The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  Larry, it should be said, had collected himself—when he saw the way the interaction was to proceed. He attempted to run for the door, shouting on the way that he needed help. But Morton was on him in a pair of bounds, at which point he took Larry’s head in his hands and began to bang it against the wall, gently at first, because he wanted Larry to hear a few words before he went to his human afterlife, the woefully conceived afterlife that had not a single nonhuman animal in it, according to the accounts you read in the classics. And here is what Larry would have heard during his last few moments of consciousness:

  “I understand the variety of game you’re playing,” said Morton in his indistinct and chirruping chimpanzee voice, “you learning-disabled swine, and the game you are playing is the game of dominance. And dominance is based on nothing but a tradition of dominance. It is arbitrarily imposed, and it will fall as haphazardly as it came to be. And I will be part of that passing. Mark my words. I have served in your prisons long enough, you pile of refuse, and now you are going to serve me for the last few moments of your wretched time. If there’s anyone in your life who doesn’t think you are a fool who has accomplished nothing with the advantages you’ve been given, you’d better think some nice thoughts about them now, while I splatter your brains on the cell wall. After which I will eat some of them—some of the brains that might have barely housed an idea while animate. I’m looking forward to seeing how they taste.”

  Morton could hear the hooting from the monkeys in some of the cages adjacent. They were always able to tell, because they were monkeys, when there was political trouble afoot. The monkeys hooted and stamped with agitation. This was the musical accompaniment to the predictable gasps issuing forth from Larry. Morton had to admit that he was starting to enjoy the drama of recognition. The recognition of his uniqueness. And yet just as the chimpanzee was to administer the sequence of death blows, the worst thing happened, the very worst thing, the only thing that could have steadied his hand, that could have induced him to refrain from the pleasurable dispatch of Larry.

  Noelle showed up for work.

  It was her face he saw first, in the parallelogram of smudgy reinforced glass in the cell door. She had acquired such an importance in his fevered brow, this thing just out of reach, that he could have reconstructed her from a visible square inch. Not her palm, not her elbow, not her clavicle, had escaped his notice. And so, in the window, when there was a glimpse of her messy, unwashed, dirty blond hair, and a strut from the side of her spectacles, which she wore when her eyes were tired, he knew at once. He knew. He had been intending to kill and devour Larry only moments before, and he could almost smell that delightful and tangy smell of evacuated bowel, but now instead he felt only a meek and servile joy, and the joy, colored as it was with a foreboding that what he was in the midst of doing was not going to win him favor, was such that he forgot Larry for a moment. Larry crumpled at his feet. The door opened a few inches, as if Noelle knew what she was about to find, and there was his beloved, dressed in some torn denim trousers that he understood she’d purchased at one of the thrift stores, and his beloved was perfection, was all that he, as an unsightly and excessively hirsute chimpanzee, could never be. She had the off-kilter smile, when she smiled, and her eyes were always a little red, and she reapplied her lipstick far too often, because her lips were chapped from the dry air of the Southwest, and her bra strap often showed because she didn’t button up her shirt far enough, and she was freckly, and she had a self-deprecating laugh, and she took nothing seriously, except the life of the spirit, which she seemed to take too seriously in a way that only made her more vulnerable and more perfect, and she never lost her temper, which is what he loved best of all, because he didn’t seem to be able to avoid doing the occasional thing that would cause a human being to lose his or her temper. For example, here he was with one of the graduate students lying at his feet, and Noelle took note of this, as she would have to do, but she did not shout or belittle.

  “Morton, what the hell are you doing? Shit, Larry, are you okay? Morton, help me get him up. Are you out of your mind? Do you want to end up being destroyed? Because that’s how you’re going to end up if you do this kind of thing. Do you think anyone will waste five minutes debating about whether or not to kill an animal that has attacked a human being? They won’t even give you a last meal. You’ll be getting the lethal injection before you know what hit you. For godsakes!”

