The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  In the café downtown, meanwhile, Noelle and Morton spent half an hour discussing their greatest personal fears. Morton was the one to bring it up. He’d been reading an online advice column: how to have the healthiest relationship, and he’d paid for a download (charging it to Dr. Koo’s credit card), The Healthiest Relationship: Ten Preliminary Steps. Here he’d learned many things. The contemporary man needed to make himself open and vulnerable, to reveal his innards for intimacy with patience and quiet confidence. And the way to make himself vulnerable, according to The Healthiest Relationship, by Deep Singh, PhD, was to talk about his greatest personal fears and his need for caring. Noelle was well aware that Morton, sipping chai latte, was unsettling to most of the patrons of the café, but never more so than when he said, audibly, “All my biggest personal fears, if I’m being honest, have to do with vivisection.”

  Noelle ventured, witlessly, “Why is that, do you think?”

  An incredibly stupid thing to say, really, because, actually, she could never know what he’d lived through, the ordeal of serving as a medical experimental subject his entire life, from the first instant of his primate consciousness (as opposed to his recently awakened human consciousness). His whole life had been about having various electrodes affixed to him, or having pieces cut off, often without anesthetic, or having various things injected into him, illnesses cultured in petri dishes from places like Congo and New Guinea. Morton had survived this only through good luck. From the moment he’d been weaned, this was what Morton had known. If, in his new consciousness, he didn’t remember those early days, with their experimental regimens, he must have somewhere stored up their trauma.

  “Isn’t that what most people are afraid of, when you get right down to it? I mean, there are other kinds of bodily fears, hemorrhaging, having an aneurysm, losing an eye, impotence, infertility, but these are really just varieties of vivisection, right?”

  Noelle said, “I don’t really have any fear of vivisection. I mean, I guess I have a fear of tremendous physical pain, but that’s almost a reflex, not a fear. Mammals recoil from physical pain, right?”

  “Actually,” Morton said, “mammals recoil from annihilation. From the foreknowledge of their deaths. Or that’s my view. There are many animals that are willing to tolerate physical pain. Dogs, you know, are willing to endure pain in order to stay near to their masters; cats, willing to endure pain, just not fear. If they have a reasonable certainty of surviving the physical pain, mammals often show remarkable fortitude. It’s only in the imminence of death that the flight mechanism overtakes. That’s my experience, at any rate.”

  “Do you suppose the arm recoils from annihilation?” said Noelle, because she was frankly a little intimidated by Morton and was, in her anxiety, falling into the disagreeable habit of easy conversation, conversation that didn’t probe into her own life.

  Morton called out, slurping the last of the watery chai, “Waiter! Waiter!”

  “He’ll—”

  Morton seemed to warm to the subject of the arm, Noelle supposed, though it was far from the healthy relationship on which he had intended to concentrate his attention, and this was something of a relief. “Look, the arm still possesses the muscle memory of its host. That’s what you have to understand, Noelle. It knows how to do certain things without fail—grasping, strangling, all the hand-to-hand combat that was part of its host’s military training.”

  “Its host?”

  “Among those muscle memories, I’m guessing, is the instinct to avoid flame. Or frostbite. The arm will not walk directly into fire, and it will not pitch itself into a frigid lake—which probably isn’t liable to happen out here right now.” Morton giggled. “The arm, therefore, does have certain kinds of instinctual activities, just like some kind of lower insect or single-celled organism!”

  “But—”

  “And now back to your greatest personal fears! And remember, Noelle, that I sympathize. I really feel the kind of personal fear we’re talking about here, I honestly do, perhaps more than any other time in my life. I want you to know just how important it is that you understand that I understand the kind of disquiet this sort of conversation brings up in a person when he or she—”

  “Morton, you should really let me tell you my fears before you—”

  She fell silent, concentrating for a moment on a smattering of crumbs that stippled Morton’s hirsute chin. A cranberry scone had immediately preceded the conversation. He’d been attempting to master the paper napkin. He had rumpled it.

  “Then please, be my guest.”

