The Four Fingers of Death (74 page)

“Morton, would it be all right if I told you something that I’m going through right now? I know that you are not really going to have an opinion on this stuff, but there’s something going on at the
omnium gatherum
, which you know is this spiritual community that I’m involved with, and I just have a bad feeling about it, and I haven’t really told anyone about it. Because, you know, obviously, here at work, nobody believes in that kind of thing. They all think it’s pretty embarrassing. I just feel like I can talk to you about this stuff without feeling, you know, judged or something.”

It wasn’t until she began to tell him that she realized how much it had been bothering her, how with these alternative ideological systems, you know, the irrational thinking took place a little bit at a time. You didn’t know at first. You just woke up one day, assuming you could still wake effectively, assuming wakefulness was still part of your life, and upon waking you realized that you had gone further than you’d meant to go in alternative culture, and now you were far away, downstream, waving at your family, who stood on the banks. What she was trying to describe to Morton was the feature of the
omnium gatherum
known as
algorithms
. They had algorithms for everything now; they had algorithms for playing chess, they had algorithms for dating, they had algorithms to predict chaotic systems like annual rainfall and the apocalypse. People hooked up a bunch of mainframes, and they got into the business of forecasting, because that was the last part of the service economy at which NAFTA still seemed to excel. And there was a reason for that. The reason for that, she started telling Morton, was that NAFTA favored the eschatological. And the guys at the
omnium gatherum
, because it was always guys who ran these things (she told Morton), had realized there was a spot in the forecasting business model where no one had yet created a lively web presence (besides, what with the Futures Betting Syndicate, it was possible to make a market in the apocalypse).

And thus were born the
algorithms
. The
algorithms
were compiled from all the available statistical data on the end, which is not to say the likes of the Chelsea Clinton senatorial campaign, but the actual predictions of the End from all the ecstatic cults and the declassified intelligence reports. The
algorithms
, after the big economic collapses of the past twenty years, she told Morton, had become really pretty popular as a web site, although a lot of the traffic was said to be
ironic;
you know, the people visiting the site didn’t really believe that the End was coming, they just liked reading the updates and looking at the advertising.

There had been many reckonings of the End over the years. The way to increase market share as a splinter religion was to come up with an attractive idea about the End and to sell it hard. Probably you had to pick a time that wasn’t too far off, not unimaginably far off, like 2112 or 2345 or something, because no one who was alive now gave a shit if the End was going to be in 2345, because their great-great-great-grandchildren would have to worry about that. You had to pick a time that was pretty soon, and then you had to collect a lot of canned goods and other kinds of donations, but not weapons, because when you collected weapons, that attracted the attention of government agencies. You had to stockpile stuff, awaiting the End, and then when the End didn’t come, you had to retire quietly to a condominium somewhere with a nice climate. People were constantly using idiosyncratic calculus to recalibrate. And interpret. This was the word that they liked at the
omnium gatherum
.

“Look around you, Morton,” she said. “The world is composed of signs. People laboring in a sandstorm of significations. And it’s their job, they say, to interpret these signs. A bicycle painted white chained on a street corner with garlands upon the seat. No coincidence. The proliferation of coyotes in downtown Rio Blanco. Those are no ordinary coyotes, and they don’t have to do with habitat destruction or the gutting of the Endangered Species Act.”

And because of all this interpretation, and owing to the popularity of the
algorithms
, the men of the
omnium gatherum
had decided that the End was
now
.

“Morton, you know and I know that the End is mainly just a silly kind of marketing. It’s attractive because it means that you don’t have to make long-range plans for things, and you don’t have to worry about how you’re going to pay for your kid’s college education, any of that sort of thing. And you don’t have to worry about voting in the next election. The End is adolescent. It’s always teenagers, on harder drugs, not that I have any right to criticize drugs, but it’s always the teenagers who think the End is at hand. Still, you know what, it’s kind of scary when they say it’s
now
. When people you know socially, and maybe you slept with them once or twice, just to be nice, when these people you know socially are suddenly talking about the End, and it’s
now
. So the question is, Morton, do you think I should just pay no attention? Should I just say that these are my friends, or some of them are my friends, anyway, and they have some really strange ideas; what do you think? Is that the right approach?”

What I think, my darling, is that when I listen to you discourse on the affairs of the day, I am filled with a warmth. A warmth such as I have never known. We may have our ups and downs, and over the course of our association there have been times when you wore outfits that I didn’t entirely approve of. And after all you are human, you are the oppressor, but despite all these things, when you make yourself vulnerable to me in this way, when your face is open and full of a yearning to understand the rushing river of the world, then I feel a tremendous warmth in my breast. I could listen to you discoursing upon the laundry all day long, if that is all that is given to you as woman. I don’t care. The outside world, after all, is only available to me as a series of computer screens. I haven’t been outdoors in years. I barely even understand what outdoors is. I don’t know all the traffic, the people walking to and fro, and all the bicycles of this town Rio Blanco. But in this space there is a person who cares for me still. My parents are gone. And the monkeys in the cages down the hall from me are beneath contempt. I am alone in the world, and thus there is only you. Only you no longer treat me as so much humanoid meat, ready to be fed into the grinder. So tell me of the End, tell me of the Beginning, tell me of everything in between, which would be called, I guess, the Middle. Tell me of the Middle, and I will listen. I will listen even if you want to tell me about the state-sponsored lotteries or the gigantic algae bloom in the Gulf of Mexico. I will listen
.

