The Four Fingers of Death

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said. “I’m really glad. But what took you so fucking long?”

  “Could I ask a question too? Which is like how come you aren’t willing to wait patiently when waiting patiently means that something good is about to happen? Isn’t waiting kind of a good thing, and don’t you have a life that has some other stuff in it besides me that you could do while you were waiting?”

  “Well, let me ask you if you know the meaning of the words ‘Come right over’? Don’t those words like mean anything to you?”

  “Haven’t I heard this speech like fifty fucking times? Can’t you fuck off?”

  “Do you want to see what I got or do you want to see what I got?”

  “How could I answer a question like that, since I don’t know what you have, so how could I know if I want to see it?”

  “What are you talking about? Or are you like such an ape that you can’t even come up with an idea of what you are talking about? Because if you had any idea what you were talking about, wouldn’t you want to see what I’m going to show you, like when I promise that it is totally worth it?”

  “Am I supposed to be able to follow your totally obscure type of thinking?”

  “I don’t know. Are you?”

  “Or am I just supposed to let your incomprehensible whatever wash over me like a fine bottle of fucking champagne?”

  “Sound sexy to you? Champagne?”

  “I’m figuring you’re figuring how sexy it sounds to you. Am I therefore right?”

  To which, in the doorway, she made no audible reply. Vienna took him by the hand, to lead him into the inner sanctum of youth and sexuality.

  “Are you,” Vienna said, “like at all informed about the post-technological, post-manufacturing, post-stagflation, mass-merchandised device known as the Pulverizer?”

  “The what?”

  “The Pulverizer?”

  “Do I look like I’d know anything about a Pulverizer?”

  “Is it that you’re trying to be like coy or something?” Vienna continued. “Would I be coy about cyborg sexuality? Would I be coy about a device that’s all about turning the tables so that what’s wrong is right, and what was bottom is now top? Would I be coy about how this device is meant to break down the last bits of human, you know, resistance that people have in proto-hominid sex, or whatever, until they are like shattered animal versions of themselves, because it’s wires and microchips and titanium that are able to make human beings into the subhuman animals that they really are? Would I be coy about that? Would I be coy about how I think I’ve never really felt anything, you know, sexually, or whatever, until I saw the Pulverizer being utilized?”

  “I mean, can I fucking ask how you got to see it utilized? I mean, should I be a little jealous, because maybe it’s like I fucking don’t want you pulverizing or getting pulverized or witnessing pulverization unless I’m there? And are you somehow retroactively saying something about all our other fucking proto-hominid-type adventures?”

  At the top of the stairs now, and beginning to march down the stairs into the fallout shelter that Vienna’s parents had expanded since they bought the place, because they were sure that Islamists or Central Asian despots or the Sino-Indian military agents or narco-traffickers would launch missiles that would wipe out most of the remnants of this nation and its free-trade satellites, just because. And, you know, nobody in Rio Blanco had a real fallout shelter, because they didn’t have basements.

  “Haven’t I told you?” Vienna said, as she reached the bottom step.

  “Told me what?”

  “What?”

  “What what?”

  “That photographer, like a big international photographer, has been pursuing me, trying to offer me a multimillion-dollar contract to appear in his advertisements that are all about female slavery?”

  “This is supposed to be, like, a believable story?”

  “I’m not saying it is or it isn’t, but is it enough that you want to hear about the Pulverizer?”

  “Well,” Jean-Paul said, “wouldn’t that depend if I were in a state of, I don’t know, arousal or something? Wouldn’t I need to evaluate certain kinds of symptoms, like I could evaluate whether I had an elevated heart rate? Or maybe my blood pressure had risen? And what about blood flow to the region of my fucking genitals? Like wouldn’t there maybe be a tightening of the tissue in my, you know, my scrotal area, or whatnot, perineum, like when I heard you use the word Pulverizer? And wouldn’t that be enough of a telltale sign that what I really wanted, at this point, was to see the Pulverizer, instead of being told some story about how you first saw it with some photographer?”

