Koko

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-sauteed 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,