The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  “A depraved imagination,” Larry said. “You sure the doc isn’t coming through here tonight?”

  “He’s taking Jean-Paul to see his lawyer. Jean-Paul has an idea for a business.”

  “Bet he makes more off of it than the old man did.”

  “Koo dosed the animal earlier. And took off,” Noelle said. “He gives a shit at first. But he has sort of mediocre follow-through. Or maybe he just can’t bear to watch.”

  “It’s the poorly paid folks who can bear to watch.”

  “The animal can tell that he’s South Korean and doesn’t take him seriously,” Noelle offered.

  “The animal thinks he faked the data.”

  The giggling contagion passed back and forth.

  “You think Morton is smart?” Larry said.

  “They’re all smart. But no one is as smart as Cherry was.”

  She often wondered, when she was back on another regimen of wondering, Why not Larry, but this inquiry discounted, right from the outset, the fact that Larry had a kind of unflattering mustache, also that he had given in to the idea that guys in their thirties looked most natural when portly and unkempt. These were black marks against him, but still there was a kindness about Larry. His treatment of the animals was evidence of this, of an idea of fair play. Larry didn’t really care about what kind of doctor he became either. He laid an avuncular palm on the backs of the animals, and then, when his work shift was done, he went back to the house on the South Side that he shared with his father. He had a hobby, which was metalwork, and once Larry had invited Noelle over to his place to see the sculptures. She was surprised at the look of commitment and ambition that crossed his face when he showed them to her. Larry occurred to her, in her lonesomeness, and then he didn’t occur to her later on. Like some fleeting weather system. Maybe it was the lot of the human beings in a primate laboratory to fail in their attempts to know one another, because the animals were reserved for a certain kind of complicated relationship, the kind where there was up and there was down, where there was vulnerability and then there was unavailability, where there was the stripping away of layer upon layer of shellac and water stains and self, until the flaws were all transparent, and with this exposure of the flaws came the capacity to brutalize, the capacity to take without mercy, the capacity, in the highest stages of love, to be inhuman, to treat the other person far worse than you would treat the merest stranger; in the laboratory, maybe this love relationship was reserved for the animals, whereas the other human beings you treated with the same disregard that you usually reserved for people’s pets. Larry! Cute guy! Likes to smoke hash! Muss his hair a little bit and tell him he’s cute! Ten minutes later she’d forgotten he was even there. Larry who?

  She came out of the tunnel vision of her hash buzz to find herself gazing at Morton fixedly. Chimps resembled the elderly, actually. Even when young they had faces like the elderly. Morton was no exception. He was the kind of weary guy you would expect to see working as a security guard at one of those office buildings in downtown Rio Blanco with a 78 percent vacancy rate. Not a guy with a lot of big plans. The kind of sentience she saw in the chimps was rarely the kind that she associated with raw brilliance. They had a shrewdness, as though they understood things from appearances. They were keen observers. They knew exactly what they didn’t know.

  Morton was like this, and she tried to explain it to Larry, who had drifted off to one corner to read online music posts. “Maybe he is one of the really smart ones. Someday we should order at least one of these miraculous talking chimps that proves we’re committing genocide in Congo and Rwanda by letting the species get wiped out.”

  “What’s the experimental protocol, anyhow?” Larry muttered.

  “Among other things, I think we’re supposed to take finger paints in and see if he wants to paint anything.”

  “That’s not asking too much.”

  She excused herself to go to the vending station down on the first floor, the vending machine that proved, beyond a shadow of experimental doubt, the relationship between hash and carbohydrate bombardment. While Larry was dragging the paints and the gigantic pad and easel into Morton’s cage, she was buying tube-shaped pastry items filled with creamy stuffing (in her inner ear she kept hearing tube of pastry! tube of pastry!), two different varieties of chocolate chip cookies, and a simulated coffee beverage sweetened with corn syrup, and she was taking these back to the laboratory, all the while experiencing the desire to hide some of these spoils from Larry, lest he take more than his share. When she got back to the lab, Larry’s notes were still on his chair—he had written the word grooming ten or twelve times on Morton’s chart—but he was otherwise nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, Morton was hard at work with the paints and the construction paper. Morton had just about covered himself with red and blue paint, and he was especially interested in flattening his palm against the paper so that he would get a reproduction of his own palm. His chimpanzee palm.

