The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  It was the most mundane thing that took his wife. A glass of water. The doctors had long indicated that pneumonia was a particular danger. Every time she was bathed by her nurses, he imagined her tumbling out of their grasp or accidentally drowning. But the night he returned from soccer practice with Jean-Paul, she was just lying on her daybed, the one with the voice-activated motor for readjusting posture. She was motionless, peaceful, Koo thought. A glass of water spilled across her. The autopsy indicated what anyone would have guessed. Simple drowning. With all the advances of twenty-first-century medicine, it was as yet impossible in a body with advanced Huntington’s to get the pharyngeal muscles to live up to their workload. The human body, so adaptive, so amenable to having bits of technology installed in it, could still fail. Every day millions of them did.

  Nathalie’s death was enough to send Koo and his half-French son, the boy with the melancholy green eyes, abroad. They made a new start in the most empty and beleaguered of desert communities, Rio Blanco, Arizona, United States of America. Koo couldn’t relinquish the conviction that the South Korean medical community had been too busy chasing research money to show a little kindness to a man whose wife was dying. If, as Koo meanwhile theorized, it would be possible, with special applications of steroids and other growth enhancers, to make strides in the matter of regrowth among the adult stem cell lines that were now available in the grant stream in the United States, such that even tissue that was in the process of necrotizing could be reattached or regenerated, then it was only a hop, skip, and a jump to apply the same stem cell principles to Parkinson’s, Huntington’s, Bell’s palsy, ALS, and other impairments. No one would have to suffer the way his wife had suffered.

  Uprooting Jean-Paul and bringing him here had not been easy. But Koo was certain that he could better pursue his research at URB. Rio Blanco was so empty of the prying eyes of regulators and government intrusion that he could specifically do what he had not been able to do in South Korea, namely work on Nathalie’s corpse. Not her corpse, exactly, but certain bits of her cadaver, to use the term he preferred, that he had harvested soon after her moment of transition. Such a little thing, that movement of the blood in and out, not so very complicated at all, but once it was stopped for a certain length of time, it was hard to restart. Koo knew the way of nature, that all things should end, but not when the equilibrium of others depended on the gentle, smiling face of Nathalie Fontaine. He had already regrown a length of her colon, a portion of her right ring finger, her pancreas, some locks of her hair, and when the time was right, he would sew these and other organs back into her.

  That is, he would sew these back into the cryogenically frozen Nathalie Fontaine. The very Nathalie Fontaine that he had shipped to Rio Blanco with great difficulty. There was only one way to insure, these days, that you could ship a cryogenically preserved cadaver for medical research without arousing intrigues, and that was by cooperating with certain kinds of international intelligence initiatives, the kinds of initiatives launched by organizations that have no acronyms, organizations that don’t turn up on a budget line on any government’s published budgets, except perhaps as discretionary spending. The greatest purveyor of discretionary spending funds was NAFTA, where, in the dilapidated present, everything was for sale, everything, and where the government would use whatever varieties of espionage and mercenary incursion necessary to attempt to restore the reputation of American ingenuity and American capital markets.

  Chief among the initiatives of the American intelligence community was trying to learn if there was a wartime application for stem cell research that could treat all the head wounds coming back from the various Middle Eastern and Central Asian theaters where our troops were as yet stationed. Triage was good at removing body parts. Triage piled up whole mounds of limbs, and it could take a shattered femur or an ulna that had once been attached to some grasping hand, and it could make a fine stump of what was still left. But as yet medicine had not found a good way to reattach a head. Still, the Americans were planning. They were trying to find ways to make do with less head, wherever possible, to ship a young man or woman back with a third of a head, if necessary.

  The military therefore required the kinds of medical researchers who could make this dream a reality without moral or ideological complaint. Who, at the very least, could pass on anything they heard or learned about international researches along similar lines. The hunt for information needed to take place outside the glare of publicity, away from round-the-clock web news outlets, because the military wanted to have an advantage that other international defense departments didn’t have. They were willing to pay a South Korean MD, if he had a little information on what was and what was not possible, and, additionally, in compensation for services rendered unto the American military, which was in the business of shipping a great number of bodies around, they would be willing to ferry a body from South Korea to the desert of the American Southwest in a large refrigerated container. No questions asked.

