Flames jumped from the floor of Koko’s room but did not sear him. Dead children clustered round him, crying out, and the others cried out from the walls. Their mouths open, their elbows pressed close to their sides. The children exhaled the reeking breath of lions, for they lived in the cave as he lived in the cave, backwards and forwards.
The door opened, and—
A fire sprang up and a wind sprang up.
Pilophage the General posed for his portrait before Justinen, the painter. The General looked grand and good, with his plumed hat beneath his arm. The Lieutenant stood in the dark cave, not good or grand, with his surfboard out before him. His shovel. And the girl in the alley off Phat Pong Road looked at him and knew.
Do you want to know what’s dark?
The Devil’s arsehole is dark. Koko went into the cave and into the Devil’s arsehole and there met the Lieutenant, Harry Beevers, his surfboard his shovel his weapon out before him, being fingered, being fluted, being shot—shooting. You want a piece of this? The Lieutenant with his cock sticking out and his eyes glowing. Then the Devil closed his nose and closed his eyes and stuck his fingers in his ears and eternity came in a thunderclap, eternity happened all at once, backwards and forwards. The woman crawled up from Nicaragua and gave birth and died in a black cloud, naked and covered in frozen mud.
At the thought of Harry Beevers the children quailed and threw their arms around each other, and their stink doubled and redoubled.
Good afternoon, gentlemen, and welcome to the Devil’s Arse-hole. It is presently no time no date no year. You will presently take yourself to the Bowery Arcade, and there you will once again face the elephant.
4
And when Babar went to bed he could not sleep. Discord and misfortune had come to Celesteville. Outside Babar’s window demons chattered. When Pilophage the General opened his massy mouth, snakes and bats flew out.
We have turned every one to his own way, every one to his own way.
Tapitor, Capoulosse, Barbacol. Podular. Pilophage. Justinen. Doulamor. Poutifor. Sturdy Hatchibombitar, whom the stunned child within Babar the King had loved best, with his red shirt and checked cap, his sturdy shoulders and broad back—the street sweeper, a man of no ambition but to keep the streets clean, a kind man, honest, sweeping and sweeping away the filth.
5
At the cusp of the night he heard outside his window the wingbeats not of birds, as at first it seemed, but of dark terrible creatures twice the size of bats. These creatures had come out of the earth in order to find him, and they would torment themselves at the window for a long time before wheeling away and returning to the earth. No other person would see or hear them, for no other person could. Harry himself had never seen them. The position of his bed in the little alcove beside the bathroom did not give him a view of the window. Harry lay in the dark for a long time, listening to the feathery, insistent sound of the wings. Eventually the din began to lessen. One by one the creatures flew back to their hole in the earth, where they huddled together squeaking and biting, dreamily licking the drops of blood from one another’s bodies. Harry listened in the dark as their number shrank to a final two or three that actually thumped against the glass in their desperation. Eventually these too flapped off. Morning was only a few hours away.
He finally slept an hour or two, and when he woke up he faced the old problem of the reality of the creatures. In the light of morning it was too easy to dismiss them as imaginary. On the nights they came, four or five nights since he had been out of uniform, they were real. He would have seen them, he had known, if he had dared to look.
But they had failed again, and at nine he got out of bed feeling both tired and invigorated. He showered carefully and long, scrubbing and soaping and fondling, sliding his hand up and down the shaft of his penis, cupping his balls, rubbing and pulling.
He dressed in the same jeans and sweater he had worn the previous day, but beneath the sweater wore a fresh shirt, stiff with starch.
When he looked at himself in the mirror beside his bed, he thought he looked like a commando—like a Green Beret. He drank two cups of coffee and remembered how he had felt on certain mornings in Camp Crandall before going out on patrol. The bitter coffee, the weight of the automatic pistol on his hip. On some of those mornings his heart had felt as hard and tight as a walnut, his skin had tingled, it had seemed to him that he saw and heard like an eagle. The colors of the tents, the red dust in the roadway, the wire glinting on the perimeter. The slight hazy dullness of the air. Beneath all the other odors of men and machinery had been a live green scent, delicate and sharp as the edge of a razor. For Harry, this had been the basic smell of Vietnam. In Ia Thuc he had grabbed an old woman’s shoulder and pulled her harshly toward him, shouting some question he could not recall, and beneath the coarse smell of wood smoke the green razor of this scent had sliced out toward him from her body.
If a woman smelled like that, Harry thought, she’d put a hook in you that you’d never get out.
He drank another cup of coffee on the fold-out couch and tried to visualize in sequence every action that would bring him together with Koko in the Bowery Arcade. At one forty-five he would take a cab to the northeast corner of Bowery and Canal. It would then be about two o’clock and Lieutenant Murphy and two or three uniformed policemen would just be meeting the Republic flight from Milwaukee at La Guardia. In Chinatown the day would be cold, grey, wintry, and few people would be on the street. Harry planned to walk across Bowery and station himself on the wide traffic island just north of Confucius Plaza for a fast look at the block containing the arcade. He visualized the long block, the tiled facades of the restaurants with their plate-glass windows. A few men and women moving quickly in heavy coats. If Spitalny had decided to conceal himself in a doorway or behind a restaurant window, Harry would see him, and immediately disappear into Confucius Plaza and wait for Spitalny to panic when he realized that something had gone wrong. When Spitalny came out of hiding, Harry could follow him and finish him off as soon as they were alone. If he did not see Spitalny waiting to ambush him—and he did not think he would—Harry planned to recross Bowery and make a quick pass through the arcade just to make sure that the staircase had not been closed or blocked. If anything unusual were going on in the arcade, he would have to follow Spitalny out onto Elizabeth Street and get up close behind him before he got to Bayard Street. Elizabeth Street was Harry’s fallback—few restaurants, gloomy tenements. But if everything went as he imagined it would, Harry planned to go back across Bowery and conceal himself among the trees and benches at the base of Confucius Plaza. There he would wait until fifteen minutes before the time he had given Koko—until twenty-five to three—then he would cross Bowery one final time, make a final pass through the arcade to see that all was clear at the Elizabeth Street end, and then wait for Koko on the staircase.
Sitting on his couch and holding the warm mug of coffee, Harry envisioned the sweep of the tiled floor toward the wide entrance. Harry would see everyone who passed by illuminated by the natural light of the street—when they turned toward the entrance and faced him, it would be as if a spotlight had been turned on them. Victor Spitalny would be burned a little brown from years of living under the Singapore sun, there would be deep lines in his face, but his hair would still be black, and in his close-set brown eyes would still be the expression of baffled grievance he had worn throughout his tour of duty.
Harry saw himself moving silently up the stairs as soon as Spitalny had passed him, treading softly over the tiles to come up behind him. He would slip the gravity knife out of his pocket. Spitalny would hesitate before leaving the arcade, as he would hesitate before entering it. Stringy and ungainly inside his ugly clothes, inside his madness, he would stand exposed for a second: and Harry would clamp his left arm around his neck and drag him out of the light back into the arcade.
Harry brought his coffee to his lips and was startled to find that it had gone cold. Then he grinned—the terrible creatures had come for Victor Spitalny.
When he could no longer ignore his hunger, Harry went out to a deli on Ninth Avenue and bought a chicken salad sandwich and a can of Pepsi. Back in his apartment, he could only eat half the sandwich—his throat closed, and his body would not allow him another bite. Harry wrapped up the other half of the sandwich and put it in the refrigerator.
Everything he did seemed italicized, drenched in significance, like a series of scenes from a film.
