The Four Fingers of Death (116 page)

I began to warm to a subject that was important to me, namely the
rivers of gore
subgenre of horror films, so popular in the new millennium. Suddenly the only films that teenagers would pay to download were films that had bodies exploding everywhere, or various infections destroying various parts of bodies, and then there were zombies, no end of zombies, zombies chewing on other people’s bodies, zombies, zombies, zombies, and blood everywhere. Bodies profaned by cinema, disassembled, reassembled, augmented, sundered, and with blood on everything, like the gastronomic
drizzle
of nouvelle cuisine. It must have been, I told Tyrone, that the one business sector in the battered economy that still had earnings potential was the manufacture of
theatrical blood
, right? People were breaststroking in the stuff, and they were reaching out to grab lengths of intestine, trying to yank themselves out of the rivers of gore with the length of intestine, and they were using severed heads as footstools, all that kind of stuff. It was horrible, I told Tyrone. How much sweeter and gentler were the heavily symbolic films of the drive-ins, with their silly conceits and affectations,
I Was a Teenage Werewolf
and
Creature from the Black Lagoon
. The cats, I meant to say, were precursors of the
rivers of gore
imagery that was so essential in
The Four Fingers of Death
, namely the film, the remake, that I was soon going to undertake to novelize.

“Listen, Monty, I’m going to leave.”

“Wait, wait. Let me just give you this.” And then it was that I reached into my pocket, my breast pocket, because I was wearing an old thrift store jacket, because I wanted to look reasonably elegant on such a day, and in the pocket of my old thrift store jacket, in a wax paper envelope, was, as you would have guessed, a McClintock original issue baseball card. Signed. As I have said, I had more than one. I managed to acquire a great wealth of them, and with these I financed a number of things in life, the down payment on our house, my wife’s surgery, some of my publications. I was down to four of the cards, before this day. This made it three.

You wouldn’t have believed the look etched on Tyrone’s face! He had expected no such thing. He had confronted the fact that he lost the contest fair and square. And giving him the card, of course, contradicted my very belief system! There were principles in the fetishistic world of collectibles. Things were worth what they were worth, and you needed to abide by prices and values. It was not wise to go allowing emotion to rule my business transactions. Normally, I adhered to these rules.

“My God,” Tyrone whispered, gazing on the card. “I’ve never actually seen one. He really was a handsome guy. And you really can’t see the arm at all.”

“I don’t approve of them covering up the arm. I think people should see the arm.”

With a mute satisfaction, we both gazed at the picture of McClintock.

Tyrone said, “Are you sure? This is really generous of you. And unexpected. I’m tempted to refuse, you know, but then something in me just doesn’t want to refuse.” He smiled. Not an easy smile. Not an uncomplicated smile. “And now I really do have to go get on the plane.”

I said, “I know you do.”

There was some settling up, and this was methodical. Two men who were not without respect for each other but who were otherwise not close. The time of their acquaintance was over. Tyrone muttered something conciliatory as he figured a tip, but by then I was distracted myself. I stood. I shook his hand; he heaved his overnight bag up onto his shoulder, and he turned and made for the door.

Try and raise

The county coroner

And then call my wife—

I’m liable

To be up all night.

It is true
, readers of my afterword, that I had not told Tyrone that I’d just lost my wife, Tara Schott Crandall. Not one week before. You may wonder why I didn’t tell him. I didn’t tell him about my loss, though I had meant to find a time to do so. But then it became impossible to remedy my silence. Now I will tell you, instead, because it’s important to tell someone about it. Had she not passed away, it is possible that I would never have completed the chess game with Tyrone. Nor would I have attempted to write the novelization of
The Four Fingers of Death
, nor would I have felt as I feel now in this mitigated night of my middle age.

