The Four Fingers of Death

  “Yes, sir, you—”

  “Did I show you the—?”

  “You did. It was—”

  “Gentlemen, I had, with the Secret Service detail, elected to do some hiking in a remote mountain range, near the border of the state of New Mexico. Bear country, I should say, and while it would, it’s true, have been unfortunate if the leader of the free world were somehow mauled in a bear attack, it’s just black bears down that way, you know. I have never seen a bear in the wild. At any rate, I’d led the good men and women of the Secret Service up one of the peaks in this range, and we’d had quite a good time at the top, where there were still some tumbledown shacks that I suppose were meant for fire observation in a much earlier era. In fact, we’d passed a few blazes on our way out toward the state line, but they were not yet any danger to the local population. Anyhow, we summited the peak in question not long after lunch, and we had a relaxing time there. Those parts of the state are now so empty that there was no danger of running into constituents, and most of the trails had been closed by the security detail in any event. At some point, I was alerted to the fact that a dust storm was coming in our direction from the northeast. There was some thought of extracting us by helicopter, but I wouldn’t hear of it. Soon enough, in the distance, you could see the storm, like a sheer wall. The dust comes from as far away as Mongolia, I was told later, though I don’t know how this would be possible, unless it was blown over the Bering Strait. Still, it was maybe twenty or thirty miles out, on a day that was dry and clear as any day can be in the desert in autumn. We watched, kept an eye on the storm, as we all but jogged down the mountain, gentlemen, and if the security people were a little apprehensive, I was practically giddy with the simple fact that nature continues to behave in a way that is impossible to predict, and if I didn’t want to be blown off the mountain, I was, at the same time, not averse to feeling the threat of the thing, as it seemed to head with its own volition toward the range on which I stood, gobbling up acres as fast as any phenomenon of God’s creation. We had a representative from the forest service on the line; we were told that the storm was, in fact, covering twenty or thirty miles an hour, and our best bet was to find a cave somewhere on the side of the mountain, and if that was impossible, we should sit down somewhere recessed and wait.

  “There was a cave some way down. And so, gentlemen, it was a race against time. Given the velocity at which that dust storm was now engulfing the lower peaks in the range, there was little chance that we were going to make it to the cave. And so we did not. We had perhaps another two miles of trail below us, and we were somewhere around the six-thousand-foot level when the big tan cloud of particulate folded over us, like a blanket of the uninhabited earth, blotting out the sun, blotting out the trail, blotting out the expanses and vistas before us, until there was nothing but the ten or twenty feet in our vicinity, all of it whirling and weaving in the great cloud of Mongolian steppe, and why was it that I felt nothing but a tremendous relief? Why was it that the dust storm seemed like the best that nature had to offer us that day, assuming that we were not going to see a black bear, as indeed we did not? There were a few raindrops concealed in that cloud, but mainly there was just the grit of it, in our mouths, in our eyes, and so on. It would have been a fine time to mount an assassination, true, if any revolutionary groups were following the course of natural history in the desert, and for this reason, the security detail eventually made use of flare guns, their sidearms, flashlights, whatever else was available in order to keep casual hikers or other members of the general population away, as we carefully picked our way through the curtains of dust toward the canyon below—”

  “Mr. President—”

  “I know, Leona, I know, gentlemen, you are wondering what the story has to do with the situation at hand.”

  “That’s right, sir,” said someone intrepid from a spot that could have been hard for the cameras to pick up.

  “What did I learn on that day? Is that what you’re asking? What I learned, from a strategic point of view, gentlemen, was about the value of natural phenomena when subduing a population in order to preserve law and order. If someone had been clever enough, that day, to harness the dust storm, they could have paralyzed the government of the United States. You might ask how I could do something so cavalier while upholding my oath of office, but I think, on the contrary, that the question is how to make the scourges of the desert submit to our will when we need them to perform for us.”

  “Mr. President, are you suggesting some kind of wildfire?”

  Gibraltar felt again the sharp pain in his midsection, and he worried that he might need to be escorted from the meeting on a gurney. He thought about his family, and about his second family—the National Aeronautics and Space Administration—and he knew what was to be said next, and he therefore knew that he not only needed to survive the meeting, he needed to start moving his people out of range.

  “Well, that’s a useful question, gentlemen. Is incineration going to do the job in terms of eradication? Would that insure that we root out what we need to root out?”

  The CDC, who was already looking a little ashen himself and liable, with the president more or less in the room, to say anything, remarked, “Sir, we don’t know for certain yet what the effect of higher temperatures is going to be. But even if the bacteria does experience higher motility in a temperate Earth climate, it can’t have adjusted to extremely high temperatures. It’s a pretty rare pathogen that can manage that, and only after many hundreds of thousands of years of adaptation. Along these lines, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that with M. thanatobacillus, we find the body temperature goes down significantly. As if the pathogen is hostile to warmth. People with the infection start to move toward room temperature. Like a, well, like a corpse.”

  The president, on the screen above, had turned three quarters from the camera, so that all but his neck, the sinews of his neck, was shrouded in the gloom of his artificially lit office. A contemplative pose.

  “Then, gentlemen, I suggest a plan be drawn up, the third option, a last option, in which we subject the city of Rio Blanco to incendiary bombing. Obviously, we don’t have time to evacuate, nor to attempt to separate the healthy from those already exposed, and this is a shame. The kind of shame that will weigh on all of us in this room a long time. But let’s get the plans in motion, and we’ll speak by teleconference later. And if incendiary isn’t good enough, Mr. Beauforte, be so kind as to get me some ideas about tactical nuclear devices.”

  It wasn’t long after that the meeting was adjourned.

  Omnium gatherum invites you to a flowering of the arts at the Valley of the Slaughtered Calf, ides of the month, 11:59 P.M. The one true law of this place, the tendency of objects to fall to Earth, will be repudiated. Clothing optional. These were the words of the prototype invite, as composed by Denny Wheeler, slight and pale, whose exclusive diet of yams had not resulted in the kind of pigmentary robustness you found naturally in the desert. He insisted that there was numerological and symbolical significance in the fact that the name of the yam was the name of the month in which he was born, reversed. No one, any longer, least of all his father, Zachary Wheeler, bothered to challenge the diet. In fact, Denny had prepared a policy statement on how a diet of yams could promote ecstatic visions. Whether this was owing to a vitamin B12 deficiency or not went unexamined.

  The plastic arm that accompanied the invitation, manufactured by undocumented emigrants in an uncooled airplane hangar just south of the border, concealed, at first blush, an additional feature, besides its ability to declaim the invitation out of a recessed speaker at the thumb joint: the arm issued sparks from its base. This to indicate the ultimate goal of the flowering of the arts, as referred to above, the firing of the crawling hand back into space, toward the gods. The Wheelers, or at least Denny, because his father was so nodded out on OxyPlus and role-playing software that he wasn’t good for anything anymore, had spent the better part of the past couple of
days procuring custom-made jet packs for the apotheosis of the arm, which was how Denny referred to the climax of the party on the web site and in any official announcements. From space it had come, to space it would justly return.

  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 m
an 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.