The Four Fingers of Death (89 page)

And so all at once, because why belabor the preparations in this account, Morton was
outside!
All at once: what was inside was
not
the totality of Morton’s life but was simply a characteristic of a former time in his life. All at once, there was an
outside
, and if outside was not what he imagined, if he did not have some memory lurking in him of what the outdoors should look like when he inhabited it (an idea that he got from his ancestral, mitochondrial self), if he did not have an idea of it from seeing it in films or through the reinforced windows of his cell, it was no less glorious and no less perfect in the beholding than in his imagination. In fact, the outdoors exceeded his imagination! They gave him a baseball cap, to shield him from the sun, and he attempted to wear Noelle’s sunglasses, though whether this was for him or for whatever humans he might encounter on his first drive through the city of Rio Blanco, he didn’t know, and he didn’t care. When the glasses fell into the foot well of the automobile in which he rode, there in the backseat, he didn’t care, because the window was rolled
down
, despite the temperatures, nearing one hundred and fifteen (he heard Dr. Koo say), and they sped through the stoplights of the thoroughfare, and what Morton noticed was how many things there were that caught his eye, how reliable was the
velocity
of contemporary life, and how sad it was. It was sad! There were all manner of wanderers in contemporary life, dressed in privation, come from other places and unable to return there, walking here and there, looking for what? Looking for what lost thing? For the notion of a life that wasn’t lost? They were going in and out of some beleaguered franchise restaurant, Morton thought, to eat some chemically enhanced carbohydrate, and then back out into the heat, to vomit, and then to go drink some more; all was decay, all was decline and fall, but rendered in the pale colors of the desert, which were orange and rose and bleached white and palest green, and everything was scorched by the glorious winds, which carried forth the flame that devoured the region but which also made it feel somehow romantic and perfect, especially when they arrived at last at the
interstate
, which no longer carried the great snarl of automobiles that it had in the last century (or so Morton was told), because no one could afford to field a fleet of
cars
anymore, and so when the laboratory sport utility vehicle, modeled on one that had been used by the troops in the Central Asian conflict, hit the interstate, there was nothing that Morton could think of but that movement was itself the source of
romance
, and freedom was velocity and movement, and freedom, therefore, made possible
romance
, and that animals in captivity could perhaps be sexual, could perform sexually, having few other activities, but they couldn’t feel desire, because
desire
was part of a spectrum of feelings, of kinds of self-knowledge that were associated with freedom, that took place among palm trees and rock formations and in the presence of mountain lions; he could feel the mountain lions out there, in their miles and miles of range, and he knew that he could feel them when the human animals no longer could; and yet chief among the possibilities of liberty, in this resplendent desert, with its great cloudless lid of brightest periwinkle, was failure, and that was what made desire possible, the failure implicit in freedom, and it was this that made him want to reach up to touch the shoulder of Noelle in the front passenger seat, the sense that he was going to fail, that his ugliness was unsurpassed, his ugliness, his total inability to understand the clothing and the cooked food, and the repression of glandular needs and wants, he was going to fail; he had come to this point, this plateau of human accomplishment where no experimental animal had ever come, where he could convince his jailers not only to release him but to understand that he was in some way something that they could never be, and this only meant that his failure was that much more undeniable, because he knew what he had to lose now, and that time when he was just another chimp, that was the one
perfect
time, because freedom was savage, cruel, and he reached up to the front seat, around the headrest, bested by the limitlessness of the desert, and he set his hand on the shoulder of Noelle, and she looked back at Morton, the chimpanzee, and she smiled, and he knew that that smile was intended for him and him alone, and he knew that that smile should have been enough, but it
wasn’t
enough, and he knew that Noelle wasn’t enough to save him now, and before him he saw the opportunities ahead of him, the dead-end jobs he would try to secure, going into the office to explain to the people in human resources, or whatever you called them and their department, that he wasn’t going to be able to type very fast, because his fingers were too big and clumsy, and then he was going to go to the fast-food restaurant, and he was going to have to point out that he wasn’t able to operate the cash register, which was the job you took when you were unable to perform any other job, the job where you handled the
money
, and he wasn’t going to be able to handle the money, because his hands were not well enough coordinated to press the buttons properly, and he couldn’t get hold of the small denominations of coinage, and so he would not be able to hold that job, and the public-relations job that involved selling legislators of the Southwest on tax credits for Chinese and Indian manufacturers that wanted to move here, he wasn’t going to be able to take that job, because he didn’t look like the legislators of the Southwest, who would be afraid, even terrified, at the recognition that the lobbyist who was approaching them was a
chimpanzee
, not a person at all, though he was able to talk like a person (sort of ), and so he wasn’t going to be able to take
that
job, and so unless they were going to be willing to hire him to do some kind of office work at the laboratory at the medical school of URB, there was no job that he was going to be fit for, but it was unlikely that the state apparatus was going to catch him in its tattered safety net, and so what was he going to do, was he going to love this woman? Was he going to content himself with
love
and give up on
work?