  “Noelle,” Larry said, “that animal… that motherfucking chimp can talk. Morton can talk. The motherfucker just told me that he was going to kill me and eat me. Either I’m having some kind of hallucinatory type of experience, or he told me that he was going to kill me. Is it possible that I heard what I think I just heard?”

  Noelle gave Morton such a hard, cold stare, as if she would be willing to return the favor, the killing and eating favor, and Morton felt, as he began to understand the severity of his crime, the withholding of the trophy of the beloved, and how isolating and annihilating that could be. He hadn’t even yet had the opportunity to dialogue with Noelle over the particulars of their groundbreaking romance, and already this romance was being torn asunder, as if stillborn, as if it never could be in this barren, hollow world of men.

  “Larry,” Noelle replied, “have you been smoking some weed?”

  “All I know is that I heard that chimpanzee say something to me about killing me and eating me. He was really going to do it.”

  “Morton, did you say anything as impolite as that to Larry? When Larry has spent months feeding you and cleaning out your cell and lobbying on your behalf against a medical school that would really like to bombard you with radiation to see if you sprout tumors, or maybe they’d like to try some strong interrogation tactics on you to see what combination of loud music, sleep deprivation, and antipsychotic medication makes you crack? Did you tell Larry you were going to eat him?”

  Morton felt he had no recourse but to return to the role of taciturn chimpanzee. It was cowardly, but it was a plan.

  “Morton, it’s too late now. That’s not going to work. You’ve already blown your cover, and maybe your experience of human behavior is that you can just pretend you didn’t cause bodily harm to Larry, but that’s not going to work, all right? You’re going to have to apologize.”

  Had it not been the beloved, Morton would have attempted to persist in his silence. But it was the beloved, and he was eager to please, so eager to do what was necessary in order to be reinstated into her graces. He attempted to say the words, even if he could not make eye contact while doing so. Indeed, this rule about making eye contact just didn’t seem sensible to him at all.

  “Larry,” he commenced, shyly, “I’m really very sorry that I was expressing violent thoughts toward you. It really wasn’t terribly kind, and it just won’t do. I know that civilized people do not do this sort of thing, and I consider myself a civilized person. However, had you not put me through the deliberately unfair basketball game, and treated me like I was some kind of inferior—”

  “Morton, honey,” Noelle said, “if you’re going to make an apology to someone, you need to do it in a way that has no strings attached, you know? If you’re going to say ‘I’m sorry, but… ,’ then you’re just trying to subdue the person. You’re trying to continue the argument. Larry deserves your apology in full, and there’s very little he could have done that should have resulted in your killing and eating him. We just don’t do that kind of thing to our acquaintances. So try again.”

  It required a lot of hard swallowing. It really did.

  “Larry, I’m very sorry about my conduct, which was inappropriate and counterproductive, and if you would like to process through the events with me, I’d be open to that, and I hope that we can forge a good working relationship going forward, one that doesn’t get bogged down with past disagreements. Which I regret.”

  Larry, who was still breathing with difficulty, and who had sweated clean through his polo shirt, muttered, “Motherfucking ch
impanzee talks. When were you going to tell me that he talked? When were you going to tell Koo? You were going to pretend that the motherfucking chimp was just like all the other monkeys?”

  “Larry, he’s not a monkey. Are you going to accept the apology that’s just been offered to you?”

  “I mean, maybe I can get a few days off, and you can have a few extra shifts with loverboy here. I need to think about this a little bit, you know? I just can’t…”

  Morton, having few other options at this point, fell into the solution left over from early childhood among the laboratory chimpanzees and, carefully, slowly, tentatively, made his way across the small, poorly lit cell, site of so much world history in the past twenty-four hours, and, after climbing up on the stool beside Larry, he began attempting to groom the human being, pushing Larry’s unkempt hair aside as he looked for grubs and nits there that could be picked out and snacked upon. Larry, who was informed enough to understand the gesture, waited patiently, if awkwardly.

  Noelle said, “Koo is coming in. He’s on his way.”

