Peter Straub - Koko

‘Hello, sir,’ said a clarion voice at his elbow.

Poole looked down at a beaming young woman with a fanatical face surrounded by a bubble of blonde hair. She held a tray of glasses filled with black liquid.

‘Might I inquire, sir, if you are a veteran of the Vietnam conflict?’

‘I was in Vietnam,’ Poole said.

‘The Coca-Cola Company joins the rest of America in thanking you personally for your efforts during the Vietnam conflict. We wish to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to you, and to introduce you to our newest product, Diet Coke, in the hope that you will enjoy it and will share your pleasure with your friends and fellow veterans.’

Poole looked upward and saw that a long, brilliantly red banner of some material like parachute silk had been suspended far above the lobby. White lettering said: THE COCA-COLA CORPORATION AND DIET COKE SALUTE THE VETERANS OF VIETNAM! He looked back down at the girl.

‘I guess I’ll pass.’

The girl increased the wattage of her smile and looked amazingly like every one of the stewardesses on Poole’s flight into Vietnam from San Francisco. Her eyes shifted away from him, and she was gone.

The desk clerk said, ‘You’ll find your meeting areas downstairs, sir. Perhaps your friends are waiting for you there.’

The executives in their blue suits sipped their drinks, pretending not to monitor the girls walking around the lobby with their inhuman smiles and trays of Diet Coke. Michael touched Judy’s note in his jacket pocket. Either it or the tips of his fingers felt hot. If he sat down in the lobby bar to watch the arrivals coming through the door, within minutes he would be asked if he were a veteran of the Vietnam conflict.

Poole went to the bank of elevators and waited while an odd mixture of veterans and Coca-Cola executives, each group pretending the other group did not exist, left the car. Only one other man, a drunken mountainous being in tiger-striped fatigues, entered the elevator with him. The man studied the buttons and pushed SIXTEEN four or five times, then stumbled against the railing at the back of the car. He emitted a foggy bourbon-flavored burp. Poole finally recognized him as the van driver who had smashed into the Camaro.

‘You know this, don’t you?’ the giant asked him. He straightened up and began to bellow out a song Poole and every other veteran knew by heart. ‘Homeward bound, I wish I were homeward bound ’…

Poole joined him on the second line, singing softly and tunelessly, and then the car stopped and the door opened. The giant, who had closed his eyes, continued to sing as Poole stepped from brown elevator carpet to green hall carpet. The doors slid shut. The elevator ascended and Poole heard the man’s voice echoing down the shaft.

A North Vietnamese soldier who looked like a twelve-year-old boy stood over Poole, prodding his neck with the barrel of a contraband Swedish machine gun he must have killed someone to get. Poole was pretending he was dead so that the NVA would not shoot him; his eyes were closed, but he had a vivid picture of the soldier’s face. Coarse black hair fell over a broad, unlined forehead. The black eyes and abrupt, almost lipless mouth seemed nearly serene in their lack of expression. When the rifle barrel pushed painfully into his neck, Poole let his head slide fractionally across the greasy earth in what he hoped was a realistic imitation of death. He could not die: he was a father and he had to live. Huge iridescent bugs whirred in the air above his face, their wings clacking like shears.

The tip of the barrel stopped jabbing his neck. An outsized drop of sweat squeezed itself out of Poole’s right eyebrow and trickled into the little depression between the bridge of his nose and the corner of his eye; one of the rusty-sounding insects blundered into his lips. When the N V A did not move on to any of the real corpses near him, Poole knew that he was going to die. His life was over, and he would never know his son, whose name was Robert. Like his love for this unknown son, the knowledge that the soldier was going to blow his head apart here on the narrow field full of dead men was total.

The shot did not come. Another of the rusty insects fell onto his sweat-slick cheek like a spent bullet and took a maddening length of time scrabbling to its legs before it lumbered off.

Then Poole heard a faint click and rustle, as of some object being pulled from a casing. The soldier’s feet moved as he shifted his weight. Poole realized that the man was kneeling beside him. An entirely uncurious hand, the size of a girl’s, pushed his head flat into the smeary earth, then yanked his right ear. His impersonation of a dead man had been too successful – the NVA wanted his ear as a trophy. Poole’s eyes snapped open by themselves, and before them, on the other side of a long grey knife where the sky should have been, hung the motionless black eyes of the other soldier. The North Vietnamese gasped. For a brimming half-second the air filled with the stench of fish sauce.

Poole jackknifed up off his bed and the NVA melted away. The telephone was ringing. The first thing he was fully conscious of was that his son was gone again.

Gone too were the corpses and the lumbering insects. Poole groped for the phone. ‘Mike?’ came tinnily from the receiver. He looked over his shoulder and saw bland pale wallpaper, a painting of a misty Chinese landscape over the bed. He found that he could breathe.

‘This is Michael Poole,’ he said into the receiver.

‘Mikey! How are you? You sound a little weirded-out, man.’ Poole finally recognized the voice of Conor Linklater, who had turned his head away from the telephone and was saying,’ ‘Hey, I got him! He’s in his room! I told you, man, Mike’s just gonna be in his room, remember?’ Then Conor was speaking to him again. ‘Hey, didn’t you get our message, man?’

Conversations with Conor Linklater, Michael was reminded, tended to be more scattered than conversations with most other people. ‘I guess not. What time did you get in?’ He looked at his watch and saw that he had been asleep for half an hour.

‘We got here about four-thirty, man, and we called you right away, and at first they said you weren’t here and Tina made ‘em look twice and then they said you were here, but nobody answered your phone. Okay. How come you didn’t answer our message?’

‘I went out to the Memorial,’ Poole said. ‘I got back a little before five. I was in the middle of a nightmare when you woke me up.’

Conor did not say good-bye and he did not hang up. Speaking more softly than before, he said, ‘Man, you sound like that nightmare really weirded you out.’

A rough hand tugging his ear away from his head; the ground greasy with blood. Poole’s memory gave him the picture of a field where exhausted men carried corpses toward impatient helicopters in the hazy blue light of early morning. Some of the corpses had blood-black holes where they should have had ears. ‘I guess I went back to Dragon Valley,’ Poole said, having just understood this.

‘Be cool,’ Conor Linklater said. ‘We’re already out the door.’ He hung up.

Poole splashed water on his face in the bathroom, roughly used a towel, and examined himself in the mirror. In spite of his nap he looked pale and tired. Megavitamins encased in clear plastic lay on the counter beside his toothbrush, and he peeled one free and swallowed it.

Before he went down the hall to the ice machine, he dialed the number for messages.

The man who answered told him that he had two messages. ‘The first one is stamped 3:55, and reads “Tried to call back –”’