The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  Future readers of my works will realize that the surgery sequence, at the time, represented a huge advance in the amount of work I had at my disposal for the reading, in that it contained several sentences. It seemed to be what I was able to come up with in those weeks of drama and anxiety. I knew my wife’s illness was genetic, and that it was unlikely that I had caught it from her, and yet I found myself having to remember, almost manually, to breathe, breathe, breathe, while I was in the waiting room or in her hospital room. When I fell asleep, in fact, I began experiencing episodes of apnea, in which I would shake myself awake, chest heaving, unable to catch my own breath, just as I had so often attempted to catch my wife’s breath for her. The same was true on the nights I tried to sleep at home in the large queen-size bed that never felt right without Tara’s skeletal frame alongside me. She was one of those sleepers who move ever closer, until they have commandeered a good three-quarters of the square footage, while you are balanced precariously on the remainder. Without her, it seemed there was nothing to keep me from spreading out and taking over everything, in an orgy of self-centeredness and, thus, insignificance.

  The twenty-first day of the month came around, the day when Tara went back into the ICU. They did more tests, which is what they do in the ICU, and I thought about canceling my reading at Arachnids. However, I decided that if Tara were awake, dressed in a pink miniskirt and some silky flowered top that she managed to find at one of the thrift shops on Fourth Avenue, she would have said, despite her oxygen mask, “Monty, get out there and live.” You understand, this is not to say she never felt sorry for herself, nor that she didn’t get bored of seeing me hanging around every day. In an earlier phase of her illness, she would occasionally take off on ridiculous trips up the block. Dragging her rolling oxygen tank, she would stick out her thumb and wait for someone with a minivan to come along. Then she’d say, Take me to a betting parlor, if you please. Or something similar. She would have the racing form, and the sports pages, and a copy of one of those periodicals designed for arms traders. Those illegal betting parlors were dangerous, unscrupulous, and sad. But when you don’t get out of the house much, you are willing to go almost anywhere. In the backseat of this stranger’s car, coughing her disgusting and very watery cough, spitting her sputum into a cup or sometimes out the window, Tara gazed upon the whole thing, the vast expanse of our part of the state, effusing to her driver. “Do you see any longhorn sheep?” “No, lady, no longhorn sheep.” “Do you see any bobcats?” “No, lady, I don’t see any bobcats.” “Do you see any javelinas?” “Sure, when don’t you?” And Tara would often conclude, “Once I was able to hike in parks, a little bit, anyway.”

  But let us now leave my wife in her unconscious state, so that the scene might shift again to the little bookstore named after the kingdom of life-forms with prehensile second antennae, e.g., scorpions, brown recluses, and their kin. I was going to Arachnids, as scheduled, whether I liked it or not, and whether or not there were going to be any listeners in the store. It bears mentioning that I did occasionally visit Arachnids as a customer, because of its excellent used books and digital media. It was a comfortable place for the slaying of time. I belonged there. It was right that I was reading here. I was going to enter the store like some prefab pop singer, therefore, striding onto the stage as if he had ownership. And I would wear the most elegant outfit (I had put some serious thought into this), namely some undertaker’s clothes, because that was how I felt, like a merchant of death, like a man whose everyday affairs had only to do with the lost, with the teeming cities of Hades, where the souls eternally suffered. So I would wear black shiny shoes and skinny tie and black armband, a black knitted cap. Let it be noted, too, that black does flatter a gentleman who has perhaps become spread out in the midsection with the nervous eating of nougat-and-marshmallow treats.

  I loitered in the philosophy section of Arachnids until a quarter past the hour. I muttered nervous prayers. Noel then made clear that we would have to make do with the audience at hand, which audience was scattered among folding chairs, and, as I have said, this audience numbered exactly five. I knew three of them. One was Jake Cohn, a pharmacist and enthusiastic supporter of the arts, who owned and operated Mud Hut magazine; then there was Jenny Martini, a flea marketeer like myself who often helped me put up my stand (she sold vintage lamps); besides Jenny and Jake, there was one of the legions of beatnik homeless men who lived in our town, probably an Iraq war veteran, wearing on this night old polyester rags. And then there was a rather stately, motionless, and imposing black man, sitting alone in the back row. He looked drugged.

