The Four Fingers of Death (77 page)

And yet. And yet. And yet. Jean-Paul, while he was engaging in the
clitoral devourment
stuff, he was mumbling and really moaning, in a proto-hominid way, if she was any judge of it. It was like Jean-Paul had become, well, maybe some kind of hyena. Hyenas were supposedly a lot like humans in some ways. And Jean-Paul was like a hyena, with his weird Korean slang protestations and his moaning. Or maybe he was rutting like a javelina. Maybe Jean-Paul was imitating the javelina’s rutting cries. Whatever it was, it sounded like he sounded when she was doing
something
to him, except that she wasn’t doing anything to him, and he was supposed to be doing something to
her
, and while she was a big fan of
clitoral devourment
, didn’t trust any guy who said he wouldn’t do it, she just didn’t think it was so
transcendental
or anything, and she didn’t believe a guy would normally be all javelina-like while pursuing the
clitoral devourment
. And maybe it meant that he was just spindling the mandrel with his own fist while he was getting down with the
clitoral devourment
, but the really weird part, the strange part, the part she couldn’t figure out, was that it was almost like there was somebody
else
in the theater of proto-hominid sex with them, and maybe this third party was working on Jean-Paul, while Vienna was just lying there getting devoured, and if so, Jean-Paul seemed to like the third party just fine. Maybe it was a border jumper who’d happened on the scene?

There was some kind of gagging choking thing that Vienna had learned was consonant with the orgasmic ecstasy of Jean-Paul Koo, and so he was gasping and his breaths were slowing, and then he was lying back on the blanket. It was all a mystery. But before she could go on and on about the mystery part, Jean-Paul reached down, she thought (through her blindfold), between her legs, freshly shorn of everything, perfumed with essential oils, and running with a marshy abundance of female perspirants, and with his hand, he demonstrated a really stunning ability to locate, like a stud, for the first time, her clitoris, her little proto-hominid standby/on switch, which was glowing red just for him, and he began palpating the standby/on switch as though he were a champion, and almost instantly she could feel herself pulled into a strange new staccato rhythm, not some pulsating thing, a rhythm that was all off-kilter and
proto-hominid
, you know, some kind of African rhythm that the proto-hominids would have attempted to bang out when they were back on the veldt eating wildebeests. While she was not at all sure that this was love, and, indeed, she had no reason to connect this sensation to love, nor did she care if it was
intimate
or anything else, she certainly did feel as if the weird proto-hominid rhythm that would fall into some pattern of twos and threes,
proto proto hominid, proto proto hominid hominid
, this digital stimulation did shut down nearly all the cerebral activity. It did pull her down into centrifugal repetitions, until she felt as though she were becoming
one with the principles of proto-hominid sexuality;
she was remade; she had become a series of, you know, ritualized gestures that were about summoning the essence of what
is
, protoplasmic, prehistoric centrality of tissue, essence of tissue, and secretion, and molecular fusing and fissioning, she was the movement of the first fishy thing out of the oceans, she was the first mammal to scrabble up the banks of the river, she was the first bacterium to
mutate
, and when she came, she felt some kind of flooding in herself, and she heard her voice cry out, and her cry had the nearly automatic involuntariness of the principle
everybody spurts
, and she felt like she could almost reach out and touch Allan Spinrad; she understood how some people could venerate Allan Spinrad, but just as she was giving herself over to
everybody spurts
, and to the theocracy of Allan Spinrad, she heard a rustling from Jean-Paul, and then, suddenly,
holyfuckingmotheroffuckinggodwhatthefuckinghellisthatohmyfuckinggodohjesusViennaohjesusViennaquicktakethefuckingohmyfuckingtakethefuckingmaskoffViennaquickjesusohhellwhatthefuckholyfuckingmotheroffuckinggodwhatthehell!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
… but she didn’t pay attention, not at first, because of what was rushing through her, all the lovers giving away all of their attachment to all the language or romance, the blinding interrogation lamp of romance, the product placement of romance, all of that being given away; she let herself go with it, back onto the veldt, eating the wildebeests, and she didn’t listen at first, until Jean-Paul ripped the mask off her face, tore away her veil of illusion, if you wanted to put it that way, having somehow freed himself from his restraints, which made it obvious to her that he couldn’t possibly have been the one who was frisking her, so perfectly obvious, and now it was obvious. Now the terrifying truth was known, and the clarity of it was so unsettling that at first she couldn’t even accept that what she was seeing in front of her, between her legs, was really what it appeared to be,
but it was
.

A severed arm.

There was a severed arm between her legs. It occurred to her that it was the Pulverizer, what with the disembodied physical comedy of that device, which slithered and slipped around so much that it had fallen well off to her side, like some birth defect, a primordial additional leg or something, but it wasn’t the Pulverizer. It didn’t look, you know, brand-new or silicone or anything. It was a severed arm with all kinds of sand and dust and bits of paper and trash and stuff stuck onto the bloody end of it where the rest of its body should have been. There were pieces of sinew or ligament or tendon or whatever sticking out of the bottom end, the stump end, shreds of muscular tissue, crystallized blood. And then the other really foul part of the severed arm, you know, if she were trying to describe the arm for a police artist or something, was that it was missing a finger, a middle finger. So it was a four-fingered hand.

