The Four Fingers of Death Read online

  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.

  I wrote these lines about George in the molded plastic chairs in the hospital waiting room. I gazed abstractedly at the scorched, nonnative palms out in front, which had died or were about to die owing to the seventh year of our
regional drought. I had brought with me a little personal digital assistant of the sort I’m sure you know (I was unwilling to have mine surgically implanted, though the wife sure loved hers), and I scribbled, metaphorically speaking, my surmises about George, my wife’s donor.

  Let us now move on to George, the tertiary phase. Among the other activities of George during his later teens was the disassembly and reassembly of an antique motorcycle (1968), which his otherwise childless parents purchased for him after much hand-wringing. They fervently wished that George would not ride the motorcycle in question, because of his eccentric habits and attitudes about so many things. Also because fuel shortages made this kind of transport frivolous. This injunction against riding the motorcycle was, for a time, acceptable to George. George was more interested in reassembly. He laid out the pieces of the motorcycle in certain patterns and shapes.

  There would be no way to write about George, and in this way to occupy many hours spent in the waiting rooms of the hospital, without writing about the fateful night that ended George’s term here on earth. Upon reassembling the motorcycle for the third time, George frivolously decided that the prohibition against riding it no longer made good sense. Some three years had passed during which he had contented himself with the reassembling, years of washing the motorcycle until its shine reflected his face and the stubble upon it, years of starting the bike only in order to make sure that it sounded right, that the timing was good—all this per the instructions of George’s motorcycle guru, a man up the block named Laramie. Overcome by the whim of precipitous maturation, George decided one night to take his motorcycle for a spin in the hills above town. Laramie, an erratic and underemployed person, confirmed the wisdom of this idea.

  It was a night featuring a stunning sunset, and I say this mindful of the fact that sunsets in this part of the world are often overpowering. The flyboys from the regional air force base were out in the evening sky in profusion, protecting us from an ill-defined enemy. It hadn’t rained for 213 days, and there were dust storms. A comet was due to emerge in the southern sky, and it would have been an agreeable thing to witness this comet, especially in the mountain pass west of town. And yet Monaco 37, the comet, didn’t seem to have been a factor in George’s untimely demise. The sunset was a factor, however. To George, locked in the constraints of a misunderstood brain disorder, history unfolded erratically, and anew. Every day was a day of import. Congress was meeting again tomorrow, there was the restocking of the depleted shelves in our supermarket price clubs, the collection and densifying of refuse in municipal garbage trucks, the ritualized busing of homeless persons to the camps by the border.

  And so the young man whose lungs would soon rest in my wife’s chest cavity kicked up the kickstand of his reassembled motorcycle. He throttled his throttle. He headed up into the northerly hills without giving much thought to his destination nor to returning expeditiously so as not to alarm his working parents. Then came his fervent apperception of the sunset. On the pavement, he followed the perfect crimson light of the magic hour, when the sun dipped behind the western peaks, when these peaks were bathed in pomegranate quanta. He followed the sunset intuitively, without questioning it, looking for its sweet spot, from which best to contemplate. I wish I could say now that George’s death was not his fault, that there was a runaway semi, a teamster who had simply worked too many shifts in a row, or maybe there was a reintroduced wolf loitering on the tarmac. It was not so. The southwestern sunset did George in. Apparently, George, unlicensed and unable to control his motorcycle, failed to operate the bike on one of our myriad regional hairpins, and despite his promise and his triumph over adversity, George sailed out over the embankment, becoming almost instantly a white plastic cross with artificial flowers and a love letter from his mom.

  As I say, I wrote many pages about George. And I waited. When I cut down all the reams of eulogistic ramblings about George, when I eliminated anything that was excessively sentimental, that described too accurately the look on the faces of George’s parents when I called on them, that utterly dignified but devastated Hispanic couple—what remained was the sentence:

  He was just a kid.

  A scant two hours after George’s demise, my wife was contacted by the international organ lottery, and we were told to report immediately to the university medical center. Preparations for leaving the house took some time because my wife was down to 15 or 20 percent of lung function. She was scared, if resigned, and kept saying “Monty, I just don’t want to die on the table.” I could barely understand her through the oxygen mask. “Monty, if I die, who is going to harass you?” To which I would say, “Nobody is dying.” I put her in a wheelchair that I used when we were making longish trips, and I wheeled her out into the driveway, and I went next door to ask the neighbors, the Rodriguezes, if we could borrow their car or if they could otherwise give us a ride, because we didn’t have a car. This had been a long-standing arrangement between myself and Mike Rodriguez, namely, that a day would come when we would be called to the hospital. On this day, there would be no time to waste. I’d told Mike all of this, fumbling, shifting from foot to foot. Could we rely on him? I’d made the same arrangement with the other neighbors, on the other side, until, as with so many houses on the block, the for sale signs went up in front of the unit. And never came down.

