The Four Fingers of Death (92 page)

Nicky: “Vi, I got this amazing story I gotta tell you….”

Taking place, understand, on the tiny little video screen on the digital, wrist-implanted, all-purpose media storage device.

Vienna: “Nicky, I just can’t right now….”

Nicky: “Why? Is there… ?”

Vi: “You just can’t imagine….”

Nicky: “Doesn’t have anything to do with the… with the thing… the homeless thing the other night, does it?”

Her parents were organizers or activists or whatever you’d call it, with all the homeless people.

Vi: “Kind of…”

Nicky: “Does it have to do with some kind of arm?”

Vi: “What?”

Nicky: “I’m asking if the trouble has anything to do with this frigging
arm
, this, like, this arm, because, like, I was interviewing these guys for the school paper, and they were all talking about this
arm
, and I was sort of thinking that it was some kind of, you know, made-up thing, like a kind of story that gets going and then it’s not really anything but what people
say
, but then there was this guy, and he said he’d had it for a while, won it in a hand of poker, and then he sold it to Moose, you know Moose, right? He sold it to Moose Mansourian for some polyamphetamine, and now I’m on my way—”

Vi: “Where does he live? This Moose guy? Where does he live?”

At which point Nicky got all protective about his sources. A journalist must have his ethics.

In the meantime, the
omnium gatherum
was attempting to synthesize all the available information on crawling hands, attempting to come up with a sort of foundational myth on the subject of the crawling hand, a myth that began with
nomadism
but which then moved even further afield, into a kind of interstellar or interplanetary
nomadism
, and in which the unity of the human body was no longer reliable or even desirable, noting, in passing, the importance of the hand in hieroglyphics, and the fact that on the tomb of Ramses, e.g., the hand signifies
manifestation
, all that is, all that is in the process of
becoming
. The hand is associated with the human body, yes, stands for it, allegorically, with four fingers for the four extremities,
and
the middle finger associated with the head. All the more reason, according to the bulletin on the subject, that the middle finger of this hand was
missing
, as if to indicate that the new body, the new human body, was headless, or effectively headless, and capable of acting despite the absence of a consciousness or a place to situate consciousness. The head signifies humanity, and the absence of humanity is the essence of this time. The Romans, meanwhile, believed that the hand signified
paternal authority
, and thus this hand is dispossessed of its body, and unable to do much beyond grasp, and even that without much effectiveness. The hand placed on the heart signifies wisdom and sagacity, and the hand without a finger indicates an abbreviated wisdom. The hand touching the head means melancholy. The hand raised above the head indicates spirituality. All of this suggested, according to the bulletin hastily concocted by the
omnium gatherum
, that the hand, in some way, indicated the
manumission
that was to come. The
omnium gatherum
therefore required the crawling hand and would, when it had studied the crawling hand, gladly return it to the state and local authorities, who, the
omnium gatherum
believed, were already on the case, were already encircling the city of Rio Blanco with some kind of independently contracted security perimeter. Now, it was true, according to the
omnium gatherum
, that the hand could be infected with something, with some kind of bacterial speckling or perhaps a viral spattering, and it was important when handling the crawling hand not only to be careful about its strength, but it was also important to wear rubber gloves and to avoid allowing the hand to touch you, because, according to the bulletin, the
apocalypsis
had its contagions.

As already noted, despite his membership in the confraternity of dealers in controlled substances, Moose Mansourian had mainly seen his life’s work as contributing to the well-being and the advancing cerebral development of his brother, Corey. In fact, though there is often a lustrous motive hiding behind the supply-and-demand economics of drug dealing, Moose’s claim was more specific. He needed to fund additional classes and eight hours a week of in-home care for his brother, who would otherwise have fallen through the cracks in the safety net of the post-government dog days of the twenty-first century. What with a mom who had fled the scene because of her inability to manage a
wild child
, and a father who worked more nonunion shifts than humanly possible in order to provide, there was no one left in the family to look after Corey. Family, as you know, is the group of people who have no choice. If Moose selected the most dangerous drugs in which to traffic, or if he graduated to these most serious felonies, that was only because this was where the profits lay.