  How did Koo live with himself? How did the doctor live with the compromises that he had made in order to come to this place, this hellish landscape of drought, flash flood, and wildfire, with the frozen body of his deceased wife in the garage, attached to a generator so that she would not be warmed, or even cooked, when the electricity went off each day? How was he able to live with keeping all this secret from a teenage son who wanted nothing much to do with him? Who didn’t realize the things that Koo had voluntarily given up in his life, the esteem of colleagues, the friendships from medical school back in Seoul, the satisfaction of knowing that his community understood what a fine husband and parent he had been. Koo had allowed these consolations to pass him by, and what he replaced them with, instead, was a teenage son who claimed to find the empirical methodology of the medical community beneath contempt.

  For all these reasons, there were many days when Koo could not live with himself at all. Koo glided like a revenant from departmental common areas to laboratory as though he heard nothing, and as though he were unable to master even the most basic English dialogue. His parents were gone, his distant cousins never wrote to him, he had a sister in South Korea who felt that his traveling to the United States was unpatriotic, though she called him every Christmas and wept; how was it that families fell so ineluctably apart? she inevitably asked. At night, when he hadn’t made any progress on the grants that supported the laboratory, he stretched his modestly proportioned body across his desk and gripped his face with his hands. The office linoleum dated back some thirty years, to a time when city universities sprang up everywhere, propelled by the idea that there would be ever more students funneled into their classrooms. The linoleum, like the university itself, was cracking, scuffed, was unreplaced. The ceilings in the building leaked during the monsoon season, and there were buckets underneath the leaks, so that occasionally the janitor, a fellow with some sort of disability, busied himself emptying them. He chased off the laboratory mice that had begun nesting in the drywall. Norris, the janitor, had some kind of affinity for Woo Lee Koo, it’s true, and the two men, one among the most brilliant medical researchers in his field, the other scattered and disassociative in his faculties, sat together and failed to talk.

  “What you up to?” the janitor might ask, looking pensively at the array of petri dishes, renal tissue, pancreatic tissue, nasal tissue, the various spectral dyes and extracts that were to be injected into them. He invariably pronounced the question with vigor.

  “Raising the dead,” replied Woo, with accented English.

  Norris said, “Had a dog once that died.”

  To this, Woo Lee Koo said nothing at all. Not only because Norris’s linguistic skills were difficult to parse. More important, Norris’s disabilities endowed him with a superhuman ability to tolerate silences. About this Koo felt especially grateful. Allowing Koo to say nothing was among the kindest things a person could do. Thus, the two men sat on the stools in the laboratory for some time until the medical researcher recol
lected that an eventual response was required.

  “His name was?”

  “Huh?”

  “The dog.”

  “Zimmerman.”

  “You came up with this?”

  “What?”

  “The name.”

  “Of the dog?”

  Koo said, in the belief that Norris would not follow the subsequent divagations of his reasoning, “Missing someone—who has passed away—is among the most human of feelings.”

  “We buried him,” Norris eulogized, more thoughtful than aggrieved. “Behind the house.”

  “One day I will be able to restore Zimmerman to you. If there is tissue remaining at the burial site.”

  “Huh?” Norris said.

  “Bring him back.”

  Norris nodded without commitment. The light would not last, and this meant the contagious darkness of Rio Blanco would soon be upon them. Before Koo went home, however, he needed to look in on the laboratory and its primates.

