The Four Fingers of Death (104 page)

However, these last lines were delivered to the naked back of his son, who, with only a towel draped around him, had struggled from the confines of the bathroom (where the paling lamps had again clicked off), followed by Vienna Roberts (who, Koo believed, gazed upon him, Koo, with a look that people occasionally referred to as “daggers”), to repair down the corridor to the garage. This response was to be expected, Koo supposed. Koo’s secret was unraveling like a moth-eaten coverlet. It was only now that Koo fell prey to an additional worry: that his son would recognize, somehow, from looking on the cadaver that had once been his wife, that some little bit of cerebral tissue had lately been harvested from her. He began almost immediately to wrestle with this last revelation. Was it better to tell him now? To tell him that the chimpanzee Morton was, perhaps, his mother, was somehow a spawn of his mother, a semimaternal, cloned version of his mother? To tell him that this cadaver was less his mother, at present, than a way station in the process of self-realization of the chimpanzee? How to talk about these things without creating still more hurt?

Jean-Paul, limping and lurching, nonetheless passed through the kitchen with singular purpose, and from there to the door that led to the garage.

“There is more that I need to tell you, I think,” Koo called timidly from behind.

“I’ll let you know… when I want to hear it,” Jean-Paul grunted. And even in the low-wattage fluorescence of the pantry, Koo could see that the stress was affecting his son. Still, there was nothing to be done, because in a few bounds the afflicted young man had thrown wide the door and was beside the cryogenic freezer. He laid his hands upon it. He examined it. He asked, as Koo joined him, what the keyboard was for. And Koo admitted that it was connected to a screen in the freezer, the site of cryogenic rest, and that this screen allowed for a Korean alphabet and for English and French in simultaneous translations, so that the boy’s mother would be able to
read
, if she chose to.

“I have received no response from her, not up to the present,” Koo added.

With Vienna’s help, the boy fiddled with the false casing and the clasps on the funerary stabilizer, and this Koo was unable to watch. And then there was the thumbprint scanner, which Koo it seemed had no choice but to disable. In the gloom of the corner of the garage (for now night had fallen on the desert, and the lights, if they had not gone out, were soon to go out, and it was only Koo’s generators that illuminated the light inside the refrigerator), he could not now see his wife, into whose eye socket he had recently inserted a lance in order to harvest cerebral tissue. Instead, he watched the faces of his son and his son’s girlfriend, silhouetted, and in that moment, in seeing their faces, he reckoned with the amount of ruin that had gone unconsidered in his many secretive attempts to animate his dead wife.

“She… looks… peaceful,” Jean-Paul said, leaning against Vienna Roberts. And in this instant, Koo surmised, a mothballed ghost went spinning and wheeling above the subdivision, a ghost recalled to the factory of ghosts.

“Don’t think this means that I am not, like, fucking horrified,
comatose
, don’t think I don’t know I have spent my entire fucking life being lied to by you, and don’t think this means that I don’t recognize you as the fucking liar and fucking hypocrite you are, but I am very happy to see my mother again; I am very happy. If I have to die, then maybe it really is okay. Now.”

“You have to do nothing of the sort,” Koo said, “if only you will return to the bathroom where the paling lamps are located. We can discuss all of this in greater detail, all the many horrible things that I have done and continue to do. However, it also bears mentioning, since we are gathered in this spot, that there is this experiment that I have long been undertaking, the experiment having to do with the reanimation of your mother—”

“The what?”

“It is as I have been saying. I have been trying to conduct experiments in which I attempted to reanimate your mother.”

“What does that—”

“It is just as I’ve been saying to you. But it is not as if she was going to get up and walk if we simply waited long enough. If I am to be able to reanimate your mother, I will be required to use her body for medical experiment. This has long been my plan, and in at least one case, I have already used some of her tissue for experiment—”

“I don’t even want to hear this,” Jean-Paul said, groaning dully, as it became clear that the positive effects of the ultraviolet radiation were quickly going to dissipate.

“Presently, I am of the opinion that a small bit of tissue from someone infected by the
M. thanatobacillus
bacteria, if engineered properly, could potentially enable the cadaver to take on some activities, and perhaps to have some limited cerebral function, in which we might be able, for example, to talk to your mother, my wife, and ask her a few questions. For example, we could ask her if the dead dream, and if they have desires. Are they like people in the middle of a seizure, who have awareness but are unable to act? Is it a locked-in syndrome? Or more, does it resemble persistent vegetative state? I know these are not easy questions for you to consider, but it may be necessary to act quickly, as we do not know how stable your condition is.”

Vienna Roberts said, now getting between father and son in the dim light of the garage, “Dr., uh, Dr. Koo? What about my family? I mean, we’re talking about family here, and about how important family is, but can you do anything for my family too? My parents, like, is it right to keep them in the dark about the van and how the van might be, I don’t know, infected or whatever it is we’re talking about, and while we’re on the subject of mothers, I mean, maybe it will be possible to find some way to make sure they’re safe too? I only have the one set of parents. And they had all kinds of trouble conceiving, you know; they had to use all kinds of medical technology. I think I’m probably, like, three-quarters petri dish or something. They aren’t ready to give me up, and I’m not ready to give them up, and so maybe in the middle of this emergency you could—”

Koo said, agitated at the reminder, “This is information that is useful to remember, yes. But in the meantime, I do need my son, who has a blood type match with his mother, to consider whether he might be willing to offer up some tissue for experiment, and it doesn’t need to be very much, just a little bit, really.”

“How much?”

“It could be something very small. Perhaps a toe. Or a finger. A pinkie.”

