The Comedy is Finished (18 page)

“That’s right,” Peter said. “That’s the whole task now, to keep as much of it alive and whole as possible, and wait for the next opportunity.”

“Koo Davis is not germane, Peter. He is a tool, a small wedge you’re using to open some doors. His death does nothing for anybody.”

“We can’t lose our credibility,” Peter said, thinking of Mark.

“But you can negotiate. You can be flexible.”

“Within limits.”

“Twenty-four hours isn’t enough time. You know that yourself.”

Peter did. But he also knew that the group in the house was fragmenting. Their stability was gone, they were breaking down. But not yet, they couldn’t collapse yet; Peter had to somehow hold them together just a little longer.
After
the operation was finished, after Peter had made his way out of the country—in his mind’s eye he saw himself at the airport in Algiers, smiling, shaking hands with the men and women he’d rescued—after this task was done,
the others could destroy themselves in any way they chose; they wouldn’t matter anymore. Joyce would undoubtedly surrender to the authorities, for instance, something she’d been wanting to do for a long time. Suicide was the likeliest end for Liz, some sort of violent murder for Mark. Larry would probably be caught by the police while trying to rob from the rich to give to the poor. This idea amused Peter, who smiled. Ginger said, “Something funny?”

“A stray thought.”

Ginger shrugged, then sat back on the stone bench, considering Peter in a thoughtful manner. “I do have one little question, Peter,” he said.

“Yes?”

“That list of people, the ten you want freed. There are some very odd names on that list, my dear.”

“I wanted a spectrum,” Peter explained. “Not just this group or that group, but as wide a range as possible.”

“They look like names picked at random.”

“They almost are. The fact is, there really aren’t that many political prisoners left in this country. We needed a big enough number to make it worthwhile, and I wanted them to represent the whole broad range of resistance and rebellion.”

“Well, try not to turn your back on some of them,” Ginger said.

“I’ll watch myself,” Peter promised. “And you watch yourself, Ginger.
Stay
in that house in Malibu.”

“Some of the time,” Ginger said, then leaned close again, with his confidential smirk. “But if you hear a little wee splash in the pool tonight, my dear, it isn’t dolphins.”

“Ginger, don’t do it.”

“I’m off, darling,” Ginger said, getting to his feet, patting Peter on the cheek. (Peter winced, trying not to betray the pain.) “Don’t worry about your little Ginger.”

Standing, Peter said, “But I do. You’ve got to keep your cover, Ginger, you wouldn’t be any good at all underground.”

Ginger giggled as though the idea appealed to him. “On the run?” he asked. “With my famous Fender?” And he took an exaggerated macho stance, strumming an imaginary guitar.

“You wouldn’t like it, Ginger,” Peter warned him. “You enjoy first class too much.”

“Oh, but my heart is with the Movement,” Ginger declared theatrically. “What is it to live dangerously? I shall tell you, my dear. To live dangerously is to live in two opposite directions at once. Like the adulterous wife, easing the lover out the back door while the kiddies home from school are entering via the front.
You
don’t live a lie, my dear, you live a simple one-dimensional life.” Ginger took another dramatic stance: “The Revolutionary! When you get up in the morning, you know precisely who you are, and you never deviate all day long. My dear, I never know who I am. It’s such a wonderful party being me!”

“Don’t spoil it, Ginger. Don’t take too many chances.”

Ginger laughed, clapping his hands together, then winked and said, in a conspiratorial half-whisper, “Splish splash, I was takin’ a bath.”

“Ginger, don’t.”

“Bye-eye.” Ginger wiggled all his fingers at Peter, then danced away toward the upper gate, like a figure from
The Wizard of Oz
. Peter watched him, worrying, frustrated, helpless to avoid these unnecessary dangers. There was no escape; when Ginger was at last out of sight, Peter turned and walked back down the brick path to the house.

As he neared the house, he saw a pale blue van just driving away down the hill. Joyce was out by the garage, obviously just having seen the person off, whoever he was. Frowning, Peter finished his
descent as Joyce walked back toward the house, and they met by the front door. Peter called, “Joyce!”

She glanced at him, weariness in her every feature. “I have to get back to Liz. She still hasn’t grounded.”

“What was that truck?”

“The gas company. A man was looking for a gas leak.”

“He was? Did he find it?”

“No, he said it must be farther up the hill.”

Peter looked away down the drive, as a cold breeze touched his spine. “He did, did he?”

