The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  He was docile enough under other circumstances, when it suited him, and he was reasonable when Noelle was administering to him, but it was his recalcitrance that persuaded Koo that he was a perfect subject for the off-the-record experiment he intended. If only Morton had been willing somehow to sacrifice himself, as Alfonse had been, if Morton were capable of serving science with an open heart. But no. Animals who tried to challenge the dominance of human animals, those animals needed to perish. Animals ate other animals, or rather, birds ate insects and animals ate birds, and animals ate animals, or animals ate plants and animals ate the animals who ate plants, and then there were three or four stages of animals eating smaller or stupider animals, and then at the top of the mound, Koo liked to remind himself and others, were the humans, ordering takeout. Humans swept through entire catalogues of species, laying waste, casting bones out a car window for a crow to snap up, and this was the order of the universe, and the simpletons who somehow managed to shield themselves from nature’s bloody claws weren’t only ignorant, they were liars: thus there was Morton with his round-the-clock war coverage and his action films.

  As to the specifics of the experiment: it had long been Koo’s intention to introduce genetic material from his late wife, his cryogenically frozen wife, into a chimpanzee. In particular, Koo intended to inject cerebral stem cell tissue from his wife into a chimpanzee, in a base of saline and amino acids, in an attempt to get this information past the blood-brain barrier so that it might mix with the genetic material of the primate in question. This was a fairly elementary experimental notion, one that had been practiced in South Korea commonly, or so it was said, though legend, myth, and fact were closely allied in his homeland. Koo’s idea was that by introducing stem cells into the brain of the primate, the primate could perhaps come to contain some portion of his wife’s intellectual residue. Koo preferred the term residue when speaking of what he had kept of his wife these many years. As a former believer in the outlandish tales of Catholicism, he wasn’t comfortable with the idea of a soul, since, as has long been understood, there was nowhere in the body where this soul could be contained, just as he was not comfortable without the notion, because a bit of superstition was evidence of the residue of self, and the residue could not be cast off, no more than a man could cast off a phobia or a taste for olives.

  What would be the nature of the residue that would manifest in Morton, the sadistic chimp, when the injection took hold of him? None could say for certain. And that was why the injection of stem cells from Mrs. Fontaine-Koo into Morton could not be included in grant proposals nor even explained fully to Noelle, the charming PhD student whose breasts occasionally caused Koo to fall into fugue state. He was in just such a fugue state, however briefly, when interrupted by Norris, on the celebrated night of the Mars mission splashdown. He had been preparing the serum for the injection, as he had prepared and abandoned it over and over again in the past seven days. Always deciding, in the end, that it was too risky. What was different tonight? Not much was different. Perhaps Koo just had less and less to look forward to. Perhaps he was going to do what he was going to do, whether it was a good idea or not. The finals of the National League of X-treme Lacrosse, the splashdown of the laughable Mars mission, and the injection of human cerebral stem cells into a chimpanzee, these things all had a desperate cast. The desperation in each seemed like one variety of the North American allegiance to lost causes.

  He left Norris behind and walked idly down the empty corridors of the building, noting the number of fluorescent bulbs that were flickering, until he found himself in the primate laboratory. The timer on the monitors in each of the cages offered, in fact, a lacrosse game for Morton and the other primates to watch. X-treme lacrosse was noted for the high number of injuries per game, and Morton was, predictably, a fan. He was a fan especially of the team from Indianapolis, which was considered to be among the most violent of all. Koo rapped on the window once, to alert the animal that he was present and intending to enter. In one latex glove, he carried the syringe containing the serum in which the stem cells of his wife’s tissue were stored. He opened the reinforced door that led in among the cages. He whispered incomplete greetings to the other animals as he passed. In Morton’s cell, viewed from the outside, there were, as ever, a few soiled toys on the floor, and some fruit and vegetable remnants and the like. Morton, it should be noted, didn’t particularly like bananas. However, he had a comedian’s allegiance to the risibility potential thereof. He may never yet have used the peels in such a way as to manifest their comic potential, but he collected them as though he were waiting.

  “Morton,” Koo said, “I regret to inform you that it is time for your shot.”

  If this remark was to be understood by the chimpanzee, it was intended in vain.

