The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  With that, they rang off.

  The problem was pieces of the body, true. Rob Antoine’s nightmares, which were mostly drug induced these days, what with the twenty-four-hour days that he’d been working, had to do with the body, with the remainder of Jed Richards that he feared was going to turn up everywhere and advertise the debacle that the Mars mission had become. In the recurrent nightmare, some portion of Richards was always trying to find a way to write, as if the most devastating thing an undead astronaut could do was somehow put pen to paper, to tell Rob that NASA was responsible for what had become of him. NASA had reduced a fine astronaut, and an eloquent spokesman for the Mars mission, a veteran, a patriot, a poet, a family man, to a disembodied head—because that was one outcome that Antoine’s dream life favored—or to a headless, armless body that was still able to type somehow. With its toes.

  The military had verified that it had subjected the crash site near Rio Blanco, the site with the larger part of the debris, to incendiary devices designed to eliminate any biological material. A controlled burn. Which meant that any mission data at that location was also entirely lost. Rob had advanced in the Mars mission because he loved the neglected part of interplanetary research, not the life-on-Mars stuff, but, for example, the study of Martian winds. He loved the way the winds worked on Mars, and he had promoted a number of studies of these winds, and none of those studies had ever been completed by the poor, lonely astronauts who had gone there to die. All that ancillary data, the topographical data about an undisturbed planet that had been unchanged for hundreds of thousands, if not millions of years, that was all obscured by the human story. And it was all going to get a lot more human very soon. If that guy, that miner who had been found dead near the crash site, was infected.

  Debra Levin stretched languidly and looked over at him, yawning.

  “What did they say?”

  “CDC? They are not happy.”

  Debra, at some way station between nap and awful truth, gave the news a respectful silence.

  “At a certain point,” she said at last, “we have to start working more directly on limiting the agency’s liability in all of this. That should be one of our priorities, along with attempting to maximize the science that is available. We should get out, leave it to other agencies.”

  There were questions Rob wanted to ask, beginning with: Did Debra Levin know and approve of the work on biological agents that was taking place on the Mars mission? Was she fully informed by the Department of Defense? And what about her predecessor, Anatoly Thatcher? She could easily be reporting to the highest levels of government without telling Vance Gibraltar or Rob or anyone else. She was capable of making even the idlest conversation seem like it was material to your annual review. Your career hung on the answer to any simple inquiry. And for this reason he left well enough alone.

  “I’m going to call the guy at URB. Everybody keeps suggesting him, the Korean guy, does stem cell issues. Subcontracted for the Company at one time.”

  “I already contacted him. You talk to him, and if I have to get on the line, I will.”

  The plane had banked south, and brought into view the great barrenness of the desert out the window. The closest thing to Mars on Earth. Rob dialed the Korean researcher while he watched the waves of terrain below him, the bottom of that long-ago ocean.

  The voice of Woo Lee Koo was sleepy and unconcerned, with an accent thick enough that Rob was grateful for his interminable linguistic pacing. There was some getting-to-know-you conversation between the two, and a reiteration of the material that Debra had used when speaking with Koo the night before. The sad truth was that Rob, who had taken on a lot of the damage control out of a sense of responsibility, was now getting used to coming up with euphemisms.

  Koo said, “As I understood the instructions, I was to keep my eyes open and to let your people know if I saw or heard anything unusual in the aftermath of the crash.”

  “That’s very helpful, and we appreciate that. But we need to alert you to what we know now. The playing field has changed. Already. It’s possible,” Rob went on, “that there was a murder near the crash, and that this murder is somehow related to the crash itself.”

  “Please go on.”

  “Since we are unsure about the effect of the relevant bacteria and its infection postmortem, we are unable to say whether this unfortunate mortality has anything to do with the crash. The facts are as follows: there was a mining professional near the crash site, a man who we believe made his way to the debris after it touched down and who was found dead nearby not long after. Our worry is that Colonel Richards, our astronaut, may have been somehow responsible.”

