Koko (42 page)

Drink it down, drink it down.

Poole walked beneath a highway overpass and eventually came to a bridge over a little
stream. On the far bank was a hodgepodge village of cardboard boxes, nests of newspaper
and trash. This warren smelled much worse than the compound of gasoline, excrement,
smoke, and dying air that filled the rest of the city. To Poole’s nose it stank of
disease—it stank like an unclean wound. He stood on the quavery little bridge and
peered
into the paper slum. Through an opening in a large carton he saw a man lying in a
squirrel’s nest of crumpled paper, staring out at nothing. A smudge of smoke curled
up into the air from somewhere back in the litter of boxes, and a baby cried out.
The baby squalled again—it was a cry of rage and terror—and the cry was abruptly cut
off. Poole could all but see the hand covering the baby’s mouth. He wanted to wade
through the stream and do medicine—he wanted to go in there and be a doctor.

His pampered, luxurious practice also felt like a confining pit. In the pit he patted
heads, gave shots, took throat cultures, comforted children who would never really
have anything wrong with them, and calmed down those mothers who took every symptom
for a major illness. It was like living entirely on Heath Bar Crunch ice cream. That
was why he would not let Stacy Talbot, whom he quite loved, disappear entirely into
the care of other doctors: she brought him the real raw taste of doctoring. When he
held her hand he confronted the human capacity for pain, and the stony questions beyond
pain. That was the cutting edge. That was as far as you could go, and for a doctor
it was a deep, humbling privilege to go there. Just now this unscientific notion was
full of salt and savor, the real taste of things.

Then Poole caught again that cryptic exhalation from this human sewer, and knew that
someone was dying, breathing in smoke and breathing out mortality, back in the rubble
of packing cases and smudgy fires and bodies wrapped in newspapers. Some Robbie. The
baby gasped and screamed, and the greasy smudge of smoke unraveled itself in the heat.
Poole tightened his hands on the wooden railing. He had no medicine, no supplies,
and this was neither his country nor his culture. He sent a feeble non-believer’s
prayer for well-being toward the person dying in the pain and stink, knowing that
any sort of well-being would be a miracle for him. This was not where he could help,
and neither was Westerholm. Westerholm was an evasion of everything his poor feeble
prayer was sent out against. Poole turned away from the world across the stream.

He could not stand finishing out his life in Westerholm. Judy could not stand his
impatience with his practice, and he could not stand his practice.

Before Poole stepped off the bridge, he knew that his relationship to these matters
had irrevocably changed. His inner compass had swung as if by itself, and he could
no longer see his marriage or his medical practice as responsibilities given to him
by a relentless
deity. A worse treachery now than to Judy’s ideas of success—which were Westerholm’s—was
treachery to himself.

He had decided something. The grip of his habitual life had loosened. It was to allow
something like this, and to allow Judy to do what she might, that he had accepted
Harry Beevers’ absurd offer to spend a couple of weeks wandering around places he
didn’t know in search of a man he wasn’t sure he wanted to find. Well, he had seen
an elephant in the streets, and he had decided something.

He had decided really to be himself in relationship to his old life, to his wife and
his comfortable job. If really being himself put his old life at risk, the reality
of his position made the risk bearable. He would let himself look in all directions.
This was the best freedom, and the decision allowed him to feel very free.

I’ll go back tomorrow
, he told himself.
The others can keep on looking.
Koko was history, Judy was right about that; the life he had left claimed him now.

Michael nearly turned around to recross the wobbly bridge and go back to the hotel
and book the next day’s flight to New York. But he decided to continue wandering south
for a time on the wide street that ran parallel to the river. He wanted to let everything,
the strangeness of Bangkok and the strangeness of his new freedom, soak into him.

He had come upon a tiny, busy fair tucked behind a fence in a vacant lot between two
tall buildings. From the street he had first seen the crown of a Ferris wheel, and
heard its music competing with hurdy-gurdy music, childish squeaks of pleasure, and
what sounded like the soundtrack of a horror movie played through a very poor sound
system. Poole walked on a few paces and came to the opening in the fence that admitted
people to the fair.

