The Four Fingers of Death (113 page)

“We still have the arm,” he said quietly.

“What’s that?” Koo called from the front seat. “Can you speak up?”

“We still have the arm,” he said.

“Which arm?”

“I believe,” Morton said, “that we have both arms. Because we brought along the second arm.”

From the back of the van, Vienna Roberts’s dad called, with a certain exasperation, “Just how many arms are we trafficking in, anyway?”

Morton reached down and touched the rucksack into which, it was true, they had somehow by now stuffed both arms. The bag was trembling and thrumming against the floor of the van, because the infected arm had now waked from its last dose of high voltage.

What liberty there was outside the van! What liberty Morton must have felt during his brief trip among the revelers! No one stared, no one cared, no one gave a second thought to a talking chimpanzee. With her hand on his matted fur, Noelle could almost feel the sense of possibility that Morton felt ebbing away. No matter his long-windedness and his insecurity, he was a person with the advantages that an educated man has, but despite this, now that he was in the van with Koo, he was in danger of being shipped back to the laboratory, some laboratory, until, with a proper publicist and a business manager, the rollout of his persona could take place. But what about the chimpanzee part of him? His chimpanzee hypostasis?

The brazenness of what happened next, therefore, was brazen only to those who didn’t know Morton as Noelle had come to know him. How he crept slowly to the side door of the van, and then, without comment, threw it open, even as they were still edging along, and, holding the bag with the two arms in it, Morton leaped from the van onto the shoulder. Of course the van stopped in its tracks, and Noelle, and then some of the doctors from URB, and then Koo himself
all
followed in exiting the van, and they all stood and watched as the chimpanzee loped down the mountain pass, with that comical gait of his, back in the direction he had come, threading his way between cars and dodging motorized skateboards and mopeds and motorcycles and extreme joggers.

Koo called after him, called after the person who, after all, had been sprung from his wife, who had some of her sardonic humor, some of her excessive self-love, some of her autodidactic pretensions, and whom he was therefore about to lose as though he were losing his wife a second time, or a third time, if we consider what was about to happen to her body, back in the garage.
Morton, please! Morton, please come back!
But how many were the ways in which he was now powerless. They had stopped traffic on the way up the mountain pass, and they had stopped it from going down by reason of rubbernecking, and even if Koo had believed that there was something he could do, some bit of suasion that could bring back his most promising experiment, he just did
not
have the time in which to do it. In a cacophony of horns and shouts, Koo and the others climbed back into the van.

And what did Noelle see now? What was it that Noelle saw fleeing down the mountain pass, carrying two left arms in a rucksack, wearing a scrap of clown costume, dried blood around his mouth, and sporting a maniacal grin?

She saw Mister Right.

It was much later that she realized it, of course. The linguistic niceties with which you describe loss come later. It was with this bodily perception locked into place that Noelle returned herself to the van, and it was with this bodily perception that she and the rest in the van rode, in silence, across the pass, into the next valley, and then south, toward the Santa Ritas, toward the last great mountain range on this side of the border.

They were a good fifteen or twenty miles out of the city itself, without having encountered any kind of military perimeter, when they saw the great light. It wasn’t, in truth, a light that you
saw
. They were bludgeoned by the light, and the sound. The desert was lit up, as it had been, periodically, with atomic perturbances in decades past. The ominous cloud was above them, stretching out its smoldering immemorial extremities in every direction, saying
this is what we had to do
, though it never failed to be the case that there
were
things that might have been done otherwise.

Morton made his choice. He’d tasted civilization. And he’d found that it consisted of large helpings of desperation, petroleum by-products, fat substitutes, sweeteners, sewage storage issues, stolen and stripped automobiles, vapor trails, good intentions, bad follow-through, selfishness, red itchy eyes, sentimentality, mold, poor logical reasoning, halfhearted orgasms, advertising, household pests, regrets, mendacities, thorns, haberdasheries, computer programming, lower-back pain, xenophobia, legally binding arbitration, cheesy buildup, racial profiling, press-on nails, the seventh-inning stretch, roundtable discussions, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, perineal pain, individually wrapped slices, road rage, and unfounded speculation, and he had decided that it was completely reasonable that he would turn his back on this civilization. What that must have felt like! Noelle considered the idea that there was an
outside of civilization
, and she concluded that she could never know what it was, because she had always been inside, because wherever two or more were gathered, there were all the pitfalls, all the disappointments. But when Morton turned his back on the van and ran back toward the
omnium gatherum
, toward, she supposed, incineration, he was heading back in the direction of something he had never possessed, but which, she thought, he intuitively knew, simply because of who he was. That it appeared to him to lie in the direction of a lot of naked and half-naked middle-class white kids, mixing it up with the Union of Homeless Citizens, not to mention the Maoist party of the Sonoran Desert and a lot of Mexican infiltrators, that was just an accident of history. What Morton wanted was simpler than all of that. Morton longed for the wild.

