Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

I quit teaching and reduced my other professional responsibilities partly because it became imperative to keep an eye on Tara’s physical condition, but also because she came to see the necessity of a complete screen detoxification , which she was hoping I would consent to supervise. I had been failing to show up for work every time Tara’s breathing took a turn for the worse. The shipping concern, they didn’t give a fig if my wife’s lungs and pancreas glistened with heavy phlegm. The bottom was falling out of their container anyway.

The first thing we did was remove all the wall devices in the living room, which were just showing digital reproductions from picture postcards of the 1950s. (We found these strangely calming.) Then we removed Tara’s subcutaneous personal digital assistant (which at that time was a crude version of what they are attempting to market now, but which had similar capabilities, photo and music storage, web uplink, video cam, videoconferencing, and so on), and then we went into the bedroom and trashed anything with a standby light. The music file redeemer, the auto-massager, the drying tree, the humidifier. The replacement for all this contemporary distraction was to be some old-fashioned books. So I went down to Arachnids and loaded up on graphic novels, German philosophy, self-help, and a few American classics. These I set in a heap by Tara’s oxygen tank. She also asked for sleeping medication, hoping that a couple days of snoring might cure her of the whole business.

When she woke on the second day, she was in a white fury, and this was a sad and frightening thing to behold in a woman who was sick enough that she could not get across the room without a major effort. Apparently, in her detoxified state, she had enough physical strength left to wipe out a stack of books that I had paid good money for.

“Get these things out of here!”

“But… you asked for books,” I said.

“You and your books disgust me.”

She flung one of the volumes at me. Something French.

“Are you sure you’re not just feeling bad because of the withdrawal?”

“You don’t know anything about it! You think you know what this feels like? You think I’m stupid? Get out of here, get out of this room right now, and don’t come back.”

“I’m trying to be supportive, in this your—”

“I’ll tell you what your kind of life is; do you want to know what your kind of life is? The boring kind. Your idea is that maybe you’ll sit around for a little while and listen to some jazz on the web, on some web site that’s about to go out of business because not one person has ever listened to any of the shit that they play on there—”

“Tara—”

Because when she got started…

“Boring, boring, everything you do is boring, with your goddamned baseball statistics—”

“I thought you liked baseball—”

“—and your old books; who’s going to read all these books, and they just sit around here and no one reads them, and you expect me to have to look at all this shit, when all I want to do is be where the action is, you know, where there’s a little energy and enthusiasm left in the—”

The third day was the same, except that she asked for a copy of Seven Ways to Accept the Wisdom of Your Illness , by some Tibetan Rinpoche or other. She got through exactly one of the seven ways before she got up from bed to throw that one out the window. I found it among the prickly pears a few weeks later.

I spent the next two days in the living room doing part-time telemarketing. We needed the few extra dollars to cover some of what I hoped would be Tara’s final wagers.

When she rose on the fifth day, her hair was wound into the whorls that kids favor when they are sucking their thumbs, and her eyes were bloodshot, and she was wearing only a diaphanous nightgown. With her swollen fingers and toes, she looked like she’d come from deepest space, from the great interstellar beyond, but one look at the smile on her face and I knew that the cure had finally taken. At least for now. She was rolling her oxygen tank behind her, like it was a child’s pull toy or a Pomeranian.

“Are you back?” I asked.

“I am back.”

“And how do you feel?”

“Like I licked the inside of my crematorium.”

“Which means?”

“Keep me in the dark about current events until further notice. Even a local news site is going to set something off. I mean, maybe I could read some coupons or a cereal box or something, but not much more.”

“Are you going to take back any of those things you—”

“Monty, you know that I’m not responsible. It’s like delirium tremens.”

She lay down on the sofa and put her head in my lap, and that was a moment I often thought about two or three years later when I found myself in the waiting room of the hospital, eating from the vending machines. The day on which the helicopter carrying the world-renowned Sino-Indian surgeon landed on the roof. (And this was only one of the many, many add-ons that your health insurance provider doesn’t deem reasonable and customary.) In the OR, they were taking the lungs out of the six-pack holder in the refrigerator, in order to test this first donor lung, to make sure it was still in good working order. Then they began talking about my wife’s condition, which, they remarked, was going to slay George’s squeaky-clean lungs, just as it had slain her own, and which made the whole transplant a complex undertaking for anyone, because, they said, my wife, Tara, was going to perish . I would never see Tara with gray hair, and I would never see her worrying about how fat she had gotten in old age; I would never see her liver spots and think how beautiful are these spots , I would never see Tara dandling a malevolent toddler on her knee, she would never bust out her identification card for seniors’ night at the movies. And I would never see her on the deck of a cruise ship in the Caribbean, drinking champagne from unbreakable stemware. I would never see her with her (as yet imaginary) children’s children, or in Rome, or getting ready to go hang gliding. She would never collect a pension. But on the day of the double lung transplant, I was thinking only that another couple of weeks would be great , and six months would be amazing, three years: like from the heavens.

They gurneyed in my wife, Tara. At the ready was the heart-lung machine and various other pieces of advanced robotic and nanotechnological complexities intended to prevent unforeseen happenstance. A moment hovered, expectant, as the systems went through their scanning protocol. Then my unconscious wife had the inferior of her two diseased lungs disconnected. I can’t really imagine which of the two was the worse, since both were full of pus and fluid and dead carbon-based gunk, stuff that Tara could no longer eliminate from her bronchi, stuff the color of turned mayonnaise. They began pulling George’s left lung out of the beer cooler, and they trimmed away a little bit of it so it would fit into Tara’s body. This after a guy with an expensive saw had opened up the whole of her, underneath her breastplate. They opened her up straight across, from latitude to latitude. And they began the arduous connection of George’s left lung to Tara’s pulmonary artery, the pulmonary vein, the bronchus, while the other nearly worthless lung pumped away haphazardly, keeping her just this side of peat moss. When the left of George’s lungs was attached, it took a few breaths, began doing its job, and they moved on to the right.

In the waiting room, the better to try not to think about the direst of circumstances, I looked at the worried faces of other people. I got up and paced, as one will, because the molded plastic chairs abraded my posterior. (There should have been a therapeutic ward in the university medical center that was devoted to nothing but the skeletal problems caused by the molded plastic chairs of hospital waiting rooms. The Montese Crandall Wing for Abnormalities of the Softened Posterior.) The other thing I did was to call again on Noel Stroop, to ask if I could have a reading at Arachnids, Inc. “Noel,” I remarked, “it’s Montese Crandall, yeah, yeah, baseball cards. Right. Look, Noel, I’m here in the hospital, where my wife is… well… never mind.… Right. That’s kind of you. Noel, let me be frank. I would like to be able to tell my wife, when she comes around, that I have accomplished something in the area of my writing. It doesn’t have to be much. I would like to tell her something good , you know, to cheer her up, while she’s realizing how many stitches she has in her chest, and how big the scar is, and how many stents and shunts there are in her. Noel, I’m wondering if you would consider giving me a chance to read there at the store, yeah, from my collected stories, such as they are, so that I can tell my wife, when she awakes.”