The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  How was it possible, Koo thought, stirring in a third molten spoonful of nonnutritive sugar substitute, that he could have loved his father so much only to feel such disrespect and boredom from Jean-Paul whenever he attempted to talk with the boy? If he tried to describe what it was that he, Koo, did, professionally speaking, which frankly many other conversationalists would find very compelling, if not philosophically electrifying—tissue regeneration, the biological definition of death, elective organ replacement, and so forth—his son would, as they say, glaze over, though his own business, this fanciful proposal for a company devoted to cut-rate cosmetic surgery procedures, was not at all distant from Koo’s research. If he tried to ask the boy about the particulars of his emotional life, his ambitions, his dreams, his sense of responsibility to the world, whether or not he cared to have a family, the younger Koo recoiled as if a branding iron had just been applied. It was only when Koo attempted to discuss theories of management and business practice, subjects on which Koo had only limited information, most of which came from his lawyer, that Jean-Paul made any attempt to engage with his dad. Even then, the boy screwed his face up into the oddest expression, something between a wince and smirk, as if spending forty-five minutes in a room with his own father was akin to proctological examination. At times, Koo was ashamed to admit, he lost his temper with Jean-Paul. Do you know what I went through to bring you here to this country? Has it occurred to you to wonder what your mother would think of what you are doing now? Do you not recall that I have a reputation to protect with the university? That I am a well-known figure in this city, and that I view myself as a guest of the university in this city and this country as a whole? These moments when Koo struck out, in his adopted tongue, did little good. He knew this. Even if he felt better at the moment in which he upbraided the boy, he knew that the words wouldn’t register. Sometimes Jean-Paul himself would lash out in turn: You don’t know what it’s like to grow up now! You don’t know what this place is like, the kinds of pressures I’m under! Most of the kids are just out there on the street doing drugs and going nowhere, and I’m, like, fucking trying to make something of myself. Oh yes, always with that word. That active participle serving as an adjective (or as verb, noun, prefix, suffix). What was the purpose of this word? People said this word for no purpose but to buy time while they attempted to compose their thoughts. And that was not the only problem with his son’s heartfelt speech! Just look at the boy! Koo would have said these words to the arbitrator who might have been present at the conversation. Look at the clothes this boy wears! And look at that wanton girlfriend who trails after him everywhere. There’s a stupidity to her expression! You can’t tell me that one look into the eyes of this girl and you do not feel the vapidity of her expression, as though she has never had a day of hardship in her life, as though she has never struggled for anything. When I look at a specimen of this kind, Koo would have said to the hypothetical arbitrator, I see why this country has fallen upon these hard times. Everywhere I see the expressions, the vacant expressions of the hardened consumer. This can be fixed with a pill! This can be fixed with a cosmetic procedure! This muscle can be made slack! This muscle can be made hard! Please wager your hard-earned minimum-wage dollars here on this collateralized debt obligation! These kids, he would have told the arbitrator, are willing to ride the elevator down, until it comes to rest at the bottom of the bottom-most subbasement, just taking and taking, never once offering back. Koo would think these things, even if he never said them, and never having said them, he would suffer with the unsaid, and he would wait until he was in his garage, with his cryogenically preserved wife, to unburden himself of his many cares. What did it mean that his most lasting and satisfying conversations were with a woman who, if not dead entirely—her tissue was preserved—was nonetheless absent from the conversation in every way?

  He had failed as a father, he supposed.

  It was in the midst of this ginseng reverie, as the satellite entertainment downlink broadcast some baroque classics, some musical crumpets, that he heard the sound of his son pulling into the driveway. It had been nearly two days since he had seen Jean-Paul. And even though he had just enumerated all the ways in which he couldn’t possibly communicate with the boy, he felt, oddly, a joy and apprehension about Jean-Paul entering the house. It was just better when the young man was around, and since, most days, Jean-Paul wouldn’t tell him where he’d been, there was nothing to do but watch and wait.

