The Four Fingers of Death (4 page)

In our case, the lead surgeon was called away from a floodlit driving range on Bureau of Land Management preserves, there in Southern Arizona. The engine of the ambulance had scarcely cooled before he was scrubbed and began bombarding his surgical tools with gamma radiation, in order to prevent antibiotic-resistant menaces. Interns and residents gathered around the operating table and in the theater above. George’s body cooled. His O-positive blood began to drain from the corpse via a pump that resembled an old-fashioned concertina. The residents flushed his arteries with a preservative that insured George’s lungs would not decay, and then they inflated them slightly, in the hope that these organs would resume function once inside Tara’s chest. They cut in all the many places that they needed to cut. And they slid the excised lungs onto plastic liners, and then they fitted these liners into a pair of six-pack holders that people used more often to take beer to picnics. Then they were ferried to URB in helicopters that were ready to scramble for medical emergencies in the desert.

Meanwhile, we were still in the driveway: “We’re not waiting for the Rodriguez kids to get back! I’m calling an ambulance!” “I don’t want an ambulance!” “You’re not thinking clearly! You only have twenty percent of lung capacity! And if the lungs aren’t in your body in six hours, then we have to wait for the next available set of lungs! I don’t give a rat’s ass if the surgery is making you uncomfortable! I don’t care if all the neighbors see! We’re getting an ambulance!” At which point Tara started crying, and I could hear her choking through the oxygen mask, and this naturally made me upset, because I genuinely hated it when my wife cried, which she nonetheless did regularly, because her disease, this scourge, had robbed her of her youth, had robbed her of the time in her twenties when she should have been sleeping around or doing a lot of drugs or at least smoking copiously. Even in college, she’d told me, she’d had to hang upside down for a while in the morning, while her roommates smacked her around to get her lungs going. This, in fact, was when I met her, when I was teaching a beginning writing course at the community college. She audited one night with a friend, and brought her rolling tank with her.

Do you require an even more detailed portrait of the beloved? If I were to fashion a more complete account, its title would be “Portrait of a Disabled Gambling Enthusiast.” Which may surprise you. But after a certain age this was Tara’s daily activity. Yes, in case you were wondering, even disabled people who are slight, beautiful, and possessed of an ethereal wasting quality can be willful, short-tempered, and self-destructive. You can become a little bit impatient with them even as you are convinced you would lie down across the local freight railroad tracks to prevent them further harm.

Tara apparently began by betting on sporting events while in college. Maybe because she was no longer able to participate in sports. (She had once been a teenage gymnast—her specialty was the balance beam.) In her own account of her gambling addiction (beginning about 2016), she too began with baseball, precisely because it had a record of more than a decade of tolerance for differently abled players. She wanted to bet on players like Dave McClintock and Juan Millagro. And making use of various online gambling forums, Tara did begin to place small wagers, using especially her disability allotments from the government. On several occasions her parents, a stiff, religious couple from the Midwest, bailed her out of her debts.

When she began betting on far more unsavory things, and making use of underworld professionals for the purposes of betting, things got worse. About the time she audited my writing class, where her luminous mortality, her consumptiveness, was both terrifying and strangely alluring, she was, by her own account, also showing up at the backroom offices of local bookmakers, wheezing on her respirator, intending to bet on the outcome of World Wrestling Federation matches, cockfights, and NASCAR. She wrote a couple of short stories about the gambling demimonde, and these stories, with their colorful argot, were of the transparently autobiographical sort that I always think makes for the finest art. She probably had more talent than I. Were Tara not preoccupied with dying, inch by inch, and with chasing down her every gambling whim to the best of her motorized ability, I believe she would have made the better writer. Alas, she had little interest in preserving her autobiography. I told myself that I should have nothing to do with her, and then I fell for her—the dreamer falling for his dream.

The Futures Betting Syndicate, which became a national obsession in the teens, about the time our class ended, was effectively niche-marketed to a temperamental beauty with a life-threatening pulmonary disease and parents who would fund her. With the emergence of the FBS, Tara had found, at last, a gaming institution that had the veneer of popular acceptance. The FBS was overseen by government regulators, and a tenth of its profits were creamed off for education, entitlement programs, and servicing the trillions of our national debt.

The FBS, as you know, created the very first subsidized futures markets organized around current events, around a host of possible outcomes, such as the likelihood of Republican control of the House of Representatives, the assassination of the newly elected prime minister of Palestine, the liquidation of the remaining portion of the Greenlandish ice shelf, and so on, and while it was notoriously bad as an indicator of actual outcomes, particularly when predicting the volatility of any season’s weather, it was quite useful as a barometer of opinion. As the popularity of the FBS increased, and as its revenues began to help the government work its way out of gargantuan funding obligations, its no-holds-barred laissez-faire market expanded into some rather odd directions. This was where Tara particularly liked to concentrate her attention. When we were dating she used to tell me these things: in one rather grisly period, in her account, she made several thousand dollars betting on the possibility that the secretary of federal gambling enterprises (titular head of the FBS) would be badly beaten in his own home. It was unclear who had first created this particular market, and the secretary’s detail of Secret Service agents was unable to stop the attack. Tara then bid on the likelihood of Israel’s use of a nuclear weapon on one of her neighbors. Again, Tara’s certainty was well-founded, as you know.