  Noel Stroop began introducing me now, mumbling an entirely incorrect pronunciation of my name, calling me, believe it or not, Montrose Candle, and indicating that I had numerous publications in the local rags. Then, having run dry of material, Noel asked the audience to please give me a warm welcome, which they attempted to do, notwithstanding that they were the proverbial happy few.

  There I was at the lectern, with the very bad wireless microphone that had long since been rendered fuzzy, and in my possession were about ninety-five words. I could think of nothing to do at first. I was certain that I was going to void my bowels. There was a uvular tickling, and I fantasized briefly about a burning lava flow coming up past the esophageal sphincter, through my old, compromised esophagus. But then I thought of my Tara, back when she was sitting out in the driveway in a wheelchair, kicking gravel, frozen with terror at the notion that she had to undergo her lung transplant. She didn’t want to have those two pieces of George the biker sewn into her for the rest of her natural life. She didn’t want to corrode her new lungs with the same mucoid rice pudding that had gummed up the last pair. She didn’t want to begin her lifelong regimen of antirejection cocktails. She didn’t want to see both her lungs spatula’d into a medical-waste container and flung into a dumpster out back of the hospital, where the javelinas would likely dig them out and feast. When I thought thus of Tara, and of the drainage that was probably taking place then through the stent above her right nipple, I realized that I could be strong, and I could read my first story, and I could be Montese Crandall, innovator in contemporary letters.

  I recited a proper introduction to my work, as follows: “I’m very glad that you have all come, and I would like to tell you about my work, in order to prepare you. My work is about paring away the fat and gristle and imprecision to leave the most rudimentary scaffolding, a process few writers are willing to undertake. As evidence of this, I’m simply going to read you an excerpt from my newest piece. However, before beginning, I think we need to observe a silence for a couple of minutes, so that you can hear my sentences arising from out of a doomed, hushed, forlorn historical moment, and together we remember how language replies always to the nothingness, how the utterance is a pure thing, a pure, uh, musical production, faced with, you know, the thundercloud of human failure sweeping down from the mountains and over the desert.”

  I then fell silent for exactly three minutes. It was like this: with only thirteen sentences total, I needed to read one sentence every three minutes, and then my reading would be the ideal length for a reading, which is thirty-nine minutes. While I could have read longer, I decided on the occasion of my first reading to warm up with something a bit less challenging, to indicate that I was taking the needs of the audience to heart. So I vacated the area of the lectern and sat, plunked myself down, in the circle with my audience, and put my wristwatch on the chair next to me, and I closed my eyes.

  Maybe it was because I hadn’t had a moment lately to be anything other than the worried lump of a husband by Tara’s bedside, the guy who just hours before had called her parents, with whom she was not close, so that they could imply that I was the reason Tara was sick now and that if she had stayed back in the Rust Belt, and dated Skeet Berman, the venture capitalist, then she would have had a happier and more fulfilling life. I was much too old for her, and my job was not a proper job, and baseball card enthusiasts wer
e shut-ins. Maybe it was because of this stress that, as soon as I was sitting quietly at Arachnids, I felt something profound swoop down on me, some scrolling news bulletin of gratitude and grace, so that my eyes filled with tears, tears that did not quite spill over, but I choked, briefly, began to hack, thinking of my own great fortune to have been given the responsibility of Tara Schott Crandall. To have seen Tara parked in the driveway prior to having George’s lungs sewn into her. To have cared for Tara despite all grim prognostications about her future. This was an honor, this was a life, whether I had succeeded entirely or not. I was confident that the audience shared, if telepathically, in this feeling, or at least shared in the possibility of silence, and it was with this conviction, after three minutes, that I stood.

  Because I had all my sentences memorized, I then dramatically presented the surgical series, just as if it were an actor’s soliloquy:

  Cut it. Cut here. Cut it out. Cut it off. Cut the cord. Cut the costs. Cut the crap. Cut your wrists. Cut and run. Cutting corners. Cutting the losses. Cutting some slack. Cut me some slack. Cut the grass. Cut the malarkey. Cut to the bone. Cut. Cut, cut.

