The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  What I think, my darling, is that when I listen to you discourse on the affairs of the day, I am filled with a warmth. A warmth such as I have never known. We may have our ups and downs, and over the course of our association there have been times when you wore outfits that I didn’t entirely approve of. And after all you are human, you are the oppressor, but despite all these things, when you make yourself vulnerable to me in this way, when your face is open and full of a yearning to understand the rushing river of the world, then I feel a tremendous warmth in my breast. I could listen to you discoursing upon the laundry all day long, if that is all that is given to you as woman. I don’t care. The outside world, after all, is only available to me as a series of computer screens. I haven’t been outdoors in years. I barely even understand what outdoors is. I don’t know all the traffic, the people walking to and fro, and all the bicycles of this town Rio Blanco. But in this space there is a person who cares for me still. My parents are gone. And the monkeys in the cages down the hall from me are beneath contempt. I am alone in the world, and thus there is only you. Only you no longer treat me as so much humanoid meat, ready to be fed into the grinder. So tell me of the End, tell me of the Beginning, tell me of everything in between, which would be called, I guess, the Middle. Tell me of the Middle, and I will listen. I will listen even if you want to tell me about the state-sponsored lotteries or the gigantic algae bloom in the Gulf of Mexico. I will listen.

  She stared at him, she gazed upon him, he had the full extent of her gaze, as though she were looking into the window of his soul, now, and it made her tremble in a way that she hadn’t experienced with him before. It was like the knowledge of her own nakedness, this trembling. It was like phased withdrawal. It was like avian flu, the new mutated version. It was like something interpersonal, and not interpersonal hostility, but the other thing. She could see him mulling it over, too; she knew he was, even as she believed it was peyote or the afterburning of it. Morton was chewing oddly, as though he’d got hold of Larry’s nicotine gum, and it seemed almost hilarious, but she resisted the desire to laugh at this gum-chewing repetition of Morton’s—laughter was species-centric behavior, it was narcissistic, unless it was the laughter of recognition, of compassion, of likeness, and without laughing she realized that Morton was trying to say something to her, and the fact that he had no real idea as to the use of his vocal cords was a genuine impediment, not to mention fine motor control of mouth and lips and tongue. It was as though a stroke victim or a coma sufferer had clawed his way back from the lower depths and was attempting to use his slack musculature. He chewed and he chewed, and then, as though he were somewhat informed on the physiognomic reasons he would never be able to talk, he put his lips together, and with a momentousness that would transport Noelle leagues beyond where she was when she parked her car out in front of the lab that morning, Morton, the chimpanzee, whispered, “You know, I am so fond of you.”

  There were only two kinds of things in the desert, the things that were dying and the things that were surviving against all odds. The dead and dying things were all around you. There were always the saguaros flopped over and scorched, only the struts that once improbably supported them left visible, or the yellowed prickly pears, or the desiccated tumbleweeds rolling past. Smaller rodents were always being plucked from their holes by passing hawks. Rattlers were always lying in wait. And it wasn’t that infrequent, especially in Rattlesnake Canyon, out by where the mining claims were tilled, on the land owned by the government, that you saw a dead body or two, or what remained of a dead body. You saw the bodily parts that hadn’t been subjected to the rigors of the food chain, the bobcats or the coyotes or the pumas, and then the raptors, the crows, and then the bugs, the waves upon waves of bugs, and the elements themselves (which were last in the process of desiccation, but which were the most sustained, the way Vienna Roberts saw it). The dead bodies upon which these elements performed their sanding and varnishing were usually the border jumpers, that was obvious, but there were regular people from Rio Blanco too, people who lost their way, and who were out walking, trying to get away from it all, from the manifold hardships of the day. They didn’t prepare. There were pirates on the interstates now too, or highwaymen. Vienna had always thought that highwaymen were guys you heard about in old country-and-western songs, but maybe they were more than that. Maybe they were fringe elements from the Union of Homeless Citizens. Grizzled men who thought that the approach of people like her parents was too gradualist. These grizzled men, who were well acquainted with violence and intimidation, referred to her parents, and bleeding-heart organizers in general, as stationaries. Maybe these grizzled homeless men killed stationaries and dumped their remains out in the desert, like on this stretch of road that ran all the way out to the coast, if you were willing to go that far. Toward Gila Bend, and farther. The bodies were picked clean before they even had time to rot, as the great trucks rumbled past on the underpopulated interstate. Death was what made sex in the desert so compelling, so taboo, so irresistible to Vienna Roberts. She liked to say so anyway. They had the Pulverizer in the back of the van and were driving west in silence, she and Jean-Paul Koo, and there was something spooky about it too. When you couldn’t see anything but cactus clear to the horizon, that was when she liked to stop. Take the interstate forty miles or so to the dirt road and then the dirt road to the primitive track, and then get out and walk. By then usually she was already feeling shivery, like the only smart thing to do would be to take her clothes off, or at least the parts of her clothes that were in the way. And they had to try to wheel the Pulverizer out too. With the rubber glove on the butt plug part of it. Then they had to try to hook up all the electronics and hope that the electronics would work even though there had been a lot of sandstorms recently. The sand could really jam up the working parts. She wondered if Jean-Paul had a hard-on, and she kept trying to look over at him in the passenger seat to see if she could tell. He wasn’t arranged the right way. It just really wasn’t that sexy when she would go to all this trouble to try to get him out into the desert, because she did it all for him, even if he didn’t know it or didn’t really care, she did it all for him, and when he just wasn’t all that into it, you know, it was sort of not sexy. It was like Jean-Paul just didn’t want to have sex at all anymore, or he wanted to watch porn for ten minutes, bang away, and then roll over and go to sleep. She felt like hominid sex was a story that you told. It had to have all the things in it that a proper story had in it, like big uncertain passages, reversals, spots in which the villains became heroes, vice versa. You just couldn’t do that in the time allotted by Jean-Paul’s porn collages, which he liked to load onto the wrist assistant and watch while he was doing other things, like calling the bank or something. It wasn’t sex as much as it was the cold cuts counter at the supermarket. She still remembered what they were like at first, when she was trying to get him to have sex. Which he did like maybe once a day tops. He didn’t even want to have sex in the car at all. There were so few cars these days that it was easy to see if there was something going on in the car, and it was, you know, pretty dangerous, with the possibility that you could run off the road and into the washes, where you might be killed or eaten by coyotes.