Corey: a doughy, slightly walleyed boy of fourteen, whose faint mustache indicated a virility that coincided with an appalling inattention to hygiene, about which Corey was nonetheless surpassingly unselfconscious. His shabbiness, however, caused Moose great embarrassment in the rare instances when he allowed friends to visit—his brother mostly naked and smelling awful in front of horror movies and infomercials, plunging grimy fingertips into his nose and ears. Corey’s other comfort in life was eating, though his ideas about food seemed narrow-minded. He never ate a vegetable willingly at all, and instead wolfed down foods that contained abundances of cheese, specifically demanding, with his limited language skills, mac and cheese, grilled cheese, and cheese pizza to the exclusion of all else.

Still, he was a sweet kid, and a loyal one. Moose Mansourian had, in the course of caring for his brother, observed a few rules for stimulating the mental activity that would insure Corey wouldn’t lose function as he grew older. Moose believed that Corey needed, above all, visual stimulation, and, though he was loath to allow his brother unlimited access to television or video games, he did accept shipment, in the last eighteen months or so, of a wall-sized monitor in return for some preferential treatment on behalf of a certain client. What Moose liked to keep on the wall monitor in Corey’s room were images of placid scenery. Sylvan scenery. He’d leave each image up for five or ten minutes, using the slide-show function, to which he was always adding images, news photos, sometimes reproductions of the great masters, family shots, including images of their mother, and so forth. Home videos from the web if they were suggestive of the homely pleasures. Corey really noticed this stuff, really paid attention to that mystical moment when the wall image changed, and occasionally when Moose’s work was done for the day or when he was waiting for a call, the two brothers would sit together and watch the stills cycle past:

“What do you see?” The older brother.

“Water,” said the younger. Though you couldn’t always understand what he was saying.

“And can you figure out what kind of water that is?”

“Waterfall?”

“A famous waterfall. Back east. People like to go and get married by the waterfall. Or they used to. I’ve never seen it, but I guess people really like the churning of the water and all that kind of stuff. Do you know why it’s important to have a photo of a waterfall on your wall when you live in the desert?”

Corey looked at him dreamily. Moose recognized that his line of inquiry had now passed beyond what was possible for Corey to understand. It didn’t matter, since Corey was often grateful just for the sound of words. Sometimes Moose would try repeating words to Corey. Just about anything was worth trying.

“The desert is a place without enough water. So this picture reminds you that there are places out there where there
is
enough water, and even though we don’t live in one of those places, that doesn’t mean there isn’t water out there that other people get to drink and shower in.”

It wasn’t long after this that he brought home the arm, wrapped in burlap. Moose felt that the arm would replace the iguana he’d gotten Corey, which had proven too freethinking. There was a robot vacuum cleaner that Corey loved completely, one of those Frisbee-shaped things that caromed off walls, sucking up crumbs and bits of paper, which, it should be said, followed Corey around. Corey watched the vacuum cleaner like the device was almost religious, jumping up onto furniture and laughing hysterically when it went by. The arm, and the terrarium into which Moose put it, were meant to bring about this same pitch of delight, and the arm was probably less dangerous, because Corey wasn’t really tall enough to reach up onto the top of the terrarium, and so he wouldn’t trifle with the arm.

On the night in question, Moose just figured he’d sleep in the room with Corey and the arm. In this way, he’d make sure that the arm didn’t get into any trouble. Knowing Corey, Moose worried that the arm would find itself used as a bat for knocking glasses off the shelf in the kitchen. Best to hang around some, smoke some weed, take the edge off, watch to see if the arm actually used the hamster wheel thing Moose had rigged up in the terrarium.

