The Four Fingers of Death (101 page)

Denny needed to explain it all to his father, even if the invitations had already gone out, because it was never effective to mount large-scale
omnium gatherum
activities without telling his father first. His father had some kind of sixth sense for these types of maneuvers, for the ebbing and flowing of institutional power, and would quickly rouse himself from semiconsciousness to complain and to condemn.

Denny took Lenz with him, because Lenz was the heart and soul of the operation. Lenz had a rice cooker, and Lenz knew how to read tea leaves. Lenz had a computer program that threw joss sticks automatically, and, first thing in the morning, Lenz read out the day’s prospects, almost always good. The Fourth Morning of the Pestilence, Lenz called and woke Denny. Denny’s cranially implanted communications time-saver stabbed him in the scalp to wake him.

“The wise man prepares for the end of everything that is, dancing.”

When Denny affixed the external screen attachment onto his face, he saw Lenz’s sallow visage, behind ringlets of dyed blue hair. What did Lenz’s mother think?

“Didn’t you do that one recently? Can’t be the end of everything every day.”

“I’m just the messenger.”

“We do have to go see the old man.”

It was Lenz’s idea that they add the clothing-optional clause to the invitation. Though Denny liked seeing a lot of naked people around as much as anyone else, it would be easier to evaluate the medical condition of the participants of the
omnium gatherum
if a lot of them were dressed in skimpy rags. If there were bodies
disassembling
, as Denny had heard, then he wanted to know ahead of time, before the crowds became too excited and too intoxicated. They talked through this piece of the festivities on the way over to his dad’s place.

The route to the auto body shop was along Grant Avenue, a major thoroughfare in Rio Blanco until the Minimum Wage Riots of the first decade of the century, when people from South of the Border, who were by that time more than half of the population in Rio Blanco, had protested the repeal of the minimum wage by blowing up portions of one of the town’s major roads. Grant was rutted with gigantic sinkholes, some of them going down hundreds of feet into the aquifer that had once lain beneath this desert. Easy to collapse. Grant was therefore considered a dangerous route across town. Denny and Lenz rode motorized skateboards, even though Denny was keen to try the jet packs he had procured from a hobbyist out by the lowlands where the event would take place.

They had effectively blanketed the community with small plastic arms announcing the performance, and you could tell because they saw them by the side of what used to be Grant Avenue. It was as if some sweatshop from the Sino-Indian Economic Compact had invaded Rio Blanco and air-dropped little arms out of a biplane,
Good people of America, please repair to your homes. Our only quarrel is with your government. We apologize for the lead-based paints on this toy, and for the fact that many young persons were injured in its manufacture
.

The paradox of modern Rio Blanco was that it could be a relatively populous urban region, and still you could be standing in the center of town, as Denny and Lenz were, and see
no one
. The town part of Rio Blanco was the part that was no town at all, and if they had been breaking and entering, they would have done so with impunity. No one would have found the wrack and ruin of their mayhem for days afterward, if ever.

Upon their entrance, Zachary Wheeler stumbled to his feet, awkwardly, his hands and feet and hair covered with dirt. He squinted against the sunlight that was allowed into his lair.

“Pop, you remember Lenz.”

“You have something planned for later this week,” Zachary said. “And you…”

In the corner of the room, the workstation that Zachary used for his complicated role-playing assignations flickered in the dark, as if scrolling through the news sites of the day according to an algorithm. Denny felt what he always felt around his father, some desire to protect Zachary from himself, and a desire to push him down on the ground and administer a number of swift kicks to spleen and pancreas. There was probably a woman, or a number of women, and maybe a few automated comfort programs, beseeching him on the computer all at once, and none of them knew who Zachary Wheeler was, or that there were people in the Rio Blanco area who revered Zachary Wheeler and would have followed him anywhere, down into the center of the world, if necessary. And here he was in the auto body shop, shooting up and trying to get it on with the women of the web.

Denny said, “We’re keeping you up-to-date.”

“What’s the scale of your—”

“A couple thousand, maybe more.”

“Something’s—”

“There’s trouble—”

Lenz added, “Federal agents already in the city.”

“Always with the federal agents…”

“We’re going to try to shoot the arm back into—”

His father lurched unsteadily forward, only to wobble against the plaster, collapsing into a seated posture.

“The arm?”

“There’s this arm.”

Zachary asked, “Do you have it with you?”

“It’s with our people, Pop. It’s safe. We’re trying to keep it in a meat locker where possible. It’s kind of decaying a little bit. It smells really bad. Do you want to come out and watch? I got jet packs.”

“Jet packs?”

“The telemetry is much more impressive now. It has self-guiding properties. Now you can easily use one to climb up over the city.”

“How far do you plan to shoot the… thing?”

“We’re going incinerate the arm with laser-guided missiles. We’ve got some sitting on the top of the pass over the canyon.”

Lenz said, “It’s from next door over in space. From Mars.”

“The whole thing, I don’t know, maybe you’re not thinking big enough.”

“How much bigger do you want me to think? We’re having a major pyrotechnical display on the outside of town, where we’re going to rid the town of this major pandemic, this thing from outer space, and we’re going to celebrate space while we’re at it, and there are a number of angles I’m pursuing in terms of making sure that we are getting high-profile attention, some broadcasting royalties. We got an in-kind donation from a toy-manufacturing facility South of the Border who, uh, designed this little toy arm for us—”

“I helped with the design,” Lenz said.