  “This is a momentous injection, but perhaps that’s all I’m going to say about it.” And why? Why was this all he was going to say? Because Woo Lee Koo believed that nearly every act of human life was, or soon would be, observed by lackluster governmental mainframes housed somewhere in the Midwest, in whose employ he sometimes served, and he therefore rarely said anything of substance in a publicly owned facility, of which these premises were one example. What he had already said in life, in fact, he had said only out of insufficient secretiveness. And he resolved to do better. “I would be more apologetic, but I am sure that you wouldn’t be apologetic with me if the sandals were on the other feet. In the course of human events, it never does any good to be merciful. Mercy rarely results in good science. This is one of the things I have learned, Morton. So this injection takes place, roughly speaking, whether you want it to or not.”

  The chimpanzee watched the television monitor without attending to the competing monologue. But once Koo began genuinely readying the injection, Morton, who’d already had a great smorgasbord of injections in his life, began spitting at the great medical researcher. Morton headed for the corner of the cell beneath the television monitor, to cower in an uncourageous fashion. He barked out a plangent chimpanzee cry.

  “This won’t do at all!” Koo said. “I am the researcher with numerous grant money at my disposal. I will be victorious. Don’t make me use restraints.”

  Morton, when the human hand of science was within reach, began trying to bite it, as he had done on other occasions, having even broken the skin of Noelle on one occasion. That bite had become infected too, and in a medical facility you could never be too careful about infection, what with the antibiotic resistances coursing through the larger hospitals of the nation. Koo, the South Korean researcher, had no choice but to restrain Morton. Luckily there were two sets of shackles in this, the highest-security cage of the primate laboratory. Koo grabbed Morton by the shoulders, after setting the syringe on the table in the cage, and he forcibly shoved the chimpanzee over toward one of the sets of shackles, to which Morton responded by baring his grand set of chompers anew, attempting to bite down on the South Korean researcher’s wrist but making contact only with a portion of his cardigan sweater, shredding one sleeve. Damn you! Koo directed a blow at the animal, in recompense, and he did manage to hit him on the shoulder before tripping over a rubber ball in the cell and plunging to the floor. If Morton could have laughed, then he was laughing now, although Koo had often argued that what appeared to be a chimpanzee laugh was something much more knowing than mirth, that the chimpanzees were much more soulful and melancholy than commonly believed. All except Morton, at any rate, who was now attempting to relieve himself of some fluid backup in the kidneys, a great arc of the urine raining down, in fact, just short of the table where the syringe lay resting.

  “You are an unworthy member of the pantheon of higher primates!” Koo expostulated. “You have no gratitude for the fact that you’re still able to serve our branch of the tree of life. I won’t have it!”

  Pausing to wipe up with a towel the liquid that pooled on the floor of the cell near the runoff drain, Koo then made for the animal again, throwing himself upon t
he chimp, reaching for the arm of the chimp and the shackle simultaneously. Just when it seemed as though the battle between doctor and chimpanzee would never be resolved, Koo did get shackle and wrist into his grasp, though this was when Morton again sank his teeth into Koo, getting a mouthful of sweater and polo shirt. Because of the buffering capacity of these synthetic fabrics, it was only a flesh wound. Morton was probably readying a good bite at the human jugular or some other more vulnerable spot, when the South Korean researcher succeeded in shackling one chimpanzee arm.

  Morton crumpled up at the recognition of his renewed and never-ending subservience. Morton wound himself into a ball. A ball of submission. The fight went out of him.

  “That’s my boy,” said the human animal. “I am grateful.”

  He affixed the other restraint, not that it held any joy for him. And there Morton hung, as though martyred, and Koo removed an alcohol swab from his pocket and found the spot on Morton’s eye socket, just below the eyebrow, which is to say into the frontal lobe, that had been shorn of its fur so that the injection could more easily take place. At last, he readied the syringe for its job, squeezing out the remaining air bubble. He had the syringe, he had the serum, he had the idea, he had the patent, or he would soon, he had the stem cell line, he had the primate, he had the time, and now he was depressing the plunger. It seemed like such a little thing in the moment, the abridgement of Morton’s freedom. But that is how it always seems to the oppressor.

