The Four Fingers of Death by Rick Moody Read Free Book Online Page B

he suggested the little spot up the block called Ho Chi Minh. On the way, I attempted to address his inquiries with respect to my endeavors as an artist. I admitted that I was not very good at ideas, else I would have written a lot more than I had written, nor was I good at getting ideas down. Normally when I had an idea it was a weak idea. Along these lines I kept monologizing. I could not keep myself from monologizing, especially since D. Tyrannosaurus had what the DSM-VIII describes as conversational pseudo-uremia , meaning that language is all but occluded in the individual’s larynx and then distributed behaviorally around the personality, with delusional overlay apparent in resulting grammatical malformations, and because I was sort of panicky about how D. Tyrannosaurus was going to respond to some of my observations, I felt that an avuncular chattiness would suit me fine. I remarked again that I had no actual ideas, that I had written some thirteen sentences in near upon seven years and that he didn’t want to know how much writing was required from which to excise the thirteen sentences, and, by the way, my wife was presently unconscious in a nearby hospital, having had both her lungs replaced, and because I had fallen far from my parents and cousins and other family and in-laws and had few or no vocational prospects, as far as I was concerned, the night could only grow darker.
The guy named after the Cretaceous reptilian carnivore fixed his wild, staring eyes on me, at which point he noted that he too wrote a little bit, and this I had already surmised because who else goes to those events? Only persons with the conversational pseudo-uremia and the aggravated hydrophobia with hygiene aversion , who are meant to be prescribed rather strong antipsychotic medications.
“And what is it that you write?”
“I cut a few words out of a book or a series of books. I paste these words down.”
“Paste them down?”
“I paste them down. Collage. They’re very short pieces.”
“How short?”
“Sometimes just a word or two.”
“And where do you get your ideas?”
Here he fixed me with a look of such desolation and loss that I don’t quite know how to describe it. The look that said all that was good in the world was false .
“… It’s the words that have the ideas. I just assemble.”
He’d been to graduate school , I learned, that waiting room of the bereaved. He’d been a champion of information systems, of certain unpopular byways of study, of ideas that made his thesis advisers dislike him. And anyway he preferred not to go to class, nor to appear in daylight, where the violent rays of the sun would reveal his, as he described it, dermal transparency . And then when he had left school, his particular interest there being the palindromic writings of a certain Belgian linguist, he became a conceptual artist for a while. In this period he lived in appropriated housing in a certain eastern city.
This was long ago, he reminded me, an era of lawlessness when it was possible to live outside the economy without surveillance. Utilities could be made to work for you. For free! This was before, well before, legalized information-gathering on all citizens. Pages were still stapled and copied at the copy shop. Concerts were performed with actual instruments. Cable and digital communications were fraudulently obtained. While living in the squat, D. Tyrannosaurus adhered to a twenty-five-hour diurnal unit, so that as the weeks wore on, he was happily alert while everyone else was asleep. Having achieved the maximum in temporal estrangement, D. Tyrannosaurus was then brought temporarily into phase. Not long after, there was the experimental diet of seven meals a day of one hundred and fifty calories each. He e-mailed it to the authors of faddish approaches to weight loss, hoping to cash in. D., as he said I might call him henceforth, insisted on sitting down for each of his seven meals. He preferred to chew each bite of food