A severed arm.
There was a severed arm between her legs. It occurred to her that it was the Pulverizer, what with the disembodied physical comedy of that device, which slithered and slipped around so much that it had fallen well off to her side, like some birth defect, a primordial additional leg or something, but it wasn’t the Pulverizer. It didn’t look, you know, brand-new or silicone or anything. It was a severed arm with all kinds of sand and dust and bits of paper and trash and stuff stuck onto the bloody end of it where the rest of its body should have been. There were pieces of sinew or ligament or tendon or whatever sticking out of the bottom end, the stump end, shreds of muscular tissue, crystallized blood. And then the other really foul part of the severed arm, you know, if she were trying to describe the arm for a police artist or something, was that it was missing a finger, a middle finger. So it was a four-fingered hand.
At first, with the ripples of orgasmic energy flowing out of her into the bounty of creation, she froze. She just couldn’t take it seriously. The arm. But that paralysis, that erotic catalepsy, only lasted a second, and then she found herself in a kind of hysterical fixation, just like the one that had overtaken Jean-Paul, who was standing at the end of the blanket holding a sneaker, wearing nothing but his satin jockstrap, getting ready to bat the hand, if the hand tried to come near him. Because, yes, the really uncanny part of it was that the hand was kind of moving.
“Is that moving?”
“Sure as fucking hell is,” Jean-Paul said. “And I’m pretty sure it, you know, it jerked me off.”
“It’s a cut-off arm; it can’t move.”
“But just look at it. It’s trembling right now and moving its fingers! Look at it right now!”
She looked at it. She did. The fingers seemed to be writhing around as if with some reflexive, postmortem trembling, some last bit of life energy.
“Jean-Paul,” she said, and here she snatched up a couple of her shredded teenage garments, layers that did little but suggest the necessity of their removal, and she started trying to yank them on without ever losing sight of the heinous extremity. “That’s some kind of, you know, nerve thing, like when you cut the head off of a chicken, right? It can’t possibly have done what you just said.”
“Did you jerk me off? Did you have your hand around my—”
“That doesn’t… Maybe it was just attached to some guy, and the guy jerked you off, and then he got hit by a car or something, and that’s what’s left.”
“Is that a better answer? That some guy jerked me off while you were sitting there with your blindfold on? There was no guy. And the arm didn’t fly here!”
As if to prove the validity of Jean-Paul’s hypothesis, the arm, which really had been mostly dormant, appeared to suddenly take note of the Pulverizer, or at least the butt plug on the end of the pile of space junk that had once been the Pulverizer, which had been cast off long ago in the drama of erotic love, and grabbing the butt plug, it thoroughly and painstakingly ripped the butt plug from the Pulverizer and went about attempting to crush it in its fist.
“Oh, fuck,” Jean-Paul said. “That arm is so alive.”
He had climbed back into his shorts. He was dressing as quickly as he could, which meant awkwardly. There was a fair amount of hopping. But that was the least of it, as Vienna also awakened to the significance of the arm. It wasn’t just that it was alive. It wasn’t just that it violated all the rules, rules of medicine and biochemistry and physics, and every other kind of rule.
“I think I had sex with that arm too.”
“It’s so disgusting,” Jean-Paul said. “I don’t even know who that belongs to.”
“Do you think that’s consensual? You know? Can it possibly be a consenting thing? Having sex with an arm? I mean, what should we do with it? Should we take it to the police to see if we can charge it with something?”
“Someone’s got to be fucking missing that arm. I mean, you’d think that he’d be wanting his arm back, wherever he is.”
The arm, having finished, to its satisfaction, the job of squeezing the life out of a marital aid, managed with some difficulty to flip itself over onto its back, or what might be supposed to be its back, so that the palm faced the sky. Vienna was surprised to realize how many things a hand could say just by its posture or orientation in the physical world. An arm with palm facing down, using its fingers as some kind of crawling device, dragging itself along, bent on meddling in the affairs of others. But the arm on its back, with its wrist upward and fingers spread wide, seemed nearly playful, or at the very least submissive, and this was maybe what led Jean-Paul to his next decision. Jean-Paul lunged at the arm. He did so with a swiftness that overpowered the arm, which had no eyes and didn’t know what was to befall it. Jean-Paul lay hold of it by its long, useless base. The fingers, realizing that they were had, began writhing and attempting to grab at him, and Jean-Paul realized, then, the way Vienna understood it, that this would once have been a formidable arm wrestler.
“You’ve got to help me with this.”
“Jean-Paul,” Vienna said, “you have to be kidding. You’re not going to bring that thing back with us. Isn’t it dangerous?”
“The guy who’s missing it might want it to be reattached.”
“Look at that thing. Half of that tissue is all, like, gangrenous and rotting away. It can’t be reattached. Whoever it was attached to is dead. I promise you.”
“You don’t know anything about this fucking stuff. You’re a retail employee — in the service economy. I know about this stuff, all right?”
And so, in a postcoital huff, Jean-Paul Koo took the writhing arm into the back of the van, and he found a roll of duct tape, which he had known would be there. (What van was without its roll of duct tape?) While Jean-Paul held the arm down with his knee (it made a horrible scratching noise with its bloody nails in the bed of the van), he freed up a suitable length of tape. And then, as Vienna watched, he wrapped the tape around the fingers of the hand. They struggled mightily to free themselves. But, as everyone knows, duct tape is hard enough with two hands.
And then Jean-Paul said, “We’re taking this to my dad.”
Rob Antoine was on the NASA jet, the one reserved for high-level agency business. You’d have thought that NASA would have a first-class piece of aeronautical design, since it was meant to be the premier space agency on the planet, the premier agency in all of the universe (until proven otherwise). On the contrary, the NASA jet was from a decommissioned-aircraft graveyard near Houston. The jet had been worked over, retrofitted, by the engineers from JPL, in their spare time, just to keep these engineers engaged through a period of budget cuts. This was a private jet unworthy of the agency emblazoned on its fuselage. The few intact seats were noteworthy for torn upholstery and tawdry stains, and there were outcroppings of hardened chewing gum under the armrests. The windows were foggy from moisture that had worked through the rubber seals over the years. Few of the overhead luggage bins latched. And the odd purse or backpack tumbled out in midflight. And the jet rattled and groaned in ways that did not inspire confidence. With every up- and downdraft, the cabin trembled as if about to plummet to earth.