The Four Fingers of Death

  “It’s contagious, you know.”

  “You mean because it’s got like all that stuff dripping off the end and flesh hanging off and pus?”

  “You know where it came from, right?”

  “From the Wheelers’ tent.”

  “I guess that’s how you got hold of it, huh?”

  “Those people just aren’t good to their volunteer staff.”

  “The thing about the arm,” Noelle said, “is that it’s infected with highly contagious bacteria that has probably come from Mars, and I’m guessing it’s highly contagious just from skin contact, and if you get the symptoms of the disease, well, it’s fatal, so far, anyway, and from what I’ve heard the symptoms are pretty awful. So is there anyone who’s touched it?”

  One of the wrestlers got up, walked to where Noelle was standing, and began pushing her over toward the arm. It was that simple, really, and when it began, she felt as though all of the day had been leading to this moment. She had been so unwise, so foolish, about what the day would bring, because she hadn’t expected it to include coercion and intimidation. She was so unwise because she hadn’t expected the omnium gatherum to end with the application of force. And now that it was happening, she saw that it had always been there. Force was there. When you went to the fast-food restaurant and ordered your hamburger with a side of microbiological contaminants, you had the police force of the marketplace behind you. The force that ensured that people like this, Mexican wrestlers, were never able to mobilize into some kind of general strike, or agitprop theater company, or tutoring organization; force, undergirding the shouted hello of the deliveryman as he goes past your house; force, as the neighbor’s dog dashes up the walk to lick your hand; force, making it possible that the big, chaotic populations out there didn’t get into your safe-deposit box; force, which through some miscalculation or some systematic series of miscalculations made possible the Sino-Indian Economic Compact, which now had its own army and its own propaganda machinery. Force. Noelle didn’t address the issue exhaustively during the millisecond in which the wrestler guy—thinning hair, unwashed physique, aubergine tights, gin blossoms, halitosis—began to edge her toward the contagious arm; she experienced convulsive little images of understanding and misunderstanding, all intuitive, upon her like a white-light experience, and she began to shout things, though she didn’t really register what she was shouting, nor did she understand exactly what it was she was shouting about, as she began to push back against the wrestler, and she was shouting, though nothing was stopping him, and his confederate (in Green Lantern costume, maybe, or something similar) now joined in the madness, to insure that there wasn’t any danger of her repelling the two of them; it was all just about the gladiatorial aspect of the thing, woman versus disembodied arm, although she did hear someone say, Where’s the monkey? You make sure that the monkey is tied up, and even in the midst of her struggle, she did want to say that it wasn’t a monkey, he wasn’t a monkey, he was a great ape, just like the thugs attempting to push her toward the arm, one big primate family, and she knew as soon as she heard them say that, that her rescuer was out there, nearby.