  Interrogatives temporarily expended, Vienna flung off the sheet from the Pulverizer, and he could fucking well see that she had got herself this ridiculously large device that looked more like a butter churner or something, comatose, my brother, and it was affixed to this rolling cart, and it had all these onboard computer monitoring devices, and then there was a butt plug on the end of the thing, and it was just like the Pulverizer was somebody’s old-fashioned juicer, or somebody’s old-fashioned lawn mower, except that now somebody was going to have the lawn mower pound this hilarious piece of silicone into them, and he didn’t know if he was supposed to use it on Vienna fucking Roberts, or if Vienna fucking Roberts was going to use it on him, Jean-Paul Koo. He had his suspicions.

  “Is this gas powered? Or electric? If it’s electric, is there some kind of generator? And if there’s a generator, where’s the generator located?”

  “I didn’t really read the instructions yet. But I think it’s got a solar panel, as well as AC, and I think it’s all charged up.”

  “Do your parents know that you are charging an expensive fucking anal battering ram in their fallout shelter? Like what would happen if the nuclear attack happened today, and the mushroom clouds rose over Phoenix, and we can only fucking hope, and you had to go down into the fallout shelter and spend the rest of your youth waiting for the gamma radiation to fucking die down, and the whole time there would be this silicone butt plug thing in the corner, ramming into stacks of canned goods?”

  “Maybe we could use it for something good, community oriented, like pounding dough for bread or beating rugs to get the dust out of them.”

  Jean-Paul said, “So I’m guessing you probably want to take this out to Rattlesnake Canyon.”

  “I’m wanting us to take it out to Rattlesnake Canyon.”

  “What if I’m not exactly sure that I want to take it out to Rattlesnake Canyon? It’s a long fucking drive, like over an hour. I mean, you’re the all-important female presence in my fucking operation, and I want you to be happy, but I’m not sure if I want to take the Pulverizer out to the fucking canyon, because I think I’m supposed to want the Pulverizer to do stuff to me, but I’m not always sure if that’s the kind of thing that I like or not, and therefore I am experiencing some, I don’t know, I guess it’s like hesitation.”

  “If that’s what you think,” Vienna said, “I’m going to be really disappointed, and I’m going to bring up that I spent lots of time trying to get this for you and thinking about you, and there’s all the kinds of things that I do for you, but then you just don’t do that much for me, you don’t think about what my needs are, and if my needs include the Pulverizer and Rattlesnake Canyon, well, then maybe you can try one fucking time to use the Pulverizer out in Rattlesnake Canyon, and you can quit with all the male, you know, prejudices, and you can just do as I say.”

