Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

“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.