Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

Здесь есть возможность читать онлайн «Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death» весь текст электронной книги совершенно бесплатно (целиком полную версию без сокращений). В некоторых случаях можно слушать аудио, скачать через торрент в формате fb2 и присутствует краткое содержание. Год выпуска: 2010, Издательство: Little, Brown and Company, Жанр: Современная проза, на английском языке. Описание произведения, (предисловие) а так же отзывы посетителей доступны на портале библиотеки ЛибКат.

The Four Fingers of Death: краткое содержание, описание и аннотация

Предлагаем к чтению аннотацию, описание, краткое содержание или предисловие (зависит от того, что написал сам автор книги «The Four Fingers of Death»). Если вы не нашли необходимую информацию о книге — напишите в комментариях, мы постараемся отыскать её.

Montese Crandall is a downtrodden writer whose rare collection of baseball cards won't sustain him, financially or emotionally, through the grave illness of his wife. Luckily, he swindles himself a job churning out a novelization of the 2025 remake of a 1963 horror classic, "The Crawling Hand." Crandall tells therein of the United States, in a bid to regain global eminence, launching at last its doomed manned mission to the desolation of Mars. Three space pods with nine Americans on board travel three months, expecting to spend three years as the planet's first colonists. When a secret mission to retrieve a flesh-eating bacterium for use in bio-warfare is uncovered, mayhem ensues.
Only a lonely human arm (missing its middle finger) returns to earth, crash-landing in the vast Sonoran Desert of Arizona. The arm may hold the secret to reanimation or it may simply be an infectious killing machine. In the ensuing days, it crawls through the heartbroken wasteland of a civilization at its breaking point, economically and culturally-a dystopia of lowlife, emigration from America, and laughable lifestyle alternatives.
The Four Fingers of Death
Slaughterhouse-Five, The Crying of Lot 49
Catch-22.

The Four Fingers of Death — читать онлайн бесплатно полную книгу (весь текст) целиком

Ниже представлен текст книги, разбитый по страницам. Система сохранения места последней прочитанной страницы, позволяет с удобством читать онлайн бесплатно книгу «The Four Fingers of Death», без необходимости каждый раз заново искать на чём Вы остановились. Поставьте закладку, и сможете в любой момент перейти на страницу, на которой закончили чтение.

Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Perhaps their price was the best thing about them, Noelle continued, because it kept the jet packs out of the reach of the drunken and most careless segment of the population. The federal, state, and local regulations didn’t work. What would be more attractive to rebels without causes, loaded to the tips of their dendrites on OxyPlus or polyamphetamine, than the idea of flight? They were all would-be Icaruses, heading straight for the sun.

“And in a way, that’s sort of what we’re getting tonight. There are always all these different mythemes , you know, ideas, stories, colliding at any omnium gatherum event. It’s supposed to be tribal, there’s supposed to be dancing, but what there is instead is a bunch of middle-aged guys trying to loft themselves up over the desert at the same time, and although none of them says he wants to be the guy who goes the very highest, higher than all the other jet packs, it’s like that anyway. There’s always a competition among these guys who had a couple of good ideas about counterculture a million years ago and now all they have is liver damage, or they are on their third case of melanoma, and big patches of their face have been removed, and nobody wants to have anything to do with them, except at omnium gatherum , because there they can wear a mask . They can go on another thirty years like this.”

“What does it have to do with—”

“And they’re going to be the ones who launch the arm . They’re going to put the arm into a jet pack and fire some missiles at it in order to incinerate it completely. They’ve got some kind of remote-controlled launch pad. And they’re going to launch in the middle of some big pyrotechnical display. Or I guess that’s the idea. Always with the fireworks. So juvenile.”

Traffic on the mountain pass had come to a halt, and standing on the side of the road, looking ornery, looking as though they reeked with some immemorial death musk, were the javelinas. The sage and prickly pear growing there kept them fat and happy. It was as if the javelinas were watching the cars, waiting for the convoy to inch by so that they might resume ownership. Their tusks had a Holocene menace. They waited as the traffic over the pass snaked its way through a dozen or so switchbacks; they waited amid the encampments of migrants, the undocumented trying to make their way south to Nogales. They waited through the fellow travelers, middle-class kids wearing all the right footgear, the goggles, the highly reflective outerwear, all of them foaming at the mouth with whatever cocktail of medications they had managed to ingest. Noelle watched, too, as a helix of turkey vultures next appeared, in the last of the light, and began to swirl above the action, waiting for the mortality on those sandy shoulders to reveal itself.

“Our plan,” Noelle said. “Let’s see. Let’s discuss our plan. Do you want to discuss our plan? Do we have one? Our plan is first for you to contact Dr. Koo, tell him that we’re almost near the event site, and then our plan is to try to make contact with some higher-up types at the omnium gatherum , some of whom I know a tiny bit, like Denny Wheeler, and then we’re going to try to get as near as we can to the arm , and somehow we’re going to try to substitute another arm in its place. How’s that sound?”

