The Four Fingers of Death (80 page)

Where was the van, exactly? The van was on its way back into town and was passing, just then, the great alpaca farm that had once stretched out beneath the mountains, and from which, when its owners had been murdered by
piratas
, the alpacas had spread wide into the high desert. The van passed the farm, and then it passed some of the abandoned malls and shops along the road known as Oracle, and then it passed some of the
gated communities
. The term was an understatement. The van passed some of these
gated communities
, heading toward the dark center of the city, the unvisited
centro
, the part where most people feared to tread and where there were few vehicles, fewer still that were not abandoned. The young lovers were somewhat reassured. This was the city as they knew it.

The arm had managed to unstick yet another length of duct tape, which hung like some strange, triage-related bandage from its side, and it was now swinging upside down, like a pendulum, by the last length of duct tape that bound it in place. It was only a matter of time. The first bump in the road would free it. The van swerved around a wreck, a pair of flaming tires. The van decelerated into the right lane as a cortege of emergency vehicles raced past, wailing. The van stopped short, because of the sloppy driving of a sedan in front of it, and thereupon the arm was flung, by the laws of physics, from the wall, and with it a couple of lengths of duct tape yet clinging. There was the sound of projectiles bouncing from surface to surface in the back of the van, but with the radio on and the young lovers talking nervously between themselves, the commotion went unheard.

The arm then set about its most beloved task, which was the task of creeping. Creeping kept the arm from any awareness of its limitations. Creeping enabled the arm to continue to infect, which was high on its list. And so it began clawing its way over empty cans of WD-40 and soda bottles, scraps of blanket and tarps, a couple of fantasy novels in paperback, until it had gotten as far into the rear of the van as it could get. Did the arm somehow know how rusted out the van was? Had the arm somehow surveyed the vehicle before it began exploring the bodies of its young friends? Did it know that there was a patch so rusted out in the back of the van that you could see the double lines passing underneath? Somehow, whether by process of elimination or by some uncanny sense as to how it might secure its freedom, the arm discovered the rusty, serrated hole at the back of the van, and it began trying to pick apart the leafy curls of metal until it knew it could go down
through
the hole. Within minutes the fingers were covered in cuts, but apparently tetanus was no worry for the arm, because it was already a field guide to germs, as the young lovers would have noticed had they not been so stymied by the sheer fact of the arm. Tetanus was nothing in addition to what the arm already harbored. Despite the spurting of globules of infected blood, it managed to crawl out the hole, from which it grasped the bottom edge of the rear bumper there. For almost a quarter mile, like something out of an action film, the arm hung.

In the van, the young lovers found themselves meanwhile improved. The satellite radio was on, and the radio was a comfort, because it was often staffed by people from the milieu of the young—sullen, underemployed middle-class people with violently passionate opinions. This while the arm clung to the bumper, as bits of its protuberant ulna and its supinator were scorched against the pavement. But since the arm had no nerve center, its nerves fired only haphazardly, with a kind of bittersweet nostalgia. It was afraid of nothing, and no pain bothered it. It hung on not because it was waiting for the perfect time to let go, but
just because
. Because there were only so many approaches to the world, grasping and scrabbling being two of them. Given the chance, occasionally, to cling with single-minded tenacity, the arm did so. But when the van came to a stop at a traffic light, somewhere around the 6000 north block, the arm dropped off and rolled like a tossed newspaper of old until it found itself by the side of the road. Freed from confinement.

Not distant, at least for those who were able-bodied or who had access to a vehicle, lay the Ina Estates, one of the most exclusive gated communities in the Rio Blanco area. Its red adobe was repainted every other year by repeat offenders among the would-be emigrant population. Following a pattern made popular in the early part of the century, the Ina Estates had actually
seceded
from Rio Blanco. The estates refused to pay taxes to the city proper, and since they had their own police and security, the city had not yet mustered the resolve to call in the National Guard. Ina Estates had its own school, its own development agency, a weekly farmers’ market, and a library that thoroughly vetted its collections. There was even a helipad, so that if the Ina Estates needed to lock the gates in order to prevent contact with the unruly region around it, it could do so and still fly in locally grown produce.

The Ina Estates, that is, were waiting it out. Waiting out eight consecutive years of a constricting gross domestic product, seven years of declining employment, which now stood at a bracing 17 percent, seven years of inflation and ballooning national debt, six and a half years of declining college enrollment, rising numbers in larceny, in particular grand theft auto, rising numbers of violent crimes, rapes and murders (and especially rising numbers of murders of
strangers
), increases in every kind of drug use, in vagrancy, in homelessness, in emigration. The Ina Estates, and the other city-states like it, were about waiting all this out, about awaiting another
American century
, in the unlikely event that one should present itself. The estates could handle a few foreclosures, since they had saved well in the flush days, and since no man or woman was allowed to purchase a unit without sufficient savings to cover the cost of the mortgage at present. Things being what they were, however, the Ina Estates could not always insure that its employee base was up to the task, since these were hard times for wage earners. The regional workforce was noteworthy for its hopelessness, and the security guy out front of the Ina Estates, loitering on his personal transporter, was no exception. The security guy, André, had been speed-dialing his ex-girlfriend, while trying not to overturn his vehicle or to disturb its gyroscope, to say that he really would
try
, he really would
try
, he was desperate to
try
to quit playing around with a certain multiuser virtual environment known as
Tajikistan
. He was going to give it up, he was going to give it up, he swore, and it was all because he had himself seen things in the tribal areas that no man should see.

