The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  What else was there to do? Koo watched the video, trying to divine the meaning of symbolic locutions still possible for his son. Patient seems able to understand language, but is unable to communicate well. Patient seems to be attempting to formulate some prolonged farewell with romantic partner, V. Roberts, despite limited linguistic skills. Koo himself, as he watched, was unable to sit still. He couldn’t stop himself from getting up, crossing the room, wearing down a portion of wall-to-wall carpeting, stuffing some empty carbohydrate into his mouth, that bowl of peppermints he had on his desk, going back to the screen, trying to rethink his strategy, remembering about the peeling wallpaper in the office, dictating some more notes, castigating himself for his paucity of ideas, despairing, and it was in the course of this that he did suddenly hit on a possibility.

  Perhaps it was only fair to let Jean-Paul know about the reanimation experiment, and to allow him to make some kind of farewell to his mother. Koo even dictated the thought into his recorder, and it was just then that he had his idea. If the infection took a more leisurely course on the planet Mars, if it was possible to slow the course of infection by refrigerating, why couldn’t he put Jean-Paul into the freezer for a few hours? Had no one explored this? Woo Lee Koo had trouble getting his thoughts to settle down, so worried was he about his difficult but lovable son, and when he tried to come up with his hypotheses, he found that he flitted around from idea to idea without being able to land.

  At the same time, there was a rather moving speech taking place on the screen before him. Vienna Roberts had risen to the occasion and supported her boyfriend throughout his lurid ordeal. Koo also made a note that any theory of the bacteria had to take into account the fact that she showed no sign of infection.

  “I get that you are not well, and maybe you think your time has come, but I want you to know that I don’t accept it, and you just shaking your head isn’t going to convince me. For me, your time just is not coming. If I were going to show the same symptoms as you, I’d already have the symptoms, which means I’m probably clean, so why don’t you just let me hug you?”

  To which his son shook his head, again.

  “Look at it another way”—wiping her eyes—“the day arrives for every lover, that day when she’s not a lover anymore, and it could be five days after she meets him, or five years, or fifty years, but no matter what that time is, the time when lovers are parted, have to be parted, no matter what has happened in all the intervening time, whether they have been unfaithful, or have taken each other for granted, or maybe they couldn’t really be intimate, or however they approached it, no matter what happened in all that time, there’s never a lover who doesn’t wish that she didn’t have a few more minutes. The end of love is when you can no longer see the possibility of a few more minutes, and when you start totaling up what’s lost. And that’s when you always wish you had done better talking through things, you know, because there was a time that was the last time you could express yourself, and you almost always wish you had expressed yourself better, because it’s the way people are, that they never get it all down in words, and in this case, if something is going to happen to you now, I really want to say that it’s partly because of me, because I—”

  A cessation of the conversation at this point, by reason of a surfeit of feelings.

  “—I was the one who had this selfish idea about us having to go out there, out into the canyon. If it all has something to do with that, with what I thought I wanted, and you didn’t even want it, then it’s up to me to be able to say it’s okay for me and I’m not worried about infection, or whatever you want to call it. It’s up to me to say whether it’s okay for me to hug you or be hugged by you, or whether I can kiss you or wrap my arms around you on the bed, or lie on top of you.”

  Son, again, with the vigorous shaking of the head, no. It was clear to Koo that Jean-Paul was still able to indicate in the negative, and therefore the affirmative, but what of more complicated grammatical structures?

  For some reason, Koo suddenly noticed that Vienna Roberts was actually wearing trousers. An unlikely garment for the slut. Had there been some kind of costume change? These denim trousers were sitting low on her hips in a way that revealed some of her pale belly and her bony hips, and it occurred to Koo that the pants belonged to his son. Perhaps she was wearing these low-slung slacks because she was already appropriating clothing from him, fetishizing his clothes, the clothes from the former Jean-Paul. Before he could halt the proceedings, the girl began removing her particle mask, unhooking it from her dainty little ears, as if this was somehow to express more emphatically her romantic thoughts, and Koo knew now that he should march across the unit and intercede, and yet he was unable, for the moment, to stop watching. It was as if this were some kind of perma-cam web broadcast, such as you might see on the independent or pirate channels, where everything was about how realistic were its means of production, which really meant: how tiresome, how shattering, for example, that program, Prima, about the first family on Mars.