Koo awakes. At first he doesn’t understand where he is or what’s going on, but as his eyes focus on the large window with all that water behind it memory returns, frightening and depressing. “So this is Baltimore,” he mutters, but his heart isn’t in it. He shifts position on the couch, then remembers in more detail: He’d been waiting for Mark, half-dreading and half-needing the confrontation, and at some fuzzy time along in there, incredibly, he’d faded away into sleep.

What time is it? His watch isn’t on his wrist, it’s—Where the hell is it? Fear and depression are making him cranky with himself.

The watch is on the end table near his head, reading a little after three-thirty. He’d been asleep nearly an hour; so where’s Mark?

Koo sits up, noticing with surprise how much stronger he feels. He’s been using his pills again for six hours now, and while he’s still weak and nervy he’s in much better shape even than when he’d dozed off.

He’s in such good shape, in fact, that he now has leisure to notice he stinks. All that old perspiration is still stickily on his body, beneath his filthy clothes. He’s also very grizzled, this being his second day without a shave. “I feel like King Kong’s socks,” he says, and gets to his feet.

Whoops; too fast. Rocking briefly under the wave of dizziness, he sits down again, hard. He’s not
that
healthy, not yet. For the next try he moves more cautiously, pausing to rest after he makes
it to his feet. “Wal, sonny,” he says, in an exaggerated old man’s cracked voice, “I may be stupid, but I ain’t the one who’s lost.” Then, in his own voice, he says, “Oh, yes, I am,” and depression settles deeper.

The bathroom is tiny, but it contains a stall shower. Koo scrubs himself briefly, then dons a pale blue terrycloth robe hanging behind the door. In a storage cabinet beside the sink he finds a Norelco electric razor and a half-full bottle of Lectric Shave. He’s feeling chilly, so he shuts the bathroom door while shaving.

These ordinary acts lift his spirits a great deal. The reason he became a comic in the first place is that he has a naturally cheerful view of life. It’s true he’s so weak while shaving that he has to support most of his weight by leaning forward against the rim of the sink, and his hands contain a tremble that was never there before, but by God he’s still alive, and he’s clean, and his health is improving by the second.

Finishing the shave, looking at his clean face in the mirror (ignoring the red eyes in the pockets of gray flesh), Koo says, “Okay, kid, we’ve worked in worse toilets than this. Don’t get all flushed about it.” Then, touching the walls for support, he moves slowly out to the main room and there’s the mean blonde seated in the swivel chair down by the window. She’s wearing dark-lensed sunglasses and a yellow dashiki, and she’s swiveling the chair left and right in short bad-tempered jolts. “Shit,” Koo says, and totters over to sink down onto the studio couch, where he sits gasping for breath—the exertion has used him up—while he watches her warily from the corner of his eye.

Liz—he remembers somebody referring to her as Liz—studies him for a long silent moment from behind her impenetrable sunglasses, then says, in tones of exaggerated contempt, “Old men are disgusting.”

Koo is cautious, but he didn’t come here to be insulted. “You look better with your clothes on,” he says.

Her scornful expression is oddly imperfect, like a poor imitation of the real thing; what Koo thinks of as Producer’s-Girlfriend level of acting. She says, “You don’t know how to treat a woman who isn’t a sex object, do you?”

“You’ve been spayed? Good.”

Is that surprise she’s showing? Something is happening on those parts of the face that he can see; her mouth twists into unusual shapes, her forehead furrows, her head nods in tiny random non-rhythmic movements. Then, speaking at first with exaggerated precision, like talking computers in the movies, but with the words becoming more and more rapid and jumbled, she says, “I haven’t run run run-run-run-runrunrunrunrunrurururururururu—” and turns her head at last away, muttering and mumbling down toward her shoulder, and finally grinds into silence.

Jesus
, Koo thinks,
she’s coked up to the eyeballs
. He watches her, warily, to see what she’ll do next.

Talk. Her face still half-turned away, her expression still impossible to read behind those round, nearly black sunglass lenses, but her voice more neutral, more natural—more human, really—than Koo has ever heard it before, she starts to talk.

“In the explosion, Paul’s arm was blown off. He was using—” a hand gesture, half bewildered and half impatient “—paraffin, something—” the hand drops lifeless to her lap “—it stuck to me. His arm, it stuck to my back, I couldn’t get it off. It was burning. His hand—” She makes a shivering recoil movement, writhing her shoulders like someone who has backed naked into a spider web, but her voice remains flat, calm, uninvolved: “I can feel his fingers sometimes, spread out between my shoulder blades.”