What did it cost Moose Mansourian, this fraternal generosity that seemed contraindicated in the world of drug dealing, whose business was composed of a client pool rapidly depleting itself of all worldly goods? What did it cost Moose? And could it really go on like this? He was suspicious, even cynical out in the world, where his linebacker physique made him good at his job. He was not a handsome man, and women never seemed to pay much attention, but he didn’t care, because he had an anxiety disorder, the one listed in the
DSM-VIII
as
anxiety specifically related to contemporaneity
, which made him suspicious, which made him trust no one, except Corey, and he was constantly drugging himself to sleep because every night the slightest sound waked him, and then he’d be up, and if he was up, he was up for good and was reading medical texts to try to put himself back to sleep, and any woman who tried to get near to him, that woman just reminded him of his mother, and if she contacted him now, he thought, while he was falling asleep next to Corey, having smoked enough weed to paralyze most people, he would do something, something horrible, he would lock her in the room with Corey for a week, and it wasn’t that he thought Corey was so bad, because on the contrary, he thought, as his lids began to close, he loved Corey, and Corey seemed to operate in the world in a way that involved less unhappiness than most people suffered with. His mother needed to have the experience of seeing Corey, and Moose needed the experience of seeing Corey see
her
, and maybe that would be the ultimate perpetual-motion object that would improve cerebral function in Corey, his mother, his mother would be the ultimate visual stimulation, and even if Corey didn’t
know
his mother, or didn’t even know he
had
a mother, although Moose had tried to explain it to him a few times, maybe it was one of those things that was contained in some deeper-down layer, the knowledge of the excellence of seeing one’s mother walking through a room, straightening a few things, doling out a few orders, and that was why, Moose thought, as his eyes closed and certain sounds in the room, certain hums, became the music of his drifting off, too early, so that he would probably wake in the middle of the night and watch the water in the fish tank bubble, that was why his mother would turn up one day, because it just didn’t make sense that a person carried around that kind of guilt, the walking out on your kids kind of guilt, and then Moose slept….

The arm appeared in this tableau with the aspect of an avenging angel, and it had no compassion in its heart, because it had no heart, and no sensory organs with which compassion might have been felt. Accordingly, there was no mercy in the arm’s decision to eliminate Moose and to spare Corey. Corey was an innocent, but the arm knew nothing of innocence. However, it is true, upon consideration, that mercy is an expression of both order and chance in the natural world, and thus perhaps mercy
was
within the arm’s grasp, so to speak. And Corey made the expression of mercy easier because he slept in an absolutely motionless way, like a newborn, really. He would keel over asleep in a position that was corpselike enough to be taken for a corpse (many were the nights that Moose or their father thought Corey was dead), and never moved once until he woke hours later. How he avoided bedsores was a mystery. The arm sensed movement and responded to it as though movement were something that needed to be eliminated from the world. And Moose writhed around a lot in his semi-sleep. He therefore appeared to the arm, to the extent that anything
appeared
to the arm, as something that needed to be brought to a halt, and so, on the bed where the two brothers slept, the smaller one curled beside the larger, there lay a single target. The arm carefully lifted off the lid of the terrarium and lowered itself down until it had negotiated the shelf of bobble-head dolls, and likewise the shelf that collected the stuffed animals. And then the arm was on the headboard of the bed, creeping, and in the time it took to creep, all of Moose Mansourian’s life was flickering on the screen of the wall-sized monitor of heavenly accounts; for example, it was being noted on the screen that though Moose had once been part of a group of brass musicians (he’d played the trombone) that had regaled some elderly people in an assisted-living type of institution with light versions of the classics, he’d also provided the OxyPlus inhalers used in at least three different overdoses; true, Moose believed in assisted suicide and had on one occasion helped a terminally ill addict effect a departure from this world, but he had also charged a fee for this work; the young Moose Mansourian, a complicated kid who was quite bad at school, and too demanding of his friends, all of whom eventually tired of him, shed bitter tears at inopportune moments, and his high school football career eventually ended because he was considered too timid after a neck injury he inflicted on a rival from the Tempe area.