Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

It was for chess-related reasons that the conversation took a turn into a kind of terrain that I would refer to as provocative , or mean-spirited, even mildly abusive , and I suppose it did so because when competition rears its head, when the loser perceives that he is the loser — in the ghastly moment of zugzwang , the moment in which any move is a bad move — then it is axiomatic that the outcome can no longer be delayed. The hand-to-hand begins, the mano a mano. Thus it was that Tyrone said:

“What makes you think you’re going to be able to write the novelization anyway? It’s not like you have any experience.”

The blackout had begun again, as I say, and now Ho Chi Minh had all but emptied of its excessively tanned and underemployed counterculturalists and university dropouts. The musty smell of snuffed candles was much in the air, a smell that anyone can love. I might have riposted to the dinosaur that I had written plenty of things, that the implications of my kind of story went beyond the margin of the page into my spectacularly boiled-down evocations of psychology. But what I said was:

“The same thing that probably makes you think that you are a fine chess player.”

What was it that Tyrone wanted? The interloper? As he blew a move with his bishop that would have, were he more adept, perhaps kept my king from heading boldly to the center of the board. Did Tyrone not want me to massacre him? Was there not some wish to be laid low by such as I, a small white man, with modest expectations for the last couple of decades of his life, in a forgotten corner of NAFTA? Tyrone could have done many things, he was brilliant, he was affable, he was usually sharply turned out, he’d had a spectacular education. Was he, too, just another one of the people who never managed to turn promise into anything concrete?

He held his great, dark brow in his hands as though it were made of crystal, as if the position of his men would somehow shatter his very brow. I had no conviction about where, when his hand flew from his temple, it would alight. But as it swept toward the king, his white king, my heart lifted up, and I felt in myself a great lofting into the skies, as he toppled the king onto its side.

And then the cocksure exterior that Tyrone had exhibited over the weeks seemed to vanish away. He became almost mute, he murmured a few syllables that I couldn’t make out, and then he reached into his valise, the valise he had brought to the café, claiming that he would soon have to fly anyway, and produced the flash drive containing the screenplay, entitled The Four Fingers of Death . He fetched it out like it was just a trifle — without any sense of what the thing meant to me.

“One of us goes away with the prize,” Tyrone said, “and one of us goes back to the airport, and flies on to, uh, Dayton.”

“Well, I want to say,” I told him, “that this has been a very agreeable transaction.”

I sure could use a beer…

Me, too, but we can’t stop now.

I bet there’s one in the kitchen.

What I was, in fact, feeling then, I think I should say, was some apprehensiveness. I didn’t want the struggle over the script to be over so quickly. Now that the attention, whether good or ill, that I had commanded during the plot against the McClintock card was about to come to its end, what to do? Thus I felt a need to keep Tyrone from exiting the Ho Chi Minh café. Suddenly, I was willing to do whatever needed to be done, for example, some gentle prodding in the direction of a drink. Did he want a drink? No, he no longer drank. Just one more cup of hickory coffee substitute? He didn’t think so. Well, then, I asked Tyrone, had he ever considered exactly what the arm represented? In The Crawling Hand ? Had he ever considered that the film was really about a certain kind of human labor? Had he considered that it represented the surplus value with which labor imbued the commodity, had he ever had any thoughts along these lines? Here it was, this arm, and it could do very little but grasp and choke. Maybe, I told Tyrone, the arm represented the alienated labor that was the trade union movement being crushed, the beginning of the era of strikebreaking, the end of the influence that labor had had in the 1930s and 1940s; maybe the arm represented the end of that sense of community of workingmen and — women together, forging a nation.

And what about the cats at the end of the film? Had Tyrone heard about the cats? They offered the most difficult moment in the film for the casual interpreter. I found, I told Tyrone, as he fiddled nervously with his surgically implanted digital minder, as though he couldn’t be bothered to listen, the cats in film, the moments when cats just appeared by chance or were compelled (in some drugged state, no doubt) to perform for the cameras, incredibly moving. For example, Mrs. Hotchkiss had a cat in the film, I told Tyrone, and there was a very tender moment, after her death, when the sheriff was visiting her house, in search of leads, and he paused to scritch (the proper word, I believe) behind the ears of Mrs. Hotchkiss’s cat, as it stood on the counter, having its way with a saucer of dairy product. Okay! I told Tyrone. That’s one cat who appears in the film, Mrs. Hotchkiss’s cat, who stands in as a sign for wildness, the wildness that is often the necessary obverse of the civilizing impulse, correct? Cats are innocents, but they are also wild, I told Tyrone, and humans are crazy enough to believe that they can somehow control the wildness of the cats. This particular cat, who could just as easily run off, comes back to the house for handouts, and so it’s a complex image, this image of the cat in Mrs. Hotchkiss’s house; it’s a beloved cat, but then again, it could also be a cat that has somehow been attacked by the crawling arm. Because that arm has been crawling around the house, has been getting into all the shelves, into all the cupboards, into all the recesses that the cat gets into, and so there has been some kind of consorting between the arm and the cat— it has to be , I told Tyrone; it couldn’t be otherwise — and later in the film, the cat cries some strangulated cry (off camera) that leads one to suspect that the cat is now contaminated , but there is no definitive information on this point, I said, after which the scene relocates to the final chase between Paul and the sheriff (the latter of whom went on to appear in the popular Gilligan’s Island program), and Paul heads off, as if for the water, because all of this story takes place next to the ocean, that repository of North American mythologies, and maybe he intends to return the arm to the crash site of the capsule, or maybe he simply intends to fling it into the ocean, we don’t know, but we do know he ends up ditching his car in a junkyard, somewhere beside the sea.

In this spot, the arm is killed by Paul, though what it means to kill the arm is unclear.

It was an arm

Lying in the sand.

A human arm.

Which is to say: he puncture-wounds the arm a few times with a piece of shattered bottle. Why that is more effective in dispatching the entity than being blown up in a space capsule, as first befell it, we just can’t say, and why this subsequent “death” of the arm should have any impact on the space infection that is apparently manipulating Paul’s teenage consciousness, causing him to behave as if he has testosterone pumped by the gallon into his circulatory system, anyway, this is all beside the point, I told Tyrone. The point is that in the junkyard there are, as you’d expect, junkyard cats . There is no better place to see cats than in a trash heap, a junkyard, a resource-management site, both the little and the large, the slow and fat, the Manx, the tuxedo, the calico, the Abyssinian, the mau, the Maine coon. In this particular junkyard, the cats immediately begin wrestling with the arm. There’s plenty of meat there, I explained to Tyrone.