The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  Slaughtering Intimacy was followed by Reproduction in the Lower Species: A Pictorial History, and then the three-volume extravaganza Primate Sexuality, and the accompanying documentary. These were considered the really popular items in the human sexuality section of the media stores, especially the occult and alternative-philosophy stores, which were, after all, the most popular media stores in Rio Blanco. Most people didn’t read anything at all, and who could blame them? When Primate Sexuality took chimpanzees and bonobos as examples of how human beings might undertake hominid sexuality, it caught on somehow. Proto-hominid, as an approach and a way of life, followed not long after, or at least it did on her parents’ bookshelf, on one particularly hard-to-reach shelf. She would use the digital book reader with these titles, so that her parents wouldn’t notice what was missing, and she would watch the chimps fucking, look at the diagrams, follow the links. Admittedly, it was going a little far when the guy who made the documentary, one R. L. Houston-Smith, suggested that some particularly recalcitrant humans, those who thought that sexuality had to be for procreative purposes only, should actually try having sex with a chimpanzee. Or a bonobo.

  Proto-hominid sexuality, according to the books, was forged in the prehistory of humankind, in our evolutionary prehistory, the time in which we never experienced nor worried about love. Back then, we experienced only sexual longing and duty. Sexual longing was incredibly violent, and here Vienna Roberts was quoting from the pages of a book she had downloaded many times; sexuality was closer to cannibalism than it was to intimacy, which was not a word that proto-hominids would have understood in any way. What we failed to do, according to Allan Spinrad’s Sex for Hominids and Proto-Hominids, which spawned a long-running infomercial as well as a reality program, was utilize all the sexual tools at our disposal, including neglect, contempt, hatred, murderous rage, and despair, let’s not forget despair, or even dishonesty, as well as the kind of stunning, overwhelming joy that one feels in having crushed the will of the loved one.

  Proto-hominid! There had to be a better way to say it. But no one had come up with that better way. For the moment, women were ripping off their golf dresses and were trying to get their husbands to ravish them in the parking lots of emptied shopping malls, and they were shouting out gibberish (part of Spinrad’s argument related to speaking in tongues), which was hard to ignore, if you were coming back from the ice cream shop, with your double scoop and jimmies, and your best friend’s mother was wearing a shark mask and red high-heeled pumps and fucking the pool boy, who had a hairy back, just like a chimpanzee.

  She and Jean-Paul got into it, because you couldn’t not get into it, because these trends came in waves, and when the world was falling down around you, you did what you could do to stick your head in the sand, the desert sand, to feel as little as possible. This the proto-hominids must have done, when they were going extinct. Like the Neanderthal had to watch the first Cro-Magnons in Central Europe, knowing how much smarter those new guys were, the brand-new Cro-Magnons. She and Jean-Paul got into it, because all the kids got into it, because the kids got into what their parents got into, even if they ridiculed their parents a little bit. And what she noticed, when she was a prodigious reader of Spinrad and the commentators on Spinrad, was that certain ideas did make her a little bit, well, there was no other way to put it, certain things kind of made her wet, when she thought about them with Jean-Paul, like there was one thing that really kind of made her wet, and not just a little bit. This one thing was a faucet being turned open, which was not what she had experienced, for example, when she had first slept with that lacrosse-playing hunk of wood Damien Lorenzo, which had been like trying to stick a fence pole into a block of concrete—anyway, what really made her wet, at first, was the idea of gagging Jean-Paul, like actually gagging him, pretty tightly, so that he couldn’t say anything. She had a horror of stuff like this at first, but then she kind of liked it. She had a kind of a high-pitched screech she got into, and she imagined this was the cry of some kind of rhesus monkey, while she was gagging him, and then when she was done gagging him, she liked to blindfold him. Now, what kind of proto-hominid male, you might ask, would be willing to be gagged and blindfolded? She wasn’t totally sure why Jean-Paul Koo was so willing to go along with this stuff, but she thought it probably had something to do with the Dead Mother, who was always around him everywhere, or so he said. She was in his back pocket. The Dead Mother. She was in his glove compartment. Only proto-hominid sex, he said, allowed him to put aside all these feelings of filial duty or whatever. He needed to really go back down through the evolutionary chain of sexuality.

