The Four Fingers of Death (106 page)

“There’s one there.” She pointed. The chimpanzee looked out the window of the departmental van, and he saw what looked like a surface-to-air missile go horizontal, blazing over Rio Blanco Peak.

There were a lot of reservations, safety concerns, from an air traffic point of view, about the jet packs. In Rio Blanco, in the early years of the jet pack fad, six or seven guys got sucked into the backdraft of jet planes. Imagine, Noelle told Morton. You’re in a window seat, and you’re looking out through the double panes, and you see some guy in a jet pack, with a pair of goggles on, waving. The plane is coming in to land, and this unregulated jet pack enthusiast is gesturing at the plane, taking his hand off the throttle, as he tries to veer away, and then this guy is getting inhaled right into the back of the engine. The desert, the expanse of rose-tipped mountaintops, crimson cloud cover on the horizon, neglected citrus groves, all laid out before you, and then there’s an explosion of food-processed human parts spraying out the back of the jet, down the side of the fuselage, onto the desert below.

Probably, this was why the jet pack designers were given notice that they were
not
to equip their jet packs with enough liftoff to get the machines over a hundred and fifty feet in altitude. Not much higher than the highest building in the vicinity. The same difficulties were being played out in all the cities of the West, cities designed for the automobile. Of course, there was a
green
aspect to the debate over the jet pack. It had to do with the kinds of fuel that were required. Any kind of natural gas, or petroleum-based product, or solid rocket fuel, that kind of stuff was just prohibitive, especially if all you were going to do was help some teenage kid get to the top of the Catalina range without having to hike.

It was the hydrogen reaction that really allowed the jet pack market to
take off
, and it was some old countercultural octogenarian in northern California who came up with the technical solution, the hydrogen-fueled jet pack. You didn’t need that much in raw materials, and you were giving off eco-friendly exhaust—water, which is no problem in the desert. So what was the problem? The initial models cost in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, which made for a rental market, initially, but as always with this stuff, you know, prices came down, especially when the Sino-Indian conglomerates got involved in manufacture. Also, it was obvious that the jet pack was good for border jumping, for felonies great and small, and so law enforcement had to get jet packs too, and anyone living in rural
anywhere
had to get a jet pack, and if it weren’t for the fact that most people just couldn’t afford them, then probably everyone would have one.

It’s sort of hypocritical
, Noelle told Morton, the way that people in the
omnium gatherum
, who were supposed to be all back to the land and into inaugurating the new dark ages, all of that stuff, were completely obsessed with getting jet packs, because jet packs were the symbol of old outlaw culture. Like with old-fashioned motorcycles, jet packs were unsafe, they were dangerous, and they used up huge amounts of fuel. “Worth it?” Noelle asked Morton. “People can get anywhere they want now pretty fast, but it’s once or twice a week that you’ll see somebody fall out of the sky, like they’ve been picked off, and I guess some of them
have
been shot, or Tasered, and then the body parts just get flattened on one of the highways or service roads.”

Perhaps their price was the best thing about them, Noelle continued, because it kept the jet packs out of the reach of the drunken and most careless segment of the population. The federal, state, and local regulations didn’t work. What would be more attractive to rebels without causes, loaded to the tips of their dendrites on OxyPlus or polyamphetamine, than the idea of flight? They were all would-be Icaruses, heading straight for the sun.

“And in a way, that’s sort of what we’re getting tonight. There are always all these different
mythemes
, you know, ideas, stories, colliding at any
omnium gatherum
event. It’s supposed to be tribal, there’s supposed to be dancing, but what there is instead is a bunch of middle-aged guys trying to loft themselves up over the desert at the same time, and although none of them
says
he wants to be the guy who goes the very highest, higher than all the other jet packs, it’s like that anyway. There’s always a competition among these guys who had a couple of good ideas about counterculture a million years ago and now all they have is liver damage, or they are on their third case of melanoma, and big patches of their face have been removed, and nobody wants to have anything to do with them, except at
omnium gatherum
, because there they can wear a
mask
. They can go on another thirty years like this.”

“What does it have to do with—”

“And they’re going to be the ones who launch
the arm
. They’re going to put the arm into a jet pack and fire some missiles at it in order to incinerate it completely. They’ve got some kind of remote-controlled launch pad. And they’re going to launch in the middle of some big pyrotechnical display. Or I guess that’s the idea. Always with the fireworks. So juvenile.”

Traffic on the mountain pass had come to a halt, and standing on the side of the road, looking ornery, looking as though they reeked with some immemorial death musk, were the javelinas. The sage and prickly pear growing there kept them fat and happy. It was as if the javelinas were
watching
the cars, waiting for the convoy to inch by so that they might resume ownership. Their tusks had a Holocene menace. They waited as the traffic over the pass snaked its way through a dozen or so switchbacks; they waited amid the encampments of migrants, the undocumented trying to make their way south to Nogales. They waited through the fellow travelers, middle-class kids wearing all the right footgear, the goggles, the highly reflective outerwear, all of them foaming at the mouth with whatever cocktail of medications they had managed to ingest. Noelle watched, too, as a helix of turkey vultures next appeared, in the last of the light, and began to swirl above the action, waiting for the mortality on those sandy shoulders to reveal itself.

