The Four Fingers of Death Page 6

  I was used to a certain amount of relapsing and remitting, but this was asking too much of me, and of our homeland security infrastructure.

  “Shhh,” she said. She was using the chat function of the FBS software to communicate with other dangerously obsessed bettors. One interlocutor was a person whose name, when translated from the relevant ideograms, seemed to be PiranhaYummy. Tara was attempting to convince this Amazonian stream dweller that the conditions were indeed absolutely right for the political action described on the big board. I told Tara that there had been a recent discovery of a subspecies of piranha in the Potomac. A small school of them could clean an overweight congressional representative down to the bones.

  “There doesn’t have to be an actual violent insurrection,” she reminded me. “There has to be the perception of violent insurrection. Look at all the other stuff they have.” It was a villanelle of the violent, a sestina of the salacious on that screen. I could very well have written one of my short stories from titles of the betting pools on the FBS if, in the days of ministering to my wife, I was still capable: “Dismemberment of American diplomat in Islamist country,” “Spain exiles its Jews,” and so on.

  “It only takes one piranha to buy,” Tara said. “Then watch the prices rise. I think I can get out before I lose my blouse.”

  I mumbled something noncontroversial and backed away from her workstation, but not before I could see some of the inexplicable chatter from PiranhaYummy and his ilk. “My bicycle has never been so rusty,” he typed to my wife. “A germ has begun its replications.” Before the automated translation, he was probably saying “Let’s have lunch; my wife doesn’t understand me the way you do.”

  It was in these next days that Tara informed me, over a hastily and badly prepared dinner, that large sums had been made and lost. Tears in her eyes. Ever deeper did my wife burrow into the subculture of Asian day traders in the futures markets. She claimed, among the dupes and shills she found there, to have connections in the anarchist underground in the USA; she claimed to know well the survivalist skinheads of the Rust Belt. It was a lot of bluster, but when deployed correctly, this bluster gave the appearance of knowledge, and this was enough to buffet the price of bids on the FBS.

  “Violent Insurrection in the United States of America,” along with “International Bioterror Strike,” began a slow but undeniable upward movement. Tara seemed to feel that if the price rose, it was she who was ascending, back into the world. Her spirits soared, and her fair, exhausted face took on a rosy hue I had not seen in a long time. Was it the magic arts of the surgeons at the medical center, with their nanotechnological robots? Or was it the likelihood of violent insurrection?

  It was when this steady climb on the FBS became somewhat meteoric that the scam no longer seemed funny or pragmatic. We were citizens of a post-industrial country that no longer produced much. Our rate of emigration exceeded our rate of immigration. Our GDP was contracting for what? The twelfth quarter? Tourism was down. Manufacturing was all but nonexistent. An analogy? The mayor of my burg, the city of Rio Blanco in which I write these lines, even this political gladiator had absconded across the all-but-dried riverbeds that separated this sovereignty from our NAFTA signatory to the south. This once robust superpower may have been on its last legs, but we still loved it, the way you love a dog in the backyard, whose attempts to close its jaws around your leg are stymied only by the rope tethered to the dead paloverde.

  One night Tara broke the news to me. Out of the blue, she’d made seven thousand dollars, all on “Violent Insurrection in the United States of America.” She was worried. She had a jones, and the jones was for grim prognostication. Tara had locked herself in the bedroom and shut the shades, and now she felt as though she had unleashed armed dissident elements, and they were fanning out around us.

  The one thing she never mentioned, in all this, was her illness.

  In the meantime, D. Tyrannosaurus and I continued our dance. I can’t tell you how many times I beat him, and in how many circumstances. The man just could not play. If he managed to stumble on a strategy, he then could be relied upon to overlook what came next, forever forgetting what my bishops were doing or all the possibilities of my queen. I beat him at night, I beat him in the morning, I beat him over lunch, I beat him downtown by the bus terminal. I beat him over the phone. I beat him by e-mail and teleconference.

