by Rick Moody
The arm went about its fell business, meanwhile, finding ways to travel from neighborhood to neighborhood. Through empty lots, tent communities, and subdivisions. Three or four more unfortunates met their fate in the process. But more important than the fatalities were the myriad limbs and extremities that the arm managed to brush against, as it served as trophy, curiosity, talisman, prosthetic limb, and, in a bodega on the South Side, one of those picker-uppers that you use to reach things on the high shelves. The arm, carrier of exotic bacteria, perhaps sensed the ways in which the laborious gravity of Earth was sapping it of its energies, and if the bacteria animated it, they couldn’t do so for long, because nothing exists forever in this place. Without some infusion of energy, the arm would eventually have to abandon its mission. If it couldn’t kill with the ferocity that would have contented it, it could, however, spread wide its contagion. All the arguments, all the Caucasian chalk circles that were drawn around the arm, in which antagonists were pitted against one another for the control of it, these were all just little data points on the Venn diagram of infection.
As indicated, by morning, the police had draped their colored tape around the Mansourian residence, and they’d congregated there, trying to ascertain what the evidence suggested in the matter of the death of Moose Mansourian, known confederate of Mexican drug kingpins, small-time, low-level operative who hadn’t been detained yet only because he didn’t give the police anyone they couldn’t get from a dozen different snitches. The only part of the story that didn’t work was the part that had to do with the learning-disabled kid stabbing Moose Mansourian to death with a plastic sword. The death was by strangulation—that was patently obvious on the body—and anyway the retarded kid seemed confused and uncertain about the whole business, which left the father, but the father had no signs of a struggle on his body. It didn’t add up.
The other thing that didn’t add up was how the Federales got wind of the whole thing so fast. They were not likely to intervene in small-town drug hits in places like Rio Blanco, not when there were dozens of other larger cities where the lawlessness was even more aggrieved. How did they know? Which way was the information flowing? All the locals knew was that before they had even finished bagging the evidence and interviewing family members, there was a whole team of federal employees pulling up at the house. Some of them were from the FBI, but others were from far more exotic agencies, including, it seemed, the Centers for Disease Control—not an agency that anyone in Rio Blanco was accustomed to encountering, except when there was that hantavirus outbreak. These guys were actually wearing Hazmat jumpsuits when they showed up, and they were urging the officers to report to a temporary quarantine station that had been set up in the university gymnasium. There they were going to be showered, given a powerful antibiotic, and then they were going to be observed for a few days. Before all that happened, the local officers were detailed to the front of the house, where they were to fend off anyone who would come along asking questions.
But one guy, one of the officers, was still in the house when a fellow with a bad comb-over who claimed to be from NASA (what NASA had to do with anything was anyone’s guess) began to try to interview the retarded kid. This was comical to watch, and the officer, Detective Paradiso, was asked by his police chief to videotape the interview between the bad-hair guy and the retarded kid, for internal use only, and so with the video camera off his tool belt, he made like he was a documentary guy, filming everything from the corner of a cramped living room.
“My name is Rob,” the guy from NASA kept reiterating. Trying to get the kid to focus. Trying to explain NASA to the kid. Space, Mars, all this stuff that was irrelevant to some kid who didn’t even really know what just happened to his brother. “Can you tell me what happened last night? Do you know what happened?”
The kid’s father was sitting next to him now, with an arm around the fucked-up kid, and the father, looking like it was all well beyond him, was crying as the kid tried to talk.
“Moose,” the kid said.
“Moose,” the NASA guy repeated. “Your brother. You were home with your brother?”
“Home.”
“Watching things on the television monitor here?”
“Waterfall.”
“You were watching a waterfall?”
The NASA guy deferred to the father, who didn’t really have anything at all to add to the account. But he had some translation skills with regard to the kid. It was really hard to understand the kid, that was for sure. He had every speech impediment it was possible to have. His big, fleshy lips were not made for the pronunciation of anything but the simplest words.
“Is it possible that your brother made you angry somehow? It’s important that we—”
“We tried that one,” Detective Paradiso called from behind the camera.
“I think I can ask the questions,” NASA guy rejoined, without much conviction. “So did your brother make you angry?”
Retarded kid just fidgeted with the plastic sword, which they had tried to take away from him but which he would not relinquish, and which was still covered with dried brown blood, and the kid was obviously really tired and wanted nothing more than to go to sleep, but probably he could sense that something horrible had happened. Whether he understood the question or not, that was debatable, but still the kid seemed to summon up some kind of response, something that you could film on your departmental video camera:
“No.”
