The Four Fingers of Death (81 page)

“Ari, what was the deal with the schoolgirl outfits, anyway? You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to. Hell, I probably wouldn’t answer it myself. But every now and then I wonder if it wouldn’t help a little bit to talk about this stuff.”

In the steam room, in the sheets of vapor, the two of them were visible and invisible to each other, and that was how they liked it. They liked some privacy and dignity in the revealing of the body’s failing. Few were the guys who still strode into the steam room with their obesity hanging about them like a fashion statement.

Aristotle, in the mists of that morning, might have said to Bogle, “You know, it’s a question I’ve wanted to answer, but the truth of the matter is I’ve never been sure. I mean, between you and me, I chased after some skirt, Irving, because in a certain time of my life chasing after some skirt just made me feel vital and alive, but now that it’s later in the day, I kind of feel that the chasing was never about beauty at all. I went to one of those schools in Portland where they mandated uniforms for the kids. That’s how it was. Did I have such a great time in school? Not really. No one much liked me, because I had these great big ears and these very small eyes. I wasn’t a total pariah. I wasn’t that kid who never had a single friend or cowered in the corner. But I was constantly trying to get close to these girls. Only problem was that the pretty girls, the ones who hiked up the skirts of their uniforms or whatever, they were the cruelest ones in the yard, the cruelest ones at recess. Maybe, as a therapist suggested once or twice, wanting the one thing that would have saved me from social exile, which was the one thing that I couldn’t ever have—”

How could the arm leap, when the arm had no legs with which to leap? It must have found some kind of ledge, some plinth at the rear of the desk, from which to fling itself, maybe that area beside the workstation where there were a number of accountancy texts, a few reference books. Maybe, in the reverie of stamp collecting, the reverie of the moment, the arm had taken advantage of Neilson. Perhaps it was simply trying to climb up into the window to see the last of the sunrise, which was, as it often was in the smoggy, dusty valley beneath the Santa Catalinas, arresting, and running afoul of the window there, it turned and fell on the man at the desk, in a sinister rage. Maybe that was how the arm came to fly at his throat, digging in a couple of its razor fingernails just above the Adam’s apple, drawing blood, and then doing the best it could, immediately, to close off Neilson’s airway. The condition is known as hypoxia, as you may know, but in this case the route was asphyxia via compression of the trachea. Time to unconsciousness is fifteen or twenty seconds in many cases. Once the arm was attached to Neilson’s throat, he naturally leaped up from the ergonomically designed desk chair and flung this chair back behind him, grabbing at the arm. His appearance during the ignominious episode of strangulation would have seemed comical to any observer; it would have seemed as though Neilson were holding the arm up to his own neck, when in fact he was trying to dislodge the fell thing, all while turning at first red and then a little bit blue, exertion demanding more oxygen, air supply rapidly dwindling. Neilson then stumbled backward over the chair and fell onto his right side, and his body began the thrashing and trembling that often characterizes manual strangling. This would perhaps have been enough to fling off the disembodied arm, were it not busy crushing the larynx and several of the bones in Neilson’s neck. This is the sign of a first-rate strangler. In general, a strangler must be able to overpower his victim entirely to achieve such marked results. Well within the fifteen-second window, therefore, Neilson was unconscious, if not actually paralyzed from the neck down. The restriction of blood flow caused brain death rapidly thereafter. Since the arm didn’t know how long it took to strangle a man, the arm didn’t know when to let go, so the arm clutched and strangled until its muscles were no longer capable of the activity. In Neilson’s case, this took almost five minutes, and in those five minutes there were all kinds of lacerations and contusions and worse that were visited upon the area of his neck. The arm waited and it punctured, and then, as if it had changed its mind about the whole business, it slid across the office floor, which was connected to a dining room and a pantry through a long, gently lit hallway in Mexican tile, and down this hall the arm went, and into the kitchen, trailing bloody smudges and septic ooze. In the kitchen, it bumped around various cabinets and baseboards, leaving more evidence of its crime, leaving so much evidence of the crime that the initial police reports would worry about the murder being multiple.

After blundering for the better part of an hour, the arm managed to push open a screen door in the the kitchen, one that led out back to where the refuse cans were stored. This was directly adjacent to the backyard of the Neilsons’ neighbor Tad Sklar, one of the few people in the Ina Estates that the Neilsons didn’t like. Sklar’s golf cart was parked by
his
garbage cans, and what the arm did, with uncanny instinct, was climb into the back of the golf cart and get down underneath the front seat, on the passenger side—just before Tad Sklar headed out to the solar-powered mini-golf emporium up the road from the Ina Estates. Sklar needed practice on his short game.

The arm, in the next hours, changed venues at an alarming pace, almost as if it had preconceptions about vectors of contagion. The following represents only a partial list of its many addresses: at the mini-golf emporium, the arm all but levitated itself over some cyclone fencing. It landed in the parking lot of a storefront devoted to adult novelties. The adult novelties business stocked a number of items that looked a great deal like the arm, and the goo that trailed after the arm would not have been out of place on a number of the frequenters of that place of business, who were occasionally flecked with excrescences owing to a lack of medical insurance with which they might have been treated. The arm managed again to haul itself into a van parked out front. The adult novelty wholesaler’s van was being unloaded at the time. It was possible that the arm somehow remembered its earlier van ride and had come to believe that vans were the preeminent variety of travel in the post-capitalist world. Fortunately for the arm, the wholesaler of rubber goods wouldn’t have noticed the rotting flesh of the arm among the plastic-wrapped wares, and didn’t, and from there the arm therefore managed to ride back into Rio Blanco itself, into the city limits, where it disembarked at a Mexican drive-thru restaurant while the wholesaler was relieving himself by a dumpster. The arm then terrified a pair of stray cats that loitered beneath the picnic table nearby. It was here that the dread appendage reclined for a long while.

