The Comedy is Finished

17

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.

So it’s craziness, simple craziness. Koo refuses to turn away, but also refuses to watch directly what she’s doing; he stares at her eyes instead. His feelings shift from alarm to annoyance and outrage—kidnapping is one thing, but this is too much—but as her eyes become less focused, as the artificial scorn fades from her face and color begins to flush her cheeks, he thinks, She’s going to make herself come, and what he feels is embarrassment—for them both.

It doesn’t take long. Her leg muscles are rigid beneath the tanned flesh, her face is increasingly swollen and red, her gaze slides away to stare at the ceiling, her mouth sags open, she breathes in tiny desperate gasps, her finger spins and spins, and from her throat come two quick guttural coughs. Mouth straining wide, she suddenly thrusts the finger into herself, jabbing and jabbing, the side of her thumb jolting against her clitoris at every plunge of the finger. Bending forward, her other hand reaching almost protectively between her legs, she prods and batters at herself in semi-privacy a few instants more, then sags over her drawn-up knees, her head lowering so he can no longer see her distorted face.

Koo also is released; he turns away, staring at the furniture, the wall, the closed bathroom door, anything at all. That was the least sane thing anybody, man or woman, ever did in his presence, and his mind is a jumble of response; pity, outrage, embarrassment, humiliation, fear. Everything, in fact, but lust: You’re a great argument for monasteries, baby, he thinks, but he doesn’t say it out loud.

Liz, in fact, is the first to speak, three or four minutes later, saying, “Well?”

He looks at her, and she’s back to her old self, angry, hostile and scornful. She’s also sitting up straight now, the sunglasses hiding her face and the dashiki down over her legs. Koo has nothing to say, but he watches her, waiting for whatever will happen next.

The drug or madness or whatever it was seems gone now. She’s merely a nasty woman; nastier than most. With more belligerence than challenge she says, “Do you think you could make me come like that? You couldn’t. Not even close.”

Koo answers without the slightest overtone of comic manner: “For the first time in my life,” he says, “I know why they call it self-abuse.”

“Funny man,” she says, as mirthlessly as he. Then she shakes her head, saying, “Do you really expect to live through this?”

“I don’t think about it,” he says, while a lump of dread forms in his stomach.

What a lot of different sneers she owns! Using a brand new one, she says, “Afraid?”

“Very. Aren’t you?”

“We having nothing to fear but fear itself,” she tells him. “And that big guy over there with the sword.”

Koo gapes at her; does she realize she’s quoting an ancient line of his?

Yes. With an ironic smile she explains, “They’re showing your old movies on television. Because of all this.”

“Oh. Is that the silver lining, or the cloud?” And, astonishingly, he senses the beginning of human contact between them.

But she won’t let it happen. Souring again, lips turning down, she says, “I’m not your fan. We’re not chums.”

“That’s the silver lining.”

“Shut up for a minute. You’re a boring person.”

“Send me home.”

She looks at him, stolidly. “You’ll never see home again. Now shut your face.”

He says nothing. She wants the last word? Fine, she’s got the last word.

And some last word it is. While the silence goes on and on in the small room—she’s brooding about something, over there behind her sunglasses—her last statement keeps circling in Koo’s head. “You’ll never see home again.” That’s the fear, tucked down into a capsule and neatly answered, the fear that there is no way out, that kidnapping isn’t really what’s happened to Koo Davis. Death is happening to him, that’s what, Death, in easy stages. He’s on the chute, the long slippery chute, sliding down into the black.

It must be five minutes they sit there in jagged silence when the door behind Koo opens again and Joyce enters, looking hopeful and almost happy—and then surprised, when she sees Liz: “So there you are!”

“Maybe,” Liz says, unmoving.

“Did you hear the announcement?”

Liz shrugs.

“On the radio,” Joyce says, as though a piling on of detail will encourage Liz to respond.

Koo says, “Something about me? Excuse me butting in, I take an interest in my well-being.”

“Yes, of course,” Joyce says. “It was from the man Wiskiel. He said the kidnappers should watch a special program tonight at seven-thirty on Channel 11, we’ll have an answer from Washington then.”

“A special? They can’t just say yes or no, they have to bring on the June Taylor Dancers?”

“They apologized for not making the six o’clock deadline,” Joyce goes on, oblivious, “but they said seven-thirty was the absolute earliest they could have the answer ready. Doesn’t that sound hopeful to you?”

She’s asking Koo, having obviously decided not to waste her high spirits on Liz, but Koo isn’t feeling particularly perky himself at the moment, and he says, “What’s so hopeful about it? It can still be yes or no.”

“Oh, it’s much more likely to be yes. If it was no, they could just say so, but if it’s yes they have to get everybody ready, get them out of their jails and all, and that takes time.”

