The Four Fingers of Death

  In the van, the young lovers found themselves meanwhile improved. The satellite radio was on, and the radio was a comfort, because it was often staffed by people from the milieu of the young—sullen, underemployed middle-class people with violently passionate opinions. This while the arm clung to the bumper, as bits of its protuberant ulna and its supinator were scorched against the pavement. But since the arm had no nerve center, its nerves fired only haphazardly, with a kind of bittersweet nostalgia. It was afraid of nothing, and no pain bothered it. It hung on not because it was waiting for the perfect time to let go, but just because. Because there were only so many approaches to the world, grasping and scrabbling being two of them. Given the chance, occasionally, to cling with single-minded tenacity, the arm did so. But when the van came to a stop at a traffic light, somewhere around the 6000 north block, the arm dropped off and rolled like a tossed newspaper of old until it found itself by the side of the road. Freed from confinement.

  Not distant, at least for those who were able-bodied or who had access to a vehicle, lay the Ina Estates, one of the most exclusive gated communities in the Rio Blanco area. Its red adobe was repainted every other year by repeat offenders among the would-be emigrant population. Following a pattern made popular in the early part of the century, the Ina Estates had actually seceded from Rio Blanco. The estates refused to pay taxes to the city proper, and since they had their own police and security, the city had not yet mustered the resolve to call in the National Guard. Ina Estates had its own school, its own development agency, a weekly farmers’ market, and a library that thoroughly vetted its collections. There was even a helipad, so that if the Ina Estates needed to lock the gates in order to prevent contact with the unruly region around it, it could do so and still fly in locally grown produce.

  The Ina Estates, that is, were waiting it out. Waiting out eight consecutive years of a constricting gross domestic product, seven years of declining employment, which now stood at a bracing 17 percent, seven years of inflation and ballooning national debt, six and a half years of declining college enrollment, rising numbers in larceny, in particular grand theft auto, rising numbers of violent crimes, rapes and murders (and especially rising numbers of murders of strangers), increases in every kind of drug use, in vagrancy, in homelessness, in emigration. The Ina Estates, and the other city-states like it, were about waiting all this out, about awaiting another American century, in the unlikely event that one should present itself. The estates could handle a few foreclosures, since they had saved well in the flush days, and since no man or woman was allowed to purchase a unit without sufficient savings to cover the cost of the mortgage at present. Things being what they were, however, the Ina Estates could not always insure that its employee base was up to the task, since these were hard times for wage earners. The regional workforce was noteworthy for its hopelessness, and the security guy out front of the Ina Estates, loitering on his personal transporter, was no exception. The security guy, André, had been speed-dialing his ex-girlfriend, while trying not to overturn his vehicle or to disturb its gyroscope, to say that he really would try, he really would try, he was desperate to try to quit playing around with a certain multiuser virtual environment known as Tajikistan. He was going to give it up, he was going to give it up, he swore, and it was all because he had himself seen things in the tribal areas that no man should see.

  Because he was making solemn oaths, he was not using the handheld monitor that purported to give heat signatures of intruders, such as the vole or the bobcat. It was true that the arm probably had a meager heat signature, because with the exception of the septic battalions coursing through it, there was very little about the arm that was alive in the conventional sense. Furthermore, André, had he been scanning the area in front of himself, would have been looking for some kind of conspiracy of drug-addled men in their twenties, the kind of guys who temporarily believe that the smash and grab is the only way to live. For these reasons, André failed to notice the arm.

  The first house on the corner belonged to the Neilsons. Aristotle Neilson, in his midfifties, had been a prominent politician in Rio Blanco, rising to the level of deputy mayor before his stripper scandal. Neilson’s particular flavor of stripper scandal was not terribly new, nor particularly shocking. He liked Catholic schoolgirl outfits on his consorts, though he was always scrupulous about making sure that these professionals were of age. His wife stood by him during his tearful resignation. Since then, Aristotle had served quietly as a freelance accountant for corporations. He rarely left the house.