“You weren’t angry?”
“No.”
“Can you tell me what happened?”
At which point the father got himself involved.
“Look, we’ve been going around and around on this stuff for four hours, and you’re talking to a child who is not verbal, and he didn’t answer this question earlier, and he’s not going to be able to answer it now. And I don’t know what all of this is about, but I know that this is the only boy I have left, and he is exhausted, and I’m exhausted, and I don’t care, personally, if this is some international diplomatic incident or whatever the hell it is, but we need to be able to go to sleep here and to try to come to some kind of closure.”
NASA guy ignored the heartfelt plea, and who can blame him, since one of the most popular web-based, enhanced-reality brands that autumn was the program entitled Closure, in which a crack team of life coaches went out into the world to help people who needed closure, for whatever reason, whether because of natural disaster, or abandonment, or murder, to find the persons they needed to find in order to make their appeal for, you guessed it, closure. The NASA guy didn’t give a shit about closure; he thought closure was some TV shit, apparently, and from the way he was talking about the whole thing, he was willing to sacrifice the retarded kid and the dad too to the dumpster of history, in order to get what he needed. But he tried a more personal appeal, and maybe it was this appeal that finally got the attention of the retarded kid, even if only for a minute.
“Corey,” he said, and it was as if some light were being switched on in the murky proceedings, by virtue of a proper name, “I’m going to tell you a little bit about me. I’ve got some kids of my own, one of them about your age, and I haven’t seen my kids in a while. In fact, my kids, along with their mom, left me not too very long ago, because of all the work I’ve been putting into the planet Mars. You know what the planet Mars is, right? I’m betting your brother told you all about Mars and the other planets. Mars is a beautiful, deserted place, and, you may have heard, last year we tried to put some men on Mars. Some women too. And what we learned, Corey, was that there are some places where people just aren’t meant to go. And when you send astronauts places where they aren’t yet meant to go, all kinds of things go wrong. You know what I mean, right? In this case, some things went wrong when we tried to bring the men back from Mars. Some men and women died on the way to Mars, and some men and women decided to stay on Mars, and then there was the one man coming back from Mars, and we did everything we could to bring him back, so that he
could be reunited with his family. We’d failed so many times, in so many different ways, but we tried to paper over our failures with this one success: we were going to bring this man home. Then something went horribly wrong even there. The man was made sick on Mars, and now it’s possible that some people are going to catch the sickness of the man from Mars, and because of this it’s urgently necessary that we—”
An incredible story, when you thought about it for a second. It wasn’t the story of the Mars mission as anyone else had heard it. Detective Paradiso, who was trying to get some nice close-ups and all, was being warned by the people from the CDC that everything he was hearing in the room was top secret, and while they were willing to tolerate temporary video storage for documentation internally at the RBPD, any leak could occasion mass hysteria, public disorder, a national health emergency, and other horrible things, and so he was to keep completely silent about all of this, all that he saw in that dim, moist living room, and therefore Paradiso was trying to listen carefully to all these dire threats, or so he told his buddies back at the precinct first chance he got, and he was sort of electrified by what he’d heard, when the kid said something that was apparently very important, and right away NASA guy got plenty interested, and all the CDC guys gathered round. What the kid said was the word arm.
“Arm?” NASA guy said right back to him. “Are you saying this had something to do with an arm?”
“Arm.”
“Like an arm that wasn’t attached to—”
“Arm.”
“Can you tell us where the arm was?”
“Maybe he means the iguana,” the father said. “We got rid of the iguana.”
“Arm,” the retarded kid said again.
But the NASA guy knew what he needed to know: “And at any time did the arm touch you, Corey? Did you have any contact with the arm? This is really important. Can you remember? Did you touch the arm?”