Biology would seem to indicate that at some point the arm would be thoroughly consumed by illness, its raw materials depleted. Even death, as a process, is not eternal, especially in the presence of
caseous necrosis
, in which the remaining cellular material starts to look like cottage cheese. However, a homeless gentleman named Miguel, an innocent, came by the drive-thru restaurant, looking for comestibles that might have been thrown away by the proprietors. Out by the dumpster, Miguel didn’t take note of an arm quickly rousing itself from its torpor. But the arm, sensing movement, stowed away in a Safeway cart beneath an army blanket that Miguel had picked up along the way, dripping on a number of magazines that contained photographs of tropical scenery. Miguel, who was exhausted, and somewhat impaired by reason of advanced alcoholism, was pushing toward the park on Stone, Don Hummel Park, where the Union of Homeless Citizens was, at that moment, attempting to conduct its massive rally and fund-raising event. Miguel, according to his impeccable credentials as an innocent with anxiety disorder, didn’t intend to stay for the rally. He didn’t even know there was a rally, because he was uninformed on current events. He’d thought he might sleep in the park.

Every corner of the Don Hummel Park thronged with the disenfranchised hordes. From the northwest, by an avenue of shuttered motels, of darkened neon signs fifty or sixty years old, they came; from the southwest and the unvisited downtown area of Rio Blanco, where once there had been banks and insurers and law firms, they came; from the southeast, in which direction streamed the would-be emigrants to South of the Border; and from the northeast, they came, the direction of loners, of homeless persons who preferred to sleep up in the foothills among the mountain lions and coyotes, to take their chances with the tooth and claw of the wild; every corner of the park on Stone was a seething mass of unruly humanity, all of it dispossessed by the state and by the mechanisms of government. Just as the Union of Homeless Citizens seemed to have organized one quadrant of the park, to have subdued it into a condition where the constituents might at least listen to speeches about their interests and needs, another part of the park would break into hilarity or fistfights or political agnosticism, such that the men and women and families gathered there would lose interest and would begin transacting their underground economics or would begin constructing anew their temporary shelters. (These living spaces were harder to come by than in other regions of the nation where lumber was more common. Here the homeless structures often featured packing cardboard, but also the spines of scorched saguaro cacti, and duct tape, because what was
not
made out of duct tape?)

From this municipality of the forgotten, forgotten by mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, forgotten by the state, the city, the nation, the Union of Homeless Citizens was attempting to organize a proper voting bloc, in order that delivery of services might be brought to the needy in Don Hummel Park. Given the size of the homeless population here, there was a genuine possibility, especially in the era of would-be secession by the gated communities, that the Union of Homeless Citizens could field a slate of administrators to seize control of the city itself. The non-homeless organizers, the
stationaries
, as they were known, had attempted, in trying to program a rally that would appeal to these disparate nomads, to bring
entertainment
as well as enlightenment to the people. Your mind and your ass were to be moved. Miguel arrived at the park just as a mariachi band, in Mexican uniform, was attempting to sing old Mexican love songs to the audience, especially such old Mexican songs as had a particular relevance to other revolutionary movements, the Zapatistas, the mestizos of Mexico City, the Maya movement of 2020, and so forth. The songs weren’t going over well. Whenever there was a lull in the action, the homeless citizens began attempting to barter, or to criticize, or to make impolite conversation.

Above all, and even in the half-light of urban night, they were all
well tanned
. It was the way you could tell the homeless citizens from the rest, who were regularly visiting paling stations. They were tan, and they were bearded, and they often had melanomas sprouting somewhere on their faces or their arms. And they had achieved, in their seething, undulating mass of disorder, something close to a perfect habitation of the present moment. In fact, a number of Buddhist ashrams in the region, as well as the
omnium gatherum
, that shadowy alternative cultural organization, had begun courting the Union of Homeless Citizens. Among the residents of Don Hummel Park, however, few were following the rally closely, nor did they know how they were intended to be organized, although there was a rumor of some burritos and tacos being given away at a certain bandstand. The citizens of Don Hummel Park were casually alert to the possibilities of changing the laws in their favor, but were more excited by the possibility of getting fed.

The political arm of the Union of Homeless Citizens, therefore, the part staffed almost entirely by
stationaries
, decided that there was one and only one nonnegotiable plank in their movement, and that plank was against ownership.
All things in common trust!
said the literature that was handed out to the relevant parties, though this was later thought to be too obscure in terms of its locution and was amended to read simply
Lend It to Your Neighbor!
Lend whatever it was you had. Miguel, who didn’t read English terribly well, wouldn’t have understood the finer points here, even had he taken the time to give them his full attention. He quickly set up underneath a tree in the park. Above him there were men who had climbed these nonnative growths and nailed up structures there. Miguel called to them, as he also asked a couple of men nearby if they wanted some tacos and would they be willing to effect a swap.

Among the activists who were most engaged in this great awakening of the Union of Homeless Citizens were Larry and Faith Roberts. Larry had been fired from URB six or eight years before for extending invitations to audit his classes to undocumented workers he met at the bus station in town. Later, he even attempted to make these new acquaintances his teaching assistants. His wife was mainly known as a writer, if a slightly inconsistent one, of articles about forms of economic oppression. By the time Miguel had arrived in the center of the Don Hummel Park and was busying about trying to secure some barter for the tacos he didn’t need, Faith Roberts was, in fact, talking into the microphone, without getting anywhere much at all. Miguel asked another guy, in his Spanglish, if he wanted some food.