Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

It was true that in the greater part of this speech Koo observed the kind of affable demeanor that he considered the most responsible and professional. He felt that he had nothing to hide, though he had long been hiding the fact that he had nothing to hide, and as a result it was important that he should not become upset, nor express any kind of irritation, because, after all, it had now been many years that his son believed that a simple urn full of leavings from a fireplace was in fact the cremains of his mother, when nothing could have been further from the truth. Koo understood that he needed to give his son the additional time and space that would allow him to feel his feelings, and perhaps these feelings were somehow bound up with his son’s worries about his own mortality, which must have been on his mind owing to his dangerous illness, and yet Koo, coming to the end of the speech, found that suddenly he was himself temporarily distraught, and waves of shame overcame him, and he recognized that he was now doing what no self-respecting man of his age and station should do, which was finding himself unable to continue. His smudged eyeglasses slid from their perch on the bridge of his nose. And there was in Koo a burning sensation, or several kinds of burning sensations, followed by something near to the headache category, almost meningeal.

“You do not understand what this has meant to me, to have her here with me, and to be able to talk with her about the ups and downs, as I have often done. Many nights when you were asleep I spoke with her, and I wrote her many letters, hundreds upon hundreds of letters, and I have had her here with me, when no other woman would keep me company in the lonely adventure that is my work. And often I expected that I would tell you, but then I believed that you would not understand. Now you must understand; you can see that I have wept these shameful tears, and you know that my ambitions for your mother may not have been your own wishes, but that they were sincere.”

However, these last lines were delivered to the naked back of his son, who, with only a towel draped around him, had struggled from the confines of the bathroom (where the paling lamps had again clicked off), followed by Vienna Roberts (who, Koo believed, gazed upon him, Koo, with a look that people occasionally referred to as “daggers”), to repair down the corridor to the garage. This response was to be expected, Koo supposed. Koo’s secret was unraveling like a moth-eaten coverlet. It was only now that Koo fell prey to an additional worry: that his son would recognize, somehow, from looking on the cadaver that had once been his wife, that some little bit of cerebral tissue had lately been harvested from her. He began almost immediately to wrestle with this last revelation. Was it better to tell him now? To tell him that the chimpanzee Morton was, perhaps, his mother, was somehow a spawn of his mother, a semimaternal, cloned version of his mother? To tell him that this cadaver was less his mother, at present, than a way station in the process of self-realization of the chimpanzee? How to talk about these things without creating still more hurt?

Jean-Paul, limping and lurching, nonetheless passed through the kitchen with singular purpose, and from there to the door that led to the garage.

“There is more that I need to tell you, I think,” Koo called timidly from behind.

“I’ll let you know… when I want to hear it,” Jean-Paul grunted. And even in the low-wattage fluorescence of the pantry, Koo could see that the stress was affecting his son. Still, there was nothing to be done, because in a few bounds the afflicted young man had thrown wide the door and was beside the cryogenic freezer. He laid his hands upon it. He examined it. He asked, as Koo joined him, what the keyboard was for. And Koo admitted that it was connected to a screen in the freezer, the site of cryogenic rest, and that this screen allowed for a Korean alphabet and for English and French in simultaneous translations, so that the boy’s mother would be able to read , if she chose to.

“I have received no response from her, not up to the present,” Koo added.

With Vienna’s help, the boy fiddled with the false casing and the clasps on the funerary stabilizer, and this Koo was unable to watch. And then there was the thumbprint scanner, which Koo it seemed had no choice but to disable. In the gloom of the corner of the garage (for now night had fallen on the desert, and the lights, if they had not gone out, were soon to go out, and it was only Koo’s generators that illuminated the light inside the refrigerator), he could not now see his wife, into whose eye socket he had recently inserted a lance in order to harvest cerebral tissue. Instead, he watched the faces of his son and his son’s girlfriend, silhouetted, and in that moment, in seeing their faces, he reckoned with the amount of ruin that had gone unconsidered in his many secretive attempts to animate his dead wife.

“She… looks… peaceful,” Jean-Paul said, leaning against Vienna Roberts. And in this instant, Koo surmised, a mothballed ghost went spinning and wheeling above the subdivision, a ghost recalled to the factory of ghosts.

“Don’t think this means that I am not, like, fucking horrified, comatose , don’t think I don’t know I have spent my entire fucking life being lied to by you, and don’t think this means that I don’t recognize you as the fucking liar and fucking hypocrite you are, but I am very happy to see my mother again; I am very happy. If I have to die, then maybe it really is okay. Now.”

“You have to do nothing of the sort,” Koo said, “if only you will return to the bathroom where the paling lamps are located. We can discuss all of this in greater detail, all the many horrible things that I have done and continue to do. However, it also bears mentioning, since we are gathered in this spot, that there is this experiment that I have long been undertaking, the experiment having to do with the reanimation of your mother—”

“The what?”

“It is as I have been saying. I have been trying to conduct experiments in which I attempted to reanimate your mother.”

“What does that—”

“It is just as I’ve been saying to you. But it is not as if she was going to get up and walk if we simply waited long enough. If I am to be able to reanimate your mother, I will be required to use her body for medical experiment. This has long been my plan, and in at least one case, I have already used some of her tissue for experiment—”

“I don’t even want to hear this,” Jean-Paul said, groaning dully, as it became clear that the positive effects of the ultraviolet radiation were quickly going to dissipate.

“Presently, I am of the opinion that a small bit of tissue from someone infected by the M. thanatobacillus bacteria, if engineered properly, could potentially enable the cadaver to take on some activities, and perhaps to have some limited cerebral function, in which we might be able, for example, to talk to your mother, my wife, and ask her a few questions. For example, we could ask her if the dead dream, and if they have desires. Are they like people in the middle of a seizure, who have awareness but are unable to act? Is it a locked-in syndrome? Or more, does it resemble persistent vegetative state? I know these are not easy questions for you to consider, but it may be necessary to act quickly, as we do not know how stable your condition is.”

Vienna Roberts said, now getting between father and son in the dim light of the garage, “Dr., uh, Dr. Koo? What about my family? I mean, we’re talking about family here, and about how important family is, but can you do anything for my family too? My parents, like, is it right to keep them in the dark about the van and how the van might be, I don’t know, infected or whatever it is we’re talking about, and while we’re on the subject of mothers, I mean, maybe it will be possible to find some way to make sure they’re safe too? I only have the one set of parents. And they had all kinds of trouble conceiving, you know; they had to use all kinds of medical technology. I think I’m probably, like, three-quarters petri dish or something. They aren’t ready to give me up, and I’m not ready to give them up, and so maybe in the middle of this emergency you could—”