York through a snowstorm. Abandoned cars, many of them dented or wrecked, lay along the side of the parkway like corpses after a battle. A few hundred yards ahead the light bar on top of a police car flashed red-yellow-blue-yellow-red. Cars crawled in single file, dimly visible, past a high white ambulance and policemen waving lighted batons. For a second Poole imagined that he saw Tim Underhill, in the snow very like a giant white rabbit, standing beside his car in the storm, waving a lantern. To stop him? To light his way forward? Poole turned his head and saw that it was a tree heavy with snow. A yellow beam from the police car flashed through his windshield and traveled across the front seat.

9 In Search of Maggie Lah (#ulink_7f798b97-9727-5696-9c07-8caba2e7d6d3)

1

All at once everything seemed to be going wrong, Tina Pumo thought, all at once everything was falling apart. He hated the Palladium and the Mike Todd Room. He also hated Area, the Roxy, CBGB’s, Magique, Danceteria, and the Ritz. Maggie wasn’t going to show up at the Mike Todd Room, and she wasn’t going to be at any of those other places either. He could stand at the bar for hours, drink until he fell down, and all that would happen was that hundreds of little night people would stomp him on the way to their next bottle of Rolling Rock.

The first time he talked his way past the doorman into the vast barnlike room that the Palladium used for publicity parties and private gatherings he had come from a marathon meeting with Saigon’s accountants. He was wearing his only grey flannel suit, purchased before the Vietnam War and small enough to pinch his waist. Pumo wandered through the crowd searching for Maggie. He noticed eventually that nearly everybody looked at him sharply, just once, then stepped away. In an otherwise crowded room, he was surrounded by a sort of DMZ, a cordon sanitaire of empty space. Once he heard laughter behind his back, turned around to see if he could share the joke, and saw everybody turn to stone, staring at him. Finally he went up to the bar and managed to catch the eye of a skinny young bartender with mascara on his face and a tangle of blond hair piled up on top of his head.

‘I was wondering if you knew a girl named Maggie Lah,’ Tina said. ‘I was supposed to meet her here tonight. She’s short, she’s Chinese, good-looking –’

‘I know her,’ the bartender said. ‘She might be in later.’ He retreated to the other end of the bar.

Tina experienced a moment of pure rage at Maggie. May be Mike Todd, Maybe not. La-La. He saw that this message was a trick followed by mocking laughter. He stormed away from the bar and found himself standing in front of a blonde girl who looked about sixteen, had stars painted on both cheeks, and wore a shiny, slinky black chemise. She was exactly his type. ‘I want to take you home with me,’ he said. The girl opened her flowerlike mouth and solved one mystery by saying, ‘I don’t go home with narcs.’

That had been a week after Halloween. For at least two weeks afterward, he kept the city at bay while he tore his kitchen apart. Every time he and the exterminators took down another section of wall, a million bugs scrambled to get out of the light – if you killed them in one place, the next day they surfaced on another. For a long time they seemed to be concentrated behind the Garland range. In order to keep the fumigant from spoiling the food, he and the kitchen staff taped thick sheets of clear plastic between the range and food preparation surfaces and wherever they were trying to exterminate the insects. They pushed all three thousand pounds of the Garland eight feet out into the middle of the kitchen. Vinh, the head chef, complained that he and his daughter couldn’t sleep at night because they heard things moving inside the walls. They had recently moved into the restaurant’s ‘office,’ a little room in the basement, because Vinh’s sister was having another baby and needed their room in her house in Queens. Normally the office was furnished with a desk, a couch, and boxes of files. Now the couch belonged to Goodwill, the desk was jammed into a corner of Pumo’s living room, and Vinh and Helen slept on a mattress on the floor.

This temporary, illegal situation looked as if it was becoming a permanent illegal situation. Helen not only couldn’t sleep, but she wet the bed – the mattress – whenever she did doze off. Vinh claimed that the bed-wetting got worse right after the child saw Harry Beevers sitting at the bar. That Harry Beevers was a devil who put curses on children was mystical Vietnamese hysteria, pure and simple, but they believed it, so for them it was true. Pumo sometimes felt like strangling Vinh, but if he did he’d not only go to jail, he’d never get another chef.

Headache upon headache. Maggie did not call or send word to him for ten days. He began having dreams about Victor Spitalny running out of the cave at Ia Thuc covered with wasps and spiders.

The Health Department issued him a Second Warning, and the inspector muttered about misuse of nonresidential space. The little office reeked of pee.

The day before Maggie put another ad in the Village Voice, Michael Poole called again, asking if he had time to see if anyone at a place called Gladstone House knew where Tim Underhill lived. ‘Oh, sure,’ Tina grumped, ‘I spend all day in bed reading poetry.’ But he looked up the number in the book. The woman who answered referred him to the editorial department. A woman named Corazon Fayre said she knew nothing about an author named Timothy Underwood, and referred him to a woman named Dinah Mellow, who referred him to Sarah Good, who referred him to Betsy Flagg, who claimed at least to have heard of Timothy Underwood, was it? No? Let me transfer you to publicity. In publicity, Jane Boot referred him to May Upshaw who referred him to Marjorie Fan, who disappeared into limbo for fifteen minutes and returned from it with the information that ten years ago Mr Underhill had written requesting that his circumstances and whereabouts be kept secret on pain of serious authorial displeasure, and that all communications, fan mail included, be directed to him through his agent, Mr Fenwick Throng.