It was fair to say, she acknowledged, that she not only wasn’t sure she could follow through on the plan, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to. She believed in the omnium gatherum , if it was possible to believe in something that was so riddled with contradictions, something so earthly and finite, something so profligate, and if she occasionally had a few critical things to say about them, that was only in the spirit of loyal opposition. She didn’t even know, really, what Koo wanted to do with the arm, in terms of his ongoing experiments. He said that it was important to secure the arm to keep it from spreading its menace across the populace, and especially in a big group like the omnium gatherum , but it was clear that this was not all he was after.

“You have an arm to substitute?”

“I do,” said Noelle.

“Which you got where, exactly?”

“Anatomy classes at the medical center. They’re disposing of those cadavers all the time. Dr. Koo has special privileges where cadavers are concerned, because he has an endowed chair, and if Dr. Koo needs an arm for an experiment he’s doing, then no one is going to tell him he can’t have an arm. So one of the anatomy classes…”

“They—”

“Cut the arm off especially for us. But we had to remove the finger ourselves.”

“You removed the middle finger yourself.”

“I know how to cut at the knuckle.”

“What did you do with the finger?” Morton asked.

“It’s in the rucksack with the arm. I guess I should throw it out somewhere. But you can’t just throw a finger anywhere.”

“I could do it for you, if you like.”

“That’s why I have the windows open. Well, plus, I don’t believe in air-conditioning. Air-conditioning is when a nation becomes weak. Decadent. This arm is only a little decayed, though. That’s the good news. From what I’ve heard about the contagious arm, it’s more than a little decayed. You know, the hardest part of this whole thing was finding a wedding ring that would fit properly on the substitute arm’s hand.”

Maybe Morton had gone wistful and sentimental over the mention of a wedding ring. She couldn’t be sure. Over the period of caring for Morton, she’d decided that postures and expressions that seemed precisely human didn’t always mean what you thought. Sometimes chimpanzees pulled faces that seemed gentle, sympathetic, and then they tried to club you to the ground. Morton was probably just looking at the valley below them, nothing more, because now they had come to the saddle of the mountain pass. She swore you could see Venus on the lip of the night sky, because the sun’s last few beams were disappearing behind the peaks in the west. And in front of them, in the broad expanse of the valley, was the answering light, the nation-state of omnium gatherum , which seemed to have erected instantly a fairground, or an amusement park, or a tent city, all these kinetic forms intent on proving that the sun revolved around the Earth.

“I got it at a pawnshop,” Noelle said, “in case you were wondering. Were you wondering? Is there something wrong?”

“I’ll get upset if I want to get upset,” Morton said. “How many talking chimpanzees are there in the world? Wait, let me think about this for a second. The number is not zero, and it’s not two . That must mean that the number of talking chimpanzees is one . And I am that talking chimpanzee. I do what I want. Do you know that there are probably television talk show hosts, right now, who would want to hear whatever it was that I had to say? If I had some kind of… representative… If I had a representative, right now, she or he could book me on some kind of talk show, and they would ask me questions like did I favor bananas, that sort of thing, and I could demonstrate to them how I knew the basics of trigonometry, and I’d tell them my higher power was probably in my own image and not in man’s image. They would think whatever I said on the subject was scintillating, earth-shattering. I have no problem. What is your problem?”

“I don’t have—” she said.

“Is it my business alone if, upon hearing about a wedding ring, I can think only of how good I’d be for you?”

“Look, we have a lot we need to do. Let’s not—”

“You’ve got an arm in a bag that you cut off a corpse in the hospital basement, and you found a wedding ring from some marriage that’s gone bad because the people in the marriage didn’t love each other as much as I love you, and you put that wedding ring on the severed arm, and somehow we’re going to attempt to substitute this arm for the infected one, and you’re doing all this for that butcher at the university. I don’t understand why you—”

Читать дальше
Тёмная тема
Сбросить

Интервал:

Закладка:

Сделать

Похожие книги на «The Four Fingers of Death»

Представляем Вашему вниманию похожие книги на «The Four Fingers of Death» списком для выбора. Мы отобрали схожую по названию и смыслу литературу в надежде предоставить читателям больше вариантов отыскать новые, интересные, ещё непрочитанные произведения.


Отзывы о книге «The Four Fingers of Death»

Обсуждение, отзывы о книге «The Four Fingers of Death» и просто собственные мнения читателей. Оставьте ваши комментарии, напишите, что Вы думаете о произведении, его смысле или главных героях. Укажите что конкретно понравилось, а что нет, и почему Вы так считаете.

x