The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  Do you require an even more detailed portrait of the beloved? If I were to fashion a more complete account, its title would be “Portrait of a Disabled Gambling Enthusiast.” Which may surprise you. But after a certain age this was Tara’s daily activity. Yes, in case you were wondering, even disabled people who are slight, beautiful, and possessed of an ethereal wasting quality can be willful, short-tempered, and self-destructive. You can become a little bit impatient with them even as you are convinced you would lie down across the local freight railroad tracks to prevent them further harm.

  Tara apparently began by betting on sporting events while in college. Maybe because she was no longer able to participate in sports. (She had once been a teenage gymnast—her specialty was the balance beam.) In her own account of her gambling addiction (beginning about 2016), she too began with baseball, precisely because it had a record of more than a decade of tolerance for differently abled players. She wanted to bet on players like Dave McClintock and Juan Millagro. And making use of various online gambling forums, Tara did begin to place small wagers, using especially her disability allotments from the government. On several occasions her parents, a stiff, religious couple from the Midwest, bailed her out of her debts.

  When she began betting on far more unsavory things, and making use of underworld professionals for the purposes of betting, things got worse. About the time she audited my writing class, where her luminous mortality, her consumptiveness, was both terrifying and strangely alluring, she was, by her own account, also showing up at the backroom offices of local bookmakers, wheezing on her respirator, intending to bet on the outcome of World Wrestling Federation matches, cockfights, and NASCAR. She wrote a couple of short stories about the gambling demimonde, and these stories, with their colorful argot, were of the transparently autobiographical sort that I always think makes for the finest art. She probably had more talent than I. Were Tara not preoccupied with dying, inch by inch, and with chasing down her every gambling whim to the best of her motorized ability, I believe she would have made the better writer. Alas, she had little interest in preserving her autobiography. I told myself that I should have nothing to do with her, and then I fell for her—the dreamer falling for his dream.

  The Futures Betting Syndicate, which became a national obsession in the teens, about the time our class ended, was effectively niche-marketed to a temperamental beauty with a life-threatening pulmonary disease and parents who would fund her. With the emergence of the FBS, Tara had found, at last, a gaming institution that had the veneer of popular acceptance. The FBS was overseen by government regulators, and a tenth of its profits were creamed off for education, entitlement programs, and servicing the trillions of our national debt.

  The FBS, as you know, created the very first subsidized futures markets organized around current events, around a host of possible outcomes, such as the likelihood of Republican control of the House of Representatives, the assassination of the newly elected prime minister of Palestine, the liquidation of the remaining portion of the Greenlandish ice shelf, and so on, and while it was notoriously bad as an indicator of actual outcomes, particularly when predicting the volatility of any season’s weather, it was quite useful as a barometer of opinion. As the popularity of the FBS increased, and as its revenues began to help the government work its way out of gargantuan funding obligations, its no-holds-barred laissez-faire market expanded into some rather odd directions. This was where Tara particularly liked to concentrate her attention. When we were dating she used to tell me these things: in one rather grisly period, in her account, she made several thousand dollars betting on the possibility that the secretary of federal gambling enterprises (titular head of the FBS) would be badly beaten in his own home. It was unclear who had first created this particular market, and the secretary’s detail of Secret Service agents was unable to stop the attack. Tara then bid on the likelihood of Israel’s use of a nuclear weapon on one of her neighbors. Again, Tara’s certainty was well-founded, as you know.

  Her talk was of upticks, bid quantities, micro-reversals in numbers of casualties in tribal conflicts, and, almost quaintly now, of sports. I was, in this period, uncertain if living with her, as I was longing to do, was going to be easy under the circumstances. True, any good sufferer of gambling para-addiction syndrome with socially unacceptable perspiration feature (see the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—Eighth Edition, or DSM-VIII) will confess to having given the FBS a try occasionally. I tried it later myself, mainly when Tara was asleep, which was during the day, because she liked to draw the blinds and stay up all night by herself. Thus, during the day, I attempted a few stray bids, based on a single betting strategy that I referred to as radical positivity. I bet only on really splendid things taking place in the world. I bet that the Fifty Years Insurgency in Sri Lanka would end within the month. I bet that doctors would find a cure for hantavirus. I bet that the greenhouse effect would suddenly be reversed, that Russia and Ukraine would stop all the carnage. In this way, I lost most of my IRA.

  I quit teaching and reduced my other professional responsibilities partly because it became imperative to keep an eye on Tara’s physical condition, but also because she came to see the necessity of a complete screen detoxification, which she was hoping I would consent to supervise. I had been failing to show up for work every time Tara’s breathing took a turn for the worse. The shipping concern, they didn’t give a fig if my wife’s lungs and pancreas glistened with heavy phlegm. The bottom was falling out of their container anyway.