  * * *

  Jean-Paul Koo, multiethnic American teenager, in his convertible, in the desert, without sunscreen. Who the fuck could tell Jean-Paul anything? Fuck whatever anyone was going to fucking tell Jean-Paul. Fuck his fucking father, for example, his father was an ignorant science moron fuck. Fucking concave-chested medical researcher never-got-outside, never-watched-a-sporting-event-not-even-lacrosse-fucking-never-listened-to-a-radio-or-watched-television fuck, with his bullshit fucking animal testing, his fucking skinny-puppy-fucking medical torture, and his fucking ridiculous pocket protector and his awful fucking jazz music, and classical music, and his worship of Jean’s fucking dead mother, people who were all goo-goo-eyed about their mothers and fathers. Fuck all of them. Fuck everyone who believed in romance; romance was for dimwits. Fuck the priests at his fucking religious high school, which was now the most popular high school in Rio Blanco, now that fucking religious education was, hmm, he didn’t know, like fucking as popular as water, because the fucking ridiculous public schools were fucking nothing but some afternoon fucking classes in fucking automotive repair, while the fucking priests at the fucking Catholic school were all about the meaningful fucking glances that meant God loves you and I’ll suck your dick in Jesus’ name. Fuck the priests and the politicians and his fucking father; Jean-Paul was a graduate! He was a high school fucking graduate who was going to take a summer off to work on his business proposal for a booth that would offer self-designed cosmetic surgery blueprints for needy consumers. He was really excited! Fuck! You could just go to this booth at, like, any fucking big-box development store, or downtown by the fucking bus station, or by the fucking paling salons, or any mall, of the few malls that remained, ghost malls, where they still had the fucking speed-walking contests and the fucking wheelchair contests, and you could go into the ridiculously fucking inviting booth, and you could just upload a photo of yourself, or, if you wanted, you could have a picture of you taken with your ridiculously fucking hot girlfriend, like for example he could have a photo taken with his ridiculously hot fucking girlfriend, Vienna Roberts, and then the computer would look at you in the horrible booth photo, and then you could use some kickass software and the online fucking programming, and you could start modifying your fucking horrible appearance, like your saggy old-woman breasts, if that was what you had, or your obese fucking saggy buttocks, if you were the kind of guy who had some totally saggy-ass buttocks, and then you could use the software for the online simulated tuck of your fucking buttocks, and then you could give yourself a face-lift and get rid of your like ten extra chins, and maybe if you were a fucking balding guy who was fucking combing over your fucking repulsive hair, then you could get some fucking plugs, or you could get some stem cell implants in the scalp tissue that would regrow the fuzzy shit. Even though his father was an idiot, his father had helped him with this part, or whatever other operations you could fucking name, cosmetic-surgery-type operations, you could fucking design any of them on the workstation, like if part of your fucking head had been blasted off by some explosive, then maybe you could use the computer to suggest a sculpted silicone-and-titanium fucking head that could go on the blasted-away portion of your head, assuming you were not totally fucking catatonic, or whatever, like a complete fucking drooling flank steak of a dude, because of the blast; anyway, the point was you could get the computer to design anything, any kind of fucking plastic surgery thing you could imagine, and then the computer would spit out a blueprint of the operations, and then it would give you like a fucking market-rate price for all these operations, like in dollars, or in Euros, or in Sino-Indian rupees, and then it would give names of various participating medical institutions that would perform the operations, and then the computer would let these fucking doctors fucking compete, because when doctors compete you win, and these doctors would offer the lowest possible price for the cosmetic surgery enhancements, like you could go to Bangladesh and you could get your new breasts, or say you were like fucking one of those guys who wanted to get remade as a woman, you could fucking go and get your dick sliced off, and the doctors in Bangladesh, you could just fucking name your price. And here was another idea that Jean-Paul Koo, the graduate, was just now thinking about, and it was another whole level of brilliance, for his business idea, which was like, like what, like a fucking designer set of fucking operations, where you like could take a star, like say you could take that former teen star, what was her name, Phonita, the one who had just married into a sultanate, some Arabic sultan from Dakar or somewhere who already had thirteen wives, or fucking whatever, she still looked good, especially her ass looked fucking hot, and you could take photos of Phonita, whose ass just didn’t look like the ass of a thirty-six-year-old or however old she fucking was, and you could take this photo that was from the government-sponsored national publication known as Celebrity Surveillance Weekly and you could scan this photo and then you could take another photo of your sour poverty-stricken face in the booth at the ghost mall, or you could scan in one of your own ugly-ass photos, and then you could have the computer compare you to Phonita, and