Urth Net
Short Story 66: Three Fingers
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.