The Four Fingers of Death (96 page)

“Morton, please,” said Dr. Koo. “We have more important—”

“Let me talk to him,” Noelle Stern, the graduate student, said. “I think I can—”

“—but if one young man has to be sacrificed,” Morton continued, sweeping his arm over the recumbent form of the younger Koo, “I admit this is regrettable, but this is the order of the epochs as they wheel past. When one species achieves too much dominance, it eventually sows the seeds of its own destruction. In your case, there is your obscene desire to wipe out other nations. Nations! Some group of you organizes itself so as to kill off some other group of yourselves, and in the process you generate this paperwork, fees for passports, that sort of nonsense, when all you want to do is kill one another! That’s a good joke! These borders that you claim mark the divisions from one nation to another? The only animal that observes them is you. What do the rest of us think of this? We think you are drunk on your own obscene power. And when that desire, the desire of nations to wipe out one another, is combined with your despicable interest in plundering a new planet of its resources, having so thoroughly polluted this one, well, then the result is this tiny little pathogen that now threatens—”

“Morton,” Noelle said, “let’s just step outside, please.”

There was some shoving for a moment, some protestation. The chimpanzee seemed to be indicating that he had lots more yet to say, but by the time this was clear, he was already well out of the bedroom. Down the hall, or even downstairs.

“Guy’s a talker,” Jean-Paul murmured.

“He seems to be very tense, and he’s not terribly effective when he’s tense,” the elder Koo said. “But we believe he can give us insight into this situation, so that we can contain it more quickly. Here, use this pad.”

Jean-Paul’s handwriting had declined, just as his speaking voice had, and where he once had the handwriting of an architect, perfect little capital letters that could fit into the graph paper squares, now there were trembly smudges.

AM I GOING TO MAKE IT?

“Son… it’s true that we don’t know enough about this disease yet, but it is bacterial, and most bacteria on Earth respond to various courses of antibiotics, and this intravenous drip we’re going to hook up—Dr. Lecompte is preparing it—will at the very least slow the accelerated course of the symptoms, and it’s more than possible it will wipe out the infection entirely.”

WHAT ABOUT OTHER PEOPLE?

“Those who have come in contact with the arm?”

OR IN CONTACT WITH ME.

Some of the government types were already making their way to the door. Checking their implanted communications devices, typing out messages.

“We aren’t aware of all the mechanisms of the contagion, whether there is a specific point when the bacteria is communicable, and so it’s possible that some people are spared, or have resistance for reasons that are so far unclear. Which doesn’t mean it’s not incredibly dangerous, as in your own case. I wish the news were better. But I am very hopeful nonetheless. We need to find the arm first, and to move from there to quarantine persons who have been in contact with those who had contact with it. But, son, these things need not concern you now. You just need to get well.”

