The Comedy is Finished

32

“You look like wet shit,” Koo tells his image in the mirror. “No reflection on you, of course.” Then he turns and walks some more around the room, slowly and carefully, bandaged arms folded across his chest. He’s testing his strength and capacity, struggling to get this battered body functioning again. Approaching another mirror he says, “Listen, guy. You gotta stop following me around.” Then he glances worried beyond his mirrored self at the deeper reflection of the half-open mirrored bathroom door; from inside there, the buzz of the electric razor continues.

Why is Mark shaving off his beard? Koo’s life depends on Mark now, even more than earlier, but Mark is remaining as erratic and unpredictable as ever. Back when they were actually talking together, when a relatively calm Mark was telling Koo about his mother, it seemed they could find an infinity of connectives, a seamless link of identity between them; but it wasn’t so. Mark has lived with pain and hatred too long, there are too many ways to tap into that underground river of rage. Watching the emotions cross Mark’s face like clouds on a windy day, Koo kept backing away from subject after subject, until it seemed there was nothing safe to say. The conversation didn’t so much run down as slowly strangle on its own constrictions. The silences grew longer, and increasingly uncomfortable.

It was during one of those silences that the knocking came at the door. Mark answered it, and spoke briefly in the doorway with the leader, Peter. Koo listened, needing to know what these people were saying to one another, but didn’t entirely understand what he heard:

Peter: “Our friend is going to the bank. I want you to go with him.”

Mark: “No.”

Peter: “No? Mark, you know that little weasel’s just looking for a chance to run out on us.”

Mark: “Let him run.”

Peter: “After we get his money. But you’ll have to go with him to the bank or he won’t come back.”

Mark: “You go with him.”

Peter: “That wouldn’t do any good, he isn’t afraid of me.”

Mark laughed at that, then said, “Nobody’s afraid of you, Peter.”

Peter was becoming more obviously irritated. “For God’s sake, Mark, why refuse this simple request? Go with Gin—our friend. Oh, what difference does it make? Ginger. Go with Ginger to the bank. I mean, why not?”

Mark: “Because I’m staying here.”

Peter: “Here? In this room?”

Mark: “That’s right.”

Peter: “We’re nearing our deadline, you know.”

Mark: “We’ll see.”

Peter: “There’s no question about that, Mark. Don’t get any ideas in your head.”

But Mark didn’t respond to that. Merely shaking his head, he moved back a step and shut the door.

Koo said, “What deadline?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Mark told him, his manner so flat and final that Koo didn’t dare question him again. Then Mark patted the black brush of beard on his face and said, “I think I’ll shave.”

So that’s what he’s doing now, in the bathroom, first having snipped and hacked away with a pair of scissors and now using an electric razor. While Koo paces—no, plods is more like it—while Koo plods back and forth out here surrounded by mirrors, plagued by more and more unanswerable questions. What deadline? Who is this new person, Ginger, of whom Koo has never heard before? Why is Mark shaving off his beard? What does Mark plan to do? What does Peter plan to do?

The razor buzz stops. Koo halts in the middle of the room, looking over at the bathroom doorway. From this angle, the mirror of the half-open door shows him the reflection of another mirror across the room, in which he can see himself from the back. It isn’t a pleasant view. He looks old, weak, tired, bent. He looks like a junk-wagon horse at the end of a long hard day.

Water splashes in the bathroom then stops. Koo moves obliquely to the left, till he can no longer see that depressing view of himself, but the door also moves, following him, and Mark comes out, stroking bare cheeks and looking awkward and a bit sheepish.

Koo essays a shaky grin and a shaky joke: “What are you gonna grow next year?”

“Corn,” Mark says. “It’s time for a money crop.”

“Corn always sells,” Koo agrees. “Believe me, I know.”

Mark turns to study himself in the nearest mirror, leaning forward, angling his head upward slightly, gazing over his cheekbones at the image of his face. “Come here,” he says.

Koo approaches, not sure what the boy has in mind. “What’s up?”

“Come here. Next to me. Put your face next to mine.”

“Listen,” Koo says, understanding now and feeling a sudden panic. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

“Cheek to cheek,” Mark insists, leaning ever closer to the mirror. “Come on.”

Thirty years ago, when Honeydew made her phone call, the thought did cross Koo’s mind that the child might just as readily not be his, that Koo might simply be the handiest or the richest or the most vulnerable of the potential fathers, and now he remembers that thought and is made afraid by it. At the time, it was easier to pay the five hundred dollars, but now the question is more vital. When he puts his cheek next to Mark’s and studies their joined faces in the mirror, will it be an echo of himself that he sees, or an echo of some long-ago actor, producer, agent, or even Army officer, unidentifiable but ubiquitously there? Or Mel Wolfe, Koo’s most frequent gag writer in the old days, who was no mean hand with the blondes himself; if it’s Mel’s face he sees next to his own in that goddamn mirror, Koo won’t know whether to laugh or cry.

