Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

It was hard to tell, at last, if the light up ahead was a legitimate light, not some phantom of her migrainous family of symptoms or just something to distract from the narrowing of the reinforced rock around her, the smell of water used to flush away the acids and the tailings. What remained of the light in this darkest of places could have been self-generated, or it could have been some actual exit , or it could have been the light of some benevolent personage, some miner who had been living in here, sneaking out through the apothecary under cover of night, when the tourists weren’t around, in search of rotgut and Sterno. Noelle waited for sound, for the reassurances of sound, in order to verify that the light was not hallucinatory, but that sound didn’t come. She called out again and heard nothing in reply. And yet instead of turning back and trying to retrace her steps, she trudged on toward where she imagined the light awaited her, around a gentle bend in the corridor. She’d only been walking five or ten minutes! It wasn’t as if she’d walked a mile down here into the mine! It wasn’t as if she were walking under the mountains and back into geologic prehistory, and was going to come out among dinosaurs rampaging on the veldt.

The room, when at last it opened up in front of her, was grand. A large group of the wrestlers was waiting. In a taciturn repose. They sat against one wall, all of them silent, and they all looked as though they’d been taking a lot of whatever there was to take upstairs at the omnium gatherum .

When her eyes adjusted, she saw the arm, against the far wall, struggling to crawl along its base toward the end of the room, where yet another corridor led off into the infernal blackness. When the arm drew near to the way out, one of the wrestlers would lift up a Taser and fire in that direction, and the arm would recoil from the blast, flop over onto one side, and lie quiet for a moment or two, before gathering its strength and setting off in the opposite direction. Like a cornered scorpion. There was much hilarity involved in this game, it seemed, as her eyes adjusted. The wrestlers were moved by the arm, by its inability to give up. Any number of Tasers were discharged (and cartridges quickly replaced) before Noelle attempted to intervene in order to establish a conversation.

“Any of you actually touch the arm?”

Was this question addressed to the leadership? Their organization, to Noelle, was more like a school board or a prom subcommittee — something without anything like a fearless leader. And so it was hard to get an answer. In the meantime, the arm, its fingers agitating as though it were practicing piano scales or doing exercises to alleviate a repetitive stress injury, turned itself around, with remarkable ease, and began moving toward where Noelle stood. Almost as if it heard her somehow.

“Touched it?” a voice murmured, though it was unclear which of the wrestlers had said it. Now she could see in the illumination of the battery-powered flashlights that few if any of the Mexican wrestlers were actually Mexican. The possibility had only just occurred to her. And why would they be? The people on the other side of the border had things to do, places to go. The people of Mexico had jobs . The wrestlers, instead, were a heterozygous lot, a multiethnic melting pot of bad vibes. What they liked about Mexican wrestling was the superheroic violence.

“It’s contagious, you know.”

“You mean because it’s got like all that stuff dripping off the end and flesh hanging off and pus?”

“You know where it came from, right?”

“From the Wheelers’ tent.”

“I guess that’s how you got hold of it, huh?”

“Those people just aren’t good to their volunteer staff.”

“The thing about the arm,” Noelle said, “is that it’s infected with highly contagious bacteria that has probably come from Mars, and I’m guessing it’s highly contagious just from skin contact, and if you get the symptoms of the disease, well, it’s fatal, so far, anyway, and from what I’ve heard the symptoms are pretty awful. So is there anyone who’s touched it?”