The lot, no more than half a block square, was a jumble of noise, color, and activity.
Booths and tables had been set up everywhere. Men grilled meat on skewers and passed
them to children, candy makers handed out paper cups of sticky candy, other men sold
comic books, toys, badges, magic tricks. At the back of the lot children and adults
stood in line to get on the Ferris wheel. At the far right of the lot, other children
howled with pleasure or froze in terror atop wooden horses on a carousel. On the lot’s
far left had been constructed the gigantic plasterboard front of a castle, painted
to resemble black stone and decorated with little
barred windows. They suddenly reminded Michael of those in St. Bartholomew’s Hospital;
the whole false front of the funhouse reminded Michael of St. Bartholomew’s. Looking
up, he could identify the window behind which Dr. Sam Stein sat plotting, the one
to the room in which Stacy Talbot lay reading
Jane Eyre.

The huge grey hungry face of a vampire, red-lipped mouth open to expose sharp fangs,
had been painted across one side of the plasterboard façade. Bursts of cackling laughter
and eerie music came from behind the plasterboard. Horror’s conventions were the same
everywhere. Within the funhouse, skeletons jumped out of dark corners and mad leering
faces gave the young a reason to put their arms around each other. Warty-nosed witches,
sadistic capering devils, and malignant ghosts parodied disease, death, insanity,
and ordinary colorless human cruelty. You laughed and screamed and came out on the
other end into the carnival, where all the real fears and horrors lived.

After the war, Koko had decided it was too scary out there, and had ducked back inside
the funhouse with the ghosts and the demons.

Across the fairground Poole saw another towering Westerner, a blonde woman who must
have been wearing high heels to reach her height of about six feet—her hair was rapidly
going grey, and had been tied into a braid at the nape of her neck. Then Poole took
in the breadth of the shoulders and knew that the person across the fairground was
a man. Of course. From the grey in his hair, from his loose embroidered linen shirt
and long braid, Poole gathered that this was a hippie who had wandered east and never
returned home. He had stayed in the funhouse too.

When the man turned to inspect something on a table Poole saw that he was a little
older than himself. The hippie’s hair had receded from his crown, and a grey-blond
beard covered the lower part of his face. Oblivious to the alarm bells ringing throughout
his nervous system, Poole continued to watch the man as if aimlessly—he noticed the
deep lines in the tall man’s forehead, the creases dragging at his wasted cheeks.
Poole thought only that the man looked oddly familiar: he thought he must have been
someone he’d met briefly during the war. They had met inside the funhouse, and the
man was a Vietnam veteran; Poole’s old radar told him that much. Then sensations of
both pain and joy jostled within him, and the tall, weathered man across the fairground
raised the object he had been examining to within a foot of his face. It was a rubber
mask of a demon’s catlike face. The man
answered its grimace with a smile. Michael Poole finally realized that he was looking
at Tim Underhill.

Poole wanted to raise his hand and shout out Underhill’s name, but he made himself
keep standing quietly between the vendor of grilled meat and the line of teenagers
waiting to get inside the funhouse. Poole finally felt his heart beating. He took
in several deep slow breaths to calm down. Until this moment he had not really been
certain that Underhill was still alive. Underhill’s face was of a lifeless whiteness
that made it clear the man spent very little time in the sun. Yet he looked fit. His
shirt was brilliantly clean, his hair was combed, his beard had been trimmed. Like
all survivors, he looked wary. He had lost a good deal of weight, and Poole guessed
that he’d also lost a lot of teeth. But the doctor in Poole thought that the most
visible fact about the man across the fairground was that he was recovering from a
good many self-inflicted wounds.

Underhill paid for the rubber mask and rolled it up and slid it into his back pocket.
Poole was not yet ready to be seen, and he moved backward into the shadow of the funhouse.
Underhill began moving slowly through the crowd, now and then pausing to inspect the
toys and books arrayed on the tables. After he had admired and purchased a little
metal robot, he gave a last satisfied, amused look at the diversions around him, and
then turned his back on Poole and began working his way through the crowds toward
the sidewalk.

Was this what Koko did, wander through a street fair buying toys?