  Informed readers and critics familiar with my work will recognize what I recognized myself in that horrible moment, that I had somehow spontaneously altered the surgery sequence. But I have since come to believe that my type of literary endeavor needs to be able to adapt to circumstances, to incorporate spontaneity if it is to grow. If the spoken version of the story was different from the written draft, so be it. However, the realization of my prolixity cast some shadow over me, and I almost immediately fell into silence again, a silence of nearly awkward length. In which I was looking down upon the Plexiglas lectern, thinking badly of myself. I guess I was kind of nervous. This secondary silence had a rather predictable effect. It drove two people out of the reading, first the beatnik guy, who was probably only there to relax for a few minutes. He needed time out of the desert heat. The beatnik guy recognized that at a reading of five persons, Noel Stroop was not going to eject him from Arachnids, despite his habit of stealing things from the computer books section and attempting resale out in front of the ruins of what was once the Dairy Queen. He took advantage of my surgery sequence to bust a move, as they used to say, and then he went out into the night and, I suppose, hopped a freight train.

  Jenny Martini was next to go, waving graciously. I would have lamented this departure, but it was time to read anew. I was down to three people, including Noel, who kept looking at his wrist-implanted digital minder. I launched violently into the single sentence that remained of my biography of George, the lung donor, and I am sure that I delivered it in such a way that the entirety of my former hundred pages were implicit in that one sentence. When I took my skullcap from my head and clamped it over my left pectoral mass, it did fill my heart with sweet sympathy. “He was just a kid,” I called out. Weren’t we all once?

  (Even I was once a child, in fact, which I have neglected to mention. An excessively needy child. A righty among lefties. A tone-deaf belter among whispery folkies. Born at a time of much uncertainty, the year being 1973. My parents were living in a van, following some troupe of jugglers and folk musicians around the country, a troupe called Nexus, that is, before my parents settled at what they used to call an ashram and conducted ongoing polygamous relations with other adults. My siblings were legion, apparently, whether by custom or actual fact. As a child, I read widely in New Age mysticism, I had no choice, I fumigated with sage, I wore dreadlocks, I cooked exclusively with brown rice, until I became a man, and, in the desert, abandoned my family, as Americans will do.)

  Silence is what happens when we do nothing to intervene. And maybe that is what we ought always to do, make less of ourselves, fill less of the atmosphere with our incomplete opinions, with our ill-considered arguments, our strident beliefs that amount to squelched flatus in a stuffy room. The universe is silent, after all, because there is no air in which sound can take place, and thus silence is the biggest part of the universe. The stripping away, the leaving behind of literature and language so that silence takes its place, this is preferable, the bookshelf that is three-quarters empty leaves room for more.

  Jenny’s departure had left just the publisher of Mud Hut and the unknown black guy. And Noel. It was unclear whether Noel’s posture—slumped over the register—was asleep or simulating sleep. At this point, I determined to cut short my program, and skipped back to one of my greatest moments as a writer, and I recited from memory the story about the stealth bomber, which I’m sure I don’t need to repeat here. What’s more important is what happened next, because after I presented the story just mentioned, I thanked the audience for its patience, having taken up no more than nine minutes, which has to be a world record where readings are concerned. Some poets use up more than nine minutes just telling you how many poems remain to be read.

  The program was now completed. Jake Cohn, for one, applauded energetically. The store was comically somber except for Jake and the unknown black man, who, despite the strange circumstances of the evening, seemed to be attentive and waiting around, I supposed, to meet me. Jake was already backing toward the door. Graciously, he invited me to submit anew to Mud Hut, if and when he managed to put together additional funding. But before he pushed back the glass door with all the band handbills on it, it occurred to me that I had forgotten to croak out the invitation that was always such an important closer at any literary event, “Does anyone have any questions?”