  Jean-Paul made a gesture, laying ahold of each elbow, as if to indicate that he was cold, and the girl took note.

  “Do you want a—”

  Pointing to a stack of wool blankets that Koo himself had brought into the room to deal with temperature extremes. But Jean-Paul shook his head vigorously. He didn’t want the blanket. Any blanket.

  “Well, then, do you want me to hold you? Would you just, like, let me—”

  Another vigorous shake of the head in the negative, so vigorous, in fact, that there was a tiny crimson spattering across the pillow and on the bedclothes.

  “What, then?”

  Jean-Paul pointed out into the hall. And thus the drama of Jean-Paul’s illness would temporarily recede from the view of omnipresent video cameras. His father had an idea where the young lovers were going, because it was a place in the unit that had often appealed to Jean-Paul when he was a boy: the bathroom, with its paling lamps. Why a boy from Asia, by way of France, had been so enamored with the brutish and homely pigmentary affectation of the paling salon was unclear to his father. Paling, in general, was no better than sniffing glue, in terms of the kinds of difficulties it so effectively promoted. But Jean-Paul had always liked it as a child, and when he could not go into an actual paling salon to soak up the ultrahigh-frequency transmissions of the irradiators, then he would apply the caramel dyes of would-be Bollywood actresses, those trying to make it big in the Sino-Indian musical espionage film circuit.

  If there was a particular stressor in the boy’s life, an audition for a school play, some kind of standardized testing, a visit from his French cousins, the younger Koo had often, in the past, repaired to the bathroom and to the paling salon that had come with the unit. In fact, the little booths that Jean-Paul had designed for his cosmetic surgery business bore a significant resemblance to the paling booths he had sometimes favored as a younger boy. An astute psychologist, with a copy of the DSM-VIII, might have diagnosed racial dysphoria, and this was a popular diagnosis in the era of the Sino-Indian Economic Compact. No one in NAFTA wanted to look like they could come from a Hindu nation.

  Koo met the youngsters in the hall and followed them toward the bathroom. Vienna, still wearing her rubberized gloves, was attempting to help along Jean-Paul, whose legs were weak and, Koo supposed, ready to detach. Instead of greeting Dr. Woo Lee Koo, the young lovers proceeded as if in this end stage of their doomed romance, they no longer needed anyone besides themselves. Least of all parents. They shut the bathroom door behind themselves gently but firmly, and Koo found himself on the other side of the action. He dictated a few more notes while he was there, mumbling in Korean as he listened to the paling lamps going on in the bathroom. It was good they were paling now, what with the blackout only a few hours away.

  If the question of self is an important marker in tertiary-stage infection, during which a rigid, human idea of self leaves the patient to be replaced by a more permeable sense of identity in which self and inan
imate objects become interdependent and less distinguishable, it should be noted that even in this advanced stage, our patient is still inclined toward idiosyncrasies he exhibited from earliest childhood. For example, despite long having been told that he risked melanoma if he didn’t discontinue paling, patient nonetheless has expressed a fervent and consistent desire to be a different color. The affectation persists at this late stage of infection despite likely skin failure and sickly pallor.