  The traces of his wife in the boy’s smile. His wife’s eyes, those unearthly green eyes that no Korean boy ever had. His hair was lighter, not jet-black. And there was something almost European about the lad, as if Jean-Paul had walked out of some French gangster picture. He loved these traces of familial history.

  Koo recognized immediately, however, that the boy was somewhat upset, even though the worthless girlfriend trailed behind him in some kind of outfit that had no purpose but the purpose of removal.

  “Dad,” Jean-Paul exclaimed, “I’m so glad you’re here!”

  These were not words that were ordinarily pronounced. In fact, Koo was lost for a moment in the consideration of whether such a thing had ever been said there at all.

  “I am very glad to see you too. I was very worried. Would you mind telling me where—”

  “There’s something I need to talk to you about, Dad. We’ve just, uh, we’ve just seen, uh, something, like, really horrible and amazing; I don’t even know how to, I don’t even think I can…”

  The girl stood in the rear of this tableau, which was the tableau of fathers and sons eager to communicate with each other but short on the skills. She too seemed unsettled, though Koo would have been hard-pressed to describe what was unsettled in her bovine expression, which mostly seemed to want sex or food.

  “Please go ahead and tell me,” he said to his son.

  “We were out in the desert. We were in…”

  “Rattlesnake Canyon,” said the girl.

  “Right. Rattlesnake Canyon.”

  “And what were you doing there exactly?” Koo asked.

  “We were picnicking in the canyon,” Jean-Paul said. “We had some vitamin-enhanced water and some cheese. Picnicking.”

  “You are not old enough to purchase wine,” Koo said, “which means that if you are lying about consuming alcohol, you must have taken alcoholic beverages from someone. I certainly hope you were not driving with the bottle of wine open, because you know how these things are taken very seriously by the police, and with good reason.”

  Jean-Paul said, “Dad, please just listen.”

  “How can I do otherwise?” said Woo Lee Koo.

  “We had finished up with the picnic, and we decided we were going to nap a little bit, and we both lay down and shut our eyes.”

  “Were you wearing sufficient sunblock?”

  “Dad! So anyway, we were totally fucking out like a light, you know, and I guess we were, like, in each other’s arms or something—”

  “Like a couple of pretzels,” the girl remarked, “and we couldn’t tell which part of us was which part of us, and which part belonged to the other.”

  The truth began to emerge in Koo as though he were the scrap of photographic paper and this conversation were the image coming to its fruition. The truth emerged and he watched it emerging, delighting in its shape and course.

  “And,” Jean-Paul said, “and suddenly, and, uh, I don’t even know how to…”

  “There was someone there with us,” the girl said. “We both felt it.”

  “We felt like there was someone there with us, and at first we each thought it was, you know, one another, and then we realized there was this other person. And I opened my eyes.”

  Jean-Paul seemed to open his eyes wide at this moment, as if to demonstrate.

  “And I saw this thing. I saw this arm. It was an arm that wasn’t attached to anything. It was lying on the blanket with us. And it was just lying there at first, and that was bad enough.”

  �
��Bad enough that the arm was there,” the girl said, and she came up closer beside Jean-Paul, and now her own hand drifted up toward Jean-Paul’s neck, and Koo watched this, as if her hand were somehow related to the story. The girl’s hand seemed to pause before selecting a muscle group where it would alight. It finally reached a spot at the meeting of neck and shoulder. She went on. “But even that was kind of fucked up somehow, because then you had to ask this question, how the fuck did this arm get there? How did this arm get all the way out into the desert where we were? Did some guy come by, like, carrying the arm? Was some mountain lion carrying the arm in its mouth and just decided to drop it off, you know?”

  “But then that wasn’t the worst part, Dad,” Jean-Paul said.

  At this moment something happened that rarely happened between the two of them, the Koos, had not happened even when his wife was dying, because in that dark time Jean-Paul was too young to know much about the ways of the world. What happened was that for a second, Jean-Paul was overcome with feeling, and a couple of tears overran the banks of his eyes. And tracked lower.

