The Four Fingers of Death (75 page)

He was fiddling around with the satellite radio, and it began saying something about the likelihood of rain in the region (after the part about mountain lion attacks), and that would be a laugh, because monsoon season was over. And they hadn’t had any rain at all in a month, except maybe one or two days when it came and washed away everything in its path, and then vanished as quickly as it had come.

“Great, just great,” Jean-Paul said, and she loved the faint traces of his Asian accent, which he tried to eliminate by the use of certain everyday English-language-type words, especially obscenities. “You’re taking me out into the desert to hook up all this electrical fucking apparatus to me, and there’s supposed to be a rainstorm.”

“Just one time maybe you could express a little bit of interest, you know? Love interest?”

“Gland interest, maybe.”

Vienna said, “That’s a totally pleasant thing to—”

“I fucking thought that the reason all the fucking web broadcasts are all recommending hominid sex or whatever is that it frees you up from stress. I mean, I like having my prostate milked as much as the next fucking guy, but that doesn’t mean that I know what love is.”

“Your position is, like,
noted
.”

“Two billion in seed capital, and some shops up and down the coast, or in all the casinos, then my dick will be really hard,
comatose
.”

“Your dick will be hard because you like it when I make it hard.”

No comeback available on that one, Vienna guessed, and anyway the van rolled off the last dirt road that had the pockmarked
No Hunting
signs on it, and they were doing great damage to the shock absorbers, in and out of the washes, with the mountains massed around them every which way and dark clouds overhead. Even with the satellite radio blaring some more suggestions for how to beat the sixth consecutive year of the down market by investing in Sino-Indian municipal bonds and terrorist futures, you could hear that the silence was coming to envelop you, and then when you shut off the engine, which is what she did next, there was the pinging of the engine cooling down, and then there was the symphonic calm of the audible desert. The two of them climbed down from the van, into their dramatic aloneness.

Around the back of the van, Jean-Paul busied himself with the Pulverizer, trying to roll it down some planks that were included in the UHC’s van for purposes just like this (wheelchair spokespersons). Vienna Roberts had the blanket she’d brought, a tan one that wouldn’t show the dust and dirt when she took it home later that night. It was in the midst of this wholesome and, she thought, feminine responsibility that she saw the disaster that was taking place, which was that the Pulverizer, weighing in somewhere near thirty kilos or more, was about to topple off the planks that Jean-Paul was using to roll it down. The Pulverizer was balanced for a moment, and in the desert silence, the sex-and-death silence of the desert, it seemed as if this moment of equipoise might last. There wasn’t a sound but the grimacing and sighing of muscular effort issuing forth from her French and Korean boyfriend. The clouds hovered above the mountains, and the mountains beckoned from geological prehistory, and the distant interstate babbled like a creek babbling, nothing more, and she lunged, she lunged at Jean-Paul to try to save the Pulverizer, and she watched as it tipped to his right, the little gloved hand that was meant to do all the pulverizing appearing to wave as the whole thing, the expensive and unusual marital aid, achieved momentum, plummeted out of Jean-Paul’s grasp, and fell onto a scattering of sedimentary rocks extruding from the sand, where, upon succumbing to gravity, it collapsed with an unpleasant crunch.

“Motherfucking motherfucker! Fuck! Fucking shit! Fuck! Fucking motherfucker! Fuck!”

A couple of punctuating electrical fizzes issued from the Pulverizer, wires shorting out, as the chassis of the device caved in. Vienna felt a wave of contempt. She recognized this response, since contempt was a dietary supplement she appreciated almost as much as the morning’s handful of caffeine tablets. Still, she bit back on the things she might have said, whispering syllables that she didn’t even really want to allow out of her mouth, “Do you
know
how much that thing cost?”

“Well, if you wanted to be so careful about the fucking thing, then why the fuck did you want to bring it out here to the canyon?”

“I thought that maybe we’d be, like,
mature
enough to bring it out here without tearing it to pieces in the first five seconds.”

“Maybe maturity is overrated,” Jean-Paul said. His modest proportions were something she liked about him. He tried to look bigger, what with the Mexican gangster wear, the sleeveless T-shirts cut off all the way up to his pecs, and the baggy white denim shorts that were fastened around his waist with a bicycle chain. Still, she must have been stupid to allow him to try to lift the Pulverizer himself. She guessed there was nothing to do with this disappointment but laugh.

“Let’s see if we can make it work,” she said.

Jean-Paul said, “It couldn’t even pulverize a stick of butter.”

“Depends, you know,” she said, “on temperature.”

The multicolored wires that connected the limb of the Pulverizer to the engine were an ominous tangle. Jean-Paul wrapped the galvanic skin response monitor around his wrist and waited to see what, if anything, would happen. To her amazement, as Vienna watched, the actual Pulverizer, which had in the scuffle been denuded of its green dishwashing glove, gave a couple of tentative flops. As if it were an amphibian that had crawled up out of the great Sonoran Ocean that once was.

They laughed at its earnestness.

Jean-Paul said, “Busted-up electronic equipment is kind of fucking cool, kind of human.”

Vienna took that moment to creep up behind him and to wrap her arms around his frame. He was so thin that it was pretty easy to get her arms one and a half times around, and this she knew because she measured in her own way, trying to stack her elbows in front. When she was done measuring, her hands strayed lower down.

