The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  In fact, that day, her parents were leading a protest out on the square by the bus station. The municipal fountains had not operated there for almost ten years. The number of OxyPlus inhalers changing hands, at the bus station, in dollar value, exceeded the gross national product of several Central Asian fiefdoms. She could hear, out beyond the store, the earnest cries demanding wholesale prices for staple items such as milk and cereal and cheese. The lack of health care in the Southwest! The absence of air-conditioning in the shelter system, which was no shelter system at all, as she had often heard her mother remark, with tears in her eyes. There were sirens too, which meant that the riot police were taking very seriously the idea of the Union of Homeless Citizens. The number of homeless persons in Rio Blanco was enough that a union thereof could challenge the housed residents of the city. Or so her mother said, chewing on the end of a gray braid.

  The door to the leather goods store opened, and in walked the somewhat flamboyant Mark Schott. He was in search of new and unusual garbs in which to array the bruised and tattered nymphets of his oeuvre. And yet his mission had a double purpose, true, because here he was again, working his persuasions on Vienna Roberts, as though charm were like instrumental excellence on the sitar, something that you had to practice.

  “Well, there you are,” he said.

  “Here I am,” she said.

  “Have you considered the work? Have you had a look at it?”

  “I have considered. But I don’t understand why me, and—”

  “I have no motive, really, except that I like to see new faces in my photographs, and when I see a face that I find interesting, I proceed with energy to include that face.”

  “How is that any different from—”

  “It’s enough for me to work in the garden that I work in; in picking the flowers there, you never get to see them again.”

  “That’s a nice way of—”

  “And what if I have a job in the planning stages for which you might be perfect?”

  “I’m considering, Mr. Schott, just like I have maybe considered various other options in my life, except that I’m considering this one a little more seriously. It’s getting daily consideration.”

  “You haven’t even asked what the assignment is.”

  Vienna Roberts absently hooked and unhooked a bustier on a mannequin beside the counter. Men of dubious occupation emerged from the aisles in various hooded garments, pining for someone for whom they could buy these hides. Their sense of purpose depended on their failure. In places of low light, meager expectations.

  “Again,” Schott continued, “you can rely on the ethics of the person who is offering you this opportunity. This is the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, because you have seen my work, and I can put you in touch with people of discernment.” All of this would turn out to be true, but what made the difference for Vienna Roberts was the thatch of ear hair that Mark Schott sported, far in excess of what should have been possible for a man in his early forties. He was kind of fat too, especially around the hips. She could outrun him. Additionally, it was really unclear if he was straight or queer, and queerness was exalted in her pantheon of human pursuits. He reminded her of her instructor in language arts, Mr. McKinley.

  “What’s the project, then?” she asked in a way that she hoped would be perceived as casual.

  In this way was her commitment secured. What a mistake.

  Oh, the words with which to describe her boredom at the Indigenous Ventures photo shoot. Such a momentous day, and yet such boredom. Any model will tell you, Vienna Roberts told friends later, that a photo shoot is a place of almost incalculable boredom. Any model will tell you that the models are dog meat, and a very small portion of dog meat, most of the time. Well, except in the case of the vogue for models who were overfed, especially in countries where hunger was a problem, which is to say most countries (excepting China and India). Models were meant to stand there, and, in the case of the Indigenous Ventures shoot, lick the face of another girl, nibble on her earlobe, and between camera setups these professional models bantered between themselves, Vienna and the other girl, they would say, “How bad is your flow? Like on day one, for example?” “Oh, man, you wouldn’t believe it; it’s like Old Faithful or something.” “And do you have violent mood swings, and do you remind the people around you that these are really due to their behavior?” “I don’t notice that I hate men any more on the first day than I do any other time. And by the way, I don’t think it’s right to talk about violent mood swings because these are concepts designed by patriarchy.”

  And so: the shoot was not terribly interesting to Vienna Roberts, was a disappointment. But it kept her out of school, which she mostly ignored except for Mr. McKinley’s language arts class, where she compiled a list of interesting terms, such as sockdolager, and anaclitic, which she knew was going to be a good word, and what about fegaries, and nixies? It was what happened after the shoot that was of interest to her. During the shoot, Mark Schott, with his excessive ear hair and pear-shaped physique, was everywhere but behind the camera. He was standing in front of the girls, exhorting them with hands that were like birds, swooping and feinting, and he was upbraiding the costumers, and he was hopping up and down crying out for new veneers of pale foundation. He was Vienna’s one ally. But at the end of the shoot, when it was time to settle up, he was suddenly unavailable. Vienna had been assured she was going to be paid, or perhaps, in retrospect when she thought about it, maybe she had not been assured that she was going to be paid. Maybe she had just forgotten to negotiate this point, and this was a reflection of how being related to a pair of political agitators, and living in a tumbledown shack across from the heavily fortified high school, did not result in good instincts where money was concerned. Mark Schott, at the end of the shoot, attempted neglect in the matter of paying up, it seemed, and when she understood what this meant, how she had been shanghaied by Schott and his sunglasses, she found the other girl, who was standing and absently throwing dice across the felt, and she said, “Did you think you were going to get paid?”