  There was some disturbance in the bathroom, some commotion, as if the two of them were moving about quite a bit, wrestling, or were engaged in some fully executed jitterbug of love, and the sound of it reminded Koo of those sequences in antiquated slapstick comedies when many more people were crammed into some tiny space than could actually fit. The recessed lighting flickered in the hall where he stood, as it always did when Jean-Paul was using the paling appliance in the bathroom. Wait! Koo was distracted by an incoming call on his digital assistant, which was, at this moment, looped around his brown plastic belt—Levy again, from Northwest Medical, with a note suggesting that isolating patients in a hyperbaric chamber had yet to produce results. In fact, Levy noted, they’d left one patient in there, and when they returned an hour later, he was in three different pieces. They had to stop one of the patient’s feet from attempting to escape into the general hospital population by crushing all the bones in it with a nearby fire ax. Koo passed a distracted moment lamenting the professional depths to which his colleagues had free-fallen in search of a quick fix for M. thanatobacillus. It was no better than the medieval responses to the buboes that wiped out so much of Europe—smoke, sex, pleasant smells, prayer, and inquisitions. Maybe these dark ages were not substantively different from those, and what was forgotten would again exceed what was remembered. But Koo found that his reveries, facing a scuffed and overdue-to-be-repainted bathroom door, beyond which was the humming of ultraviolet radiation, were suddenly interrupted by a braying that could only be one thing. It was like a familiar song, that sound, the sound of his son’s voice, his son’s voice saying a rather familiar thing:

  “That feels fucking great!”

  What? Unmistakably his son’s voice, audibly so, followed in turn by an unreserved giggling from Vienna Roberts, a laughter prompted, Koo assumed, by the sound of the patient speaking for the first time in a day or so.

  “Fucking great!”

  Koo began pounding on the door, and he was astonished to find with what enthusiasm he was pounding on the door, with what flooding relief he begged to be admitted, calling his son’s name, for here was a moment to be treasured, a moment when things seemed as though they were not quite as grim as he’d previously imagined. Under the margin of the door, in the hum of the paling salon, there was, for a minute at any rate, some hope.

  The door swung back, and there was his son, his skin hanging like rags on his body, having lost quite a bit of weight already, a bit of clotted arterial gunk in the corners of his eyes, which were both bloodshot and slightly yellowy, but smiling, smiling.

  Koo said, “What is it that’s going on?” And while the words may have had the ring of paternal injunction about them, Koo also felt giddy with the possibilities of the moment.

  “Dad,” Jean-Paul said, struggling but articulating nonetheless, “I really feel better in here. Is it possible that I could feel better in here? Could this…”

  So overpowering was the sense that something at last might have been going right for the infected young man, that Koo didn’t even notice at first, and neither did Jean-Paul, that Vienna Roberts had thrown herself around her contagious lover, encircling him. Without a mask or a hospital gown on, nor other protection, she encircled Jean-Paul, and she lay her face against his face, and then her breast against his breast, and there they were now, having conjoined their destinies, the lovers. Koo was moved enough that, at last, he felt unable to repel a conviction that it would be all right:

  “My son,” he said, “I am so happy to hear your voice. You don’t know how happy I am to hear your voice. I am even happy to hear your cursing. I have not been so happy to hear your cursing in many years. In fact, I am rarely happy to hear your cursing, but today I am very happy. You should feel encouraged to curse some more. You should curse to your heart’s content. And I must say that this moment gives me some ideas, some ideas I must share with some of the other medical personnel who are working on this question of what to do about the disease. If you would be interested to know, the idea that I have is that there are two factors that worked to inhibit the growth of the bacteria M. thanatobacillus on the planet where it was incubating, and the first of these factors is the far greater impact of cosmic rays and other radiation on the planet Mars.”

  “But Dad,” Jean-Paul said, slurring perceptibly, “what does that have to do with—”

  “This machine for which we pay rather too much money, because of the amount of electrical energy it uses, aims to apply ultraviolet radiation to your skin, in order to cook away the upper layers of skin, the pigment manufacturing of the dermal cells. It is an apparatus that I have always deplored and found unnecessary, even barbaric, and yet it may be that in this case the radiation is duplicating the kinds of effects that were present on the surface of Mars. On the one hand, as I am thinking about it now, it is possible that the bacteria on Mars became irradiated by the surface conditions, the lack of atmosphere on the planet, and therefore became inured to low-level radiation, but the very same conditions kept it from duplicating effectively, and thus the slow rate of progression of the infection in those who were on the Mars mission.”