  In any conventional horror story, Neilson’s situation would be suffused with karmic resonances. He had, himself, elected to obtain the services of uniform-wearing exotic dancers. No one had made him do it. In the conventional horror story, therefore, he deserved what was coming. In these pages, however, he didn’t deserve what was coming, and the fact that the arm had made it under the gate and into the Ina Estates without any trouble, without being run over by any onrushing vehicle, and was now making its way across the gravel lawn and rock garden that were features of the Neilsons’ comfortable property, this was all owing to chance, sheer systemic chance. The arm was not karmic repayment, not about guilt, not about retribution. Chance, in this story, is a much harsher taskmaster than the Old Testament retributive theologies.

  In order to prove that Aristotle Neilson, named after the Greek philosopher by a mother who liked orderliness, didn’t in any way deserve what was about to happen to him, and because it’s unfair to kill a character who is not fully developed, we must pause here briefly to note a couple of the finer things about Aristotle Neilson, who at the moment that the arm was rubbing off its epidermis hauling itself over the rocks in the front yard was looking at the stamp collection he’d assembled as a boy. Aristotle Neilson had extremely small eyes, beady little things, and he knew it. This was, in fact, one of many reasons that Aristotle had never quite believed in his wife’s love, though she tried and tried to nurture this sensation by feting every birthday and by repetitively intoning that there was no husband in the Southwest more generous and helpful than he. On the philanthropic front, despite his crimes, Aristotle Neilson continued anonymously sponsoring college education for kids from the Native American reservations. He always went to see the graduations of his Native American kids who made it all the way through, and he always reminded them at some point in their educations that English composition was a really excellent class if you got a good instructor. Aristotle Neilson had no children of his own, owing to a sterility that had gone undiscovered, ironically, until his ambivalence about child rearing was past.

  A further list of the poignancies of Aristotle Neilson’s life could go on and on, but, under the circumstances, time was short. In the Ina Estates, owing to the fact that there was security outside the walls of the campus, people often left their doors open and their cars unlocked. It wasn’t really a problem for the arm to secure an entrance into the Neilson residence. Mrs. Neilson, who had completely overcome the legacy of her husband’s political self-destruction by throwing herself into an administrative position at a day care center in town, was not at home. It was only Aristotle on the premises. Aristotle Neilson, plenty satisfied with his anonymity, with the absolute lack of interest on the part of his neighbors. It was only recently that the very serious episodes of depression, variants on that time-honored DSM-VIII listing, depression as a result of public indignity, had begun to lift. He was idly flipping through some of the sheets of stamps that he had collected as a boy in the state of Oregon, where his father had been a middle manager with the postal service. (This was before stamps were abolished entirely.) In particular, Aristotle was looking at a sequence of stamps entitled Legends of Jazz, and as he looked at these fanciful and beautiful designs, he was also wearing a headset that played one of the satellite stations, and because he could hear nothing, therefore, he could not hear the arm, which had launched itself like a shipwrecked sailor onto some of the old-fashioned books on Aristotle’
s old-fashioned bookshelves, where the arm was managing to slide erratically from one row of books to another, not without dangling occasionally, sometimes by a finger or two, and doing so while dripping the occasional Pollockian spatter on Aristotle’s Mexican tile floor. In the time before the arm got to Aristotle, he did not stop to consider why call girls in Catholic school uniforms had such an attraction, because that would have occasioned too tidy a dispatch for Aristotle Neilson. (The arm flung itself from a shelf full of old encyclopedias onto the right-most edge of Neilson’s desk, which was covered with hard-copied files of his clients in the accounting consultancy, dislodging a couple of these files so that they toppled and spilled some of their trade secrets.) Neilson would have claimed not to know the answer to this question (of schoolgirl outfits), had he been able, in some vulnerable and unthreatening circumstance, even to address it. Perhaps, say, he had been in the steam room at the gymnasium at the Ina Estates with Irving Bogle, a lawyer friend who’d had business before the city of Rio Blanco and who had seen the denouement with the hookers as an entrapment designed to remove a politician unprotected by major benefactors. Let’s say that Bogle and Neilson were in the steam room, and Bogle, after a long silence, had asked the question:

  “Ari, what was the deal with the schoolgirl outfits, anyway? You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to. Hell, I probably wouldn’t answer it myself. But every now and then I wonder if it wouldn’t help a little bit to talk about this stuff.”

