The Four Fingers of Death (100 page)

He had good informants in local government; he had a politburo that made decisions in the absence of input from his father. This politburo included local judges, doctors at area hospitals, liberal clerics from the mosques, a librarian or two, a few university professors, representatives of the Union of Homeless Citizens, and his shadow, as Denny put it, a transgender activist called simply Lenz. Lenz would admit to a urethra, nothing more. Lenz had many strong opinions, and when Denny was unsure of something and was unable to satisfy the grizzled veterans of the movement who intended to take control of the
omnium gatherum
, he would more often just ask Lenz, who would sit down in an empty arroyo south of town, not far from the old airport, and wait. There were no chemical additives to the condition of Lenz. There was nothing that Lenz needed or wanted. Lenz just was.

The arm, Lenz explained to Denny, had tumbled into a deprived echelon of the community where it could injure many. Generally speaking, the community of Rio Blanco welcomed, accepted, supported outsiders, and, as a result, even a detached arm oozing interplanetary bacteria could still count on a few defenders. Unfortunately, the permeable and accepting portion of the community did not always take the best care of itself. It was underinsured, for example. It didn’t really take into account the dangerous situations in which it often found itself. A nugget of fool’s gold was enough to beguile the community. As in the case of a detached arm.

The jet packs had been Denny’s idea. He wasn’t living with his father anymore. His father was living in a shuttered auto body shop on the edge of town that he had refinished in dirt, topsoil, and fill, and it was here that his father had embarked on such profundities of meditation and inward seeking that he was, he said, not to be disturbed. Denny, having grown up in the magnetic center of the
omnium gatherum
, abandoned by a mother who moved back to New Delhi to take up the post of culture minister in one of the provinces of the Sino-Indian Economic Compact, no longer believed in the language of the
omnium gatherum
, no longer believed that when a man in middle age sat in an empty auto body shop for six months he communed with the great powers of the universe. And yet Denny
did
believe in the political and mercantile possibilities of the
omnium gatherum
, and he promised donors meetings with his father, and signed copies of books by his father, and he reserved bandwidth on the web site for the sharing of personal insights by major donors. This was good business.

He’d also come up with the NirvanaCam, which photographed his father’s meditation sessions for up to six hours a day. He had archived all of the meditating over the past two years, which basically looked like a guy with bad posture sitting until he slumped over onto his side. Denny hoped that his father’s dilated pupils and, on occasion, his needle tracks escaped notice.

And now a parable. Denny had once, as a boy, been encouraged to meditate with a paralyzed guru. This paralyzed guru had a reputation for holiness above holinesses; he was a man whose very word was enough to mobilize seekers, or at least that had been the case at one time. The guru had suffered a very serious ischemic event, perhaps from the drugs and the excesses. Suddenly, the holy man was all but entirely paralyzed. And while he could speak with a technological interface, he often chose not to.

Zachary Wheeler, who couldn’t effectively parent his teenage son, a boy whose very belief system clashed with the non-Western consciousness that Zachary had cultivated throughout his adult life, begged Denny to meet with the holy man. For a nominal fee, or for barter, or for transportation costs, or for payment in kind, or for favors in the afterlife, the holy man, now paralyzed, would turn up and make a few pronouncements in a synthesized voice.
Hello, Denny, I’m Robert, and even though you can’t see my mouth moving, it is indeed my mind that is constructing and refining these thoughts. We’re here today to try to exchange our realities. This is our goal. I’m going to show you how my being works, the reality of how I use this body now, how I have decided to consort with the people who help to look after me. It is, you might be surprised to find, possible to experience my condition as a sort of freedom, no matter how it may seem, and that’s what I propose to teach you today. In return, as is the way of things, you are going to show me your reality. The joy and the resourcefulness of youth. I welcome learning about you. For the record, I had to work up this speech back in my room, so I’m not going to go on at any length now. Let’s just try and sit for a little while, and then when we’re done you can tell me a few things about yourself, the things I cannot learn just from being here with you. I’d like that. Okay, first try to find a comfortable seated position
.

