The Four Fingers of Death (93 page)

The arm knew naught of these forking tales, of the good and bad Moose Mansourians, and of the simple and tender relationship between Moose and the younger kid beside him, and so when the arm propelled itself through the air onto the throat of Moose Mansourian, the forking narratives of a life neither good nor bad were nowhere apparent, and the arm, because it knew no compassion, dug in its fingernails, so that when Moose, awakening from a stupor, grabbed the forearm and pulled, he did little more than pull the long, serrated fingernails of the arm through some important biological real estate, so that there was an Old Faithful geysering, this happening so quickly and so quietly that the boys’ father was not awakened (he was in the habit of drinking), and the young Corey, who slept like a corpse and dreamed only of empty desert landscapes with rabbits and javelinas grazing upon them, wasn’t roused until later, speckled with crimson, at which point he beheld the arm finishing off his brother, and unfortunately for Corey, and for Moose, his first impulse, because he didn’t understand, was to laugh.

The mother of young Moose would have been brought low by the recognition of this moment. The teachers who had cared about him and who worried when he didn’t go to college would have been brought low. The neighbors, who all said of Moose, despite the rumors, that he was respectful and kept to himself, they all would have been brought low, and were, when emergency vehicles arrived, and, later, a cortege of more government vehicles than any had seen in years. Who would not have found him- or herself weeping had he or she come upon that scene, the dead boy in the pool of blood, and his learning-disabled brother chasing the arm around the room as though it were some kind of toy, forgetting, for the moment, that his elder sibling, the person who cared most about him, was toggling into the off position once and for all. The arm did nothing but spread loss and grief, it was a force for
harm
, but Corey didn’t really understand these things, not yet, and so once he had stabbed at the arm a few times with a plastic sword he kept at bedside, he actually opened the door for it, to watch the arm scuttle out into the hall of the Mansourian homestead, where it somehow made instinctual or rather uncanny progress toward the front door, at which point Corey, who was mostly enjoined from opening and closing doors, opened the front door, because he had learned the manipulation of locks. And when no one was looking, he sometimes contented himself by fiddling with—opening and closing—doors, and so he released his brother’s murderer out into the gravel front yard, and he stood there watching it make its way across the dusty waste; in the light of a lone solar-powered streetlamp, the arm, circumnavigating a prickly pear that was yellowing on the lawn, toppled off the curb and into the street. All this took place in the deeper part of the night, you see, when the gangs came out down on the lower part of Fourth Avenue, near to Nineteenth or Twentieth, thereabouts, and maybe the gangs would seize the murderer, the arm, as a curiosity, because gangs were the only people who could thrive in the deep night of Rio Blanco. They were the only people, besides the
nomads
, who took pleasure in this fragmented metropolis, with one of the highest murder rates in the nation. Corey, who stood in the xerisphere of his own front yard, gazed up, bloody plastic Excalibur in his hand. And it was here that he stood when his father was finally roused, perhaps by the commotion and perhaps by the great darkness that was at that moment sweeping over his slumbering heart. This ineffectual patriarch stumbled from his tiny little bed in the stifling upstairs master bedroom, and even the scorpions in the wall sorrowed from their hideouts, and Mr. Mansourian, arriving at the front door and seeing his more challenged son with a plastic sword covered in blood, and beholding the night sky leaking back into the insubstantial bit of creation called Rio Blanco, Mr. Mansourian cried out,
What have you done? What have you done? Oh, lord!
Taking the innocent boy and shaking him hard, and seeing the fear in Corey’s eyes, watching as Corey started to cry, he then instead took him into his arms. What else was there to do?

The arm went about its fell business, meanwhile, finding ways to travel from neighborhood to neighborhood. Through empty lots, tent communities, and subdivisions. Three or four more unfortunates met their fate in the process. But more important than the fatalities were the myriad limbs and extremities that the arm managed to
brush against
, as it served as trophy, curiosity, talisman, prosthetic limb, and, in a bodega on the South Side, one of those picker-uppers that you use to reach things on the high shelves. The arm, carrier of exotic bacteria, perhaps sensed the ways in which the laborious gravity of Earth was sapping it of its energies, and if the bacteria animated it, they couldn’t do so for long, because nothing exists forever in this place. Without some infusion of energy, the arm would eventually have to abandon its mission. If it couldn’t
kill
with the ferocity that would have contented it, it could, however, spread wide its contagion. All the arguments, all the Caucasian chalk circles that were drawn around the arm, in which antagonists were pitted against one another for the control of it, these were all just little data points on the Venn diagram of infection.

As indicated, by morning, the police had draped their colored tape around the Mansourian residence, and they’d congregated there, trying to ascertain what the evidence suggested in the matter of the death of Moose Mansourian, known confederate of Mexican drug kingpins, small-time, low-level operative who hadn’t been detained yet only because he didn’t give the police anyone they couldn’t get from a dozen different snitches. The only part of the story that didn’t work was the part that had to do with the learning-disabled kid stabbing Moose Mansourian to death with a plastic sword. The death was by strangulation—that was patently obvious on the body—and anyway the retarded kid seemed confused and uncertain about the whole business, which left the father, but the father had no signs of a struggle on his body. It didn’t add up.