The End

*
Astute fans of the genre in whose field I am plowing (people who are familiar with the just-released film
The Four Fingers of Death
) will notice I have already taken liberties in one very basic way. I mean, if it is my responsibility to render exactly the film in question, I have failed. All of this backstory about the Mars shot, on which I have just expended a number of pages, does not actually appear in the film. I plead guilty on this point. But do I need to defend myself? I realized that I could not effectively write the second half of the story if I didn’t know a little more about the protagonist,
M. thanatobacillus
, the bacteria that causes all the damage. I couldn’t write about the bacteria unless I described those first afflicted with it. And writing about those poor, sick astronauts involved doing the unthinkable, really, moving the action onto the planet Mars, which is only hinted at in the actual film. Similarly, in the film
The Four Fingers of Death
the entire action takes place in the San Diego area. I felt I had no choice but to remove the story to a location I know more about—Rio Blanco itself. One ought to write about what one knows, correct? The desert of my part of the world, after all, is more like Mars, which always forces one to reflect back on when it might have had water, as it once apparently did. That’s what makes deserts so satisfying. They have a geological nostalgia about them. They are always struggling, always threatening the careless with their dramatics. That’s why I moved to the desert myself. So the Mars of
The Four Fingers of Death
is really just the contemporary American Southwest, the Southwest of 2025 or thereabouts, with its parboiled economy, its negative population growth, its environmental destruction, its deforestation, its smoldering political rage. Readers may ask how I felt so comfortable inventing characters out of whole cloth, when only one or two characters in this first section of my novelization actually appear in the film version of
The Four Fingers of Death
, and my answer to that is that they aren’t paying me enough to keep me from writing my own version of this story. Well, actually, they are paying me enough, because they have, in fact, asked me to cut the first section, but you will know, if you have this book in your hand, that I prevailed in this particular argument. I have nothing more to lose, and I’m not cowed by threats of a litigious nature, threats the fly-by-night publisher is so happy to invoke whenever there’s an argument between us. Never fear, readers. I actually think that the disputed nature of the manuscript offers you some interesting possibilities. You can actually buy two copies of the book, preserve one, and you can take the second one and just lop off the first half. The part you just read. And then you can read the second half as though that were the entire book. In fact, I divided it into two sections for this very reason. So if you have two copies of the old-fashioned softcover paperback, or if you have copies of the book on your digital reader, or perhaps on your wrist assistant, you can easily just erase the first half. Those who have somehow stumbled on this note
before
reading the first half of the book, well, all the better for you, because you are in a position to imagine what the second half would be like without this first half. In fact, the novelization as a whole might be improved in a digital reading type of environment, because then you could perform the interesting experiment of swapping the first half and the second half, so that first you know what happens with the bacterium on Earth, and then you could go backward and learn about the origin of the bacterium and the trip to Mars afterward. I’m trying not to give away too many plot points as I make these suggestions about the structure of the book, and I hope that is clear. Moreover, I suppose if you needed to buy three copies of the book, in order to have these three different versions (the one that is as shown here, the one without the first section, and the one in which the order of the first and second books is reversed), you could do that, and there is, I should point out, also a fourth possible structure for the book, namely the book in which only the sections about myself, Montese Crandall, appear. Because it has certainly occurred to me that there is a more conventional narrative here, namely the story of my life unencumbered by all this futurist stuff, and you could also just have that version of the book, in which there is only the apparatus, the textual apparatus. I suppose this would be the length of a short novel. This all suggests that you have, in fact, four books in one, all of them assembled by you, and none privileged by me, as the writer, nor by the movie tie-in publishing company, but really constructed or unconstructed and reassembled by
you
the reader. You are free to do this reassembly in any way that pleases you, and if this perfect freedom requires you to buy a couple of extra copies of the book, well, who is counting? You might be wondering how I came up with this idea to have a book that really is three and a half books in one. And the truth is that it came to me in a dream. I really was having trouble sleeping, as I often do, and I took some of those extra-strength sleep aids you can get now, the kind that you’re supposed to use on those long business trips to the East. Anyway, I slept about sixteen hours and missed a morning shift at the flea market, and then at some point in the middle of the afternoon, when I must have run the course of the medication and slipped into a more REM-oriented state, I fell into evaluating four different possible approaches to the
The Four Fingers of Death
, in my sleep, without being able to resolve them. Indeed, in my sleep, the resolution would be at my peril, or so the dream muses said. The promptings of the subconscious, I explained to my publishers, are such that one
must
heed them. And anyway, this innovative structure might result in a higher volume of sales, each of the four versions with its distinctively colored and designed cover.—M. C.

Afterword:
On
The Crawling Hand

by Montese Crandall

T
he Crawling Hand
, as directed by Herbert L. Strock and released in 1963, has to be one of the finest films ever made, in this or any other century. Though it cannot be disputed that the acting is somewhat rudimentary, though the sets are ridiculous and look as if they were just pasted up, though the story is capable of causing spasms of laughter, it is, I intend to argue, a masterpiece. Yes, the dialogue is so awkward that it nearly, through ironistic transformation, disarms you into believing that it is something else entirely. Because I have now seen the film twenty-one or twenty-two times, I can recall portions of this dialogue, and because repetition and attention and commitment to even the worst examples of entertainment improve them considerably, these lines have come to assume, for me, yes, the dimensions of
poetry
: