The Four Fingers of Death (109 page)

Yes, there was something humiliating about the waste-containment systems, Noelle thought, and generally she avoided food and water before
omnium gatherum
events in an attempt to steer clear of the V-shaped bank of vacuum-containment modules. However, she’d noticed that it was precisely when you believed you wouldn’t have to relieve yourself that you found you needed to do exactly that, and, also, that if there was someone you didn’t want to run into, someone with whom you did not want, at all, to share a conversation of several minutes while wreathed in the earthy perfume of such places, you would
definitely
run into that person. The opportunity for humbling always lay right around the corner, and its perfume was cloacal.

And so this was where she ran into her coworker Larry. He was wearing a purple feather boa, and some cutoff shorts dyed black, and she could tell, almost instantly, that he was on some kind of hallucinogen, because in the half-light of the lamps by the vacuum-containment modules, she could see his monstrously dilated pupils. Moreover, when she spoke to him, there was a long delay in his reply, as if a great number of gears, and the little gnomes who turned these gears, had to be put into play for him to come up with the polite response. It seemed, at first, that he didn’t even recognize her, and they had to go around and around with the introductions.

“It’s me, Noelle. Your coworker. You see me every day?”

“I do?… Oh… hey… Noelle!”

“At the lab! I can’t believe you—”

“Noelle?” he said, as if testing out the syllables. “Noelle?”

“What are you doing here?”

“Noelle, that’s a woman I work with—”

She couldn’t figure out, at first, if this was an attempt at humor.

“—a big
omnium gatherum
person. I decided to come have a look.”

“Met anyone? Interesting, I mean. Talked to anyone?”

“Talked?”

“To anyone.”

“Oh, right. Yeah. I…”

“Listen, Larry, I’m wondering if it would be okay for me to change the subject and—”

“Did we have… a subject?”

“I guess we didn’t, really. The thing is, Larry, I brought Morton out here, according to Dr. Koo’s instructions, because we thought he’d be effective undercover, and he was just carried off.”

“Morton was…”

“Carried off.”

“Morton, the…”

“Chimpanzee.”

“Oh! Talking chimpanzee. Bad frigging temper.”

“These guys in wrestling costumes came by, and it was like they already knew who he was, and it was like they hog-tied him, and before I could even figure out what to do, he was carried off.”

“Excuse me for a second, Noelle.” Because one of the vacuum-containment privacy modules had opened up, and when opportunity presented itself, one had to grab it. The little privacy station seemed to belch forth a customer, a relieved customer, in this case a youngster, one of those tweenagers who went by the designation
board rat
, for the fact that he was basically surgically attached to a motorized board and had, moreover, brought the board with him into the privacy module, as if it were the board that needed to be evacuated. This
board rat
slunk out of the privacy module as though he didn’t want anyone to notice him and his stringy figure-eight earlobes, and indeed Larry didn’t notice him. Larry noticed only the open door, where he saw his salvation. “I’ll be right out,” he called over his shoulder, but Noelle knew that he wouldn’t be right out. He would be in there, in the vacuum-containment privacy module, for as long as it took for her to move on. The feather boa just wasn’t the kind of personal expression that Larry wanted to share, and he would stay in there, checking through the little two-way mirror, for as long as it took. Some parts of us (Noelle hoped to jot this down in her journal) were really only available to strangers. Should she wait? Should she go?

While she deliberated, the most demoralizing quadrant of the Valley of the Slaughtered Calf, a small group of
gunslingers
dressed in some of the props of the old American West, dashed into the V-shaped concatenation of privacy modules and began firing off their Tasers. No doubt they were heading for Old Rio Blanco, with the aim of obliterating some blotch of sunburned guys playing the roles of the Tohono O’odham or the Hopi, and it would all be very simulated and very childish, this reenactment of how the genocide was won, but it would be a fine prolegomenon for the explosive displays of the later evening.

There was such a fixation on Tasers at
omnium gatherum
. A number of kids had been Tasered at the last event, and when you bought your ticket through whatever rapacious Sino-Indian ticketing consortium furnished the tickets for
omnium gatherum
events, you signed an online agreement that indicated that you accepted the possibility of having a Taser or other nonlethal firearm turned on you. There was one kid, people said, who’d brought it on himself, because he was spouting some kind of pro-capitalist fulmination—
the banks were right that it is this kind of thing that has dragged down the country so that it is no longer able to package complex financial instruments on the world capital markets!
—shouting, shouting, shouting, and the guys with the Tasers, because it was always
guys
with Tasers, took it on themselves to render this kid prone. Unfortunately, it was a number of guys who all got the idea at roughly the same time, and the kid went down like the proverbial sack of Mexican taters, and there was a sort of mini-stampede of partygoers trying to flee the violence. After that, people with weapons were specifically asked to go to the Old Rio Blanco simulation arena, where there was a tent, more of a yurt, really, erected to minister to those with Taser burns or arrhythmias.

While Noelle watched, this posse of outlaws with Tasers turned their firepower on one of the privacy modules, where some poor sufferer of irritable bowel syndrome or similar ailment was just trying to get the problem behind him so he could go on to be entertained by floats and madness. This poor individual was not expecting at that moment to be subjected to neuromuscular incapacitation. But these guys were Tasering the outside of the privacy module, and if the poor sufferer touched any of the walls inside the module, he was getting a pretty intense charge right about now, perhaps even a
drive stun
charge, which is the setting that effects
pain compliance
, and sure enough, there was some screaming, and the door fell open, and out tumbled… a guy in a Mexican wrestling costume.

