The Four Fingers of Death (105 page)

In the café downtown, meanwhile, Noelle and Morton spent half an hour discussing their greatest personal fears. Morton was the one to bring it up. He’d been reading an online advice column: how to have the healthiest relationship, and he’d paid for a download (charging it to Dr. Koo’s credit card),
The Healthiest Relationship: Ten Preliminary Steps
. Here he’d learned many things. The contemporary man needed to make himself open and vulnerable, to reveal his innards for intimacy with patience and quiet confidence. And the way to make himself vulnerable, according to
The Healthiest Relationship
, by Deep Singh, PhD, was to talk about his greatest personal fears and his need for caring. Noelle was well aware that Morton, sipping chai latte, was
unsettling
to most of the patrons of the café, but never more so than when he said, audibly, “All my biggest personal fears, if I’m being honest, have to do with vivisection.”

Noelle ventured, witlessly, “Why is that, do you think?”

An incredibly stupid thing to say, really, because, actually, she could never know what he’d lived through, the ordeal of serving as a medical experimental subject his entire life, from the first instant of his primate consciousness (as opposed to his recently awakened
human
consciousness). His whole life had been about having various electrodes affixed to him, or having pieces cut off, often without anesthetic, or having various things injected into him, illnesses cultured in petri dishes from places like Congo and New Guinea. Morton had survived this only through good luck. From the moment he’d been weaned, this was what Morton had known. If, in his new consciousness, he didn’t remember those early days, with their experimental regimens, he must have somewhere stored up their trauma.

“Isn’t that what most people are afraid of, when you get right down to it? I mean, there are other kinds of bodily fears, hemorrhaging, having an aneurysm, losing an eye, impotence, infertility, but these are really just varieties of vivisection, right?”

Noelle said, “I don’t really have any fear of vivisection. I mean, I guess I have a fear of tremendous physical
pain
, but that’s almost a reflex, not a fear. Mammals recoil from physical pain, right?”

“Actually,” Morton said, “mammals recoil from annihilation. From the foreknowledge of their deaths. Or that’s my view. There are many animals that are willing to tolerate physical pain. Dogs, you know, are willing to endure pain in order to stay near to their masters; cats, willing to endure pain, just not fear. If they have a reasonable certainty of surviving the physical pain, mammals often show remarkable fortitude. It’s only in the imminence of death that the flight mechanism overtakes. That’s my experience, at any rate.”

“Do you suppose the
arm
recoils from annihilation?” said Noelle, because she was frankly a little intimidated by Morton and was, in her anxiety, falling into the disagreeable habit of easy conversation, conversation that didn’t probe into her own life.

Morton called out, slurping the last of the watery chai, “Waiter! Waiter!”

“He’ll—”

Morton seemed to warm to the subject of the arm, Noelle supposed, though it was far from the
healthy relationship
on which he had intended to concentrate his attention, and this was something of a relief. “Look, the arm still possesses the muscle memory of its host. That’s what you have to understand, Noelle. It knows how to do certain things without fail—grasping, strangling, all the hand-to-hand combat that was part of its host’s military training.”

“Its host?”

“Among those muscle memories, I’m guessing, is the instinct to avoid flame. Or frostbite. The arm will not walk directly into fire, and it will not pitch itself into a frigid lake—which probably isn’t liable to happen out here right now.” Morton giggled. “The arm, therefore, does have certain kinds of instinctual activities, just like some kind of lower insect or single-celled organism!”

“But—”

“And now back to your greatest personal fears! And remember, Noelle, that I sympathize. I really
feel
the kind of personal fear we’re talking about here, I honestly do, perhaps more than any other time in my life. I want you to know just how important it is that you understand that I understand the kind of disquiet this sort of conversation brings up in a person when he or she—”

“Morton, you should really let me tell you
my
fears before you—”

She fell silent, concentrating for a moment on a smattering of crumbs that stippled Morton’s hirsute chin. A cranberry scone had immediately preceded the conversation. He’d been attempting to master the paper napkin. He had rumpled it.

“Then please, be my guest.”

In truth, Noelle kind of wanted to get away from him, because she found his attempts at seductive conversation laughable and foul. But it was the laughable qualities, at least for the moment, that made it hard to leave.

She mumbled, “I guess I should say that my biggest fear is being loved. And I don’t know why I’m telling you that. But there it is. Some people’s fears are the silliest ones of all.”

The hiss of a distant cappuccino machine. Change rendered in all but worthless paper currency. Morton, who really was learning phenomenally quickly, gazed upon the woman he loved, or the woman he
said
he loved.

