The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  From this municipality of the forgotten, forgotten by mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, forgotten by the state, the city, the nation, the Union of Homeless Citizens was attempting to organize a proper voting bloc, in order that delivery of services might be brought to the needy in Don Hummel Park. Given the size of the homeless population here, there was a genuine possibility, especially in the era of would-be secession by the gated communities, that the Union of Homeless Citizens could field a slate of administrators to seize control of the city itself. The non-homeless organizers, the stationaries, as they were known, had attempted, in trying to program a rally that would appeal to these disparate nomads, to bring entertainment as well as enlightenment to the people. Your mind and your ass were to be moved. Miguel arrived at the park just as a mariachi band, in Mexican uniform, was attempting to sing old Mexican love songs to the audience, especially such old Mexican songs as had a particular relevance to other revolutionary movements, the Zapatistas, the mestizos of Mexico City, the Maya movement of 2020, and so forth. The songs weren’t going over well. Whenever there was a lull in the action, the homeless citizens began attempting to barter, or to criticize, or to make impolite conversation.

  Above all, and even in the half-light of urban night, they were all well tanned. It was the way you could tell the homeless citizens from the rest, who were regularly visiting paling stations. They were tan, and they were bearded, and they often had melanomas sprouting somewhere on their faces or their arms. And they had achieved, in their seething, undulating mass of disorder, something close to a perfect habitation of the present moment. In fact, a number of Buddhist ashrams in the region, as well as the omnium gatherum, that shadowy alternative cultural organization, had begun courting the Union of Homeless Citizens. Among the residents of Don Hummel Park, however, few were following the rally closely, nor did they know how they were intended to be organized, although there was a rumor of some burritos and tacos being given away at a certain bandstand. The citizens of Don Hummel Park were casually alert to the possibilities of changing the laws in their favor, but were more excited by the possibility of getting fed.

  The political arm of the Union of Homeless Citizens, therefore, the part staffed almost entirely by stationaries, decided that there was one and only one nonnegotiable plank in their movement, and that plank was against ownership. All things in common trust! said the literature that was handed out to the relevant parties, though this was later thought to be too obscure in terms of its locution and was amended to read simply Lend It to Your Neighbor! Lend whatever it was you had. Miguel, who didn’t read English terribly well, wouldn’t have understood the finer points here, even had he taken the time to give them his full attention. He quickly set up underneath a tree in the park. Above him there were men who had climbed these nonnative growths and nailed up structures there. Miguel called to them, as he also asked a couple of men nearby if they wanted some tacos and would they be willing to effect a swap.

  Among the activists who were most engaged in this great awakening of the Union of Homeless Citizens were Larry and Faith Roberts. Larry had been fired from URB six or eight years before for extending invitations to audit his classes to undocumented workers he met at the bus station in town. Later, he even attempted to make these new acquaintances his teaching assistants. His wife was mainly known as a writer, if a slightly inconsistent one, of articles about forms of economic oppression. By the time Miguel had arrived in the center of the Don Hummel Park and was busying about trying to secure some barter for the tacos he didn’t need, Faith Roberts was, in fact, talking into the microphone, without getting anywhere much at all. Miguel asked another guy, in his Spanglish, if he wanted some food.

  “I got some tacos here. Pretty good. Pretty fresh.”

  The blank expression was irritating, but there was no shortage of blank expressions in the present company.

  The grandstanding from the bandstand echoed off the falling-down houses of the neighborhood, and in that reverberant and hard-to-hear sonic field, Miguel could only make out a few things: “The way you all make shelters… I’m sure you know… is a powerful suggestion of spiritual presence and rootedness… when faced with the colossal appetites… of a culture that wanted to… rule the world… but lost all that it once had… including its moral standing…”

  As if the passage of seconds enabled the Anglo with the blank expression, he of the burned-out eyes, to respond, the man offered Miguel a fistful of pills immediately recognizable as the universal currency of Don Hummel Park, polyamphetamine. It wasn’t the case that everyone there was a user, as indeed Miguel was no longer a user himself, but that didn’t mean that the stuff didn’t have value. The dollar, what with inflation, and because it was trading badly against the peso, was nobody’s idea of a currency. Food stamps, which were scarce because of the fiscal situation of the nation as a whole, were more valuable, but polyamphetamine was the one thing that seemed to accrue value. The city that housed Don Hummel Park may have been full of people who hadn’t gone to college or didn’t speak the language or who were somewhat blunted from the early stages of cirrhosis, but they understood the basics of supply and demand. Miguel, therefore, was happy to offer a taco or two for the polyamphetamine, except that he had a pang of regret. This stuff was probably worth fifty or sixty dollars, and the tacos maybe an eighth of that, and it wasn’t really a fair trade. The sleeping man gets taken in the wager; this was one of the Eastern bits of wisdom that had been circulating among them.

  “That’s kind of you, señor, but I’m going to look into this cart and see what else I can offer you, in addition.” The Anglo, slate entirely wiped clean, waited.