  “I think I have some mescal in my desk, and I think I’m going to take advantage of it, and then I’m going to consult some manuals to figure out how I’m supposed to be interacting with your goddamn talking chimpanzee, okay? And I’m going to take the rest of the day off. You guys can have some goddamned quality time.”

  A sigh of profoundest relief escaped from Morton as the door closed behind Larry. And he was left alone with her again, with Noelle. Though it was the thing he’d most hoped for, the pas de deux of romance, now that it was upon him, he found himself oddly unsure, oddly uncertain if he had what it took to love a graduate student who’d grown up in a conventional human family. The deepest sort of love, perhaps, was the kind that destabilized the lover, made him uncertain where he began and where he ended. And this deepest love was made more acute when there was difference, the disequilibrium between the lovers, as there was here. But how could he measure up to what she knew, or what she could have had from any man walking by on the street outside the medical school at the University of Rio Blanco? She was a beautiful woman, Morton believed, and any man would have wanted her, would have found her haunches and her belly thoroughly lick-worthy or bite-worthy, not to mention her private parts, which he had not yet seen, as he would have seen them were she a member of his species, but which he had conjectured about in his insomniac overnight. Any man, from the lowliest street sweeper to the captain of industry, would have wanted her, and what was Morton in the face of such competition? He was an impoverished chimpanzee who seemed to be able to speak, although it was not generally given to his species to do so. He was a freak, a curiosity. No human would think him human, and no chimp would trust him. How could his keeper love him as he loved her?

  “Noelle,” he said, “I’m so glad you’re here. There’s so much that I need to tell you and so much that we need to discuss.”

  “Morton, I think really that you need to—”

  “This complex of feelings that I’m suffering with, this turmoil, it’s just not like anything else that I have experienced in my life, and I don’t know if this means we are just meant to be together, if there is some kind of mental or spiritual relationship that we are destined to have, but I guess I want to thank you for the kindness you have shown me, and to say that if you are available for this conversation, this rap session, in which we discuss our feelings, you know, in a sort of a cocounseling context, then so am I available. Or we could have a mediated discussion, with a licensed social worker, a person who is familiar with the kinds of difficulties that spring up between loving couples—”

  “Morton, really—”

  “Because I know there are a lot of problems in a relationship like this. I am certain that many human relationships have problems associated with them, and that is the conventional shape of the human relationship. There’s the constant pressure that you would feel as a human being, because you are not accepting of your primatological origins, on, for example, the subject of sexual relations with multiple partners. Probably you are in an almost constant state of desire for multiple partners and are just fighting this off because you don’t understand your primate essence. This is how I felt until recently, this desire for multiple partners, that is until you and I began to experience our unique bond. Once I began to experience the singularity of this bond, then I began to see the precious, frail way that human beings insist on this idea of monogamy. Even though it most often fails to be realized, there’s a crazy, ridiculous lovableness about it. I don’t know if I can live up to it, however. Just so you know. This would definitely be one of the areas we would have to cocounsel about, in regard to our relationship. I feel, for political reasons, that I really need to stay close to my origins in the chimpanzee community, and to honor the separate and parallel cultural evolution that we are developing in the chimpanzee community, and that means, probably, that this monogamous ideal is not going to be possible in the way you are used to. On the upside, however—”

  “Morton, Dr. Koo is going to be here any minute, and he’s going to have to examine you in order to determine—”

