The Four Fingers of Death (68 page)

And what was the furnace of that explosion like? The furnace of that explosion was like all great light shows. If your planetarium remains open in these times of endless night, then you are lucky, but, if not, perhaps you remember going to the planetarium in days past, in order to smoke various controlled substances and to listen to the thunder of the genre known as
dead girlfriend
, while the lasers etched out their predictable patterns above. Would you require another manifestation of the light show? While it is true that all fireworks displays resemble all other fireworks displays, especially those mounted in hard-luck small towns, there is still something earnest and generous about these fireworks displays, because they are the light of munitions put to good use, the light of munitions tamed. How else might this light of munitions be used? This light might be used for ill, as in the carpet-bombing of Central Asian cities by computer-controlled drones. This conflagration illuminates the night in a startling way, but is that what you want lighting your pockmarked highways and your blown bridges? It’s a transient light, as all exploding things are transient, unless perhaps your explosion is of the nuclear sort, fission or fusion, of which only eleven have ever been exploded above ground in combat, and the most recent of these of a very modest sort, with deaths only in the tens of thousands. And while there are all kinds of treaties preventing this particular kind of light, nuclear fission, it continues to persist, even to proliferate, likewise the unpleasant suntan that goes with it, as well as the thyroid tumors and the relentless nightmares. What is the best of all kinds of light? Well, the best of all the varieties of light, since you ask, is the so-called Big Bang, coming from the perturbance within (and upon) an infinitely hot and dense speck that exists in what can only be referred to as the Nothingness or otherwise as the Time Before. This something in the middle of the Nothingness, this infinitely hot and dense singularity, because of a perturbance within and without, experiences some kind of rapid transformation at incalculably hot temperatures, and it commences the transition from infinitely dense to something quite a bit larger and more diffuse, and this light, which is, as far as we know, the light that has in turn generated all other light, it flings material far into its recesses and emptinesses, which open up in all directions, and some of this material, this gas and matter, begins to coalesce into constituent lights, which are themselves imitations of the originary light, the expanding and expansive light, as all lights are fragmentary and pale imitations of some preliminary light, and around these lights spheroids begin to accumulate, some of them rocky, some of them icy, some of them gaseous, some of them possessed of spectacular rings, but it should be noted that all these nightlights, scattered, as they say, like grains of sand across what is, these are all imitative, and not terribly successful as such, but their light is adequate, in millions upon millions of cases, to permit the kinds of chemical processes that bring about organic compounds. What these orbiting spheroids require, when life is present, is
light itself
, and all light has a backwardly gazing tonality to it, recalling, as it does, the originary light, and so despite the fact that great destructive force necessarily occasions light, any kind of light is nonetheless the sign that some kind of something is mitigating or flying in the face of the much more frequent and much more permanent Nothingness.

And so the explosion in the sky over the American Southwest was
light
, was continuous with the history of light as shown above, and light can’t be bad, and light involves the transmutation of some kind of energy into some other kind of energy, and there is poetry to this, but occasionally there is also tragedy, at least if, for example, you were watching the light from the ground, if you were well-informed enough to know that you needed to be watching, or if you were one of the people in the desert of the Southwest who happened to be looking up at the sky, or who had a telescope or very good binoculars, or who just knew what was going on, you might have thought of this turn of events as tragic, but properly considered it was just another example of light as a celebration of not-darkness, and in this case, perhaps there could be plenty of
good
involved, because a badly contagious astronaut was going to be obliterated in this particular light show, as well as most of the metal casing in which he was housed at the time of the explosion, and this was good, from a public-health perspective, as were the extraordinarily violent temperature extremes that were involved in the reentry of the ERV; these could be responsible for killing off potentially lethal infectious agents, referred to in some circles as military weapons systems.

The only outstanding question, when the explosion was considered as a field of possibilities upon which one might, for example, wager, if one were part of a national gambling syndicate that gambled on the outcomes of political events and natural disasters, was: whether the ERV was high enough in its flight path to be completely incinerated or blown apart in the upper atmosphere, as was to be hoped. Because a large, far-flung trail of debris would constitute a civic emergency, not to mention a national security problem, even more so if, as appeared to be the case, the debris field included large portions of a sovereign NAFTA cosignatory that was, nonetheless, trying to minimize border incursions from the North.

The staff at NASA was monitoring the path of the ERV very carefully and they were satisfied, until the last moment, that it was on a northwesterly course to make a reasonable splashdown in the North Atlantic. A splashdown, though long outmoded in the landing protocols of a NASA that was now smaller and more efficient, allowed NASA the resources to go to the planet Mars itself and to avoid building wings onto the ERV. With splashdown, you could design a very simple reentry craft, and it could be kept away from population centers for a time. But NASA, or the better part of NASA (except for one middle manager who was at the moment of the explosion on his way down the corridor to liberate the one returning astronaut, Colonel Jed Richards, by toggling the auto-destruct emergency switch), was well into a collective delusion about the ERV, and into the midst of their shared delusion came a scrim of bright white fuzz on the screens that depicted the craft itself, and this white fuzz was followed by instantaneous blackness, which was followed by an absence of radio transmission, and, according to radar that tracked the craft, a multitude of
pieces
of the ERV, instead of one large, easily tracked ERV, rained across the screen, and many of these pieces vanished in front of the personnel manning the radar, until there were only a few minor bits of the ERV that were capable of being tracked, and these were falling out of the sky at the usual accelerating rate of thirty-two feet per second per second.