it would recommend various surgeries that you could get so that you would look indistinguishable from Phonita, like if you wanted to have her poochy fucking lips, those lips that were always pooching out like that, like the fucking computer would recommend like massive fucking shots of silicone in your fucking lips, until your lips just fucking screamed blow job, or whatever the fuck else, and then you’d have to work really hard to get that perfect Phonita ass, like when Jean-Paul had put in his own picture and one of Phonita, because even though he was a boy, and a macho fucking intravenous-drug-using boy, he kind of thought that it would be pretty hot to be fucking Phonita, and the computer, the sample software he had designed, had recommended that he would need massive skeletal shaving and bone-replacement surgeries to get his hips to look like Phonita’s hips, just so some Arabic sultan from Dakar or some bribe-happy Chinese functionary from Shanghai would want to marry him and make him a sex slave and put him up in some two-hundred-story high-rise that was eventually going to be bombed out of existence by some guy who had a second-grade fucking reading level or whatever. Anyway, that was Jean-Paul’s business idea, the Designer Self, and he had already trademarked it and was working on the patents, and even though his father was a ridiculous fucking pocket-protector-wearing fucking geek, he was pretty good on the patents and the copyright protections and all of that, because his father was, you know, like fucking advanced on the stem cell shit, and he always had legal protections and knew
like fucking excellent lawyers. All Jean-Paul really wanted to do anyhow was just like sell the business to some Sino-Indian magnate from Mumbai and start another fucking excellent business and fucking retire at thirty, so he had spent a lot of time this summer, between when he was working at the salmonella factory also known as Iguana Juana’s and when he was going to see his totally fucking hot girlfriend, Vienna Roberts, on the bad side of Rio Blanco, which is to say the part of town where the signs were not in English and where the car theft problem had reached a new level of total lawlessness, between these two big-time sucks, he was working on the Designer Self, and talking about it online, like on those fucking Pump and Dump web sites, like where his fucking handle was TtlGloblaDom, he’d go on the Pump and Dump sites and he’d say, Hey, have u guys herd of this new major f’ing enterprise that’s got some major f’ing venture cap, called Designer Self, the bossest f’ing biz plan to come down the f’ing pike in a f’ing decade or more, and just looking for a partner for the IPO, or maybe more venture capital injections, and in this way he already had a ton of legitimate inquiries about his business idea, and he would be driving across town, without his fucking sunscreen, because he wasn’t the kind of fucking white person who went to any fucking paling salon, to rub in his fucking whiteness, you know, and he would be yelling into his cranially implanted data-storage assistant, Hey, listen, this is Jean-Paul fucking Koo calling, and I’m hoping that you’re going to help me fabricate the first booth for my massive business plan called the Designer Self, because I have heard that you’re one of the best industrial architects out there, and here’s what I want the booth to look like; I want it to fucking look like it’s the booth that you have to step into to get to paradise, that inviting, like it’s paradise that we’re giving away with this booth, do you know what I mean, like you can be made to look any way you want to look, like finally the inside part of you, the part that has been yearning to be set free, that beautiful part of you that’s been trapped in this body with, I don’t know, like pustules and scabs from your hemorrhagic fever and shit all over your face, you can be free of that part of you, or if you have burns over seventy-five percent of your body, say, you could get rid of those burns with new designer skin; that’s what I want the booth to look like, and I want to know if you want to be the one to get in on the ground floor of this new business plan, because I am willing and able to sell shares as we speak, and then in truth, when he was done with this call, he was practically hyperventilating, which is something Jean-Paul did, sometimes; he had these really awful panic attacks, and he didn’t fucking tell anyone about them, but he fucking told Vienna Roberts, because he told her everything, you know, because that is what a NAFTA girl is for, a NAFTA girl is for accepting you when you know that you have to seem like you believe all the time even though you don’t fucking believe anymore, mainly what you do is feel like you’re never going to get anywhere and that no one fucking believes in you so you have to do all the fucking believing yourself, and that was why he was going over to the wrong side of Rio Blanco right now, in his convertible that got only like twenty-five miles of algae-based fuel a gallon in city traffic, which was fucking embarrassing; he was going over there because Vienna Roberts was the only one who believed in him, and he didn’t fucking believe that she believed, and he didn’t fucking believe that she believed that he believed, and he didn’t fucking think it was going to last, but while it lasted, he would go over there, to Vienna Roberts’s place, and put his fucking head in her lap while she worked on her parents’ plan for a Union of Homeless Citizens that was going to be organized first here in Rio Blanco and then it was going to take over the whole of the Southwest.