The Four Fingers of Death (84 page)

“I am a doctor. I have looked at bodies in every state of life and death. Your body, when you do not have your clothes on, means nothing to me. It is just a body. You’re a sack of water and minerals. So come be quick about it and strip off these clothes, which we are going to have to burn immediately.”

“You’re so not burning that skirt,” Vienna Roberts said. “It’s, like, a designer thing. I got it at the thrift store.”

“I am very much burning it,” Koo said. “And you should watch out for those clothes from the thrift store; they are not always sanitary. I am going to get some rubber gloves, and I am going to burn these outfits, and you are to take the starter dosage of these”—handing over the jar of medicaments—“which is twice what it says there, and then you are to get into the shower, at the hottest possible temperature, and shower for a very long time. For at least fifteen minutes or so. And you will find some of the industrial cleanser that I have been using there, and you are to cleanse all the affected areas, any parts of you that have been in contact with the infectious agent. For that is what the arm is, an infectious agent, you understand. This is very important.”

The teenagers shyly began removing their contagious outer garments, and Koo handed them towels, which would also go into the bonfire he was going to make of their garments. Vienna Roberts stood by as Jean-Paul, completely forgetting that it was ungallant to take the first shower, stepped across the threshold of the tub. The shower curtain billowed out to receive him.

“Have you contacted your parents?” Koo asked Vienna, heedless of her discomfort in the bathroom.

“We went to find them after we… there was a problem, and so.”

“What was the problem?”

Jean-Paul, who could apparently make out the conversation even from inside the shower, said: “We
lost the arm
.”

“You lost the arm.”

“We had the arm and then we lost it.”

“You were where exactly? When it was lost?”

“We were driving in the van.”

“We left the van back at my place,” Vienna said, “so we could get Jean-Paul’s car, and so that my parents—”

Koo said, “Have your parents operated the van? And are you certain that the arm is not somewhere hidden in the back?”

“The arm,” Vienna Roberts offered, “was in the van. Jean-Paul taped it up pretty good, with a lot of duct tape, and then we taped it to the side of the wall, inside the van, so that we’d know it was safe while we were driving back into town, but somehow it managed to get free through a hole in the floor. We think.”

Koo said, “There are people for whom this particular object, this limb, is very, very important, and we are going to have to try to find it. So it would be helpful if you knew when you last saw it. And at the same time, we are going to need to locate the van and disinfect it somehow. This is also very important.”

“It’s, like,” Jean-Paul called from the shower, a bit louder than was necessary, “we were so fucking shocked by the arm in the first place that we were kind of, you know, like preoccupied with talking all about it, and for a while we kept looking back there, and we were driving, and the arm was staying put, and we were talking, and then somehow—”

“It’s like it just magically got out of the van, Mr. Koo,” Vienna said. “We didn’t even see how it could get out of there until we were parked and everything. There was this tiny little spot in the back that was rusted out. I mean, the van, you know, it’s an old van. It’s not like it’s new. It’s old. But there was only one spot that was rusted out, and that was way back in the corner, and it must have just crawled out of there.”

“How did it know, Dad?” Jean-Paul called. “It’s not like it has eyes or anything. How does it know?”

“Some species of insects do their job by being willing to try anything. They flail about, fly at the window every possible way, for the rest of their life, if necessary, just hoping that one day, somehow, that window will be open a crack, or that they will, by chance, arrive at a spot that is open that they didn’t try earlier. This trial-and-error approach has, you know, been responsible for innovation and evolutionary discovery over the years.”

“So where’s the arm from?” Vienna asked.

“The arm… the arm,” Koo said. “I am meant to avoid telling you where the arm came from, because it is rather a top-secret arm, and you do not have clearance to learn more about the arm, nor, in fact, do I. But I will tell you a bit, if you think that perhaps you will be able to keep the fact of the arm to yourselves. Which means that you may not blabber about the arm to your school friends, nor may you type anything about the arm onto your online sites, your social-networking video sites, or what have you. I assume you have not done this yet, am I correct?”

“Yeah, of course,” said the girl.

“Then listen carefully. Jean-Paul, can you hear me? The arm, it seems, is not from this world. The arm is from the planet Mars. In fact, the arm is from the mission to the planet Mars, and from a portion of the capsule, which touched down—crashed, I should say—just outside of town.”

“Does that mean,” Jean-Paul said, flinging the shower curtain to one end of the curtain rod and grabbing a towel, “that you know whose arm it is?”

Jean-Paul held up Vienna’s towel, gracefully, as she stepped from it into the deluge. Koo caught a glimpse of her pale, lithe girl body.

“Yes,” he said. “It is the arm belonging to the man who flew back to Earth from the Mars mission.”

“That’s his arm?” Jean-Paul said.

“So I have been told by certain authorities. This is their presumption. Was it missing a finger?”

“Yeah, and—”

“—wearing a wedding ring.”

Koo looked carefully at his son, as if he could, without much experience of the bacterium and its infections, diagnose the preliminary stages of the disease. And with the young people, there were all kinds of exhaustion that they routinely presented. There was the exhaustion from taking too many drugs, and there was the exhaustion of driving all night to a licentious place on the other side of the border, and there was the exhaustion of mechanical, loveless, young-person sexuality, and there was the neglecting of common hygiene practices. This was one of the few times that Koo had found he was able to convince his son to take a shower. The chances were that there was no sign of infection at this stage, no early fever, as with a retrovirus, nor convulsive vomiting. He wanted to continue to keep the young people calm, but he wanted to feel that he had tried everything he could try.