Without even glancing toward the far bank, Poole clattered over the flimsy bridge
after Underhill. They were moving toward central Bangkok. It had grown darker since
Poole had first come upon the fair, and dim lights now burned in the shoebox restaurants.
Underhill moved at an easy pace and was soon a block ahead of Poole. His height and
the brilliant whiteness of his shirt made him very easy to see in the turmoil and
congestion of the sidewalk.

Poole remembered how he had missed Tim Underhill on the day of the Memorial’s dedication.
That
Underhill had been lost, and here was
this
Underhill, a ravaged looking man with a braid
in his whitening hair, just strolling beneath a noisy concrete traffic overpass.

Underhill’s stride lengthened as he neared the corner that led to Bang Luk. Poole
saw him round the corner at the shuttered bank like a man hurrying to get home, and
jogged through the darkness and the crowd of milling Thais on the sidewalk. Underhill
had simply melted through all the people, but Poole had to jump down into the street.
Horns blared, lights flicked at him. The street traffic too had increased, and now
it was thickening into the perpetual traffic jam of Bangkok’s night.

Poole ignored the honking and began running. A taxi zipped past him, then a bus, packed
to the windows with people, who grinned down and called out to him. He reached the
corner in a few seconds and trotted over the cobbles into Bang Luk.

Men still loaded vans and trucks with flats of flowers; the shop windows spilled out
light. Poole glimpsed a billowing shirt as white as a ghost and slowed to a walk.
Underhill was opening the door between Jimmy Siam and Bangkok Exchange Ltd. One of
the flower wholesalers at a depleted barrow called out to him, and Underhill laughed
and twisted around to shout something back in Thai. He waved at the vendor, went inside,
and closed the door behind him.

Poole stationed himself against the first of the garages. Within minutes a light went
on behind the shutters above Jimmy Siam. Now Poole knew where he lived; an hour earlier
he had not thought he would ever find him.

A vendor emerged from the garage and frowned at Poole. He picked up a large jade plant
in a pot and carried it inside, still scowling.

The shutters opened above Jimmy Siam’s. Through the opened French windows Poole could
see a flaking white ceiling dripping thin stalactites of paint. A moment later Underhill
appeared carrying a large jade plant very much like the one the suspicious vendor
had taken inside. He set the plant down on his balcony and went inside without closing
the French windows.

The vendor darted out through his garage door and glared at Poole. The man hesitated
a moment, then began walking toward Poole, speaking vehemently in Thai.

“I’m sorry, I don’t speak your language,” Poole said.

“You go away, scum,” the man said.

“All right,” Poole said. “No need to be so upset.”

The man uttered a long sentence in Thai and spat on the ground.

Underhill’s light snapped off. Poole looked up at the windows, and the stocky little
flower vendor rushed a few steps toward him, waving his hands in the air. Poole retreated
a few steps. Underhill was dimly visible through the French windows, drawing them
closed.

“No bother!” the man shouted. “No make sick! Go away!”

“For God’s sake,” Poole said. “Who do you think I am?”

The vendor shooed him back a few more paces, but scurried back into his garage as
soon as Underhill appeared at his street door. Poole shot back into the darkness by
the wall. Underhill had changed into a conventional Western white dress shirt and
a baggy seersucker jacket that flapped around him as he walked.

Underhill turned onto Charoen Krung Road and began marching through the crowds on
the sidewalk. Poole found himself stalled behind groups of men or whole gatherings
of families who had assembled on a patch of sidewalk and intended to stay there. Children
jumped and yelled; here and there a boy fiddled with the controls of a radio. Underhill’s
head floated above the rest, moving easily and steadily toward Surawong Road.

He was going to Patpong 3. It was a long walk, but presumably Underhill wanted to
save the few baht of the ruk-tuk fare.

Then Poole lost sight of him. It was as if his tall form had disappeared, like the
White Rabbit, into a hole in the ground. He was visible nowhere on the long stretch
of sidewalk. When Poole looked at the jammed street, he did not see Underhill there
either—only a priest in a saffron robe melting imperturbably through the unstoppable
traffic.