The Four Fingers of Death (95 page)

Jean-Paul tried to say something routine, like “Come in,” or “Enter,” or even “Yeah,” but he was not sure he really said anything at all. And so he tried again, and again he was not sure whether the words came out the way he intended them to be spoken, and then the door opened just the same, and his father, as if distracted, made his entrance with some kind of retinue, some guys in fucking Hazmat suits, actual Hazmat suits, and then Vienna too, and then if that wasn’t enough, the woman from the laboratory, she came in, and Jean-Paul always kind of liked the woman from the laboratory, and then this big posse of official-looking types, and at the end of the line of people cramming into his bedroom was a
chimpanzee
. There was a chimpanzee in his room. He had encountered some of the official chimpanzees over the years. The chimpanzees who lived and worked and were fucking sacrificed at the University of Rio Blanco laboratories. Now and then his father would let him meet a chimpanzee or two, but his father was also worried about his son getting attached to chimpanzees who were then going to be sacrificed during some upcoming regimen of horror. Relationships with the chimpanzees were a dangerous thing. But apparently this had changed, because here was the chimpanzee, standing right beside his father, wearing a pair of gray cotton gym shorts that made him look like one of those middle-aged guys in January who think that, in the new year, they’re going to tone up.

“Son,” his father said, “how are you feeling this morning?”

Jean-Paul was nearly certain that he said, “Okay, considering that my limbs are about to disassemble.” But it was becoming clear to him that he was wanting for the pinpoint muscular abilities required for sophisticated verbal communication.

“Are you not able to speak more than that?” His father somehow managed to sound calm, even slightly bored about the whole thing, but Jean-Paul knew him well enough to know how much concern lay below what was apparent.

“Not too much,” Jean-Paul tried, which sounded more like
nnnmmmmcccccchhh
.

“We’re here for a routine examination, and to attempt a treatment protocol that is, I should say, frankly experimental, but which we imagine will at least slow down the progress of the bacteria for a while. Are you prepared to listen as we describe this to you? I suppose I should introduce everyone first.”

He introduced some guys who were from the Centers for Disease Control, which was now subcontracted to a large multinational drug company from the Grand Cayman Islands, and who were all suited up. He thought he could make out a pair of glasses inside one of the suits, some bad facial hair. There was a guy from NASA. And then there was a guy from the FBI who was apparently leading the investigation. Finally, his father turned to the chimpanzee, as though the chimpanzee were just another medical researcher. “And this is Morton, who is a rather special and momentous part of the team, recently signed on. Morton, please meet my son, Jean-Paul.”

“Nice to make your acquaintance,” the chimpanzee said to him. And the thing was that Jean-Paul, in his sickened state, didn’t think it was all that unusual that the chimpanzee would be speaking to him. It was as if the possibilities of the world now included talking chimpanzees—as they also permitted the disassembly of bodies.

“Pleasure is mine,” Jean-Paul mumbled.

“Your father has told me a lot about you,” the chimpanzee continued, “and I have always been, well, I guess a little excited to meet you. You know, in the event he hasn’t told you himself, your father is actually very proud of you, of your entrepreneurial abilities and interests. I don’t suppose anyone these days hears that sort of thing often enough. My own father, if you don’t mind my saying, was never known to me, and so I’m envious of people who have good relationships with their dads, as you certainly seem to do. Yours is the first bedroom of an American young man that I have been lucky enough to see—although I have entered a number of them on various web-based programs.”

“Morton,” Dr. Koo said to the animal protégé, who certainly sounded sort of like a human, even if he had a squeaky, uncertain voice. Jean-Paul, if he’d just heard this voice over the phone or something, he would have said that it was the voice of a middle-aged gay man with a speech defect. “Morton, there’s no time for the chitchat here.”

“Oh, I’m very sorry. I’m still a little bit in the dark about the—”

“Son,” the elder Koo began, “the reason Morton is here is that we have some theories about the course of the illness that afflicts you at present, and we believe that Morton might have specific insight into it. His insights may enable us to map the vectors of disease before the epidemic escapes from the immediate environs of the city of Rio Blanco.”

“I get you.”

“The rest of these gentlemen are here to observe, after which they will be heading out in the field to try to locate the arm. When we find it, we will be disposing of it through means yet to be determined.”

What the fuck could he learn from the fucking chimpanzee, or what could the chimpanzee learn from him? He felt like he should just offer it a kiwi and tell it to get the hell out of his sick chamber, but as soon as it opened its mouth, Jean-Paul found it oddly sympathetic.

“My theory,” Morton said, “which I admit has yet to be proven, is that the bacillus that is infecting you has a very specific effect, and that effect is retro-phylogenetic. If you follow me. Are you familiar with the notion of phylogeny?”

“Could you use some plain fucking words?” Jean-Paul said. He didn’t feel good about it, about being so rude to the chimpanzee, but one of the features of the illness everyone was asking about was
profound personality change
, and he couldn’t fucking keep his feelings to himself, and he felt like he was going to rip the fucking head off of someone.

