The Four Fingers of Death (64 page)

When Jean-Paul Koo heard from his ridiculously sexy girlfriend known as Vienna Roberts, saying she had something she wanted to
show
him, well, it could only fucking mean one thing, which was they were going to have to drive out to Rattlesnake Canyon or Esprero, whatever fucking canyon, you name it, and she’d have some new outfit, like it would be a combination of a shredded pair of army fatigues and some fucking crotchless something or other because she was all about the crotchless something or other, and then he was supposed to, you know, like do the dance of nakedness in the desert, but hopefully on a
trail
, because otherwise you could really stick yourself on something out there, and plus, oh come on, the mountain lion attacks were just getting like fucking
ridiculous
in Rattlesnake Canyon, because they kept building up Ownership Units on the mountainside, a good idea except for the fucking economic downturn and stagflation, and massive unemployment, and drought, and temperatures of 120 degrees Fahrenheit, and now not only are the parks basically abandoned, but there are no fucking rangers, and there are all these half-built Ownership Units and foundations dug and otherwise fucking abandoned, and so like every other week it’s some fucking disease-carrying person repatriated from the border, like with XDR-TB, who probably had a good fucking reason for wanting to be here, and that disease carrier was just shredded by a fucking mountain lion, broad daylight, or else it’s like a jogger, you know, and apparently what they fucking say, or at least all the fucking rumors are like okay the worst fucking thing that you can fucking do if you want the puma to bite your fucking head off and roll it around in its mouth like it’s a fucking lollipop,
comatose
, worst thing you can do is be out jogging and pushing like one of those fucking motorized three-wheeled perambulator things, with your fucking little bundle of fucking joy in it, because for some reason, or this was what they said, anyway, fucking pumas just fucking loved those fucking kids, and what they did was first they jumped off some overhang that you were running underneath because you were so fucking stupid you ran under an overhang, and maybe you were even wearing your headset, maybe using the screen option, and you only had half a fucking eye on what you were doing, and right then the puma leaped off the fucking overhang, because the puma could fucking jump twenty feet in a single bound, and it overturned the motorized three-wheeled thing, and the puma knocked little Junior out of the three-wheeled thing, and he popped Junior into his mouth like Junior was a burrito from the twenty-four-hour drive-thru place; hold those green chilies; I’ll take little Junior here with a soft tortilla and maybe fucking enchilada style with a little drizzle of red sauce; and that’s exactly what Junior would look like when fucking Junior was half hanging out of the puma’s slavering mouth, and then the alarm in the carriage would go off, you know in case somebody would want to steal a fucking baby from the fucking Southwest, or would try to hold the baby hostage, for like some millions that nobody had anymore? Go take a Chinese baby, motherfucker. Anyway, the alarm went off and then Mom screamed, and the mountain lion said,
You got a problem?
and before he was even finished slurping down the spaghetti insides of Junior, he had his mouth clamped around the head and neck of Mom, who was about to be a decapitated body stump.

The thing was, Vienna fucking Roberts would get an idea like this into her head, the idea of the mountain lion, and that would somehow only fucking embolden her, the idea that they might be getting into the dance of nakedness down in Rattlesnake Canyon, and some mountain lion would come jumping off the ledge, because there was always a ledge in fucking Rattlesnake Canyon, and it would fucking pounce on them,
comatose
, while Jean-Paul would be in flagrante or whatever, and there would be blood and cum and body parts everywhere. You’d think this would fucking be enough to kind of sour Jean-Paul, but no, the fucking truth of the fucking matter was that the worse it got, and the more pressured Jean-Paul felt about the whole dance of nakedness thing, the better he liked it. He fucking liked the fucking outrageousness; he was a slave to the outrageousness, to the freakiness of the freak, and CEOs had to do it, and so when Vienna Roberts said,
Okay, come over, I have something to show you
, then Jean-Paul drove over, like an indentured fucking servant, and even if the algae fuel cost fucking thirty-five dollars a fucking gallon or whatever, he would drive, because it was his money, and he could do with it what he wanted to do with it, and he fucking liked watching all the fucking people walking around with that fucking stiff, aimless posture of people on the street, fucking brain-addled people, giddyheads, like with fucking heatstroke, and he had one of the last automobiles on his street that had a fucking air-conditioning unit. So he drove over, and he fucking pounded on the door, a firm pounding, because a firm pounding was like a firm fucking handshake, and Jean-Paul was always trying to remember stuff like this and berating himself when he fucking forgot, because it was one of the fucking rules of advancement in the era of the Sino-Indian economic domination, the firm fucking handshake; Jean-Paul practiced the unmistakable door knock, and it didn’t fucking matter anyway, because Vienna’s parents wouldn’t fucking be there, because they were camped on the golf course out off Silverbell, trying to teach homeless people about Mao’s Little Red Book and the Sendero Luminoso, but who even knew who the fuck these people were; Jean-Paul only knew because his dad would go
red in the face
with disgust at the mention of Mao; his dad said Mao was responsible for all the evil in the world, which was a pretty great amount of evil; so he pounded on the fucking door, and Vienna fucking Roberts came to the door, and she wasn’t even wearing anything particularly slutty, actually; she was just wearing short-shorts and a tank top, nothing that she fucking wouldn’t wear any other day.