  The first thing we did was remove all the wall devices in the living room, which were just showing digital reproductions from picture postcards of the 1950s. (We found these strangely calming.) Then we removed Tara’s subcutaneous personal digital assistant (which at that time was a crude version of what they are attempting to market now, but which had similar capabilities, photo and music storage, web uplink, video cam, videoconferencing, and so on), and then we went into the bedroom and trashed anything with a standby light. The music file redeemer, the auto-massager, the drying tree, the humidifier. The replacement for all this contemporary distraction was to be some old-fashioned books. So I went down to Arachnids and loaded up on graphic novels, German philosophy, self-help, and a few American classics. These I set in a heap by Tara’s oxygen tank. She also asked for sleeping medication, hoping that a couple days of snoring might cure her of the whole business.

  When she woke on the second day, she was in a white fury, and this was a sad and frightening thing to behold in a woman who was sick enough that she could not get across the room without a major effort. Apparently, in her detoxified state, she had enough physical strength left to wipe out a stack of books that I had paid good money for.

  “Get these things out of here!”

  “But… you asked for books,” I said.

  “You and your books disgust me.”

  She flung one of the volumes at me. Something French.

  “Are you sure you’re not just feeling bad because of the withdrawal?”

  “You don’t know anything about it! You think you know what this feels like? You think I’m stupid? Get out of here, get out of this room right now, and don’t come back.”

  “I’m trying to be supportive, in this your—”

  “I’ll tell you what your kind of life is; do you want to know what your kind of life is? The boring kind. Your idea is that maybe you’ll sit around for a little while and listen to some jazz on the web, on some web site that’s about to go out of business because not one person has ever listened to any of the shit that they play on there—”

  “Tara—”

  Because when she got started…

  “Boring, boring, everything you do is boring, with your goddamned baseball statistics—”

  “I thought you liked baseball—”

  “—and your old books; who’s going to read all these books, and they just sit around here and no one reads them, and you expect me to have to look a
t all this shit, when all I want to do is be where the action is, you know, where there’s a little energy and enthusiasm left in the—”

  The third day was the same, except that she asked for a copy of Seven Ways to Accept the Wisdom of Your Illness, by some Tibetan Rinpoche or other. She got through exactly one of the seven ways before she got up from bed to throw that one out the window. I found it among the prickly pears a few weeks later.

  I spent the next two days in the living room doing part-time telemarketing. We needed the few extra dollars to cover some of what I hoped would be Tara’s final wagers.

  When she rose on the fifth day, her hair was wound into the whorls that kids favor when they are sucking their thumbs, and her eyes were bloodshot, and she was wearing only a diaphanous nightgown. With her swollen fingers and toes, she looked like she’d come from deepest space, from the great interstellar beyond, but one look at the smile on her face and I knew that the cure had finally taken. At least for now. She was rolling her oxygen tank behind her, like it was a child’s pull toy or a Pomeranian.

  “Are you back?” I asked.

  “I am back.”

  “And how do you feel?”

  “Like I licked the inside of my crematorium.”

  “Which means?”

  “Keep me in the dark about current events until further notice. Even a local news site is going to set something off. I mean, maybe I could read some coupons or a cereal box or something, but not much more.”

  “Are you going to take back any of those things you—”

  “Monty, you know that I’m not responsible. It’s like delirium tremens.”

  She lay down on the sofa and put her head in my lap, and that was a moment I often thought about two or three years later when I found myself in the waiting room of the hospital, eating from the vending machines. The day on which the helicopter carrying the world-renowned Sino-Indian surgeon landed on the roof. (And this was only one of the many, many add-ons that your health insurance provider doesn’t deem reasonable and customary.) In the OR, they were taking the lungs out of the six-pack holder in the refrigerator, in order to test this first donor lung, to make sure it was still in good working order. Then they began talking about my wife’s condition, which, they remarked, was going to slay George’s squeaky-clean lungs, just as it had slain her own, and which made the whole transplant a complex undertaking for anyone, because, they said, my wife, Tara, was going to perish. I would never see Tara with gray hair, and I would never see her worrying about how fat she had gotten in old age; I would never see her liver spots and think how beautiful are these spots, I would never see Tara dandling a malevolent toddler on her knee, she would never bust out her identification card for seniors’ night at the movies. And I would never see her on the deck of a cruise ship in the Caribbean, drinking champagne from unbreakable stemware. I would never see her with her (as yet imaginary) children’s children, or in Rome, or getting ready to go hang gliding. She would never collect a pension. But on the day of the double lung transplant, I was thinking only that another couple of weeks would be great, and six months would be amazing, three years: like from the heavens.