“I hope you’re right,” Koo tells her. “In fact, I’m positive you’re right.”

“I know I am.” Joyce takes everything literally. Now she actually smiles fondly at Koo, and says, “It really hasn’t been that bad, has it?”

Can she be serious? Koo studies her earnest face, and decides she can. He says, “You know how, sometimes, there’s a thing that somebody doesn’t like, and he’ll say, ‘Well, it’s not as bad as a poke in the eye with a sharp stick’? You ever hear anybody use that remark?”

“I think so,” she says, doubtfully.

“Well, this,” Koo tells her, “is exactly as bad as a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. In fact, worse. In fact, two pokes, two eyes, two sharp sticks.”

“Oh, it isn’t that bad,” she says, with a laugh, as though he’s joking.

Koo frowns. He will not do Burns and Allen with this nitwit. “Okay,” he says. “So it isn’t that bad.”

Abruptly Liz yanks herself to her feet, saying to Joyce, “He’s an insect. He’ll be squashed, that’s all, sooner or later. Don’t smile at him, he’s dead already.” And she strides from the room, closing the door hard behind her.

Joyce looks pained, like a punctilious hostess. “Don’t mind Liz. Really. She’s been...upset today.”

“You don’t know the half of it.”

“I’ll have to—” Joyce is edging, in tentative muddled movements, toward the door, drawn by Liz’ wake. “Things will be all right now,” she says, but her smile is panicky.

Will things be all right? One of these people is talking death, one is talking release, one is talking father-son, one is talking African tribes, and Count Dracula isn’t talking at all. And Koo is not at all as heartened as Joyce at the prospect of this seven-thirty television spectacular; it sounds more like a negotiating phase than a final step, and so far Koo doesn’t much like the way these people negotiate. Making a sudden decision, surprising himself, he says, “Wait.”

“Yes?”

Is this the right move? Who knows; it’s what he’s going to do. “I want you to take a message to Mark.”

“Mark?” She frowns at him, her manner more keen than usual. “Is this the same thing that Larry talked to him about?”

“That’s right. Why?”

“They had a fight about it. Mark and Larry.”

Koo can’t quite contain a sudden triumphant grin. So his instinct is right; Mark went too far with that father-son line, he scared himself. Mark is on the run now, Koo has the edge, and by God he’s determined to find some useful advantage in it. With all these crazy people on the loose around here negotiations with Washington are less useful to Koo than his own initiative; somehow, somehow, he has to get himself out of here. (Was his message received, in that last tape? Was it understood? Is the house being surrounded at this very moment? No, he can’t count on that either; wishing won’t make it so.) “You tell Mark,” he says, “that if he won’t answer my questions I’ll ask them of you.”

“Well, what are they? Why not just ask me to begin with?”

“Tell Mark,” Koo insists. “Then either he comes down or you do.”

She hesitates, then slowly nods: “All right. But I don’t want him to fight with me. I’ll ask him once.”

“That’s fine.”

She leaves, and Koo lies back on the studio couch, staring at the ceiling. Now that it’s too late, he’s no longer so absolutely sure he has the upper hand with Mark. That’s a brutal boy, after all; swift violent action is his specialty.

Although he’s still very weak, nervousness soon drives Koo up onto his feet. He treads slowly the length of the room, door to window, and then back, pausing at the door; with all this traffic in and out, would somebody have forgotten to lock that?

No. He tests it, and it’s still solidly sealed against him. And the next time it opens, will Mark be coming in? With balled fists and enraged eyes? The thought pushes Koo away from the door, and he moves shakily down the room again to the far end, to the window and all that heavy viscous weight of translucent water. With his back to the water, Koo stands with his hands in the pockets of the terrycloth robe, and waits.

One minute; two minutes; and the door swings open and Mark walks in.

Koo presses his back against the window glass, ashamed of his fear and hating his physical weakness, watching Mark push the door shut behind himself and advance into the room. And into Koo’s mind comes a scene from one of those early movies, Ghost to Ghost: Fleeing the villains, the character he played backs through a doorway, unaware it leads to a tiger’s cage containing a tiger. Shutting the door, inadvertently locking it, he turns, sees the tiger, and freezes. The emotions Koo portrayed in that long-ago scene he now feels, almost literally; he is locked in a cage with a tiger, with a ferocious beast.

The ferocious beast paces to the middle of the room, his expression a deeply sullen glare. “All right,” he says. “Get it over with.”

Koo’s mouth and throat are dry. He has trouble breathing, making sounds, forming words. Hoarse, he finally says, “Is it true?”

“Is what true? Say the words.”

