The Four Fingers of Death

by Rick Moody

  While Noelle watched, this posse of outlaws with Tasers turned their firepower on one of the privacy modules, where some poor sufferer of irritable bowel syndrome or similar ailment was just trying to get the problem behind him so he could go on to be entertained by floats and madness. This poor individual was not expecting at that moment to be subjected to neuromuscular incapacitation. But these guys were Tasering the outside of the privacy module, and if the poor sufferer touched any of the walls inside the module, he was getting a pretty intense charge right about now, perhaps even a drive stun charge, which is the setting that effects pain compliance, and sure enough, there was some screaming, and the door fell open, and out tumbled… a guy in a Mexican wrestling costume.

  The Taser vigilantes fell on the Mexican wrestler almost immediately. They blasted away. If he’d been a piece of pork heavily infected with trichinosis, he’d have been rendered completely fit for human consumption, so overwhelming was the concentration of Taser power. In this instance, he certainly cohered with the DSM-VIII’s definition of excited delirium, in that he was in a known drug location, fraternizing with known purveyors of drugs, probably taking OxyPlus or polyamphetamines, and was an aficionado of Mexican wrestling—all of which added up to a much higher likelihood of ventricular fibrillation in the aftermath of Taser discharge.

  “Hey, wait,” Noelle called out generally. “Do you know him? The guy in the costume? You know him?”

  Everybody was wearing a costume. Easily half the people in the line for the privacy modules, and all the passersby heading to and fro, turned to respond to Noelle. But one of the pistoleros, the one with the eye patch, registered that there had been an inquiry, and he said, “Our thing tonight is that we’re chasing the Mexican wrestlers.”

  “Do you know where they are?”

  “What?”

  “They abducted my friend. Morton is his name.”

  The pistolero turned to his associates. “You guys, this lady says that the wrestlers kidnapped her friend.”

  Protestations of outrage ensued, we’ll get ’em, we’ll shoot them all down, there’s no excuse for these Central American entertainments, and so on. Without giving Noelle much to go on, they all headed off at a trot (without actual horses) in the direction of the Old Rio Blanco stage set. The only felicitous development, right then, besides the fact that she no longer had to wait for Larry to finish in the privacy module, was to be found in the small army of voyeurs who were following the pistoleros at some remove, just for the sheer drama, some of them on bicycles and motorized skateboards. Above, a few jet packs. Noelle accepted an offer from a pair of twins who were riding a tandem bicycle. She rode in between, sidesaddle. And the greater distances of the desert—which on foot were unnavigable—became manageable, and soon they were heading into the swirling clouds of stampeding vigilantes. All of the omnium gatherum seemed to head off with them, like stars in an endlessly expanding firmament.

  The rucksack that had the replacement arm had grown heavier and heavier in the time that Noelle had been carrying it alone, and this despite the fact that she realized she’d lost any number of other personal possessions. Her outfit was down to the bra (the shirt was a self-inflicted loss, but still), sandals, ripped shorts. The elastics had fallen out of her pigtails, and her headband had fallen off, and her hair was windswept, and her skin sandblasted, and she’d become another one of the desert rats in this pursuit of the arm. A dozen miles from the nearest shower.

  The lights were extinguished in Old Rio Blanco, though it wasn’t quite yet the official blackout hour, and it occurred to her to wonder if, in the Old West, they’d confined their shoot-outs to daylight the better to see the targets, because if there were just gas lamps or candles back then, a lot of innocent bystanders were going to get filled full of holes, or, in this modern setting, were going to get laid out with neuromuscular incapacitation. Nevertheless, the stampede of freethinkers pulled up at the darkened burg of Old Rio Blanco, uncertain about how to gain admission what with the dark. Weren’t the lights always on in order to bilk any tourists who still came out this way? Noelle imagined that the Wheeler family would have settled this question beforehand, the question of Old Rio Blanco, and she was laden with an uncanny feeling, this feeling that there was something deeply wrong, that the omnium gatherum had been left too much to its own devices, as though it were the autistic progeny of contemporary American culture now released to do whatever it liked, to dash out its brains if it saw fit.