  Larry was probably getting soap and water for cleanup. Noelle decided to risk going in and watching from a closer position. She was always willing to try getting in the cage one more time, even when afraid, and it was true that Morton seemed remarkably docile. She pushed the door open slowly, so that Morton could see that a pasty, hairless primate was entering the room, a featherless biped, and as though he were used to researchers, as he probably was (having come from a private university in the Northeast that had closed because of declining enrollment), he paid almost no attention to Noelle at all. A sign of respect, Koo always argued, before attempting to shackle him.

  “Morton,” she said, “I’ll be your hapless human researcher for the evening. Anything I can get you?”

  His eyes swung abruptly from the paper to Noelle. He held her gaze for a moment, as though he were thinking about how to respond, and then he went back to work, smiling faintly.

  “Would it be all right if I looked at what you’re doing?”

  He made no show to indicate that anything else would be to his liking, and so she approached, slowly. Upon reaching his side of the canvas, as it were, she saw the requisite handprints. There was also some effective abstract expressionism, which she thought certainly would allow him to be admitted to some guild of macho boy painters from the 1950s.

  “I guess you’re into all that drip stuff, huh? You’d probably drink too much, treat your wife badly, and die in a car crash? Well, what about something representational? Like a landscape? You got all this desert around here. Dramatic mountaintops. Night skies. Have you ever been to the desert before, Morton?”

  Morton seemed to pause briefly, as if trying to settle the question of whether he was allowed to mate with her, before returning to his painting. There was, in truth, something evasive about Morton, as if despite his dour aspect he just didn’t want to get into any trouble, really. If he’d been a human primate, he would have had a job in maintenance, maybe in Kansas City, where he would have always hoped that everything was running smoothly because he just didn’t like any aggravation. While Noelle Stern was thinking all of this, however, she noticed that there was something unusual about Morton’s painting. She sort of couldn’t believe at first that she was seeing what she thought she was seeing, and she blamed the hash, which, you know, was a lot stronger than when she was a kid. There was something at the top of the sheet of paper exposed on the easel that—

  “Uh, Morton, you didn’t, you couldn’t have possibly written something at the top of the page, did you? Did you get some rudimentary instructions on how to do some block letters? Because that looks suspiciously like written English to me. You couldn’t possibly know English, right?”

  It would have been one thing had there been just the one word. You could write off one word, or something that resembled one word, as exactly the stuff of monkeys typing, and dumb, which seemed to be the first word, written out with an almost stereotypical backward letter, well, dumb just wasn’t that hard a word to write, you know, and it could have been the kind of t
hing where Morton had copied it down, having seen it graffitied somewhere near his cage long ago, all in caps, or maybe he just randomly learned a few letters from watching online news networks or something, seeing the scroll or the advertisements at the margins, but the fact was, there was a second word, and the second word was broad, so that it was absolutely certain that the two words worked together, worked in concert, because it appeared to Noelle Stern that Morton had somehow managed to write a sexist putdown with his finger paints, dumb broad, and not just once, because he had made red highlights behind the blue of the letters. He’d written out dumb broad twice, once with each available color.

  “Jesus, Morton, please tell me you aren’t a sexist asshole, okay?”

  And then she called for Larry as though Larry were the life raft and she the drowning graduate student. “Larry? Larry?” She called and called, and then it occurred to her, as she was desperately calling, that it was all a big joke, a big prank, and then she began to assemble in her mind the techniques required for the prank, the theory and practice. Noelle was an earnest kind of a person, a person who believed in the omnium gatherum and its principles, and she realized that it was possible, even probable, that Larry had snuck the scribbled words onto the pad while she’d been getting her confections, and had ducked out to let her have the revelation in private, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, and she was so high that she would have believed anything. She had to force herself to find the prank amusing, and she worked hard at it. And she patted Morton on the arm, as the plot and its execution flourished in her, and then she made for the observation room, unsure about whether she was still irritated, and when she got in there, sure enough Larry was doubled over in fits of laughter, and if that weren’t enough, he was eating one of her pastry tubes, licking out all the filling.