  Why secure the primate in a darkened antechamber? He talked too much, and he didn’t act properly subservient to the wrestlers, who had all finished high school, and so they Tasered him and put him in a straitjacket and banished him to the shaft that led farther down into the mine, with the idea that they would release him at some relevant point later in the evening. For the time being, it was important that they had possession of the talking chimpanzee and no one else did. The monkey was, in truth, stronger than most of the wrestlers in the room, however, and that, soon enough, was self-evident, because he was used to biting things off with his teeth, shredding stuff, throwing things around, and therefore he freed himself from the straitjacket without difficulty (Noelle put this together later on), and he made his way into the room, and thus onto the scene, the scene including the severed arm, which was trying to draw near to the voices, the human voices, probably because the arm could feel the waves of commotion coming from the disputing voices. The arm moved toward the commotion with the irrepressible need to bring a halt to it, as the wrestlers were meanwhile pushing Noelle toward the arm, and she wasn’t sure if it was all a big joke to them or if they meant to expose her to the arm, but she was struggling and pushing against the slick, unwashed bodies of the wrestlers, and there were at least three of them now attempting to move her toward the arm, and there was her voice, caroming off the walls of the storage antechamber in the mine and echoing from distant walls of corridors, Why are you doing this?, all the way down in the most subterranean part of the Earth, and that was what drove Morton, she supposed later, to fling himself upon the three wrestlers, tearing them from her, biting them so that they were covered in blood, so that he was covered in blood, so that his black-and-gray coat was covered with human blood, and this provoked the rest of the bench, as it were, and soon there must have been eight or ten of them in the center of the room, and many threats were being uttered, not terribly inventive threats, by the Mexican wrestlers, apparently because they were intimidated, or were loath to fire their Tasers immediately, lest they somehow injure an important prize, and there were the shrieking primate cries of Morton, who had already driven off several of the wrestlers, who were fleeing up the corridor back toward the apothecary, some of them indicating that this just wasn’t cool and that they were heading back up above ground where things were more chill, but then there were others who had no purpose but mutilating Morton and infecting Noelle, or so it seemed, and they would stay there until someone really got hurt, because when the restraints were unfastened, and the blood flowed, and force was loosed upon the world, there was someone who was about to get hurt, and Noelle figured, even in the midst of worrying, that either she would be raped or Morton would be torn apart or both, and that wasn’t even taking into consideration the arm, which, she noticed, had closed in on one of the wrestlers and was now attached to the synthetic fabrics of his togs, making use of its disgusting and fungally afflicted fingernails, and this guy, who she thought was masquerading as one of the Justice League of America superheroes, or that was his outfit, this guy was trying to keep Morton from biting off the nose of one of the other wrestlers, and he didn’t even realize, at first, that the arm was intending to summit him, that the arm was soon going to apply the maximum amount of force to his throat, until it was too late; the batterer didn’t realize that this was what was happening, even as he attempted to strangle Morton, and Noelle shouted, “Morton!” But there was nothing she could do about Morton now; Morton may have had all the language in the world, but he had no natural reason at all not to make use of his nonhuman animal instinct. There were no moral rules in place for Morton. Were they going to put Morton in jail when all this was done? Were they going to issue a press release that said “The animal had to be destroyed”? It was only because Morton cared for her, no matter how violent this all was, that there were bodies against every wall in the room, contused or concussed.

  During a pause in the confrontation, with a Taser frozen between the last two combatants, a lone wrestler didn’t realize that Morton had the upper body strength of a world-class weightlifter; the wrestler, who probably did his time in the gym and maybe shot up some steroids before breakfast, he watched as the Taser he intended to fire got closer and closer, centimeter by centimeter, to his own face, and the look of terror crept into his eyes, as Morton was shrieking his chimpanzee shriek, and another wrestler, one of the blond wrestlers who seemed to have attempted to dye his hair dark so as to simulate being a Mexican wrestler, and whose bootblacking was now coming off his head because he was sweating so much, this guy rallied from a prone position to grab Morton’s arm and attempted to manipulate the outcome of this face-off, but still the Taser crept toward the face of wrestler number one, and then there was a horrible cry as Morton successfully applied the Taser to its owner, somewhere right under his chin, and the wrestler collapsed to
the floor as if he were doing a choreographed wrestling routine, and then Morton, who now had possession of a Taser and who was ducking as some others were fired his way, turned the weapon on the blond with the dripping, muddy hair and used the pain compliance feature of the Taser on this adversary, who howled and immediately fell to the floor. Noelle noticed that the mook with the arm attached to him had stumbled over into a corner by the hallway, the hallway that led farther down into the mine shaft, and the arm was, for the moment, lying beside him, as though it too had been, again, Tasered. She got the idea, now, to swap the arms, because her rucksack was over where she had first walked into the room, probably it had fallen from her when they were trying to force her up against the arm, and the situation would have been perfect right now, and she could lay ahold of the arm, but the only problem was she no longer had the rubber gloves with which to gather it up, and unless she could use one of the capes from the wrestlers or some other bit of stray fabric, how was she going to do what needed to be done? On the other hand, so many of these guys had probably touched the arm already—