The Taser vigilantes fell on the Mexican wrestler almost immediately. They blasted away. If he’d been a piece of pork heavily infected with trichinosis, he’d have been rendered completely fit for human consumption, so overwhelming was the concentration of Taser power. In this instance, he certainly cohered with the
DSM-VIII’
s definition of
excited delirium
, in that he was in a known drug location, fraternizing with known purveyors of drugs, probably taking OxyPlus or polyamphetamines, and was an aficionado of Mexican wrestling—all of which added up to a much higher likelihood of ventricular fibrillation in the aftermath of Taser discharge.

“Hey, wait,” Noelle called out generally. “Do you know him? The guy in the costume? You know him?”

Everybody was wearing a costume. Easily half the people in the line for the privacy modules, and all the passersby heading to and fro, turned to respond to Noelle. But one of the pistoleros, the one with the eye patch, registered that there had been an inquiry, and he said, “Our thing tonight is that we’re chasing the Mexican wrestlers.”

“Do you know where they are?”

“What?”

“They abducted my friend. Morton is his name.”

The pistolero turned to his associates. “You guys, this lady says that the wrestlers kidnapped her friend.”

Protestations of outrage ensued,
we’ll get ’em, we’ll shoot them all down, there’s no excuse for these Central American entertainments
, and so on. Without giving Noelle much to go on, they all headed off at a trot (without actual horses) in the direction of the Old Rio Blanco stage set. The only felicitous development, right then, besides the fact that she no longer had to wait for Larry to finish in the privacy module, was to be found in the small army of voyeurs who were following the pistoleros at some remove, just for the sheer drama, some of them on bicycles and motorized skateboards. Above, a few jet packs. Noelle accepted an offer from a pair of twins who were riding a tandem bicycle. She rode in between, sidesaddle. And the greater distances of the desert—which on foot were unnavigable—became manageable, and soon they were heading into the swirling clouds of stampeding vigilantes. All of the
omnium gatherum
seemed to head off with them, like stars in an endlessly expanding firmament.

The rucksack that had the replacement arm had grown heavier and heavier in the time that Noelle had been carrying it alone, and this despite the fact that she realized she’d lost any number of other personal possessions. Her outfit was down to the bra (the shirt was a self-inflicted loss, but still), sandals, ripped shorts. The elastics had fallen out of her pigtails, and her headband had fallen off, and her hair was windswept, and her skin sandblasted, and she’d become another one of the desert rats in this pursuit of the arm. A dozen miles from the nearest shower.

The lights were extinguished in Old Rio Blanco, though it wasn’t quite yet the official blackout hour, and it occurred to her to wonder if, in the Old West, they’d confined their shoot-outs to daylight the better to see the targets, because if there were just gas lamps or candles back then, a lot of innocent bystanders were going to get filled full of holes, or, in this modern setting, were going to get laid out with neuromuscular incapacitation. Nevertheless, the stampede of freethinkers pulled up at the darkened burg of Old Rio Blanco, uncertain about how to gain admission what with the dark. Weren’t the lights
always on
in order to bilk any tourists who still came out this way? Noelle imagined that the Wheeler family would have settled this question beforehand, the question of Old Rio Blanco, and she was laden with an uncanny feeling, this feeling that there was something deeply wrong, that the
omnium gatherum
had been left too much to its own devices, as though it were the autistic progeny of contemporary American culture now released to do whatever it liked, to dash out its brains if it saw fit.

The buildings were all stage sets, yes, which meant they had only the front side. But in the moonlight the front side of everything looked ominous and forgotten, as though it had all been abandoned, as though the
idea
of simulation had been abandoned in favor of neglect. And yet the pistoleros entered that municipality with the kinds of whoops of mayhem that probably the bad guys had avoided back when Rio Blanco was a genuine outpost of the homesteaders, ringed on every side by restive native populations. The whoops were a cinematic invention, but in this case they effected the desired result.

The desired result was: that a veritable army of Native Americans, real or simulated Native Americans, and their Mexican wrestler compadres, appeared from nowhere, from out of the enveloping darkness, and beset the pistoleros. And then there was a whole lot of Tasering. It was hard to make out, in fact, who was holding what weapon and who was falling to the ground with neuromuscular incapacitation. The laughing and the cries of recognition and hilarity, they made it pretty difficult to sort out, and the farther that Noelle moved toward the framed-up simulations of Old Rio Blanco’s sets, the more confused and disoriented she seemed to become, spatially, emotionally, physically. Out of breath, uncertain about which direction was
out
, Noelle sat down on the front step of what appeared to be yet another filmic saloon. The windows were painted with fake lamplight—this she knew from a prior visit—but in the dark, these murals were just so much wood and plaster and nails. After watching some more young men race around shooting at one another, after watching the Native Americans overturn the historical record—so that almost all the cowboys, all the vigilantes, lay quivering on the dusty main street of Old Rio Blanco—Noelle realized that there was another bystander, another witness, sitting just down the step from her. One of the fraternity of Mexican wrestlers. He was outfitted, in fact, in red, white, and blue, with a cape, with a mask, with some fancy shoes that resembled the kind of flippers that he might have employed in a neighbor’s swimming pool. If she could have read dejected in the half-light, she would have said he was
dejected
, and whatever was his motivation, he had found that it was long since unaccomplished.