  It was a really good prank, the kind of thing that would be told for years and years over beers at that bar near campus. It was all in good fun, and everyone could laugh. Except that when the two of them, Larry and Noelle, went back into Morton’s cage to tell the whole story over again, Noelle could have sworn that dumb was crossed out, or it looked a lot like it had been crossed out, and the d replaced with something that looked like the letters t and h. Larry, his eyes bloodshot, unable to contain his guffaws, until the point at which he was beginning to hiccup, he was laughing and insisting that that was exactly what he had written. But she knew better; she knew, at once, that Morton had crossed out dumb, because it was rude. Morton, she knew, didn’t approve of the boorishness and unpleasantness of Larry, the fat and slightly unwashed Larry, the low-status human male who couldn’t even be bothered to mate well.

  Thumb broad. Thumb broad. Thumb broad. Because Morton and Noelle shared something, something sexy and evolutionarily profound: opposable thumbs.

  Jean-Paul’s fucking ridiculously hot girlfriend, Vienna Roberts, could not be trusted, not in her ridiculous hotness. She couldn’t be trusted not to send out, what were they called, pheromones, whatever they were called; she couldn’t be trusted not to send them out, her ready-to-be-doing-it hot fucking vibes, out into the world, and he wasn’t always sure that he fucking needed to have sex like five fucking times a day, like in alleys and out behind the abandoned car dealerships out on the South Side, like, what was so fucking great about getting naked in an abandoned car dealership, some grease monkey could turn up at any time, or maybe like some fucking swine-flu-carrying poor-person grease monkey, freshly repatriated from the border or something, and Jean-Paul’d have his nightstick in her ridiculously perfect aperture, and then the disease carrier would be like what the fuck, watching them, but that would probably only embolden Vienna fucking Roberts, and she’d be like, ohmygod Jean-PaaaaaaUUUUULLL, all the contractions, like all Psoas magnus; the disease-carrying poor-person grease monkey could tell that something profoundly intimate was fucking taking place, and the disease-carrying poor person would just see, he could bear witness, totally comatose, he would be blinded by the high beams of her wet, convulsing self or whatever.

  Which means Jean-Paul couldn’t always fucking keep up, but you know, if you’re like going to be a successful business owner, and this has been totally fucking proven, like read any book about successful CEOs, you’ll see that they all know how personality, the pursuit of fucking business personality, like this can really fucking make the difference for a corporation, make or break, like the thing with these start-ups is you have to nuke the competition before they even get the chance to start up their putrid low-class operations, and that means that there has to be a fucking personality who is a brand on his very own, a slaughterer of men; like look at those Asian pop-singing androids, they have their militias, like they travel with their own heavily armed militias, and the Sino-Indian economic compact guarantees these militias travel everywhere, across all the borders in the region; they’re like little city-states, devoted to fucking pop songs about cleanliness and obedience, comatose, and it’s a little bit different because those androids aren’t fucking allowed to appear like they have sex, but like the CEOs of the large fucking corporations that profit from the androids, those fucking guys, they have to have entire departments of the company that do nothing but place reports in the news and shit about how the CEOs are getting the freak on, day and night, maybe not taking clients to fucking strip clubs or anything, but you know these guys have posses of wives, they all converted to polygamy cults, and then they just get the freak on day and night, except when they’re calling analysts to talk about price-earnings ratios, stock valuation, and all that.