  “Don’t touch that arm!” Morton called out. “I forbid you to touch that arm. If there’s anyone in this room who should touch that arm, it should be me. Now is the time that I contribute something to human progress! Now is the moment in history that separates the humans from the higher primates, isn’t that so? Look around this room, if you please, and what do you notice about the human being who was allegedly given dominion over the other animals?” Morton addressed what few of the wrestlers were left, lying injured at the margins of that room beneath the earth, and it was as if he had rehearsed the speech, and perhaps this was, in fact, what he’d been doing out in the hallway while attempting to free himself from the straitjacket. He was preparing the speech that would lead, inevitably, to his martyrdom. “What do the humans do in the time of their greatest ignominy? What do they do when faced with the possibility of redemption and dignity? They attack the weak, that’s what they do, isn’t that right? Look around us, Noelle. Look at those who have fled, who have gone back to the festival to disappear into its crowds, after having kidnapped an innocent bystander, namely yours truly, for their own torture and delight. When they look deep into their hearts, they find that they have no hearts; they find that the ill-treatment of the weak and undernourished and hapless is somehow, according to human beings, funny. Nothing could be more sidesplitting than the demonstration of their meager superiority!

  “And so I aim to teach you something tonight, you human beings; I aim to teach you something about selflessness, and about love. Because I love this woman right here, Noelle Stern. Are you listening to me, those of you who remain in this room? I love this woman. This woman took care of me when no one would take care of me at all. She brought me my breakfast; she brought me my lunch and dinner. She emptied out my waste products from the cell where I was imprisoned, and she schooled me in the kind of politesse that has made me the man that I am. The man you see before you right now. And while I understand that you do not think I am a man, I use the word advisedly. When she had to administer experimental drugs to me, she did so in a regretful way, and on more than one occasion, I am certain that I saw tears in her eyes. I spoke my very first words to her, and while it is possible that I spoke those words simply because I had some human cells injected into me—yes, that’s right, Noelle, I believe I understand the experiment—in short, yes, it is possible that I am speaking to you because I have those little crystals of a dead person in my brain, but still I choose to think that I began to speak because I finally had something that I very badly needed to say, and that something was about gratitude. I had a need to speak, and that is what language is for, is it not? For me, there were many obstacles—insufficient fine motor control, poor laryngeal function—but I overcame all these things, because my need, my love, was so strong that I had to speak. Was this enough? No! I am here to tell you now that I have lived in both worlds, like Tiresias, in the world of the mute nonhuman animal and in the world of the human animal, and I can confirm that language has its limitations! There are so many things that language cannot express, I say this to you right now—”

  Although the arm had been at a safe distance, at the thundering vibrations of Morton’s voice, it began reaching and lunging in his direction, and he was forced to keep himself between Noelle and the arm in order to continue his oratory without interruption.

  “For example, I have found that the longing I have felt has been ill served by language. I have tried to get it down, in poetry and in my diary entries, and I have tried using metaphor and simile, all the finest varieties of speech, and there’s just no way that I can properly describe what I’m feeling. For example, there are times of the day when this woman—”

  “Morton, we really don’t have time…”

  “Just let me finish up,” he said firmly, in dramatic aside. “There are times when I have been in the cell, and you’ve been off duty, when I have felt the traces of you there in the room with me, even though you were off for the day. I have felt you there. I have felt whatever conversation it is that we had earlier, and I have felt you there with me, and I have experienced you as a tightness in the chest, an itchiness of the scalp, an inability to experience the daily pleasures of the world. But do words accurately convey this feeling? I could just as easily be describing heartburn to you, brought on by spicy food or ulcerative colitis, or perhaps some kind of myocardial infarction, but those would not be sensations that one associates with longing, would they? No, they wouldn’t. This language that I have somehow received, this thing that separates me from other animals, it makes me now a miracle of science, but—”

  A couple wrestlers dragged themselves up from whatever fog of gang warfare afflicted them or whatever alcoholic poisoning they were temporarily sleeping off, and made unobtrusive exits.

