(urth) Short Story 66: Three Fingers

[Marc Aramini]

THREE FINGERS


 “Three Fingers” was first published in New Constellations in 1976 and is
included in T*he Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other
Stories.*


 SUMMARY:


 Michael Moss attempts to push Disney trinkets for a dime to a chubby boy
reaching through a school fence, then considers going to 44th street in his
size S pea jacket to try to sell his wares. He notes no black “Mickey
Mafia” cars following him, then hides from an approaching hearse. A stocky
women named June gives him a ride to the store, and he tries to sell her
inscribed Disney photos and celluloid figures. Most of his goods are
forged. The store is closed but he gets a ride back near his house on a
Triumph Bike from a couple named Harley and Amaryllis.


 He goes to eat at White Castle when he sees that the man at the counter
has beagle puppy ears rather than human ears, so he goes to the soda
fountain across the street to watch him.


 When he returns to his house he questions the “woman who [runs] the place”
about callers, and in his equipment filled room, once he puts on his home
made Mickey Mouse cap, he is accosted by Captain Hook, the Big Bad Wolf,
and the Wicked Queen. When he encourages them to take off their masks after
accusing them of being conglomerations of historical and mythical figures,
they are revealed to be paunchy businesspeople in suits. They attempt to
force candy in his mouth and nostrils, a suffocation through a surfeit of
sweetness. Most of the disjunction here occurs through the final line, when
it is revealed that someone is trying to force antipsychotic medication
down his throat with four/three fingers encased in white/red gloves.


 THEME:


 Here, Wolfe is playing with a few wonderful ideas – the obvious ones that
the Disney villains are far more historical and archetypal than their
actual surface identity – Captain Hook is every dark captain in history,
the Big Bad Wolf a remnant of a line of sinister far more bestial predators
going back to the wolf Isengrim, nemesis of Reynard the fox. To Michael
Moss, the horror of these characters looms behind their sanitized, cartoon
faces. Yet in reality, the corporate world has stripped them of their
mythic and historical power and turned them into the means of making a
large profit (ironically, something he is trying to do to them on a much
smaller scale) – thus, underneath the masks descended from legend we see
only corporate abuse … and historical symbols being trademarked as watered
down (or sweetened up) narrative property.


 DIAMONDS:


 Diamonds keep occurring as a description whenever someone reaches out to
buy Michael's goods in the story: “The little boy stretched out a hand,
thrusting his chubby arm though the diamond mesh of the playground fence” …
Later, when Michael tries to sell the figures in his cigar box to June, she
reaches out “plump, diamonded fingers.” It seems that everyone who reaches
out for his wares is associated with diamonds, though of course the first
is merely the shape of the fence. Michael's hands fidget to hide the hole
in his jeans. The final image of the story involves a hand forcing medicine
down his throat – certainly the medicine is also a poison as advertised for
destroying the interesting fantasy world Michael inhibits.


 AMBIGUOUS DETAILS:


 The overall message that companies like Disney to some degree represent
the cut throat consumer nature of profiting off old legends and
trademarking them in such a way that ideas which should be intrinsically
free are “owned” by unimaginative businessmen does not of course explain
the descent into insanity in the last several seconds (nor the disjunction
between four/three fingers - but I would like to think that we are counting
fingers and not thumbs, and that those administering the para-reserpine to
Michael are being viewed through his disjunctive double vision.)


 Michael Moss is obsessed with Disney and its characters as well, and
perhaps embodies the earlier ideology of Mickey Mouse and Disney before
consumerism and business sense created the “surfeit of sweetness” and
banality any sanitized vision of archetypes will create. He does seem to
regret inflation and his prices are so cheap that it harkens back to the
pre-inflation prices extent at the start of the 20th century.

It seems that Michael is trying to make a profit on the Disney images
just as much as the corporation is, albeit at a microscopic scale – he
relishes the attention he gets from them as something that makes him
“important”, but he sees the mythic importance of all the characters,
and even tries to assume the role of Mickey Mouse by putting on the
hat to confront the villains, though he does not prove up to the task.


 DATE:


 The story is set at a date sufficiently distanced from 1935 such that a
stout woman in a mink coat with two sons at Antioch college (ie – not
young) can speculate, “I didn't know they had plastic way back then,”
unaware of celluloid. This might be a 1976 kind of statement, though the
prices at which Michael is attempting to sell his goods seems ridiculously
cheap to modern eyes, and might even be set well past 1976. At 10 to 85
cents, even with modern inflation, assuming this was the seventies, he is
asking for the modern equivalent of perhaps 60 cents to maybe 6 dollars for
something that is over 40 years old in mint condition (even though he
manufactures them in his room – everything seems counterfeit in this
particular story).


 THE RESIDENCE OF MOSS:


 There is some hint that his “apartment” is a bit more like a hospital ward
than a living quarter:


 “The woman who ran the place where he lived said, 'Did you have a nice
walk, Mr. Moss?' ...

'You wouldn't let them in if they came, would you? I mean even if they knew
my name and said they were friends of mine. You wouldn't let them into my
room?' The woman smiled, smoothing her white dress with her hands, wanting
to be busy again.”


 Her white dress, wanting to be busy, and her responsibility for refusing
to admit people to the room all at least echo a medical set up. (Note that
she also fidgets with her hands here – they come up quite a bit in this
story).


 He supposedly has a Dremo Moto-Tool to create his miniatures and an
injection molding machine filling his room. He puts on his felt cap with
Mickey ears made from his father's skull cap to work, and at this point,
when he puts on the home made guise of Mickey Mouse, the villains come out.