  The buildings were all stage sets, yes, which meant they had only the front side. But in the moonlight the front side of everything looked ominous and forgotten, as though it had all been abandoned, as though the idea of simulation had been abandoned in favor of neglect. And yet the pistoleros entered that municipality with the kinds of whoops of mayhem that probably the bad guys had avoided back when Rio Blanco was a genuine outpost of the homesteaders, ringed on every side by restive native populations. The whoops were a cinematic invention, but in this case they effected the desired result.

  The desired result was: that a veritable army of Native Americans, real or simulated Native Americans, and their Mexican wrestler compadres, appeared from nowhere, from out of the enveloping darkness, and beset the pistoleros. And then there was a whole lot of Tasering. It was hard to make out, in fact, who was holding what weapon and who was falling to the ground with neuromuscular incapacitation. The laughing and the cries of recognition and hilarity, they made it pretty difficult to sort out, and the farther that Noelle moved toward the framed-up simulations of Old Rio Blanco’s sets, the more confused and disoriented she seemed to become, spatially, emotionally, physically. Out of breath, uncertain about which direction was out, Noelle sat down on the front step of what appeared to be yet another filmic saloon. The windows were painted with fake lamplight—this she knew from a prior visit—but in the dark, these murals were just so much wood and plaster and nails. After watching some more young men race around shooting at one another, after watching the Native Americans overturn the historical record—so that almost all the cowboys, all the vigilantes, lay quivering on the dusty main street of Old Rio Blanco—Noelle realized that there was another bystander, another witness, sitting just down the step from her. One of the fraternity of Mexican wrestlers. He was outfitted, in fact, in red, white, and blue, with a cape, with a mask, with some fancy shoes that resembled the kind of flippers that he might have employed in a neighbor’s swimming pool. If she could have read dejected in the half-light, she would have said he was dejected, and whatever was his motivation, he had found that it was long since unaccomplished.

  “Are you with the wrestlers?” she asked.

  He replied, “I was just wearing the outfit, and then, somehow, I learned that you can’t just wear a wrestling outfit.”

  “It was a coordinated thing?”

  “I think maybe we just all got here, dressed as wrestlers, and that gave us some kind of, you know, group identity. Suddenly, we all had to subdue a lot of people with fancy holds.”

  “You see a chimpanzee come through here with the others?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “A chimpanzee.”

  A pause.

  “That wasn’t a chimpanzee; that was a man in a chimpanzee suit.”

  “How many chimpanzees are there liable to be in these parts?”

  “I guess there could be plenty of chimpanzees,” the wrestler said, and he stood, and he moved along the step on which they sat, closer to Noelle. “But I’ve only seen one tonight.”

  “Does he talk?”

  “Can’t shut him up.”

  “That’d be my friend.”

  “Says he knows people at the college there, says he’s got all kinds of lawyers, says he’s going to have these lawyers press charges, says we’ll have to cover his legal fees. He talks so much that eventually you just kind of think he’s full of shit.”

  Noelle asked the wrestler if he wanted some protein caplets, which was all she had left in the rucksac
k with the arm, the caplets the youngsters liked to take in lieu of proper meals. The phial of caplets was dusty but intact.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” the wrestler said.

  “Do you think maybe you could let me see Morton?”

  “Don’t know if the other guys are going to like that. Especially now that we busted down the cowboys and we have control of the area.”

  Noelle said, “I have some stuff I need to do with Morton before they burn the arm, or shoot the arm off into space, or whatever they are going to do with it. Morton and I have responsibilities.”

  “Which arm?”

  “Is there more than one arm?”

  “Oh, the arm! We found the arm too. We find things and pick them up, and then we bring them all back here, to the warehouse.”