  “The worst part was that the arm moved. The arm was still moving somehow. It was able, I don’t know how it was fucking able, but it was somehow fucking able to move, and it was moving toward Vienna, and it touched me—”

  Koo had sat by, listening to the story, awaiting the moment when he could intervene, but his pleasing sense of knowingness evaporated at this recitation of the facts, and he pushed back the stool from the counter in the kitchen:

  “You touched it? How much did you touch it?”

  “I touched it just a little bit.”

  “How much is a little bit? I need to know exactly how much you touched it.”

  “What are you saying? Dad, are you saying—”

  “I’m asking you how much you touched it. Was it oozing any material? Did you notice anything coming from it? Any liquids at all?”

  “What are you saying? Do you know something about this arm?”

  He cared little about salving their alarm just then. He was thinking about: treatment options and the urgency of prompt diagnosis.

  “I think I have some very powerful antibiotics in the bathroom,” said Koo to his son. “You must come with me. We don’t know whether they will work yet, but prophylactically speaking, it’s worth a try. How do you feel now?”

  “I feel scared.”

  “Besides that.”

  “I feel tired.”

  “Probably just too much exposure to the sun. So you are saying that you had minimal contact with the arm. You didn’t handle it?”

  “It handled me a little bit. At least I think it handled me a little bit, because I was, uh, I was asleep, and I felt something touching me, and I don’t think it was Vienna.”

  “And did you touch it as well?” he said to the girl.

  “It touched me… a lot,” the girl said. “It touched me… all over.”

  He led the two of them into the master bathroom, where, water shortage be damned, he threw on the shower and told them to strip down immediately. There were some expressions of shyness, but Koo would hear none of it.

  “I am a doctor. I have looked at bodies in every state of life and death. Your body, when you do not have your clothes on, means nothing to me. It is just a body. You’re a sack of water and minerals. So come be quick about it and strip off these clothes, which we are going to have to burn immediately.”

  “You’re so not burning that skirt,” Vienna Roberts said. “It’s, like, a designer thing. I got it at the thrift store.”

  “I am very much burning it,” Koo said. “And you should watch out for those clothes from the thrift store; they are not always sanitary. I am going to get some rubber gloves, and I am going to burn these outfits, and you are to take the starter dosage of these”—handing over the jar of medicaments—“which is twice what it says there, and then you are to get into the shower, at the hottest possible temperature, and shower for a very long time. For at least fifteen minutes or so. And you will find some of the industrial cleanser that I have been using there, and you are to cleanse all the affected areas, any parts of you that have been in contact with the infectious agent. For that is what the arm is, an infectious agent, you understand. This is very important.”

  The teenagers shyly began removing their contagious outer garments, and Koo handed them towels, which would also go into the bonfire he was going to make of their garments. Vienna Roberts stood by as Jean-Paul, completely forgetting that it was ungallant to take the first shower, stepped across the threshold of the tub. The shower curtain billowed out to receive him.

  “Have you contacted your parents?” Koo asked Vienna, heedless of her discomfort in the bathroom.

  “We went to find them after we… there was a problem, and so.”

  “What was the problem?”

  Jean-Paul, who could apparently make out the conversation even from inside the shower, said: “We lost the arm.”

  “You lost the arm.”

  “We had the arm and then we lost it.”

  “You were where exactly? When it was lost?”

  “We were driving in the van.”

  “We left the van back at my place,” Vienna said, “so we could get Jean-Paul’s car, and so that my parents—”

  Koo said, “Have your parents operated the van? And are you certain that the arm is not somewhere hidden in the back?”

  “The arm,” Vienna Roberts offered, “was in the van. Jean-Paul taped it up pretty good, with a lot of duct tape, and then we taped it to the side of the wall, inside the van, so that we’d know it was safe while we were driving back into town, but somehow it managed to get free through a hole in the floor. We think.”