  “—this language that I have received is as much curse as blessing. And if language, then, is not sufficient to meet the needs of the likes of me, what is there that remains to me? This is the question I ask myself. In what way can I demonstrate my love? The only way I can demonstrate it is with my actions. That is how we do it in the world of chimpanzees, at least as I understand it—from having met a few chimps over the years and having read a number of books on the subject, as well as watching chimpanzee-themed programs online. We demonstrate our needs quickly—with actions—in a decisive way, and that is what I’m going to do right now.”

  With that, Morton took the Taser that he was holding and applied it to the arm, which was flailing madly around in the center of the dusty floor, flailing as if there were a butterfly it was attempting to catch, and the arm came to rest.

  “Morton, do you really have to do this?”

  And he picked up the arm. Just picked it up as if it were a bough in the woods. Or a scroll from some religious tradition. And he put it under his own arm. Then he accepted, from Noelle, the bag in which the other arm was secreted away. And then, as if they were a couple, he and Noelle, a couple who had been together for years and years, the two of them exchanged and organized the various items in their custody, swapping out of the bag the arm from the cadaver with the infected arm, and they started, in silence, up the grim, lightless way, back toward the apothecary. Those who were left behind evidently wanted to remain, and their needs were no longer a matter of concern for this couple that united the primates into the one common line.

  Noelle said, “This really panicked me on the way down.”

  Morton said, “I was blindfolded.”

  Noelle said, “Did you really have to do that?”

  Morton said, “Do what?”

  Noelle said, “The arm?”

  They covered the distance to the parking lot in half the time, because distance has mostly to do with perception. And then they were out. Which left only the one last chore, the task that they had understood as the purpose of coming here, to the omnium gatherum. They were going to drop off the replacement arm, find the URB van, meet Koo
and the others, and drive back into town to a secure location. As it turned out, once upon the main street of Old Rio Blanco, the stage set, they were confronted by Woo Lee Koo, his son, Jean-Paul, Vienna Roberts, her parents (very much out of place and completely dumbfounded, according to Noelle’s first impression), and various members of the department of medicine from the hospital. Who had all, according to Dr. Koo, tracked the two of them with the transponder that Dr. Koo had subdermally implanted in Morton long ago. In his left wrist. Koo had followed the signal to Old Rio Blanco before completely losing track of them somewhere. The signal went dead.

  Dr. Koo was nervous about something, incredibly nervous, agitated, distracted, or so it seemed to Noelle. Distracted in a way she had never seen before, short-tempered, and he was saying that they had to leave now, they had to leave as quickly as they were able to leave. There was confusion, he said, confusion at the highest levels, though when had there not been confusion in these recent days? Still, Noelle Stern found that she felt nothing so much as exhaustion, notwithstanding the course of events. What she wanted to do was to lie down somewhere, and maybe throw up, since the migraine she’d been fighting off was still making all the lights dance with their nasty, sinister, impressionistic auras. But Koo was barking orders at everyone and insisting that they keep moving and that there was no time to stop, and when she asked why they had to keep moving, she was told that there was no time to discuss it, they simply needed to get to a van and move out of the immediate area of this valley as quickly as possible, preferably to the other side of the mountains. Morton was still carrying the arm, and Noelle asked what they were meant to do with it, to which Koo said, There’s no time, no time; just throw the arm anywhere, one of the other attending physicians said, and then someone disagreed, no, you just can’t throw it anywhere, you have to dispose of it somehow, or at least leave it with trusted deputies, and we need at least one tissue sample; wait a second, Noelle wanted to say. Didn’t we come here to get the arm for some reason? Wasn’t there a reason for getting the arm, that had to do with something, she couldn’t remember what exactly, with some experiment that Koo was doing? And then she noted that Jean-Paul looked like death warmed over, which she supposed must have been exactly what he was, death warmed over, and he wasn’t saying anything, and he seemed to be bleeding, and why was he out, exactly? What about the quarantine? He moved around the fringes of the group, as they all hastened back toward the omnium gatherum, and he was wearing a ridiculous amount of clothing, he was covered head to toe, though it was probably still somewhere near to a hundred degrees.