  The wrestler stood, as if the protein caplets had given him enough energy to move, and while he was talking now, he was walking into the night, past the slumbering bodies, away. “You go in by the apothecary; there’s a door. That was the green room, you know. When they were using Old Rio Blanco for the movies, or whatever they used it for. Even the most fake stuff has to have some kind of moment when it’s totally real, that’s the thing, and the apothecary has the one real spot in town here. It’s like an actual interior space. Or at least it’s the only part I know that’s real. Maybe there’s some other real part that I just don’t know about. So you should try over by the apothecary; that’s our house of representatives, where we gather for periodic encounter sessions to discuss how the crusade is going, whether we need better planned coordination, stuff like that. So you go on over there, and they have the mascot, and they’re trying, I think, to get him to take off the boxer shorts, or anyway that’s what they told me. They have a clown costume for him. The story is that they were going to put the clown costume on a dwarf who was going to come along for a fee. It’s not a festival if you don’t have a proper dwarf. Anyway, they’re trying to get your friend to wear the clown costume, and he doesn’t want to do it, but they are threatening him with the arm.”

  Or at least she thought that was the end of this incredibly revealing speech, but now she wasn’t sure that the protein caplets she’d given him were really protein caplets at all, but maybe they were some kind of peyote distillate or something, because she was feeling a little bit unsteady herself. Had she taken one when she’d given them to the wrestler? Things were kind of swimming, and there was a lot of haloing around the flashlights that glimmered from various spots in Old Rio Blanco, which meant, she guessed, that there were snipers out there, and she needed to walk as quietly as possible through town, to the apothecary, despite her neurological or psychedelic or psychotic symptoms.

  Unless she was sick with whatever it was that the arm had. Unless this was the death march, some kind of middle-class, white, countercultural version of the death march, in which you walked by a lot of bodies in prone position. The apothecary got closer without ever quite moving into reach, just as Noelle’s conspiratorial reasoning—which she’d kept in check earlier in the day—rose up from the background noise of her psychosis and began urging on her the possibility that actually the Mexican wrestlers were government agents of some kind. Maybe the Mars mission skeptics, the pistoleros, the wrestlers, were all part of some kind of conspiratorial activity that was about finding the infected arm and keeping it under government control, keeping it free from the forces of anarchy for as long as possible, which in this instance meant keeping it from tens of thousands of drug-addled young people. It was a self-fulfilling line of reasoning, or maybe that was just the drugs talking, but the conspiratorial reasoning, once it fell on her with the suddenness of a Somali pirate ship, was indisputable, though she knew that when large numbers of people came to believe in government conspiracy, government conspiracy appeared, as if summoned, and thus if it was not true yet, it would be, because the one thing the government would not tolerate without police or military presence was a breakdown in belief in government.

  And so: in her worn-out sandals she dashed across the main street of Old Rio Blanco, she fell in and out of the beams of flashlights, and she could see the muzzle flashes of the Tasers here and there, could hear the occasional cry of one of the fallen, for whom pain compliance had unfortunately proven necessary, and before her was the doorway to the apothecary, or at least she thought so. And you would have thought that there would be some kind of sentry there, some guy who would allow you ingress only if you had the proper sequence of door knocks, but no, there was no sentry, and when she felt the door yield to her, she could tell it was nothing more than reinforced, if durable, corrugated cardboard. It swung back.

  Awfully dark for the one real architectural structure in Old Rio Blanco, and there was no common area on the other side of the door, no welcome center, not as far as she could tell. There was only a long corridor that led away from the main street of town, from the omnium gatherum, and back into some space that hadn’t, from the other side of the door, seemed possible, but Noelle followed it, followed the corridor, calling out now, as the lost do. First for Morton, and then for anyone who might hear her.

  Claustrophobia was high on her list of defects of character, and there was only so far she could go on this portion of her adventures before she was going to be a lot more claustrophobic than she wanted to be. She was already making a mental note about what to do if the corridor had a fork anywhere, and her mental note said always go to the left, no matter what, because then if the corridor kept curving to the left, eventually she’d be back where she started. Always go left. She thought she heard some stirring, just then, and she thought she heard it again, but what she heard was her own discomfort. Her own misery expressed in nervous fidgeting.