  Getting him out of all of his rags, so that he had on only the satin jockstrap thing, out on the desert floor, with the big clouds massing in the west, there was something about it that was enough for her, or temporarily enough, proto-hominid enough, never mind hominid, which was level two, and when she got him like that there was always some other thing she wanted to do, some other degradation that she wanted to visit upon him. It was in fact never enough, and in this case she wanted to tie him up, and she had some of those things, what were those things called, those cords that you used to attach to things, bungee cords? She could bungee-cord his wrists, and then instead of laying him down gently, she would just pummel him until he was on his back on the desert floor, and he was still laughing, which was always a good sign, and she took off everything except her bra, because the one thing that Vienna Roberts couldn’t stand was anything to do with her nipples. Maybe for this reason, if she left Jean-Paul’s wrists unbound, he was always ripping at her bra, trying to get at her nipples, biting at them and generally causing a lot of trouble. She hated that maternal thing, didn’t like feeling that anyone was using her in some maternal way, because she wanted all the maternal parts of her shut off; she would have been glad, as a teenager, to have her cervix and her uterus and all that stuff taken out of her body, because you know, proto-hominids had no idea that sexuality caused babies; that wasn’t something they put together at all. They didn’t make decisions about sexuality based on anything to do with procreation. They just wrestled around and bit one another and penetrated one another and had orgasms, and in the process, they got covered with sweat, blood, and come, and then some time later, in a completely different place and environment, ordained by the plentiful gods, the females swelled up and went through that agonizing labor business.

  Naked as a primate, she located a furry eye mask of her own. If the desert was about death, then she wanted the possibility of death, she wanted the reintroduced wolves hovering just out of range of the rutting proto-hominid teenagers, and she wanted the coyotes and the mountain lions all getting ready to devour them, hopefully waiting right behind that stand of greasewood until the moment when they were about to come together, she and Jean-Paul, and then the mountain lions could jump out and sink in their teeth. Before she put the blindfold on, she tried to get the harness on, and the floppy Pulverizer rigged up flush against Jean-Paul’s ass. There was lots in Allan Spinrad’s book about anal penetration. Nothing was more important in indicating the limits of civilized masculine power, in this day and age, than the anal penetration of the male, and in Vienna Roberts’s opinion (because eventually she had gotten even that block of wood known as Damien Lorenzo to agree to allow her to put things up his ass), no male really felt anything, not even a little, unless he had something up him, and this was because he hadn’t given up enough yet, enough self-respect; proto-hominid sex was nothing if it wasn’t about casting off any last remaining bit of self-respect—but the problem was that notwithstanding Spinrad’s advice, she kind of found the whole anal thing gross, you know, she just didn’t like getting anything that was in there on herself, and you just couldn’t trust guys, not guys like Jean-Paul who are hooked up to their computer like ninety hours a week, guys who’d already had three or four screen detoxes to their credit, you couldn’t really expect them to bathe, and in fact, people just didn’t bathe all that much in the dese
rt anymore, because there wasn’t really enough water. What little water was left was saved for hospitals and mining operations. And so it wasn’t like Jean-Paul wasn’t going to, well, you know, it was like there could be all kinds of stuff down there, who knew, things growing, encrustments. She tried to get the Pulverizer in there a little bit, and there was a kind of hiccuping laugh from him, and then she pulled down the eye mask and then rolled onto him, in the dark, and there was the breeze, and the babbling creek of the distant interstate, and there were the clouds massing, and she knew they were massing, and then she and Jean-Paul were rubbing against each other, and nowhere in the proto-hominid manual did it say what you were supposed to feel really, because feeling things, that was so old-fashioned, you know? And guys never wanted to feel things anyhow, emotions, and she kept privately to herself that one last little bit of feeling, the kind she wasn’t supposed to have, and that last little bit of feeling was for having the part of him inside of her, and even if she did kind of think that it was disgusting, that part of men was disgusting, the mandrel was disgusting, she just hadn’t gotten past it, and even if she did think that, that they were disgusting, there was a way in which she still wanted to have him inside of her, not that she needed completing, forget it, nothing about completing, she was complete as she was, she didn’t want to be completed, she wanted to take things away from other people, and she wanted to squander what she took away, but something in her quieted when he was inside her, and maybe something quieted when the Pulverizer was inside of him, if it was really in there.

