Koko. Peter Straub
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.
2
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 turrets, 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