Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

“Please go ahead and tell me,” he said to his son.

“We were out in the desert. We were in…”

“Rattlesnake Canyon,” said the girl.

“Right. Rattlesnake Canyon.”

“And what were you doing there exactly?” Koo asked.

“We were picnicking in the canyon,” Jean-Paul said. “We had some vitamin-enhanced water and some cheese. Picnicking.”

“You are not old enough to purchase wine,” Koo said, “which means that if you are lying about consuming alcohol, you must have taken alcoholic beverages from someone. I certainly hope you were not driving with the bottle of wine open, because you know how these things are taken very seriously by the police, and with good reason.”

Jean-Paul said, “Dad, please just listen.”

“How can I do otherwise?” said Woo Lee Koo.

“We had finished up with the picnic, and we decided we were going to nap a little bit, and we both lay down and shut our eyes.”

“Were you wearing sufficient sunblock?”

“Dad! So anyway, we were totally fucking out like a light , you know, and I guess we were, like, in each other’s arms or something—”

“Like a couple of pretzels,” the girl remarked, “and we couldn’t tell which part of us was which part of us, and which part belonged to the other.”

The truth began to emerge in Koo as though he were the scrap of photographic paper and this conversation were the image coming to its fruition. The truth emerged and he watched it emerging, delighting in its shape and course.

“And,” Jean-Paul said, “and suddenly, and, uh, I don’t even know how to…”

“There was someone there with us,” the girl said. “We both felt it.”

“We felt like there was someone there with us, and at first we each thought it was, you know, one another, and then we realized there was this other person. And I opened my eyes.”

Jean-Paul seemed to open his eyes wide at this moment, as if to demonstrate.

“And I saw this thing . I saw this arm. It was an arm that wasn’t attached to anything. It was lying on the blanket with us. And it was just lying there at first, and that was bad enough.”

“Bad enough that the arm was there,” the girl said, and she came up closer beside Jean-Paul, and now her own hand drifted up toward Jean-Paul’s neck, and Koo watched this, as if her hand were somehow related to the story. The girl’s hand seemed to pause before selecting a muscle group where it would alight. It finally reached a spot at the meeting of neck and shoulder. She went on. “But even that was kind of fucked up somehow, because then you had to ask this question, how the fuck did this arm get there? How did this arm get all the way out into the desert where we were? Did some guy come by, like, carrying the arm? Was some mountain lion carrying the arm in its mouth and just decided to drop it off, you know?”

“But then that wasn’t the worst part, Dad,” Jean-Paul said.

At this moment something happened that rarely happened between the two of them, the Koos, had not happened even when his wife was dying, because in that dark time Jean-Paul was too young to know much about the ways of the world. What happened was that for a second, Jean-Paul was overcome with feeling, and a couple of tears overran the banks of his eyes. And tracked lower.

“The worst part was that the arm moved . The arm was still moving somehow. It was able, I don’t know how it was fucking able, but it was somehow fucking able to move, and it was moving toward Vienna, and it touched me—”

Koo had sat by, listening to the story, awaiting the moment when he could intervene, but his pleasing sense of knowingness evaporated at this recitation of the facts, and he pushed back the stool from the counter in the kitchen:

“You touched it? How much did you touch it?”

“I touched it just a little bit.”

“How much is a little bit? I need to know exactly how much you touched it.”

“What are you saying? Dad, are you saying—”

“I’m asking you how much you touched it. Was it oozing any material? Did you notice anything coming from it? Any liquids at all?”

“What are you saying? Do you know something about this arm?”

He cared little about salving their alarm just then. He was thinking about: treatment options and the urgency of prompt diagnosis.

“I think I have some very powerful antibiotics in the bathroom,” said Koo to his son. “You must come with me. We don’t know whether they will work yet, but prophylactically speaking, it’s worth a try. How do you feel now?”

“I feel scared.”

“Besides that.”

“I feel tired.”

“Probably just too much exposure to the sun. So you are saying that you had minimal contact with the arm. You didn’t handle it?”

“It handled me a little bit. At least I think it handled me a little bit, because I was, uh, I was asleep, and I felt something touching me, and I don’t think it was Vienna.”

“And did you touch it as well?” he said to the girl.

“It touched me… a lot,” the girl said. “It touched me… all over.”

He led the two of them into the master bathroom, where, water shortage be damned, he threw on the shower and told them to strip down immediately. There were some expressions of shyness, but Koo would hear none of it.

“I am a doctor. I have looked at bodies in every state of life and death. Your body, when you do not have your clothes on, means nothing to me. It is just a body. You’re a sack of water and minerals. So come be quick about it and strip off these clothes, which we are going to have to burn immediately.”

“You’re so not burning that skirt,” Vienna Roberts said. “It’s, like, a designer thing. I got it at the thrift store.”

“I am very much burning it,” Koo said. “And you should watch out for those clothes from the thrift store; they are not always sanitary. I am going to get some rubber gloves, and I am going to burn these outfits, and you are to take the starter dosage of these”—handing over the jar of medicaments—“which is twice what it says there, and then you are to get into the shower, at the hottest possible temperature, and shower for a very long time. For at least fifteen minutes or so. And you will find some of the industrial cleanser that I have been using there, and you are to cleanse all the affected areas, any parts of you that have been in contact with the infectious agent. For that is what the arm is, an infectious agent, you understand. This is very important.”

The teenagers shyly began removing their contagious outer garments, and Koo handed them towels, which would also go into the bonfire he was going to make of their garments. Vienna Roberts stood by as Jean-Paul, completely forgetting that it was ungallant to take the first shower, stepped across the threshold of the tub. The shower curtain billowed out to receive him.

“Have you contacted your parents?” Koo asked Vienna, heedless of her discomfort in the bathroom.

“We went to find them after we… there was a problem, and so.”

“What was the problem?”

Jean-Paul, who could apparently make out the conversation even from inside the shower, said: “We lost the arm .”

“You lost the arm.”

“We had the arm and then we lost it.”

“You were where exactly? When it was lost?”

“We were driving in the van.”

“We left the van back at my place,” Vienna said, “so we could get Jean-Paul’s car, and so that my parents—”

Koo said, “Have your parents operated the van? And are you certain that the arm is not somewhere hidden in the back?”

“The arm,” Vienna Roberts offered, “was in the van. Jean-Paul taped it up pretty good, with a lot of duct tape, and then we taped it to the side of the wall, inside the van, so that we’d know it was safe while we were driving back into town, but somehow it managed to get free through a hole in the floor. We think.”