“It’s carrying some kind of germ?”

“It’s carrying a germ indeed. Most of the people on the mission to the planet Mars died of something, and they are rather worried about this pathogen getting into the environment here on Earth. According to the theories, the incubation is rather long, and given that this is the case, we will have some time to move to a treatment plan before too many people get sick. But this all depends on our ability to find the arm and subject it to testing. So do you have an idea where you lost it?”

“Wherever it lands, there’s going to be people who see it.”

“What did you do after you lost the arm?” his father asked.

“We went to drop the van back at Vienna’s place, figuring we could pick up my car, but I guess that was a mistake,” Jean-Paul said, and his concern was evident. “But there was a note from her parents asking her to drop the van off at the rally downtown, so we took it down there. They needed it for something. And then we came straight here.”

“Did you tell them about it? Did you tell anyone else about it?”

“We didn’t tell anyone.”

“You must keep it that way for now,” Koo said. “You and the girl must probably stay in one place for a few days and limit contact. Most people who have had contact are being quarantined. And you will have to call the Robertses and alert them, and let us hope they use antibacterial agents or avoid that van. Now, go find some clothes for yourself and the girl, and come downstairs and help me to burn these items. A son should help his father with these things.”

A long night has passed and now the bright dawn is upon me
, Morton scrawled in his childish hand,
and scarcely have I experienced a night so long, at least not in recent memory. Is it a long night simply because it is the night in which I have declared my feelings? Is it possible that this world is ready for a love so profane, a chimpanzee’s love for a human woman? I am well aware, or at least these were my thoughts through the harsh night of the primate laboratory where I live, that as a chimpanzee, as part of a species in the midst of being hunted from the globe, that the human animal is not the animal I should lavish with my affections. I am aware of this. But a primate will love what a primate will love. Desire, as I have been experiencing it, is a disconcerting riot of feelings. Just as one feeling, one color, one hue, becomes nameable, it is succeeded by its obverse. There is a dynamic opposition between loves practical and impractical. In practical love, I resolve to keep to myself what I have already partly declared so as to be able to live comfortably in my world of experimental medical protocols. In impractical love, I throw my caution to the wind, as a chimpanzee often must do, and just attempt the inadvisable thing, the vulnerability of desire. Neither of these solutions to my predicament stays with me, or this was what I came to believe in the course of the long night I am describing. I wrestled myself to and fro trying to find ways to feel comfortable sleeping. My only comfort lay in the possibility that I might be able to speak with Noelle further. While waiting, I contented myself with the fact that I now possess the kinds of feelings that have given us the greatest poems. Songs too. For example, I recently heard a song on the computer entitled “More Than a Woman,” I believe that was the title. The frail, trembling falsetto of the men singing the song moved me greatly. Perhaps one day I too shall be able to contribute to the enormous legacy of descriptions of love
.

It was Larry, the other graduate student, who arrived first at the lab in the morning. Not bright and early, as Morton had hoped, but when it damn well suited him, perhaps an hour before his lunch break. Morton had tolerated Larry in the past, no more. It was simply unjust that he had to deal with Larry on this day of all days. Let it be said, first of all, that Larry smoked something, some sedative or mild hallucinogen, on the far side of the mirror. Morton believed that Larry smoked something most days. There was always some vegetal odor that leaked under the lab door. Morton was not yet worldly enough to identify it, though he had ideas. Morton no longer wished to be exposed to the battery of human intoxicants with which they seemed to fill their days. Now that he employed the English language in his own way, now that he was capable of the helix of desire and consciousness that enabled the one primate to feel that it can subdue the others, he had no interest whatsoever in dulling himself. He would, with a clear mind, with a will to
power
, wrest life to his purposes.

After a good half hour of rooting around on the other side of the observation mirror, dropping things and then rearranging whatever it was that he had dropped, calling his pals to ask them to pick up more pseudoephedrine so that he could modify it in the laboratory bathroom, or so Morton believed, Larry at last entered the cell area.

“What’s it going to be today?” the researcher said, yawning. “A little screen time, big guy? There was a really big mess at the rally over on Stone. Want to watch a little of that? There’s footage on the Net. There were helicopters on the scene, that kind of shit. Probably some live feed from the police department. Wake you right up.”

Should Morton tell him? Should Morton tell Larry to please flee back into the observation room and masturbate himself, or whatever it was this deadbeat human did in order to pass the time? Defecate in his desk drawer? Should Morton tell him in no uncertain terms that
now
was not the time? Morton turned the pros and cons over in his rationalizing mind. He couldn’t, in point of fact, determine any reason to speak with Larry at all. Larry was simply not someone with whom Morton wished to speak. In fact, it occurred to him that he should ball up the piece of construction paper on which he’d been writing down his thoughts. He balled up his notes (feeling grateful that he hadn’t written the love poem he’d contemplated there, since anything he wrote was liable to be somewhat historic, especially if he used the sonnet form). He batted around the wadded-up ball of diaristic notes just the way a chimpanzee would do it and knocked this ball into the trash bin.