He couldn’t fucking feel one fucking thing in his leg, not one fucking thing; his leg felt like it wasn’t even his own fucking leg, and when he looked down at the leg, or at the other leg, at the pair of legs, it was like they were not legs at all, like they were fucking lengths of PVC piping or something, or like a severed tree limb, or like they were made of marble, and he could still move his legs, a little fucking bit, but it was like the legs no longer fucking belonged to him, but they belonged on some junk heap, like the junk heaps of the Mexicans who sat out at the empty corners on the margins of the city, sheets over their heads, selling bits and pieces of junk, a wagon wheel, a fucking human skull; they would have been happy to have one of his legs, his legs that no longer belonged to him but which were now a kind of anemic white, his former fucking legs, they might as well cut the fucking legs off of him, and at first it was his fucking feet that felt like they were dead and would have to be fucking amputated, but then it was the fucking foot and the fucking shin, and then he could fucking feel the fucking death creeping up him, and he couldn’t fucking get comfortable with the temperature in the room, his fucking sick chamber, like one minute he was hot, and if that wasn’t fucking predictable, well, what the fuck wasn’t predictable, because it was the fucking desert, and who cared if it was almost dawn, if it was the fucking desert, and it was hot until the winter, fucking desert fucking inferno, and it was a hundred fucking degrees fucking Fahrenheit, and so he was probably fucking hot because it was fucking hot, but what about when he was fucking cold, didn’t seem so good, and he said he was cold, he called out to Vienna that he was fucking cold, he couldn’t fucking get warm; he was pretty sure that he said he was fucking cold, but she didn’t come, and no one came to deal with the fact of how fucking cold he was, not Vienna, not his father, and he lay there on the fucking bed, and maybe this was what fucking expiration felt like, like death was some kind of material that you could feel fucking infiltrating you a little bit at a time, like death was a fucking radioactive element or something, like americium or polonium or barium or one of those fucking radioactive elements that only survived for a fucking millisecond, except that it survived when it was laying waste to your bloodstream, fucking death, the thing that survived only when it was in a bloodstream, in a fucking circulatory system, you could see it fucking gathering its force and laying waste to you, and then you knew your fucking time was come, and maybe that was when Vienna heard him crying out about the blanket, Give me a fucking blanket for godsakes because I’m fucking dying in here! I’m so fucking cold! and then she appeared or someone fucking appeared, spread a fucking blanket out on him, and he wasn’t cold, and maybe the fucking radioactive death particles would be held at fucking bay for a little bit longer, unless on the other hand death were just this bacterial thing, and the bacterial colonies were fucking massing in him, and the fucking bacterial colonies were outnumbering the colonies of benevolent cells that were Jean-Paul Koo, until there would be no him left, just fucking bacteria, and there would be so much of it that any person who touched him would rub off a piece of him, and his limbs would fucking come off, like if you just pulled on his leg a tiny fucking little bit, his leg would just come off of him, and it had fucking served him so well, this leg, taken him just about every fucking place he’d ever gone, except for the places that his fucking car had taken him, when he could afford the thirty-one dollars a fucking gallon or whatever it was (but by the time you read this it will probably be thirty-six) that you had to pay to algae up the car, but the leg had fucking taken him every other fucking place, like back when he still played a little lacrosse, when he was fucking good, his legs had done it, had carried him from one end to the other of the pitch, his fucking arms had carried the stick and cradled that little jewel at the center of the game; you know how when you are eating a chicken, and the chicken is like way overcooked or whatever, then you just pull on the fucking wing, you fucking yank, and the whole thing just comes right off, and death was just fucking exactly like that, it cooked him until he was like some kind of chicken from the Chicken Shack that you could just fucking rip right apart, and he had fucking overheard his father whispering to some guy, like some government fucking guy, because there were all these fucking government guys, at least this was what he fucking thought, that it wasn’t any fucking dream, because he wasn’t a dreamer, because he wanted to know the fucking truth, not some decorated version; what was good about the morning? When you woke up, you lived in the truth, and he knew that, and what he had fucking overheard was this fucking idea that his body was going to disassemble, that was the shorthand, that was living in the truth, and he fucking didn’t want Vienna to see his body disassemble, and why had he fucking gone out into the fucking desert to have fucking sex anyhow, because he could have done so many fucking other things. His fucking business needed fucking attention, because he needed a fucking capital infusion, you know? All the seed money, well, it was all going over to China or fucking India, and where the fuck could he get the money, especially if he spent all his fucking time graduating from fucking high school or out in the desert having sex? Well, they fucking said that it couldn’t be done, his business, and his father always felt like he could have done better monetizing the patents, and if the incubation of the fucking M. thanatobacillus was so fucking long, then maybe there would be time, anyway, to file some fucking patents before his body disassembled and started crawling around trying to strangle people or kick people in the ass, and when Vienna had been here, last night, she’d said he looked fine, and he could tell that he couldn’t talk right anymore, and that he was having trouble pronouncing some sounds, like you know, the sh sound, it was fucking hard, you know, but when she went to the bathroom, he used one of the surgical gloves that his father had left around for him, and he borrowed her compact, and all he could say was that he fucking looked like Jean-Paul Koo, but he looked like the nasal inhaler version of Jean-Paul Koo, you know? Like he was all fucked on OxyPlus or something, had not fucking eaten for ten days and was mostly locked away in someone’s dungeon or something, and he knew she was trying
