Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

“What do you see?” The older brother.

“Water,” said the younger. Though you couldn’t always understand what he was saying.

“And can you figure out what kind of water that is?”

“Waterfall?”

“A famous waterfall. Back east. People like to go and get married by the waterfall. Or they used to. I’ve never seen it, but I guess people really like the churning of the water and all that kind of stuff. Do you know why it’s important to have a photo of a waterfall on your wall when you live in the desert?”

Corey looked at him dreamily. Moose recognized that his line of inquiry had now passed beyond what was possible for Corey to understand. It didn’t matter, since Corey was often grateful just for the sound of words. Sometimes Moose would try repeating words to Corey. Just about anything was worth trying.

“The desert is a place without enough water. So this picture reminds you that there are places out there where there is enough water, and even though we don’t live in one of those places, that doesn’t mean there isn’t water out there that other people get to drink and shower in.”

It wasn’t long after this that he brought home the arm, wrapped in burlap. Moose felt that the arm would replace the iguana he’d gotten Corey, which had proven too freethinking. There was a robot vacuum cleaner that Corey loved completely, one of those Frisbee-shaped things that caromed off walls, sucking up crumbs and bits of paper, which, it should be said, followed Corey around. Corey watched the vacuum cleaner like the device was almost religious, jumping up onto furniture and laughing hysterically when it went by. The arm, and the terrarium into which Moose put it, were meant to bring about this same pitch of delight, and the arm was probably less dangerous, because Corey wasn’t really tall enough to reach up onto the top of the terrarium, and so he wouldn’t trifle with the arm.

On the night in question, Moose just figured he’d sleep in the room with Corey and the arm. In this way, he’d make sure that the arm didn’t get into any trouble. Knowing Corey, Moose worried that the arm would find itself used as a bat for knocking glasses off the shelf in the kitchen. Best to hang around some, smoke some weed, take the edge off, watch to see if the arm actually used the hamster wheel thing Moose had rigged up in the terrarium.

What did it cost Moose Mansourian, this fraternal generosity that seemed contraindicated in the world of drug dealing, whose business was composed of a client pool rapidly depleting itself of all worldly goods? What did it cost Moose? And could it really go on like this? He was suspicious, even cynical out in the world, where his linebacker physique made him good at his job. He was not a handsome man, and women never seemed to pay much attention, but he didn’t care, because he had an anxiety disorder, the one listed in the DSM-VIII as anxiety specifically related to contemporaneity , which made him suspicious, which made him trust no one, except Corey, and he was constantly drugging himself to sleep because every night the slightest sound waked him, and then he’d be up, and if he was up, he was up for good and was reading medical texts to try to put himself back to sleep, and any woman who tried to get near to him, that woman just reminded him of his mother, and if she contacted him now, he thought, while he was falling asleep next to Corey, having smoked enough weed to paralyze most people, he would do something, something horrible, he would lock her in the room with Corey for a week, and it wasn’t that he thought Corey was so bad, because on the contrary, he thought, as his lids began to close, he loved Corey, and Corey seemed to operate in the world in a way that involved less unhappiness than most people suffered with. His mother needed to have the experience of seeing Corey, and Moose needed the experience of seeing Corey see her , and maybe that would be the ultimate perpetual-motion object that would improve cerebral function in Corey, his mother, his mother would be the ultimate visual stimulation, and even if Corey didn’t know his mother, or didn’t even know he had a mother, although Moose had tried to explain it to him a few times, maybe it was one of those things that was contained in some deeper-down layer, the knowledge of the excellence of seeing one’s mother walking through a room, straightening a few things, doling out a few orders, and that was why, Moose thought, as his eyes closed and certain sounds in the room, certain hums, became the music of his drifting off, too early, so that he would probably wake in the middle of the night and watch the water in the fish tank bubble, that was why his mother would turn up one day, because it just didn’t make sense that a person carried around that kind of guilt, the walking out on your kids kind of guilt, and then Moose slept….

The arm appeared in this tableau with the aspect of an avenging angel, and it had no compassion in its heart, because it had no heart, and no sensory organs with which compassion might have been felt. Accordingly, there was no mercy in the arm’s decision to eliminate Moose and to spare Corey. Corey was an innocent, but the arm knew nothing of innocence. However, it is true, upon consideration, that mercy is an expression of both order and chance in the natural world, and thus perhaps mercy was within the arm’s grasp, so to speak. And Corey made the expression of mercy easier because he slept in an absolutely motionless way, like a newborn, really. He would keel over asleep in a position that was corpselike enough to be taken for a corpse (many were the nights that Moose or their father thought Corey was dead), and never moved once until he woke hours later. How he avoided bedsores was a mystery. The arm sensed movement and responded to it as though movement were something that needed to be eliminated from the world. And Moose writhed around a lot in his semi-sleep. He therefore appeared to the arm, to the extent that anything appeared to the arm, as something that needed to be brought to a halt, and so, on the bed where the two brothers slept, the smaller one curled beside the larger, there lay a single target. The arm carefully lifted off the lid of the terrarium and lowered itself down until it had negotiated the shelf of bobble-head dolls, and likewise the shelf that collected the stuffed animals. And then the arm was on the headboard of the bed, creeping, and in the time it took to creep, all of Moose Mansourian’s life was flickering on the screen of the wall-sized monitor of heavenly accounts; for example, it was being noted on the screen that though Moose had once been part of a group of brass musicians (he’d played the trombone) that had regaled some elderly people in an assisted-living type of institution with light versions of the classics, he’d also provided the OxyPlus inhalers used in at least three different overdoses; true, Moose believed in assisted suicide and had on one occasion helped a terminally ill addict effect a departure from this world, but he had also charged a fee for this work; the young Moose Mansourian, a complicated kid who was quite bad at school, and too demanding of his friends, all of whom eventually tired of him, shed bitter tears at inopportune moments, and his high school football career eventually ended because he was considered too timid after a neck injury he inflicted on a rival from the Tempe area.

The arm knew naught of these forking tales, of the good and bad Moose Mansourians, and of the simple and tender relationship between Moose and the younger kid beside him, and so when the arm propelled itself through the air onto the throat of Moose Mansourian, the forking narratives of a life neither good nor bad were nowhere apparent, and the arm, because it knew no compassion, dug in its fingernails, so that when Moose, awakening from a stupor, grabbed the forearm and pulled, he did little more than pull the long, serrated fingernails of the arm through some important biological real estate, so that there was an Old Faithful geysering, this happening so quickly and so quietly that the boys’ father was not awakened (he was in the habit of drinking), and the young Corey, who slept like a corpse and dreamed only of empty desert landscapes with rabbits and javelinas grazing upon them, wasn’t roused until later, speckled with crimson, at which point he beheld the arm finishing off his brother, and unfortunately for Corey, and for Moose, his first impulse, because he didn’t understand, was to laugh.