The Four Fingers of Death

  It was fair to say, she acknowledged, that she not only wasn’t sure she could follow through on the plan, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to. She believed in the omnium gatherum, if it was possible to believe in something that was so riddled with contradictions, something so earthly and finite, something so profligate, and if she occasionally had a few critical things to say about them, that was only in the spirit of loyal opposition. She didn’t even know, really, what Koo wanted to do with the arm, in terms of his ongoing experiments. He said that it was important to secure the arm to keep it from spreading its menace across the populace, and especially in a big group like the omnium gatherum, but it was clear that this was not all he was after.

  “You have an arm to substitute?”

  “I do,” said Noelle.

  “Which you got where, exactly?”

  “Anatomy classes at the medical center. They’re disposing of those cadavers all the time. Dr. Koo has special privileges where cadavers are concerned, because he has an endowed chair, and if Dr. Koo needs an arm for an experiment he’s doing, then no one is going to tell him he can’t have an arm. So one of the anatomy classes…”

  “They—”

  “Cut the arm off especially for us. But we had to remove the finger ourselves.”

  “You removed the middle finger yourself.”

  “I know how to cut at the knuckle.”

  “What did you do with the finger?” Morton asked.

  “It’s in the rucksack with the arm. I guess I should throw it out somewhere. But you can’t just throw a finger anywhere.”

  “I could do it for you, if you like.”

  “That’s why I have the windows open. Well, plus, I don’t believe in air-conditioning. Air-conditioning is when a nation becomes weak. Decadent. This arm is only a little decayed, though. That’s the good news. From what I’ve heard about the contagious arm, it’s more than a little decayed. You know, the hardest part of this whole thing was finding a wedding ring that would fit properly on the substitute arm’s hand.”

  Maybe Morton had gone wistful and sentimental over the mention of a wedding ring. She couldn’t be sure. Over the period of caring for Morton, she’d decided that postures and expressions that seemed precisely human didn’t always mean what you thought. Sometimes chimpanzees pulled faces that seemed gentle, sympathetic, and then they tried to club you to the ground. Morton was probably just looking at the valley below them, nothing more, because now they had come to the saddle of the mountain pass. She swore you could see Venus on the lip of the night sky, because the sun’s last few beams were disappearing behind the peaks in the west. And in front of them, in the broad expanse of the valley, was the answering light, the nation-state of omnium gatherum, which seemed to have erected instantly a fairground, or an amusement park, or a tent city, all these kinetic forms intent on proving that the sun revolved around the Earth.

  “I got it at a pawnshop,” Noelle said, “in case you were wondering. Were you wondering? Is there something wrong?”

  “I’ll get upset if I want to get upset,” Morton said. “How many talking chimpanzees are there in the world? Wait, let me think about this for a second. The number is not zero, and it’s not two. That must mean that the number of talking chimpanzees is one. And I am that talking chimpanzee. I do what I want. Do you know that there are probably television talk show hosts, right now, who would want to hear whatever it was that I had to say? If I had some kind of… representative… If I had a representative, right now, she or he could book me on some kind of talk show, and they would ask me questions like did I favor bananas, that sort of thing, and I could demonstrate to them how I knew the basics of trigonometry, and I’d tell them my higher power was probably in my own image and not in man’s image. They would think whatever I said on the subject was scintillating, earth-shattering. I have no problem. What is your problem?”

  “I don’t have—” she said.

  “Is it my business alone if, upon hearing about a wedding ring, I can think only of how good I’d be for you?”

  “Look, we have a lot we need to do. Let’s not—”

  “You’ve got an arm in a bag that you cut off a corpse in the hospital basement, and you found a wedding ring from some marriage that’s gone bad because the people in the marriage didn’t love each other as much as I love you, and you put that wedding ring on the severed arm, and somehow we’re going to attempt to substitute this arm for the infected one, and you’re doing all this for that butcher at the university. I don’t understand why you—”

  Morton’s voice was getting more and more shrill, like a chimpanzee in the forest, in fact, and he was banging on the dashboard of the van, and as the windows were rolled down, there were people on foot listening and watching, an army of adherents of omnium gatherum. One guy mumbled, Nice costume, as they went past.