She stared at him, she gazed upon him, he had the full extent of her gaze, as though she were looking into the window of his soul, now, and it made her tremble in a way that she hadn’t experienced with him before. It was like the knowledge of her own nakedness, this trembling. It was like phased withdrawal. It was like avian flu, the new mutated version. It was like something interpersonal, and not interpersonal hostility, but the other thing. She could see him mulling it over, too; she knew he was, even as she believed it was peyote or the afterburning of it. Morton was chewing oddly, as though he’d got hold of Larry’s nicotine gum, and it seemed almost hilarious, but she resisted the desire to laugh at this gum-chewing repetition of Morton’s—laughter was species-centric behavior, it was narcissistic, unless it was the laughter of recognition, of compassion, of likeness, and without laughing she realized that Morton was trying to say something to her, and the fact that he had no real idea as to the use of his vocal cords was a genuine impediment, not to mention fine motor control of mouth and lips and tongue. It was as though a stroke victim or a coma sufferer had clawed his way back from the lower depths and was attempting to use his slack musculature. He chewed and he chewed, and then, as though he were somewhat informed on the physiognomic reasons he would never be able to talk, he put his lips together, and with a momentousness that would transport Noelle leagues beyond where she was when she parked her car out in front of the lab that morning, Morton, the chimpanzee,
whispered
, “You know, I am so fond of you.”

There were only two kinds of things in the desert, the things that were dying and the things that were surviving against all odds. The dead and dying things were all around you. There were always the saguaros flopped over and scorched, only the struts that once improbably supported them left visible, or the yellowed prickly pears, or the desiccated tumbleweeds rolling past. Smaller rodents were always being plucked from their holes by passing hawks. Rattlers were always lying in wait. And it wasn’t that infrequent, especially in Rattlesnake Canyon, out by where the mining claims were tilled, on the land owned by the government, that you saw a dead body or two, or what remained of a dead body. You saw the bodily parts that hadn’t been subjected to the rigors of the food chain, the bobcats or the coyotes or the pumas, and then the raptors, the crows, and then the bugs, the waves upon waves of bugs, and the elements themselves (which were last in the process of desiccation, but which were the most sustained, the way Vienna Roberts saw it). The dead bodies upon which these elements performed their sanding and varnishing were usually the border jumpers, that was obvious, but there were regular people from Rio Blanco too, people who lost their way, and who were out walking, trying to get away from it all, from the manifold hardships of the day. They didn’t prepare. There were pirates on the interstates now too, or highwaymen. Vienna had always thought that highwaymen were guys you heard about in old country-and-western songs, but maybe they were more than that. Maybe they were fringe elements from the Union of Homeless Citizens. Grizzled men who thought that the approach of people like her parents was too
gradualist
. These grizzled men, who were well acquainted with violence and intimidation, referred to her parents, and bleeding-heart organizers in general, as
stationaries
. Maybe these grizzled homeless men killed
stationaries
and dumped their remains out in the desert, like on this stretch of road that ran all the way out to the coast, if you were willing to go that far. Toward Gila Bend, and farther. The bodies were picked clean before they even had time to rot, as the great trucks rumbled past on the underpopulated interstate. Death was what made sex in the desert so compelling, so taboo, so irresistible to Vienna Roberts. She liked to say so anyway. They had the Pulverizer in the back of the van and were driving west in silence, she and Jean-Paul Koo, and there was something spooky about it too. When you couldn’t see anything but cactus clear to the horizon, that was when she liked to stop. Take the interstate forty miles or so to the dirt road and then the dirt road to the primitive track, and then get out and walk. By then usually she was already feeling shivery, like the only smart thing to do would be to take her clothes off, or at least the parts of her clothes that were in the way. And they had to try to wheel the Pulverizer out too. With the rubber glove on the butt plug part of it. Then they had to try to hook up all the electronics and hope that the electronics would work even though there had been a lot of sandstorms recently. The sand could really jam up the working parts. She wondered if Jean-Paul had a hard-on, and she kept trying to look over at him in the passenger seat to see if she could tell. He wasn’t arranged the right way. It just really wasn’t that sexy when she would go to all this trouble to try to get him out into the desert, because she did it all
for him
, even if he didn’t know it or didn’t really care, she did it all
for him
, and when he just wasn’t all that into it, you know, it was sort of not sexy. It was like Jean-Paul just didn’t want to have sex at all anymore, or he wanted to watch porn for ten minutes, bang away, and then roll over and go to sleep. She felt like hominid sex was a
story
that you told. It had to have all the things in it that a proper story had in it, like big uncertain passages, reversals, spots in which the villains became heroes, vice versa. You just couldn’t do that in the time allotted by Jean-Paul’s porn collages, which he liked to load onto the wrist assistant and watch while he was doing other things, like calling the bank or something. It wasn’t sex as much as it was the
cold cuts counter
at the supermarket. She still remembered what they were like at first, when she was trying to get him to have sex. Which he did like maybe once a day tops. He didn’t even want to have sex in the car at all. There were so few cars these days that it was easy to see if there was something going on in the car, and it was, you know, pretty dangerous, with the possibility that you could run off the road and into the washes, where you might be killed or eaten by coyotes.