… Night fell over the desert and Monaco 37 streaked past again and the stars were like the future perfect of an uncommon verb. Or the stars were the filaments of discarded human aspirations. Or the stars in the night sky were the innumerable preschoolers of September, afraid to climb onto the bus in order to have their liberty abridged. Or the stars in the night sky were like so many holes into which our heads were to be stuck. Or the stars in the night sky were the innumerable computations of some frail and overburdened supercomputer, come to the logical end of its computations. Or the stars in the night sky were the total sum of responsibilities, grievances, loves, of a certain nation listing to the end of empire. Or the stars in the night sky were an example of every possible color in the spectrum of all colors, but the beauty of this spectrum was so overwhelming that an unaided eye could no longer discern it. Or the stars in the night sky were the number of words required to correctly describe the stars as a whole. Or the stars in the night sky represented the number of times that a certain recalcitrant boy was reminded to observe the natural world around him. Or the stars in the night sky were ghosts of all the dead, known and unknown to this boy and others. Or the stars in the night sky were pocket lighters flicked on during the encore of the stadium rock show, back when there were still pocket lighters. Or the stars in the night sky were a painterly representation of the idea of insignificance. Or the stars in the night sky were the manifest eruption of something from nothing. Or the stars hinted at a conflagration happening on the other side of a wall of dark substances, through which these tiny holes had been poked. Or the stars in the night sky were a soup of possibility, a broth of what might have been and what might come to pass. The stars in the night sky were a grinding down of all the
mineralia
of planet Earth into infinitesimal grains, which grains were in turn bits of gas and debris cast off by the stars themselves. The stars in the night sky indicated the natural end of our twenty-four-hour day, and that was why they were greeted with such astonishment and relief—the turning away of the sun was both relief and impertinence. The stars in the night sky were the light show for the desert itself, a ratification of its disuse. The stars in the night sky could only be appreciated in silence. The stars in the night sky could only be experienced in motionlessness. The stars in the night sky had a cumulative effect, and the longer you looked at them, the more you wanted to, as if the stars were somehow addictive. The stars in the night sky
were
addictive, and when used improperly they crowded out other activities, particularly social activities, unless these social activities were organized around the night sky itself. The stars in the night sky cohered with certain harmonic principles, cycles per second, but they did not accord with musical principles that affirmed tonality, but, rather, a more random sequence of assonances and dissonances of such long duration that most human beings would perceive the musical principles of the stars in the sky as having a dull, endless sameness, a dissonant mercilessness. The stars in the night sky were prolix, show-offy, because they meant to make a mockery of mathematical ideas of infinity, just by being here. They were finite but limitless. The stars in the night sky had to be seen in the desert, and eventually the desert lured out all stargazers, even people who were busy with many other things, special education, identity theft, the making of low-budget pornography films, day-trading in Central Asian markets; they all found that when they saw the stars in the desert, they put aside childish things, and thus, in the desert there was the Very Large Array, and then the Very Very Very Large Array, and then there was the International Sonoran Array, which was so large that you had to
fly
from one end of the field of radio dishes to the other to bear witness to the entirety of the stargazing apparatus of the desert; whole cities sprang up inside the International Sonoran Array; it had its complex of universities and think tanks, mostly now concentrated on the
other
side of the border, since that was where the venture capital was located, where there was less fallout from the emigration problem. People came to the desert because the stars were in the desert, and the stars had yet to be corrupted by man, though man had managed to corrupt so much else, and there was no fee involved. In fact, the stars, it seemed, would crush man in a scenic, gravitational panorama before man would ever corrupt the stars, and that was why man mostly neglected them, or attempted to surpass the stars, gauzing over the night sky with his sugary glaze, in the pursuit of making the night sky less seductive and more like the screen of a monitor switched to the off position.

The
omnium gatherum
, because of its interest in the primeval, staked a claim to the night sky. Here in the desert. People went over the mountain pass to the great emptiness beyond, west of Rio Blanco, and they abandoned their cars and their bikes by the national forest, which was no kind of forest at all, but just a long stretch of saguaros and cholla. And they walked a mile or two into the Valley of the Slaughtered Calf for the night sky, and for the particular entertainment of that night, which was the
Apotheosis of the Arm
. Volunteers had roped off a portion of the valley, and the Bureau of Land Management, which was protective of local mining claims, became
suddenly
, on this night in the beginning of the cooler part of autumn, with the stars spilling into the sky, all but absent. They waived a number of permits. Unaccountably. There was a police cruiser or two at the front entrance of the Valley of the Slaughtered Calf, but no one could tell whether there was an officer of the peace resting within the cars or not, and so the disaffected streamed past, the disaffected, the forgotten, the homeless, the religious zealots, the disabled (in their motorized wheelchairs), the conspiracy theorists, the abused, the ambulatory masses who were hardly so huddled, they came to the Valley of the Slaughtered Calf because they believed that something unforeseen might take place here, or because, at the very least, they believed that they could dope themselves here, which was revolution for its own sake, and in doping themselves they wouldn’t have to reconsider and revisit their misfortunes any longer. The fighter jets had lifted off at the air force base, and the sky had fallen into a certain portentous silence. The partygoers were wearing festive garb, when they were wearing garb, although it was mostly just the OxyPlus addicts from the local fraternities (those who had not yet failed) who willingly came naked, or in loincloths, wearing headbands and sunglasses but otherwise with their nether parts dangling in the penumbra, flailing as they began to dance, not even recognizing the not-at-all-tribal metronomic battery of
dead girlfriend
as it pummeled the public-address system, admixed with the recordings of the calls of the last remaining humpback whales, sounds of slot machines from the nearby reservation casinos, high-tension lines amplified. Their nakedness was dazzling to themselves, and what women were present would long for these fraternity men, at least in the masculine imagination this was the case, the imagination of those who didn’t end up falling asleep or vomiting and passing out.