  Miguel was babbling some sequence of kindly thoughts about the beauty of the evening. A monsoon, if one was possible that night, would take the edge off the heat, and so forth, and as he was lifting up the edge of the army blanket, which was really one of his most precious bits of linen, he found himself in possession of an arm.

  Truths are lubricated and personal things, and there is an adherent for every truth under the sun. Some truths, despite veracity, will appear to be downright ludicrous. In addition, there is the category of truths known only to people under severe conditions, such as during the withdrawal of a drug from their system. This category of truths is more slippery, more reflective of a dynamic system than of the simple on-and-off modalities of street-level truth, and in his investigations of this approach, the withdrawal approach to truth, Miguel had found, occasionally, that he saw things that weren’t, according to more empirical methods of investigation, there, just as there were other things that he assumed were there but were not. A lamppost that you could put your hand right through, for example. He had learned, under certain circumstances, to be patient, to allow the different registers of truth to coexist, just as the various dimensions coexisted; it was all good to Miguel, and he didn’t become unduly worried when there was something happening that should not, by most accounts, have been happening at all. He therefore did not gasp when he beheld the severed arm. He didn’t treat the arm as though it were somehow abject, a thing to be feared or driven out of the comforting rabble of civilization. He just wasn’t sure it was there. Nevertheless, after looking at the arm for some time, after looking at the wild, staring eyes of the Anglo who also beheld it, after watching the arm contract and extend its fingers, he had to assume that there was a genuine possibility that the arm existed in the empirical world, resting in his shopping cart and gumming up his magazines.

  He looked at the Anglo guy. “I could, well, I could offer you this.”

  He pointed at the arm. It wiggled its fingers.

  The Anglo guy handed over the polyamphetamine tablets, guaranteed to wipe out short-term memory entirely, and as if the arm were somehow a talisman in his own private pantheon, the Anglo guy lifted the arm out of the shopping cart. This was done in such a way that Miguel never had any contact with the thing, though he’d just been rooting around in there. He would have confessed t
hat he had a feeling that contact with it was unwise, even though he couldn’t have said why. The stuff coming out of it that looked like rubber cement was probably not the kind of thing you wanted to touch. The Anglo guy apparently had no such reservations. He treated the arm as though it were a shillelagh or other device suitable for assault on antagonists, and he disappeared into the crowd with his new prize.

  There the arm was quickly passed from hand to hand: a bunch of men around a campfire passed it back and forth attempting to play the arm as though it were a clarinet or a soprano saxophone. One of them actually believed it was a water pipe with which certain intoxicants could be smoked. One man tried to arm-wrestle the arm, but he found that the arm was a disappointing competitor because it couldn’t be propped up effectively. A woman attempted to get the arm to make a fist, so that she could batter her boyfriend with it. The arm was good-natured about this. It was in a dormant period, or perhaps near its final demise, but it lacked the wherewithal to respond to any of these lighthearted engagements with unpleasantness. In the distance, Faith Roberts was shouting, in a shrill, programmatic way, Rise up! Rise up! Rise up! Rise up! And then, as if according to prior arrangement, the police began to storm Don Hummel Park.

  The electroshock sidearm, or Taser, was another of the businesses that flourished in an era when almost nothing was made in North America, and when it became possible to administer the electroshock from a distance, when it was no longer necessary to get up close to the subject to persuade him with pain compliance—styled rhetoric, then the electroshock sidearm assumed unimpeachable status among law-enforcement officials. All the border patrol officers along the as-yet-uncompleted freedom wall that separated Rio Blanco and the southern part of Arizona from our trading partner South of the Border used electroshock sidearms, as it was also considered sporting to wear the night-vision shades and take down the border jumpers now and then.

  Moreover, Rio Blanco understaffed its law-enforcement department, because of budgetary problems. As a result, the police relied on the electroshock devices to attempt to do the big jobs, when they had to. They entered the Don Hummel Park immediately upon hearing the rhetoric ascend to its revolutionary theatricality, hoping not to have to subdue the crowd, which numbered in the tens of thousands, while the police were but a couple hundred. They had blockaded all the corners of the park and had a number of old, dented school buses with which to round up detainees. They moved into the park, in riot gear, in a fashion that was calculated to be imposing. It was near the southwest corner of the park, in the course of mopping up, that a certain rank-and-file member of the constabulary saw a man waving a severed human arm. The officer attempted to remove the arm from the man’s grasp, calling after him that he would need to relinquish it, identifying himself as an officer and so forth, but the man with the arm, before leaping over some playground equipment, tossed the arm to another man, in a move that would perhaps, had this been an American football game, been referred to as a lateral pass, and the man who received the arm, which appeared to be waving to the crowd as it went by, faked as though to hand it off to an officer near him, but he kept the arm to himself before passing it behind his back, hotdogging, to a friend, who bounded into an encampment, a scattering of tents and lean-tos, going in one end and out another, until the police who descended on this spot were, it needs to be said, confused. The pain compliance began not long after, and as soon as the pain compliance began, the Union of Homeless Citizens ran for the hills, quite literally. No exit was without its unlucky souls, the innocents who were swept into the buses and hauled off to the penal wastes. But those who were more resourceful jumped walls and police barricades, and commandeered vehicles going by, or ran into nearby cul de sacs and rubble-strewn yards where they would not be found for days, if at all.