“Our plan,” Noelle said. “Let’s see. Let’s discuss our plan. Do you want to discuss our plan? Do we have one? Our plan is first for you to contact Dr. Koo, tell him that we’re almost near the event site, and then our plan is to try to make contact with some higher-up types at the
omnium gatherum
, some of whom I know a tiny bit, like Denny Wheeler, and then we’re going to try to get as near as we can to
the arm
, and somehow we’re going to try to substitute another arm in its place. How’s that sound?”

It was fair to say, she acknowledged, that she not only wasn’t sure she could follow through on the plan, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to. She believed in the
omnium gatherum
, if it was possible to believe in something that was so riddled with contradictions, something so earthly and finite, something so profligate, and if she occasionally had a few critical things to say about them, that was only in the spirit of loyal opposition. She didn’t even know, really, what Koo wanted to do with the arm, in terms of his ongoing experiments. He said that it was important to secure the arm to keep it from spreading its menace across the populace, and especially in a big group like the
omnium gatherum
, but it was clear that this was not all he was after.

“You have an arm to substitute?”

“I do,” said Noelle.

“Which you got where, exactly?”

“Anatomy classes at the medical center. They’re disposing of those cadavers all the time. Dr. Koo has special privileges where cadavers are concerned, because he has an endowed chair, and if Dr. Koo needs an arm for an experiment he’s doing, then no one is going to tell him he can’t have an arm. So one of the anatomy classes…”

“They—”

“Cut the arm off especially for us. But we had to remove the finger ourselves.”

“You removed the middle finger yourself.”

“I know how to cut at the knuckle.”

“What did you do with the finger?” Morton asked.

“It’s in the rucksack with the arm. I guess I should throw it out somewhere. But you can’t just throw a finger anywhere.”

“I could do it for you, if you like.”

“That’s why I have the windows open. Well, plus, I don’t believe in air-conditioning. Air-conditioning is when a nation becomes weak. Decadent. This arm is only a little decayed, though. That’s the good news. From what I’ve heard about the contagious arm, it’s more than a little decayed. You know, the hardest part of this whole thing was finding a wedding ring that would fit properly on the substitute arm’s hand.”

Maybe Morton had gone wistful and sentimental over the mention of a wedding ring. She couldn’t be sure. Over the period of caring for Morton, she’d decided that postures and expressions that seemed precisely human didn’t always mean what you thought. Sometimes chimpanzees pulled faces that seemed gentle, sympathetic, and then they tried to club you to the ground. Morton was probably just looking at the valley below them, nothing more, because now they had come to the saddle of the mountain pass. She swore you could see Venus on the lip of the night sky, because the sun’s last few beams were disappearing behind the peaks in the west. And in front of them, in the broad expanse of the valley, was the answering light, the nation-state of
omnium gatherum
, which seemed to have erected instantly a fairground, or an amusement park, or a tent city, all these kinetic forms intent on proving that the sun revolved around the Earth.

“I got it at a pawnshop,” Noelle said, “in case you were wondering. Were you wondering? Is there something wrong?”

“I’ll get upset if I want to get upset,” Morton said. “How many talking chimpanzees are there in the world? Wait, let me think about this for a second. The number is
not
zero, and it’s not
two
. That must mean that the number of talking chimpanzees is
one
. And I am that talking chimpanzee. I do what I want. Do you know that there are probably television talk show hosts, right now, who would want to hear whatever it was that I had to say? If I had some kind of… representative… If I had a representative, right now, she or he could book me on some kind of talk show, and they would ask me questions like did I favor bananas, that sort of thing, and I could demonstrate to them how I knew the basics of trigonometry, and I’d tell them my
higher power
was probably in my own image and not in man’s image. They would think whatever I said on the subject was scintillating, earth-shattering. I have no problem. What is your problem?”

“I don’t have—” she said.

“Is it my business alone if, upon hearing about a wedding ring, I can think only of how good I’d be for you?”

“Look, we have a lot we need to do. Let’s not—”

“You’ve got an arm in a bag that you cut off a corpse in the hospital basement, and you found a wedding ring from some marriage that’s gone bad because the people in the marriage didn’t love each other as much as I love you, and you put that wedding ring on the severed arm, and somehow we’re going to attempt to substitute this arm for the infected one, and you’re doing all this for that butcher at the university. I don’t understand why you—”

Morton’s voice was getting more and more shrill, like a chimpanzee in the forest, in fact, and he was banging on the dashboard of the van, and as the windows were rolled down, there were people on foot listening and watching, an army of adherents of
omnium gatherum
. One guy mumbled,
Nice costume
, as they went past.