Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

“Morton,” she said, “I’ll be your hapless human researcher for the evening. Anything I can get you?”

His eyes swung abruptly from the paper to Noelle. He held her gaze for a moment, as though he were thinking about how to respond, and then he went back to work, smiling faintly.

“Would it be all right if I looked at what you’re doing?”

He made no show to indicate that anything else would be to his liking, and so she approached, slowly. Upon reaching his side of the canvas, as it were, she saw the requisite handprints. There was also some effective abstract expressionism, which she thought certainly would allow him to be admitted to some guild of macho boy painters from the 1950s.

“I guess you’re into all that drip stuff, huh? You’d probably drink too much, treat your wife badly, and die in a car crash? Well, what about something representational? Like a landscape? You got all this desert around here. Dramatic mountaintops. Night skies. Have you ever been to the desert before, Morton?”

Morton seemed to pause briefly, as if trying to settle the question of whether he was allowed to mate with her, before returning to his painting. There was, in truth, something evasive about Morton, as if despite his dour aspect he just didn’t want to get into any trouble, really. If he’d been a human primate, he would have had a job in maintenance, maybe in Kansas City, where he would have always hoped that everything was running smoothly because he just didn’t like any aggravation. While Noelle Stern was thinking all of this, however, she noticed that there was something unusual about Morton’s painting. She sort of couldn’t believe at first that she was seeing what she thought she was seeing, and she blamed the hash, which, you know, was a lot stronger than when she was a kid. There was something at the top of the sheet of paper exposed on the easel that—

“Uh, Morton, you didn’t, you couldn’t have possibly written something at the top of the page, did you? Did you get some rudimentary instructions on how to do some block letters? Because that looks suspiciously like written English to me. You couldn’t possibly know English, right?”

It would have been one thing had there been just the one word . You could write off one word, or something that resembled one word, as exactly the stuff of monkeys typing, and dumb , which seemed to be the first word, written out with an almost stereotypical backward letter, well, dumb just wasn’t that hard a word to write, you know, and it could have been the kind of thing where Morton had copied it down, having seen it graffitied somewhere near his cage long ago, all in caps, or maybe he just randomly learned a few letters from watching online news networks or something, seeing the scroll or the advertisements at the margins, but the fact was, there was a second word, and the second word was broad , so that it was absolutely certain that the two words worked together, worked in concert, because it appeared to Noelle Stern that Morton had somehow managed to write a sexist putdown with his finger paints, dumb broad , and not just once, because he had made red highlights behind the blue of the letters. He’d written out dumb broad twice, once with each available color.

“Jesus, Morton, please tell me you aren’t a sexist asshole, okay?”

And then she called for Larry as though Larry were the life raft and she the drowning graduate student. “Larry? Larry?” She called and called, and then it occurred to her, as she was desperately calling, that it was all a big joke, a big prank, and then she began to assemble in her mind the techniques required for the prank, the theory and practice. Noelle was an earnest kind of a person, a person who believed in the omnium gatherum and its principles, and she realized that it was possible, even probable , that Larry had snuck the scribbled words onto the pad while she’d been getting her confections, and had ducked out to let her have the revelation in private, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha , and she was so high that she would have believed anything. She had to force herself to find the prank amusing, and she worked hard at it. And she patted Morton on the arm, as the plot and its execution flourished in her, and then she made for the observation room, unsure about whether she was still irritated, and when she got in there, sure enough Larry was doubled over in fits of laughter, and if that weren’t enough, he was eating one of her pastry tubes, licking out all the filling.

It was a really good prank, the kind of thing that would be told for years and years over beers at that bar near campus. It was all in good fun, and everyone could laugh. Except that when the two of them, Larry and Noelle, went back into Morton’s cage to tell the whole story over again, Noelle could have sworn that dumb was crossed out, or it looked a lot like it had been crossed out, and the d replaced with something that looked like the letters t and h . Larry, his eyes bloodshot, unable to contain his guffaws, until the point at which he was beginning to hiccup, he was laughing and insisting that that was exactly what he had written. But she knew better; she knew, at once, that Morton had crossed out dumb , because it was rude. Morton, she knew, didn’t approve of the boorishness and unpleasantness of Larry, the fat and slightly unwashed Larry, the low-status human male who couldn’t even be bothered to mate well.

Thumb broad. Thumb broad. Thumb broad . Because Morton and Noelle shared something, something sexy and evolutionarily profound: opposable thumbs.

Jean-Paul’s fucking ridiculously hot girlfriend, Vienna Roberts, could not be trusted, not in her ridiculous hotness. She couldn’t be trusted not to send out, what were they called, pheromones , whatever they were called; she couldn’t be trusted not to send them out, her ready-to-be-doing-it hot fucking vibes, out into the world, and he wasn’t always sure that he fucking needed to have sex like five fucking times a day, like in alleys and out behind the abandoned car dealerships out on the South Side, like, what was so fucking great about getting naked in an abandoned car dealership, some grease monkey could turn up at any time, or maybe like some fucking swine-flu-carrying poor-person grease monkey, freshly repatriated from the border or something, and Jean-Paul’d have his nightstick in her ridiculously perfect aperture, and then the disease carrier would be like what the fuck, watching them , but that would probably only embolden Vienna fucking Roberts, and she’d be like, ohmygod Jean-PaaaaaaUUUUULLL , all the contractions, like all Psoas magnus; the disease-carrying poor-person grease monkey could tell that something profoundly intimate was fucking taking place, and the disease-carrying poor person would just see, he could bear witness, totally comatose , he would be blinded by the high beams of her wet, convulsing self or whatever.

Which means Jean-Paul couldn’t always fucking keep up, but you know, if you’re like going to be a successful business owner, and this has been totally fucking proven, like read any book about successful CEOs, you’ll see that they all know how personality , the pursuit of fucking business personality, like this can really fucking make the difference for a corporation, make or break, like the thing with these start-ups is you have to nuke the competition before they even get the chance to start up their putrid low-class operations, and that means that there has to be a fucking personality who is a brand on his very own, a slaughterer of men; like look at those Asian pop-singing androids, they have their militias, like they travel with their own heavily armed militias, and the Sino-Indian economic compact guarantees these militias travel everywhere, across all the borders in the region; they’re like little city-states, devoted to fucking pop songs about cleanliness and obedience, comatose , and it’s a little bit different because those androids aren’t fucking allowed to appear like they have sex, but like the CEOs of the large fucking corporations that profit from the androids, those fucking guys, they have to have entire departments of the company that do nothing but place reports in the news and shit about how the CEOs are getting the freak on, day and night, maybe not taking clients to fucking strip clubs or anything, but you know these guys have posses of wives, they all converted to polygamy cults, and then they just get the freak on day and night, except when they’re calling analysts to talk about price-earnings ratios, stock valuation, and all that.