Peter Straub - Koko

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 propped against a pad of red flesh. All of her hair had fallen out, and she wore a brilliantly colored knit cap that made her look vaguely Middle Eastern.

‘Do you think Emmaline Grangerford had cancer?’ she asked him. ‘I suppose not, actually. I keep hoping I’ll read a book some day that has someone like me in it, but I never do.’

‘You’re not exactly an ordinary kid,’ Michael said.

‘Sometimes I think all of this stuff couldn’t really be happening to me – I think I must have just made it all up, and I’m really lying in my bed at home, doing a spectacular job of staying out of school.’

He opened her folder and skimmed through the dry account of her ongoing catastrophe.

‘They found a new one.’

‘So I see.’

‘I guess I’ll get another dent in my head.’ She tried to smile sideways at him, but failed. ‘I sort of like going to the CAT-scan, though. It’s tremendous travel. Past the nurses’ station! All the way down the hall! A ride on the elevator!’

‘Must be highly stimulating.’

‘I get faint all over and have to lie down for days and days.’

‘And women clothed in white minister to your every need.’

‘Unfortunately.’

Then her eyes widened, and for a moment she closed her hot fingers over his. When she relaxed, she said, ‘This is the moment when one of my aunts always tells me that she’ll pray for me.’

Michael smiled and held her hand tightly.

‘At times like that I think that whoever is in charge of listening to prayers must be really sick of hearing my name.’

‘I’ll see if I can get one of the nurses to take you out of your room once in a while. You seem to enjoy elevator travel.’

For a second Stacy looked almost hopeful.

‘I wanted to tell you that I’m going to be doing some traveling myself,’ Michael said. ‘Toward the end of January I’ll be going away for two or three weeks.’ Stacy’s face settled back into the mask of illness. ‘I’m going to Singapore. Maybe Bangkok, too.’

‘Alone?’

‘With a couple of other people.’

‘Very mysterious. I guess I ought to thank you for giving me plenty of warning.’

‘I’ll send you a thousand postcards of men waving snakes in the air and elephants crossing against rickshaw traffic.’

‘Swell. I visit the elevator, and you visit Singapore. Don’t bother.’

‘I’ll bother if I want to.’

‘Don’t do me any favors.’ She turned her head away from him. ‘I mean it. Don’t bother.’

Michael had the feeling that this had happened before, in just this same way. He leaned forward and stroked her forehead. Her face contorted. ‘I’m sorry you’re angry with me, but I’ll see you again next week and we can talk about it some more.’

‘How could you know what I feel? I’m so stupid. You don’t have any idea about what goes on inside me.’

‘Believe it or not, I have some idea,’ he said.

‘Ever see a CAT-scan from the inside, Dr Poole?’

Michael stood up. When he bent over to kiss her, she turned her head away.

She was crying when he left the room. Michael stopped at the nurses’ station before escaping the hospital.

That evening Poole called the other men about the charter flight. Conor said, ‘Wild, sign me up, man.’ Harry Beevers said, ‘Outstanding. I was wondering when you were going to come through for us.’ Tina Pumo said, ‘You know what my answer is, Mike. Somebody’s got to mind the store.’

‘You just became my wife’s hero,’ Michael said. ‘Well, anyhow…would you mind trying to find Tim Underhill’s address for us? His paperback publisher is Gladstone House – somebody there ought to know it.’

They agreed to have a drink together before the trip.

One night the following week, Michael Poole drove slowly home from New York through a snowstorm. Abandoned cars, many of them dented or wrecked, lay along the side of the parkway like corpses after a battle. A few hundred yards ahead the light bar on top of a police car flashed red-yellow-blue-yellow-red. Cars crawled in single file, dimly visible, past a high white ambulance and policemen waving lighted batons. For a second Poole imagined that he saw Tim Underhill, in the snow very like a giant white rabbit, standing beside his car in the storm, waving a lantern. To stop him? To light his way forward? Poole turned his head and saw that it was a tree heavy with snow. A yellow beam from the police car flashed through his windshield and traveled across the front seat.

All at once everything seemed to be going wrong, Tina Pumo thought, all at once everything was falling apart. He hated the Palladium and the Mike Todd Room. He also hated Area, the Roxy, CBGB’s, Magique, Danceteria, and the Ritz. Maggie wasn’t going to show up at the Mike Todd Room, and she wasn’t going to be at any of those other places either. He could stand at the bar for hours, drink until he fell down, and all that would happen was that hundreds of little night people would stomp him on the way to their next bottle of Rolling Rock.