At first, with the ripples of orgasmic energy flowing out of her into the bounty of creation, she froze. She just couldn’t take it seriously. The arm. But that paralysis, that erotic catalepsy, only lasted a second, and then she found herself in a kind of hysterical fixation, just like the one that had overtaken Jean-Paul, who was standing at the end of the blanket holding a sneaker, wearing nothing but his satin jockstrap, getting ready to bat the hand, if the hand tried to come near him. Because, yes, the really uncanny part of it was that the hand
was
kind of moving.

“Is that moving?”

“Sure as fucking hell is,” Jean-Paul said. “And I’m pretty sure it, you know, it jerked me off.”

“It’s a cut-off arm; it
can’t move
.”

“But just look at it. It’s trembling right now and moving its fingers! Look at it right now!”

She looked at it. She did. The fingers seemed to be writhing around as if with some reflexive, postmortem trembling, some last bit of life energy.

“Jean-Paul,” she said, and here she snatched up a couple of her shredded teenage garments, layers that did little but suggest the necessity of their removal, and she started trying to yank them on without ever losing sight of the heinous extremity. “That’s some kind of, you know,
nerve thing
, like when you cut the head off of a chicken, right? It can’t possibly have done what you just said.”

“Did you jerk me off? Did you have your hand around my—”

“That doesn’t… Maybe it was just attached to some guy, and the guy jerked you off, and then he got hit by a car or something, and that’s what’s left.”

“Is that a better answer? That some guy jerked me off while you were sitting there with your blindfold on? There was no guy. And the arm didn’t fly here!”

As if to prove the validity of Jean-Paul’s hypothesis, the arm, which really had been mostly dormant, appeared to suddenly take note of the Pulverizer, or at least the butt plug on the end of the pile of space junk that had once been the Pulverizer, which had been cast off long ago in the drama of erotic love, and grabbing the butt plug, it thoroughly and painstakingly ripped the butt plug from the Pulverizer and went about attempting to crush it in its fist.

“Oh, fuck,” Jean-Paul said. “That arm is
so
alive.”

He had climbed back into his shorts. He was dressing as quickly as he could, which meant awkwardly. There was a fair amount of hopping. But that was the least of it, as Vienna also awakened to the significance of the arm. It wasn’t just that it was alive. It wasn’t just that it violated all the rules, rules of medicine and biochemistry and physics, and every other kind of rule.

“I think I had sex with that arm too.”

“It’s so disgusting,” Jean-Paul said. “I don’t even know who that belongs to.”

“Do you think that’s consensual? You know? Can it possibly be a consenting thing? Having sex with an arm? I mean, what should we do with it? Should we take it to the police to see if we can charge it with something?”

“Someone’s got to be fucking missing that arm. I mean, you’d think that he’d be wanting his arm back, wherever he is.”

The arm, having finished, to its satisfaction, the job of squeezing the life out of a marital aid, managed with some difficulty to flip itself over onto its back, or what might be supposed to be its back, so that the palm faced the sky. Vienna was surprised to realize how many things a hand could
say
just by its posture or orientation in the physical world. An arm with palm facing down, using its fingers as some kind of crawling device, dragging itself along, bent on meddling in the affairs of others. But the arm on its back, with its wrist upward and fingers spread wide, seemed nearly playful, or at the very least submissive, and this was maybe what led Jean-Paul to his next decision. Jean-Paul lunged at the arm. He did so with a swiftness that overpowered the arm, which had no eyes and didn’t know what was to befall it. Jean-Paul lay hold of it by its long, useless base. The fingers, realizing that they were
had
, began writhing and attempting to grab at him, and Jean-Paul realized, then, the way Vienna understood it, that this would once have been a formidable arm wrestler.

“You’ve got to help me with this.”

“Jean-Paul,” Vienna said, “you have to be kidding. You’re not going to bring that thing back with us. Isn’t it dangerous?”

“The guy who’s missing it might want it to be reattached.”

“Look at that thing. Half of that tissue is all, like, gangrenous and rotting away. It can’t be reattached. Whoever it was attached to is
dead
. I promise you.”

“You don’t know anything about this fucking stuff. You’re a retail employee—in the service economy. I know about this stuff, all right?”

And so, in a postcoital huff, Jean-Paul Koo took the writhing arm into the back of the van, and he found a roll of duct tape, which he had known would be there. (What van was without its roll of duct tape?) While Jean-Paul held the arm down with his knee (it made a horrible scratching noise with its bloody nails in the bed of the van), he freed up a suitable length of tape. And then, as Vienna watched, he wrapped the tape around the fingers of the hand. They struggled mightily to free themselves. But, as everyone knows, duct tape is hard enough with two hands.

And then Jean-Paul said, “We’re taking this to my dad.”

Rob Antoine was on the NASA jet, the one reserved for high-level agency business. You’d have thought that NASA would have a first-class piece of aeronautical design, since it was meant to be the premier space agency on the planet, the premier agency in all of the universe (until proven otherwise). On the contrary, the NASA jet was from a decommissioned-aircraft graveyard near Houston. The jet had been worked over, retrofitted, by the engineers from JPL, in their spare time, just to keep these engineers engaged through a period of budget cuts. This was a private jet unworthy of the agency emblazoned on its fuselage. The few intact seats were noteworthy for torn upholstery and tawdry stains, and there were outcroppings of hardened chewing gum under the armrests. The windows were foggy from moisture that had worked through the rubber seals over the years. Few of the overhead luggage bins latched. And the odd purse or backpack tumbled out in midflight. And the jet rattled and groaned in ways that did not inspire confidence. With every up- and downdraft, the cabin trembled as if about to plummet to earth.