But how long was it going to last? Denny wanted to know. How long would he have to sit still? The paralyzed man, once the handlers scuttled out of the meditation room at the ashram, fell silent, and because of the ischemic event, the paralyzed man certainly didn’t
move
. Some goo, it seemed, ran out of the corners of his eyes, because he wasn’t very good at blinking, and there was, now and then, some drool, but mostly he didn’t move. And there was no sound now, no sound but a low-frequency hum, which was probably a swamp cooler next door, or there was the occasional muffled footfall in the hallway, or the rattling of the rice paper dividers that sequestered the two of them into this infernal cell. Time seemed to hover, and then time drew to an inscrutable halt. Maybe there was a little bit of breathing from the paralyzed man, and then on occasion Denny heard his own anxious breathing, and he felt a mild fluttering in his eardrums, and then, in due course, an absolute boredom overcame him. A crystalline and highly condensed boredom. It was with a sort of irritation that he considered the juxtaposition of boredom and enlightenment—maybe this juxtaposition was essential to the people who reveled in enlightenment, that unquantifiable thing that
didn’t know what it was
, just as this juxtaposition was also essential to those who were certain enlightenment was passive nonsense that allowed arms traders and transnational oligarchs to seize for their own the ground underneath the meditators, the cloaks belonging to the meditators, the food that the meditators were going to eat when they broke their fast, the confederates of the meditators, and, finally, the bodies of the meditators themselves. Denny’s boredom and uncertainty about the paralyzed man grew until he wasn’t sure if the paralyzed man was awake or not, and for a long spell he could do nothing but watch a spider in the corner of the room; he attempted to count the gossamer threads of its arachnid lattices in the dusty sunlight of the cell in which he found himself, wondering when the spider would cross the room and climb the craggy face of the paralyzed man, and when he was finished with this spidery fantasy, when there was no other thinking to be done, Denny became convinced that he was dead, that the paralyzed man was dead; maybe he, Denny, had somehow killed the paralyzed man, maybe his disgust for enlightenment, for the trappings of the
omnium gatherum
and all of its kind, had killed the paralyzed man, maybe he, Denny, gave off some kind of force field of worldly hate that slew enlightenment whenever it turned up, and this gave way to some further anxiety that he, Denny, might be dead as well, the exchange of information, the sharing of
realities
advertised by the paralyzed man’s prosthetic voice, somehow involved a transmigratory exchange; the paralyzed man was attempting to
swap
bodies with him; the paralyzed man was some kind of incubus who intended to suck the vital juices out of him, this was Denny’s further anxiety, and what he had carelessly believed to be delusional crap in the first place, the bunk of enlightenment, was now an attempt by the paralyzed man to lay hold of Denny’s young, virile body and to swipe it, and once he, Denny, was sure of this, he decided he needed to kill the paralyzed man if he, the paralyzed man, wasn’t dead already, because it was either kill him or be inhabited by him, and if you meet a paralyzed Buddha in the meditation room, one who drools, be sure to strangle him, because there wasn’t room enough in this adolescent for the both of them, unless the paralyzed man was already dead, but how could he verify if the paralyzed man was dead, if he, Denny, was not supposed to move in order to get a better look? Could he hear the breathing anymore? He didn’t think he could hear the breathing! He could feel the paralyzed man’s soul knocking at the doorway of his own, he was almost sure of it; the silence was so silent that you could just about hear such a thing, and he could feel that though he was young and physically strong, he was not strong in his heart, whatever
heart
meant, which was hard to figure when you really thought carefully about it; there was not enough self in himself to repel the paralyzed man, whose spirit fluttered from corner to corner of the room like laundry in a gale, and the meditation went on like this for some time, though how long was unknown, maybe five or six minutes, maybe ninety seconds, until Denny knew he was going to leave. Buddha was an incubus, and Denny didn’t give up his corpuscular self to incubi, and he saw how the Buddha intended to enter him through his mouth, through his already receding gums, intending to inhabit him, intending to seize control of him, and this was the first of the many visions that Denny had (and what he eventually did, though it took a long time, was wait for the holy man to begin to snore, and when the snoring began, Denny bolted), all of which were visions that were critical of the precepts of the
omnium gatherum
, all of them parricidal, and this was why he went to college and studied business administration, because he didn’t care about the precepts of the
omnium gatherum
, he thought that the
omnium gatherum
was just some kind of protein deficiency. He figured if he had to inherit something from his father, who spent his days nasally inhaling OxyPlus and trying to seduce women on role-playing sites, he’d inherit an economic powerhouse, and he would
monetize
it.