  There was a sort of pouting expression that Vienna Roberts got, but it was actually a little bit fucking cruel, in addition to being a pout, and Jean-Paul Koo recognized stuff like this from the DSM-VIII, because his father had put him in fucking psychotherapy from the first minute they got to this country, because everyone was in fucking psychotherapy, or everyone took fucking psychopharmacological medications; with Jean-Paul Koo it was always about the Dead Mother; it was all about the Dead Mother and it had always
been about the Dead Mother; the Dead Mother represented every fucking thing; there was no thing, no object, no abstraction, that wasn’t gummed up by the Dead Mother; the Dead Mother was available to Jean-Paul in every reflective surface, the Dead Mother was in the ghostly reflections of the bright Rio Blanco sunshine against the vandalized and empty office buildings downtown, the Dead Mother was in the sun-dappled images in his rearview mirror; the Dead Mother was in large bags, like when he fucking had to reach into large suitcases or duffel bags, the Dead Mother was in there; there was the anxiety about the Dead Mother; the Dead Mother was always in the dark in the hypnagogic moments before sleep, and sometimes in that dark, the Dead Mother was benign or even loving, and he was certain in these moments that the Dead Mother cared; other times, the Dead Mother, in the dark, was vengeful, and then the Dead Mother wished that Jean-Paul would have made more of himself than a small-business owner and a would-be Mexican gangster and a not very good son; the Dead Mother was all women in authority, and with women in authority, Jean-Paul’s panic was so fucking acute that he would fail to show up for conversations with women in authority, even when these conversations were for the good of Jean-Paul Koo, like one fucking time in school, even though he didn’t fucking want it, he won some award for like best science project, and all he fucking had to do was walk down the corridor to the principal’s office, where they had like a three-hundred-fucking-dollar fucking gift certificate to the really good used-media store on Grant, Arachnids, and they had like a bronzed fucking Venus flytrap or some shit with his name on it, and every day over the balky loudspeaker, the assistant principal announced, at the end-of-school announcements: “Jean-Paul Koo, please come to the principal’s office,” and maybe this was actually the fucking kind of thing that increased the positive cred that he had among the toughs of the private school, because having to go to the principal’s office was bad, you know, at least until the announcements started announcing the fucking science award, and then the Dead Mother, the ghostly version, some incarnation, was cornering him in the halls between classes and saying, “Jean-Paul, please, we’ve had your award for several weeks,” but because she was the Dead Mother, the assistant principal, he backed away, his eyes filling with embarrassing and inexplicable tears that he attempted to conceal, and he’d come up with some excuse, and he’d turn and run down the hall like he was late for detention, even though he never had fucking detention and wasn’t late for it; and, furthermore, the Dead Mother was in college applications, and his inability to fill out college applications; the Dead Mother was in any kind of church, because she was all about the churches; and if there was a Transcendental Other, then the Dead Mother was somehow next to the Transcendental Other, because the Dead Mother had died a prolonged and painful fucking death, as Jean-Paul would have been the first to admit, and the Dead Mother had suffered, and he had too, although he admitted this only to himself, and in private; he knew he had fucking suffered because of the Dead Mother’s prolonged and ravaging illness and demise, and no young kid, like Jean-Paul had been, should fucking have to go through that, but probably yet his story wasn’t any worse than many other fucking stories he’d heard, like when he went to a grief-counseling group, when they first came here, because his father wasn’t eating and would work all night and then sleep during the day, and Jean-Paul, even though he was only a kid then, he called all these places in the phone book, like no fucking kid should have to do that, call the fucking grief-counseling numbers, and no kid should have to beg his father please to go with him to the grief-counseling group, and there were all these kids there, their mothers had jumped off bridges in front of them, their mothers had pulled the car over and left the engine running and the radio on and then jumped, or their mothers had killed their siblings, and there were rivers of grief about the Dead Mother, and so the Dead Mother flowed liberally, flash flooded Jean-Paul’s riverbed, into the washes of Rio Blanco, her watery remains flowed into all the gullies of this dry place; she was everywhere, and because she was everywhere, she became a consultant on the product line of the Transcendental Other, that is if the Transcendental Other existed, and so this was why when there was the pouting thing from Vienna fucking Roberts, he could not do anything about Vienna fucking Roberts, which meant that he had to do whatever she wanted, because he could not let go of the Dead Mother. He fucking agreed to go out to Rattlesnake Canyon, and he fucking asked how they were going to get the fucking Pulverizer out of the fucking fallout shelter, back up the stairs, and into the convertible, because there really wasn’t room for the fucking Pulverizer, which wasn’t going to fit in the backseat, not to mention all the electronics that came along with.

  “Taking the van,” Vienna said.

  “What van?”

  “Taking the van that the Union of Homeless Citizens uses for the meals-on-wheels program.”

  “You have that? That van belonging to a fucking not-for-profit entity? In your parking area?”

  Outside. By the old, scorched agaves. After Vienna fucking refused to allow Jean-Paul to fucking see the Pulverizer in the on position, they managed with great effort and a lot of sweat—running down the back of Jean-Paul’s tank top, reeking up the fallout shelter—to get the Pulverizer up the fucking stairs, where its casters made it not so hard to wheel out into the street. Vienna had put a rubber glove over the butt plug, out of discretion probably, so that the Pulverizer, as it was going into the van, looked a lot like some kind of very complicated prosthetic hand, maybe a prosthetic hand that was intended to teach people about the necessity of the firm handshake.