  “How could he have been responsible?” Koo asked.

  “Strictly speaking, he couldn’t have been. Since he was killed when the mission was aborted. But anecdotal reports of M. thanatobacillus infections on Mars itself suggest that parts of the body may continue to function, may continue to have muscular capabilities, after heart and brain function has stopped, at least as we understand it here on Earth.”

  “I have made clear my skepticism about this.”

  “We understand your skepticism, and we share it, but we are not in a position to allow even unlikely medical claims to go uninvestigated. We have the military on the case, and we are trying to fend off the local police, because once the local police are involved, we believe that there will be publicity about the crash and the quarantine. As you may have seen online, we are already trying to balance the public’s need to know with our own institutional needs. What we would like is for you to go out to the quarantine site. To look for Colonel Richards.

  “If you should find some portion of him, and we are able to provide you with distinguishing markings, for example that he is missing a finger on his left hand, we want you to go ahead and begin looking at some of the tissue under the microscope and see if you can find evidence of any particular pathogen. We believe the bacteria is related to sepsis. It’s our understanding, Dr. Koo, that this kind of research is related to some of the applications of stem cells that you have been looking at in your own work, so perhaps there will be compensation in that way.”

  Koo replied, “I would perhaps like to harvest a tiny bit of the tissue, if in fact it behaves the way you say it behaves. Would that be possible?”

  “Dr. Koo,” Rob Antoine said, while his boss listened in from across the empty aisle, “we are in no position to keep you from making a bit of an excision to further the cause of your own science, but you didn’t hear that from me. What we would like to be assured of is your commitment to provide us with any information you should gather as quickly as possible, and to aid in the quarantining of the Rio Blanco area.”

  “On these points, you may rest assured.”

  “Very kind of you,” Rob Antoine said. “And by the way, Dr. Koo, we suggest that you don’t allow Colonel Richards, any part of him, to touch your own skin in any way. We suggest he be treated as a genuine biohazard and that you wear the kinds of protective gear you would normally wear in the presence of a level-four biohazard. We believe that the bacteria is spread only through contact with the tissue or with bodily fluids, not through airborne means, but we don’t want you or anyone at the URB facility to be exposed to risk, is that clear?”

  “That is clear.”

  “By the way, that’s great news about the football team.”

  Nearer to sunrise now, which as anyone will tell you is the right time to land an aircraft in the desert. The light was layered with orange and crimson as if it had been pried loose from the palette of some Impressionist. One of the pilots up front attempted to use the public-address system to announce the descent to the agency director and Rob Antoine. Down they went, into the desert, as if into the center of the story, as if into the remaining pieces of the Mars mission reentry.

  “Good enough?” Rob said to Debra Levin, by which he meant the telephone call.

  “Fine,” she said, looking at the device on her wrist to s
ee messages incoming. She had the typical manager’s ADD problem. She finished no conversation so much as she went back to the answering of new messages on her wrist.

  At the end of this day or the next, Rob Antoine knew that he would be out of a job.

  Of fingerprints the hand began to learn, of friction ridges inborn in its remaining and animate bits of self. Of the beauty of these papillae, of the eccrine glands, and how these were signs of a distant past. If the arm could no longer bring back the memories of the larger part of its missing physiognomy, it could at least take pleasure in the irreducible facts of its being—so oversimplified when juxtaposed with the beauty and complexity of, for example, a prefrontal cortex. The prefrontal cortex could have imagined what was taking place at this moment, the rubbing against the duct tape that bound the hand. But the prefrontal cortex could have done nothing about it, and would have quickly despaired at the effort involved. Not so the hand. Bit by bit the fingerprints began to rub off the adhesive of the duct tape. Just by means of friction. They had no reason to do otherwise; they had no other wish. Part of the simple perfection of the arm, freed from the rest of the body, was that it loved repetition. It appreciated the length of time required to scrape the adhesive off the duct tape. Its friction ridges had no sense of themselves beyond the carrying out of this task.