“I’m so glad you’re here,” she said. “I’m really glad. But what took you so fucking long?”

“Could I ask a question too? Which is like how come you aren’t willing to wait patiently when waiting patiently means that something good is about to happen? Isn’t waiting kind of a good thing, and don’t you have a life that has some other stuff in it besides me that you could do while you were waiting?”

“Well, let me ask you if you know the meaning of the words ‘Come right over’? Don’t those words like mean anything to you?”

“Haven’t I heard this speech like fifty fucking times? Can’t you fuck off?”

“Do you want to see what I got or do you want to see what I got?”

“How could I answer a question like that, since I don’t know what you have, so how could I know if I want to see it?”

“What are you talking about? Or are you like such an ape that you can’t even come up with an idea of what you are talking about? Because if you had any idea what you were talking about, wouldn’t you want to see what I’m going to show you, like when I promise that it is totally worth it?”

“Am I supposed to be able to follow your totally obscure type of thinking?”

“I don’t know. Are you?”

“Or am I just supposed to let your incomprehensible whatever wash over me like a fine bottle of fucking champagne?”

“Sound sexy to you? Champagne?”

“I’m figuring you’re figuring how sexy it sounds to you. Am I therefore right?”

To which, in the doorway, she made no audible reply. Vienna took him by the hand, to lead him into the inner sanctum of youth and sexuality.

“Are you,” Vienna said, “like at all informed about the post-technological, post-manufacturing, post-stagflation, mass-merchandised device known as the Pulverizer?”

“The what?”

“The Pulverizer?”

“Do I look like I’d know anything about a Pulverizer?”

“Is it that you’re trying to be like coy or something?” Vienna continued. “Would I be coy about
cyborg
sexuality? Would I be coy about a device that’s all about turning the tables so that what’s
wrong
is
right
, and what was bottom is now top? Would I be coy about how this device is meant to break down the last bits of human, you know,
resistance
that people have in proto-hominid sex, or whatever, until they are like shattered animal versions of themselves, because it’s wires and microchips and titanium that are able to make human beings into the subhuman animals that they really are? Would I be coy about that? Would I be coy about how I think I’ve never really felt anything, you know, sexually, or whatever, until I saw the Pulverizer being utilized?”

“I mean, can I fucking ask how you got to see it
utilized?
I mean, should I be a little jealous, because maybe it’s like I fucking don’t want you pulverizing or getting pulverized or witnessing pulverization unless I’m there? And are you somehow retroactively saying something about all our other fucking proto-hominid-type adventures?”

At the top of the stairs now, and beginning to march down the stairs into the fallout shelter that Vienna’s parents had expanded since they bought the place, because they were sure that Islamists or Central Asian despots or the Sino-Indian military agents or narco-traffickers would launch missiles that would wipe out most of the remnants of this nation and its free-trade satellites,
just because
. And, you know, nobody in Rio Blanco had a real fallout shelter, because they didn’t have basements.

“Haven’t I told you?” Vienna said, as she reached the bottom step.

“Told me what?”

“What?”

“What what?”

“That photographer, like a big international photographer, has been pursuing me, trying to offer me a multimillion-dollar contract to appear in his advertisements that are all about female slavery?”

“This is supposed to be, like, a believable story?”

“I’m not saying it is or it isn’t, but is it enough that you want to hear about the Pulverizer?”

“Well,” Jean-Paul said, “wouldn’t that depend if I were in a state of, I don’t know, arousal or something? Wouldn’t I need to evaluate certain kinds of symptoms, like I could evaluate whether I had an elevated heart rate? Or maybe my blood pressure had risen? And what about blood flow to the region of my fucking genitals? Like wouldn’t there maybe be a tightening of the tissue in my, you know, my scrotal area, or whatnot, perineum, like when I heard you use the word
Pulverizer?
And wouldn’t that be enough of a telltale sign that what I really wanted, at this point, was to see the Pulverizer, instead of being told some story about how you first saw it with some photographer?”

Interrogatives temporarily expended, Vienna flung off the sheet from the Pulverizer, and he could fucking well see that she had got herself this ridiculously large device that looked more like a butter churner or something,
comatose, my brother
, and it was affixed to this rolling cart, and it had all these onboard computer monitoring devices, and then there was a butt plug on the end of the thing, and it was just like the Pulverizer was somebody’s old-fashioned juicer, or somebody’s old-fashioned lawn mower, except that now somebody was going to have the lawn mower pound this hilarious piece of silicone
into them
, and he didn’t know if he was supposed to use it on Vienna fucking Roberts, or if Vienna fucking Roberts was going to use it on him, Jean-Paul Koo. He had his suspicions.

“Is this gas powered? Or electric? If it’s electric, is there some kind of generator? And if there’s a generator, where’s the generator located?”

“I didn’t really read the instructions yet. But I think it’s got a solar panel, as well as AC, and I think it’s all charged up.”

“Do your parents know that you are charging an expensive fucking anal battering ram in their fallout shelter? Like what would happen if the nuclear attack happened today, and the mushroom clouds rose over Phoenix, and we can only fucking hope, and you had to go down into the fallout shelter and spend the rest of your youth waiting for the gamma radiation to fucking die down, and the whole time there would be this silicone butt plug thing in the corner, ramming into stacks of canned goods?”