  She said, “It’s not for Koo that we’re here.”

  “I’m here for you,” he said, “so speak for yourself. Koo doesn’t care about anyone but himself and his reputation in the medical community. Do you love him? Is he the one who’s in the way of your having a fulfilling and maturing love relationship with me? In The Healthiest Relationship, it says that the first rule of a maturing relationship is correct concentration. If there’s someone else you’re thinking about, some other person with whom you have unfinished business, then you’re never going to commit to this relationship robustly and—”

  “Quit it with that stuff,” she said. “And Koo is not my type.”

  “That’s what people always say. It’s a truly lukewarm response.”

  “How would you know?” she said, as, at three miles an hour, she braked the car into another sequence of switchbacks down the far side of the pass.

  “Because I read the book.”

  “I’ll tell you the truth if you feel you are strong enough.”

  “Stronger than anyone you’ve met. I have to be. I’m the only one of me on Earth.”

  “Okay then,” Noelle said. There was a slow unfolding of the story, and it coincided with the downward slope of the mountain, the story about how there was one night when Koo invited her for dinner, and she couldn’t be sure, that night, if he wanted it to be a romantic dinner or just a dinner of friends who were colleagues. She even remembered the menu, which was nothing that a man would prepare. It was salmon in parchment with brussels sprouts and pickled green beans. Koo had to take a call at one point, and if she hadn’t been a little paranoid to begin with, a little uncertain, she could have sworn that it was some kind of official call, like from a government agency or something, and so she went to get more wine, and to the bathroom, and next to the door to the bathroom, through the kitchen, was the hall that led to the garage, and Noelle just wasn’t the sort of person who would ever snoop, she claimed, but on this occasion, she felt an inexorable pull toward private detection, because Koo was such a mystery. So she pushed open the door to the garage, which had all the usual neglected stuff in there, including an algae-fueled convertible, which she later learned was Jean-Paul’s, and it was all surrounded by boxes and corrugated containers. Some gardening equipment. And then—she was sure Koo was still talking on the phone—she saw this freezer, this large horizontal freezer in the back of the garage. For some sneaky reason, she really wanted to know what it was. Not that she suspected anything terribly unusual.

  “I went over to look at the freezer, and it’s not like I didn’t know that there was a risk that I’d get caught, you know. It’s not that I didn’t know that he could just come in at any moment and find me there. I sort of had the idea he would find me. But doing what? Looking at some cuts of beef ? Looking at some brisket? I don’t know how I knew what was going on, I mean, it’s not the sort of thing that you expect to find hidden away in most people’s garages. I guess you expect a Ping-Pong table or a gaming console. Paintball guns. I don’t know. But somehow I knew, or had an idea there was something there, and so I went over to the freezer, and I learned that it was locked, an
d it would be locked, but it was like I had to find a way to spring it open somehow, in the couple of minutes remaining, if I even had that much time. And I was going around the exterior, looking for some kind of latch. Because it had to have a latch somewhere, right? Then I realized that the keypad on the exterior had a thumbprint scanner, and that was what I was fiddling with, trying to override, like a real idiot, when he came out into the garage.”

  “What was in it?” Morton asked. With a great urgency.

  “I’m getting to that part. The thing I always remember, actually, is not finding out what was in the freezer. It was the look on his face when he saw me there. Maybe he had come into the garage to menace me, to fire me or threaten me, or to somehow scare me away from what I was doing, which was snooping. But once he was faced with me, it wasn’t as easy as all that. The look on his face was all about the mixed feelings. The look he wore was irritation mixed up with concern, a kind of expression that I’d never seen on his face before. I’m not even sure I knew he was capable of looking this way, of having so much going on in him, and maybe, as his employee or coworker, I kind of tried to pretend he didn’t have those kinds of feelings. He’s a reserved guy, right?