“I think that a really good marital-aids store should have all kinds of busted-up digital stuff, the shit that most people throw in a closet because they fucking still don’t know how to get rid of it. Stores should buy it off people and should advertise ways to attach all that old digital stuff onto body parts. That would be really hot,
comatose
. Then you wouldn’t have to pulverize me, you know, and then I could fucking have my own fucking Pulverizer attached to me, so I could use it on stuff, things around the house. Feral animals. I could pulverize whatever I wanted to pulverize, like it could be people, but it could be anything. People need to be able to have more sex with machines. I think there should be more sex with machines, and not some machine that
looks
like a human, no way, a real machine. Or else there could be a threesome where one of the participants is a machine.”

As if on cue, because he was young and there was always a need, he slid down the baggy white denim shorts, underneath which he had one of those satiny jockstraps that the really macho boys all wore, and his ass was exposed, therefore, and he kind of attempted to make a union between himself and the flopping Pulverizer, just for the sake of trying, and to indicate that beneath the gruff exterior, he was a bottom. He dragged the busted-up Pulverizer, the flopping fish, onto the blanket that Vienna had set out, a blanket that was already pretty dusty with sand and valley fever spores, and he, Jean-Paul, the machine, and Vienna herself got down on the blanket and attempted to do what lovers did, here in the hominid age of sexuality.

It was a long time coming, you know, the recognition that what was inhibiting
stationaries
in the late twentieth century, what was destroying marriages and giving young people the wrong idea, was too much
civilization
in sexuality—this was how Vienna remembered learning about hominid and proto-hominid sex, anyway. She learned about it at a precocious age, back when her friends were still playing with Transportation Safety Administration Barbie or Waste Management Barbie. Vienna Roberts was trying to get her girlfriends to show her
theirs
, and she was trying to get the boys at school to show her how to carry off a girl to paradise, and she was stealing books from her parents’ library, because her parents, by their own account, had a vigorous appetite, and she remembered reading some of the books that advocated approaches to sexuality that eventually became
hominid
or
proto-hominid
. With great generational paradigm shifts, no one person can be responsible for the new thinking—sentiments like this came from a variety of sources. Well, but still there was that one book,
Slaughtering Intimacy
, which Vienna’s father said would have been a bigger deal if the author hadn’t insisted on making it a book instead of an online lecture series, but that book, the way she heard it, made the argument that what people wanted in sexuality was
not
intimacy. Intimacy was sometimes an inhibitor. We were obliged, according to
Slaughtering Intimacy
, to be all polite most of the time when we were at work, and when we were out in society, polite, polite, and what we wanted to do when we got into the bedroom was treat one another like
possessions
. We didn’t want the arduous work of being polite.
Slaughtering Intimacy
was, you know, obviously a lot more popular with guys at first, because it argued that you should try using particularly unsavory words for sex and that you should openly express disregard or even contempt in the bedroom, since disregard or contempt, in multiple psychological tests over the years, created greater desire in men. Could real-world situations duplicate the laboratory testing?

Then there was a kind of backlash, in which women started to realize that maybe there were ways in which they, too, felt disgusted with their partners. Maybe the deformed appearance of the male sexual organ was something you could build into the experience, so that when that disgusting pink or black thing was readying itself to try to split you in half, you could think of it not as something you loved, but as an amputated limb of some kind, and you could take pleasure in the horror of sexuality, the foul, reeking disgust of it. Instead of thinking sex was glorious, tender, and beautiful, you could think of it as disgusting, dehumanizing, even laughable, and you could engage in it with these things in mind.

Slaughtering Intimacy
was followed by
Reproduction in the Lower Species: A Pictorial History
, and then the three-volume extravaganza
Primate Sexuality
, and the accompanying documentary. These were considered the really popular items in the
human sexuality
section of the media stores, especially the occult and alternative-philosophy stores, which were, after all, the most popular media stores in Rio Blanco. Most people didn’t read anything at all, and who could blame them? When
Primate Sexuality
took chimpanzees and bonobos as examples of how human beings might undertake hominid sexuality, it caught on somehow.
Proto-hominid
, as an approach and a way of life, followed not long after, or at least it did on her parents’ bookshelf, on one particularly hard-to-reach shelf. She would use the digital book reader with these titles, so that her parents wouldn’t notice what was missing, and she would watch the chimps fucking, look at the diagrams, follow the links. Admittedly, it was going a little far when the guy who made the documentary, one R. L. Houston-Smith, suggested that some particularly recalcitrant humans, those who thought that sexuality had to be for procreative purposes only, should actually try having sex
with a chimpanzee
. Or a bonobo.

Proto-hominid
sexuality, according to the books, was forged in the prehistory of humankind, in our evolutionary prehistory, the time in which we never experienced nor worried about
love
. Back then, we experienced only sexual longing and duty. Sexual longing was incredibly violent, and here Vienna Roberts was quoting from the pages of a book she had downloaded many times; sexuality was closer to cannibalism than it was to
intimacy
, which was not a word that proto-hominids would have understood in any way. What we failed to do, according to Allan Spinrad’s
Sex for Hominids and Proto-Hominids
, which spawned a long-running infomercial as well as a reality program, was utilize all the sexual tools at our disposal, including neglect, contempt, hatred, murderous rage, and despair, let’s not forget despair, or even dishonesty, as well as the kind of stunning, overwhelming joy that one feels in having crushed the will of the loved one.