There was no device manufactured by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory that could track, from the ground, the remaining mind of Colonel Jed Richards. While there were devices that could, and did, track his heart rate, his blood pressure, his galvanic skin response, brain activity, temperature, even the condition of his bowels (not very good), these devices were useless after the advent of the explosion. If it were possible to track the mind of Richards, what would NASA have learned? In the explosion, the last of Richards’s mind, however it was able to operate, was lost, and with it all the details of the way in which Colonel Jed Richards effected his departure from this world. Did he use some inflammatory device, like the onboard welder, to blow up the liquid oxygen reserves and therefore likewise to ignite some of the solid fuel that remained, which was meant to effect a few gentle booster firings if necessary? These things would long be unknown, despite a blue-ribbon commission that was soon to be put into motion.

However: the mind of Colonel Jed Richards could be said, at the instant of the explosion, to have come to approximate, in terms of its brutal monomania, the infinite singularity of the universe prior to expansion. It had become the density of a consciousness that was capable of one last gesture, of saying
I am
, and almost nothing else, a perceiving consciousness, otherwise devoid of characteristics. Perhaps, in retrospect, there was muscular memory of prior cerebral function, and this muscular memory was able to ignite the oxygen tank, even to plan its ignition. Whichever Richards was in charge—the strictly muscular Richards, the proto-Richards, the amoebic Richards, the particularity of Richards—the explosion, notwithstanding, did take place, outside of NASA’s jurisdiction, and most of the ERV and its occupant were incinerated above the Sonoran Desert.

Most of the occupant.

My beautiful and eternal wife, to whom I have been wedded these many years, and to whom I will be wedded always
, typed Woo Lee Koo, onto the autotranslation keyboard he had installed on the outside of the cryogenic refrigeration unit in which he kept his wife’s remains, in his office in the garage of his home in the Grant’s Pass Complex,
I have come to write to you again to apologize for the slovenly way in which I have been pursuing my researches. It is now, I believe, some years since I have been here in this decadent and futile nation, years in which I have had ample opportunity to learn the secret of regeneration of necrotic tissue, and yet, to my shame, I have yet to attain the result I desire. The experiments I have conducted seem to be of little or no value. I can see the answers to the questions before me, tantalizingly, but it’s as if nature just doesn’t want to collaborate with the likes of me, as if to deny the love of two persons who only wish to repair an unjust separation one from the other
.

Koo had installed the keyboard along with a screen on the interior, in the hope that someday his cryogenically preserved wife could read on the AutoTrans what was being typed to her. There was also a small keyboard
inside
, in case she wanted to type back. Koo recognized that this was desperate, even pathological, that in the present scientific environment there was little chance that a frozen dead woman was going to type back to him.

I know you wonder constantly if I have been true to you. And so it is my responsibility to reassure you occasionally on this subject. You may have been wondering again if there was a woman, or women, who have tempted me, and from whom I have obtained some sexual favors in order to soothe my lonely heart. Today it is my duty to reassure you that there have been no such favors, and therefore very little soothing. I was at the bank on Congress Street last week, and I would like to let you know that I still have a very healthy savings that I am keeping in federally secured treasury certificates because of volatility and downward trending in securities markets. In the course of my trip to the bank on Congress Street I espied a pretty young woman ahead of me, also making, as it turned out, a deposit. She was small hipped, as you were, and her hair was the color of straw. And despite the passing of many years, my darling wife, I would like to tell you that my heart leaped up, briefly, when it imagined that you were once again among us. I waited a respectful time for this young woman to complete her transaction, and then I averted my eyes, so that she would not feel as though I were in some way ungallant. She was not you, but insofar as she was you, she was handsome, and I felt fortunate to be in her presence, and also lucky when she had passed out of the cubbyhole of the Automatic Teller Machines. The ghosts of the past should be fleeting, don’t you think?

It was Tuesday that Koo most often wrote to his wife, Nathalie, because this was a night when his son often worked late at that restaurant. This allowed for uninterrupted time in the garage with the cryogenic refrigerator and the AutoTrans keyboard. Jean-Paul, in his youthful self-centeredness, had never once asked what the refrigerator was
for
, though Koo did keep some tissue samples in the front of the refrigerator. There was a false front that he’d had built into the thing according to his specifications. And so Jean-Paul had never even expressed an interest in the technology. The son, that is, disdained his father’s work.

Perhaps I ought to have spoken to this young woman in the bank, because sometimes, my darling, days can go by in which I do not engage in lighthearted conversation with anyone. One night recently, I went to the bedroom of our son, who is now eighteen years old, and who seems to be more interested in starting a business than in going on to college or university as I would like him to do. I visited his bedroom and sat down on the extra bed, because he has twin beds in that room, as I have described to you. He was perusing, or seemed to be perusing, a book of tips for entrepreneurs. I said to him that I had had the idea that we might remodel the living quarters, our quarters, with an eye toward allowing more sunlight into the rooms. And we might, I suggested, take down the wall separating his room from his walk-in closet, so that he would have more square footage. The construction of these apartments, as I have said in the past, is shoddy, and the desert is destructive to anything that is not sturdily built. There are so very many people in Rio Blanco who would be happy to do this kind of work, remodeling work. At any rate, Jean-Paul indicated to me that there was no point in remodeling his room, because he did not expect to be living with me very much longer. My darling, may I say that this conversation saddened me greatly. It is not that I feel the boy should be required to continue to live with me. It is simply that I didn’t plan for this moment to come so quickly. By concentrating on my work, I prove, again and again, that I am not very good at my daily life. I do not want to be alone, without my son, and yet I believe I have made myself alone even as he lives under my very roof. I wish that you were here to help me talk to him
.