“Are you aware,” Morton went on, “that your speech has become difficult to discern? I think maybe it’s better if we try to keep this to very simple communications, binary questions, especially since, as your father will tell you, we believe that the pathogen, which was originally adapted to an earthly ecosystem, mutated on the planet called Mars, and that mutation was lethal, true enough, but now that the pathogen is back on Earth, it seems to have become rather
more
aggressive. We are therefore pressed for time. I would like to check the facts of my theory against the evidence in your own case. Is that acceptable to you?”

The entire city of Rio Blanco, not to mention the great expanses of the Southwest, maybe even what remained of the United States of America, teetered on the brink of a
lethal pandemic
, or whatever you’d call it, and yet the chimpanzee took the time to posture a little bit, as if he were dazzled by his own oratory, this oratory that no other chimpanzee had. Also, he seemed especially taken with the woman from the laboratory. It was like everything was for her approval. The chimp practically had a
stiffy
over her.

“Yeah, go on,” Jean-Paul said.

“Reverse phylogeny would mean that the disease, effectively, has a specific trajectory. The disease wants to roll back the higher organisms. The first sign of this, in effect, would be impulse control. Having experience with a slightly less evolutionarily advanced species, I know that as we move backward through the primate family tree, we begin, first of all, to experience things like murderous rage and reproductive urgency. So I ask: Are you finding, for example, violent impulses in yourself?”

“I’m lying in bed. I’m not able—”

“I’m afraid we can’t understand you.”

“Why the fuck should I fucking talk to a fucking monkey? Dad?”

Morton continued, “I’m not a monkey. And am I to take it that your disinclination to answer the questions is itself a sign of the reverse phylogeny I’m describing?”

“If you want.”

“During the period of contact with the arm, what kind of behavior did you notice? Did you notice that it was, say, aggressive?”

An interesting question, you know. What the fuck
did
the arm think, if it didn’t have any spot in it where thinking was done, and if it didn’t
think
, what was it most like, on the big flowchart of the dwindling animals of the world? Was the arm anything like a man? Like a particular man, an astronaut, to whom it used to be attached? The arm, probably, was more like an insect, or maybe like a snake. It was like some kind of particularly stupid Sonoran snake, squirming across the barren desert floor looking for chipmunks and lizards on which to gorge itself, unconcerned about coyotes.

“It didn’t do much. It squeezed things and moved around.”

“Is that an affirmative reply?”

“Uh—”

“And do you feel, about your body, in your illness, a sense of becoming
other
, moving nearer to instincts and purposes that are other from what we associate with the higher mammals?”

“Wouldn’t know how to answer that.”

“You—”

“Don’t know how to answer,” Jean-Paul said. “I’m not a scientist. I find that shit—”

“He’s saying he can’t answer it,” Vienna Roberts broke in. His girl. She’d donned some rubber gloves and was now at his bedside, holding his hand. Was his inability to recognize that his hand was being held by the ridiculously hot Vienna Roberts a symptom of whatever it was that Morton, the chimpanzee, was trying to claim was the
nature
of the illness? And how come she didn’t have any symptoms? Did the arm only want to kill
men?
“He can’t answer the questions, and I don’t see what the point of them is anyhow. Give him the injection, for godsakes.”

One of the guys from NASA, who was even willing to take off his protective mask, so that you could see his exhausted face and heinous comb-over, chimed in too. “Dr. Koo, I can’t say I disagree. We’re losing valuable time here. I think we should be out in the field tracking the arm. This is a national epidemiological emergency we have here, and it’s only four days, presumably, since your son was infected by the remains of Colonel Richards, and—”

Morton stamped his feet petulantly and launched into an elaborate defense. “The arm, ladies and gentlemen, behaves like an
animal
. That’s your word for the living things that are different from you. The arm behaves like a living thing that is different from you. So it has a very few primitive impulses. The arm doesn’t understand that it is evading its capturers. The arm wishes to overpower, and in this way it is a very pure thing. It is the lofty human being brought down to its simplest layer of activity, of self—the entity that overpowers, the thing that dominates, subdues, and destroys. The arm is just a vestigial bit of the human, and right now, this boy, this young man here, is beginning to move into the gloom that the arm inhabits—”

“I’m not moving into any—”

“Give him the injection, Dr. Koo,” Vienna pleaded.

“I think it’s best that we move our teams out into the field,” the NASA guy said.

“—the twilight of the post-human, post-physiognomic self, the self that is no longer conscious of itself. That twilight is upon us now! It is at hand! Its progress is relentless. It may be that consciousness was just an anomaly on the radar of evolution, and that evolutionary time spent on the consciousness of the human animal is coming to its close. Reflexive self-consciousness has been lorded over the rest of the animal kingdom for millennia, and it has never been
just
, and it isn’t now. The only surprise, at this stage, is that the rapaciousness of the human animal took so long to be called into question. Maybe it’s ironic that it was something so small, something so microscopic, that accomplished what all the nonhuman life-forms have so wished for—”