Jean-Paul could fucking tell that they had put something into the drip along with the antibiotic. A fucking antibiotic, he wasn’t stupid, he was anything but stupid, he knew that an antibiotic like that could have a powerful effect on the body, could render the body sick with its poisons, and he could almost feel himself turning green, but that wasn’t the
half
of it. Because he recognized now that there was also some sedative in the cocktail. His mind, free of his body, ran through a list of antipsychotic medications. Some drug company (or the CDC) had promoted the antipsychotic family of medications, he knew, more reliable for anxiety, less habit-forming, and when there was a danger that a sick person might go into a, you know, reverse-phylogenetic rage and begin
strangling his family
, before or after his limbs began detaching from his fucking body, then it was probably a reasonable prescription, Zebulite, fewer fucking side effects, like it might correct the nausea and diarrhea from the antibiotic; Zebulite didn’t cause the dyskinesia so common from the excess use of the fucking antipsychotic family, until you would even fucking see on some job applications
No antipsychotic-related speech defects or tremors, please
, you could tell, you could fucking tell sometimes, like the fucking telemarketer would call at a certain hour, like the dinner hour, and you’d be trying to have dinner with your ridiculously hot girlfriend, a video message would appear on your implanted personal messaging device, and up would pop this grainy video, and you could see the fat, unhappy woman in the message, trying to get you to deposit what little money you had left in a Chinese bank, and this unhappy woman would have the massive weight gain associated with antipsychotics; the woman would also have her tongue lolling around in her mouth, and between her Mandarin accent and the antipsychotic-related speech defects, you couldn’t understand one fucking thing that she was fucking trying to say, and on top of that, her arm seemed to be spontaneously reaching up and scratching her head, and he fucking didn’t want to buy whatever it was she was trying to sell, and it seemed fucking unpatriotic, if you asked Jean-Paul, when an American company was somehow subcontracting to bring you fucking sales pitches from Chinese nationals, especially Chinese nationals on antipsychotic medication, who were probably suffering from some complex related to the fact that they were plundering the fucking globe of its remaining wealth and creating two-thirds of its fucking carbon emissions, and Jean-Paul could feel that his interior tirade about the antipsychotics in the intravenous drip was beginning to occlude his ability to interact with the remaining humans in the room, and he took up the pad, and he attempted to write a note to Vienna Roberts, and couldn’t focus enough on the pad in order to remind her that she was fucking ridiculously hot, and he was so glad she wasn’t sick, and he was grateful to her for sticking around when everyone else was leaving, and fucking leaving him here until his limbs started detaching, like if his leg fell off of his body and started trying to escape across the room, tiptoeing out of the room, think about it: the leg could maybe get around pretty well, hopping or what have you, but the fucking leg couldn’t do anything. It would just kind of lie there trying to kick things, and maybe it could kick someone in the balls or something, but that would be about it, but once he was fucking deprived of the leg, then he was deprived of it and it could go anywhere, and he was trying to get some of this down on the pad, and he could, in the haze of antipsychotic medication, before asking for some food, like maybe they could bring him some carbs, some cannoli, and from the haze, he could hear his father’s voice asking if he had any advice on where to look for the arm, and he tried to tell him the bad news, which was that he had no idea, because, you know, he’d been quarantined since the thing fell out of the van; his father always made the mistake of presuming that young people had some kind of fucking telepathic communication, like morphic fucking resonance, like they could just communicate without even using their implanted communications devices, but if they were asking his opinion, which he was happy to give, the place to look for the arm was among the
nomads
, and the problem with fucking looking among the
nomads
was that the
nomads
couldn’t be trusted to stay in one place, and lots of them were missing limbs anyhow, or were carrying withered skulls or old leathery limbs from various places, things that looked like limbs, because the
nomads
, he thought in his antipsychotic haze, had fucking trashed the human body and no longer needed any bilateral arrangement of limbs. The
nomads
could make devices and fuse themselves to these devices, and mopeds, and motor scooters, and they could make their way from shady spot to shady spot, slathered in sunblock or lead-free exterior white paint, which had become the cut-rate sunblock of choice among
nomads
, and to them the arm would be just another totem, interesting for how it coincided with their system of beliefs but not much more than that, and for that reason, no one was liable to keep the fucking arm for very long, especially when it was trying to
pinch
people, harass their pets, or maybe trying to molest them or whatever; they weren’t going to sit still for the fucking arm, and they were going to try to trade it with someone, and so it just wasn’t going to be easy to chase it into the world of the
nomads;
Jean-Paul could see it all before him, just how hard it was going to be, and he tried to write some of this down on the pad, but despite his best intentions, this is what Vienna Roberts found on the pad when she tried to read it out to those who remained behind in the sick chamber:

Despite the hand-to-hand combat of decades of budgetary infighting, despite having tendered his own resignation multiply, despite having physically menaced members of Congress, Vance Gibraltar still found the citadels of power to which he occasionally traveled intimidating.
Intimidating
was such an unbecoming word, true. He didn’t betray intimidation. There were no visible symptoms, no rashes, no sores.

Still, coming to the president’s weekend retreat in West Virginia was not something he’d done before. And it was not something he hoped to do again soon. He suspected that he had been summoned for reasons that were not going to burnish his curriculum vitae. He and Debra Levin had both been requested to appear to answer for the emergency response that was playing out in the desert Southwest. He was going to be part of a team that was to suggest the difficult choices that lay ahead. And at the end of this conversation, he was, he believed, going to be pastured. For the rest of his days.

On the surface, there was nothing that a casual observer would not have found civilized, even genteel, about the presidential weekend residence. After having passed through several layers of Secret Service, Gibraltar and his driver had nosed down a cypress-lined way, bordered by woods fecund with kudzu and other viny opportunists, toward an antebellum porch with a fresh coat of paint. It was a structure of the sort that Gibraltar associated with dramas of the Southern Gothic variety. Upon disembarking from his limousine, and after suffering through the retinal scan, the fingerprint scan, the DNA test, and every other kind of security procedure imaginable, Gibraltar was invited into the residence proper and shown to a sitting room decorated in gay calicos and painted in a mild linen white. The chairs were arrayed at a circular meeting table with keyboards inlaid for note-taking. All four corners of the ceiling had cameras secreted in them.

The rumors about the president had come as relentlessly as all the other bad news in the past twelve months. As the economy racked up another quarter of negative growth, as the undocumented emigrants began to scale the walls both north and south, as populations moved into negative terrain, as the health care industry collapsed beneath the sagging weight of the aging population, Xers and Yers, and the drag of antibiotic resistance, as grand theft and rape and murder reached new levels of cultural acceptability because of the OxyPlus addiction epidemic, as the warlike rhetoric flared anew in Central Asia, it was rumored that the commander in chief had fallen prey to some kind of psychiatric complaint that involved what the
DSM-VIII
referred to as
persecution delusion, legitimate, with nomadic presentation
, the manifestations of which involved removing himself from location to location, never staying longer than a few days in any one redoubt. Some of these surprise appearances coincided with regional emergencies of various kinds: the president today appeared at the site of a plane crash; the president toured a floodplain. And yet the appearances were never followed by a return to Washington, not for any length of time.