The Four Fingers of Death (112 page)

“For example, I have found that the longing I have felt has been ill served by language. I have tried to get it down, in poetry and in my diary entries, and I have tried using metaphor and simile, all the finest varieties of speech, and there’s just no way that I can properly describe what I’m feeling. For example, there are times of the day when this woman—”

“Morton, we really don’t have time…”

“Just let me finish up,” he said firmly, in dramatic aside. “There are times when I have been in the cell, and you’ve been off duty, when I have felt the traces of you there in the room with me, even though you were off for the day. I have felt you there. I have felt whatever conversation it is that we had earlier, and I have felt you there with me, and I have experienced you as a tightness in the chest, an itchiness of the scalp, an inability to experience the daily pleasures of the world. But do words accurately convey this feeling? I could just as easily be describing heartburn to you, brought on by spicy food or ulcerative colitis, or perhaps some kind of myocardial infarction, but those would
not
be sensations that one associates with longing, would they? No, they wouldn’t. This language that I have somehow received, this thing that separates me from other animals, it makes me now a miracle of science, but—”

A couple wrestlers dragged themselves up from whatever fog of gang warfare afflicted them or whatever alcoholic poisoning they were temporarily sleeping off, and made unobtrusive exits.

“—this language that I have received is as much curse as blessing. And if language, then, is not sufficient to meet the needs of the likes of me, what is there that remains to me? This is the question I ask myself. In what way can I demonstrate my love? The only way I can demonstrate it is with my
actions
. That is how we do it in the world of chimpanzees, at least as I understand it—from having met a few chimps over the years and having read a number of books on the subject, as well as watching chimpanzee-themed programs online. We demonstrate our needs quickly—with actions—in a decisive way, and that is what I’m going to do
right now
.”

With that, Morton took the Taser that he was holding and applied it to the arm, which was flailing madly around in the center of the dusty floor, flailing as if there were a butterfly it was attempting to catch, and the arm came to rest.

“Morton, do you really have to do this?”

And he picked up the arm. Just picked it up as if it were a bough in the woods. Or a scroll from some religious tradition. And he put it under his own arm. Then he accepted, from Noelle, the bag in which the other arm was secreted away. And then, as if they were a couple, he and Noelle, a couple who had been together for years and years, the two of them exchanged and organized the various items in their custody, swapping out of the bag the arm from the cadaver with the infected arm, and they started, in silence, up the grim, lightless way, back toward the apothecary. Those who were left behind evidently wanted to remain, and their needs were no longer a matter of concern for this couple that united the primates into the one common line.

Noelle said, “This really panicked me on the way down.”

Morton said, “I was blindfolded.”

Noelle said, “Did you really have to do that?”

Morton said, “Do what?”

Noelle said, “The arm?”

They covered the distance to the parking lot in half the time, because distance has mostly to do with perception. And then they were out. Which left only the one last chore, the task that they had understood as the purpose of coming here, to the
omnium gatherum
. They were going to drop off the replacement arm, find the URB van, meet Koo and the others, and drive back into town to a secure location. As it turned out, once upon the main street of Old Rio Blanco, the stage set, they were confronted by Woo Lee Koo, his son, Jean-Paul, Vienna Roberts, her parents (very much out of place and completely dumbfounded, according to Noelle’s first impression), and various members of the department of medicine from the hospital. Who had all, according to Dr. Koo, tracked the two of them with the transponder that Dr. Koo had subdermally implanted in Morton long ago. In his left wrist. Koo had followed the signal to Old Rio Blanco before completely losing track of them somewhere. The signal went dead.

Dr. Koo was nervous about something, incredibly nervous, agitated, distracted, or so it seemed to Noelle. Distracted in a way she had never seen before, short-tempered, and he was saying that they had to leave
now
, they had to leave as quickly as they were able to leave.
There was confusion
, he said,
confusion
at the highest levels, though when had there not been confusion in these recent days? Still, Noelle Stern found that she felt nothing so much as exhaustion, notwithstanding the course of events. What she wanted to do was to lie down somewhere, and maybe
throw up
, since the migraine she’d been fighting off was still making all the lights dance with their nasty, sinister, impressionistic auras. But Koo was barking orders at everyone and insisting that they keep moving and that there was no time to stop, and when she asked why they had to keep moving, she was told that
there was no time to discuss it
, they simply needed to get to a van and move out of the immediate area of this valley as quickly as possible, preferably to the other side of the mountains. Morton was still carrying the arm, and Noelle asked what they were meant to do with it, to which Koo said,
There’s no time, no time;
just throw the arm anywhere, one of the other attending physicians said, and then someone disagreed, no, you just can’t throw it anywhere, you have to dispose of it somehow, or at least leave it with trusted deputies, and we need at least one tissue sample;
wait a second
, Noelle wanted to say.
Didn’t we come here to get the arm for some reason?
Wasn’t there a reason for getting the arm, that had to do with something, she couldn’t remember what exactly, with some experiment that Koo was doing? And then she noted that Jean-Paul looked like death warmed over, which she supposed must have been exactly what he was, death warmed over, and he wasn’t saying anything, and he seemed to be bleeding, and why was he out, exactly? What about the quarantine? He moved around the fringes of the group, as they all hastened back toward the
omnium gatherum
, and he was wearing a ridiculous amount of clothing, he was covered head to toe, though it was probably still somewhere near to a hundred degrees.