  In the process, I began to piece together some of the mysterious chapters in the life of D. Tyrannosaurus. He was not exactly forthcoming, but I worked on him. D. adhered to the story that he was born among theropods, sixty-five million years ago, and in that period of his youth he assumed the stalking position and fed on smaller lizards as they emerged from the undergrowth. He also claimed to have mutated into his present shape.

  Conversationally, and otherwise, he was a sociologist of every kind of neglected group, of every association of losers, the street people of the city, with their leathery skin and milky eyes, the itinerants, the ragpickers, the freelance probability experts, the addicts, the call girls with their bioluminescent scarifications. He was extremely passionate about the oldest profession. He never took them home, at least I never saw him take a streetwalker home, but he was forever introducing me. “Montese,” he would say, “this is Maria, and she’s going to advise me.”

  He had a sibling, he said—though what kind of sibling he wouldn’t make clear—who was laboring in the adult film business, in production, one of the last robust sectors of our economy. This sibling, he said, in a rather fateful moment, had recently forwarded D.’s name to a fly-by-night book-publishing company whose business involved novelizations of low-budget films for the online gaming market and webcasting. These novelizations were to be written on the cheap, quickly, and were intended to be composed of the screenplay with a bit of connective tissue woven in to make them palatable to a logophobic online audience. Novelizations generated a little extra money for the e-book goons, and they left something behind for the collecting market. Novelizations monetized a leftover piece of the filmmaking and gaming business, the screenplay, and were farmed out as piecework. The writer retained no rights.

  Obviously, this was a very different kind of writing from the sort that I pursued. D. had written, by his estimate, seventeen of these online novels, in little more than five years. Under a great variety of pseudonyms. His favorite novelizations, he said, were romantic comedies, because these were the most imaginative. He could say the woman wore red, and then a page later he could say she wore white, as long as their wedding arrived on schedule on or about page 200.

  Now there was a new assignment, D. said. A sort of a science-fiction film. Even though D. believed that science fiction was anal-sadistic, even though it was possible to find belief in extraterrestrial intelligence in the DSM-VIII, where it was considered floridly psychotic, D. was actually looking forward to writing this science-fiction novelization, into which he was going to attempt to bury little hunks of his own philosophical interests, he said, secret messages, critiques of power and nationalism, homophobia, sexism, and racism.

  “How much are you getting for the assignment? If you don’t mind my asking?”

  He didn’t mind. He was getting $750. For three weeks’ work.

  As I say, this kind of mercenary writing was radically different from what I imagined I could do myself, and yet I suddenly coveted D.’s job. That is, I didn’t want to take his job away from him, since this would not have been neighborly, but I wanted to do something more than just write seven-word short stories. I wanted to write the novelization in order to inspire pride in my wife. I wanted to tilt at the windmill of an audience. I wanted to capture the age. I wanted to think my way out of desperation and cockroach infestation. Now that Tara was back in the house and encouraging me again, it seemed a natural and organic example of artistic progression. I just needed to get my foot in the door.

  “Let’s play a game for the novelization.”

  “What do you mean?” said the Tyr
annosaurus.

  “A game of chess!”

  We were out in front of that restaurant where they cooked the meat on the roof. They housed the meat in some kind of cast-iron container—hoisted it up, sealed it off so raptors couldn’t get to it—and it roasted in the midday sun. The restaurant with the meat on the roof had prickly pear enchiladas, a personal favorite. Tasted like mango and bar soap.

  D. said, “Would have to be untimed.”

  I said, “How long would you need? For your moves?”

  “One move a week.”

  “Oh, come on. Are you going to consult a team of experts? I’ll give you a pawn. I’ll give you the queen’s pawn. You’ll still get white.”

  “What do I get? If I win?” D.’s whispery voice was barely audible in the stiff wind, which brought with it a brace of tumbleweeds, cartwheeling across an empty parking lot before us.

  “You get to do the novelization yourself.”

  He said, “I already get to write the book.”