  He was fiddling around with the satellite radio, and it began saying something about the likelihood of rain in the region (after the part about mountain lion attacks), and that would be a laugh, because monsoon season was over. And they hadn’t had any rain at all in a month, except maybe one or two days when it came and washed away everything in its path, and then vanished as quickly as it had come.

  “Great, just great,” Jean-Paul said, and she loved the faint traces of his Asian accent, which he tried to eliminate by the use of certain everyday English-language-type words, especially obscenities. “You’re taking me out into the desert to hook up all this electrical fucking apparatus to me, and there’s supposed to be a rainstorm.”

  “Just one time maybe you could express a little bit of in
terest, you know? Love interest?”

  “Gland interest, maybe.”

  Vienna said, “That’s a totally pleasant thing to—”

  “I fucking thought that the reason all the fucking web broadcasts are all recommending hominid sex or whatever is that it frees you up from stress. I mean, I like having my prostate milked as much as the next fucking guy, but that doesn’t mean that I know what love is.”

  “Your position is, like, noted.”

  “Two billion in seed capital, and some shops up and down the coast, or in all the casinos, then my dick will be really hard, comatose.”

  “Your dick will be hard because you like it when I make it hard.”

  No comeback available on that one, Vienna guessed, and anyway the van rolled off the last dirt road that had the pockmarked No Hunting signs on it, and they were doing great damage to the shock absorbers, in and out of the washes, with the mountains massed around them every which way and dark clouds overhead. Even with the satellite radio blaring some more suggestions for how to beat the sixth consecutive year of the down market by investing in Sino-Indian municipal bonds and terrorist futures, you could hear that the silence was coming to envelop you, and then when you shut off the engine, which is what she did next, there was the pinging of the engine cooling down, and then there was the symphonic calm of the audible desert. The two of them climbed down from the van, into their dramatic aloneness.

  Around the back of the van, Jean-Paul busied himself with the Pulverizer, trying to roll it down some planks that were included in the UHC’s van for purposes just like this (wheelchair spokespersons). Vienna Roberts had the blanket she’d brought, a tan one that wouldn’t show the dust and dirt when she took it home later that night. It was in the midst of this wholesome and, she thought, feminine responsibility that she saw the disaster that was taking place, which was that the Pulverizer, weighing in somewhere near thirty kilos or more, was about to topple off the planks that Jean-Paul was using to roll it down. The Pulverizer was balanced for a moment, and in the desert silence, the sex-and-death silence of the desert, it seemed as if this moment of equipoise might last. There wasn’t a sound but the grimacing and sighing of muscular effort issuing forth from her French and Korean boyfriend. The clouds hovered above the mountains, and the mountains beckoned from geological prehistory, and the distant interstate babbled like a creek babbling, nothing more, and she lunged, she lunged at Jean-Paul to try to save the Pulverizer, and she watched as it tipped to his right, the little gloved hand that was meant to do all the pulverizing appearing to wave as the whole thing, the expensive and unusual marital aid, achieved momentum, plummeted out of Jean-Paul’s grasp, and fell onto a scattering of sedimentary rocks extruding from the sand, where, upon succumbing to gravity, it collapsed with an unpleasant crunch.

  “Motherfucking motherfucker! Fuck! Fucking shit! Fuck! Fucking motherfucker! Fuck!”

  A couple of punctuating electrical fizzes issued from the Pulverizer, wires shorting out, as the chassis of the device caved in. Vienna felt a wave of contempt. She recognized this response, since contempt was a dietary supplement she appreciated almost as much as the morning’s handful of caffeine tablets. Still, she bit back on the things she might have said, whispering syllables that she didn’t even really want to allow out of her mouth, “Do you know how much that thing cost?”