Vienna’s mother asked, again, what they were all talking about.

Revelers, the tens of thousands of revelers, took no note of the worry in this particular retinue, this extended family, and this was the way of the revelers. The finest revelry precedes destruction; it was always thus, as when it preceded the shortest day of the year, or the eclipse, or the ritual sacrifice of teenagers. That was when people really let their hair down and committed a few indiscretions. How many of them were already sick? Noelle wondered, and she even said something about it to Koo, as they rushed against the tide back toward the van.
How many of them do you think are sick?
He had no answer for that and didn’t seem much to care. If he seemed to have put aside the concerns about his dead wife, the one in the freezer, he had replaced that particular family madness with a need to protect the group around him now, Vienna, Jean-Paul, Morton, and Noelle. He was the shepherd who couldn’t relax while any lamb strayed.

At last, they found themselves beside the van, the one Noelle had driven in, watching, from that vantage point, the undulations of the crowd on the desert floor. It was an image from the Northern Renaissance, what she saw, from Bosch or Brueghel, the incessant activity of the night, the modified vehicles with their cannons and neon and sound systems, doing figure eights around the cacti, the costumes, the leafleting political groups. But they didn’t stay long to look, though it was now only fifteen or twenty minutes until the reputed firing-into-space of the arm, and Koo was adamant that they leave while they could. He’d abandoned his own van on the shoulder of the road, back up over the pass, but there was no time to bother about that. And they all piled in. Inside, in the confines of the vehicle, Noelle could hear how badly Jean-Paul was wheezing. That was about all he was doing. He seemed to stop breathing for long periods of time, but no one said anything about it. Maybe there was just nothing to say anymore. Maybe this was your neighbor now. Your neighbor was bleeding from every part of him, was unable to talk in any way, and the best that was to be expected of him was that he (or she) had just to stay alive a little bit longer before breaking into bloody sections. And your challenge, the challenge you faced with your neighbor, was to try to find a way to love him when he collapsed in front of his house and lay there until the turkey vultures came by to pick clean his bones. His estate would be raided by the federal government and dispersed to the military-industrial complex. Noelle believed that she could thrive in this future because she was not squeamish. It was something of a shocker, therefore, when Koo, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, called to her: “Noelle, isn’t it a wonderful thing that we believe we have found a treatment protocol for the
M. thanatobacillus
infection?”

“You have? And what is the treatment?”

“Radiation therapy,” Koo said. “And we’ve already given Jean-Paul his first round of treatments, which is why he’s a little sluggish. The bacterium, we believe, acted more slowly on Mars in part because of the thinness of the atmosphere and the extreme cold, and though it had, to some degree, adapted to the radiation there, large doses seem to slow the course of the infection.”

“Just wonderful.”

“All the more reason why we need to remove ourselves from this… area… as quickly as possible.”

“Because?”

But Koo took up with bickering at the driver, one of the residents from the medical program at URB whom Noelle had seen around the hospital campus a couple times but hadn’t met. The van wasn’t going anywhere. The van was parked in a line of vehicles inching up and down the mountain pass, and there were more cars waiting to leave, and it looked like it was going to be a good long time.

“What’s the rush?” Noelle asked again.

“It’s a rather unfortunate situation,” Koo said, “but I have reason to believe that there will be some kind of police or federal military intervention at this festival tonight.”

“What does that mean?”

“As I have already told the others,” Koo said, “I am not certain what it means, but the CDC seems to feel that in order to control a larger possible outbreak of the disease, something needs to be done about the Rio Blanco area. What with people flying around in their jet packs, and the border-jumping, there is a real danger that the infected can move about too easily. The CDC wishes to try to contain the illness in this area.” And to the driver: “Can you please hurry?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that they could try to quarantine or even eliminate people at the festival who are infected or already at risk.”

She thought of Larry, she thought of the Wheelers, she thought of that guy from last week who got turned into a paloverde tree, she thought of all the many people she knew out there, in the expanses of the Valley of the Slaughtered Calf, and she thought of the families of those people, and their coworkers, and their friends. And then she remembered about Morton.

Noelle said, “Well, then, it might be that this is the moment to speak to the issue of Morton, who has had some contact with the—”

“What about Morton? Morton, are you all right?”

Morton was sitting in the back of the van, and he had his face pressed to the window, watching as the van began its steep ascent into the switchbacks, as if there were something that he was leaving behind in escaping from the
omnium gatherum
. Noelle reached across the backseat and set a hand on his shoulder. His coat was matted and sweaty, and she could tell that if there were a chimpanzee equivalent for weeping, then Morton had begun to cry.