Koko

TIM

UNDERHILL

And then what happened?

Nothing.

Nothing happened.

It has been two years since Michael Poole and I left the police station and drove back to Saigon, Tina Pumo’s old restaurant, and nothing more has been heard of Koko, or M.O. Dengler, or whatever he is calling himself now. There are times—times when everything is going smoothly in my life—when I know that he is dead.

It is true that Koko must have yearned for death—I think he thought of himself as giving his victims the gift of freedom from the fearful eternity he perceived all about him. “I am Esterhaz,” he wrote in the note he left for Michael, and in part he meant that what happened on the frozen banks of the Milwaukee River never stopped happening for him, no matter how many times he killed in order to make it stop. Backwards and forwards describes an eternity which has become intolerable to the man caged within it.

Lieutenant Murphy finally sent Michael Poole copies of some photographs that had been taken from the room at the YMCA. These were photographs of convicted or accused serial murderers Dengler had clipped from newspapers and magazines. Ted Bundy, Juan Corona, John Wayne Gacy, Wayne Williams, David Berkowitz—over each head Dengler had drawn a flat round golden ring: a halo. They were eternity’s agents, and in my worst moments I think that Koko saw us, the members of Harry Beevers’ platoon, in that way too, as dirty angels, agents of release from one kind of eternity into another. I have work to do, Koko said in the basement room on Elizabeth Street, and that we have not heard of him or from him does not mean that his work is done or that he has stopped doing it.

A year after Koko lost himself in Honduras, I finished the book I had been writing. My old publisher, Gladstone House, published it under the title The Secret Fire; the reviews were excellent, and the sales something less than that but at least good enough to make me self-sufficient long enough to write what I thought would be my next book, a “nonfiction novel” about M.O. Dengler and Koko. Now I know that I cannot write that book—I don’t really know what a “nonfiction novel” is; you can’t tie an eagle to a plough horse without making both of them suffer.

But as soon as I could afford to do it I took the same flight to Tegucigalpa from which Koko escaped while Michael Poole and I were being sewn up and sedated in St. Luke’s Hospital. And with the novelist’s provisional doubt I saw, as I saw the girl he had tried to murder in Bangkok, what happened on that flight. I saw how it could have happened, and then I saw it happen.

This is one version of how Koko came to Honduras.

The jet is small and so old it rattles, and few North Americans are on board. The Central American passengers have black hair and brick-colored skin, they are talkative and exotic, and I think Koko would have felt immediately at home among them. He too came out of the basement, he too left the children of Ia Thuc and the Patpong girl behind him in the basement, and now another language echoes about him. I think he closes his eyes and sees a wide plaza in a small sunstruck city, then sees the plaza littered with dead and dying bodies. On the steps of the Cathedral, bodies lie sprawled and twisted, their arms outflung, the fingers curled in toward the palms, the eyes still open, staring. The sun is very near, a large white hazy disc like a halo. Abundant flies. Koko is sweating—he imagines himself sweating, standing in the center of the plaza, his skin prickling with the heat.

When the little plane lands at Belize two people get off into a shredding dazzle of light that instantly devours them. At the back of the plane, visible to the passengers, two men in brown uniforms pitch a few suitcases out through an open bay. White cement, hard bouncing light.

In fifteen minutes they are back in that world above the world, above clouds and rainfall, where Koko feels himself freed from gravity and near to—what? God, immortality, eternity? Perhaps all of these. When he closes his eyes he sees a broad sidewalk lined with cafes. Rows of empty white chairs fan out from white tables with colorful sun umbrellas, and waiters in black waistcoats and black trousers stand in the open doorways of the cafes. Then the music of eternity swells in his mind, and he sees bloodied corpses sprawling in the chairs, the waiters slumped dead in the doorways, blood running into the gutters and moving slowly down the pitched street.…

He sees brown naked children, sturdy peasant children with stubby hands and broad backs, burned in a ditch.

Images, running without gravity or coherence, on a spool of film.

I have work to do.

When they land at San Pedro de Sula half a dozen suddenly impatient men and women thrust their way through the aircraft, carrying woven baskets and bottles of duty-free whiskey. The men’s neckties are pulled off- center, and their faces are filmed with sweat. When they speak they growl like dogs, for they have evolved from dogs as some men have evolved from apes and others from rats and mice, still others from panthers and other feral cats, others from goats, snakes, some few from elephants and horses. Koko squints through the window at a dull white bureaucratic building, the terminal. A limp flag, half eaten by the light, droops over the building.

Not here.

After the pack has left the plane, a lone man carrying an orange boarding pass makes his way down the aisle to the last row of seats. He is a Honduran, a San Pedro de Sulan, in an ill-fitting tan sports jacket and a chocolate brown shirt, and his orange boarding pass means that he is a domestic passenger.

Just before the plane begins to move again, Koko stands up, nods at the stewardess (who has ignored him throughout the flight), and walks down the length of the plane to sit beside the new passenger.

“Buen’ dia,” the man says, and Koko smiles and nods.

A moment later they taxi away from the white boxy bureaucratic terminal. Shaking and rattling, the plane rises up off the earth and again enters the world without time. There are twenty minutes before they will touch ground again, and sometime during that twenty minutes, perhaps at a moment when the stewardess disappears either into the toilet or the cockpit, Koko stands up and moves out into the aisle. His blood is zooming through his veins, and within himself he feels a sweet necessary urgency. Eternity is holding its breath. Koko smiles and points to the floor of the plane. He says, “Did you drop that money?” The man in the tan jacket glances up sideways at Koko, then bends forward to look down at the cabin floor. And Koko edges in beside him and puts his arms around the man’s neck and gives the head a good firm twist. There is a crack! too quiet to be heard over the engine noise, and the man’s body sags into his seat. Koko sits down beside the corpse. Now his feelings are impenetrable to me. There is that question the civilian world is forever asking combat veterans, silently or outright, How does it feel to kill someone?, but Koko’s feelings at this moment are too personal, wedded to his terrible history, and that is a darkness I cannot penetrate.

Let us say: he hears the dead man’s soul rushing out of the body beside him, and it is a confused, unhappy soul, startled by its release.

Or let us say: Koko looks straight through the roof of the airplane and sees his father seated in glory on a golden throne, nodding down at him with stern approval.

Or: he instantly feels the dead man’s being, his essence, slip into his own body through his eyes or his mouth or the opening at the end of his penis and it is as if Koko has eaten the man, for thoughts and memories flare within Koko’s mind, and Koko sees a family and recognizes his brother, his sister:

he sees a little whitewashed house on a dirt lane with a rusty car before it,

he smells tortillas frying on a blackened griddle.…

Enough.