Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

I would describe my discontent as being like a skin lesion, or like an archipelago of buboes. I had felt that D. was my first legitimate new friend in some years, and now I felt like some kind of exotic figurine he had collected so as to have me on his manifest , along with one of the Dave “Three-in-One” McClintock class B baseball cards and a bunch of cyborg prototypes. Another man might have left the table immediately, certain that he would sunder relations with D. Tyrannosaurus. Another man might have lamented his naïveté, or started a fistfight, or contacted some oversight agency, or hired a trained professional to deal with Tyrannosaurus. But not me.

I said: “It’s a wager.”

Because even if he was a wheeler and a dealer, or some kind of conceptual artist who specialized in duping innocents, I would crush him on the chessboard. I would read up on games played with a missing pawn; I would read up on the Bulgarian tactics that had proven so popular in the chess world recently. I would find whatever hidden stratagems I required to make D. Tyrannosaurus, convicted felon, rue the day he had come to the desert.

Next, as an effective researcher, I determined to use my talents to see what was available about D. on the web, now largely pages in Cantonese. As any citizen of the NAFTA treaty knows, the surveillance capabilities of the web permit much, for a nominal fee, and I managed to locate the alumnae association from his graduate school, the prison records for all the prisons in his home state; I even scoured lists of art exhibitions by persons with variants of his name. I did find six or seven persons with names that had D’ s and T ’s as their initial consonants who had similar biographies. But as far as a particular D. Tyrannosaurus, or any variant of this name I could come up with, the results were thin. What was the nature of his felony? Was his crime against property? Was he an arsonist or some kind of detonator of government buildings? Was his crime somehow indivisible from his art? Was his crime political or philosophical? It was only the most determined, these days, who could stay out of the reach of the global media, but among these, apparently, was D. Tyrannosaurus.

He had his reasons, evidently, and I believed they would come to light. But my principal reason for wanting to play this game of chess was that I wanted the work . I wanted to write the novelization he described. And I wanted to make my life better, in a Horatio Alger sort of way — I wanted the money, I wanted the self-respect, and I wanted the approval of Tara Schott Crandall, the woman with the new lungs. This made a rather adorable story, writing a science-fiction novelization in order to impress a double lung transplant from whose side I had not strayed for more than three or four hours in a couple of years, except when she was in the ICU and I left her, for example, to give a reading at Arachnids. But just as the chess match was looming on the calendar, something awful happened, the awful thing that goes by the name fungus . Prior to the events described here, I knew nothing about fungus but that mushrooms were tasty and that you should wash between your toes. But fungus, in particular aspergillus , would become my wife Tara’s greatest threat.

There are a number of kinds of organ rejection, as we now know from the medical literature. The first of these is instantaneous, in which the organ is flooded with lymphocytes, and death is immediate. Tara, to our great relief, did not suffer this rejection, which is rare in the era of nanotechnological agents. A second kind of rejection is chronic, and characterized by a hardening of the tissues involved at the spots where the organs are connected by the surgeons. While a certain amount of antirejection therapy can help here, the long-term prognosis is cloudy and dark. Still, you may have time to see your child graduate or your spouse appear, inevitably, on a reality-based web program.

Then there is an intermediate sort of rejection, a sort where you have some time, but it is not great time. What happens in this third alternative is that all the nearby germs come stampeding onto your prairie. Germs you never even heard of. With lung transplants, the most common of these infections is pneumonia. But there are far more exotic germs. People coming to the NAFTA signatories to buy up distressed companies and close them down bring a lot of exotic infectious agents with them. Patients who are trying to fight tissue rejection are prey to any Southeast Asian mite that comes along.

Naturally, my personal bête noire among the new hospital-cultured strains of disease is necrotizing fasciitis , or flesh-eating disease. There was a report just the other day. A woman’s thumb was swelling up; she went to the doctor. He sent her home. That night they took off her arm, the next day both legs, and on the third day she died, leaving behind two children.

Tara had shortness of breath. Even when she got home. We didn’t think much of that. She’d had shortness of breath through the entirety of our marriage. She sounded like a toy train, what with the whistling and the chest cough. But upon coming home, she began complaining rather quickly about pressure in her chest. I say complaining , but that is not the right word, really, because she did not complain. We were picnicking, after I sold a Barry Bonds rookie baseball card at profit enough to live on for a month, and we were in the park by the railroad depot, the one where all the Central Americans live, and we had some cheese, some jug wine, and some sourdough bread, and a small army of men came over to ask for change, though we didn’t really have any change, most of which was worthless anyhow. Despite all of this, Tara was smiling, and her gingham dress nearly matched the cloth we put down on the sands beneath a shady, nonnative palm. She had alluring sunglasses on, sunglasses designed to repel ultraviolet rays and to suggest erotic submissiveness, and as far as she was concerned, there was no better day than this, this unanticipated day, this extra day.

She said: “If you had to weigh, under pain of long-term torture and incarceration, the amount you love me in loaves of bread, how many loaves would it be?”

“This old game,” I said, though the game was new. “If I must. Let’s see. More than a bread truck. Or a bread factory. And if it were in bottles of wine, easily more than a cask, easily more than a wine cellar. My love would be counted in vineyards. And if it were cheese, more cheese than in the Sea of Tranquility. And if it were measured in dark matter, more than ninety percent of the universe would be it, would be the love . And no scientist would be able to locate or recognize it, because it’s everywhere .”

“You always know the right things to say. And if you didn’t, I’d tell you what to say.” She drained a glass of wine. Tannins were good for her gums; the grape skin had free radicals. I tried to keep track of these things. I employed sage, healing prayer, crystals.

Then my wife said, “Monty, there’s something not right going on.”

I wasn’t paying attention at first. After all, there was almost always something not right .

“Again?”

“There’s something not right .”

“What do you mean, there’s—?”

“I mean there’s something not right .”

“What are you saying?”

She put her hand on top of mine. My thrift store wedding ring. She looked into my eyes.

“Monty, you have to get prepared. And I don’t think you are.”

“What are you saying?”

“Things are not… It’s not going to go on like this for very much longer.”

“I don’t agree. I think things can go on the way they are going on, and if I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be sitting here taking in the—”