Koko

because of that asshole Woyzak than happy about the money. He decided after a while that he was more happy than miserable, which called for another drink.

Eventually the bar filled up. Conor stared at a nice-looking woman until he began to feel like a coward and got off his stool to talk to her. She was in training to do something in computers. (At a certain point in the evening, about sixty percent of the women in Donovan’s were in training to do something in computers.) They had a few drinks together. Conor asked her if she would like to see his funny little apartment. She told him he was a funny little guy and said yes.

“You’re a real homebody, aren’t you?” the girl asked Conor when he turned on the light in his apartment.

After they had made love, the girl finally asked him about the lumps spread across his back and over his belly. “Agent Orange,” he said. “I sort of wish I could teach them to move around, spell out words, shit like that.”

He woke up alone with a hangover, wishing he could see Mike Poole and talk to him about Agent Orange, wondering about Tim Underhill.

1

“Well, here it is,” Michael said. “There’s a medical conference in Singapore next January, and the organizers are offering reduced fares on the flight over.”

He looked up from his copy of American Physician. Judy’s only response was to tighten her lips and stare at the “Today” show. She was eating her breakfast standing up at the central butcher- block counter while Michael sat alone at the long kitchen table, also of butcher block. Three years before, Judy had declared that their kitchen was obsolete, insulting, useless, and demanded a renovation. Now she ate standing up every morning, separated from him by eight feet of overpriced wood.

“What’s the topic of the conference?” She continued to look at the television.

“ ‘The Pediatrics of Trauma.’ Subtitled ‘The Trauma of Pediatrics.’ ”

Judy gave him a half-amused, half-derisive glance before taking a crisp bite out of a piece of toast.

“Everything should work out. If we have any luck, we ought to be able to find Underhill and settle things in a week or two. And an extra week is built into the tickets.”

When Judy kept staring silently at the television set, Michael asked, “Did you hear Conor’s message on my machine yesterday?”

“Why should I start listening to your messages?”

“Harry Beevers sent Conor a check for two thousand to cover his expenses.”

No response.

“Conor couldn’t believe it.”

“Do you think they were right to give Tom Brokaw’s job to Bryant Gumble? I always thought he seemed a little lightweight.”

“I always liked him.”

“Well, there you are.” Judy turned away to place her nearly spotless plate and empty coffee cup into the dishwasher.

“Is that all you have to say?”

Judy whirled around. She was visibly controlling herself. “Oh, I’m sorry. Am I allowed to say more? I miss Tom Brokaw in the mornings. How’s that? In fact, sometimes Old Tom kind of turned me on.” Judy had ended the physical side of their marriage four years before, in 1978, when their son Robert—Robbie—had died of cancer. “The show doesn’t seem as interesting anymore, like a lot of things. But I guess these things happen, don’t they? Strange things happen to forty-one-year-old husbands.” She looked at her watch, then gave Michael a flat, sizzling glance. “I have about twenty minutes to get to school. You know how to pick your moments.”

“You still haven’t said anything about the trip.”

She sighed. “Where do you suppose Harry got the money he sent to Conor? Pat Caldwell called up last week and said Harry gave her some fairy tale about a government mission.”

“Oh.” Michael said nothing for a moment. “Beevers likes to think of himself as James Bond. But it doesn’t really matter where he got the money.”

“I wish I knew why it is so important for you to run away to Singapore with a couple of lunatics, in search of another lunatic.” Judy tugged furiously at the hem of her short brocade jacket and for a second reminded Michael of Pat Caldwell. She wore no makeup, and there were ashy streaks of grey in her short blonde hair.

Then she gave him her first really honest glance of the morning. “What about your favorite patient?”

“We’ll see. I’ll tell her about it this afternoon.”

“And your partners will cover everybody else, I suppose.”

“All too gleefully.”

“And in the meantime, you’re happy about trotting off to Asia.”

“Not for long.”

Judy looked down and smiled with such bitterness that Michael’s insides twisted.

“I want to see if Tim Underhill needs help. He’s unfinished business.”

“Here’s what I understand. In war, you kill people. Children included. That’s what war is about. And when it’s over, it’s over.”

“I don’t think anything is ever really over in that sense,” Michael said.

2

Michael Poole had killed a child at Ia Thuc, that was true. The circumstances were ambiguous, but he had shot and killed a small boy standing in a shadow at the back of a hootch. Michael was not superior to Harry Beevers, he was like Harry Beevers. There was Harry Beevers and the naked child, and there was himself and the small boy at the back of the hootch. Everything but the conclusion was different, but the conclusion was what mattered.

Some years ago Michael had read in an otherwise forgotten novel that no story existed without its own past, and the past of a story was what enabled us to understand it. This was true of more than stories in books. He was the person he was at the moment—a forty-one-year-old pediatrician driving through a suburban town with a copy of Jane Eyre beside him on the car seat—in part because of the boy he had killed in Ia Thuc, but more because before he had dropped out of college, he had met and married a pretty education major named Judith Writzmann. After he was drafted, Judy had written to him two or three times a week, and Michael still knew some of those letters by heart. It was in one of those letters that she said she wanted their first child to be a son, and that she wanted to name him Robert. Michael and Judy were themselves because of what they had done. He had married Judy, he had murdered a child, he had drunk it down, drunk it down. Judy had supported him through medical school. Robert—dear tender dull beautiful Robbie—had been born in Westerholm, had lived his uneventful ordinary invaluable child’s life in that suburban town his mother cherished and his father loathed. Robbie had been slow to speak, slow to walk, slow in school. Poole had realized that he did not give a damn if his son went to Harvard after all, or to any other college either. He shed sweetness over Poole’s whole life.

At five, Robbie’s headaches took him into his father’s hospital, where they found his first cancerous tumor. Later there were others—tumors on his spleen, on his liver, on his lungs. Michael bought the boy a white rabbit, and the child named it Ernie after a character on “Sesame Street.” When Robbie was in remission he would haul Ernie around the house like a teddy bear. Robbie’s illness endured three years—years that seemed to have had their own time, their own rhythm, unconnected to the world’s time. In retrospect, they had sped past, thirty-six months gone in at most twelve. Within them, each hour lasted a week, each week a year, and those three years had taken all Michael’s youth.

But unlike Robbie he lived through them. He had cradled his son in the hospital room during the quiet struggle for the last breath: at the end, Robbie had given up his life very easily. Michael had put his dear dead boy back down on his bed, and then—again, nearly for the last time—embraced his wife.

“I don’t want to see that damned rabbit when I get home,” she said. She meant that she wanted him to kill