Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

“Just wonderful.”

“All the more reason why we need to remove ourselves from this… area… as quickly as possible.”

“Because?”

But Koo took up with bickering at the driver, one of the residents from the medical program at URB whom Noelle had seen around the hospital campus a couple times but hadn’t met. The van wasn’t going anywhere. The van was parked in a line of vehicles inching up and down the mountain pass, and there were more cars waiting to leave, and it looked like it was going to be a good long time.

“What’s the rush?” Noelle asked again.

“It’s a rather unfortunate situation,” Koo said, “but I have reason to believe that there will be some kind of police or federal military intervention at this festival tonight.”

“What does that mean?”

“As I have already told the others,” Koo said, “I am not certain what it means, but the CDC seems to feel that in order to control a larger possible outbreak of the disease, something needs to be done about the Rio Blanco area. What with people flying around in their jet packs, and the border-jumping, there is a real danger that the infected can move about too easily. The CDC wishes to try to contain the illness in this area.” And to the driver: “Can you please hurry?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that they could try to quarantine or even eliminate people at the festival who are infected or already at risk.”

She thought of Larry, she thought of the Wheelers, she thought of that guy from last week who got turned into a paloverde tree, she thought of all the many people she knew out there, in the expanses of the Valley of the Slaughtered Calf, and she thought of the families of those people, and their coworkers, and their friends. And then she remembered about Morton.

Noelle said, “Well, then, it might be that this is the moment to speak to the issue of Morton, who has had some contact with the—”

“What about Morton? Morton, are you all right?”

Morton was sitting in the back of the van, and he had his face pressed to the window, watching as the van began its steep ascent into the switchbacks, as if there were something that he was leaving behind in escaping from the omnium gatherum . Noelle reached across the backseat and set a hand on his shoulder. His coat was matted and sweaty, and she could tell that if there were a chimpanzee equivalent for weeping, then Morton had begun to cry.

“We still have the arm,” he said quietly.

“What’s that?” Koo called from the front seat. “Can you speak up?”

“We still have the arm,” he said.

“Which arm?”

“I believe,” Morton said, “that we have both arms. Because we brought along the second arm.”

From the back of the van, Vienna Roberts’s dad called, with a certain exasperation, “Just how many arms are we trafficking in, anyway?”

Morton reached down and touched the rucksack into which, it was true, they had somehow by now stuffed both arms. The bag was trembling and thrumming against the floor of the van, because the infected arm had now waked from its last dose of high voltage.

What liberty there was outside the van! What liberty Morton must have felt during his brief trip among the revelers! No one stared, no one cared, no one gave a second thought to a talking chimpanzee. With her hand on his matted fur, Noelle could almost feel the sense of possibility that Morton felt ebbing away. No matter his long-windedness and his insecurity, he was a person with the advantages that an educated man has, but despite this, now that he was in the van with Koo, he was in danger of being shipped back to the laboratory, some laboratory, until, with a proper publicist and a business manager, the rollout of his persona could take place. But what about the chimpanzee part of him? His chimpanzee hypostasis?

The brazenness of what happened next, therefore, was brazen only to those who didn’t know Morton as Noelle had come to know him. How he crept slowly to the side door of the van, and then, without comment, threw it open, even as they were still edging along, and, holding the bag with the two arms in it, Morton leaped from the van onto the shoulder. Of course the van stopped in its tracks, and Noelle, and then some of the doctors from URB, and then Koo himself all followed in exiting the van, and they all stood and watched as the chimpanzee loped down the mountain pass, with that comical gait of his, back in the direction he had come, threading his way between cars and dodging motorized skateboards and mopeds and motorcycles and extreme joggers.

Koo called after him, called after the person who, after all, had been sprung from his wife, who had some of her sardonic humor, some of her excessive self-love, some of her autodidactic pretensions, and whom he was therefore about to lose as though he were losing his wife a second time, or a third time, if we consider what was about to happen to her body, back in the garage. Morton, please! Morton, please come back! But how many were the ways in which he was now powerless. They had stopped traffic on the way up the mountain pass, and they had stopped it from going down by reason of rubbernecking, and even if Koo had believed that there was something he could do, some bit of suasion that could bring back his most promising experiment, he just did not have the time in which to do it. In a cacophony of horns and shouts, Koo and the others climbed back into the van.

And what did Noelle see now? What was it that Noelle saw fleeing down the mountain pass, carrying two left arms in a rucksack, wearing a scrap of clown costume, dried blood around his mouth, and sporting a maniacal grin?

She saw Mister Right.

It was much later that she realized it, of course. The linguistic niceties with which you describe loss come later. It was with this bodily perception locked into place that Noelle returned herself to the van, and it was with this bodily perception that she and the rest in the van rode, in silence, across the pass, into the next valley, and then south, toward the Santa Ritas, toward the last great mountain range on this side of the border.

They were a good fifteen or twenty miles out of the city itself, without having encountered any kind of military perimeter, when they saw the great light. It wasn’t, in truth, a light that you saw . They were bludgeoned by the light, and the sound. The desert was lit up, as it had been, periodically, with atomic perturbances in decades past. The ominous cloud was above them, stretching out its smoldering immemorial extremities in every direction, saying this is what we had to do , though it never failed to be the case that there were things that might have been done otherwise.

Morton made his choice. He’d tasted civilization. And he’d found that it consisted of large helpings of desperation, petroleum by-products, fat substitutes, sweeteners, sewage storage issues, stolen and stripped automobiles, vapor trails, good intentions, bad follow-through, selfishness, red itchy eyes, sentimentality, mold, poor logical reasoning, halfhearted orgasms, advertising, household pests, regrets, mendacities, thorns, haberdasheries, computer programming, lower-back pain, xenophobia, legally binding arbitration, cheesy buildup, racial profiling, press-on nails, the seventh-inning stretch, roundtable discussions, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, perineal pain, individually wrapped slices, road rage, and unfounded speculation, and he had decided that it was completely reasonable that he would turn his back on this civilization. What that must have felt like! Noelle considered the idea that there was an outside of civilization , and she concluded that she could never know what it was, because she had always been inside, because wherever two or more were gathered, there were all the pitfalls, all the disappointments. But when Morton turned his back on the van and ran back toward the omnium gatherum , toward, she supposed, incineration, he was heading back in the direction of something he had never possessed, but which, she thought, he intuitively knew, simply because of who he was. That it appeared to him to lie in the direction of a lot of naked and half-naked middle-class white kids, mixing it up with the Union of Homeless Citizens, not to mention the Maoist party of the Sonoran Desert and a lot of Mexican infiltrators, that was just an accident of history. What Morton wanted was simpler than all of that. Morton longed for the wild.