  In ancient Persia, true, there were those who specialized in the categorizing of types of fingerprints. The Persians believed that there were nine fundamental varieties. The nine kinds of fingerprints were evidence of the esteem in which you would be held in the glorious afterworld: king, soldier, magus, priestess, miner, courtesan, oxherd, undertaker, child. Each class with its fingerprint, condemned or exalted. Much later, the taxonomists of human anatomy moved on to skulls and body sizes, of which the arm had neither, but neither did it know of its dermal papillae. Magus or courtesan? The arm knew only the horror of constraint.

  Duct tape had become a sort of beachhead in the battle for the American economy. The arm didn’t know that a movement to build and manufacture goods here in the soulless townships of NAFTA had foundered in the early twenty-first century, allowing a great many jobs to migrate elsewhere. But in the decade that followed, in order to compete with the Sino-Indian Economic Compact, small boutique operations sprang up. In fact, the first business that was identified as profitable by the federal government was the tape-manufacturing business. A group of disenfranchised union members and some left-leaning professors from the Midwest began a grassroots nonprofit whose goal was to buy up and syndicate tape-manufacturing operations. Since there was no reason for the duct tape manufacturer called Canard Enterprises to secure a maximal profit (no publicly traded shares), it could absorb higher manufacturing costs without affecting the bottom line. In Detroit and in Toledo and in Dayton, the most American of American businesses became duct tape.

  Because of its popularity among politicians and do-gooders, American duct tape achieved a new level of cultural and national pride. Chinese manufacturers of such items as epoxy wrote and published vile calumnies about American duct tape—that it was inferior, that it was unreliable, that it was made from the skin of Central Asian political prisoners—but the regular folks, even those who shopped only at the $9.99 stores, bought the domestically produced variety of duct tape and swore by it. It had been used on the first moon shots and on the Mars mission, and contained in one of the myriad NASA manuals was information on how to subdue a psychotic astronaut: apply duct tape. Duct tape was used by homeless persons in the Southwest to secure their belongings to their shopping carts and to patch tears in their outfits. It could be applied in a state of physical, mental, or economical deterioration. It could be applied in time of war.

  For this reason, there was duct tape in the back of the van that Jean-Paul Koo and Vienna Roberts had used for their fateful trip to Rattlesnake Canyon. For this reason, because it was the preferred adhesive for a country that could no longer afford better, duct tape was at hand, and because it was at hand it was used on the hand. The arm, true, knew nothing about the Canard syndicate of tape manufacturers, knew nothing about how many lower-middle-class families were prevented from destitution by the manufacturing and use of duct tape. The arm knew only that it wanted to get the tape off. And in the time it would have taken to read and comment on the annual report of Canard Enterprises, NA, the arm had made significant inroads in the rending of the fabric strip that was one of the important components of duct tape. The fabric, as though it were the outer garment of a grieving mother, was being torn asunder, one square centimeter at a time.

  A more detailed description of the hand is warranted at this juncture. The hand was becoming slovenly, even dangerous, in its manicure. Duct tape was strong enough to resist the elements, it was true, but it was not strong enough to resist long, unsightly fingernails. If the arm were a woman’s arm, its hand would have been well on the way to becoming the hand of one of those register girls who favor press-on nails in remarkably bright colors. But the arm did not belong to a woman; in fact, it was neither woman nor man. (And had the arm had ears, it would now have heard some fearful conversation among the young people in the front of the van, much of it amounting to conjecture as to how the arm knew how to do the sexual things it had done. Did the arm somehow remember about sexuality? Did the arm remember the kinds of sexual activity in which it had been engaged while it was attached to a body? Was this the muscle memory physical therapists talked about? But then what were the chances that the arm, while alive, had been bisexual, so that it was effective at techniques with both male and female partners? It was really gross, one of the young people up front remarked, that the hand seemed to have really good technique. The other young person agreed; they really didn’t want to think about it very much. Though if the arm had been able to think about it, instead of just doing it, being sexual, the arm would have taken pride in the gift of its erotic expertise.) Its hand resembled, at the masculine extreme, one of those hands attached to a particularly good fingerpicker, one of those folk music archival wonks who have long and unruly hair and who can mimic the styles of any of the blues greats.