  The Rodriguez family was not answering the bell. I thought I’d stressed to Mike the importance of his letting me know if and when he was traveling. I shouted to Tara, out in the driveway, “Should I call a cab?” As you know, most of the taxi companies had been priced out of the market by the extremely high cost of corn-and-petroleum-blended fuel products. And the taxis had not exactly been replaced by a reliable system of mass transit. Unless you count walking. There was a lot of walking going on. A lot of balancing things on the head. Tara wheezed, “The Rodriguezes will be back soon.” Tara said this because there were five grown Rodriguez children, all living at home. They each drove occasionally. Rather too fast, if you asked me. Nevertheless, I said to my wife, “Are you frigging crazy? We have to get you up to the hospital and into the operating room.” This was when, despite my urgency, I realized exactly how scared my wife, Tara, was. She was scared enough that she would rather die in the driveway of heatstroke than go through with the operation.

  Which was why I had to yell. I don’t like yelling. In fact, Tara and I had an arrangement where no yelling would take place, ever, which was counterproductive, at least according to an online course on marital communication I had once taken, entitled “The Healthiest Relationship: Ten Preliminary Steps,” by Deep Singh, PhD. (1) Assess what works for you. (2) Accept your shortcomings. (3) Practice tolerance and understanding. I can’t remember the other seven steps. But let us not dwell here. I also need to reconstruct for you now what was already happening in the hospital—the sequence of events in which poor George was being harvested of all his usable bits.

  I don’t know the biographies of all the recipients the way I know the biography of George. And yet I can tell you a few things: his corneas passed on to a septuagenarian in Pasadena, his liver went to a baritone of the popular-music world whose hepatitis C had compromised the liver he was born with, and George’s heart went to a retiree in the northern part of our state, a former autoworker. These heroic stories fork off from the story of my wife, Tara, each taking place on the same day, with similar drama. Be at such and such a medical facility at such and such a time. There were worried people like me in waiting rooms all over the southwestern part of the nation. We constituted a community of worriers, all of us with fingernails chewed to the quick, with shooting pains in the lower intestines, red eyes, unwashed hair, caffeine breath.

  In our case, the lead surgeon was called away from a floodlit driving range on Bureau of Land Management preserves, there in Southern Arizona. The engine of the ambulance had scarcely cooled before he was scrubbed and began bombarding his surgical tools with gamma radiation, in order to prevent antibiotic-resistant men
aces. Interns and residents gathered around the operating table and in the theater above. George’s body cooled. His O-positive blood began to drain from the corpse via a pump that resembled an old-fashioned concertina. The residents flushed his arteries with a preservative that insured George’s lungs would not decay, and then they inflated them slightly, in the hope that these organs would resume function once inside Tara’s chest. They cut in all the many places that they needed to cut. And they slid the excised lungs onto plastic liners, and then they fitted these liners into a pair of six-pack holders that people used more often to take beer to picnics. Then they were ferried to URB in helicopters that were ready to scramble for medical emergencies in the desert.

  Meanwhile, we were still in the driveway: “We’re not waiting for the Rodriguez kids to get back! I’m calling an ambulance!” “I don’t want an ambulance!” “You’re not thinking clearly! You only have twenty percent of lung capacity! And if the lungs aren’t in your body in six hours, then we have to wait for the next available set of lungs! I don’t give a rat’s ass if the surgery is making you uncomfortable! I don’t care if all the neighbors see! We’re getting an ambulance!” At which point Tara started crying, and I could hear her choking through the oxygen mask, and this naturally made me upset, because I genuinely hated it when my wife cried, which she nonetheless did regularly, because her disease, this scourge, had robbed her of her youth, had robbed her of the time in her twenties when she should have been sleeping around or doing a lot of drugs or at least smoking copiously. Even in college, she’d told me, she’d had to hang upside down for a while in the morning, while her roommates smacked her around to get her lungs going. This, in fact, was when I met her, when I was teaching a beginning writing course at the community college. She audited one night with a friend, and brought her rolling tank with her.