The Comedy is Finished

with great reluctance to answer the bell for yet another round, he nevertheless lifts his heavy eyelids, looks at Mark’s expressionless face, and says, “Mine.”

Mark is about to answer, express some mistrust, but then his eyes flicker, and Koo hears it, too: Voices outside the door, coming up the stairs. “Sounds like the cavalry,” Mark says, then glances toward the barricade. “Still, they’ll take a while to get through all that.”

“Mark.”

The head swivels back, the eyes study Koo’s face. “Yes?”

“I’m about to say something stupid.”

“Go ahead.”

“I—” Koo hesitates, tries to find a more self-protective way to phrase it, fails, and goes on: “I want you to love me.”

Mark stares. There are people in the hall, just outside the door, shouting to one another, but Mark and Koo both ignore them. Mark says, “You want me to love you. So I won’t kill you?”

“No. Regardless of anything. I just want it, that’s all.”

“I thought you were smart, Koo.”

“You were wrong.”

“I sure was.”

In sudden rage, Mark says, “You complete schmuck, why do you think I wanted to kill you? It’s because I wanted to love you, you asshole!”

“What?” Koo can’t follow this last turn.

“You’ve been my father all my life,” Mark says; then in sudden disgust he twists away from Koo, scrambling to his feet. “Oh, the hell with it. The hell with you. What made me think you were worth struggling over?”

Mark begins with quick angry movements to dismantle the barricade, pushing the television set away, tossing dresser drawers to left and right. Outside, the voices are calling Koo’s name. “In here,” Koo shouts, as much to recapture Mark’s interest as to answer the voices, but Mark pays no attention. Koo struggles to rise, having trouble because it hurts to put pressure on his arms, and in a hurry because there’s something left to say to Mark. He doesn’t know what it is, but he feels the urgency and he believes the words will come of their own accord if he can ever get up on his damn feet.

But it takes too long. He is barely standing, weaving, when the final pieces of the barricade are shoved out of the way by people on the outside pressing against the door. And now they all burst in, and a pistol butt flashes through the air, and Mark reels backward, blood pouring from his temple.

“Mark!” Koo tries to catch him, but the boy is falling, and his weight drags Koo down onto the floor with him; Koo bouncing at a tangent off the edge of the bed, finishing in a seated position on the floor among all those uniformed legs, with Mark’s bloody head in his lap.

Koo looks down in astonishment. Mark’s eyes are half-open, barely conscious; the blood pulsing from the forehead gash is rich and dark. And the room is filling with people; cops in uniform, plainclothesmen, men with pistols and rifles in their hands.

“Mister Davis! Mister Davis!”

Koo raises his head, seeing a face he saw on television. This face is saying, “Mister Davis, thank God you’re alive! I’m Michael Wiskiel of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

“Yeah, yeah, I caught your pilot. Is there a doctor in the house?”

“Mister Davis, we’ll get you medical care at—”

“Not for me. For this boy here.”

Wiskiel’s expression, when he looks at Mark, becomes stern, disapproving: “Somebody get that creature out of here.”

“Wait wait!” As hands start reaching, Koo leans over Mark’s head, spreading his own aching arms protectively above the boy’s body. “He’s not—Listen, he’s not what you think.”

Before Wiskiel can respond to that, he’s shoved unceremoniously to one side, and there’s Lynsey Rayne. She’s crying, she’s laughing, she’s yelling out loud, and now she drops to her knees in front of Koo and flings her arms around him hard enough to about knock him out. “Koo! Koo! Baby!”

Koo’s painful arms go around her, he pats the back of her head, he says, “Hello, Lynsey. Hello, darling.”

“You’re alive!” Leaning back to look at him while still holding him tight, her face shiny and tear-streaked and beaming with a huge smile, her glasses crooked on her nose, she says, “I didn’t really believe it anymore, Koo. I’d given up. I was sure you were dead.”

“Me, too.”

But people are pulling at Mark again, and the boy has become conscious enough to struggle with them, feebly. Clutching Mark’s arms, Koo says to the cop-faces all around, “What are you doing? What’s the idea?”

Wiskiel, standing over them, says, “Mister Davis, your ordeal is over now. Let that fellow go.”

“No. He’s—” And Koo is aware of Mark looking up at him, eyes glinting in the bloodied face. “He’s my son.”

“Koo, Koo.” It’s Lynsey, patting Koo’s cheek, looking at him in maternal worry, saying, “Koo, don’t. You’ve been through so much—”

Squatting down next to Lynsey, the FBI man says, “Mister Davis, it’s normal for kidnap victims to become emotionally involved with their captors, dependent on them.”

“I’m telling you, it’s true. He’s not—” But can he claim Mark wasn’t part of the kidnap plot? Things are about to get very complicated, Koo can see that, but first things first. “He’s my son, and he stays with me.”

Mark mutters, barely loud enough for Koo to hear, “You’re gonna hate yourself in the morning.”

“You shut up,” Koo tells him.

Lynsey says, “Koo? Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“I don’t have the first idea what I’m doing, Lynsey,” Koo says, absently patting Mark’s cheek, “but one thing is definite, and no fooling. This is my son. He’s my own absolute son, and I want you to be nice to him. He’s the only person I’ve ever met who needs love more than I do.”

“Yeah, but will you respect me in the morning?”

The audience roars; they’ve heard the line a hundred times, over the radio, on the big screen, on the tube. And now in person. And it’s always a scream.

But he thinks of Mark as he says it, and a look of concern briefly crosses his features. The custody, the trial—and what will come after? What kind of life will they have, separately or together?

But as the laughter crests and starts subsiding, as the big light turns toward him and the camera dollies forward on its track, the next line rises to his lips, the next gag; and the cloud that crossed his features passes. The audience leans forward.

Koo Davis is home.