  In the steam room, in the sheets of vapor, the two of them were visible and invisible to each other, and that was how they liked it. They liked some privacy and dignity in the revealing of the body’s failing. Few were the guys who still strode into the steam room with their obesity hanging about them like a fashion statement.

  Aristotle, in the mists of that morning, might have said to Bogle, “You know, it’s a question I’ve wanted to answer, but the truth of the matter is I’ve never been sure. I mean, between you and me, I chased after some skirt, Irving, because in a certain time of my life chasing after some skirt just made me feel vital and alive, but now that it’s later in the day, I kind of feel that the chasing was never about beauty at all. I went to one of those schools in Portland where they mandated uniforms for the kids. That’s how it was. Did I have such a great time in school? Not really. No one much liked me, because I had these great big ears and these very small eyes. I wasn’t a total pariah. I wasn’t that kid who never had a single friend or cowered in the corner. But I was constantly trying to get close to these girls. Only problem was that the pretty girls, the ones who hiked up the skirts of their uniforms or whatever, they were the cruelest ones in the yard, the cruelest ones at recess. Maybe, as a therapist suggested once or twice, wanting the one thing that would have saved me from social exile, which was the one thing that I couldn’t ever have—”

  How could the arm leap, when the arm had no legs with which to leap? It must have found some kind of ledge, some plinth at the rear of the desk, from which to fling itself, maybe that area beside the workstation where there were a number of accountancy texts, a few reference books. Maybe, in the reverie of stamp collecting, the reverie of the moment, the arm had taken advantage of Neilson. Perhaps it was simply trying to climb up into the window to see the last of the sunrise, which was, as it often was in the smoggy, dusty valley beneath the Santa Catalinas, arresting, and running afoul of the window there, it turned and fell on the man at the desk, in a sinister rage. Maybe that was how the arm came to fly at his throat, digging in a couple of its razor fingernails just above the Adam’s apple, drawing blood, and then doing the best it could, immediately, to close off Neilson’s airway. The condition is known as hypoxia, as you may know, but in this case the route was asphyxia via compression of the trachea. Time to unconsciousness is fifteen or twenty seconds in many cases. Once the arm was attached to Neilson’s throat, he naturally leaped up from the ergonomically designed desk chair and flung this chair back behind him, grabbing at the arm. His appearance during the ignominious episode of strangulation would have seemed comical to any observer; it would have seemed as though Neilson were holding the arm up to his own neck, when in fact he was trying to dislodge the fell thing, all while turning at first red and then a little bit blue, exertion demanding more oxygen, air supply rapidly dwindling. Neilson then stumbled backward over the chair and fell onto his right side, and his body began the thrashing and trembling that often characterizes manual strangling. This would perhaps have been enough to fling off the disembodied arm, were it not busy crushing the larynx and several of the bones in Neilson’s neck. This is the sign of a first-rate strangler. In general, a strangler must be able to overpower his victim entirely to achieve such marked results. Well within the fifteen-second window, therefore, Neilson was unconscious, if not actually paralyzed from the neck down. The restriction of blood flow caused brain death rapidly thereafter. Since the arm didn’t know how long it took to strangle a man, the arm didn’t know when to let go, so the arm clutched and strangled until its muscles were no longer capable of the activity. In Neilson’s case, this took almost five minutes, and in those five minutes there were all kinds of lacerations and contusions and worse that were visited upon the area of his neck. The arm waited and it punctured, and then, as if it had changed its mind about the whole business, it slid across the office floor, which was connected to a dining room and a pantry through a long, gently lit hallway in Mexican tile, and down this hall the arm went, and into the kitchen, trailing bloody smudges and septic ooze. In the kitchen, it bumped around various cabinets and baseboards, leaving more evidence of its crime, leaving so much evidence of the crime that the initial police reports would worry about the murder being multiple.

