The Four Fingers of Death (69 page)

As Koo typed his weekly missive, there was in the distance a chorus of emergency sirens spreading out into the desert night. There had been water riots taking place on the far side of the pass, where the collecting pools were meant to drain into the nearly empty aquifer underneath the greater Rio Blanco area. A large undulation of homeless people, despite daytime temperatures in the area of 115 degrees Fahrenheit, had hiked over the pass and camped out beside these collecting pools, demanding that the water be handed out more democratically. They also wanted all the golf courses to be turned over to the people and xeriscaped. Koo saw some merit in these arguments. He disliked golf, wasn’t even sure how it was played, but his neglect of the water riots had more to do with his wife and his work than with any political position on water rights.

I have told you, I believe, about Alfonse, the orangutan to whom we attempted to restore liver function. Without success. I was very disappointed by the outcome of this experiment, and, as you know, I became rather fond of Alfonse. He was a willful but dignified gentleman. I find that Noelle, my assistant, the one I had over to dinner once or twice (though our dealings have been entirely chaste), has also become very passionate about the primates themselves. With acquaintance, I must say, one begins to treat these apes as though they are human neighbors or coworkers. Alfonse had no choice but to die a miserable death from liver disease. And yet there was a tragic sense that he perhaps understood himself to be collaborating with us on the project, and approved. Perhaps I have merely fallen prey to the disagreeable tendency to weep over what should be the greater glory of science. Occasionally, I will be watching a family navigating the crosswalk, just today, for example, and I will want to weep just over the fact that here is a family, a family entire, walking together in a crosswalk. Is this familiar to you? The same is true for me with some web-based programming. It causes passionate feelings. Perhaps it is the apartness of my own family that causes me to feel these things
.

He had been typing for some sixty minutes or so, as he often did on his Tuesday nights, and now his eyelids had begun to grow sluggish. Some nights, he would just stretch out on the fusty hide-a-bed in the garage. Since Jean-Paul made no attempt to locate his father in the modest confines of the Grant’s Pass single-family unit nor to see how his father busied himself, it had been many weeks since Jean-Paul had come upon his progenitor clothed and snoring with abandon on the verminous sofa bed. And yet this night Koo would not yet succumb to sleep when there were important points to append.

It is in this vulnerable state, my love, this state of aggrieved responsibility, that I conceived of the experiment with Morton, the newest chimpanzee at our research center. Last week, I did harvest a modicum of your cerebral tissue, and I confess that though I would like to have forgotten what your remains looked like during the course of the procedure, I have been having a rather difficult time forgetting. I am, I suppose, haunted. Of course, I have seen many cadavers in my life, and I observe a rather rigorous three-step approach to the medicalizing of cadavers: (1) do not look the cadaver in the face, (2) cut the cadaver open and begin to deal with constituent parts as rapidly as possible, (3) remove and store the head. Still, as you can imagine, it is not possible to be so cavalier when the cadaver was once your truest love and best friend. Moreover, my darling, as you know, I was harvesting cerebral tissue from your frontal lobe, which I then intended to take into the laboratory and cultivate into the relevant stem cells, after which I was going to introduce activated cells into the frontal lobe of the chimp called Morton. It was impossible not to look at you in the face, nor could I cut you into constituent parts, nor could I even cover your face, according to my rules for cadavers, because I needed to plunge in the needle, and, yes, it was one of those larger-gauge needles. I used a felt-tip marker to indicate a certain spot on the front of your face. This is why it was difficult for me, and why I was not able to recover from the revelation of seeing and of removing you briefly from storage. I didn’t want you to thaw all the way, because then you would not freeze in the right condition. The things in the world that cause decay, the things that break down the dead, they are not modest in their supply
.

As with all my work, darling one, I took the task seriously and did not shirk my responsibilities, despite the fact that I didn’t sleep well for some time after seeing you again. I know that your cadaver is no longer you; I know that the match light of consciousness scarcely flickers in you until we solve the problem of regeneration, which as you know is exactly the problem I am attempting to resolve, and yet, notwithstanding the absence of consciousness, your cadaver does resemble some slightly puffy, tumid version of yourself, the you I loved so passionately and continue to love. This resemblance is faint and can break the heart of a person afflicted with a good memory. At these times, no matter what else I think, I am grateful that death released you from the confines of your illness
.

Thus, having been satisfied about the condition of the stem cell colony, I injected the serum I had prepared into Morton earlier today. I injected the serum, that is, according to our experimental regimen. After the injection, I found that Morton displayed no behavior that I would consider unusual. The good news, in fact, is that Morton didn’t immediately die, which has happened so many other times with the experimental volunteers I have worked with. I put Noelle and Larry in charge of watching the chimpanzee. Should you find you are suddenly awakened by a doubling, by a recognition that there is another you out there, or if you suddenly experience some dawning of primate consciousness within you, you should please feel free to contact me. In fact, you should feel free to contact me under any circumstances. I would be very glad to hear from you
.

This I suppose exhausts the news I wanted to impart to you this week, except to say that the weather has finally begun to cool. I am very taken with the rather violent wind that has blown up from the west today. I love you as ever
.