One of the wrestlers got up, walked to where Noelle was standing, and began pushing her over toward the arm. It was that simple, really, and when it began, she felt as though all of the day had been leading to this moment. She had been so unwise, so foolish, about what the day would bring, because she hadn’t expected it to include coercion and intimidation. She was so unwise because she hadn’t expected the omnium gatherum to end with the application of force. And now that it was happening, she saw that it had always been there. Force was there. When you went to the fast-food restaurant and ordered your hamburger with a side of microbiological contaminants, you had the police force of the marketplace behind you. The force that ensured that people like this, Mexican wrestlers, were never able to mobilize into some kind of general strike, or agitprop theater company, or tutoring organization; force, undergirding the shouted hello of the deliveryman as he goes past your house; force, as the neighbor’s dog dashes up the walk to lick your hand; force, making it possible that the big, chaotic populations out there didn’t get into your safe-deposit box; force, which through some miscalculation or some systematic series of miscalculations made possible the Sino-Indian Economic Compact, which now had its own army and its own propaganda machinery. Force. Noelle didn’t address the issue exhaustively during the millisecond in which the wrestler guy — thinning hair, unwashed physique, aubergine tights, gin blossoms, halitosis — began to edge her toward the contagious arm; she experienced convulsive little images of understanding and misunderstanding, all intuitive, upon her like a white-light experience, and she began to shout things, though she didn’t really register what she was shouting, nor did she understand exactly what it was she was shouting about , as she began to push back against the wrestler, and she was shouting, though nothing was stopping him, and his confederate (in Green Lantern costume, maybe, or something similar) now joined in the madness, to insure that there wasn’t any danger of her repelling the two of them; it was all just about the gladiatorial aspect of the thing, woman versus disembodied arm, although she did hear someone say, Where’s the monkey? You make sure that the monkey is tied up , and even in the midst of her struggle, she did want to say that it wasn’t a monkey, he wasn’t a monkey, he was a great ape, just like the thugs attempting to push her toward the arm, one big primate family, and she knew as soon as she heard them say that, that her rescuer was out there, nearby.

Why secure the primate in a darkened antechamber? He talked too much, and he didn’t act properly subservient to the wrestlers, who had all finished high school, and so they Tasered him and put him in a straitjacket and banished him to the shaft that led farther down into the mine, with the idea that they would release him at some relevant point later in the evening. For the time being, it was important that they had possession of the talking chimpanzee and no one else did. The monkey was, in truth, stronger than most of the wrestlers in the room, however, and that, soon enough, was self-evident, because he was used to biting things off with his teeth, shredding stuff, throwing things around, and therefore he freed himself from the straitjacket without difficulty (Noelle put this together later on), and he made his way into the room, and thus onto the scene, the scene including the severed arm, which was trying to draw near to the voices, the human voices, probably because the arm could feel the waves of commotion coming from the disputing voices. The arm moved toward the commotion with the irrepressible need to bring a halt to it, as the wrestlers were meanwhile pushing Noelle toward the arm, and she wasn’t sure if it was all a big joke to them or if they meant to expose her to the arm, but she was struggling and pushing against the slick, unwashed bodies of the wrestlers, and there were at least three of them now attempting to move her toward the arm, and there was her voice, caroming off the walls of the storage antechamber in the mine and echoing from distant walls of corridors, Why are you doing this? , all the way down in the most subterranean part of the Earth, and that was what drove Morton, she supposed later, to fling himself upon the three wrestlers, tearing them from her, biting them so that they were covered in blood, so that he was covered in blood, so that his black-and-gray coat was covered with human blood, and this provoked the rest of the bench, as it were, and soon there must have been eight or ten of them in the center of the room, and many threats were being uttered, not terribly inventive threats, by the Mexican wrestlers, apparently because they were intimidated, or were loath to fire their Tasers immediately, lest they somehow injure an important prize, and there were the shrieking primate cries of Morton, who had already driven off several of the wrestlers, who were fleeing up the corridor back toward the apothecary, some of them indicating that this just wasn’t cool and that they were heading back up above ground where things were more chill , but then there were others who had no purpose but mutilating Morton and infecting Noelle, or so it seemed, and they would stay there until someone really got hurt, because when the restraints were unfastened, and the blood flowed, and force was loosed upon the world, there was someone who was about to get hurt, and Noelle figured, even in the midst of worrying, that either she would be raped or Morton would be torn apart or both, and that wasn’t even taking into consideration the arm, which, she noticed, had closed in on one of the wrestlers and was now attached to the synthetic fabrics of his togs, making use of its disgusting and fungally afflicted fingernails, and this guy, who she thought was masquerading as one of the Justice League of America superheroes, or that was his outfit, this guy was trying to keep Morton from biting off the nose of one of the other wrestlers, and he didn’t even realize, at first, that the arm was intending to summit him, that the arm was soon going to apply the maximum amount of force to his throat, until it was too late; the batterer didn’t realize that this was what was happening, even as he attempted to strangle Morton, and Noelle shouted, “Morton!” But there was nothing she could do about Morton now; Morton may have had all the language in the world, but he had no natural reason at all not to make use of his nonhuman animal instinct. There were no moral rules in place for Morton. Were they going to put Morton in jail when all this was done? Were they going to issue a press release that said “The animal had to be destroyed”? It was only because Morton cared for her, no matter how violent this all was, that there were bodies against every wall in the room, contused or concussed.