“You made toy arms.”

The thing that made Zachary so threatening was that he lived the
omnium gatherum
story, and as a result he could always see it ramifying before him. It could go this way, and did, and then at the same time there might be a completely different set of possibilities, and it seemed that all these possibilities were simultaneous, and though it would be nice, would be more convenient, if there were just one story, just one
omnium gatherum
, Zachary Wheeler knew that there was not. It was almost as if the
omnium gatherum
, Denny thought, when confronted with his father, had no single, indisputable meaning. It was more like something that could be claimed by anyone. And Zachary’s approach, which was perhaps what had brought him to this bleak spot, centered on the possible interpretations. This was why Zachary, in the end, didn’t much care if his son treated the
omnium gatherum
as a possibility for copyright, trademarking, or branding. That was one way of defining the
omnium gatherum
. His father’s was the madness that resulted from hearing
all
the voices. His father believed all the clamoring voices, with their insistences and their tragedies.

“What about City Hall?” his father said.

“City Hall?”

“Who’s going to be looking after City Hall?”

“Who’s usually looking after City Hall?”

“The police,” Zachary said, “are going to be looking after you, policing your event. So that means—”

“Means what?”

“Means that we could take control of City Hall. Just keep a detachment of people separate, and when the time comes, you escort the mayor from City Hall, take him to the site of the festivities, or to a black site, and then you leave a few guys behind. In City Hall.”

Denny had so much to learn.

Among the many unflattering stages of
M. thanatobacillus
infection, according to the observations of Dr. Woo Lee Koo, as he bore witness to these in his son, was a stage in which the infected party behaved like a great ape. Indeed, Jean-Paul, his legitimate son, his biological son, had begun exhibiting many of the characteristics of Morton, his adoptive son—uninhibited scratching, chest-thumping, grunting, aggressive and childlike behavior, public masturbation. In fact, his son seemed to go about with an unconcealed erection whenever he was not resting. Jean-Paul seemed to feel it appropriate that he should rub himself erotically against any surface available—the side of an armchair, a large appliance. The sleek curves of an old-fashioned electric-cell automobile out front of the unit also proved very useful in this regard, even if the quarantined Jean-Paul should not have been outside. When Koo had attempted to get him up and around for this brief interval of fresh air, Jean-Paul had a spontaneous orgasm just from lying on the front hood of that automobile. Soon after, he began spontaneously hemorrhaging from his eye sockets and his ears, but this didn’t inhibit sexual feeling, as Koo dictated in his notes that evening:
The patient seems to have very little pain. I notice considerable distension in the patient’s genitals. Perhaps the infection itself is somehow engorging the genital region. Would orgasm as experienced by the patient result in a new route of contagion? That is, does the infection have a venereal route of transmission, in addition to its blood-borne routes? This has not been much considered by the medical community thus far, but it seems important, especially as the patient is clearly experiencing erectile sensation of a pleasurable sort
.

Koo made sure to install cameras in the bedroom of his son. The erotic frenzy of tertiary infection would have challenged any dispassionate medical practitioner, even more so if the viewer happened to be the father of the infected party; nevertheless, the cameras enabled Koo to watch Jean-Paul around the clock, and to see the frustration, the wordlessness, the disinhibition, and the desperation that the boy was exhibiting as he began to understand that his cognition, indeed, even the ability of his larynx, pharynx, and vocal cords to produce sound, was failing with each passing hour. Jean-Paul had taken to pointing at things when he needed them, and much of the time, in fact, he was simply pointing at Vienna Roberts, his frequent visitor, and making sounds that could only be interpreted as weeping. Koo the Elder, who was administering intravenous antibiotics around the clock, found himself in a constant state of conflicted sentiment—the scientific interest of the case was overwhelming. But his son was withering before his eyes.

And this was not the only conflict. At some point soon, Jean-Paul, his father recognized, would be, if he was not already, clinically dead, and yet still mobile. The inexplicable course of the infection was now known. Jean-Paul would have no recognizable pulse, but would still be alive for several days, maybe even more. At this point, in a postmortem state, his son’s tissue would be of paramount use for medical experiment, not to mention, though Koo was not a person who much mentioned these things, that he could not bear what was to come. Koo had, by staying in touch with some of the other medical researchers in the area, Lecompte et al., learned that there were now upwards of twenty advanced cases of
M. thanatobacillus
quarantined in the hospitals of the region. Several more among medical personnel who had become infected through ignorance of the danger or through unsanitary practices. Preventive vivisection of the advanced cases was now common, and there were therefore, in various laboratories, pieces of several persons, citizens of Rio Blanco, who had come in contact with the crawling hand and had contracted its pathogen. And this had all happened so quickly! In just four days! It was undeniable, how the pathogen thrived in the warmer Earth climes, with deadly results. Some of Koo’s colleagues, friends, enemies, acquaintances, were already subjecting the extremities of patients—here a toe, here a human ear, here a severed head that still managed to make the most hideous caterwauling (according to the clinic on the South Side)—to various kinds of tests. But Koo himself remained convinced that none as yet had attempted to perform any large-scale experiments relating to the ongoing problem of
reanimation
.