Koo typed the last characters of his letter and depressed “send,” the mail-related digital command that is the bane of impulsive typists. And then he settled in on the rotting couch. On the side table, an uneaten sandwich of sprouts and peanut butter warmed toward room temperature. It would not be long now until the lights of Rio Blanco went off. Then there would be no light in the garage beyond the red operating beacon on the side of the cryogenic freezer, which Koo powered with his home generator, at some expense. But, just as he stood to watch, through the dusty garage panes, as a few buildings in the hills disappeared into the footprint of the blackouts, the telephone rang.

The
actual
telephone? Who still used it? Old ladies and marketing consultants and government agencies. Koo only had one for emergencies now, and because he’d hated that itchy feeling in the wrist that came from having that tangle of wires and chips implanted in it. Koo had also noticed that official communications—whether from utilities or university deans—still took place on the mobile telephone, though its days were numbered. With the caller identification, you could see the face of the caller on the charging stand, however, and in the case at hand, Koo didn’t recognize the face, though this was probably made more difficult by the fact that the color balance on the phone had gone awry. It was a number from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, according to the textual display, the laughingstock of the international space race, the laughingstock of governmental agencies.

“Woo Lee Koo,” he said.

The lady in question gave her name, which he then forgot. This introduction was followed by some rather lengthy throat clearing. The woman dwelt for example on the high degree of confidentiality required for the conversation that was to follow. It was as if this woman had no idea how
few
people Koo spoke to on a given day. Not to mention his history of governmental subcontracting. She apologized for the lateness of the hour. She apologized for using the telephone. “Yet,” she said, “we believe that we find ourselves in the midst of a national emergency.”

Koo said, “It is late and I am preparing to go to bed.”

“Dr. Koo,” the attractive woman with the attractive voice said, before reiterating the need for confidence, “we are contacting you because of where you live. And because of your expertise. You are, according to people who have referred you to us, the leading researcher on gerontology, mortality, and stem cell—related research in the area around Rio Blanco. Would that be a correct characterization?”

Koo had to agree that he believed this
was
the case.

What followed then was a story so preposterous that it could only be true. The broad parameters of the story were: that the Mars mission reentry had taken place, this afternoon or evening, though the public had yet to be informed about the completion of the mission, because of the difficulties associated with touchdown; that the returning voyager, the infamous
man who had trod on Mars
, had been onboard the ship up until it was within a very few miles of Earth’s surface; that the ship had not splashed down. The ship had broken up, scattering pieces of itself far and wide in the desert. NASA, according to the woman, wanted to alert Koo to the symptoms associated with
the illness
that this astronaut (and others, apparently) had contracted on the planet Mars, in the hopes that he, Koo, could keep an eye on the area hospitals. Did he have contacts at all area hospitals? If he came in contact with the symptoms she was about to describe, he was to isolate, even
quarantine
, the individuals in question in his facility, and to contact NASA immediately. They, the authorities, had reached out to a couple of other doctors at the various medical facilities in Rio Blanco, she would not say which, because she was hoping for discretion, in order to avoid misunderstanding, public-health emergencies, and, well,
panic
. They would be compiling reports based on what they learned from various respondents.

Koo, without giving any sign of the strain of excitement that swept through him, asked the woman to again explain the symptoms of the illness, which she characterized as “slow-moving decay, which doesn’t seem to affect the consciousness of the sufferer, at least not in the early phases of the illness, and these symptoms are accompanied by rapid hair growth, enlargement of the brow, and sunken eye cavities, pelvic girdle, and some other portions of the body. In the late stages, catastrophic hemorrhaging, skin failure, organ failure, and then death.”

“This sounds like radiation sickness,” Koo said. “Or perhaps long-term corticosteroid abuse.”

“The popular description of the disease favored by the Mars mission astronauts, though this can be considered anecdotal, was that the bacterium,
M. thanatobacillus
, caused bodies to ‘disassemble.’ ”

“Rubbish.”

“Gets the attention.”

“But what makes you think that the contaminant has actually entered the ecosystem?”

“We trust that it has not. Which is why we insist on your discretion. Most of the Earth Return Vehicle did break up or was vaporized, but there were a few larger pieces of the craft that we believe touched down on Earth, and if any of these contained Colonel Jed Richards, any or all of him, there remains the possibility that the infectious agent could be transmitted by rats, fleas, coyotes, for example, or border jumpers.”

Koo agreed to keep his eyes open. But what Koo had precisely begun to consider, in his very focused and scientific mind, was whether a bacterium that “disassembled” bodies could somehow be reverse engineered. It was an interesting question. Were there important medical applications as regarded the bacterium? Koo inquired of the woman from NASA if they had any idea where the pieces of the craft had gone down. She indicated that the remnants were likely spread out over a fifty-mile radius, including areas of terrain in northern Mexico. Koo determined to go in search, first thing in the morning. He wanted to find part of the astronaut. It didn’t even have to be that
large
a piece, he whispered to his wife. It could be as small as a finger.

By the witching hour of dusk, Bix Rafferty of the Forsaken Mining Corp. achieved a balance of the chemical reagents in his veins and arteries—non-drowsy formula, mescal, energy beverages, and Sea Breeze, an alcohol-based face cleanser—and this balance of reagents was enough that he occasionally experienced visitations by a certain Navajo holy man. Smitty. While Rafferty was certain that a Smitty
really existed
, a person called Smitty, he did recognize that the conversations with Navajo Smitty involved themes and subjects that seemed plainly ethereal, even paranormal, well above and beyond the two men called Smitty and Bix.