Hesitantly, like someone entering a too-hot tub, Koo stands with his shoulder touching Mark’s shoulder, his neck stretching as his face nears Mark’s face. But then Mark reaches a hand up behind Koo, grabs him by the neck and yanks him closer, strong fingers firm, pressing the side of his face to Mark’s cold cheek, and for a long moment of silence they study themselves, Mark with a kind of scientific intensity, Koo in hope and fear...and longing. To see himself renewed, even in the features of this lost crazy boy, would be wonderful.

Doubtfully, Mark says, “The eyebrows?”

“No,” Koo says. “Yours are more curved, like your mother’s.”

“Jawline.”

Koo squints. “Do you really think so?”

Mark slowly shakes his head, the smooth-shaven cheek sliding with a strange cold intimacy on Koo’s face. “No,” Mark says. “Nothing.”

Koo might disengage now, safely move away from Mark’s cheek and from the hand gripping the back of his neck, but he’s reluctant to give up the search. Mel Wolfe is not in that face, nor is there anyone else Koo recognizes, except for the faint traces of Honeydew herself. “Goddamn it,” he says, peering at their two faces, “I must have the weakest genes in the history of the human race.”

“Why?”

“Neither of my other boys looks like me either.”

Mark chuckles, but it’s a warning sound, like a growl.

“Lucky man,” he says. “You said that just right.”

“Said what?”

“Your other boys.” Mark’s gripping hand clenches briefly, painfully, on Koo’s neck, and Mark says, “If you’d said it any other way, I’d have broken your neck right now.”

“You’re a tough audience,” Koo tells him, very shaky again, and this time he does disengage, easing slowly away. Mark’s hand drops, letting him go, and Koo moves awkwardly to the bed, feeling much weaker. Seating himself, he rests his forearms in his lap while watching Mark continue to study his own reflection.

This could be dangerous. Koo is convinced there’s still murder inside Mark, just waiting to be triggered. Is that what this is all about? This whole delay here, this strange new sequence in which Mark almost seems to have changed sides, to have joined the prisoner in an alliance against his jailers, could simply be the waiting period until Mark can find again the proper circumstances for murder. The boy has to get into the right frame of mind before he can kill his father; the search of their faces could simply have been the way to psych himself up.

Still in the mirror, Mark says, “Do I look like anybody else you used to know?”

“Wait a minute,” Koo says, in a fresh panic. He can harbor such doubts about paternity, but does he dare permit Mark this further grievance? On the other hand, how can he quickly, immediately, now, drive the idea out of the boy’s head?

By direct attack; dangerous, but the only choice. “Believe me, Mark,” Koo says, “I only pay for my own mistakes.”

Mark turns slowly away from the mirror and gazes at Koo for a long time, a small crooked smile on his lips. Then, speaking very softly, he says, “And have you paid enough?”

“I don’t know,” Koo tells him. “You’re the one keeping the books.”

Mark considers that, nodding, still with the small smile. Then he says, “The FBI coming to the house—did you have something to do with that?”

“What house?”

“The first one. That’s why we moved. Somebody came through, saying he was from the gas company.”

“Oh.” Now it’s Koo’s turn to smile; it did work after all, and he’s pleased with himself, even though it ultimately doesn’t seem to have helped. “Yes,” he says. “I guess that was me.”

“I knew it,” Mark says, not threateningly but as though he too is pleased with Koo’s accomplishment. “The others didn’t think so, but I knew it was you. How’d you do it?”

“That room I was in. I saw it in the movies once, when a director named Gilbert Freeman owned the house.”

“Gilbert Freeman. You said that name, on one of the tapes.”

“I called him my favorite host in all the world.”

“Right.” Mark frowns, thinking about that. “How does that tell anybody anything?”

“I hardly knew Gilbert Freeman. He’s never been my host.”

Laughing, very pleased with Koo, Mark says, “Sly old man. I’m glad I met you.”

“Well,” Koo says. “Uhhh. I’m not sure the feeling’s mutual.”

“No, I suppose not,” Mark agrees, the laughter giving way again to the small almost absentminded smile. “Well, time will tell, won’t it?”

“If it does,” Koo says, “I’ll never tell time again.”

“Ugh. You can do better than that.”

“Not right now I can’t,” Koo says.