  “Well, if you wanted to be so careful about the fucking thing, then why the fuck did you want to bring it out here to the canyon?”

  “I thought that maybe we’d be, like, mature enough to bring it out here without tearing it to pieces in the first five seconds.”

  “Maybe maturity is overrated,” Jean-Paul said. His modest proportions were something she liked about him. He tried to look bigger, what with the Mexican gangster wear, the sleeveless T-shirts cut off all the way up to his pecs, and the baggy white denim shorts that were fastened around his waist with a bicycle chain. Still, she must have been stupid to allow him to try to lift the Pulverizer himself. She guessed there was nothing to do with this disappointment but laugh.

  “Let’s see if we can make it work,” she said.

  Jean-Paul said, “It couldn’t even pulverize a stick of butter.”

  “Depends, you know,” she said, “on temperature.”

  The multicolored wires that connected the limb of the Pulverizer to the engine were an ominous tangle. Jean-Paul wrapped the galvanic skin response monitor around his wrist and waited to see what, if anything, would happen. To her amazement, as Vienna watched, the actual Pulverizer, which had in the scuffle been denuded of its green dishwashing glove, gave a couple of tentative flops. As if it were an amphibian that had crawled up out of the great Sonoran Ocean that once was.

  They laughed at its earnestness.

  Jean-Paul said, “Busted-up electronic equipment is kind of fucking cool, kind of human.”

  Vienna took that moment to creep up behind him and to wrap her arms around his frame. He was so thin that it was pretty easy to get her arms one and a half times around, and this she knew because she measured in her own way, trying to stack her elbows in front. When she was done measuring, her hands strayed lower down.

  “I think that a really good marital-aids store should have all kinds of busted-up digital stuff, the shit that most people throw in a closet because they fucking still don’t know how to get rid of it. Stores should buy it off people and should advertise ways to attach all that old digital stuff onto body parts. That would be really hot, comatose. Then you wouldn’t have to pulverize me, you know, and then I could fucking have my own fucking Pulverizer attached to me, so I could use it on stuff, things around the house. Feral animals. I could pulverize whatever I wanted to pulverize, like it could be people, but it could be anything. People need to be able to have more sex with machines. I think there should be more sex with machines, and not some machine that looks like a human, no way, a real machine. Or else there could be a threesome where one of the participants is a machine.”

  As if on cue, because he was young and there was always a need, he slid down the baggy white denim shorts, underneath which he had one of those satiny jockstraps that the really macho boys all wore, and his ass was exposed, therefore, and he kind of attempted to make a union between himself and the flopping Pulverizer, just for the sake of trying, and to indicate that beneath the gruff exterior, he was a bottom. He dragged the busted-up Pulverizer, the flopping fish, onto the blanket that Vienna had set out, a blanket that was already pretty dusty with sand and valley fever spores, and he, Jean-Paul, the machine, and Vienna herself got down on the blanket and attempted to do what lovers did, here in the hominid age of sexuality.

  It was a long time coming, you know, the recognition that what was inhibiting stationaries in the late twentieth century, what was destroying marriages and giving young people the wrong idea, was too much civilization in sexuality—this was how Vienna remembered learning about hominid and proto-hominid sex, anyway. She learned about it at a precocious age, back when her friends were still playing with Transportation Safety Administration Barbie or Waste Management Barbie. Vienna Roberts was trying to get her girlfriends to show her theirs, and she was trying to get the boys at school to show her how to carry off a girl to paradise, and she was stealing books from her parents’ library, because her parents, by their own account, had a vigorous appetite, and she remembered reading some of the books that advocated approaches to sexuality that eventually became hominid or proto-hominid. With great generational paradigm shifts, no one person can be responsible for the new thinking—sentiments like this came from a variety of sources. Well, but still there was that one book, Slaughtering Intimacy, which Vienna’s father said would have been a bigger deal if the author hadn’t insisted on making it a book instead of an online lecture series, but that book, the way she heard it, made the argument that what people wanted in sexuality was not intimacy. Intimacy was sometimes an inhibitor. We were obliged, according to Slaughtering Intimacy, to be all polite most of th
e time when we were at work, and when we were out in society, polite, polite, and what we wanted to do when we got into the bedroom was treat one another like possessions. We didn’t want the arduous work of being polite. Slaughtering Intimacy was, you know, obviously a lot more popular with guys at first, because it argued that you should try using particularly unsavory words for sex and that you should openly express disregard or even contempt in the bedroom, since disregard or contempt, in multiple psychological tests over the years, created greater desire in men. Could real-world situations duplicate the laboratory testing?

  Then there was a kind of backlash, in which women started to realize that maybe there were ways in which they, too, felt disgusted with their partners. Maybe the deformed appearance of the male sexual organ was something you could build into the experience, so that when that disgusting pink or black thing was readying itself to try to split you in half, you could think of it not as something you loved, but as an amputated limb of some kind, and you could take pleasure in the horror of sexuality, the foul, reeking disgust of it. Instead of thinking sex was glorious, tender, and beautiful, you could think of it as disgusting, dehumanizing, even laughable, and you could engage in it with these things in mind.