  Into the midst of this mayhem came the rains. Violently, indiscriminately, and retributively. As if there were a reservoir that had been collecting, somewhere in the troposphere, during the months of drought, until in early fall, out of spite, some disgruntled engineer threw the lever on the trough. The majority of those ill affected by the monsoon season in Rio Blanco, as with those more ill affected by the drought in the first place, were those gathered at Don Hummel Park, in the process of being rounded up by the constabulary. There weren’t more than a pair of rain slickers in the entire rally, although the Union of Homeless Citizens was equipped with polyethylene garbage bags, which were scored for use as outerwear (you stuck your head through the perforated section). The rains, however, were violent enough that no one remembered to man the booth with the polyethylene bags, and the police, who had been given a weather forecast by dispatch (dewpoint: 58 percent, chance of thunderstorms, some severe, 65 percent), did little better. The police drew to a halt wherever they stood, with their Tasers and their nightsticks, and attempted to affix rain visors and to don high-visibility ponchos. The remainder of the crowd, well versed in dispersal, made tracks. Only the homeless citizens who were impaired or brain damaged or perhaps simply in love with the pyrotechnical display of the elements stood and watched, watched palm fronds washed into the nearby drains, watched the rivers swell in the streets, watched the few automobiles of Rio Blanco attempting to ford the rivers that had sprung up, watched one vehicle strike a utility pole, watched as lawfulness and lawlessness alike were swept away. Anything smokable was now wet, anything drinkable was now watered down in this cumulonimbus multicell in the mature-to-dissipating stage whose elapsed rainfall was, within the hour, 1.37 inches.

  Larry and Faith Roberts backed out of the bandstand, slipped behind a pair of large speakers that stood there totemically. There was a bank of portable johns as well, off of which the rain pelted with such severity that the Robertses wondered if it were not genuine hail. They got between these portable johns and the stunned and watered-down police, and then, when there was an opportunity, they slipped into a van marked Union of Homeless Citizens. A glaringly obvious getaway vehicle, true, and that was why it worked so well.

  A busy day for Woo Lee Koo, medical researcher, now working as a paid consultant for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, whose brief was to search the hospitals and areas in and around Rio Blanco for persons complaining of unexplained bacterial infections. He was also in search of portions of human bodies, limbless bodies, bodiless limbs, portions and fragments, hard-to-distinguish bits of tissue, DNA, blood and guts, and so forth; and, in particular, according to rumor and forensic evidence, a certain human arm. A human arm missing one finger, with two others rather badly reattached. Wearing a wedding ring. If that weren’t enough, if all that bloody responsibility were not enough, there had also been a call from his assistant Noelle, who claimed that she had some incredible news, news he wouldn’t believe, and would he please come down to the primate laboratory as soon as he was able. Despite these rather fascinating developments, either one of which would bear on his continuing researches in the area of cellular senescence, Koo found himself, unfortunately, completely preoccupied elsewhere that afternoon. He sat in the kitchen of his unit on the west side of town, slurping slowly, methodically, from a mug of ginseng tea, bewailing, if only to himself, the relationship that currently existed between himself and his son, Jean-Paul Koo.

  His relationship with his own father, who’d died when he was at university in Korea, was noteworthy for its great collegiality, as, he supposed, was often the case in Korean households. His father was not a dispenser of narrowly argued legalistic regulation, short-tempered, and/or selfish. No, his father was gentle, patient, and very funny, with a broad smile and great wisps of white hair that would come loose in the wind, as though he had suddenly grown horns. Father and son were so close that they often walked the streets of the city with an arm around each other. Koo’s friends marveled, and always spoke of elder Koo as the best father on the block, though in truth Woo Lee Koo did not believe his father was anything much out of the ordinary. In fact, it was precisely his ordinariness that made Koo’s father so enviable. He
resembled a medical experiment that goes exactly as planned. His father’s reactions were predictable, verifiable, kindly, and perhaps for this reason there was no rebelling against the elder Koo. The elder Koo had had, according to legend, a passionate gambling streak as a young man; he’d worked his way through the casinos of Hong Kong and Macao, betting and losing, winning and betting again. His father was always trying to encourage Woo Lee Koo to take more risks and to revel in the pleasing uncertainty of human events. For these reasons, his death, in a very avoidable car accident, struck Woo Lee Koo hard and continued to trouble him. His father’s death may have been responsible, Koo supposed, for the single-minded way he pursued his medical ambitions, as if to look up from the textbooks would somehow result in a disagreeable flooding of sentiment.