  At this point, D. Tyrannosaurus demonstrated an intimate knowledge of a subject that surprised me. Indeed, his intimate knowledge had been so obscured in the prior weeks of our friendship that the light that shone at this moment seemed enough to make me review the friendship in its entirety. He said, “If I win I’d sure be happy to have a Dave McClintock rookie card, class B issue.”

  Have I spoken to the classes of McClintock cards? I have already noted that McClintock’s bionic arm was not visible in the baseball card that first commemorated his elevation to the big leagues. You will recall the details. In general I prefer that people think there is no card but this one. However, in fact, this was not the story in its entirety. The photograph that had been taken of his left profile was in fact the most prominent of the Dave “Three-in-One” McClintock rookie cards. But there was also a second issue of the cards in which McClintock was shot from the right side of the plate (he was a switch-hitter), and the titanium arm, with its ferocious mechanization, its industrial sinews and assembly-line microchip controls, was clearly visible protruding from a short-sleeved jersey.

  There were counterfeit cards in those days, sure, back when home color printing was first taking off. There were entire cartels devoted to the issuance of counterfeit cards. And, eventually, because this is how people are, some portion of the collecting world became equally taken with the fakes. With the result that the Topps Company began issuing cards with watermarks and testimonial stamps. A McClintock rookie card, class B, would thus have the titanium arm and the Topps watermark, which was in the shape of a standard-issue baseball bat.

  “How do you know about that?” I asked, as we were seated. And I said it with a fair amount of shock.

  “How do I know about what?” said D.

  “McClintock, class B cards.”

  “You told me about it.”

  “I don’t think I did.”

  “You did.”

  “I did not.”

  “You did.”

  You know, there are any number of powerful additives in the water supply these days, additives that are meant to redress the follies of human character, diseases of the age, such as repeated reorganizing of household objects, hearty laughter at neutral remarks, the ever-popular fear of photosynthesis and photosynthesizers. And chief among these, I well know, is the almost total inability to remember anything that has happened, also known as elective pseudo-dementia. The almost total inability to remember events that seemed earth-shattering less than a year ago, the complete obliteration of trends inside of weeks, the reversal of strongly held opinions, and so forth—I wasn’t the only person who had disabilities like these. Therefore, I wasn’t likely to remember if I had or had not discussed Dave “Three-in-One” McClintock with D. Tyrannosaurus. And yet I believed I had not. I believed that Dave “Three-in-One” McClintock, class B series, and all facts pursuant to this matter were secured in a register of discretion that I did not trot out for just anyone, especially not a frequenter of ladies of the night. And perhaps the incompleteness of my trust was evident on my face, because the man known as Tyrannosaurus immediately began to attempt a flanking maneuver.

  “Forget about it, man.” The waiter brought around a plate of unidentifiable smoked meats.

  “I can’t,” I said.

  “Everybody knows about McClintock and the class B cards.”

  “No, everybody does not,” I said.

  Again, I began combing through my half-remembered and somewhat fuzzy recollections of events at which D. Tyrannosaurus had been present, over the weeks. I began trying to decide if his sudden appearance was nothing but an attempt to locate one of the nation’s preeminent dealers in baseball cards, in order to blandish him out of valuable assets and transfer them to who knows where, Macao, or Mauritania, or Madagascar.

  “Montese,” D. offered, “this seems sudden, so I’m just going to tell you the truth. You know it in your heart anyway. What my particular interest is, these days, well, my particular interest is in collecting things that are in danger of being lost. That’s why, for example”—gesturing around the chronically empty interior of the restaurant of smoked meats—“I wanted to come to this… grill. There are more people standing around waiting to serve the food than there are people in here to eat. The only people left who can really afford restaurants bring security.