  In truth, Noelle kind of wanted to get away from him, because she found his attempts at seductive conversation laughable and foul. But it was the laughable qualities, at least for the moment, that made it hard to leave.

  She mumbled, “I guess I should say that my biggest fear is being loved. And I don’t know why I’m telling you that. But there it is. Some people’s fears are the silliest ones of all.”

  The hiss of a distant cappuccino machine. Change rendered in all but worthless paper currency. Morton, who really was learning phenomenally quickly, gazed upon the woman he loved, or the woman he said he loved.

  “That, Noelle, is among the saddest things I’ve heard anyone say in a while. And you know I would like to help you with it, and I know that you don’t want me to help you with it. I expected you to say a fear of heights, or a fear of rats, or something more concrete, because that’s what people do, I think. What they do is let out a little bit of the story, in order to throw off a friend or acquaintance. And then they keep the big, scary part of the tale hidden away. I’ve been developing a theory, you know, during the boring stretches of my imprisonment, and the theory is that Homo sapiens sapiens is the loneliest animal on all the planet. This is a bit ironic, because excepting certain kinds of insects and some bacteria, Homo sapiens sapiens has to be one of the commonest, if not the commonest animal species there is. He’s always surrounded with cronies, coworkers, church acquaintances. And yet no matter what he does, he seems to be keeping the one admirable part of himself, his consciousness, away from all the other individuals of the species. Either he is unable to give of himself in such a way that his fellows can understand him, or else he is overburdening them so that they can only wish to avoid him. It’s all the same in either case, Homo sapiens sapiens lives in a warehouse of solitude from which, if he’s lucky, he watches the other people trudging past, and all the while he’s wondering why not me, why not me, why am I untouched by the tender fingers of civilization?”

  “Morton,” Noelle said. “You know, I am moved, and it’s not like I say that lightly or anything, but—”

  “You’re thinking that I am myself an example of the person who asks too much of his fellows, and when this is juxtaposed with my comical ugliness, why then I am just another example of the man who gets nothing, who spends weekend nights drinking himself into liver failure. You’re feeling surges of pity for me that are mitigated only by your physical revulsion. But let me tell you, Noelle, things are different for me.”

  The robotic franchise service module, who had swept away Morton’s empty mug earlier, with a I-have-seen-it-all-before look, brought back a fresh cup of the steaming beverage, and Morton grabbed at it ferociously.

  “We really should be heading out to the valley.”

  “We’re not heading out until I finish saying what I want to say! And you may not want to hear this, but I’m going to tell you anyway. Noelle, I know what I am. I know who I am and what I am. I have no illusions, and I have really only two purposes in this, my second act. My two purposes are: first, to tell the truth as I see it, no matter what it is, the verismo of my life, and, second, to love you, Noelle Stern, in such a way that I no longer have to possess you or saddle you with conditions at all, mental or physical. Those are my two purposes. It may seem to you as though you have a lot of responsibilities now, because of what I’ve just said, as if I’m going to expect something from you. But I want you to know that yo
u have no responsibilities, and all you have to do is to take in a little bit of my love, when you are able, just so that maybe you can begin to overcome this fear of yours, the one that you’ve—”

  “Morton, you know, most people, when they say things like this, they find later on that maybe they aren’t sure it was the—”

  “No, Noelle. Don’t go telling me how I’m to grow out of this feeling, this feeling of usefulness that I have. Look at my biography, if you will. I am a man whose very death has been commuted. If I weren’t talking right now, and wearing these boxer shorts and these sandals, I’d be just another chimp getting experimentally infected with Ebola and being force-fed an antibiotic-enriched milk shake by another workaholic who only cares about his grant applications. Every day is free for me now, Noelle, and even if there is no freedom for me in this economy, even if it is my future to sweep up after the robotic service module in some café somewhere, at least after the talk show hosts are no longer interested in me, I am still better off than I ever was. I have a purpose, and I understand my purpose, and this makes me a better person than I was before. It gives my life meaning. You can’t talk me out of what I believe. In fact, your reaction isn’t really relevant. And now we’d better pay.”