  “But maybe that night he felt a little bit like he was going to trust me, like he’d met someone he was going to trust a little bit, even if he didn’t have that much confidence that anyone anywhere was so trustworthy. He had his son and he was raising his son, and there wasn’t anyone else to do that for him, and he was running the lab, and he had all these people working for him, and what he didn’t have time for was whatever went on with the human emotions, and that was what was happening in this weird expression, how maybe he’d felt something like hope, and then he found me in the garage, and then he knew he wasn’t going to have that feeling. Which was why it was such a complicated look, because maybe it was about relief. Or that was what I guessed. In the moment. Before I realized that I was feeling pretty awful about sneaking around. He knew there were things that he had hoped he wouldn’t have to tell me. But now he was going to have to tell me something, whether he wanted to or not. Whether I wanted him to tell me or not.”

  “And?”

  “He said: ‘That’s my wife.’”

  “His wife?”

  “In the freezer.”

  “He had his wife in the freezer?”

  “That’s what he said. In a freezer in the garage. And he went on, very briefly, to explain that he had a special exemption from various regulatory agencies, whatever the regulatory agencies were—there are probably a number of agencies involved in regulating the interstate traffic in dead wives—and because of his special exemption, he had brought his deceased wife with him from Korea. And that she was in the freezer. Sometime back I guess he’d told me that his wife had died of some slow disease. Parkinson’s? Mostly you don’t die of Parkinson’s. You die of the complications. Anyway, she died over in Korea, and then he brought her to the US with him. Most people think the whole cryogenic thing is just designed to separate people from their money, and I sure don’t know too many people who looked into it enough to design their own freezer. But that’s the kind of man Dr. Koo is. He built his own freezer, and his own locking mechanism, with a thumbprint-recognition device on it, in order to house his wife, who has been frozen in there, in the garage, for however many years. I guess if you’re not going to do anything with your dead wife, if you’re not going to, you know, have sex with her, you can keep her in the garage for a pretty long time.”

  There was a look of uncomplicated terror on Morton’s face, a look that indicated that Morton had not yet acquired the necessary finesse for this sort of revelatory exchange.

  “Does it have anything to do with me?”

  “Does what?” Noelle said.

  “The doctor’s frozen wife. Do I have anything to do with the frozen body of his wife and the kinds of experiments that he is conducting…”

  It was a question that Noelle had thought about but hadn’t yet exhausted. And she would have addressed it further if the two of them had not, at that moment, arrived at the gate, such as it was. The gate to the Valley of the Slaughtered Calf, west of the city of Rio Blanco. To which all regional pilgrimages led. The site of the Apotheosis of the Arm. The gate, such as it was, consisted of a couple of police cruisers, as indicated previously, lights lazily turning on their roofs. And there was a young woman wearing nothing but reflective tape over the formerly controversial parts of her body, collecting tickets and shining a flashlight into the drivers’ windows of passing vehicles, asking the drivers if they were here for omnium gatherum and, if not, didn’t they want to turn around and head back into town, because there was liable to be a rather enormous traffic snarl ahead. Scooters, pedestrians, motorbikes, downed jet packs, and so on. The activity here would make it impossible to pass through the Valley of the Slaughtered Calf and make it out to the west, on the road that led to Southern California.

  At once, with the admissions-related conversation transacted, Noelle and Morton found themselves in a different nation, a nation of the fanciful and pointless, where there were streamers, and people on stilts, and a great number of naked middle-aged men with sagging and woebegone scrota wobbly beneath them, a nation of golf carts kitted out like sharks or whales or pirate ships, a nation of handmade signs proclaiming the local Belly Dancers Union, or classes in abstruse varieties of kundalini, unlock your animal unconsciousness, or give yourself the gift of colonic irrigation. How was it there was no proper transition between that world and this, through a cave, behind a waterfall, into a wardrobe? In Rio Blanco, where there wasn’t an economic model for the miraculous, Noelle supposed, there was nothing to do but go over the mountain pass and down a few switchbacks, and here it was, the kind of elsewhere that is considered not-yet-exploited by local miners, the kind of elsewhere that can furnish a miracle, if by miraculous you mean a platoon of Catholic schoolgirls, or someone giving a lecture on shamanic strategies, or a band of serenading minstrels wearing clown makeup, or a Singing Bowl Ensemble, lucid dreamers, players of the jaw harp. It was a city of alternative therapies and cultures sitting idly by, awaiting word from the planning commission of the whimsical.