  All Jean-Paul could fucking think about was kinds of lubricant, and he was hoping that there was some deluxe desensitizing kind of lubricant that he could get at the drive-thru health and beauty aids joint, the one that now had cyclone fencing and fucking bulletproof glass everywhere from people trying to get at the OxyPlus nasal inhalers and also the Epsom salts that were used in the quick, explosive chemical reactions that made the new more potent polyamphetamine tablets that you could get everywhere. Maybe Vienna had some nasal inhalers, and if he was supposed to have the Pulverizer pulverizing him, the OxyPlus would charge up his prostate and loosen him some. Vienna was fucking talking to him while she was driving, and she was telling him all this stuff about her day, like apart from everything else, she lost a fucking earring, comatose, baby, and her friend Stacey just was being a total bitch and refusing to allow her to teach hand signals for the history of terrorism class, but he wasn’t hearing any of it, because he was worrying about the Pulverizer pulverizing him and drilling his colon all the way up into his diaphragm.

  He punched buttons on the fucking satellite radio. He liked the motivational programs. He liked the station that played nothing but motivational programs, like Closing the Big Sale with Glenn Baisley. Somehow, by happenstance, he scanned past the local news outlet, Channel 932. Through whatever sequence of events secretly overseen by the Dead Mother, he heard the tail end of the report in which, in a voice dulled with repetition, an announcer observed that “on the east side of the city, near Rattlesnake Canyon, another jogger has been badly mauled by a wildcat—”

  Colonel Jed Richards—according to those at the agency who were employed with no other purpose but to watch the feeds of the cameras inside the ERV—had suddenly elected to turn the video camera from the main console, where it had been positioned for these past few days, so that it would again capture his face.

  Many were those who upon first seeing that face saw something that they believed they would long find unforgettable. In the months afterward, when NASA employees spoke of the face, they spoke of it with the kind of fear and disgust that is reserved for atrocities. It was no longer a face as we know it. It was a face without the neotenic smoothness of twenty-first-century man; it was a face ragged with woe and bad hygiene; it was a face that had rappelled humankind backward down the evolutionary chain, back beyond the Cro-Magnon or the Australopithecus; it was the face of a sallow and underfed dog, though a dog that n
onetheless continued to have human features, the face of a starveling coyote or hyena, with gigantic furry rings around his eyes, as in the eyes of a raccoon, with bloody residues in the eye sockets and rivulets of congealed blood cascading from them. There were crusty bits of crimson about the nose and the corners of the mouth, and the mouth hung open as though he couldn’t get enough air; his tongue, blackened, hung out of his mouth; long, patchy hair hung down over his eyes; he gasped, wordlessly, and this face looked into the camera so plangently, so balefully, that none of those who witnessed the face could fail to turn away; and despite that, Colonel Richards, however mysteriously, had managed to stay alive with little or no oxygen in the capsule, and those who watched the face, those who turned away and then turned back, those who bore witness as the face revealed itself, they felt as though they had to do something, and fast, to help this poor, agonizing man, to relieve his suffering in whatever way they could. There was weeping in the canteen, where NASA employees lined up for yet another ice cream bar—the only foodstuff that remained stocked in the canteen since the ordeal began. There were moments of true pathos when people would shove their legal tender into the machines, get the ice cream bars, and then watch as others fell huskily against the glass plates on the vending carousels, releasing in their sighs the accumulated months of frustration and disappointment. Many were the NASA employees who had not cared for Colonel Jed Richards in the early phases of the Mars mission. He was demanding, and he was vain. But here in the endgame, Richards had taken one for the team. This was what the team itself believed. Colonel Richards was gazing courageously upon the prospect of an inglorious death. Colonel Richards, the team believed, was perfectly aware that his death had either already taken place, such that he was presently in some new postmortal conscious state, the likes of which had never been seen before on Earth, or else Colonel Richards was going to have an even more inglorious death imminently. Upon reentry. Team members who couldn’t bear one another just a few weeks ago held one another, offered handkerchiefs, asked after the family, in the canteen, as if there were nothing that could repair the damage done by the end of the Mars mission. Nothing except family and friends.