  “The way everyone has been staring, they should be paying us.”

  But Morton, oblivious, slid from the seat onto the sawdusted floor, refolded his paper napkin, and, reaching up, set it on the table, after which he gave the robotic franchise service module a grin and slapped it percussively on the back. “Maybe something better,” he said to that plastic encasement of silicon chips, “is just around the corner.”

  The vogue for jet packs, Noelle told Morton in the van on the way over the mountain pass, dated back about ten years. She was trying to change the subject; she was trying hard, wondering why she had agreed to drive Morton out here, and why Koo had allowed him to go, excepting the fact that at the omnium gatherum no one would give him a second look. And she realized he’d never seen a jet pack, but in online reports and infomercials. She told him: once the traffic problem got to where you could be parked on Sixth Street in Rio Blanco for an hour, trying to get to the interstate, having a leisurely conversation with the people in the vehicles fore and aft, the automobile became no longer the engine of the national economy. Although what truly put an end to Detroit, to a business sector that had been rescued by the government twice in the past twenty years, was the depletion of the Middle Eastern petroleum supply. Old-time fuel became astronomically expensive. Even the electric-cell cars were pretty expensive, since they required a generating plant somewhere in the supply chain. Electric cars, Noelle was saying, also became more expensive than most people could afford, and those little death contraptions only went so far on a charge and could be totaled at five miles an hour, and still there was a lot of traffic, and so people just started moving toward the idea of the jet pack. If you couldn’t get through the traffic, why not go over it?

  At first, it was just hobbyists. Guys in Hawaiian-print shirts in backyards, swilling cough syrup, monkeying with lawn mower engines. So many of these hobbyists were lost in the pursuit of the dream, she told Morton. They’d lift off above the subdivision, jet a couple hundred yards, and then lose control, dropping into a grove of cholla. The Southwest was full of these stories. White guys who had nothing more going for them, Noelle told Morton, than their jet packs. They couldn’t get proper jobs, and their wives had left them. Kids loved these guys. Kids loved jet packs. Search and rescue would pluck one kid off Finger Rock, and another off Mount Lemon, and by the time they’d ferry these little ones to safety, there’d be another one stranded up there. The kids had altitude sickness too. No pressurized air with a jet pack, you know. They’d be throwing up everywhere when they arrived at the hospital.

  “There’s one there.” She pointed. The chimpanzee looked out the window of the departmental van, and he saw what looked like a surface-to-air missile go horizontal, blazing over Rio Blanco Peak.

  There were a lot of reservations, safety concerns, from an air traffic point of view, about the jet packs. In Rio Blanco, in the early years of the jet pack fad, six or seven guys got sucked into the backdraft of jet planes. Imagine, Noelle told Morton. You’re in a window seat, and you’re looking out through the double panes, and you see some guy in a jet pack, with a pair of goggles on, waving. The plane is coming in to land, and this unregulated jet pack enthusiast is gesturing at the plane, taking his hand off the throttle, as he tries to veer away, and then this guy is getting inhaled right into the back of the engine. The desert, the expanse of rose-tipped mountaintops, crimson cloud cover on the horizon, neglected citrus groves, all laid out before you, and then there’s an explosion of food-processed human parts spraying out the back of the jet, down the side of the fuselage, onto the desert below.

  Probably, this was why the jet pack designers were given notice that they were not to equip their jet packs with enough liftoff to get the machines over a hundred and fifty feet in altitude. Not much higher than the highest building in the vicinity. The same difficulties were being played out in all the cities of the West, cities designed for the automobile. Of course, there was a green aspect to the debate over the jet pack. It had to do with the kinds of fuel that were required. Any kind of natural gas, or petroleum-based product, or solid rocket fuel, that kind of stuff was just prohibitive, especially if all you were going to do was help some teenage kid get to the top of the Catalina range without having to hike.

