Koko (13 page)

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.

“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.

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 it.

And kill it he nearly had, even though the command was like that of a vain evil queen
in a tale. He shared enough of his wife’s rage to be capable of the act. But instead
he took the rabbit to a field at the northern edge of Westerholm, lifted its cage
out of his car, swung open the little gate, and let the rabbit hop out. Ernie had
looked about with his mild eyes (eyes not unlike Robbie’s own), hopped forward, and
then streaked off into the woods.

As Michael turned into the parking lot beside St. Bartholomew’s hospital, he realized
he had driven from his house on Redcoat Park to Outer Belt Road and the hospital,
through virtually all of Westerholm, with tears in his eyes. He had negotiated seven
corners, fifteen stop signs, eight traffic lights, and the heavy New York-bound traffic
on the Belt Road without properly seeing any of it. He had no memory of having driven
through the town. His cheeks were wet and his eyes felt puffy. He pulled his handkerchief
from his pocket and wiped his face.

“Don’t be a jerk, Michael,” he said to himself, picked up the copy of
Jane Eyre
, and got out of the car.

A huge irregular structure the color of leaf mold, with turrests,
flying buttresses, and hundreds of tiny windows punched into its façade, stood on
the other side of the parking lot.

Michael’s first obligation at the hospital was to look over all the babies that had
been born during the night. As he had once a week for two months, the period of time
Stacy Talbot had been confined to a private room in St. Bartholomew’s, he made this
duty last as long as he could.

When the last baby had been examined and after a quick tour of the maternity floor
to satisfy his curiosity about the mothers of the infants he had just seen, Michael
got on the elevator to go up to the ninth floor, or Cancer Gulch, as he had once overheard
an intern call it.

The elevator stopped at the third floor, and Sam Stein, an orthopedic surgeon of Michael’s
acquaintance, got into the car with him. Stein had a beautiful white beard and hulking
shoulders and was five or six inches shorter than Michael. His massive vanity allowed
him to convey the impression that he was peering down at Michael from a great height,
though he had to tilt his beard upward to do it.

A decade ago, Stein had badly botched a leg operation on a young patient of Michael’s
and then irritably dismissed as hysteria the boy’s increasing complaints of pain.
Eventually, after disseminating blame amongst every physician who had treated the
child, especially Michael Poole, the orthopedist had been forced to operate on the
child again. Neither Stein nor Michael had forgotten the episode and Michael had never
referred another patient to him.

Stein glanced at the book in Michael’s hand, frowned, then glanced up at the lighted
panel above the door to see where he was going.

“In my experience, Dr. Poole, decent medical men rarely have the leisure for fiction.”

“I don’t have any leisure, period,” Michael said.

Michael reached Stacy Talbot’s door without encountering another of Westerholm’s approximately
seventy doctors. (He figured that about a quarter of these were not presently talking
to him. Even some of those who were would think twice about his presence on the Oncology
floor. This was just normal medicine.)

Michael supposed that for someone like Sam Stein what was happening to Stacy Talbot
was also just normal medicine. For him, it was very much like what had happened to
Robbie.

He stepped inside her room and squinted into the darkness. Her eyes were closed. He
waited a moment before moving toward
her. The blinds were down and the lights were off. Flowers from the shop on the hospital’s
ground floor wilted in the dense dark air. Just visible beneath a welter of tubes,
Stacy’s chest rose and fell. On the sheet next to her hand lay a copy of
Huckleberry Finn.
The placement of the bookmark showed that she had nearly finished reading it.

Michael stepped toward her bed, and her eyes opened. It took her a moment to recognize
him, and then she grinned.

“I’m glad it’s you,” she said.

Stacy was not really his patient at all anymore—as the disease rampaged throughout
her brain and body, she had been handed off to one specialist after another.

“I brought you a new book,” he said, and put it on her table. Then he sat down next
to her and gently took her hand in his.

Stacy’s dehydrated skin emanated heat. Michael could see each brown spike of her eyebrows
propped against a pad of red flesh. All of her hair had fallen out, and she wore a
brilliantly colored knit cap that made her look vaguely Middle Eastern.

“Do you think Emmaline Grangerford had cancer?” she asked him. “I suppose not, actually.
I keep hoping I’ll read a book some day that has someone like me in it, but I never
do.”

“You’re not exactly an ordinary kid,” Michael said.

“Sometimes I think all of this stuff couldn’t really be happening to me—I think I
must have just made it all up, and I’m really lying on my bed at home, doing a spectacular
job of staying out of school.”

He opened her folder and skimmed through the dry account of her ongoing catastrophe.