  “And—”

  “It means that you are going to stay in the bathroom under the paling lamps for a good portion of this day, I believe, at least until I see about radiation treatments at the hospital.”

  The young man smiled, as perhaps he had not smiled for some time now, and the girl kissed him on the face. There was a kind of slurpy sound issuing from Jean-Paul’s skin when she applied herself to it. Some of it pulled away with her.

  “Still, there is another factor,” Koo went on, “that must be considered. That is the temperature issue. The surface of the planet Mars is extremely cold, as you know, and such air as exists there is all but anaerobic, and so it’s more than possible that lowering your body temperature would effectively slow down the rate of infection.”

  “Are you going to put me in the freezer in the garage? And leave me there to freeze?”

  Woo Lee Koo, without realizing the error he was about to make, said, “There is not room in the freezer in the garage, because there is already someone in there.”

  “There’s…”

  “Perhaps this is not the best time to discuss this.” As if Koo had become suddenly faint of heart, as if the rebuses that made up his mostly concealed personality, the compartments secreted away in other compartments, had now eased into view.

  “I believe that the number of male cases of infection is greatly larger than the number of female cases,” he went on, “and I had not earlier concentrated much attention on this issue, but it is possible that we should look at estrogen as some kind of natural suppressor of the infection. Perhaps hormones play an important role in this process. Perhaps the bacteria first targets the endocrines—”

  “Dad, what the fuck do you mean that there’s already someone in the freezer? I mean, I know there is a lot of other stuff going on right now. But is there some reason why you said what I think you just said?”

  “Perhaps if Miss Roberts continues to be free of symptoms, we would be able to take a blood test from her in order to look at it under the microscope? If it isn’t the estrogen, it’s possible that she has some kind of—”

  “Dad!”

  “—resistance—”

  The timer on the paling lamps went off, and Vienna Roberts, ignoring the turn of events, cranked the timer around again, in the clockwise direction.

  “We will also have to make sure that we have enough generator power available to run the
paling lamps twenty-four hours if we need to do so. Perhaps if you stay in this room for a long enough period, then some of the skin’s regenerative capabilities will begin their work, and instead of just arresting the disease you can begin to recover some of your former appearance.”

  Jean-Paul turned to Vienna Roberts. “Did you hear what I heard?”

  And then the elder felt that he had no choice but to say what he had to say, what he had prepared for so long to say, in so many different ways. No matter what father-and-son conversation they shared, no matter what father-and-son conversation was not going according to Koo’s intentions, no matter what chastisements he was meting out, or what paternal advice, there was always in the limbic portion of Woo Lee Koo’s neural net the moment when this conversation would take place, the conversation in which it was revealed that Koo was not the man that he seemed, not the good man, the generous man, the family man, but rather a man who was afraid to let go of certain things, a man who was afraid to face up to certain facts, a man who could not accept death, after all, though death was accepted by other people bravely every day. Why was it that he was this man? Koo had formulated myriad answers to the question, or, at least, he had imagined many times over the moment in which he composed a brave accounting of his actions, and his son simply forgave him. Koo never sat at a keyboard and typed in the words Because I believe that the love of the family is the only love that a man will have in this world, and should you chance upon this love, you must do what you can to preserve it, you must sacrifice whatever you have to preserve this family, because I believe these things without reservation, I have done what I have done. Koo didn’t write down the words; he didn’t consider which was the best way of delivering these dicta in his second language. But he considered that his point of view was just and right, and that his son, eventually, would see that he was just and right, because there was no other way to think about these issues. And yet now that Koo was about to have the conversation with his son, he understood that perhaps he was not so right as all that. At least, he was not sure how his son was going to react, because indeed he could think of no elegant way to say “Your mother is in the freezer in the garage.” Although this was better than, for example, “Your mother is in this soup.”