  Which didn’t mean that proto-hominid sex wasn’t more like Mexican wrestling than it was like love, at least the proto-hominid sex of Jean-Paul and Vienna. Someone was on top and then they were not on top, and someone was elbowing the other one in the head, and then someone was trying to pin someone else down, and they were breathing hard not because they were turned on exactly, although there was some of that, but more because they were exhausted from all the wrestling. There was a reason why rounds in wrestling were only so long, couple of minutes, and it went on like this, wrestling and spitting and grunting, and occasionally Jean-Paul would shout something in Korean, because when he was really enjoying himself, he enjoyed himself in the language of his birth. From Vienna’s point of view, which was no kind of point of view just then, since she was blindfolded, it was all about sensation—she didn’t fall into that thing where she was concerned about whether she was emaciated enough, because even though Jean-Paul denied it, she was certain that Jean-Paul only liked women who were emaciated—and she didn’t care if she was making a strange face or if one of them had unsightly body hair; she just felt certain things. Her body was being wrung out, like on one of those nonelectric dryers that people were using again. You cranked the clothes between two pieces of lathed mahogany, and then the garment was automatically lofted onto a line in the yard to bake in the desert heat. Sex was like that, like laundry, and all kinds of important psychosexual juices were being moved through the proto-hominid latitudes of her—her back brain, her uvula, her perineum, her labia, her small intestines. The juices were like the runoff from an industrial accident, a flaming, pressurized sluice of erotic by-products that could run from a factory down into a wash somewhere, erotic by-products that could flood the Rio Blanco city center, washing away encampments of homeless people, maybe even her parents, who were busy trying to organize the homeless citizens, and along with her parents, also the unstuffed armchairs that the homeless people used for reclining in the park off Stone, shopping carts, tarps, old-model cellular telephones and satellite phones that the homeless people used to communicate with one another, various OxyPlus intravenous drip bags and nasal inhalers, piles of clothes from the charitable thrift stores, all of this was being washed away in the erotic runoff from her. Oh, and it was also true that proto-hominid sex put a big premium on female ejaculate and encouraged women to work hard to learn the skill, because everybody spurts was a rallying cry of the proto-hominid movement, and maybe therefore Vienna, who really didn’t understand what this signified exactly, and who had been unable to get the high school sexual education counselor to tell her (he had a twenty-point memo he handed out detailing the things he wasn’t allowed to say), he couldn’t be relied on to tell her anything about female ejaculate, and the part in Spinrad’s book that had the everybody spurts subhead, it was hard to understand, even though she felt like she understood everything else, so basically she just imagined a lot of fluid, fluid everywhere, gigantic streams of fluid gushing forth from her, especially during the blissful penetration and the even more blissful clitoral devourment, which was another Spinrad recommendation, although, you know, the proto-hominids probably didn’t engage in oral sex, this was a much disputed subject, but that willingness to devour the partner, the part of sexual congress that could move straight into cannibalism, like where you really would eat a bloody shank from each other, you know, maybe with some kind of condiment, the clitoral devourment would do pretty well as a symbol of the kind of proto-hominid willingness to devour the partner, and she was really getting into that clitoral devourment, even though she wasn’t, you know, entirely sure if Jean-Paul really knew exactly where the clitoris was, and most of the time, well, he had these ideas about how he was going to work hard to get her off, but once he stuck the mandrel of love into her, there was a real danger that he would gush in about ninety seconds and it would be on her leg or something, and that was the end of that, but anyhow, for the moment he was fulfilling his obligation to pursue clitoral devourment, and she was imagining the kinds of waterfalls and tidal waves and tsunamis that were consistent with the idea that everybody spurts, and she found that against her better judgment, she did lapse into English language for a brief moment, and with a somewhat, well, uncomatose fervency, “This feels so fucking good!”

  Then a strange thing happened. Vienna Roberts knew, and she was fond of telling her friends, that there was a goal with this new sex thing, like there was a goal with everything American, there was a payoff, there was a bottom line, and the bottom line of proto-hominid sex was complete negation of cerebral activity. As with, she guessed, religions, like Buddhism or whatever, the goal with proto-hominid sex was to strike a fabulous blow against the reasoning part of the brain. Most people thought this whole idea was totally fake. Even her parents joked about it. Probably Spinrad was taking some kind of mood stabilizer when he wrote that part, and with his bald head, his little potbelly, and his stumpy legs (she’d seen him on the infomercial), he was cardiologically unsound, and probably he had some transient seizure while leaking a little eyedropper full of seminal fluid, and that was what he referred to as complete negation of cerebral activity. Both she and Jean-Paul had subjected this claim to exhaustive testing involving OxyPlus, cannabis, inhaled cleaning agents, mild strangulation, and they had found that they had headaches and got sore throats, but they still managed to worry about what would happen if their parents found their naked bodies in the desert. With all of their rigid scientific testing, they had never once achieved complete negation of cerebral activity.