Because he was making solemn oaths, he was not using the handheld monitor that purported to give heat signatures of intruders, such as the vole or the bobcat. It was true that the arm probably had a meager heat signature, because with the exception of the septic battalions coursing through it, there was very little about the arm that was
alive
in the conventional sense. Furthermore, André, had he been scanning the area in front of himself, would have been looking for some kind of conspiracy of drug-addled men in their twenties, the kind of guys who temporarily believe that the
smash and grab
is the only way to live. For these reasons, André failed to notice the arm.

The first house on the corner belonged to the Neilsons. Aristotle Neilson, in his midfifties, had been a prominent politician in Rio Blanco, rising to the level of deputy mayor before his stripper scandal. Neilson’s particular flavor of stripper scandal was not terribly new, nor particularly shocking. He liked Catholic schoolgirl outfits on his consorts, though he was always scrupulous about making sure that these professionals were
of age
. His wife stood by him during his tearful resignation. Since then, Aristotle had served quietly as a freelance accountant for corporations. He rarely left the house.

In any conventional horror story, Neilson’s situation would be suffused with karmic resonances. He had, himself, elected to obtain the services of uniform-wearing exotic dancers. No one had made him do it. In the conventional horror story, therefore, he
deserved
what was coming. In these pages, however, he didn’t deserve what was coming, and the fact that the arm had made it under the gate and into the Ina Estates without any trouble, without being run over by any onrushing vehicle, and was now making its way across the gravel lawn and rock garden that were features of the Neilsons’ comfortable property, this was all owing to chance, sheer systemic chance. The arm was not karmic repayment, not about guilt, not about retribution. Chance, in this story, is a much harsher taskmaster than the Old Testament retributive theologies.

In order to prove that Aristotle Neilson, named after the Greek philosopher by a mother who liked orderliness, didn’t in any way deserve what was about to happen to him, and because it’s unfair to kill a character who is not fully developed, we must pause here briefly to note a couple of the finer things about Aristotle Neilson, who at the moment that the arm was rubbing off its epidermis hauling itself over the rocks in the front yard was looking at the stamp collection he’d assembled as a boy. Aristotle Neilson had extremely small eyes, beady little things, and he knew it. This was, in fact, one of many reasons that Aristotle had never quite believed in his wife’s love, though she tried and tried to nurture this sensation by feting every birthday and by repetitively intoning that there was no husband in the Southwest more generous and helpful than he. On the philanthropic front, despite his crimes, Aristotle Neilson continued anonymously sponsoring college education for kids from the Native American reservations. He always went to see the graduations of his Native American kids who made it all the way through, and he always reminded them at some point in their educations that English composition was a really excellent class if you got a good instructor. Aristotle Neilson had no children of his own, owing to a sterility that had gone undiscovered, ironically, until his ambivalence about child rearing was past.

A further list of the poignancies of Aristotle Neilson’s life could go on and on, but, under the circumstances, time was short. In the Ina Estates, owing to the fact that there was security outside the walls of the campus, people often left their doors open and their cars unlocked. It wasn’t really a problem for the arm to secure an entrance into the Neilson residence. Mrs. Neilson, who had completely overcome the legacy of her husband’s political self-destruction by throwing herself into an administrative position at a day care center in town, was not at home. It was only Aristotle on the premises. Aristotle Neilson, plenty satisfied with his anonymity, with the absolute lack of interest on the part of his neighbors. It was only recently that the very serious episodes of depression, variants on that time-honored
DSM-VIII
listing,
depression as a result of public indignity
, had begun to lift. He was idly flipping through some of the sheets of stamps that he had collected as a boy in the state of Oregon, where his father had been a middle manager with the postal service. (This was before stamps were abolished entirely.) In particular, Aristotle was looking at a sequence of stamps entitled Legends of Jazz, and as he looked at these fanciful and beautiful designs, he was also wearing a headset that played one of the satellite stations, and because he could hear nothing, therefore, he could not hear the arm, which had launched itself like a shipwrecked sailor onto some of the old-fashioned books on Aristotle’s old-fashioned bookshelves, where the arm was managing to slide erratically from one row of books to another, not without dangling occasionally, sometimes by a finger or two, and doing so while dripping the occasional Pollockian spatter on Aristotle’s Mexican tile floor. In the time before the arm got to Aristotle, he did
not
stop to consider
why call girls in Catholic school uniforms
had such an attraction, because that would have occasioned too tidy a dispatch for Aristotle Neilson. (The arm flung itself from a shelf full of old encyclopedias onto the right-most edge of Neilson’s desk, which was covered with hard-copied files of his clients in the accounting consultancy, dislodging a couple of these files so that they toppled and spilled some of their trade secrets.) Neilson would have claimed not to know the answer to this question (of schoolgirl outfits), had he been able, in some vulnerable and unthreatening circumstance, even to address it. Perhaps, say, he had been in the steam room at the gymnasium at the Ina Estates with Irving Bogle, a lawyer friend who’d had business before the city of Rio Blanco and who had seen the denouement with the hookers as an entrapment designed to remove a politician unprotected by major benefactors. Let’s say that Bogle and Neilson were in the steam room, and Bogle, after a long silence, had asked the question: