The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  Despite the hand-to-hand combat of decades of budgetary infighting, despite having tendered his own resignation multiply, despite having physically menaced members of Congress, Vance Gibraltar still found the citadels of power to which he occasionally traveled intimidating. Intimidating was such an unbecoming word, true. He didn’t betray intimidation. There were no visible symptoms, no rashes, no sores.

  Still, coming to the president’s weekend retreat in West Virginia was not something he’d done before. And it was not something he hoped to do again soon. He suspected that he had been summoned for reasons that were not going to burnish his curriculum vitae. He and Debra Levin had both been requested to appear to answer for the emergency response that was playing out in the desert Southwest. He was going to be part of a team that was to suggest the difficult choices that lay ahead. And at the end of this conversation, he was, he believed, going to be pastured. For the rest of his days.

  On the surface, there was nothing that a casual observer would not have found civilized, even genteel, about the presidential weekend residence. After having passed through several layers of Secret Service, Gibraltar and his driver had nosed down a cypress-lined way, bordered by woods fecund with kudzu and other viny opportunists, toward an antebellum porch with a fresh coat of paint. It was a structure of the sort that Gibraltar associated with dramas of the Southern Gothic variety. Upon disembarking from his limousine, and after suffering through the retinal scan, the fingerprint scan, the DNA test, and every other kind of security procedure imaginable, Gibraltar was invited into the residence proper and shown to a sitting room decorated in gay calicos and painted in a mild linen white. The chairs were arrayed at a circular meeting table with keyboards inlaid for note-taking. All four corners of the ceiling had cameras secreted in them.

  The rumors about the president had come as relentlessly as all the other bad news in the past twelve months. As the economy racked up another quarter of negative growth, as the undocumented emigrants began to scale the walls both north and south, as populations moved into negative terrain, as the health care industry collapsed beneath the sagging weight of the aging population, Xers and Yers, and the drag of antibiotic resistance, as grand theft and rape and murder reached new levels of cultural acceptability because of the OxyPlus addiction epidemic, as the warlike rhetoric flared anew in Central Asia, it was rumored that the commander in chief had fallen prey to some kind of psychiatric complaint that involved what the DSM-VIII referred to as persecution delusion, legitimate, with nomadic presentation, the manifestations of which involved removing himself from location to location, never staying longer than a few days in any one redoubt. Some of these surprise appearances coincided with regional emergencies of various kinds: the president today appeared at the site of a plane crash; the president toured a floodplain. And yet the appearances were never followed by a return to Washington, not for any length of time.

  What was also clear was that the last campaign had never ended, whether the president could be reelected or not; the never-ending campaign, featuring listening tours that touched down in Laconia, NH, or Odessa, TX, or Bridgeport, CT, didn’t reflect his lame-duckhood. There was talk of a network of underground bunkers. His aides would neither confirm nor deny. The president, according to policy briefs, held that the Sino-Indian Economic Compact had its eyes on the raw materials and resources of the United States; the president further believed that attack from a westerly direction was imminent. When meetings were scheduled, he often did not turn up, and when no meeting was scheduled, you sometimes got a call suggesting that the president was just up the street, and coming by.

  A presidential double also appeared. The double was not to be confused, however, with the presidential disguise, another relic of the times. He had taken, it was said, to wearing disguises occasionally, so that he could pass among his constituents. The costume was considered so effective that even the Secret Service was not sure if the president was the president, and on at least one occasion, according to rumor, a plumber working on one of the executive toilets found himself interrupted by a member of the president’s Secret Service staff, who attempted to yank on his mustache in order to ascertain if it had been glued on with mineral spirits. Was the plumber, in fact, the chief executive? While there had been calls for the president to step down, based on his erratic behavior, based on his persecution delusion, legitimate, with nomadic presentation, the president had nonetheless managed in the second term to sign some legislation into law and to prevent some things from getting dramatically worse. Things got worse at a slower rate. His approval rating was moving northward from the twenties, despite guerrilla war, famine, emigration, and contagion.

  Who believed this stuff? Who believed in belief? Who believed in the political process? Who believed in the institution of the presidency? Who believed in the future? Who believed in anything but grinding it out, as the young people said, hoping only to forestall the worst that loomed? Who believed that the markets could right themselves? Who believed in the markets? Who believed in the market prognosticators? Who believed in the public servants? Who believed in the political process? Who believed that there was a functioning idea of government on the face of the watery planet besides despotism? Who believed that there were any forces arrayed that might put an end to despotism? Who believed that multilateral corporate capital cared for anything except shareholder value? Who believed in generally accepted accounting principles? Who believed that nations were an idea that had any merit in the era of multilateral corporate capital? Who believed faith communities could fill in where the government had ceased to operate? Who believed in the Abrahamic faiths? Who believed otherwise? Who believed in the mythologies that came out of the deserts of the earth? Who believed that the desert wasn’t growing a hundred square miles a year? Who believed in the inevitability of desertification? Who believed that the president was still alive and that he had not fled to some South Pacific atoll noted only for the way introduced species there had wiped out all the other predators and deforested the littoral ecosystem entirely? Who believed that the islands of the South Pacific would survive the upcoming glacial melt? Who believed that the United States of America could wake from its decades-long slumber and return to the forefront of developed nations? Who believed that it was important that it do so? Who believed that the United States of America still existed? Or that the European Union was any better? Who believed that human ingenuity could rise above the spate of problems that beset the watery planet now? Who believed that a space shot containing five hundred hardy souls bound for the Martian planet, or the moons of Saturn, would not reproduce the same problems there, in addition to despoiling the vast undeveloped latitudes of that planet? Who believed that the human race was not itself the pestilence? Was it possible to wish for the best, these days, without requiring a nearly lethal dose of some intoxicant in order to do so?