  And yet. And yet. And yet. Jean-Paul, while he was engaging in the clitoral devourment stuff, he was mumbling and really moaning, in a proto-hominid way, if she was any judge of it. It was like Jean-Paul had become, well, maybe some kind of hyena. Hyenas were supposedly a lot like humans in some ways. And Jean-Paul was like a hyena, with his weird Korean slang protestations and his moaning. Or maybe he was rutting like a javelina. Maybe Jean-Paul was imitating the javelina’s rutting cries. Whatever it was, it sounded like he sounded when she was doing something to him, except that she wasn’t doing anything to him, and he was supposed to be doing something to her, and while she was a big fan of clitoral devourment, didn’t trust any guy who said he wouldn’t do it, she just didn’t think it was so transcendental or anything, and she didn’t believe a guy would normally be all javelina-like while pursuing the clitoral devourment. And maybe it meant that he was just spindling the mandrel with h
is own fist while he was getting down with the clitoral devourment, but the really weird part, the strange part, the part she couldn’t figure out, was that it was almost like there was somebody else in the theater of proto-hominid sex with them, and maybe this third party was working on Jean-Paul, while Vienna was just lying there getting devoured, and if so, Jean-Paul seemed to like the third party just fine. Maybe it was a border jumper who’d happened on the scene?

  There was some kind of gagging choking thing that Vienna had learned was consonant with the orgasmic ecstasy of Jean-Paul Koo, and so he was gasping and his breaths were slowing, and then he was lying back on the blanket. It was all a mystery. But before she could go on and on about the mystery part, Jean-Paul reached down, she thought (through her blindfold), between her legs, freshly shorn of everything, perfumed with essential oils, and running with a marshy abundance of female perspirants, and with his hand, he demonstrated a really stunning ability to locate, like a stud, for the first time, her clitoris, her little proto-hominid standby/on switch, which was glowing red just for him, and he began palpating the standby/on switch as though he were a champion, and almost instantly she could feel herself pulled into a strange new staccato rhythm, not some pulsating thing, a rhythm that was all off-kilter and proto-hominid, you know, some kind of African rhythm that the proto-hominids would have attempted to bang out when they were back on the veldt eating wildebeests. While she was not at all sure that this was love, and, indeed, she had no reason to connect this sensation to love, nor did she care if it was intimate or anything else, she certainly did feel as if the weird proto-hominid rhythm that would fall into some pattern of twos and threes, proto proto hominid, proto proto hominid hominid, this digital stimulation did shut down nearly all the cerebral activity. It did pull her down into centrifugal repetitions, until she felt as though she were becoming one with the principles of proto-hominid sexuality; she was remade; she had become a series of, you know, ritualized gestures that were about summoning the essence of what is, protoplasmic, prehistoric centrality of tissue, essence of tissue, and secretion, and molecular fusing and fissioning, she was the movement of the first fishy thing out of the oceans, she was the first mammal to scrabble up the banks of the river, she was the first bacterium to mutate, and when she came, she felt some kind of flooding in herself, and she heard her voice cry out, and her cry had the nearly automatic involuntariness of the principle everybody spurts, and she felt like she could almost reach out and touch Allan Spinrad; she understood how some people could venerate Allan Spinrad, but just as she was giving herself over to everybody spurts, and to the theocracy of Allan Spinrad, she heard a rustling from Jean-Paul, and then, suddenly, holyfuckingmotheroffuckinggodwhatthefuckinghellisthatohmyfuckinggodohjesusViennaohjesusViennaquicktakethefuckingohmyfuckingtakethefuckingmaskoffViennaquickjesusohhellwhatthefuckholyfuckingmotheroffuckinggodwhatthehell!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!… but she didn’t pay attention, not at first, because of what was rushing through her, all the lovers giving away all of their attachment to all the language or romance, the blinding interrogation lamp of romance, the product placement of romance, all of that being given away; she let herself go with it, back onto the veldt, eating the wildebeests, and she didn’t listen at first, until Jean-Paul ripped the mask off her face, tore away her veil of illusion, if you wanted to put it that way, having somehow freed himself from his restraints, which made it obvious to her that he couldn’t possibly have been the one who was frisking her, so perfectly obvious, and now it was obvious. Now the terrifying truth was known, and the clarity of it was so unsettling that at first she couldn’t even accept that what she was seeing in front of her, between her legs, was really what it appeared to be, but it was.