  Soon she realized that she was in fact in the recesses of some kind of mining operation. What the apothecary apparently led into—she must have misjudged one of the early doorways, missed where she was intended to stop and wait—was a disused mine. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility, since there had once been a lot of mining in Rio Blanco, nickel and copper, for example. But along with claustrophobia was her fear of large interior spaces, reminding her of one she’d visited in Europe, a cavern into which a small Italian town had thrown all of its trash for over a thousand years. It was the thousand years of trash that frightened her most. All that neglect for all that time. There were probably people who’d been flung in—alive—and never heard from again, for a thousand years. How far could she go into this cavern, herself, how far down into the unvisited past of the Southwest, before she was officially lost and needed to turn back, assuming that if she just turned 180 degrees she would in fact eventually find the front door of the apothecary’s shop, which would in turn lead to the omnium gatherum, and back to her original problem, which was finding Morton, and finding the arm, and getting out of here?

  It was hard to tell, at last, if the light up ahead was a legitimate light, not some phantom of her migrainous family of symptoms or just something to distract from the narrowing of the reinforced rock around her, the smell of water used to flush away the acids and the tailings. What remained of the light in this darkest of places could have been self-generated, or it could have been some actual exit, or it could have been the light of some benevolent personage, some miner who had been living in here, sneaking out through the apothecary under cover of night, when the tourists weren’t around, in search of rotgut and Sterno. Noelle waited for sound, for the reassurances of sound, in order to verify that the light was not hallucinatory, but that sound didn’t come. She called out again and heard nothing in reply. And yet instead of turning back and trying to retrace her steps, she trudged on toward where she imagined the light awaited her, around a gentle bend in the corridor. She’d only been walking five or ten minutes! It wasn’t as if she’d walked a mile down here into the mine! It wasn’t as if she were walking under the mountains and back into geologic prehistory, and was going to come out among dinosaurs rampaging on the veldt.

  The room, when at
last it opened up in front of her, was grand. A large group of the wrestlers was waiting. In a taciturn repose. They sat against one wall, all of them silent, and they all looked as though they’d been taking a lot of whatever there was to take upstairs at the omnium gatherum.

  When her eyes adjusted, she saw the arm, against the far wall, struggling to crawl along its base toward the end of the room, where yet another corridor led off into the infernal blackness. When the arm drew near to the way out, one of the wrestlers would lift up a Taser and fire in that direction, and the arm would recoil from the blast, flop over onto one side, and lie quiet for a moment or two, before gathering its strength and setting off in the opposite direction. Like a cornered scorpion. There was much hilarity involved in this game, it seemed, as her eyes adjusted. The wrestlers were moved by the arm, by its inability to give up. Any number of Tasers were discharged (and cartridges quickly replaced) before Noelle attempted to intervene in order to establish a conversation.

  “Any of you actually touch the arm?”

  Was this question addressed to the leadership? Their organization, to Noelle, was more like a school board or a prom subcommittee—something without anything like a fearless leader. And so it was hard to get an answer. In the meantime, the arm, its fingers agitating as though it were practicing piano scales or doing exercises to alleviate a repetitive stress injury, turned itself around, with remarkable ease, and began moving toward where Noelle stood. Almost as if it heard her somehow.

  “Touched it?” a voice murmured, though it was unclear which of the wrestlers had said it. Now she could see in the illumination of the battery-powered flashlights that few if any of the Mexican wrestlers were actually Mexican. The possibility had only just occurred to her. And why would they be? The people on the other side of the border had things to do, places to go. The people of Mexico had jobs. The wrestlers, instead, were a heterozygous lot, a multiethnic melting pot of bad vibes. What they liked about Mexican wrestling was the superheroic violence.