to say that it would be all right, because at least on Mars the fucking thing was supposed to take about a month and a half or more, and during the time before your fucking body disassembled you had time to get your affairs in order, and even if you were a fucking kid and you didn’t have all that fucking many affairs, at least you were free of like big debt, or whatever else, like fucking ex-wives or fucking children, there was just you, and your fucking business that you would leave to your fucking dad, and maybe part of it to the ridiculously hot Vienna fucking Roberts, or whatever, before your body disassembled. The stupid fucking sentimental thing, that was what really pissed him off, was when he fucking gave in, like it was all chemistry, there was this fucking cell, and it fucking divided or it didn’t fucking divide, and there was a lot of carbon, and there were some vitamin D receptors, who knew what the fuck else, the cells needed protein, and then there was this bacteria, and then why all the fucking sentimental stuff, like everything he’d ever smelled in his life, like the fucking bowl of chicken soup of his childhood was so fucking beautiful, every fucking ice cream cone, now that it was a thing that might fucking be gone, and the sunlight in the desert, what was fucking more fucking beautiful, and he was so fucking lucky to have these days, the days where the light on the Santa Catalina Mountains got seen by him, and to have seen the clouds sweeping through that amber sunlight on the fucking mountains, and to have been able to fucking see a fucking mountain lion that one time, in the hills out by Mount Kelsey, traversing its eight miles or whatever, and hopefully it was killing one more jogger on its fucking way, so lucky to have been the one who got to see the mountain lion, which was fucking specializing in not fucking being seen by anyone, and then he fucking got to see the cactus blossoms, again, the saguaro blossoms, the Mexican poppy, just a couple months ago, and he got to see all the shit that got swept up by the monsoons and deposited down in the washes, whole encampments of nomads washed downstream, it was a fucking catastrophe, and catastrophe is a beautiful thing, a thing that must be seen, and whatever the fuck else, it was fucking great, because it’s real, merciless nature, and what was more beautiful than that, and it was all reminding him of his mother, that was the fucking sentimental thing, and it was fucking pathetic; you should just fucking think about fucking blood and bacteria and fucking human fecal material, or the fucking waves of bugs that fucking ate your body, or whatever, every time you were tempted to be sentimental, you needed to think about those things, but that didn’t mean that he didn’t keep fucking thinking that he was seeing his mother in the corners of the room, back from before she was really gone; he could remember some spectral or fucking ghostly part of her life, when she was still walking around, from when he was really fucking small, and maybe this thing, the disassembling Jean-Paul, the inevitable fucking disassembling Jean-Paul, made him closer to the ghost of his fucking mother, and the fucking heat and the fucking cold, and the fucking fever, and these all made him closer to his mother, wherever his mother was, and if he could fucking summon his fucking mother, just this one time, if fucking death could just yield up its predictable qualities, its eternal and endless predictability, just one time, just yield up one bit of maternal wisdom, for one fucking second, then he would totally repent of all that he’d done, like when he fucking complained about having to take care of her when she was bedridden, he would repent, he would fucking repent if the relentlessly predictable scientific qualities of death would give way to the childish sentimentality, and his mother could come to him and could fucking tell him what to expect of the next month, if he even had a fucking month. She could tell him what to expect, like what do you expect from it, why does it have to be this thing where no one will tell you what to expect? Does it make any sense that no one will fucking tell you? Why does it have to be like that? Like all the pleasures of his short fucking life, or of any fucking life, were just the thing that was to distract you from the fact that no one could tell you about this one thing, they just couldn’t tell you about the time and place of the end of you, of your impact on this fucking dark world, and his mother could tell him, even if it was cheesy, his wanting his fucking mother to just fucking turn up one fucking time, was it so much to ask? Couldn’t his dead mother just like turn up one fucking time, at the advent of his fucking death, and tell him one thing? He writhed in the bed with it, his cement limbs trembled with it, injustice, the ungodly injustice, the rank injustice of the silence of illness and death, and even when he trembled with it, there was no result, and no point to all of it, except that this was just what was happening right now, and there was no explication, except that he was alone with it, until the knock at the door.