Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

Such simple words! Who would care! At this late stage, when all the hooting and hollering was over, who would care really if there was violent insurrection in the United States of America! Violent insurrection in the People’s Republic of China would be the kind of thing that would bring out the tremors in brokers in Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Kuala Lumpur. And yet “Violent Insurrection in the United States of America” was the subject that piqued the interest of my wife, Tara Schott Crandall. She was too sickly to make love to me; indeed, we hadn’t had each other’s clothes off in so long that it was almost as if I didn’t know how to unbutton my own trousers. Did it mean that I didn’t love her? It did not . I loved her enough to overlook her renewed hours spent in front of the screen, even when, one night, I walked into her office, pulled up the shades, kissed her upon the brow, which was only a little slick with perspiration, looked over her shoulder, and saw that she was spending three thousand dollars (a not insignificant portion of our savings) betting on the futures market in the aforementioned “violent insurrection.”

“Let’s just hope it starts on the East Coast,” I said. And then: “Are you not worried that the betting will produce the result?”

I was used to a certain amount of relapsing and remitting, but this was asking too much of me, and of our homeland security infrastructure.

“Shhh,” she said. She was using the chat function of the FBS software to communicate with other dangerously obsessed bettors. One interlocutor was a person whose name, when translated from the relevant ideograms, seemed to be PiranhaYummy. Tara was attempting to convince this Amazonian stream dweller that the conditions were indeed absolutely right for the political action described on the big board. I told Tara that there had been a recent discovery of a subspecies of piranha in the Potomac. A small school of them could clean an overweight congressional representative down to the bones.

“There doesn’t have to be an actual violent insurrection,” she reminded me. “There has to be the perception of violent insurrection. Look at all the other stuff they have.” It was a villanelle of the violent, a sestina of the salacious on that screen. I could very well have written one of my short stories from titles of the betting pools on the FBS if, in the days of ministering to my wife, I was still capable: “Dismemberment of American diplomat in Islamist country,” “Spain exiles its Jews,” and so on.

“It only takes one piranha to buy,” Tara said. “Then watch the prices rise. I think I can get out before I lose my blouse.”

I mumbled something noncontroversial and backed away from her workstation, but not before I could see some of the inexplicable chatter from PiranhaYummy and his ilk. “My bicycle has never been so rusty,” he typed to my wife. “A germ has begun its replications.” Before the automated translation, he was probably saying “Let’s have lunch; my wife doesn’t understand me the way you do.”

It was in these next days that Tara informed me, over a hastily and badly prepared dinner, that large sums had been made and lost. Tears in her eyes. Ever deeper did my wife burrow into the subculture of Asian day traders in the futures markets. She claimed, among the dupes and shills she found there, to have connections in the anarchist underground in the USA; she claimed to know well the survivalist skinheads of the Rust Belt. It was a lot of bluster, but when deployed correctly, this bluster gave the appearance of knowledge, and this was enough to buffet the price of bids on the FBS.

“Violent Insurrection in the United States of America,” along with “International Bioterror Strike,” began a slow but undeniable upward movement. Tara seemed to feel that if the price rose, it was she who was ascending, back into the world. Her spirits soared, and her fair, exhausted face took on a rosy hue I had not seen in a long time. Was it the magic arts of the surgeons at the medical center, with their nanotechnological robots? Or was it the likelihood of violent insurrection?

It was when this steady climb on the FBS became somewhat meteoric that the scam no longer seemed funny or pragmatic. We were citizens of a post-industrial country that no longer produced much. Our rate of emigration exceeded our rate of immigration. Our GDP was contracting for what? The twelfth quarter? Tourism was down. Manufacturing was all but nonexistent. An analogy? The mayor of my burg, the city of Rio Blanco in which I write these lines, even this political gladiator had absconded across the all-but-dried riverbeds that separated this sovereignty from our NAFTA signatory to the south. This once robust superpower may have been on its last legs, but we still loved it, the way you love a dog in the backyard, whose attempts to close its jaws around your leg are stymied only by the rope tethered to the dead paloverde.

One night Tara broke the news to me. Out of the blue, she’d made seven thousand dollars, all on “Violent Insurrection in the United States of America.” She was worried. She had a jones , and the jones was for grim prognostication. Tara had locked herself in the bedroom and shut the shades, and now she felt as though she had unleashed armed dissident elements, and they were fanning out around us.

The one thing she never mentioned, in all this, was her illness.

In the meantime, D. Tyrannosaurus and I continued our dance. I can’t tell you how many times I beat him, and in how many circumstances. The man just could not play. If he managed to stumble on a strategy, he then could be relied upon to overlook what came next, forever forgetting what my bishops were doing or all the possibilities of my queen. I beat him at night, I beat him in the morning, I beat him over lunch, I beat him downtown by the bus terminal. I beat him over the phone. I beat him by e-mail and teleconference.

In the process, I began to piece together some of the mysterious chapters in the life of D. Tyrannosaurus. He was not exactly forthcoming, but I worked on him. D. adhered to the story that he was born among theropods, sixty-five million years ago, and in that period of his youth he assumed the stalking position and fed on smaller lizards as they emerged from the undergrowth. He also claimed to have mutated into his present shape.

Conversationally, and otherwise, he was a sociologist of every kind of neglected group, of every association of losers, the street people of the city, with their leathery skin and milky eyes, the itinerants, the ragpickers, the freelance probability experts, the addicts, the call girls with their bioluminescent scarifications. He was extremely passionate about the oldest profession. He never took them home, at least I never saw him take a streetwalker home, but he was forever introducing me. “Montese,” he would say, “this is Maria, and she’s going to advise me.”

He had a sibling, he said — though what kind of sibling he wouldn’t make clear — who was laboring in the adult film business, in production, one of the last robust sectors of our economy. This sibling, he said, in a rather fateful moment, had recently forwarded D.’s name to a fly-by-night book-publishing company whose business involved novelizations of low-budget films for the online gaming market and webcasting. These novelizations were to be written on the cheap, quickly, and were intended to be composed of the screenplay with a bit of connective tissue woven in to make them palatable to a logophobic online audience. Novelizations generated a little extra money for the e-book goons, and they left something behind for the collecting market. Novelizations monetized a leftover piece of the filmmaking and gaming business, the screenplay , and were farmed out as piecework. The writer retained no rights.