  The primates of URB’s laboratory were better looked after than the majority of the men and women of the Southwest, many of whom were living outdoors or in shantytowns and trailer parks. Just a month ago a trailer park outside Rio Blanco had been swept down into a wash south of the Santa Ritas. The residents, those who had not been pincushioned in the forests of cacti, had taken up residence in the stadium where the football team, the Magpies, played at home. Among those living there was a small army of alternative-lifestyle enthusiasts, adherents of the movement named omnium gatherum, who found science and its advances anathema, who were certain that essences of local weeds would treat their medical complaints. Their direct action against the laboratory that housed the primates had become a matter of federal investigation. This was part of the reason the building where Koo worked was run-down. The university, besides putting up cyclone fencing and concrete barriers out in front of the structure, besides vetting all employees more thoroughly than the Central Intelligence Agency vetted their own, could do no more, could afford no more, and so the building, after the firebombing, stood as a monument to the endurance of a certain implacability of human thought in the face of mock-scientific, pseudo-religious psychobabble.

  Koo, therefore, looked in on the primates every night, and he treated them with the care and respect that he sometimes failed to show his colleagues or even his graduate students. When Alfonse, the orangutan, had received his innovative liver cell injection three months prior, to relieve the symptoms of cirrhosis with which Koo had afflicted him, Koo stayed with the animal day and night for two weeks. He stayed with the animal as he got weaker and more feverish, and he pleaded with Alfonse to fight harder, to accept this new therapy, to permit his liver to heal, even if there was no hard evidence that a positive attitude had any effect on healing. Koo’s team had needed to let more than three-quarters of the liver perish first, because of the possibility of spontaneous regeneration, and Koo felt certain that Alfonse had become delusional as a result. Now, Alfonse had always preferred the seeds of the pomegranate. And so Koo went to the expensive market on the east side of town himself and brought back the fruits. He harvested the seeds himself. He even juiced them for Alfonse, while conducting long rambling lectures on the great German composers, hiking in the Rio Blanco area, beekeeping in the era of colony collapse disorder, and the like. He didn’t even know what he was saying exactly, only that the words were tumbling out, flash floods in a wash, and it didn’t really matter whether they made sense at all. He was talking to an orangutan. Many were the evenings that he brought the problems of his investigations into the primate laboratory instead of discussing them with Jean-Paul Koo, with whom it would have been more likely. He discussed his hopes and ambitions with spider monkeys, chimpanzees, orangutans, and so forth.

  One night: Alfonse, who had often been responsive to music, particularly the more meditative opuses of Satie or Debussy, huddled insensate in a corner while assorted nocturnes in the classical genre enlivened his cell. When his instructor, for this was what Koo believed himself to be when he was in the room with the primates, an instructor in the secrets of evolutionary fact, attempted to put a hand on Alfonse’s shoulder, as he often did, even though the orangutans were known to bite when unhappy, the animal gave him a look that was instantly recognizable by Koo, and this despite that in his years of dealing with animals he’d always resisted the desire to impute language or linear perception to them. Alfonse had looked at Koo, and in his face he’d said, I can’t keep indulging you in this way. Let a fellow go if it’s his time to go.

  Was this set of muscular responses to the nocturnes haphazard? Was Koo interpreting what was in no way genuine? Was it the case that if you allowed an orangutan the liberty to behave as he wished for years and years, you would inevitably see in him an arrangement of craniofacial muscles that resembled every possible human expression? Would you say that the orangutan had the look of someone who had cheated at golf? Would you say that the orangutan was chastising you for failing to pick up the wet towels from the bathroom floor? Would the orangutan yearn to see the country of his birth (in this case a laboratory in Chapel Hill, NC, that had a surfeit of orangutans and needed, by way of trade, one of URB’s lemurs)? Would the orangutan laugh with that abandon that is the sign of the truly hopeless? And why, why, why, Koo often wondered, though he knew well the answer, could the primate not explain to him or to someone, some other ape, someone somewhere, what it was that he wanted to say, instead of sitting there like a bumpkin, when the injection was rendered unto him, the liver cells that they had grown in the lab and injected into his side, so that Alfonse yelped, but with a look on his brute face that he would accept this insult too, as he had accepted so much else, without being permitted to go outside, without being permitted much beyond eating and watching nature programming on a large flat-screen mounted in the corner? Koo could not help it, he wept when the injection was rendered unto Alfonse, reproaching the nonhuman animal, Just defend yourself this one time! Alfonse yelped, and Koo felt saline duct excretions down his own cheek, and there was a broth of pity endorphins in him, though this was nothing compared to the suffering he felt upon the night Alfonse gave the last of himself to science, the night when Alfonse, two and a half months ago, collapsed onto his side, and Koo and his graduate assistant Noelle Stern rushed to him from beyond the reinforced glass where they often watched the animals.