  Jake hurried to his folding chair. It was getting on toward night, and there were the blackouts to consider, the OPEC embargo and all of that, and so at ten P.M. the lights were meant to go off for all nonessential businesses. Everyone wanted to get home in advance of the blackout, especially when a lot of them were walking home. And so why did I ask for questions? Better to ask why the borscht belt comic works himself into a frenzy with the house three-quarters empty. Better to ask why the protestors, who number only three, play to the camera as the traffic rushes past heedless. If you can wish a vanished world into being, if you can dredge up your dreams from the lake bottom, why not do so with brio? The imposing black man raised his hand immediately, and in a hoarse whisper that recalled certain jazz greats during talk-back portions of their bonus tracks, he immediately asked—“Where do you get your ideas?”

  Since Jake did take this opportunity to press on to other engagements, since Noel had most of the chairs folded and stacked so quickly that it was as if they’d never been set out at all, there was nothing to do but take this man and his question out into the dusty night. He was about a foot taller than I, and his hair was grayer than I’d thought when he was sitting in the back of the room. In close company, in fact, his manner was even more halting and irregular than when he had first attempted to pronounce his hoarse question. The phrase wild, staring eyes was made for interlocutors like this. Since I’m a fan of the new expanded edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—Eighth Edition, since I flip through it looking for syndromes that I have yet to contract, I did have a couple of diagnostic speculations about this gentleman who later announced his improbable name as: D. Tyrannosaurus.

  My speculations touched upon aggravated hydrophobia with hygiene aversion, which you found a lot of in our town, and though it was considered a civic virtue to refrain from bathing, a virtue taken to extremes by some local ragamuffins, Mr. Tyrannosaurus undertook to fulfill this duty with especial loyalty. There was also mixed caffeine obsession with chronic caffeine dependence, which became evident when he suggested the little spot up the block called Ho Chi Minh. On the way, I attempted to address his inquiries with respect to my endeavors as an artist. I admitted that I was not very good at ideas, else I would have written a lot more than I had written, nor was I good at getting ideas down. Normally when I had an idea it was a weak idea. Along these lines I kept monologizing. I could not keep myself from monologizing, especially since D. Tyrannosaurus had what the DSM-VIII describes as conve
rsational pseudo-uremia, meaning that language is all but occluded in the individual’s larynx and then distributed behaviorally around the personality, with delusional overlay apparent in resulting grammatical malformations, and because I was sort of panicky about how D. Tyrannosaurus was going to respond to some of my observations, I felt that an avuncular chattiness would suit me fine. I remarked again that I had no actual ideas, that I had written some thirteen sentences in near upon seven years and that he didn’t want to know how much writing was required from which to excise the thirteen sentences, and, by the way, my wife was presently unconscious in a nearby hospital, having had both her lungs replaced, and because I had fallen far from my parents and cousins and other family and in-laws and had few or no vocational prospects, as far as I was concerned, the night could only grow darker.

  The guy named after the Cretaceous reptilian carnivore fixed his wild, staring eyes on me, at which point he noted that he too wrote a little bit, and this I had already surmised because who else goes to those events? Only persons with the conversational pseudo-uremia and the aggravated hydrophobia with hygiene aversion, who are meant to be prescribed rather strong antipsychotic medications.

  “And what is it that you write?”

  “I cut a few words out of a book or a series of books. I paste these words down.”

  “Paste them down?”

  “I paste them down. Collage. They’re very short pieces.”

  “How short?”

  “Sometimes just a word or two.”

  “And where do you get your ideas?”

  Here he fixed me with a look of such desolation and loss that I don’t quite know how to describe it. The look that said all that was good in the world was false.

  “… It’s the words that have the ideas. I just assemble.”

  He’d been to graduate school, I learned, that waiting room of the bereaved. He’d been a champion of information systems, of certain unpopular byways of study, of ideas that made his thesis advisers dislike him. And anyway he preferred not to go to class, nor to appear in daylight, where the violent rays of the sun would reveal his, as he described it, dermal transparency. And then when he had left school, his particular interest there being the palindromic writings of a certain Belgian linguist, he became a conceptual artist for a while. In this period he lived in appropriated housing in a certain eastern city.