Koo nods. He knows the answer now, but he understands he does have to say the words: “Are you my son?”

“Yes.” There’s nothing in the word but Mark’s usual flat bluntness.

“You mean it—you meant physically, actually.”

“Flesh of your flesh.” Mark’s lips writhe in loathing over his teeth as he says the words. “Bone of your bone.”

“I—” Koo shakes his head. “I don’t understand.” Could Lily have had another child after they’d separated? But there wouldn’t have been any reason to keep it secret.

“You paid five hundred dollars to have me killed,” Marks says, without particular emotional force. “My mother spent the money to have me born instead.”

“Five hundred...an abortion.”

Mark’s smile is terrifying, and so is his low voice: “Did somebody call my name?’

“Jesus,” Koo says, barely above a whisper. “I don’t—I’m sorry, I don’t—” He gestures helplessly with both hands, his weight sagging back against the window.

“You don’t remember?” Anger, mockery, hatred; Mark leans toward Koo, but doesn’t step closer. “I was worth five hundred dollars to you not to exist, and now you don’t even remember?”

“It’s been—I don’t know how—”

“You don’t know which!” Mark stares at him in a kind of triumphal horror. “You filthy monster, you don’t even know which of your little murders I am!”

Ahhh, God, that’s true. There were three over the years, all of them decades ago; all, in fact, in the right era to be this fellow standing here. How old is he; thirty, thirty-two? Grown from a hasty error, all the way up to this. “I’m sorry,” Koo says, fighting down a sudden tidal wave compulsion to shed tears. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry.” Mark becomes calmer as Koo’s agitation increases. “Sorry for what?”

“For everything. Everything.”

“Sorry you don’t know which one I am. Sorry you didn’t get what you paid for.”

“No! Jesus, I’m not—” But of course he is. Five hundred dollars thirty years ago to not be in this room with this savage? There’s no way Koo can keep his reaction to that idea out of his mind.

And apparently no way he can keep it off his face; Mark emits an angry bark of laughter, saying, “That’s right. If only my mother had obeyed orders, you wouldn’t have me to worry about, would you?”

“Is that—is that why I’m here? Is that why you picked me?”

Rage flares in Mark at the question. His hand, clawlike, shoots out as though to clutch Koo’s throat, but then merely stays in the air, trembling. “I didn’t pick you! They picked you.” With a hand-wave to indicate the others in the gang. “All I did was...” the enraged face permits again a suggestion of the terrifying smile, “hint a little.”

“You mean the others don’t know. Is that it? They don’t know?”

“If you tell them, I’ll kill you.”

“But if they don’t know, if that isn’t the reason, then why me? Why me?”

“Because you were the hawks’ jester. You’re here because you are who you are. I’m here because you are who you are. It all comes together.”

“Who—who was—” But Koo can’t ask the question, even though he craves the answer. He stares at the boy’s face, trying to see some other face in it, some face he can recognize.

Mark understands the unasked question, and it makes him laugh, not pleasantly. “Who is my mother? That’s up to you.”

No familiar feature can show through that mask of rage. Koo stares and stares, but it’s impossible. And if he knew, would it make anything better? Cozier, more familiar? Familiar; family. He gestures helplessly: “I never knew.”

“You have cockroaches,” Mark whispers at him, gloating, intimate. “Cockroaches in the walls. Me.”

“Don’t. Please.”

But Mark is no longer under control. The break that Koo feared has occurred; suddenly everything is different: “I’m the cockroach in the wall,” Mark says. His eyes are bright and lifeless, pieces of quartz. “Call the exterminator, Koo, call him back. I’m still here.”

“Wait.”

“You shouldn’t have asked, Koo. You really shouldn’t have asked.”

Mark’s face is closer, larger, filling Koo’s vision; a stone face, not human. Mark’s hand reaches out again, this time rests on Koo’s shoulder, a neutral weight like a board or a hangman’s rope. Everything drains from Mark’s stone face, and Koo closes his eyes. He’s going to kill me now. There’s no evasion, no salvation.

The other hand touches Koo’s trembling throat at the same instant that Peter’s voice says, “Well, now what?”

The hands lift from Koo’s body. He opens his eyes, seeing the expressionless face receding, Peter in the open doorway at the other end of the room. Koo droops against the window and Peter comes deeper into the room, saying, “Mark? What are you doing?”

“A discussion,” Mark says, and gives Koo a flat look. “Isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” Koo says.

“Discussion?” Peter looks from face to face. “About what?”

“A private discussion.” Mark looks again at Koo, again says, “Isn’t that right?”

“Yes,” Koo says.

Peter continues to frown at them both, then shrugs, giving it up. “Get dressed, Koo,” he says. “There’s been a change of plan.”