Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

Over at the omnium gatherum , they had begun a project that involved hot-air ballooning. The omnium gatherum wanted to send up hot-air balloons so as to warn the citizens of the Southwest about a repressive police state apparatus that was now hovering everywhere around them, concealed in washes and behind underpasses. With a flotilla of hot-air balloons, like a series of jewels in the cloudless skies, the omnium gatherum would be able to radio back to Earth, with personal wireless handsets, the exact whereabouts of agents of the INS, the DEA, the ATF, and so forth. The flotilla could also use a doctor, they said, to minister to those brave souls who intended to live in this post-nationalist milieu, and perhaps she wished to be the doctor.

While she made up her mind, she had the simplest responsibility remaining to her. She had to go in and observe Morton. In the aftermath of some experimental injection. What the experimental protocol was, she didn’t ask. She’d given a lot of injections, and she didn’t ask what they were, and she didn’t ask when she was directed to observe. To relieve some of the tedium, she’d saved a treat for herself. She had some decent, locally prepared hash, and she was going to smoke it with Larry in the observation room behind the two-way mirror. This ought to have been the night when Noelle Stern’s lack of ambition, her lack of desire to be a doctor in the way that her father had been a doctor, should have come back to haunt her. Because smoking hash in the observation room could really fuck up experimental results. Morton could turn out to be one of those rare serial-killing chimpanzees who had recently been written up in the National Geographic , chimps who for no reason would randomly select other chimps and kill them, rip out their testes and their organs, and feast on the relevant parts. Morton was one of these, she said to Larry, passing the hookah back to him, and he was going to smash the two-way mirror and dismember both of them.

“A depraved imagination,” Larry said. “You sure the doc isn’t coming through here tonight?”

“He’s taking Jean-Paul to see his lawyer. Jean-Paul has an idea for a business.”

“Bet he makes more off of it than the old man did.”

“Koo dosed the animal earlier. And took off,” Noelle said. “He gives a shit at first. But he has sort of mediocre follow-through. Or maybe he just can’t bear to watch.”

“It’s the poorly paid folks who can bear to watch.”

“The animal can tell that he’s South Korean and doesn’t take him seriously,” Noelle offered.

“The animal thinks he faked the data.”

The giggling contagion passed back and forth.

“You think Morton is smart?” Larry said.

“They’re all smart. But no one is as smart as Cherry was.”

She often wondered, when she was back on another regimen of wondering, Why not Larry , but this inquiry discounted, right from the outset, the fact that Larry had a kind of unflattering mustache, also that he had given in to the idea that guys in their thirties looked most natural when portly and unkempt. These were black marks against him, but still there was a kindness about Larry. His treatment of the animals was evidence of this, of an idea of fair play. Larry didn’t really care about what kind of doctor he became either. He laid an avuncular palm on the backs of the animals, and then, when his work shift was done, he went back to the house on the South Side that he shared with his father. He had a hobby, which was metalwork, and once Larry had invited Noelle over to his place to see the sculptures. She was surprised at the look of commitment and ambition that crossed his face when he showed them to her. Larry occurred to her, in her lonesomeness, and then he didn’t occur to her later on. Like some fleeting weather system. Maybe it was the lot of the human beings in a primate laboratory to fail in their attempts to know one another, because the animals were reserved for a certain kind of complicated relationship, the kind where there was up and there was down, where there was vulnerability and then there was unavailability, where there was the stripping away of layer upon layer of shellac and water stains and self, until the flaws were all transparent, and with this exposure of the flaws came the capacity to brutalize, the capacity to take without mercy, the capacity, in the highest stages of love, to be inhuman, to treat the other person far worse than you would treat the merest stranger; in the laboratory, maybe this love relationship was reserved for the animals, whereas the other human beings you treated with the same disregard that you usually reserved for people’s pets. Larry! Cute guy! Likes to smoke hash! Muss his hair a little bit and tell him he’s cute! Ten minutes later she’d forgotten he was even there. Larry who?

She came out of the tunnel vision of her hash buzz to find herself gazing at Morton fixedly. Chimps resembled the elderly, actually. Even when young they had faces like the elderly. Morton was no exception. He was the kind of weary guy you would expect to see working as a security guard at one of those office buildings in downtown Rio Blanco with a 78 percent vacancy rate. Not a guy with a lot of big plans. The kind of sentience she saw in the chimps was rarely the kind that she associated with raw brilliance. They had a shrewdness, as though they understood things from appearances. They were keen observers. They knew exactly what they didn’t know.

Morton was like this, and she tried to explain it to Larry, who had drifted off to one corner to read online music posts. “Maybe he is one of the really smart ones. Someday we should order at least one of these miraculous talking chimps that proves we’re committing genocide in Congo and Rwanda by letting the species get wiped out.”

“What’s the experimental protocol, anyhow?” Larry muttered.

“Among other things, I think we’re supposed to take finger paints in and see if he wants to paint anything.”

“That’s not asking too much.”

She excused herself to go to the vending station down on the first floor, the vending machine that proved, beyond a shadow of experimental doubt, the relationship between hash and carbohydrate bombardment. While Larry was dragging the paints and the gigantic pad and easel into Morton’s cage, she was buying tube-shaped pastry items filled with creamy stuffing (in her inner ear she kept hearing tube of pastry! tube of pastry! ), two different varieties of chocolate chip cookies, and a simulated coffee beverage sweetened with corn syrup, and she was taking these back to the laboratory, all the while experiencing the desire to hide some of these spoils from Larry, lest he take more than his share. When she got back to the lab, Larry’s notes were still on his chair — he had written the word grooming ten or twelve times on Morton’s chart — but he was otherwise nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, Morton was hard at work with the paints and the construction paper. Morton had just about covered himself with red and blue paint, and he was especially interested in flattening his palm against the paper so that he would get a reproduction of his own palm. His chimpanzee palm.

Larry was probably getting soap and water for cleanup. Noelle decided to risk going in and watching from a closer position. She was always willing to try getting in the cage one more time, even when afraid, and it was true that Morton seemed remarkably docile. She pushed the door open slowly, so that Morton could see that a pasty, hairless primate was entering the room, a featherless biped, and as though he were used to researchers, as he probably was (having come from a private university in the Northeast that had closed because of declining enrollment), he paid almost no attention to Noelle at all. A sign of respect, Koo always argued, before attempting to shackle him.