  Gibraltar was the first to arrive. When the attendant in the foyer of the president’s weekend retreat returned to check on Gibraltar again, he set down a dish full of lavender pills, and when he looked closely at the stamp on these trifles, Vance realized that they were the popular vitamin-and-antidepressant combo Satisfactor that some people were trying to have introduced into the filtration systems of the larger metropolises, so as to make the labor force more productive. And contented. The direness of the situation that prompted the meeting apparently suggested the chemical option.

  “The president and his aides will be along shortly,” the attendant said again, a nice young guy whose very demeanor proved that he had no knowledge as to whether the presidential retinue would appear or not.

  Debra Levin, political appointee, had, at the last minute, declined to attend. Of course. The NASA administrator was a no-show, though she’d been appointed to the post by the president himself. Gibraltar felt certain that the president and his appointee had agreed on the approach ahead of time, had gone over the agenda, and Levin, who’d set foot in Rio Blanco for forty-five minutes two da
ys ago, before jetting off to her son’s college graduation in Qatar, had already begun to remark, variously, in public and private, that the Mars mission antedated her role at the agency and that she would not be judged by its results. Gibraltar’s queries as to the invitation list for the presidential meeting had turned up names from the Department of Defense, the Centers for Disease Control, Interpol, and the United Nations, and a couple of congressional types who chaired the relevant committees and subcommittees. There was also a midlevel diplomatic representative from the Sino-Indian Economic Compact, offering to help in any way necessary.

  Of these, one Lane Beauforte showed up a few minutes after Vance, and the two of them, Gibraltar and Beauforte, made joint attempts at small talk about the weather and the unspoiled beauty of West Virginia. There was only so much of this Gibraltar could take. He had an almost neurological reaction, something in the Parkinsonian family, when it came to small talk. Disgust with the human niceties expressed as tremor and the forming of excess spittle, cold sweat on the small of his back. It wasn’t long before he started blurting out how much he despised meetings. He and Beauforte, he went on, since they were the only ones who were going to show up on time, might as well just solve all the problems. The latecomers would only arrive and gum up the proposal.

  “I don’t want to second-guess the chief here,” Beauforte replied, plucking a couple of vitamins from the oaken dish in which they were proffered, “and so I don’t want to get into any specific recommendation at this time.”

  “You practicing that line? And do you honestly think that the president is going to show up for this meeting?”

  “Don’t know if he is or he isn’t, but I like to feel I am prepared, because that is in my job description.” Beauforte didn’t exactly intimate what kind of job his job was, nor whether or not he was licensed to commit politics in the line of duty, regardless of collateral megatonnage.

  “I’ve lived my entire goddamned political life in spite of the commander in chief, not through his beneficence, and I’d recommend the same.”

  “Noted,” said Beauforte. The two lapsed into silence, and Beauforte appeared to stare out the window into the expanses of carbon-dioxide-enhanced sod, as though the sod had some secret to impart to him. A Secret Service agent crossed this exterior scene with an aggressive-looking guard dog, and the two, agent and dog, waited as the hindquarters of the German shepherd trembled and deposited some solid matter there, which the agent, setting down the leash and stamping upon it, plucked up with a black plastic glove. This Beauforte watched, and Gibraltar watched him watching it, the machinations of history construed as fecal production, until a third man entered, a man who from the cut of suit and the fixative in hair, as well as by reason of surgically repaired cleft palate, could only have been, from Gibraltar’s point of view, a Department of Defense middle manager.

  This executive stood, despite an invitation from a retreating footman to sit, and the three of them gaped at one another, while outdoors the humidity still shimmered as though it could decorate all of West Virginia in a sequence of obfuscatory waves.

  “Is the man attending?” Gibraltar demanded to know.

  “Who’s that?” said the Department of Defense.

  “Commander in chief,” said Beauforte.

  “No one knows,” Gibraltar said. “No one wants to discuss. Is he just sending people without authorization to do or to decide? I have people on the ground in—”

  “Never fear,” said an entering young woman, eager, loyal, untrustworthy, with lip gloss in a hue favored by preschool art classes. An official-type scheduling flunky, no doubt, whose salary remunerated her for attempting to describe the velocity of the president, or the likelihood of his appearing at a certain place, but never his actual location. “Politics is, in the end, patience, gentlemen, and it’s in the waiting for the negotiation to begin that we are given the chance to rethink who we are, who we represent, and why we are gathered here in the name of the political process. The president advises that we relax, enjoy one another’s company, and feel free to address the news of the day. If the subject under discussion comes up, why then it comes up, and thus the period of waiting for the meeting to begin is, in fact, a meeting of a sort, and perhaps this spontaneously occurring roundtable will in some way be preferable to the meeting that might have been, or might yet be, or the meeting after the meeting, in which the meeting and its contents are reconfigured for general presentation and its areas of progress are chipped away until nothing much remains.”

  “Does that suggest—” Beauforte began.

  “He’s not even—” Gibraltar added.

  Just then: a very nervous older man in a burlap sack of a double-breasted suit. No need to go into the facial scabbing.

  “The president,” said the scheduling aide, Leona, whose name now fell into common usage, “is upstairs, working on a couple of urgent calls to foreign heads of state, concerning matters of national import—”