  It was the hydrogen reaction that really allowed the jet pack market to take off, and it was some old countercultural octogenarian in northern California who came up with the technical solution, the hydrogen-fueled jet pack. You didn’t need that much in raw materials, and you were giving off eco-friendly exhaust—water, which is no problem in the desert. So what was the problem? The initial models cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, which made for a rental market, initially, but as always with this stuff, you know, prices came down, especially when the Sino-Indian conglomerates got involved in manufacture. Also, it was obvious that the jet pack was good for border jumping, for felonies great and small, and so law enforcement had to get jet packs too, and anyone living in rural anywhere had to get a jet pack, and if it weren’t for the fact that most people just couldn’t afford them, then probably everyone would have one.

  It’s sort of hypocritical, Noelle told Morton, the way that people in the omnium gatherum, who were supposed to be all back to the land and into inaugurating the new dark ages, all of that stuff, were completely obsessed with getting jet packs, because jet packs were the symbol of old outlaw culture. Like with old-fashioned motorcycles, jet packs were unsafe, they were dangerous, and they used up huge amounts of fuel. “Worth it?” Noelle asked Morton. “People can get anywhere they want now pretty fast, but it’s once or twice a week that you’ll see somebody fall out of the sky, like they’ve been picked off, and I guess some of them have been shot, or Tasered, and then the body parts just get flattened on one of the highways or service roads.”

  Perhaps their price was the best thing about them, Noelle continued, because it kept the jet packs out of the reach of the drunken and most careless segment of the population. The federal, state, and local regulations didn’t work. What would be more attractive to rebels without causes, loaded to the tips of their dendrites on OxyPlus or polyamphetamine, than the idea of flight? They were all would-be Icaruses, heading straight for the sun.

  “And in a way, that’s sort of what we’re getting tonight. There are always all these different mythemes, you know, ideas, stories, colliding at any omnium gatherum event. It’s supposed to be tribal, there’s supposed to be dancing, but what there is instead is a bunch of middle-aged guys trying to loft themselves up over the desert at the same time, and although none of them says he wants to be the guy who goes the very highest, higher than all the other jet packs, it’s like that anyway. There’s always a competition among these guys who had a couple of good idea
s about counterculture a million years ago and now all they have is liver damage, or they are on their third case of melanoma, and big patches of their face have been removed, and nobody wants to have anything to do with them, except at omnium gatherum, because there they can wear a mask. They can go on another thirty years like this.”

  “What does it have to do with—”

  “And they’re going to be the ones who launch the arm. They’re going to put the arm into a jet pack and fire some missiles at it in order to incinerate it completely. They’ve got some kind of remote-controlled launch pad. And they’re going to launch in the middle of some big pyrotechnical display. Or I guess that’s the idea. Always with the fireworks. So juvenile.”

  Traffic on the mountain pass had come to a halt, and standing on the side of the road, looking ornery, looking as though they reeked with some immemorial death musk, were the javelinas. The sage and prickly pear growing there kept them fat and happy. It was as if the javelinas were watching the cars, waiting for the convoy to inch by so that they might resume ownership. Their tusks had a Holocene menace. They waited as the traffic over the pass snaked its way through a dozen or so switchbacks; they waited amid the encampments of migrants, the undocumented trying to make their way south to Nogales. They waited through the fellow travelers, middle-class kids wearing all the right footgear, the goggles, the highly reflective outerwear, all of them foaming at the mouth with whatever cocktail of medications they had managed to ingest. Noelle watched, too, as a helix of turkey vultures next appeared, in the last of the light, and began to swirl above the action, waiting for the mortality on those sandy shoulders to reveal itself.

  “Our plan,” Noelle said. “Let’s see. Let’s discuss our plan. Do you want to discuss our plan? Do we have one? Our plan is first for you to contact Dr. Koo, tell him that we’re almost near the event site, and then our plan is to try to make contact with some higher-up types at the omnium gatherum, some of whom I know a tiny bit, like Denny Wheeler, and then we’re going to try to get as near as we can to the arm, and somehow we’re going to try to substitute another arm in its place. How’s that sound?”