Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

Morton’s voice was getting more and more shrill, like a chimpanzee in the forest, in fact, and he was banging on the dashboard of the van, and as the windows were rolled down, there were people on foot listening and watching, an army of adherents of omnium gatherum . One guy mumbled, Nice costume , as they went past.

She said, “It’s not for Koo that we’re here.”

“I’m here for you ,” he said, “so speak for yourself. Koo doesn’t care about anyone but himself and his reputation in the medical community. Do you love him? Is he the one who’s in the way of your having a fulfilling and maturing love relationship with me? In The Healthiest Relationship , it says that the first rule of a maturing relationship is correct concentration . If there’s someone else you’re thinking about, some other person with whom you have unfinished business, then you’re never going to commit to this relationship robustly and—”

“Quit it with that stuff,” she said. “And Koo is not my type.”

“That’s what people always say. It’s a truly lukewarm response.”

“How would you know?” she said, as, at three miles an hour, she braked the car into another sequence of switchbacks down the far side of the pass.

“Because I read the book.”

“I’ll tell you the truth if you feel you are strong enough.”

“Stronger than anyone you’ve met. I have to be. I’m the only one of me on Earth.”

“Okay then,” Noelle said. There was a slow unfolding of the story, and it coincided with the downward slope of the mountain, the story about how there was one night when Koo invited her for dinner, and she couldn’t be sure, that night, if he wanted it to be a romantic dinner or just a dinner of friends who were colleagues. She even remembered the menu, which was nothing that a man would prepare. It was salmon in parchment with brussels sprouts and pickled green beans. Koo had to take a call at one point, and if she hadn’t been a little paranoid to begin with, a little uncertain, she could have sworn that it was some kind of official call , like from a government agency or something, and so she went to get more wine, and to the bathroom, and next to the door to the bathroom, through the kitchen, was the hall that led to the garage, and Noelle just wasn’t the sort of person who would ever snoop , she claimed, but on this occasion, she felt an inexorable pull toward private detection, because Koo was such a mystery. So she pushed open the door to the garage, which had all the usual neglected stuff in there, including an algae-fueled convertible, which she later learned was Jean-Paul’s, and it was all surrounded by boxes and corrugated containers. Some gardening equipment. And then — she was sure Koo was still talking on the phone — she saw this freezer, this large horizontal freezer in the back of the garage. For some sneaky reason, she really wanted to know what it was. Not that she suspected anything terribly unusual.

“I went over to look at the freezer, and it’s not like I didn’t know that there was a risk that I’d get caught, you know. It’s not that I didn’t know that he could just come in at any moment and find me there. I sort of had the idea he would find me. But doing what? Looking at some cuts of beef? Looking at some brisket? I don’t know how I knew what was going on, I mean, it’s not the sort of thing that you expect to find hidden away in most people’s garages. I guess you expect a Ping-Pong table or a gaming console. Paintball guns. I don’t know. But somehow I knew, or had an idea there was something there, and so I went over to the freezer, and I learned that it was locked, and it would be locked, but it was like I had to find a way to spring it open somehow, in the couple of minutes remaining, if I even had that much time. And I was going around the exterior, looking for some kind of latch. Because it had to have a latch somewhere, right? Then I realized that the keypad on the exterior had a thumbprint scanner, and that was what I was fiddling with, trying to override, like a real idiot, when he came out into the garage.”

“What was in it?” Morton asked. With a great urgency.

“I’m getting to that part. The thing I always remember, actually, is not finding out what was in the freezer. It was the look on his face when he saw me there. Maybe he had come into the garage to menace me, to fire me or threaten me, or to somehow scare me away from what I was doing, which was snooping. But once he was faced with me, it wasn’t as easy as all that. The look on his face was all about the mixed feelings. The look he wore was irritation mixed up with concern, a kind of expression that I’d never seen on his face before. I’m not even sure I knew he was capable of looking this way, of having so much going on in him, and maybe, as his employee or coworker, I kind of tried to pretend he didn’t have those kinds of feelings. He’s a reserved guy, right?

“But maybe that night he felt a little bit like he was going to trust me , like he’d met someone he was going to trust a little bit, even if he didn’t have that much confidence that anyone anywhere was so trustworthy. He had his son and he was raising his son, and there wasn’t anyone else to do that for him, and he was running the lab, and he had all these people working for him, and what he didn’t have time for was whatever went on with the human emotions, and that was what was happening in this weird expression, how maybe he’d felt something like hope, and then he found me in the garage, and then he knew he wasn’t going to have that feeling. Which was why it was such a complicated look, because maybe it was about relief. Or that was what I guessed. In the moment. Before I realized that I was feeling pretty awful about sneaking around. He knew there were things that he had hoped he wouldn’t have to tell me. But now he was going to have to tell me something, whether he wanted to or not. Whether I wanted him to tell me or not.”

“And?”

“He said: ‘That’s my wife.’”

“His wife?”

“In the freezer.”

“He had his wife in the freezer?”

“That’s what he said. In a freezer in the garage. And he went on, very briefly, to explain that he had a special exemption from various regulatory agencies, whatever the regulatory agencies were — there are probably a number of agencies involved in regulating the interstate traffic in dead wives — and because of his special exemption, he had brought his deceased wife with him from Korea. And that she was in the freezer. Sometime back I guess he’d told me that his wife had died of some slow disease. Parkinson’s? Mostly you don’t die of Parkinson’s. You die of the complications. Anyway, she died over in Korea, and then he brought her to the US with him. Most people think the whole cryogenic thing is just designed to separate people from their money, and I sure don’t know too many people who looked into it enough to design their own freezer. But that’s the kind of man Dr. Koo is. He built his own freezer, and his own locking mechanism, with a thumbprint-recognition device on it, in order to house his wife, who has been frozen in there, in the garage, for however many years. I guess if you’re not going to do anything with your dead wife, if you’re not going to, you know, have sex with her, you can keep her in the garage for a pretty long time.”

There was a look of uncomplicated terror on Morton’s face, a look that indicated that Morton had not yet acquired the necessary finesse for this sort of revelatory exchange.

“Does it have anything to do with me?”

“Does what?” Noelle said.

“The doctor’s frozen wife. Do I have anything to do with the frozen body of his wife and the kinds of experiments that he is conducting…”