  Mighty Alfonse, your epitaph, voilà, given to you by your employer, written upon loose-leaf paper, so old-fashioned, included in the file of you that is now relegated to some university hall of records across town. Alfonse, it was clear that you never demanded remuneration and were therefore never paid in full for your sacrifice, and this your employer recognized. Not a dollar, adjusted for inflation or otherwise, was ever amassed in a bank account somewhere with your name on it. Alfonse, you were allowed exercise on certain occasions, and we tried to enrich you with various games, though at the time of your demise you were long past the daybreak of your life when games much interested you. As to the matter of your virility, it would be nearly impossible to assess your virility, because you were separated from your cousins and distant relations in North Carolina, and you never once cohabited with a female orangutan, just a couple of girl baboons and a brace of chimpanzees. Did you know that you missed out on the sweet dance of love, Alfonse? We thought you did. We your employers (Koo wrote, in Korean, and then laboriously translated) suspect that you once knew of love and gave up the habit of it only with a great regret. Because even if you never tasted the delights of sexual congress, you did get the occasional erection, and your erection, Alfonse, was a great and mighty thing, something that delighted you, since you did occasionally attempt to get other primates to pay attention to you when those nerve endings were feeling sensitive. Where did this knowledge of the uses of your erection come from, Alfonse? From your predecessors? Did your mother, before you were weaned, somehow make clear to you that this was how things came and went upon planet Earth, that if you could
not frolic on the plains, the grasslands of the veldt, protecting your territory and swinging in the baobabs, at the very least, you could in our laboratory drink a draft of love? Well, Alfonse, we did not provide you with a mate, and that is your additional loss, though we take some solace in our belief that you were not completely deprived of this knowledge. This deprivation is to be lamented, but it is nothing when compared to your larger sacrifice in the matter of research upon varieties of liver disease. You were only twenty years old when you gave your life, and so you were not even old enough to imbibe, and for that reason your liver was as squeaky clean as a liver could be, before we got to it. You never protested, and you lived with your illness without anxiety or fear. You suffered quietly, until the days of your madness and your coma. Your employer would personally like to thank you, therefore, for giving your life to the University of Rio Blanco. You will not be forgotten. Actually, it’s possible you will be largely forgotten, since you have no heirs, and your employer will be sacrificing others of your kind before too much time goes by. Still, this doesn’t mean that there was not heartbreak here in abundance; your employers have shed tears for you, for the bloody vocation in which they are engaged; much grieving there was, and many intoxicants drunk, in silence and awe, as you were shoveled out of the crematorium. Many thanks, good friend.

  Had Koo gone soft? He certainly did not want to go soft, and that was why research went on, and it was why research sometimes took place well after the working hours, when Koo’s efforts would not be witnessed by the prying eyes of his graduate students, nor various oversight agencies. And that was why he had settled on a certain rather dangerous experiment with the chimpanzee who was next up for regenerative experiments, the animal known as Morton. Named after Noelle’s nephew, the boy who had asked to have a chimpanzee designated for him. Morton, the nonhuman, was a sour person, if he could be said to be a person, a chimpanzee who would never do as told and who had seemed to take as strong a disliking to Koo as Koo took to this experimental subject. They had spent many an evening on either side of the piece of glass that separated the two stages of primate evolution, each of them suspicious. Morton seemed to laugh at atrocities on the television. Never was there a body count, nor some human limbs dug up in a basement in Ohio, for which Morton didn’t get a bizarre and toothy grin upon his visage, as if to say, Look at my gums! No gum recession! And it was whenever Koo averted his gaze from this spectacle that Morton scooped some of his own redolent fecal material and did his best Jackson Pollock upon the reinforced glass.