  When Jean-Paul Koo heard from his ridiculously sexy girlfriend known as Vienna Roberts, saying she had something she wanted to show him, well, it could only fucking mean one thing, which was they were going to have to drive out to Rattlesnake Canyon or Esprero, whatever fucking canyon, you name it, and she’d have some new outfit, like it would be a combination of a shredded pair of army fatigues and some fucking crotchless something or other because she was all about the crotchless something or other, and then he was supposed to, you know, like do the dance of nakedness in the desert, but hopefully on a trail, because otherwise you could really stick yourself on something out there, and plus, oh come on, the mountain lion attacks were just getting like fucking ridiculous in Rattlesnake Canyon, because they kept building up Ownership Units on the mountainside, a good idea except for the fucking economic downturn and stagflation, and massive unemployment, and drought, and temperatures of 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and now not only are the parks basically abandoned, but there are no fucking rangers, and there are all these half-built Ownership Units and foundations dug and otherwise fucking abandoned, and so like every other week it’s some fucking disease-carrying person repatriated from the border, like with XDR-TB, who probably had a good fucking reason for wanting to be here, and that disease carrier was just shredded by a fucking mountain lion, broad daylight, or else it’s like a jogger, you know, and apparently what they fucking say, or at least all the fucking rumors are like okay the worst fucking thing that you can fucking do if you want the puma to bite your fucking head off and roll it around in its mouth like it’s a fucking lollipop, comatose, worst thing you can do is be out jogging and pushing like one of those fucking motorized three-wheeled perambulator things, with your fucking little bundle of fucking joy in it, because for some reason, or this was what they said, anyway, fucking pumas just fucking loved those fucking kids, and what they did was first they jumped off some overhang that you were running underneath because you were so fucking stupid you ran under an overhang, and maybe you were even wearing your headset, maybe using the screen option, and you only had half a fucking eye on what you were doing, and right then the puma leaped off the fucking overhang, because the puma could fucking jump twenty feet in a single bound, and it overturned the motorized three-wheeled thing, and the puma knocked little Junior out of the three-wheeled thing, and he popped Junior into his mouth like Junior was a burrito from the twenty-four-hour drive-thru place; hold those green chilies; I’ll tak
e little Junior here with a soft tortilla and maybe fucking enchilada style with a little drizzle of red sauce; and that’s exactly what Junior would look like when fucking Junior was half hanging out of the puma’s slavering mouth, and then the alarm in the carriage would go off, you know in case somebody would want to steal a fucking baby from the fucking Southwest, or would try to hold the baby hostage, for like some millions that nobody had anymore? Go take a Chinese baby, motherfucker. Anyway, the alarm went off and then Mom screamed, and the mountain lion said, You got a problem? and before he was even finished slurping down the spaghetti insides of Junior, he had his mouth clamped around the head and neck of Mom, who was about to be a decapitated body stump.

  The thing was, Vienna fucking Roberts would get an idea like this into her head, the idea of the mountain lion, and that would somehow only fucking embolden her, the idea that they might be getting into the dance of nakedness down in Rattlesnake Canyon, and some mountain lion would come jumping off the ledge, because there was always a ledge in fucking Rattlesnake Canyon, and it would fucking pounce on them, comatose, while Jean-Paul would be in flagrante or whatever, and there would be blood and cum and body parts everywhere. You’d think this would fucking be enough to kind of sour Jean-Paul, but no, the fucking truth of the fucking matter was that the worse it got, and the more pressured Jean-Paul felt about the whole dance of nakedness thing, the better he liked it. He fucking liked the fucking outrageousness; he was a slave to the outrageousness, to the freakiness of the freak, and CEOs had to do it, and so when Vienna Roberts said, Okay, come over, I have something to show you, then Jean-Paul drove over, like an indentured fucking servant, and even if the algae fuel cost fucking thirty-five dollars a fucking gallon or whatever, he would drive, because it was his money, and he could do with it what he wanted to do with it, and he fucking liked watching all the fucking people walking around with that fucking stiff, aimless posture of people on the street, fucking brain-addled people, giddyheads, like with fucking heatstroke, and he had one of the last automobiles on his street that had a fucking air-conditioning unit. So he drove over, and he fucking pounded on the door, a firm pounding, because a firm pounding was like a firm fucking handshake, and Jean-Paul was always trying to remember stuff like this and berating himself when he fucking forgot, because it was one of the fucking rules of advancement in the era of the Sino-Indian economic domination, the firm fucking handshake; Jean-Paul practiced the unmistakable door knock, and it didn’t fucking matter anyway, because Vienna’s parents wouldn’t fucking be there, because they were camped on the golf course out off Silverbell, trying to teach homeless people about Mao’s Little Red Book and the Sendero Luminoso, but who even knew who the fuck these people were; Jean-Paul only knew because his dad would go red in the face with disgust at the mention of Mao; his dad said Mao was responsible for all the evil in the world, which was a pretty great amount of evil; so he pounded on the fucking door, and Vienna fucking Roberts came to the door, and she wasn’t even wearing anything particularly slutty, actually; she was just wearing short-shorts and a tank top, nothing that she fucking wouldn’t wear any other day.