  “Let’s say I knew you had some baseball cards, okay? Let’s say I even came down to this furnace of a place because you have some baseball cards. Does that mean that I think any less of you? Does that mean that I hung around for however many weeks just to get some damn baseball cards? I know how this sounds, and I’m sure it’s hard to hear, but I stuck around because I’m happy to spend some time with other people who see how things are now. You’re an interesting guy, Montese. You’re a guy with vision. Maybe even you’re a genuine part of history. You’re the man who was able to anticipate history, to anticipate what the body is in the process of becoming, and in this card you see the composite that is the human body, the composite it’s becoming, and so you’re the man I, and the people I represent, needed to see.”

  I would describe my discontent as being like a skin lesion, or like an archipelago of buboes. I had felt that D. was my first legitimate new friend in some years, and now I felt like some kind of exotic figurine he had collected so as to have me on his manifest, along with one of the Dave “Three-in-One” McClintock class B baseball cards and a bunch of cyborg prototypes. Another man might have left the table immediately, certain that he would sunder relations with D. Tyrannosaurus. Another man might have lamented his naïveté, or started a fistfight, or contacted some oversight agency, or hired a trained professional to deal with Tyrannosaurus. But not me.

  I said: “It’s a wager.”

  Because even if he was a wheeler and a dealer, or some kind of conceptual artist who specialized in duping innocents, I would crush him on the chessboard. I would read up on games played with a missing pawn; I would read up on the Bulgarian tactics that had proven so popular in the chess world recently. I would find whatever hidden stratagems I required to make D. Tyrannosaurus, convicted felon, rue the day he had come to the desert.

  Next, as an effective researcher, I determined to use my talents to see what was available about D. on the web, now largely pages in Cantonese. As any citizen of the NAFTA treaty knows, the surveillance capabilities of the web permit much, for a nominal fee, and I managed to locate the alumnae association from his graduate school, the prison records for all the prisons in his home state; I even scoured lists of art exhibitions by persons with variants of his name. I did find six or seven persons with names that had D’s and T’s as their initial consonants who had similar biographies. But as far as a particular D. Tyrannosaurus, or any variant of this name I could come up with, the results were thin. What was the nature of his felony? Was his crime against property? Was he an arsonist or some kind of detonator of government buildings? Was his crime somehow indivisible from his art? Was his crime political
or philosophical? It was only the most determined, these days, who could stay out of the reach of the global media, but among these, apparently, was D. Tyrannosaurus.

  He had his reasons, evidently, and I believed they would come to light. But my principal reason for wanting to play this game of chess was that I wanted the work. I wanted to write the novelization he described. And I wanted to make my life better, in a Horatio Alger sort of way—I wanted the money, I wanted the self-respect, and I wanted the approval of Tara Schott Crandall, the woman with the new lungs. This made a rather adorable story, writing a science-fiction novelization in order to impress a double lung transplant from whose side I had not strayed for more than three or four hours in a couple of years, except when she was in the ICU and I left her, for example, to give a reading at Arachnids. But just as the chess match was looming on the calendar, something awful happened, the awful thing that goes by the name fungus. Prior to the events described here, I knew nothing about fungus but that mushrooms were tasty and that you should wash between your toes. But fungus, in particular aspergillus, would become my wife Tara’s greatest threat.

  There are a number of kinds of organ rejection, as we now know from the medical literature. The first of these is instantaneous, in which the organ is flooded with lymphocytes, and death is immediate. Tara, to our great relief, did not suffer this rejection, which is rare in the era of nanotechnological agents. A second kind of rejection is chronic, and characterized by a hardening of the tissues involved at the spots where the organs are connected by the surgeons. While a certain amount of antirejection therapy can help here, the long-term prognosis is cloudy and dark. Still, you may have time to see your child graduate or your spouse appear, inevitably, on a reality-based web program.

  Then there is an intermediate sort of rejection, a sort where you have some time, but it is not great time. What happens in this third alternative is that all the nearby germs come stampeding onto your prairie. Germs you never even heard of. With lung transplants, the most common of these infections is pneumonia. But there are far more exotic germs. People coming to the NAFTA signatories to buy up distressed companies and close them down bring a lot of exotic infectious agents with them. Patients who are trying to fight tissue rejection are prey to any Southeast Asian mite that comes along.