And then the cocksure exterior that Tyrone had exhibited over the weeks seemed to vanish away. He became almost mute, he murmured a few syllables that I couldn’t make out, and then he reached into his valise, the valise he had brought to the café, claiming that he would soon have to fly anyway, and produced the flash drive containing the screenplay, entitled The Four Fingers of Death. He fetched it out like it was just a trifle — without any sense of what the thing meant to me.
“One of us goes away with the prize,” Tyrone said, “and one of us goes back to the airport, and flies on to, uh, Dayton.”
“Well, I want to say,” I told him, “that this has been a very agreeable transaction.”
I sure could use a beer…
Me, too, but we can’t stop now.
I bet there’s one in the kitchen.
What I was, in fact, feeling then, I think I should say, was some apprehensiveness. I didn’t want the struggle over the script to be over so quickly. Now that the attention, whether good or ill, that I had commanded during the plot against the McClintock card was about to come to its end, what to do? Thus I felt a need to keep Tyrone from exiting the Ho Chi Minh café. Suddenly, I was willing to do whatever needed to be done, for example, some gentle prodding in the direction of a drink. Did he want a drink? No, he no longer drank. Just one more cup of hickory coffee substitute? He didn’t think so. Well, then, I asked Tyrone, had he ever considered exactly what the arm represented? In The Crawling Hand? Had he ever considered that the film was really about a certain kind of human labor? Had he considered that it represented the surplus value with which labor imbued the commodity, had he ever had any thoughts along these lines? Here it was, this arm, and it could do very little but grasp and choke. Maybe, I told Tyrone, the arm represented the alienated labor that was the trade union movement being crushed, the beginning of the era of strikebreaking, the end of the influence that labor had had in the 1930s and 1940s; maybe the arm represented the end of that sense of community of workingmen and — women together, forging a nation.
And what about the cats at the end of the film? Had Tyrone heard about the cats? They offered the most difficult moment in the film for the casual interpreter. I found, I told Tyrone, as he fiddled nervously with his surgically implanted digital minder, as though he couldn’t be bothered to listen, the cats in film, the moments when cats just appeared by chance or were compelled (in some drugged state, no doubt) to perform for the cameras, incredibly moving. For example, Mrs. Hotchkiss had a cat in the film, I told Tyrone, and there was a very tender moment, after her death, when the sheriff was visiting her house, in search of leads, and he paused to scritch (the proper word, I believe) behind the ears of Mrs. Hotchkiss’s cat, as it stood on the counter, having its way with a saucer of dairy product. Okay! I told Tyrone. That’s one cat who appears in the film, Mrs. Hotchkiss’s cat, who stands in as a sign for wildness, the wildness that is often the necessary obverse of the civilizing impulse, correct? Cats are innocents, but they are also wild, I told Tyrone, and humans are crazy enough to believe that they can somehow control the wildness of the cats. This particular cat, who could just as easily run off, comes back to the house for handouts, and so it’s a complex image, this image of the cat in Mrs. Hotchkiss’s house; it’s a beloved cat, but then again, it could also be a cat that has somehow been attacked by the crawling arm. Because that arm has been crawling around the house, has been getting into all the shelves, into all the cupboards, into all the recesses that the cat gets into, and so there has been some kind of consorting between the arm and the cat—it has to be, I told Tyrone; it couldn’t be otherwise — and later in the film, the cat cries some strangulated cry (off camera) that leads one to suspect that the cat is now contaminated, but there is no definitive information on this point, I said, after which the scene relocates to the final chase between Paul and the sheriff (the latter of whom went on to appear in the popular Gilligan’s Island program), and Paul heads off, as if for the water, because all of this story takes place next to the ocean, that repository of North American mythologies, and maybe he intends to return the arm to the crash site of the capsule, or maybe he simply intends to fling it into the ocean, we don’t know, but we do know he ends up ditching his car in a junkyard, somewhere beside the sea.
In this spot, the arm is killed by Paul, though what it means to kill the arm is unclear.
It was an arm
Lying in the sand.
A human arm.
Which is to say: he puncture-wounds the arm a few times with a piece of shattered bottle. Why that is more effective in dispatching the entity than being blown up in a space capsule, as first befell it, we just can’t say, and why this subsequent “death” of the arm should have any impact on the space infection that is apparently manipulating Paul’s teenage consciousness, causing him to behave as if he has testosterone pumped by the gallon into his circulatory system, anyway, this is all beside the point, I told Tyrone. The point is that in the junkyard there are, as you’d expect, junkyard cats. There is no better place to see cats than in a trash heap, a junkyard, a resource-management site, both the little and the large, the slow and fat, the Manx, the tuxedo, the calico, the Abyssinian, the mau, the Maine coon. In this particular junkyard, the cats immediately begin wrestling with the arm. There’s plenty of meat there, I explained to Tyrone.
“They love that the arm moves and halts and wiggles its digits. This just makes the cats want to use their very primitive hunting instincts on the arm, and so the cats begin tearing into the meat on the arm, and it’s almost as if the film used genuine feral cats for this sequence, hungry ones, because they really fight with one another, and they really struggle to get the upper hand, so to speak. Maybe they glued some meat onto the rubberized arm, some tuna, for the cats to fight over.”
“Monty, I know this is important—”
“One more second, I have something to give you, but let me tell you about this last little bit, and then I will…”
His turn to sigh, a purely theatrical sigh — the one entitled Prima Donna.
“Why are the cats in the sequence? The next-to-last sequence in the film? Theoretically, we are only interested in the human characters. Right? We’re interested in Paul, and we’re interested in whether he’s going to recover fully from the affliction that has beset him. Why the cats? Are they meant to indicate that the infection from the arm is now loosed on the natural world? This reminds me—”
I began to warm to a subject that was important to me, namely the rivers of gore subgenre of horror films, so popular in the new millennium. Suddenly the only films that teenagers would pay to download were films that had bodies exploding everywhere, or various infections destroying various parts of bodies, and then there were zombies, no end of zombies, zombies chewing on other people’s bodies, zombies, zombies, zombies, and blood everywhere. Bodies profaned by cinema, disassembled, reassembled, augmented, sundered, and with blood on everything, like the gastronomic drizzle of nouvelle cuisine. It must have been, I told Tyrone, that the one business sector in the battered economy that still had earnings potential was the manufacture of theatrical blood, right? People were breaststroking in the stuff, and they were reaching out to grab lengths of intestine, trying to yank themselves out of the rivers of gore with the length of intestine, and they were using severed heads as footstools, all that kind of stuff. It was horrible, I told Tyrone. How much sweeter and gentler were the heavily symbolic films of the drive-ins, with their silly conceits and affectations, I Was a Teenage Werewolf and Creature from the Black Lagoon. The cats, I meant to say, were precursors of the rivers of gore imagery that was so essential in The Four Fingers of Death, namely the film, the remake, that I was soon going to undertake to novelize.