It is true
that there is a consciousness of things, and then there is the unconsciousness of things, and generally we recognize that these are the two ways of living in the world. We think of consciousness as the essential prerequisite of daily life, enabling us to do what needs to be done, to negotiate the paperwork, to heat the hot water, to recycle the recyclables, to julienne the vegetables, but in fact we spend much less time conscious than we think we do, and this I know now from the weeks in which Tara’s new lungs began to succumb to their fungal infection, and she began to get sicker and sicker. What I mean is that my attempts to stay awake and alert throughout her illness were marred by my own eruptions of unconsciousness. I tried to stay awake through nights, so that I could watch her as she slept, as she kicked off the sheets and blankets again, so that I could say to her such sentimental things as she wouldn’t tolerate when awake; for example, I reiterated that I had mostly floundered in life, didn’t consider myself very good at life, until I’d met her, when she came to sit in on my writing class, and though—I said to her—I didn’t immediately apprehend, back when she audited, that she was going to be the reinforced shipping container of my future, containing every good thing that would happen for the next years, I did recognize the fluttering in my heart, as I ought to have, because I am just smart enough to be able to identify the advent of affection, I told Tara. I had come to know, I told her, that I was a man of some delusion and some inability to assess dew points and leading economic indicators of the heart, but, I told her, I did better in this case because of her, and it was perhaps true, as I held her hand in mine, and she stirred briefly, that she didn’t really
want
the responsibility of making me a better man,
I was one
, and this was not to be construed as requiring obligation on her part, unless she counted the obligation of accepting my gratitude. I should have known when she came into the class that something was bound to change in me, a selfish and preoccupied guy who taught the class mainly for the
cold, hard green
, though the money wasn’t great, and the students worse, and I was about to finish this thought when I found that, indeed, the distractions of exhaustion could overtake even myself. There was only so long I could sit up with her, so many days and nights.

At the beginning of the end there were moments when she was wide awake, and miserable, tired of antibiotics pumped into her through one of many stents, tired of being a body connected to technologies, and she complained mightily and she reminded me that I needed to lose weight or no one was going to take an interest in me after she was gone, and, she said again, I shouldn’t look at her with those
mooning
eyes, and I replied, “If you think I am hanging around here thinking about what’s going to happen after you are gone, you certainly don’t know me very well. My kind of steadfastness, let me remind you, Tara, is the kind that doesn’t waver, the kind that is
true
, even when it is wrong to be so steadfast, or even if I am harmed in the process. Even if steadfastness is unfashionable, or not borne out by the facts, I will be steadfast. I believe that you are going to get better, and if you want me to lose weight because you want me to look better for
you
, then I will lose weight to look better for
you
, but not for whoever comes after you are gone, if anyone comes at all, which I doubt.”

Tara was weeping, I remember, after I spoke, and she apologized, even though she said that I wasn’t taking seriously what the doctors were already telling her, and the oxygen tank wheezed, and Tara wheezed, inhaling from the oxygen tank, and she coughed up something that must have had some blood in it, because of the awful color, and I wiped some of this away.

Accordingly, Tara came to inhabit a space that was between the bright, airy consciousness that is central to human life, and the dark, opiated abstraction that is close to death, in which Tara was known only to Tara through the mechanism of nightmare. I no longer appeared to have complete conversations and interactions with her—there were just excisions from time and life, after which she vanished intermittently. What happened in her middle place? What did Tara think of then?

In the supposedly
real
world, things around the Crandall abode fell into disuse, and their gears and mechanisms were ruined by the elements. Advertising circulars amassed on the front doorstep, and one of the wall monitors in the living room, on which I had presumptuously kept a still from
The Crawling Hand
, went on the fritz, so that there was only white noise upon the screen. A scorpion was given free rein over the expanses of the kitchen counter, and these things went on this way, and the fungus in Tara’s lungs got a little bit worse, and another square inch of tissue gave up processing the air in her very expensive oxygen canisters, and perhaps I can be forgiven the feeling that all the world was behaving as Tara was behaving, that is, as though it were succumbing to infection, dwindling into moments of incomprehensibility that were the moments of the dream world. I got up and called the flea market and told them they could put someone else in my stall because I wasn’t going to make it in, and the guy on the other end, Tim, who was in charge of licenses, forbore to charge me the twenty dollars I owed, because he was a good man, and I can’t exactly remember how that conversation ended, because next I was asleep for some hours, and it was the afternoon, and I had had such fits of crying, whenever I felt I was out of earshot of my sick wife, that I couldn’t stay awake for long, but nor could I sleep for long, and I wondered if there was some chance that my unconsciousness and Tara’s unconsciousness would find a place where they could meet and enjoy each other in the remaining time. But in our next conversation I had no choice but to say, “I would like to take you back to the hospital now.”

And she said, “Monty, there’s no point in going back to the hospital.”

“They can help.”

“They can’t help.”

“But you are in pain.”

“I’m not.”

“They can keep you breathing.”

“Please stop saying this!”