Admittedly, this was hard to do with an organization that was radically opposed to the exchange of currency. He had to do whatever he could to avoid currency, or else risk diluting the
omnium gatherum
brand, and so he took care to spawn a brisk exchange of favors and influence; likewise he insured that every opportunity to patent and to advertise be pursued, for example, the web site that catalogued
apocalypsis
(his idea), where there was a discreet banner advertising for services that were aligned with the
omnium gatherum
, aura readings, colonic cleansing, and so forth. Denny also accepted administrative aid from alternative-lifestyle theoreticians, or from people on their staffs. The interactive multiplatform text that was generated from the accounts of the apocalypse, that was copyrighted to the
omnium gatherum
, but Denny took 30 percent off the top of the organization’s take. Thank god
someone
in the organization had the sense to look after this stuff. Maybe his dad would have done so when younger, before the drug-resistant syphilis, but somewhere along the line his dad lost the thread. Denny didn’t know if it had something to do with his mother’s going back to India. She’d received funding from the Sino-Indian Economic Compact for a performance piece in which she kissed as many people as possible, upwards of several hundred a day, and she had brought this project, under the auspices of a museum in New York, to the fair shores of this second-rate superpower and had been filmed at great length walking across the country dispensing kisses, while trying to avoid the oral herpes virus, and in the desert Southwest, she found that Zachary Wheeler came through the line several times, even though the waits in Rio Blanco were sometimes hours long. Eventually, even though he invited her to kiss some constituents as part of an
omnium gatherum
roundtable discussion, and to discuss techniques of kissing (she preferred to graze a spot at the interstices of upper and lower lips), and the spiritual rewards of kissing, one thing led to another. Or this is what Denny’s father told him. Denny had never met his mother, who had denied the baby once it was born at the URB Medical Center, and after handing off the half-breed baby to Zachary, she returned to India to marry a shipping magnate, who probably knew nothing of the coast-to-coast juggernaut of kisses. She then took up her political position.

Zachary didn’t talk about the
mother
much anymore, didn’t talk much at all, and he seemed happy enough when Denny started mounting multimedia performances, or unlicensed outdoor gatherings without municipal approval. The
Apotheosis of the Arm
, which Denny had only just begun to understand to be the next phase of the
omnium gatherum
, consisted of a vision of the arm being fired in a jet pack high above the desert, in order to be incinerated, spectacularly so, such that a dangerous pandemic could be averted in a region already suffering with unemployment in the high twenties, a negative outflow of population to the tune of 10 percent per annum, and a very high rate of hospital admissions for drug abuse and overdose. Denny had seen the
Apotheosis of the Arm
while melting down the teddy-bear cactus out behind his condominium for water. This was long before the Mars mission reentry. Weeks before. The day was well over 115, and he wasn’t wearing a hat, and he had forgotten to tell anyone he was going for a walk, and maybe it was only natural that he would see the arm, crawling in front of him; maybe the arm
intended
to come to him. After he ran back into the house to fetch some garden gloves and a long-sleeved shirt, the arm was no longer to be found, nor were there any tracks that might have indicated the arm’s presence. But he had seen the arm, he knew he had, and he was trying to understand its profit potential, but in the meantime, he knew that the
Apotheosis of the Arm
had to proceed as many other
omnium gatherum
multimedia extravaganzas had proceeded, just like the release of the timber wolves. That had been quite a night, the release of the timber wolves. When the
omnium gatherum
learned that the prior releases of timber wolves had all ended in
death
, when local hunters took it upon themselves to roust the wolves, track them by helicopter, hooting as they blasted them, the
omnium gatherum
had mounted a large-scale reintroduction that was called
hunting the hunters
, with many volunteers cooperating to track the wolves and then to track the trackers. They released two hundred and thirty-nine wolves on that night.