Koo winces, but she doesn’t seem to be looking at him or to care
in particular what his reaction is. She holds her left hand out away from her body, fingers splayed as those other fingers must have been splayed against her back, but she doesn’t look at her hand either, or seem aware of her gesture. “I couldn’t get it off,” she says, her narration increasingly choppy. “I was burning, all my clothes burned off—my hair burning, everything burning—Frances grabbed me by the face, she held my chin and led me—she knew the house, how to get out—and the arm on my back, burning.”

She stops, and Koo looks at her in silence. His mind is full of questions—what explosion, where, who was Paul, how did she escape—but her manner is too crazy, he’s afraid to poke at her with words. So he sits watching her while the silence lengthens. The outstretched tense hand gradually settles to her side, rigidity leaving the long bony fingers. Her head twitches or nods from time to time, reminding Koo of a sleeping dog agitated by dreams of hunting, and he’s wondering if he should say something after all when suddenly she begins again:

“The kitchen, the wall was—they’d taken it down, all the plaster and paint—down to the brick, just the one wall—it was supposed to look nice, brick—Frances took me through the kitchen, but my back—the arm—I scraped my back against the brick—even the brick was hot, everything—it was the only way, the arm—I scraped it off against the brick.”

“Jesus,” Koo whispers, staring at her.

She doesn’t seem to notice. With only the slightest pause, she goes on: “Frances waited for me—I scraped and scraped, everything burning, and the ceiling fell in and hit her—under the wood, down on the floor—I pulled her out, and we ran away.”

A deep breath and now she nods, almost in satisfaction, as though approving of her own report, and her next sentence is more coherent, more normal in tone and phrasing: “Grace was just around
the corner, so we went there and she gave us clothes, and then we ran away.”

“What happened to Frances?” The question pops out, unplanned.

A vague hand gesture. “She died, from the ceiling. We all died.”

“When was this?”

“Yesterday.”

“Ah,” Koo says, and knows better than to ask any more. Maybe this girl is hopped up, as he’d originally thought, and maybe she’s merely crazy, but it’s clear enough there’s one central real-life event in her mind—an explosion, a fire, a burning arm stuck to her back—surrounded by layers of weirdness. This creature shouldn’t be walking around loose.

Koo’s watch is now on his wrist, and it tells him the time is shortly after four; shouldn’t he be taking more of his pills? (He’s always thought of them as his “pills,” but maybe from now on he should think of them as his “medicine.” Grim thought.) Doctor Answin’s letter of instructions is on the table near Koo’s left hand; still cautiously watching Liz, he picks up the letter, glances at it, and sees the answer is yes.

Will she mind if he gets up, moves around? “I have to take some pills,” he says, but she doesn’t seem to notice, to see him or hear him or be aware of anything except the drifting phantoms in her mind. He gets to his feet, crosses to the pill case on a side table, assembles the right dosage, and goes off to the bathroom for a glass of water. And when he returns she’s changed again, she’s removed her sunglasses to show the cold small eyes, and she’s smiling at him, a hostile nasty smile; back to the good old Liz of yesteryear. Under her icy gaze he returns to the couch and lies down, adjust the tails of the robe over his knees.

“So you like women,” she says.

“They’re better than tuna on toast.”

She glares at him, rage distorting the attempted superiority of the smile. “You
hate
women.”

“Oh, goody,” he says. “Psychology.”

“You don’t know how to deal with women, so you fuck them and then run off.”

“It doesn’t work the other way around.”

“You think
we
need
you
?”

“I don’t know what you need, honey,” Koo tells her, in utter sincerity, “but if it’s me, you’re outa luck.”

“I’ll show you how much we need you,” she says. “Watch.”

Koo doesn’t know what to expect—he’s actually braced to duck a thrown knife, something like that—but what happens is, she slides lower in the upholstered swivel chair so that she’s sitting on the base of her spine, then pulls up the skirt of the dashiki over onto her stomach and spreads her knees far apart, showing that she’s naked beneath, her cunt a beginner’s origami within its shawl of hair. Astonished, now believing she has some sort of seduction in mind—with a last-second refusal, no doubt—Koo watches her angry eyes, wondering how far he dare go in letting her see just how little she turns him on. But next she slips the middle finger of her right hand into her mouth, smiling around it like some evil child, then lowers the moistened finger between her legs, touching herself, finding the clitoris, manipulating it, her finger and hand moving in a small quick repeated circle, like a piece of machinery in a model railroad set.