  They gurneyed in my wife, Tara. At the ready was the heart-lung machine and various other pieces of advanced robotic and nanotechnological complexities intended to prevent unforeseen happenstance. A moment hovered, expectant, as the systems went through their scanning protocol. Then my unconscious wife had the inferior of her two diseased lungs disconnected. I can’t really imagine which of the two was the worse, since both were full of pus and fluid and dead carbon-based gunk, stuff that Tara could no longer eliminate from her bronchi, stuff the color of turned mayonnaise. They began pulling George’s left lung out of the beer cooler, and they trimmed away a little bit of it so it would fit into Tara’s body. This after a guy with an expensive saw had opened up the whole of her, underneath her breastplate. They opened her up straight across, from latitude to latitude. And they began the arduous connection of George’s left lung to Tara’s pulmonary artery, the pulmonary vein, the bronchus, while the other nearly worthless lung pumped away haphazardly, keeping her just this side of peat moss. When the left of George’s lungs was attached, it took a few breaths, began doing its job, and they moved on to the right.

  In the waiting room, the better to try not to think about the direst of circumstances, I looked at the worried faces of other people. I got up and paced, as one will, because the molded plastic chairs abraded my posterior. (There should have been a therapeutic ward in the university medical center that was devoted to nothing but the skeletal problems caused by the molded plastic chairs of hospital waiting rooms. The Montese Crandall Wing for Abnormalities of the Softened Posterior.) The other thing I did was to call again on Noel Stroop, to ask if I could have a reading at Arachnids, Inc. “Noel,” I remarked, “it’s Montese Crandall, yeah, yeah, baseball cards. Right. Look, Noel, I’m here in the hospital, where my wife is… well… never mind.… Right. That’s kind of you. Noel, let me be frank. I would like to be able to tell my wife, when she comes around, that I have accomplished something in the area of my writing. It doesn’t have to be much. I would like to tell her something good, you know, to cheer her up, while she’s realizing how many stitches she has in her chest, and how big the scar is, and how many stents and shunts there are in her. Noel, I’m wondering if you would consider giving me a chance to read there at the store, yeah, from my collected stories, such as they are, so that I can tell my wife, when she awakes.”

  As I may have indicated earlier, Tara didn’t come out of her coma on any accelerated schedule. In the days after the completion of her double lung transplant, I was permitted to observe my wife’s slumbering form, first in the ICU and then in the general hospital population, and this is when the word ischemia suddenly became a part of daily conversation. The doctors would ask, “Are you Mr. Crandall?” though we’d been multiply introduced, and I would say, yet again, “Why do you think I’m hanging around her bed day and night, looking as though I’m a homeless person, mumbling to myself and breaking out into, well, spontaneous heaving sobs?” They would ignore my comments. “In the coming days, it’s possible that we might see the following… ,” and then the word ischemia was always slipped into the monologue. Other bits of medical argot were also deployed, diabetes mellitus, further “clubbing” of the fingertips and toes, progressive deafness due to long-term consumption of antibiotics, cross-infection from other lung patients, genetic stuff I didn’t understand, and then something about a transmembrane conductance regulator. These conversations always ended with someone asking whether I had been tested for the certain recessive gene myself, the gene that caused Tara’s difficulties. Which was another way of asking if I knew of or accepted the barrenness, the non-productivity of our marriage, to which I replied only with silence, because that was my way.

  The expectations the doctors had for my wife were optimistic, after a fashion, until they remembered to ask about her age. My wife, at thirty-eight, was sicker than most people with her illness. Younger people didn’t have trouble with ischemia or reperfusion injuries subsequent to their surgery. They bounced back quicker from the infections. Whatever the cause, my wife long remained unconscious. Or, more exactly, she was in a way station between delirium and unconsciousness. During this stretch, when I was either sitting next to her bed or eating nougat-and-peanut snack items, Tara was having incredibly vivid nightmares, all of which involved persecution. She dreamed that I personally was a member of the FBI’s domestic fraud task force and was coming to cut parts of her body off bit by bit so that they could be blown up in garish desert explosions. Or I was a serial killer and was trying to administer lethal drugs to her. Or else I was eating bits of her. Or I was forcing her to have sex with me, even though she was missing limbs. Or I was using my amputation stumps to penetrate her. Or she was trying to flee from me and other persecutors, even though she had only 20 percent of lung function.

  It was a good thing, therefore,
that I had secured an upcoming reading at Arachnids, Inc. This was a welcome distraction. The only problem, as regarded my reading, was that I had a grand total of six or seven sentences to read to the audience. Despite the fact that I admitted to absolutely little doubt as an artist, some of these sentences were clearly better than others. Either I was going to read the sentences over and over again, so that they would transport by virtue of a canny repetition, or it was going to be a very short reading. Well, there was a third alternative, namely that I would produce some new material. I have heard of, and have never exactly approved of, people attempting to write new works just so that they’d have something to read. Here was my chance. Blood and guts. The heartbreak of mortality. The last bit of air squeezed out of a diseased lung. The love, or at least the considerable devotion, cut short by fate. Out of great adversity comes great art, and so I came up with my celebrated lung transplant sequence. (See The Collected Works of Montese Crandall, presently under construction, p. 4.)