Her talk was of upticks, bid quantities, micro-reversals in numbers of casualties in tribal conflicts, and, almost quaintly now, of sports. I was, in this period, uncertain if living with her, as I was longing to do, was going to be easy under the circumstances. True, any good sufferer of
gambling para-addiction syndrome with socially unacceptable perspiration feature
(see the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—Eighth Edition
, or
DSM-VIII
) will confess to having given the FBS a try occasionally. I tried it later myself, mainly when Tara was asleep, which was during the day, because she liked to draw the blinds and stay up all night by herself. Thus, during the day, I attempted a few stray bids, based on a single betting strategy that I referred to as
radical positivity
. I bet only on really splendid things taking place in the world. I bet that the Fifty Years Insurgency in Sri Lanka would end within the month. I bet that doctors would find a cure for hantavirus. I bet that the greenhouse effect would suddenly be reversed, that Russia and Ukraine would stop all the carnage. In this way, I lost most of my IRA.

I quit teaching and reduced my other professional responsibilities partly because it became imperative to keep an eye on Tara’s physical condition, but also because she came to see the necessity of a
complete screen detoxification
, which she was hoping I would consent to supervise. I had been failing to show up for work every time Tara’s breathing took a turn for the worse. The shipping concern, they didn’t give a fig if my wife’s lungs and pancreas glistened with heavy phlegm. The bottom was falling out of their container anyway.

The first thing we did was remove all the wall devices in the living room, which were just showing digital reproductions from picture postcards of the 1950s. (We found these strangely calming.) Then we removed Tara’s subcutaneous personal digital assistant (which at that time was a crude version of what they are attempting to market now, but which had similar capabilities, photo and music storage, web uplink, video cam, videoconferencing, and so on), and then we went into the bedroom and trashed anything with a standby light. The music file redeemer, the auto-massager, the drying tree, the humidifier. The replacement for all this contemporary distraction was to be some old-fashioned books. So I went down to Arachnids and loaded up on graphic novels, German philosophy, self-help, and a few American classics. These I set in a heap by Tara’s oxygen tank. She also asked for sleeping medication, hoping that a couple days of snoring might cure her of the whole business.

When she woke on the second day, she was in a white fury, and this was a sad and frightening thing to behold in a woman who was sick enough that she could not get across the room without a major effort. Apparently, in her detoxified state, she had enough physical strength left to wipe out a stack of books that I had paid good money for.

“Get these things out of here!”

“But… you asked for books,” I said.

“You and your books disgust me.”

She flung one of the volumes at me. Something French.

“Are you sure you’re not just feeling bad because of the withdrawal?”

“You don’t know anything about it! You think you know what this feels like? You think I’m stupid? Get out of here, get out of this room right now, and don’t come back.”

“I’m trying to be supportive, in this your—”

“I’ll tell you what your kind of life is; do you want to know what your kind of life is? The boring kind. Your idea is that maybe you’ll sit around for a little while and listen to some
jazz
on the web, on some web site that’s about to go out of business because not one person has ever listened to any of the shit that they play on there—”

“Tara—”

Because when she got started…

“Boring, boring, everything you do is boring, with your goddamned baseball statistics—”

“I thought you liked baseball—”

“—and your old books; who’s going to read all these books, and they just sit around here and no one reads them, and you expect me to have to look at all this shit, when all I want to do is be where the
action
is, you know, where there’s a little energy and enthusiasm left in the—”

The third day was the same, except that she asked for a copy of
Seven Ways to Accept the Wisdom of Your Illness
, by some Tibetan Rinpoche or other. She got through exactly one of the seven ways before she got up from bed to throw that one out the window. I found it among the prickly pears a few weeks later.

I spent the next two days in the living room doing part-time telemarketing. We needed the few extra dollars to cover some of what I hoped would be Tara’s final wagers.

When she rose on the fifth day, her hair was wound into the whorls that kids favor when they are sucking their thumbs, and her eyes were bloodshot, and she was wearing only a diaphanous nightgown. With her swollen fingers and toes, she looked like she’d come from deepest space, from the great interstellar beyond, but one look at the smile on her face and I knew that the cure had finally taken. At least for now. She was rolling her oxygen tank behind her, like it was a child’s pull toy or a Pomeranian.

“Are you back?” I asked.

“I am back.”

“And how do you feel?”

“Like I licked the inside of my crematorium.”

“Which means?”

“Keep me in the dark about current events until further notice. Even a local news site is going to set something off. I mean, maybe I could read some coupons or a cereal box or something, but not much more.”

“Are you going to take back any of those things you—”

“Monty, you know that I’m not responsible. It’s like delirium tremens.”