  Without looking up. “By Mark? Are you kidding? He’s usually pretty bad about that. He gives you a good reference when you go on to do other things. Mark pays in experience; that’s what he’ll tell you.”

  Vienna Roberts had, when she was in the midst of a good self-esteem day and was able to assess herself accurately, exactly one undeniable ability, often commented upon in her mediocre report cards and letters home from school: she spoke the truth to power. She was raised up to do just this. Vienna Roberts, when driven into the emotional tones that might best be described as defiant, could summon in herself such a reservoir of put-downs as to lay low any antagonist. And it was in this mood that she tailed a couple of the makeup under-assistants in no better position than herself, demanding of them where Schott might be pinned down, only to be told that Schott was well on his way to another shoot. When the assistants were asked where this next location was, they admitted that the next location was an airplane hangar outside of town. And when asked about the particulars of the next project, the under-assistants looked warily at each other and one of them whispered to Vienna Roberts that the product that was being photographed next was the Pulverizer.

  “What’s a Pulverizer?”

  “A Pulverizer,” said the under-assistant of eyeliner and rouge and self-paling creams, “has to be seen to be understood.”

  She hitched a ride out with them. It was not that the under-assistants, who were driving an algae-powered van that was so far beyond its 200,000 mile checkup that it could have quit at any moment, and which was not possessed of air-conditioning, wanted to bring along a churlish young leather goods store employee with delusions of adulthood, but perhaps the under-assistants, like all good people, favored stories in which the downtrodden have their moment of speaking the truth to power. The van had no reliable shock absorption, and so the conversation pixilated as though being run through an old eight-millimeter film projector. />
  “You know Mark is a really generous man, right?” said the one under-assistant, whose assumed name was Orion. “He’s really involved with all the border charities, and with border groups that are about trying to increase awareness of the unique culture of the border area. He helps a lot of border jumpers across. And he pays off a lot of people to make things right when there’s a danger of slavery. So he’s a good man. And it’s not like he really mistreats us, because he is doing so much good. And if he uses an economic model that’s about barter or payment in services, that doesn’t mean he’s trying to steal. And I don’t know if he told you this, but if you’re sick or something, he can lay his hands on you.”

  “I’m sure he’d be happy to.”

  Orion said, “He cured Mitchell’s chlamydia.”

  “But did he cause the chlamydia too?”

  “You aren’t talking seriously,” Orion said.

  Mitchell, it turned out, was the other assistant. Mitchell nodded supportively.

  “When he cured the chlamydia, he said he could also do spider veins, alopecia, and canker sores.”

  “Alopecia?”

  The airstrip where the shoot was to take place was located at the abandoned Rio Blanco International Airport. That airport was meant, in a different time, to connect the city with the affluent coca-producing regions to our south. During the Panama Consensus, in which it was held that taxing coca and allowing limited consumption would ease the cost of drug interdictions that the NAFTA ruling body could no longer bankroll, Rio Blanco had appeared to be in a good position to benefit. Longer runways were paved, additional terminals built, a rail link to the city was pondered. But then the political winds changed direction, and the Panama Consensus was labeled appeasement, and now the airport lay mostly abandoned, but for freight carriers who came in one end, off-loaded, and got as quickly out of the lawless Southwest as they could. It was here, in hangar number six, that Vienna Roberts, when she ought to have been at field hockey practice, witnessed a demonstration of the Pulverizer.

  It seems, in retrospect, that the Pulverizer was a quaint piece of machinery, not at all as advanced as she might have expected. But in hangar number six, a Pulverizer was hooked up to a standard-issue wrist assistant, its nanoprocessors and online resources, and this computing power was attached to a harness, which was fashioned of a black synthetic rubber material and doubtless manufactured in a sweatshop somewhere in the Sino-Indian world. Across the front of the harness was affixed the Pulverizer itself, which, Vienna observed, was a long, retractable metal antenna, at the end of which was a large rubber missile in the graduated bulb shape that was suitable for, well, a certain consenting-adult type of activity, and this harness was, it appeared, being worn by the same girl who had been Vienna’s gambling pal at the Indigenous Ventures shoot. What she was going to Pulverize, in fact, was a young Hispanic boy of unimpeachable comeliness, who apparently needed to make big money fast. This was Mark Schott’s beneficent way of insuring that the Latino American boy was not pressed into wage-free service down in more tropical latitudes. In fact, since it was a still photograph, this young man didn’t have to get Pulverized. He just had to look willing to be Pulverized, while Vienna’s friend was meant to look willing to do whatever it took. All this for a well-funded online-shopping emporium that specialized in such things. Well, as her parents often pointed out, it was the twelfth quarter of recession.