Down into the ravine they went, on the far side of the outskirts of town, into some new stratification of rock crumbling on the sides of the road, they hurtled in silence, and the permanence of the rock formations made a mockery of the chimpanzee; he would survive a few more moments, with his hand on the shoulder of the human woman, whispering
I felt so strong, just this morning I felt so strong, and now I feel so weak, and I don’t know if I am strong enough now to be out here, in this world of limitless opportunities, which is really a world of poverty and failure
, and she smiled and he smiled back at her, a chimpanzee grin, as Koo turned the car around, in the next town, and asked if he wanted something, did he want a soda or something? And the list of things he
wanted
was so long that Morton sat there in silence, wondering if he could even make a beginning of the description of the something that he wanted, because just as one thirst was slaked, another rose in its stead, and he didn’t know how to call all these needs, all these desires, which were
not
to be understood as fragmentary and interrupted, but overpowering, because his was a consciousness that appeared ex nihilo, with no
self
to attach to its fragments, if by
self
we mean a self that has a story of its coming-to-be, and he cried silently, even as he grinned his chimpanzee grin, with his hand upon Noelle’s shoulder, and perhaps the human animals believed that a chimpanzee weeping was weeping at their
success
, at the way the chimpanzee was now a part of all that was, the human story, but he was weeping instead at the mess he’d made of things, and the mess that had been made of him, and he couldn’t think of what to say about whether there was something he wanted, so he said he wanted Coca-Cola, which was the most recognized and widely circulated American product, and he had read somewhere that the word was the most commonly understood English-language word, after the word
okay
, and so maybe Coca-Cola, whatever that was, would make him feel
okay
, and so he sat in the car, with his hand on Noelle’s shoulder, awaiting his Coca-Cola, and she was so good to let him keep his hand there, as he looked out the window at the desperate and slovenly humans coming and going at the not very convenient convenience store, placating their addictions to small things, that Morton wept, because if he tried to mate with Noelle, the hole in him would spill over across the species boundary, because love was the hole as well as the thing that repaired the hole.

Koo, coming around the side to the open window, handed him a Coca-Cola, muttering something about how it was probably manufactured South of the Border and was therefore better than what was domestically available.

“Morton,” Koo said, settling himself behind the wheel again, turning to face his protégé, the onetime experimental subject, “there’s something I’d like to ask you about, since you are out in the world with me for the afternoon. In fact, it’s just what I was thinking when I came to understand that you probably would enjoy a little trip outside. You see, we are having this big problem just now. And when I say ‘we,’ what I mean is ‘we’ the human race. We are having a bit of a problem. It’s a problem that I think you might be able to help me with. It all started on Mars.”

Happiness Is Submission to God
. These words were among the most inscrutable and ineffable bits of antique public signage in Rio Blanco—let’s not get into the old liquor store neon on Ninth Street and those flickering beseechments for motels-by-the-hour lining the thoroughfare called Oracle.
Happiness Is Submission to God
. Inscribed on a small cottage in the neighborhood of the university, a cottage that had long been yet another staple of off-campus housing for a certain kind of URB student, the kind of student who had come to the campus to be neither pre-law nor premed. In fact, the lineage of the house itself—pale green with evergreen trim, right on the Sixth Street artery as it headed for
El Centro—
was a subject of enthusiastic conjecture among students of the mind. The entirety of the jihadist movement of the early part of the century was born in this very house, it was said. The slogan painted on the side of the house in part
created
this movement, though if the Wahhabis who lived there in the 1970s had not painted the quotation from the Qur’an on the side of the building, who had? No matter how far back you dated the building and its slogan, there was someone who had lived there
before
, who had rented it to the guy, or the woman, who had in turn rented it to the Wahhabis. Therefore, there was no origin for the slogan, only people searching for its origin:
Happiness Is Submission to God
.

First: the avant-garde theatrical troupe, from the historical epoch in which the phrase
avant-garde theatrical troupe
was not yet comical, the epoch of drug-perfected mummers who specialized in improvising works of absurdism in which they flung bodily fluids on the audience, invoking and citing works of oriental mysticism, until their parents cut them off. The works of the
avant-garde theatrical troupe
had lately been experiencing a renaissance, as in the case of the four-hour spectacular
Menarche
, revived in an abandoned warehouse on the South Side. These players had trashed the house, looted it of some of its gutters, which became props in a dramatic spectacular, and then passed the house—prized, additionally, because of its
basement
, a rarity in these parts—on to the next quixotic subculture, which was the subculture of the
radical political underground
. A national fugitive allegedly stayed a night in the house marked
Happiness Is Submission to God
, belittling the slogan as petty bourgeois, after his participation in a botched armored-truck robbery. This fugitive was taking a lot of pollutants, in order to buck himself up, and so while sleeping there he dreamed of being vivisected by a beloved uncle. As if vivid dreaming were some kind of contagion, or a reaction to valley fever spores, several of the political activists who lived there in this period began having vivid nightmares, in fact, and perhaps this was why they passed the house on to a cadre of videographers. The house stayed in the hands of the film and video department for a good five or six years, and its exterior appeared in many, many documentaries about the treatment of migrant farmworkers, and investigations into civic corruption and its relationship to land acquisition by URB. So routine did life then become in the house on Sixth Street that it was actually in danger of being repainted. Who cared about whether or not happiness was submission to God? There was, it is true, a video in production that purported to interpret the slogan, and since this documentary felt that the slogan was excessively
denominational
for a building associated with a state-funded institution of higher education, the videographer (and his friends) intended to repaint the house as the climax of the film. However, the problem of regional
vermin
was concurrently raising its multiple heads and segmented eyes in the house. The cockroaches were a nuisance but were not terribly frightening. Cockroach races, films thereof, were good sport. The lizards occasionally ate the roaches, so the lizards were at first welcome. The pack rats, however, were a little more challenging. One hapless video student narrowly avoided getting bitten by a pack rat. But soon the battle with vermin escalated to the tarantula. Total fumigation was required.