  After blundering for the better part of an hour, the arm managed to push open a screen door in the the kitchen, one that led out back to where the refuse cans were stored. This was directly adjacent to the backyard of the Neilsons’ neighbor Tad Sklar, one of the few people in the Ina Estates that the Neilsons didn’t like. Sklar’s golf cart was parked by his garbage cans, and what the arm did, with uncanny instinct, was climb into the back of the golf cart and get down underneath the front seat, on the passenger side—just before Tad Sklar headed out to the solar-powered mini-golf emporium up the road from the Ina Estates. Sklar needed practice on his short game.

  The arm, in the next hours, changed venues at an alarming pace, almost as if it had preconceptions about vectors of contagion. The following represents only a partial list of its many addresses: at the mini-golf emporium, the arm all but levitated itself over some cyclone fencing. It landed in the parking lot of a storefront devoted to adult novelties. The adult novelties business stocked a number of items that looked a great deal like the arm, and the goo that trailed after the arm would not have been out of place on a number of the frequenters of that place of business, who were occasionally flecked with excrescences owing to a lack of medical insurance with which they might have been treated. The arm managed again to haul itself into a van parked out front. The adult novelty wholesaler’s van was being unloaded at the time. It was possible that the arm somehow remembered its earlier van ride and had come to believe that vans were the preeminent variety of travel in the post-capitalist world. Fortunately for the arm, the wholesaler of rubber goods wouldn’t have noticed the rotting flesh of the arm among the plastic-wrapped wares, and didn’t, and from there the arm therefore managed to ride back into Rio Blanco itself, into the city limits, where it disembarked at a Mexican drive-thru restaurant while the wholesaler was relieving himself by a dumpster. The arm then terrified a pair of stray cats that loitered beneath the picnic table nearby. It was here that the dread appendage reclined for a long while.

  Biology would seem to indicate that at some point the arm would be thoroughly consumed by illness, its raw materials depleted. Even death, as a process, is not eternal, especially in the presence of caseous necrosis, in which the remaining cellular material starts to look like cott
age cheese. However, a homeless gentleman named Miguel, an innocent, came by the drive-thru restaurant, looking for comestibles that might have been thrown away by the proprietors. Out by the dumpster, Miguel didn’t take note of an arm quickly rousing itself from its torpor. But the arm, sensing movement, stowed away in a Safeway cart beneath an army blanket that Miguel had picked up along the way, dripping on a number of magazines that contained photographs of tropical scenery. Miguel, who was exhausted, and somewhat impaired by reason of advanced alcoholism, was pushing toward the park on Stone, Don Hummel Park, where the Union of Homeless Citizens was, at that moment, attempting to conduct its massive rally and fund-raising event. Miguel, according to his impeccable credentials as an innocent with anxiety disorder, didn’t intend to stay for the rally. He didn’t even know there was a rally, because he was uninformed on current events. He’d thought he might sleep in the park.

  Every corner of the Don Hummel Park thronged with the disenfranchised hordes. From the northwest, by an avenue of shuttered motels, of darkened neon signs fifty or sixty years old, they came; from the southwest and the unvisited downtown area of Rio Blanco, where once there had been banks and insurers and law firms, they came; from the southeast, in which direction streamed the would-be emigrants to South of the Border; and from the northeast, they came, the direction of loners, of homeless persons who preferred to sleep up in the foothills among the mountain lions and coyotes, to take their chances with the tooth and claw of the wild; every corner of the park on Stone was a seething mass of unruly humanity, all of it dispossessed by the state and by the mechanisms of government. Just as the Union of Homeless Citizens seemed to have organized one quadrant of the park, to have subdued it into a condition where the constituents might at least listen to speeches about their interests and needs, another part of the park would break into hilarity or fistfights or political agnosticism, such that the men and women and families gathered there would lose interest and would begin transacting their underground economics or would begin constructing anew their temporary shelters. (These living spaces were harder to come by than in other regions of the nation where lumber was more common. Here the homeless structures often featured packing cardboard, but also the spines of scorched saguaro cacti, and duct tape, because what was not made out of duct tape?)