Hays sensed that perhaps the crawling hand was not a beneficent presence in the landscape of Rio Blanco. So when he figured out that Moose had stiffed a homeless guy on the polyamphetamine and thereby obtained the arm, he made a beeline for the Mansourian residence, which was on the South Side. Moose’s father worked at the coal plant. His mother had abandoned Moose and his brother, Corey, who had an extra supply of genetic material. Apparently, Moose believed that Corey was really going to like the arm, because Corey was interested in all kinds of weird stuff, though he was basically a gentle kid, and Moose liked trying to do things that he thought would amuse Corey, and so he took the arm and sold the addict guy a bunch of laxative pills, claiming they were polyamphetamine, and Nicky was so shocked at what he was learning, just with a little flash recorder that he’d borrowed from school, and a notepad, that he couldn’t stop calling people to tell them the story. One of the people he called was his old girlfriend, well, not his girlfriend, really, but they had known each other in a carnal way, a hooking-up way, and her name was Vienna Roberts. The conversation was like this:
Nicky: “Vi, I got this amazing story I gotta tell you….”
Taking place, understand, on the tiny little video screen on the digital, wrist-implanted, all-purpose media storage device.
Vienna: “Nicky, I just can’t right now….”
Nicky: “Why? Is there…?”
Vi: “You just can’t imagine….”
Nicky: “Doesn’t have anything to do with the… with the thing… the homeless thing the other night, does it?”
Her parents were organizers or activists or whatever you’d call it, with all the homeless people.
Vi: “Kind of…”
Nicky: “Does it have to do with some kind of arm?”
Vi: “What?”
Nicky: “I’m asking if the trouble has anything to do with this frigging arm, this, like, this arm, because, like, I was interviewing these guys for the school paper, and they were all talking about this arm, and I was sort of thinking that it was some kind of, you know, made-up thing, like a kind of story that gets going and then it’s not really anything but what people say, but then there was this guy, and he said he’d had it for a while, won it in a hand of poker, and then he sold it to Moose, you know Moose, right? He sold it to Moose Mansourian for some polyamphetamine, and now I’m on my way—”
Vi: “Where does he live? This Moose guy? Where does he live?”
At which point Nicky got all protective about his sources. A journalist must have his ethics.
In the meantime, the omnium gatherum was attempting to synthesize all the available information on crawling hands, attempting to come up with a sort of foundational myth on the subject of the crawling hand, a myth that began with nomadism but which then moved even further afield, into a kind of interstellar or interplanetary nomadism, and in which the unity of the human body was no longer reliable or even desirable, noting, in passing, the importance of the hand in hieroglyphics, and the fact that on the tomb of Ramses, e.g., the hand signifies manifestation, all that is, all that is in the process of becoming. The hand is associated with the human body, yes, stands for it, allegorically, with four fingers for the four extremities, and the middle finger associated with the head. All the more reason, according to the bulletin on the subject, that the middle finger of this hand was missing, as if to indicate that the new body, the new human body, was headless, or effectively headless, and capable of acting despite the absence of a consciousness or a place to situate consciousness. The head signifies humanity, and the absence of humanity is the essence of this time. The Romans, meanwhile, believed that the hand signified paternal authority, and thus this hand is dispossessed of its body, and unable to do much beyond grasp, and even that without much effectiveness. The hand placed on the heart signifies wisdom and sagacity, and the hand without a finger indicates an abbreviated wisdom. The hand touching the head means melancholy. The hand raised above the head indicates spirituality. All of this suggested, according to the bulletin hastily concocted by the omnium gatherum, that the hand, in some way, indicated the manumission that was to come. The omnium gatherum therefore required the crawling hand and would, when it had studied the crawling hand, gladly return it to the state and local authorities, who, the omnium gatherum believed, were already on the case, were already encircling the city of Rio Blanco with some kind of independently contracted security perimeter. Now, it was true, according to the omnium gatherum, that the hand could be infected with something, with some kind of bacterial speckling or perhaps a viral spattering, and it was important when handling the crawling hand not only to be careful about its strength, but it was also important to wear rubber gloves and to avoid allowing the hand to touch you, because, according to the bulletin, the apocalypsis had its contagions.
As already noted, despite his membership in the confraternity of dealers in controlled substances, Moose Mansourian had mainly seen his life’s work as contributing to the well-being and the advancing cerebral development of his brother, Corey. In fact, though there is often a lustrous motive hiding behind the supply-and-demand economics of drug dealing, Moose’s claim was more specific. He needed to fund additional classes and eight hours a week of in-home care for his brother, who would otherwise have fallen through the cracks in the safety net of the post-government dog days of the twenty-first century. What with a mom who had fled the scene because of her inability to manage a wild child, and a father who worked more nonunion shifts than humanly possible in order to provide, there was no one left in the family to look after Corey. Family, as you know, is the group of people who have no choice. If Moose selected the most dangerous drugs in which to traffic, or if he graduated to these most serious felonies, that was only because this was where the profits lay.
Corey: a doughy, slightly walleyed boy of fourteen, whose faint mustache indicated a virility that coincided with an appalling inattention to hygiene, about which Corey was nonetheless surpassingly unselfconscious. His shabbiness, however, caused Moose great embarrassment in the rare instances when he allowed friends to visit — his brother mostly naked and smelling awful in front of horror movies and infomercials, plunging grimy fingertips into his nose and ears. Corey’s other comfort in life was eating, though his ideas about food seemed narrow-minded. He never ate a vegetable willingly at all, and instead wolfed down foods that contained abundances of cheese, specifically demanding, with his limited language skills, mac and cheese, grilled cheese, and cheese pizza to the exclusion of all else.
Still, he was a sweet kid, and a loyal one. Moose Mansourian had, in the course of caring for his brother, observed a few rules for stimulating the mental activity that would insure Corey wouldn’t lose function as he grew older. Moose believed that Corey needed, above all, visual stimulation, and, though he was loath to allow his brother unlimited access to television or video games, he did accept shipment, in the last eighteen months or so, of a wall-sized monitor in return for some preferential treatment on behalf of a certain client. What Moose liked to keep on the wall monitor in Corey’s room were images of placid scenery. Sylvan scenery. He’d leave each image up for five or ten minutes, using the slide-show function, to which he was always adding images, news photos, sometimes reproductions of the great masters, family shots, including images of their mother, and so forth. Home videos from the web if they were suggestive of the homely pleasures. Corey really noticed this stuff, really paid attention to that mystical moment when the wall image changed, and occasionally when Moose’s work was done for the day or when he was waiting for a call, the two brothers would sit together and watch the stills cycle past: