Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

After a good half hour of rooting around on the other side of the observation mirror, dropping things and then rearranging whatever it was that he had dropped, calling his pals to ask them to pick up more pseudoephedrine so that he could modify it in the laboratory bathroom, or so Morton believed, Larry at last entered the cell area.

“What’s it going to be today?” the researcher said, yawning. “A little screen time, big guy? There was a really big mess at the rally over on Stone. Want to watch a little of that? There’s footage on the Net. There were helicopters on the scene, that kind of shit. Probably some live feed from the police department. Wake you right up.”

Should Morton tell him? Should Morton tell Larry to please flee back into the observation room and masturbate himself, or whatever it was this deadbeat human did in order to pass the time? Defecate in his desk drawer? Should Morton tell him in no uncertain terms that now was not the time? Morton turned the pros and cons over in his rationalizing mind. He couldn’t, in point of fact, determine any reason to speak with Larry at all. Larry was simply not someone with whom Morton wished to speak. In fact, it occurred to him that he should ball up the piece of construction paper on which he’d been writing down his thoughts. He balled up his notes (feeling grateful that he hadn’t written the love poem he’d contemplated there, since anything he wrote was liable to be somewhat historic, especially if he used the sonnet form). He batted around the wadded-up ball of diaristic notes just the way a chimpanzee would do it and knocked this ball into the trash bin.

Nothing could be harder, now that Morton was waked, than to return to the life of an impoverished slave. A proper time and place beckoned, from which to reveal the extent of his accomplishments, but he was willing to entertain, temporarily, the notion of gradualism. At least until Noelle returned for her shift.

Morton ambled casually over to the computer console, took control of the joystick, and selected the site of one of the left-leaning newspapers in Europe. His knowledge of European history was spotty. For example, Morton could not name all the British monarchs between Victoria and Elizabeth II. He knew there was an abdication in there somewhere, and some deadbeats. It was really rather embarrassing. Time to apply himself to his studies.

Larry, who stood around like an idiot, said, “Look, bub, the notes from Noelle are all missing, from last night. In the office? You didn’t take those notes, did you? We got to keep the notes really organized for Dr. Koo. He’s very particular about having all the notes. It’s, like, uh, the one thing he insists on. I mean, the guy’s not here very often; I don’t know if he even bothers to publish his experimental results, but he sure wants the notes. Did you take those?”

Morton gaped at Larry, as if he didn’t understand a word of his tedious blather.

“Never mind, then. What do you want for breakfast, pal? I’ve got some bananas, some mangos, some cold cereal. I brought in some cereal. For myself. You want some cold cereal? I like the really mushy shit. Where it’s like there’s paper pulp in the bowl.”

This kind of talk was not to be withstood. Some human beings, it appeared to Morton, talked like complete imbeciles. Everything was baby talk, all the day long, and it always came back to scatological terminologies, the constant allusion to waste products. Everything was either going in or coming out. That was it. Humans were just big organ sacks, made for extruding fluids, and then discussing, endlessly, the extrusion thereof. While Morton was considering this tendency, which he termed feco-narcissism , for a forthcoming treatise on same, the imbecile Larry came back in with bananas. Morton selected one critically. A potassium delivery system. They weren’t giving Morton enough roughage in his diet, and chimpanzees occasionally experienced irregularity in the same way humans did. Maybe he should tell the imbecile to fix him up a proper bowl of oat bran.

Upon finishing the banana, however, Morton elected to do a little light reading, checked some of the stock prices on the Nikkei and the Hang Seng exchanges. It was true that Morton had no actual stock portfolio, because he was not paid for the labor he performed, but he was interested in learning about the way the securities market functioned, so that when the day came he would be prepared. It wasn’t enough, as he understood it, to perform at the market level. He needed to outearn the human beings. Which would require highly leveraged investments.

After the market updates, he went to a few online dating services where he had constructed profiles for himself. It was not that he believed he would meet anyone in this way, since he had no online photograph and referred to himself as extremely hirsute in his profiles, but he could practice his language skills there, as well as the rules of social interaction. Throughout all of this, however, all this time-wasting, there was the grand, unfulfilled feeling swelling in his chest. Was it an adolescent feeling, this sensation that he wanted only to gaze upon the woman indwelling in his heart? Could he do none of the things he had done before, such as perform in experimental medical regimens? Could he not be a worker among workers, no matter how unfair the environment in which he toiled?

Larry came back out and, muttering something about animal enrichment , indicated that he intended to play some ball with Morton, the ball in question being a lightweight foam-rubber basketball of some kind. Larry had dragged in a small backboard, of the sort that one bought for youngsters, nonregulation, and he was in the process of steadying this backboard against one wall, when he began regaling Morton with some cultural insights, Larry-style.

“You know, this is really a great game in terms of exercise, all that. I’m not really able to play it as well as I used to, because I got some meniscal damage, ACL damage, and so forth, from when I played back in college, but I still feel like nothing is better for you. In terms of aerobic workout. So I’ve brought this in today to see if I can explain the basic strategy of the game to you. I’m just going to make a little free throw line here with this. And always remember that you have to have your game face when you’re…”

Larry spun the ball in his palm, as though this were a nervous tic.

“… and then this is the other shooting line, what’s the name of that, the three-point line? Okay, the three-point line, this box marks it; if you can sink one from beyond here you get three points, and this is one-on-one, and the important thing in one-on-one is to watch the physical part of the game, right, pal? No contact in the game at all; it’s all done without touching each other. That’s one of the laws of the game. So I won’t touch you, and you won’t touch me. And I recognize that the ball won’t bounce particularly well in this enclosed little space, but you’re kind of supposed to dribble the ball, you know, not carry it; there’s something called double-dribbling, and traveling. We won’t go too far into those finer points. Just try not to do those things, you got it? You shoot from back there, and you get two or three points, depending on where you are. Ready?”

Morton had watched and listened with galloping feelings of irritation. He’d been reading up, among his other threads of research, on an organization known as the International Humanist and Ethical Union, which had recently managed to have itself adopted as the official state religion in Great Britain (following the death of the last of the British line of monarchs and the abdication of her grandchildren), founded on the idea that every human being was unique and complex and not capable of being reduced to repetitive and unflattering stereotypes, and yet Morton was challenged, to say the least, his uniqueness was challenged by Larry, by the way that Larry was treating him. Larry threw him the basketball, which Morton dropped. It rolled into a corner.