The other thing that didn’t add up was how the Federales got wind of the whole thing so fast. They were
not
likely to intervene in small-town drug hits in places like Rio Blanco, not when there were dozens of other larger cities where the lawlessness was even more aggrieved. How did they know? Which way was the information flowing? All the locals knew was that before they had even finished bagging the evidence and interviewing family members, there was a whole team of federal employees pulling up at the house. Some of them were from the FBI, but others were from far more exotic agencies, including, it seemed, the Centers for Disease Control—not an agency that anyone in Rio Blanco was accustomed to encountering, except when there was that hantavirus outbreak. These guys were actually wearing Hazmat jumpsuits when they showed up, and they were urging the officers to report to a temporary quarantine station that had been set up in the university gymnasium. There they were going to be showered, given a powerful antibiotic, and then they were going to be observed for a few days. Before all that happened, the local officers were detailed to the front of the house, where they were to fend off anyone who would come along asking questions.

But one guy, one of the officers, was still in the house when a fellow with a bad comb-over who claimed to be from NASA (what NASA had to do with anything was anyone’s guess) began to try to interview the retarded kid. This was comical to watch, and the officer, Detective Paradiso, was asked by his police chief to videotape the interview between the bad-hair guy and the retarded kid, for internal use only, and so with the video camera off his tool belt, he made like he was a documentary guy, filming everything from the corner of a cramped living room.

“My name is Rob,” the guy from NASA kept reiterating. Trying to get the kid to focus. Trying to explain NASA to the kid. Space, Mars, all this stuff that was irrelevant to some kid who didn’t even really know what just happened to his brother. “Can you tell me what happened last night? Do you know what happened?”

The kid’s father was sitting next to him now, with an arm around the fucked-up kid, and the father, looking like it was all well beyond him, was crying as the kid tried to talk.

“Moose,” the kid said.

“Moose,” the NASA guy repeated. “Your brother. You were home with your brother?”

“Home.”

“Watching things on the television monitor here?”

“Waterfall.”

“You were watching a waterfall?”

The NASA guy deferred to the father, who didn’t really have anything at all to add to the account. But he had some translation skills with regard to the kid. It was really hard to understand the kid, that was for sure. He had every speech impediment it was possible to have. His big, fleshy lips were not made for the pronunciation of anything but the simplest words.

“Is it possible that your brother made you angry somehow? It’s important that we—”

“We tried that one,” Detective Paradiso called from behind the camera.

“I think I can ask the questions,” NASA guy rejoined, without much conviction. “So did your brother make you angry?”

Retarded kid just fidgeted with the plastic sword, which they had tried to take away from him but which he would not relinquish, and which was still covered with dried brown blood, and the kid was obviously really tired and wanted nothing more than to go to sleep, but probably he could sense that something horrible had happened. Whether he understood the question or not, that was debatable, but still the kid seemed to summon up some kind of response, something that you could film on your departmental video camera:

“No.”

“You weren’t angry?”

“No.”

“Can you tell me what happened?”

At which point the father got himself involved.

“Look, we’ve been going around and around on this stuff for four hours, and you’re talking to a child who is
not verbal
, and he didn’t answer this question earlier, and he’s not going to be able to answer it now. And I don’t know what all of this is about, but I know that this is the only boy I have left, and he is exhausted, and I’m exhausted, and I don’t care, personally, if this is some international diplomatic incident or whatever the hell it is, but we need to be able to go to sleep here and to try to come to some kind of
closure
.”

NASA guy ignored the heartfelt plea, and who can blame him, since one of the most popular web-based, enhanced-reality brands that autumn was the program entitled
Closure
, in which a crack team of life coaches went out into the world to help people who needed
closure
, for whatever reason, whether because of natural disaster, or abandonment, or murder, to find the persons they needed to find in order to make their appeal for, you guessed it,
closure
. The NASA guy didn’t give a shit about
closure;
he thought
closure
was some TV shit, apparently, and from the way he was talking about the whole thing, he was willing to sacrifice the retarded kid and the dad too to the dumpster of history, in order to get what he needed. But he tried a more personal appeal, and maybe it was this appeal that finally got the attention of the retarded kid, even if only for a minute.

“Corey,” he said, and it was as if some light were being switched on in the murky proceedings, by virtue of a proper name, “I’m going to tell you a little bit about me. I’ve got some kids of my own, one of them about your age, and I haven’t seen my kids in a while. In fact, my kids, along with their mom, left me not too very long ago, because of all the work I’ve been putting into the planet Mars. You know what the planet Mars is, right? I’m betting your brother told you all about Mars and the other planets. Mars is a beautiful, deserted place, and, you may have heard, last year we tried to put some men on Mars. Some women too. And what we learned, Corey, was that there are some places where people just aren’t meant to go. And when you send astronauts places where they aren’t yet meant to go, all kinds of things go wrong. You know what I mean, right? In this case, some things went wrong when we tried to bring the men
back
from Mars. Some men and women died on the way to Mars, and some men and women decided to stay on Mars, and then there was the one man coming back from Mars, and we did everything we could to bring him back, so that he could be reunited with his family. We’d failed so many times, in so many different ways, but we tried to paper over our failures with this one success: we were going to bring this man home. Then something went horribly wrong even there. The man was made sick on Mars, and now it’s possible that some people are going to catch the sickness of the man from Mars, and because of this it’s urgently necessary that we—”