Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

No one, let it be said, would mistake me for a pugilist, for a law-and-order type of guy, for a person drawn to physical conflicts, for a militarist. I do not carry a Taser or other weapon, loaded or unloaded, though this is legal and even encouraged in my state. However, I could easily write at least five pages about these sorts of weapons, the Gatling, the ArmaLite, the Glock, the proton disrupter, revealing a complex and deeply seated need for appurtenances of male power and phallic supremacy, even as I disdain these commonplaces in my everyday life and incline, in this era of Islamist saber rattling, toward a foreign policy of tolerance and nonintervention. And yet, as you will have surmised at this point, the five pages of such a story would sooner or later be stripped of elaborations, adjectives, adverbs, similes, astute geopolitical views, until what remained was only:

We went with the stealth bomber.

This was a sentence of such limpid beauty and such durability that it was very difficult to follow up, notwithstanding an unprecedented second publication on the Mud Hut site. So affecting was the sentence, in fact, that there was a danger in having composed it, namely that I would retreat to the reliable paycheck of some day job, becoming, for example, an exclusive buyer and seller of baseball cards and other sports memorabilia (I had resigned my second job as shipping clerk upon the promise of first publication), without composing again. I don’t know how many months went by. During this time, my argument was simply: Why bother? Have I not already proven myself? Have I not written a timeless epic from the front lines of the military-industrial complex, which in the third decade of the new millennium we now know to be not only a complex , but, more or less, the entire shebang? The answer was yes . There was no longer a need to prove my dominance in the writing field. In fact, what I craved instead, here at the top of my game, was domesticity , the ability to control a little narrow patch of scorpion- and tarantula-infested dry land around a single-story house in a town where it never rained.

Yet, professionalism being what it is, in due course a suite of stories in the first person followed. Apparently, I could not stop. In general, I much prefer a narration from the third-person point of view. The first person is tiresome and confining. It is the voice of narcissists and borderline personalities. Still, my wife, whose problem was a respiratory problem, was getting worse. She was fast approaching her double lung transplant, and while it would have been easy just to wait around until her name came up on the international organ lottery (now under Malaysian control), while it would have been easy to collect the meager government funds disbursed to her as a citizen with a chronic genetic condition, I did, in fact, need some avenue of self-expression. Along came the idea for my masterful trilogy. If you like, if it helps you to understand the kinds of influences that resulted in the literary coming-of-age of Montese Crandall, you may think of these next three stories as related thematically to the three-volume compositions of the nineteenth century, not unlike a doorstopper by a Thackeray or a Trollope.

Well, actually, on advice of counsel, and in order to avoid violating my own copyright with regard to a future Collected Works of Montese Crandall , now being discussed at one of the larger presses, I am obligated to forgo quotation of these works from the middle period. I’m sure you understand. Perhaps at some future date, I will be able to oblige. Oh, okay, I’ll include one:

Last one home goes without anesthesia.

Not really in the first person, but you get the idea. Years had passed in my writerly biography, years of dreams and ambitions, years of seeing other, less-equipped artists finding publication, even renown, in web-publishing venues or even small-press publication, while I had completed as yet only five publishable sentences, notwithstanding my education at a state school in the Northeast, and a master of fine arts degree from an online program out in the Rust Belt. As a result I was in no position to suppress my trilogy or to recall its publication, which constituted a full 60 percent of my output. Not every work by a writer is his best, especially when he is preoccupied with more homely responsibilities, one of these being the resale of baseball cards obtained from the disgruntled mothers of the world, who, as you know, have forged an international conspiracy to throw out the baseball cards that have been laboriously collected by their sons, in order to drive up prices. My other activity consisted of lugging oxygen tanks around my house. There was also the vigorous pounding on the back of my wife, Tara, which was occasionally necessary in the mornings, so that she could take advantage of life. I loved my wife. I comforted her when she needed comforting. My wife, understand, was going to die, and she knew it, and I knew it, and now you know it too. When the breeze blew up across the waterless tundra of my state, I often thought if only I could just harness some of that breeze and give it to Tara, our problems would be resolved. There are no sailboats in my part of the country that need the breezes; the jet pilots would be happy to encounter less clear-air turbulence; the state officials have resisted wind farms at every turn. And the atmosphere that shrink-wraps the globe offers a rich supply of oxygen. Why couldn’t my wife, Tara, have a bit of it in her bloodstream? What made her so undeserving?

With this going on, you see, I sometimes didn’t feel much like writing.

Before I knew it, the double lung transplant was upon us. This is how it works with the international organ lottery. Your day comes, and you are ready. Our transplant was to be performed at the University of Rio Blanco Medical Center here in town by a doctor whose name I have chosen to forget. According to the relaxed rules of organ donorship, it was now possible to learn certain facts about your organ donor, especially if you were willing to make payments through professional intermediaries for whom everything was negotiable. You might learn a great number of things. For example, I learned that the boy died not a hundred miles from here, in that crumbling metropolis to the north, while driving an antique motorcycle. And I learned that he was just a kid, the donor, which is the kind of thing people always say about these full-body harvests. He was just a kid. Name of George.

George had ears that were considerably undersized. He had an overbite. He was otherwise normal in appearance, strapping, even attractive. Everyone was very hopeful that George, with the aid of untimed examinations and a battery of tutors, was going to make it through a business administration course he was pursuing at the junior college outside town. George was superlative at logical systems. He liked to do long division in his head, and if he failed to make eye contact, I learned, it didn’t mean that George didn’t favor his fellow man, didn’t feel a gigantic abscess of love in his twenty-year-old heart, for people and things. He was fanatic about the underperforming college basketball team here in our town. He owned tropical fish. He loved his otherwise childless parents.

In a state of possession, I at last applied pen to page to compose a history of George, whose surname I have agreed to keep secret. I wrote these pages, quickly and voluminously, reams and reams of words, during the part of Tara’s recovery when she seemed to be in a coma. I was doubting the accumulated wisdom of the expert surgeons and nurses at the URB Medical Center. I was morbidly anxious. I had symptoms of something like colitis or perhaps Crohn’s disease. So I wrote about George. George’s interest in marbles; George’s fits of rage, which terrified his parents because of his occasional need to destroy his own property; George’s implicit upset over the word autism ; George’s early woes in Little League; his subsequent triumphs in baseball because of his willingness to repeat an activity for days and days and days (batting practice). George’s occasional desire to wear, in public, dresses belonging to his mother, though this made him the subject of merciless taunting. George and housework, in particular vacuuming. George’s almost erotic fetishism of vacuums. George and Finnish death metal, a musical genre these days known as dead girlfriend .