  Morton was mumbling to himself, or rather making a variety of non- or preverbal grunts and squeaks that Noelle presumed meant more in the chimpanzee argot than in the human tongue, as their URB van was subsumed into the swelling and eddying of drug-addled countercultural citizens. Someone was crying out, “Burn your ID! Burn your ID!” and Noelle watched in quiet admiration as a complement of those from nearby did pull out driver’s licenses and credit cards, even entire wallets, lofting them onto a bonfire near the gate. Meanwhile, as in some medieval square, a rival group of miscreants was erecting a sculpture, or so it seemed, just beyond the police cars by the gate, and this sculpture was studded with nails and screws and bits of glass designed to cause a flat tire in any attempt by the state and local authorities to drive onto the central plain of the festival itself.

  Part of the layout of the omnium gatherum was fractal: there was no sector that was any more vital or less important than the whole, so that there was no center, no organizing principle. With this in mind, Noelle and Morton couldn’t locate any central staging area at all. Things were often miles upon miles farther off than they appeared, and here appearances were obscured by waves of pyrotechnical displays, rockets and fireworks flaming this way and that. There was a staging area somewhere, where the jet packs were attached to a plywood framework, in the middle of which, Noelle guessed, they would place the arm when the time came. It was just a matter of stumbling on it by, more or less, heading away.

  Where did people get all the money for this shit, or was it just the case that somewhere out there was a kid, in the neighborhood, who’d learned that the raw materials for backyard explosives were easily come by, especially on the family farm; this kid who was onto the specific variety of fertilizers and ethanols and oxygen tanks that would launch just about anything int
o the air? When a temporary cloud of these explosions dissipated and the canopy of stars connecting all the summits of the mountains again appeared, Noelle and Morton, who were parking the car somewhere, nowhere, could see, lit in haphazard flashlights, maybe a half mile hence, the circle of homemade rocket launchers.

  “That really looks like a real chimpanzee,” someone said, moving past.

  Noelle’s embarrassing anxiety was that she resembled nothing so much as an undercover policewoman. The omnium gatherum had long known that all its events were infiltrated by the constabulary, and revolutionaries disputed the best way to recognize them. Would they be dressed rather obviously like police attempting to pass? Would they look too clean? Or would they go overboard and wear elaborate costumes, ones that failed to have a handmade dimension? Noelle, as they walked along, almost unconsciously began making pigtails at the top of her head, pigtails that would look, she hoped, like antennae, and though Morton was talking to her, was asking questions about how all of this was possible, she wasn’t paying attention, but was thinking: that one is kinda cute, that one has a nice outfit, that one is probably a rapist, while attempting to get her hair up on top of her head. And when her hair was up on the top of her head, looking, she hoped, cute in a kind of Venusian way, she pulled the blouse she had worn to work that morning from her body, just pulled it right off, buttons snapping everywhere, and then shredded it into long shreds by biting into one end and yanking. From these strips she made a headband for Morton and one for herself, and now she was a woman wearing sandals, denim cutoff shorts, and a black bra, partially obscured by the straps of the rucksack (with the extra arm in it), and some kind of strange, shredded headband. She was a woman who looked as if she were about to metamorphose into something else, into a nomad, not really a woman who was one with the fashion aesthetics of the omnium gatherum, but this outfit would have to do unless she felt like taking off her bra, which she didn’t really want to do, because Morton was looking at her like she was nothing but a receiving agent for chimpanzee spermatazoa. She didn’t want him to get lost in the mayhem of the event, but she didn’t want him to feel like this was their omnium gatherum assignation either. She should have sent him into the tent marked Men’s Erotic Massage back a ways and left him there, until she figured out what was what.