Then she said I could take her to the hospice, if I wanted, which is also known as the place of death, which is also known as oblivion, which is also known as the end of hope, which is also the place where love founders, which is also the place where many people go and many people pretend they are not going to go, which is the place of witless intoxication, which is the place of life that is
not life
, and the place of all horrible smells, and the antiseptics that cover up the horrible smells, which is the place of faint smiles, and then the place of no smiles, and which is the place of pains that cannot be remediated and futures that go unlived, which is also the place where I did not and would not go with Tara, and as soon as the word
hospice
was pronounced, I began thinking, as would a child, of ways to scuttle any plans that involved hospice, and so I said that I wouldn’t discuss hospice with her, and to this Tara said, “That’s fine with me, because I’m happy to die here, Monty, but I just want you to promise me that you’ll be here either way.”

That thing

On the beach—

I just can’t get it

Out of my mind.

There must have been more to it than that, or maybe there were several conversations of this kind, and hours and hours that went on in this way, and some of these conversations were during the day, even though the curtains were drawn, and some of the conversations were in the middle of the night, and there was no one there to hear them, only Tara and myself, and so now there is only me to speak of them; I know that at some moment I suggested that we go on one last drive in the desert, that I absolutely wouldn’t take no for an answer, the two of us had to go on a drive, and I would borrow an electric car, because I knew a guy who knew a guy, even though I wasn’t at all sure I knew such a person; about the only person I knew with a car was the blackguard called D. Tyrannosaurus, and I wasn’t sure if I was willing to ask; there was only the illness, and the space between when she was conscious and when she was unconscious, and there was the illness that was now the third person in our marriage; the illness, that is, had volition and personality, so that I could feel on occasion as if I had spoken to the illness, or that the illness was talking through Tara, and so I wasn’t sure if I should always tell her the truth, or even tell her what I was doing, because if the illness was giving the answers, through her, then why bother to tell her the truth, because the illness wouldn’t convey the truth to Tara, except in those moments when I could do no better than speak to the events, those moments when even a man like myself, who was not always so good at evaluating the truth, could see that things were not going as he would have liked them to go; still I felt that I had some leeway in this space between consciousness and unconsciousness, and if I could borrow a car, then I could just pick her up, because she didn’t even weigh what a pillow weighs, and I could carry the last of her out into the car, which is what I did, and I got one of the Rodriguezes to help me, after the nurse who came a couple hours a day had left, and Maria Rodriguez said,
Mr. Crandall, this is liable to be a little dangerous
, and I said no, no, and probably everyone knew that I
wasn’t
taking her to the hospital,
everyone
being defined on this day as myself, Tara, the illness, and Maria Rodriguez; still, I put her and her machines in the back of the car belonging to D. Tyrannosaurus, to whom I had offered no reason for needing to borrow his vehicle, but I simply asked, and he agreed, and I poured a month’s profits into the fuel tank, some algae-based fuel mixture, and then I took a generator, and I took the oxygen tank, and I took all kinds of monitors, and I spent half an hour loading all this equipment into the car, and then I bore up my lightweight wife, whose eyes had rolled into the back of her head, and I lurched with her out to the car, shuffling, stumbling, saying, as I carried her,
Please don’t leave yet, please don’t leave me yet, please don’t leave, please don’t leave me, please don’t leave me yet
. There was more that I wanted to show her, I said, and I could put her in the back of Tyrone’s car; we would go at this leisurely pace, and we would watch the way the sun fell across the Catalinas, and the way the decrepit buildings crumbled into the desert again, and I pointed all of this out to Tara in the car; it improved things so much when she was here with me, and it was all because of
you
, I told her, how much we loved this place, because under my own steam I just ran myself into the ground, did nothing, never going outside, just sitting around checking baseball scores online and eating the same thing every night, but
your
excitement made me excited about this place, the taco stands, the old movie palaces, the used-media stores, all empty, like the shopping centers were all empty, I loved it because
you
loved it, and the dream of being able to understand a place by driving through it, I said, this was what
you
gave me in this place, and it was a place of ruins, and somehow the ruins made me feel alive; it was all about death, I said, the indigenous people who got run out of here, the ruins of what the Americans brought here, all ruins, and the ruins were what made me love it; nothing can last here for long, not without effort, but that doesn’t mean that I can take the idea of
your
being a thing of the past in this place, that doesn’t mean I can take that, I can take all the fires and all the floods, and all the poisons, but I can’t take this place without you, I don’t want to live in this place without
you
in it, I don’t want to stay behind, if staying behind means the memories of you, every corner where I turn, where you were, every wisecrack that you uttered, every middle finger you thrust at some other driver, I don’t want to think of this place, but I offer you this one last trip, and maybe, before I leave here, as I will surely have to do, I will at least have
this
memory.