Koko

He had no home, and he could quit.

Trying not to sob or at least not to show that he was sobbing, he sat down in the doorway. On the other side of the great glass door, an empty marble hallway led toward a row of elevators. He saw the cartoon policemen strutting around his room. He saw the jackets on their hangers, the shirts in the drawers. (The cards on the dresser.) Tears spilled over his cheeks. His razor, his toothbrush. Things taken away, things lost, things raped and left dazed, dying, dead.…

Koko saw Harry Beevers in the close darkness at the back of a cave. His father whispered his question. Harry Beevers leaned toward him with his eyes gleaming, his teeth, his whole face shining and sweating and gleaming. Get the fuck out of here, troop, he said, and a bat flew out of his mouth. Or share the glory. In the mess on the ground on the other side of the lieutenant he saw in the narrow beam one little outflung hand with fingers curling toward the palm. Koko’s body had walked out of itself. Right under the stench of eternity hovered the smells of powder, piss, shit. Beevers turned and Koko saw his long erection straining out of his trousers. His history slammed together—he met himself, he was traveling backwards and forwards.

He looked up from his place within the shelter of the doorway and saw a blue and white police car roll past, followed closely by another. They had left his room. Maybe one would be left. Maybe he could go there and talk about the lieutenant.

Koko stood up and hugged himself tight. In his room would be one man to whom he could talk, and this thought was like an unaccustomed substance in his blood. Once he talked, everything would be different and he would be free, for after he talked the man would understand backwards and forwards.

For the space of several seconds Koko saw himself as if from a great distance, a man standing in a doorway with his arms wrapped around himself because he was oppressed by a great grief. Flat, even daylight, the light of ordinary reality, lay over everything before him. During these seconds Koko saw his own terror, and what he saw both astonished and frightened him deeply. He could go back and say: I made a mistake. No demons or angels surrounded him; the drama of supernatural redemption in which he had been so long enfolded had fled away down the long street crowded with taxicabs, and he was an ordinary man, out in the cold by himself.

He was trembling, but he was not crying anymore, anymore. Then he remembered the face of the girl in Tina Pumo’s living room, and the face suggested to him the one neighborhood in all the city where he might feel most at home.

He would carry the anvil a little further, and see what happened.

And when he left the subway at Canal Street his whole body told him that he had been right. The subway had taken him someplace absolutely out of America. He was in an Asian world again. Even the smells were at once subtler and denser.

Koko had to force himself to walk slowly and breathe normally. With a pounding heart he passed beneath a sign in Chinese characters and turned south into Mulberry Street. It seemed to him that he was hungry as he had not been in a week. The last meal he could actually remember eating had been served by a stewardess.

Suddenly Koko was so attacked by hunger that he could have opened his mouth and let slide into him every store, every brick, every blaring yellow sign, every teapot and chopstick, every duck and eel, and every man and woman on the street along with the stop signs and traffic lights and mailboxes and telephone booths.

He paused only long enough to buy a Times, a Post, and a Village Voice at a newsstand before turning into the first restaurant where a row of ducks the color of buckwheat honey hung above pots of brown soup and white sticky porridge.

When the food came, the world melted, time melted, and as he ate he was back in the times when he had lived within the elephant and every time he drew breath he drew in the elephant.

In the papers today a bus driver had won nearly two million dollars in something called Lotto. A ten-year-old boy named Alton Cedarquist had been thrown off a roof in a part of town called Inwood. A block of buildings in the Bronx had burned down. In Angola, a man named Jonas Savimbi posed with an ugly Swedish machine gun and promised to fight through eternity; in Nicaragua, a priest and two nuns had been killed and beheaded in a tiny village. Backward and forward, yes indeedy. In Honduras, the government of the United States had claimed two hundred acres of land as a training site—it used to be theirs and now it was ours. We issued the usual heartfelt promises that one day soon it would be theirs again. In the meantime our mouths were open and two hundred acres had disappeared down our throats. Koko could smell the grease in which weapons were packed; he could hear the sound of crunching boots, of hands slapping the stocks of rifles.

The lords of the earth turned to him with a question on their faces.

But the real estate pages, in which he had hoped to find a good cheap room for rent, were written in code, most of which he did not understand, and showed almost no rentals at all in Chinatown. The only space available down here appeared to be a two-bedroom apartment at Confucius Plaza, at a price so high that at first he thought it must be a misprint.

Anything more? the waiter asked in Cantonese, the language in which Koko had ordered his meal.

I have finished, thank you, Koko said, and the waiter scribbled on a slip, tore it off and placed it on the table beside his plate. A grease spot instantly blossomed in the center of the green piece of paper.

Koko watched the grease spot swell out another two centimeters in diameter. He counted out money and placed it on the table. He looked up at the waiter, who was moving slowly toward the back of the restaurant.

They took my home from me, he said.

The waiter turned around and blinked.

I have no home now.

The waiter nodded.

Where is your home?

My home is in Hong Kong, the waiter said.

Do you know of some place where I might live?

The waiter shook his head. Then he said, You should live with your own kind. He turned his back on Koko and proceeded to the front of the restaurant, where he leaned on the cash register and in a loud complaining whine began to speak to another man.

Koko flipped over to the back page of the Village Voice and found himself reading the words, at first as meaningless as the code in the real estate ads, TWIDDLE: UR BEAST I EVER SCENE, PAIN IS ILL-U-SHUN. SURVE-LIVE. LUMINOUS DIAL. Beneath this one was another addressed to the universe at large and perhaps one other like himself, whirling loose within it. A STIFLED DROWSY UNIMPASSIONED GRIEF. WEYOUI MUST FIND THAT WHICH WAS LOST. Koko felt his tension breaking deep within him, just as if this ad really had been placed for him by someone who knew and understood him.

But in the meantime the other man at the front of the restaurant, more prosperous and managerial than the waiter, was looking at him with a cocked head and a light in his eye that only the promise of money could have put there. Koko folded his paper and stood up to approach him. He already knew that he had found a room for himself.

There came the customary formalities, including the customary expressions of surprise at Koko’s facility with Cantonese.

I have a great love for all things Chinese, Koko said. It is a great shame that my purse is not as large as my heart.

The avaricious gleam in the restaurant owner’s eye suffered a slight diminution.

But I will happily give a fair price for whatever you may be good enough to make available to me, and you will also earn my everlasting gratitude.

How did you come to be homeless?

My room was appropriated for other uses by my landlord.

And your possessions?

I carry all I own.

You have no job?

I am a writer, of some small reputation.