Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

During a pause in the confrontation, with a Taser frozen between the last two combatants, a lone wrestler didn’t realize that Morton had the upper body strength of a world-class weightlifter; the wrestler, who probably did his time in the gym and maybe shot up some steroids before breakfast, he watched as the Taser he intended to fire got closer and closer, centimeter by centimeter, to his own face, and the look of terror crept into his eyes, as Morton was shrieking his chimpanzee shriek, and another wrestler, one of the blond wrestlers who seemed to have attempted to dye his hair dark so as to simulate being a Mexican wrestler, and whose bootblacking was now coming off his head because he was sweating so much, this guy rallied from a prone position to grab Morton’s arm and attempted to manipulate the outcome of this face-off, but still the Taser crept toward the face of wrestler number one, and then there was a horrible cry as Morton successfully applied the Taser to its owner, somewhere right under his chin, and the wrestler collapsed to the floor as if he were doing a choreographed wrestling routine, and then Morton, who now had possession of a Taser and who was ducking as some others were fired his way, turned the weapon on the blond with the dripping, muddy hair and used the pain compliance feature of the Taser on this adversary, who howled and immediately fell to the floor. Noelle noticed that the mook with the arm attached to him had stumbled over into a corner by the hallway, the hallway that led farther down into the mine shaft, and the arm was, for the moment, lying beside him, as though it too had been, again, Tasered. She got the idea, now, to swap the arms, because her rucksack was over where she had first walked into the room, probably it had fallen from her when they were trying to force her up against the arm, and the situation would have been perfect right now, and she could lay ahold of the arm , but the only problem was she no longer had the rubber gloves with which to gather it up, and unless she could use one of the capes from the wrestlers or some other bit of stray fabric, how was she going to do what needed to be done? On the other hand, so many of these guys had probably touched the arm already—

“Don’t touch that arm!” Morton called out. “I forbid you to touch that arm. If there’s anyone in this room who should touch that arm, it should be me . Now is the time that I contribute something to human progress! Now is the moment in history that separates the humans from the higher primates, isn’t that so? Look around this room, if you please, and what do you notice about the human being who was allegedly given dominion over the other animals?” Morton addressed what few of the wrestlers were left, lying injured at the margins of that room beneath the earth, and it was as if he had rehearsed the speech, and perhaps this was, in fact, what he’d been doing out in the hallway while attempting to free himself from the straitjacket. He was preparing the speech that would lead, inevitably, to his martyrdom. “What do the humans do in the time of their greatest ignominy? What do they do when faced with the possibility of redemption and dignity? They attack the weak , that’s what they do, isn’t that right? Look around us, Noelle. Look at those who have fled, who have gone back to the festival to disappear into its crowds, after having kidnapped an innocent bystander, namely yours truly, for their own torture and delight. When they look deep into their hearts, they find that they have no hearts; they find that the ill-treatment of the weak and undernourished and hapless is somehow, according to human beings, funny . Nothing could be more sidesplitting than the demonstration of their meager superiority!

“And so I aim to teach you something tonight, you human beings; I aim to teach you something about selflessness, and about love . Because I love this woman right here, Noelle Stern. Are you listening to me, those of you who remain in this room? I love this woman. This woman took care of me when no one would take care of me at all. She brought me my breakfast; she brought me my lunch and dinner. She emptied out my waste products from the cell where I was imprisoned, and she schooled me in the kind of politesse that has made me the man that I am. The man you see before you right now. And while I understand that you do not think I am a man, I use the word advisedly. When she had to administer experimental drugs to me, she did so in a regretful way, and on more than one occasion, I am certain that I saw tears in her eyes. I spoke my very first words to her, and while it is possible that I spoke those words simply because I had some human cells injected into me — yes, that’s right, Noelle, I believe I understand the experiment — in short, yes, it is possible that I am speaking to you because I have those little crystals of a dead person in my brain, but still I choose to think that I began to speak because I finally had something that I very badly needed to say, and that something was about gratitude . I had a need to speak, and that is what language is for, is it not? For me, there were many obstacles — insufficient fine motor control, poor laryngeal function — but I overcame all these things, because my need, my love, was so strong that I had to speak. Was this enough? No! I am here to tell you now that I have lived in both worlds, like Tiresias, in the world of the mute nonhuman animal and in the world of the human animal, and I can confirm that language has its limitations! There are so many things that language cannot express, I say this to you right now—”

Although the arm had been at a safe distance, at the thundering vibrations of Morton’s voice, it began reaching and lunging in his direction, and he was forced to keep himself between Noelle and the arm in order to continue his oratory without interruption.

“For example, I have found that the longing I have felt has been ill served by language. I have tried to get it down, in poetry and in my diary entries, and I have tried using metaphor and simile, all the finest varieties of speech, and there’s just no way that I can properly describe what I’m feeling. For example, there are times of the day when this woman—”

“Morton, we really don’t have time…”

“Just let me finish up,” he said firmly, in dramatic aside. “There are times when I have been in the cell, and you’ve been off duty, when I have felt the traces of you there in the room with me, even though you were off for the day. I have felt you there. I have felt whatever conversation it is that we had earlier, and I have felt you there with me, and I have experienced you as a tightness in the chest, an itchiness of the scalp, an inability to experience the daily pleasures of the world. But do words accurately convey this feeling? I could just as easily be describing heartburn to you, brought on by spicy food or ulcerative colitis, or perhaps some kind of myocardial infarction, but those would not be sensations that one associates with longing, would they? No, they wouldn’t. This language that I have somehow received, this thing that separates me from other animals, it makes me now a miracle of science, but—”

A couple wrestlers dragged themselves up from whatever fog of gang warfare afflicted them or whatever alcoholic poisoning they were temporarily sleeping off, and made unobtrusive exits.

“—this language that I have received is as much curse as blessing. And if language, then, is not sufficient to meet the needs of the likes of me, what is there that remains to me? This is the question I ask myself. In what way can I demonstrate my love? The only way I can demonstrate it is with my actions . That is how we do it in the world of chimpanzees, at least as I understand it — from having met a few chimps over the years and having read a number of books on the subject, as well as watching chimpanzee-themed programs online. We demonstrate our needs quickly — with actions — in a decisive way, and that is what I’m going to do right now .”