  Koo said, “There are people for whom this particular object, this limb, is very, very important, and we are going to have to try to find it. So it would be helpful if you knew when you last saw it. And at the same time, we are going to need to locate the van and disinfect it somehow. This is also very important.”

  “It’s, like,” Jean-Paul called from the shower, a bit louder than was necessary, “we were so fucking shocked by the arm in the first place that we were kind of, you know, like preoccupied with talking all about it, and for a while we kept looking back there, and we were driving, and the arm was staying put, and we were talking, and then somehow—”

  “It’s like it just magically got out of the van, Mr. Koo,” Vienna said. “We didn’t even see how it could get out of there until we were parked and everything. There was this tiny little spot in the back that was rusted out. I mean, the van, you know, it’s an old van. It’s not like it’s new. It’s old. But there was only one spot that was rusted out, and that was way back in the corner, and it must have just crawled out of there.”

  “How did it know, Dad?” Jean-Paul called. “It’s not like it has eyes or anything. How does it know?”

  “Some species of insects do their job by being willing to try anything. They flail about, fly at the window every possible way, for the rest of their life, if necessary, just hoping that one day, somehow, that window will be open a crack, or that they will, by chance, arrive at a spot that is open that they didn’t try earlier. This trial-and-error approach has, you know, been responsible for innovation and evolutionary discovery over the years.”

  “So where’s the arm from?” Vienna asked.

  “The arm… the arm,” Koo said. “I am meant to avoid telling you where the arm came from, because it is rather a top-secret arm, and you do not have clearance to learn more about the arm, nor, in fact, do I. But I will tell you a bit, if you think that perhaps you will be able to keep the fact of the arm to yourselves. Which means that you may not blabber about the arm to your school friends, nor may you type anything about the arm onto your online sites, your social-networking video sites, or what have you. I assume you have not done this yet, am I correct?”

  “Yeah, of course,” said the girl.

  “Then listen carefully. Jean-Paul,
can you hear me? The arm, it seems, is not from this world. The arm is from the planet Mars. In fact, the arm is from the mission to the planet Mars, and from a portion of the capsule, which touched down—crashed, I should say—just outside of town.”

  “Does that mean,” Jean-Paul said, flinging the shower curtain to one end of the curtain rod and grabbing a towel, “that you know whose arm it is?”

  Jean-Paul held up Vienna’s towel, gracefully, as she stepped from it into the deluge. Koo caught a glimpse of her pale, lithe girl body.

  “Yes,” he said. “It is the arm belonging to the man who flew back to Earth from the Mars mission.”

  “That’s his arm?” Jean-Paul said.

  “So I have been told by certain authorities. This is their presumption. Was it missing a finger?”

  “Yeah, and—”

  “—wearing a wedding ring.”

  Koo looked carefully at his son, as if he could, without much experience of the bacterium and its infections, diagnose the preliminary stages of the disease. And with the young people, there were all kinds of exhaustion that they routinely presented. There was the exhaustion from taking too many drugs, and there was the exhaustion of driving all night to a licentious place on the other side of the border, and there was the exhaustion of mechanical, loveless, young-person sexuality, and there was the neglecting of common hygiene practices. This was one of the few times that Koo had found he was able to convince his son to take a shower. The chances were that there was no sign of infection at this stage, no early fever, as with a retrovirus, nor convulsive vomiting. He wanted to continue to keep the young people calm, but he wanted to feel that he had tried everything he could try.

  “It’s carrying some kind of germ?”

  “It’s carrying a germ indeed. Most of the people on the mission to the planet Mars died of something, and they are rather worried about this pathogen getting into the environment here on Earth. According to the theories, the incubation is rather long, and given that this is the case, we will have some time to move to a treatment plan before too many people get sick. But this all depends on our ability to find the arm and subject it to testing. So do you have an idea where you lost it?”