  The Hispanic boy wore some kind of wireless skin-response monitor of his own, one that assessed particular kinds of arousal, based on pulse, body temperature, blood pressure, vocalizations, and so forth, or this was what Vienna later learned in the literature. A voice on the set shouted Quiet, please! The generator hummed. The Pulverizer made a satisfying noise when it began. It sounded like one of those household cleaning robots, or maybe like an antique windup toy. Flash photography commenced. Before long, everyone on the shoot was sweating and furiously rehydrating, and the Pulverizer, which was a little balky in temperatures at which asphalt routinely melted, was sometimes Pulverizing, and sometimes it was looking more like a Wilterizer. It was in the midst of a temporary malfunction, when Mark Schott called Setup number five!, that Vienna got close to the man, close enough to do what had to be done, close enough to bring herself to the attention of the assembled. She remarked, in due course, about how it was not professional, given everything that Schott had said to her in the store, that he would just leave her to fend for herself without even pursuing the matter of compensation, which was a word she often heard her mother use. A worker had nothing to give, Vienna Roberts said, stealing lines from broadsides that were often lying around the house, but her labor, and her labor was a dignified thing, a thing worthy of respect, and when an employer exploited that labor, why that was as good as a declaration of war; that was part of the imperial menace that had brought this country to its knees, that had made a once-proud people weak, soft; many were the decades, many were the dark days of history when the oppressor would pry loose from the unlucky multitudes their precious labor, keeping for himself the coffers of minted currency that rightfully belonged to the people—

  Schott caved. For her trouble, he said, she was welcome to the Pulverizer.

  It was the fourth consecutive round-the-clock shift for many if not all at Mission Control. There were facilities people, janitors and HVAC experts, there were even some cafeteria dishwashers who had remained on-site. There were the numerous Mars mission department heads and subdepartment heads. They were all here, around the clock, beards grown out, slips showing. So much halitosis, so much body odor. All of these NASA employees were camped in front of their screens, whether personal or wall-mounted, in the cafeteria, in the control room, as the monitors documented the reentry, the ERV containing Colonel Jed Richards as it neared the edge of the Earth’s atmosphere. The world had its news cycles, its narcotic game shows, its sports pages, its violent hot spots, all of which had come to eclipse the Mars mission, as though the billions and billions of light-years beyond this dust mote where we lived were of no consequence. Not so among the employees of NASA. They had given up their lives and their families to live the Mars mission.

  Mission Director Rob Antoine’s sleeplessness was of such magnitude that if you had told him that there were little green men in the capsule with Colonel Richards, in the last hours before reentry, he would not have batted a heavy-lidded eye. In fact, Antoine would have attempted to execute message discipline by describing the appearance of these green men as interplanetary mutual interfacing, or focused coevolutionary exchange. In fact, Antoine saw indeterminate mammalians crawling all around his office corners. The rest of the team fared little better.

  At some point in midafternoon, he found himself in the men’s room, and he took the opportunity to despair about his thinning hair. He was a man of systemic reiterations. He looked at opportunities for failure and then he worried at them, like the polar bear in the cage whose neurotic steps become perfectly metronomic. Pool, ball, rock ledge, pool, ball, rock ledge, fish. Antoine saw the thinning hair, heard the voice of his ex-wife telling him that the combing over was pathetic, that it looked like topiary, and still his hand seized upon the brush, and the brush brushed up the forelock and over the shiny bald part of his head, as if powerless to do otherwise.

  Three days now since Colonel Jed Richards had turned the video camera on a certain spot in the capsule that revealed absolutely nothing. An empty part of the capsule. A bank of onboard monitors. That was it. The attendant question, as Antoine saw it, and this had been the focus of much of his thinking when his thinking was capable of being focused, involved the course of Richards’s infection with M. thanatobacillus. Or lack thereof. If Richards was still alive, why didn’t he simply turn off the video? Antoine had been an early believer of the theory that Richards had shoved the video camera out of reach, to get it away from his face, to deny Earth its final attempt to consume images of the return of its heroic explorer. Antoine had promoted this theory as a sort of impulsive mac
hismo interpretation. And yet the only evidence that Richards was still alive in the capsule was the life-support-systems monitor that indicated the presence of something at 96.6 degrees Fahrenheit. A pulse and respiration could be faintly heard.

  Three days of video feed. It gave you a lot of time to think. It was easy to get distracted by the relentlessness of that image. For example, Antoine had to admit, among his other foibles, that he tolerated, even revered, extremely boring things, boring art, boring music, boring film, televised golf. He had a wall-sized monitor in his home office, one of those total-wall guys, and he liked to loop footage from the original Mars explorer missions, grainy, amateurish footage from the rovers. He’d leave it up there for days at a time, while he was doing paperwork or realphabetizing books. Antoine would even, when trying to solve vexing interpersonal problems, watch the Mars rover footage. Mars was one of the truly boring places. It was matched only by Uranus. The guys working on the Uranus explorer craft were excited when there was a cloud on Uranus. It happened very rarely.

  Antoine watched Mars while his wife was leaving him, and he watched Mars while his kids were packing up, and he watched Mars, sometimes, while he was brushing his forelock thirty times or when he was folding his socks. He bought socks in twelve-packs, in twelve-packs of twelve-packs.