Because he was making solemn oaths, he was not using the handheld monitor that purported to give heat signatures of intruders, such as the vole or the bobcat. It was true that the arm probably had a meager heat signature, because with the exception of the septic battalions coursing through it, there was very little about the arm that was alive in the conventional sense. Furthermore, André, had he been scanning the area in front of himself, would have been looking for some kind of conspiracy of drug-addled men in their twenties, the kind of guys who temporarily believe that the smash and grab is the only way to live. For these reasons, André failed to notice the arm.
The first house on the corner belonged to the Neilsons. Aristotle Neilson, in his midfifties, had been a prominent politician in Rio Blanco, rising to the level of deputy mayor before his stripper scandal. Neilson’s particular flavor of stripper scandal was not terribly new, nor particularly shocking. He liked Catholic schoolgirl outfits on his consorts, though he was always scrupulous about making sure that these professionals were of age. His wife stood by him during his tearful resignation. Since then, Aristotle had served quietly as a freelance accountant for corporations. He rarely left the house.
In any conventional horror story, Neilson’s situation would be suffused with karmic resonances. He had, himself, elected to obtain the services of uniform-wearing exotic dancers. No one had made him do it. In the conventional horror story, therefore, he deserved what was coming. In these pages, however, he didn’t deserve what was coming, and the fact that the arm had made it under the gate and into the Ina Estates without any trouble, without being run over by any onrushing vehicle, and was now making its way across the gravel lawn and rock garden that were features of the Neilsons’ comfortable property, this was all owing to chance, sheer systemic chance. The arm was not karmic repayment, not about guilt, not about retribution. Chance, in this story, is a much harsher taskmaster than the Old Testament retributive theologies.
In order to prove that Aristotle Neilson, named after the Greek philosopher by a mother who liked orderliness, didn’t in any way deserve what was about to happen to him, and because it’s unfair to kill a character who is not fully developed, we must pause here briefly to note a couple of the finer things about Aristotle Neilson, who at the moment that the arm was rubbing off its epidermis hauling itself over the rocks in the front yard was looking at the stamp collection he’d assembled as a boy. Aristotle Neilson had extremely small eyes, beady little things, and he knew it. This was, in fact, one of many reasons that Aristotle had never quite believed in his wife’s love, though she tried and tried to nurture this sensation by feting every birthday and by repetitively intoning that there was no husband in the Southwest more generous and helpful than he. On the philanthropic front, despite his crimes, Aristotle Neilson continued anonymously sponsoring college education for kids from the Native American reservations. He always went to see the graduations of his Native American kids who made it all the way through, and he always reminded them at some point in their educations that English composition was a really excellent class if you got a good instructor. Aristotle Neilson had no children of his own, owing to a sterility that had gone undiscovered, ironically, until his ambivalence about child rearing was past.
A further list of the poignancies of Aristotle Neilson’s life could go on and on, but, under the circumstances, time was short. In the Ina Estates, owing to the fact that there was security outside the walls of the campus, people often left their doors open and their cars unlocked. It wasn’t really a problem for the arm to secure an entrance into the Neilson residence. Mrs. Neilson, who had completely overcome the legacy of her husband’s political self-destruction by throwing herself into an administrative position at a day care center in town, was not at home. It was only Aristotle on the premises. Aristotle Neilson, plenty satisfied with his anonymity, with the absolute lack of interest on the part of his neighbors. It was only recently that the very serious episodes of depression, variants on that time-honored DSM-VIII listing, depression as a result of public indignity, had begun to lift. He was idly flipping through some of the sheets of stamps that he had collected as a boy in the state of Oregon, where his father had been a middle manager with the postal service. (This was before stamps were abolished entirely.) In particular, Aristotle was looking at a sequence of stamps entitled Legends of Jazz, and as he looked at these fanciful and beautiful designs, he was also wearing a headset that played one of the satellite stations, and because he could hear nothing, therefore, he could not hear the arm, which had launched itself like a shipwrecked sailor onto some of the old-fashioned books on Aristotle’s old-fashioned bookshelves, where the arm was managing to slide erratically from one row of books to another, not without dangling occasionally, sometimes by a finger or two, and doing so while dripping the occasional Pollockian spatter on Aristotle’s Mexican tile floor. In the time before the arm got to Aristotle, he did not stop to consider why call girls in Catholic school uniforms had such an attraction, because that would have occasioned too tidy a dispatch for Aristotle Neilson. (The arm flung itself from a shelf full of old encyclopedias onto the right-most edge of Neilson’s desk, which was covered with hard-copied files of his clients in the accounting consultancy, dislodging a couple of these files so that they toppled and spilled some of their trade secrets.) Neilson would have claimed not to know the answer to this question (of schoolgirl outfits), had he been able, in some vulnerable and unthreatening circumstance, even to address it. Perhaps, say, he had been in the steam room at the gymnasium at the Ina Estates with Irving Bogle, a lawyer friend who’d had business before the city of Rio Blanco and who had seen the denouement with the hookers as an entrapment designed to remove a politician unprotected by major benefactors. Let’s say that Bogle and Neilson were in the steam room, and Bogle, after a long silence, had asked the question:
“Ari, what was the deal with the schoolgirl outfits, anyway? You don’t have to answer that if you don’t want to. Hell, I probably wouldn’t answer it myself. But every now and then I wonder if it wouldn’t help a little bit to talk about this stuff.”
In the steam room, in the sheets of vapor, the two of them were visible and invisible to each other, and that was how they liked it. They liked some privacy and dignity in the revealing of the body’s failing. Few were the guys who still strode into the steam room with their obesity hanging about them like a fashion statement.