“That, Noelle, is among the saddest things I’ve heard anyone say in a while. And you know I would like to help you with it, and I know that you don’t want me to help you with it. I expected you to say a
fear of heights
, or a
fear of rats
, or something more concrete, because that’s what people do, I think. What they do is let out a little bit of the story, in order to throw off a friend or acquaintance. And then they keep the big, scary part of the tale hidden away. I’ve been developing a theory, you know, during the boring stretches of my imprisonment, and the theory is that
Homo sapiens sapiens
is the loneliest animal on all the planet. This is a bit ironic, because excepting certain kinds of insects and some bacteria,
Homo sapiens sapiens
has to be one of the commonest, if not
the
commonest animal species there is. He’s always surrounded with cronies, coworkers, church acquaintances. And yet no matter what he does, he seems to be keeping the one admirable part of himself, his consciousness, away from all the other individuals of the species. Either he is unable to give of himself in such a way that his fellows can understand him, or else he is overburdening them so that they can only wish to avoid him. It’s all the same in either case,
Homo sapiens sapiens
lives in a warehouse of solitude from which, if he’s lucky, he watches the other people trudging past, and all the while he’s wondering
why not me, why not me, why am I untouched by the tender fingers of civilization?
”

“Morton,” Noelle said. “You know, I am moved, and it’s not like I say that lightly or anything, but—”

“You’re thinking that I am myself an example of the person who asks too much of his fellows, and when this is juxtaposed with my comical ugliness, why then I am just another example of the man who gets nothing, who spends weekend nights drinking himself into liver failure. You’re feeling surges of pity for me that are mitigated only by your physical revulsion. But let me tell you, Noelle, things are different for me.”

The robotic franchise service module, who had swept away Morton’s empty mug earlier, with a I-have-seen-it-all-before look, brought back a fresh cup of the steaming beverage, and Morton grabbed at it ferociously.

“We really should be heading out to the valley.”

“We’re not heading out until I finish saying what I want to say! And you may not want to hear this, but I’m going to tell you anyway. Noelle, I know what I am. I know who I am and what I am. I have no illusions, and I have really only two purposes in this, my second act. My two purposes are: first, to tell the truth as I see it, no matter what it is, the
verismo
of my life, and, second, to love you, Noelle Stern, in such a way that I no longer have to possess you or saddle you with conditions at all, mental or physical. Those are my two purposes. It may seem to you as though you have a lot of responsibilities now, because of what I’ve just said, as if I’m going to expect something from you. But I want you to know that you have
no responsibilities
, and all you have to do is to take in a little bit of my love, when you are able, just so that maybe you can begin to overcome this fear of yours, the one that you’ve—”

“Morton, you know, most people, when they say things like this, they find later on that maybe they aren’t sure it was the—”

“No, Noelle. Don’t go telling me how I’m to grow out of this feeling, this feeling of usefulness that I have. Look at my biography, if you will. I am a man whose very death has been commuted. If I weren’t talking right now, and wearing these boxer shorts and these sandals, I’d be just another chimp getting experimentally infected with Ebola and being force-fed an antibiotic-enriched milk shake by another workaholic who only cares about his grant applications. Every day is free for me now, Noelle, and even if there is no freedom for me in this economy, even if it is my future to sweep up after the robotic service module in some café somewhere, at least after the talk show hosts are no longer interested in me, I am still better off than I ever was. I have a purpose, and I understand my purpose, and this makes me a better person than I was before. It gives my life meaning. You can’t talk me out of what I believe. In fact, your reaction isn’t really relevant. And now we’d better pay.”

“The way everyone has been staring, they should be paying us.”

But Morton, oblivious, slid from the seat onto the sawdusted floor, refolded his paper napkin, and, reaching up, set it on the table, after which he gave the robotic franchise service module a grin and slapped it percussively on the back. “Maybe something better,” he said to that plastic encasement of silicon chips, “is just around the corner.”

The vogue for jet packs, Noelle told Morton in the van on the way over the mountain pass, dated back about ten years. She was trying to change the subject; she was trying hard, wondering why she had agreed to drive Morton out here, and why Koo had allowed him to go, excepting the fact that at the
omnium gatherum
no one would give him a second look. And she realized he’d never seen a jet pack, but in online reports and infomercials. She told him: once the traffic problem got to where you could be parked on Sixth Street in Rio Blanco for an hour, trying to get to the interstate, having a leisurely conversation with the people in the vehicles fore and aft, the automobile became no longer the engine of the national economy. Although what truly put an end to Detroit, to a business sector that had been rescued by the government twice in the past twenty years, was the depletion of the Middle Eastern petroleum supply. Old-time fuel became astronomically expensive. Even the electric-cell cars were pretty expensive, since they required a generating plant somewhere in the supply chain. Electric cars, Noelle was saying, also became more expensive than most people could afford, and those little death contraptions only went so far on a charge and could be totaled at five miles an hour, and still there was a lot of traffic, and so people just started moving toward the idea of the jet pack. If you couldn’t get through the traffic, why not go
over
it?

At first, it was just hobbyists. Guys in Hawaiian-print shirts in backyards, swilling cough syrup, monkeying with lawn mower engines. So many of these hobbyists were lost in the pursuit of the dream, she told Morton. They’d lift off above the subdivision, jet a couple hundred yards, and then lose control, dropping into a grove of cholla. The Southwest was full of these stories. White guys who had nothing more going for them, Noelle told Morton, than their jet packs. They couldn’t get proper jobs, and their wives had left them. Kids loved these guys. Kids loved jet packs. Search and rescue would pluck one kid off Finger Rock, and another off Mount Lemon, and by the time they’d ferry these little ones to safety, there’d be another one stranded up there. The kids had altitude sickness too. No pressurized air with a jet pack, you know. They’d be throwing up everywhere when they arrived at the hospital.