  Disgust, certainly, had led the young people to put the arm in the back of the van, where they wouldn’t have to look at it, where it was secured to the side wall of the van with a further surplus of duct tape. Disgust was natural under the circumstances. But the arm, without any consciousness to itself, was more than efficient at the exploitation of this disgust. Many are the living things that find disgust to be their sacred ally. The arm moved swiftly in the destruction of duct tape, with its jagged blues-picking fingernails, and as the young lovers enumerated the kinds of disgust they felt about the arm, the arm steadily improved its circumstances so that, as soon as was feasible, it could wave its appendages wildly, scratching against the wall of the van, scoring the interior finish, abrading whichever surface it applied itself to. For some time, in this way, the hand resembled a wildly waving child at a parade, hastening to catch the attention of any bugling militarist that chanced by. All this would have seemed, to the casual observer, to be in vain, because the arm was still affixed to the side of the van with multiple strips of NAFTA-made duct tape. But such a reading would have been to misunderstand how freedom carries with it a certain mayhem, as the summer sun follows the torrents of spring. The hand, by waving and flapping like a wild beast, managed, whether intentionally or not, to shake loose the first strip of duct tape that held it against the wall of the van.

  Where was the van, exactly? The van was on its way back into town and was passing, just then, the great alpaca farm that had once stretched out beneath the mountains, and from which, when its owners had been murdered by piratas, the alpacas had spread wide into the high desert. The van passed the farm, and then it passed some of the abandoned malls and shops along the road known as Oracle, and then it passed some of the gated communities. The term was an understatement. The van passed some of these gated communities, heading toward the dark center of the city, the unvis
ited centro, the part where most people feared to tread and where there were few vehicles, fewer still that were not abandoned. The young lovers were somewhat reassured. This was the city as they knew it.

  The arm had managed to unstick yet another length of duct tape, which hung like some strange, triage-related bandage from its side, and it was now swinging upside down, like a pendulum, by the last length of duct tape that bound it in place. It was only a matter of time. The first bump in the road would free it. The van swerved around a wreck, a pair of flaming tires. The van decelerated into the right lane as a cortege of emergency vehicles raced past, wailing. The van stopped short, because of the sloppy driving of a sedan in front of it, and thereupon the arm was flung, by the laws of physics, from the wall, and with it a couple of lengths of duct tape yet clinging. There was the sound of projectiles bouncing from surface to surface in the back of the van, but with the radio on and the young lovers talking nervously between themselves, the commotion went unheard.

  The arm then set about its most beloved task, which was the task of creeping. Creeping kept the arm from any awareness of its limitations. Creeping enabled the arm to continue to infect, which was high on its list. And so it began clawing its way over empty cans of WD-40 and soda bottles, scraps of blanket and tarps, a couple of fantasy novels in paperback, until it had gotten as far into the rear of the van as it could get. Did the arm somehow know how rusted out the van was? Had the arm somehow surveyed the vehicle before it began exploring the bodies of its young friends? Did it know that there was a patch so rusted out in the back of the van that you could see the double lines passing underneath? Somehow, whether by process of elimination or by some uncanny sense as to how it might secure its freedom, the arm discovered the rusty, serrated hole at the back of the van, and it began trying to pick apart the leafy curls of metal until it knew it could go down through the hole. Within minutes the fingers were covered in cuts, but apparently tetanus was no worry for the arm, because it was already a field guide to germs, as the young lovers would have noticed had they not been so stymied by the sheer fact of the arm. Tetanus was nothing in addition to what the arm already harbored. Despite the spurting of globules of infected blood, it managed to crawl out the hole, from which it grasped the bottom edge of the rear bumper there. For almost a quarter mile, like something out of an action film, the arm hung.