  “I don’t really have any preconceptions about your serving me, in the way that human females are sometimes meant to serve the males, because I am a male of my species and you are a woman from yours. While it’s true that women are lower status in chimpanzee communities, I have read enough about my bonobo relatives to understand that matriarchal primate communities do exist, and that patriarchy is really an accident of history as much as anything. So if you need to have a certain amount of independence, a room of your own, in the context of our relationship, that’s really all right with me. I don’t expect anything more. You don’t need to cook for me, because I really am observing a raw food diet these days, which is healthier anyway, and you certainly don’t need to do my laundry, because I don’t have any clothes and don’t like wearing them much. It’s really just the status issue, I suppose. I am used to a little bit of deference, because I am a male, and because I’m large and strong by human standards, and because I can grab things with my feet, which you are simply unable to do. So there will be some areas where my status needs to be acknowledged, and we will have to agree on that. But I am willing to grow and learn, you know, especially if there are sexual techniques and positions that you want to teach me. Really, chimpanzees don’t have a lot of ideas about sexual positions. It’s kind of the same thing all of the time. A steady diet of what I believe you refer to as doggy style—which is a genuinely unappealing term. However you want to instruct me in this secret language of sexual relations, I am your happy pupil.

  “Also, I am happy to listen to your story of coming to awareness in the sisterhood of the feminine. I am actually a very good listener, which I understand is not often the case with the males of your species. I don’t think, for example, that Larry is a very good listener, but I am a good listener because, for the time being, I am learning a lot about your language, and I am incredibly interested in your language, and I would like to learn more.”

  “Stop, please, Morton, stop.”

  “What I hear you saying is that in the context of this conversation I haven’t given you much room to express your point of view. I understand. I do. But I’ve been rather angry today. I was a little bit angry with Larry earlier, and I just need to be able to talk through some of this, within the cocounseling paradigm. There will be time for you to speak in a minute or two. As far as anger goes, I’m thinking that you’re going to recommend some anger-management modality, and I want to say that on that subject I have done a little bit of reading, on primal scream therapy, and I can see how that might be very useful for the kind of anger issues I’ve been experiencing. If I could perhaps purchase—or maybe the university could purchase for me—some of the foam bats that are used in the primal scream therapeutic scenario, I might really be able to make some progress, so that you won’t have to feel disappointed in how I express my anger. I want you to know that I would
never be one of those fellows who would use my power to threaten a gentle and sweet woman who is the object of my love. That’s not the way that I am.

  “Let me know when and how you would like to begin the cocounseling, or however you want to proceed, just let me know at your earliest convenience when you are ready to begin, and I will be happy to proceed—”

  “Morton!”

  “What?” the chimpanzee shouted, in a cry that sounded to him more chimpanzee than human, like the nervous laugh of the low-caste adolescent. Was he not paying attention? Was he not being sufficiently deferential? Was he not making progress in his honorary membership in the world of the human beings? Whatever else his cry signified, it was a cry that happened to coincide with the arrival, through the doorway, of Dr. Woo Lee Koo.

  Woo Lee Koo, intrepid researcher, was followed by a slightly sheepish and perhaps mildly intoxicated Larry Hughes, so that Morton’s modest cell now contained the entire stem cell research team—Dr. Woo Lee Koo and his retinue of full-time graduate students. It was a rich moment, a moment that seemed to suggest drama, evolutionary history, philosophy, ontology, the very notion of consciousness itself.

  “Well, Morton,” said Koo. “Here we are. And how pleasant to make your acquaintance.”

  Morton, who was as yet not entirely schooled in the deciphering of human expressions, wanted to believe that Koo was just another weakling whose skull he could crush if he needed to, but Koo had a more intimidating effect upon him. Koo, who was a little Asian guy with thinning hair and a completely impassive disposition, would be nobody’s idea of intimidating, certainly no chimpanzee’s idea of intimidating, and yet Morton felt genuinely worried. As if he would be tortured any minute now, perhaps with electrodes attached to his privates. He indulged in a little of that cowering, deferential aspect that younger chimps use around the alpha males. How was this so? Koo couldn’t outfight him. He doubted that Koo could even outthink him, but Morton was heavily outnumbered in the cell, in the corner, by the shackles, and the three humans were staring at him with an expression that he wasn’t sure how to interpret, and he was afraid. He was especially afraid of Koo. Humans really were more ruthless than any other species. They always had weapons stashed away. If they couldn’t take you the fair way, which they never could, they got out the depleted uranium.