 LITERARY AND CULTURAL ALLUSIONS:


 Besides Disney references, we have at least one other to contemporary
fiction:

“He thumbed for nearly an hour before a married couple named Harley and
Amaryllis gave him a ride back on their Triumph bike” refers to Richard
Hall's 1969 story “To Sport with Amaryllis” in which a square fellow named
Harley concedes to his wife Amaryllis' free love and progressive desires.
It was also published in the Orbit anthologies of Damon Knight.


 The title of that story comes from Milton's poem Lycidas, a lament for a
drowned friend, which begins:


 Yet once more, O ye Laurels, and once more

Ye Myrtles brown, with Ivy never-sear

I com to pluck your Berries harsh and crude,

And with forc'd fingers rude,

Shatter your leaves before the mellowing year.

Bitter constraint and said occasion dear,

Compels me to disturb your season due:

For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime

…

Alas! What boots it with uncessant care

To tend the homely slighted Shepherds trade,

And strictly meditate the thankles Muse,

Were it not better don as others use,

to sport with Amaryllis in the shade,

Or with the tangles of Neaera's hair?

Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise

(That last infirmity of Noble mind)

To scorn delights and live laborious dayes


 Interesting in light of its forceful fingers in the opening stanza, and
the concept that we do not just take it easy and enjoy life when goaded on
by something else that might cost us.


 THE PARARESERPINE


 Reserpine was once used in the treatment of schizophrenia and
hypertension, isolated from Rauwolfia Serpentina, the Indian snakeroot,
which had been used to treat insanity, fever, and snake bite for centuries
in India. One of its side effects can be nightmares and Parkinsonism (could
this be the flitting of his hands interrupting his gestures as seen in the
car scene with June?)

 Para as a prefix could mean many things, including alongside, near, or
synthesized. The idea that all of this is a psychotically induced
hallucination is certainly possible, especially in the fictional light of
Harley and Amaryllis and the businessmen in Disney disguises which resonate
with legendary villains and archetypes. The name Michael Moss makes him a
more rat like survivor trying to make a profit – in this case a scavenger
inspired by the increasingly sanitized Mickey Mouse.


 THE DISNEY FIGURES:


 Mickey Mouse Club photos for sale include Tommy Kirk and Annette
Funicello, and he tries to foist Pinocchio, Geppetto, Stromboli, and Snow
White collectibles on people. He forges their signatures on a counter top
and decorates the heart joining their names shield like with Ben Ali Gator
and Hyacinth Hippo (dancers from Fantasia) and a beribboned sailor cap for
a crest (I'm pretty sure that's Donald Duck's hat).


 He identifies Hook with pirates like Blackbeard and Barbarosa and Bligh,
the Big Bad Wolf as “the wolf of old europe, the wolf that tore the
sentries to bits in front of the winter palace at St. Petersburg. The wolf
that was killed by the invention of firearms like the great god Pan by the
coming of Christ. The wolf people now say never existed, and forget all the
stories. You are Baron Isengrim.” (He is referring here to the serf's
rebellion and roaming wolves after the death of Peter the Great in 1725 –
social upheaval and collapse, the failure of civilization to predation).


 The Wicked Queen becomes powerful and cruel women in power like Lucrezia
Borgia and Catherine De Medici and even Morgan le Fay, while our thin
scavenger selling forged goods puts on his cap and tries to assume the role
of Mickey Mouse.

IS THERE A FINGER CHOMP?

The motions of hands throughout are interesting, including the chubby
child's  hand reaching through the diamond meshed fence, the chubby
beringed hand of the woman June reaching for the Snow White replica, and
Michael's own: “All his gestures were interrupted by the desertions of his
left hand, which made quick trips to draw the torn cloth [leaving his knee
exposed] together again.” I have always thought that Moss acts to bite off
the finger of the villainous toon/executive, who has both real and mythic
identities, thus making the glove both white and red with blood, and
accounting for the different number of fingers, though the casual nature
that it strokes his face does not seem to support this reading:

“He tried to swallow it before she could get in another, and found that it
had become a red jelly bean too, and went down easily. 'What is it?' said
the man who had been Captain Hook. 'Synthetic para-reserpine,' said the
woman. 'I've had good luck with it on him.' She touched Michael's face with
a white/red rubber-gloved hand that had four/three fingers.”

  Of course, we also have the odd fact that Mickey Mouse and his crew only
seem to have three fingers and one thumb, and this might simply show the
transition from his interesting fantasy world of three fingered Disney to
banal reality … but note that the RED rubber glove has three fingers, and
not, as is typical in Disney, the white one. For this reason, I think the
final moment constitutes a pretty severe chomp, and that one way or another
Michael Moss doesn't live in reality, though his version of things might be
more interesting. Indeed, his violence might be able to make at least one
feature of the real world conform to the three fingered schematics of his
fantasy. If he is in a hospital all along, then these paunchy businessmen
assume one more identity: the nurses and caregivers “tormenting” him after
his walk.

RESONANCE WITH OTHER WORKS: I feel that what Wolfe is doing thematically
here, taking pop culture, and identifying its mythic roots while at the
same time making it all too ordinary, is exactly the kind of thing that
happened in “Thag”, where Henry Nailer, an ordinary father, is somehow
translated into a mythic fairy story and an ordinary man “becomes” Odin.
Here, in the imagination of a young boy, these corporate types become
figures of legendary villainy behind defanged children's masks.
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