Vienna’s mother asked, again, what they were all talking about.
Revelers, the tens of thousands of revelers, took no note of the worry in this particular retinue, this extended family, and this was the way of the revelers. The finest revelry precedes destruction; it was always thus, as when it preceded the shortest day of the year, or the eclipse, or the ritual sacrifice of teenagers. That was when people really let their hair down and committed a few indiscretions. How many of them were already sick? Noelle wondered, and she even said something about it to Koo, as they rushed against the tide back toward the van. How many of them do you think are sick? He had no answer for that and didn’t seem much to care. If he seemed to have put aside the concerns about his dead wife, the one in the freezer, he had replaced that particular family madness with a need to protect the group around him now, Vienna, Jean-Paul, Morton, and Noelle. He was the shepherd who couldn’t relax while any lamb strayed.
At last, they found themselves beside the van, the one Noelle had driven in, watching, from that vantage point, the undulations of the crowd on the desert floor. It was an image from the Northern Renaissance, what she saw, from Bosch or Brueghel, the incessant activity of the night, the modified vehicles with their cannons and neon and sound systems, doing figure eights around the cacti, the costumes, the leafleting political groups. But they didn’t stay long to look, though it was now only fifteen or twenty minutes until the reputed firing-into-space of the arm, and Koo was adamant that they leave while they could. He’d abandoned his own van on the shoulder of the road, back up over the pass, but there was no time to bother about that. And they all piled in. Inside, in the confines of the vehicle, Noelle could hear how badly Jean-Paul was wheezing. That was about all he was doing. He seemed to stop breathing for long periods of time, but no one said anything about it. Maybe there was just nothing to say anymore. Maybe this was your neighbor now. Your neighbor was bleeding from every part of him, was unable to talk in any way, and the best that was to be expected of him was that he (or she) had just to stay alive a little bit longer before breaking into bloody sections. And your challenge, the challenge you faced with your neighbor, was to try to find a way to love him when he collapsed in front of his house and lay there until the turkey vultures came by to pick clean his bones. His estate would be raided by the federal government and dispersed to the military-industrial complex. Noelle believed that she could thrive in this future because she was not squeamish. It was something of a shocker, therefore, when Koo, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, called to her: “Noelle, isn’t it a wonderful thing that we believe we have found a treatment protocol for the M. thanatobacillus infection?”
“You have? And what is the treatment?”
“Radiation therapy,” Koo said. “And we’ve already given Jean-Paul his first round of treatments, which is why he’s a little sluggish. The bacterium, we believe, acted more slowly on Mars in part because of the thinness of the atmosphere and the extreme cold, and though it had, to some degree, adapted to the radiation there, large doses seem to slow the course of the infection.”
“Just wonderful.”
“All the more reason why we need to remove ourselves from this… area… as quickly as possible.”
“Because?”
But Koo took up with bickering at the driver, one of the residents from the medical program at URB whom Noelle had seen around the hospital campus a couple times but hadn’t met. The van wasn’t going anywhere. The van was parked in a line of vehicles inching up and down the mountain pass, and there were more cars waiting to leave, and it looked like it was going to be a good long time.
“What’s the rush?” Noelle asked again.
“It’s a rather unfortunate situation,” Koo said, “but I have reason to believe that there will be some kind of police or federal military intervention at this festival tonight.”
“What does that mean?”
“As I have already told the others,” Koo said, “I am not certain what it means, but the CDC seems to feel that in order to control a larger possible outbreak of the disease, something needs to be done about the Rio Blanco area. What with people flying around in their jet packs, and the border-jumping, there is a real danger that the infected can move about too easily. The CDC wishes to try to contain the illness in this area.” And to the driver: “Can you please hurry?”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that they could try to quarantine or even eliminate people at the festival who are infected or already at risk.”
She thought of Larry, she thought of the Wheelers, she thought of that guy from last week who got turned into a paloverde tree, she thought of all the many people she knew out there, in the expanses of the Valley of the Slaughtered Calf, and she thought of the families of those people, and their coworkers, and their friends. And then she remembered about Morton.
Noelle said, “Well, then, it might be that this is the moment to speak to the issue of Morton, who has had some contact with the—”
“What about Morton? Morton, are you all right?”
Morton was sitting in the back of the van, and he had his face pressed to the window, watching as the van began its steep ascent into the switchbacks, as if there were something that he was leaving behind in escaping from the omnium gatherum. Noelle reached across the backseat and set a hand on his shoulder. His coat was matted and sweaty, and she could tell that if there were a chimpanzee equivalent for weeping, then Morton had begun to cry.
“We still have the arm,” he said quietly.
“What’s that?” Koo called from the front seat. “Can you speak up?”
“We still have the arm,” he said.
“Which arm?”
“I believe,” Morton said, “that we have both arms. Because we brought along the second arm.”
From the back of the van, Vienna Roberts’s dad called, with a certain exasperation, “Just how many arms are we trafficking in, anyway?”
Morton reached down and touched the rucksack into which, it was true, they had somehow by now stuffed both arms. The bag was trembling and thrumming against the floor of the van, because the infected arm had now waked from its last dose of high voltage.
What liberty there was outside the van! What liberty Morton must have felt during his brief trip among the revelers! No one stared, no one cared, no one gave a second thought to a talking chimpanzee. With her hand on his matted fur, Noelle could almost feel the sense of possibility that Morton felt ebbing away. No matter his long-windedness and his insecurity, he was a person with the advantages that an educated man has, but despite this, now that he was in the van with Koo, he was in danger of being shipped back to the laboratory, some laboratory, until, with a proper publicist and a business manager, the rollout of his persona could take place. But what about the chimpanzee part of him? His chimpanzee hypostasis?
The brazenness of what happened next, therefore, was brazen only to those who didn’t know Morton as Noelle had come to know him. How he crept slowly to the side door of the van, and then, without comment, threw it open, even as they were still edging along, and, holding the bag with the two arms in it, Morton leaped from the van onto the shoulder. Of course the van stopped in its tracks, and Noelle, and then some of the doctors from URB, and then Koo himself all followed in exiting the van, and they all stood and watched as the chimpanzee loped down the mountain pass, with that comical gait of his, back in the direction he had come, threading his way between cars and dodging motorized skateboards and mopeds and motorcycles and extreme joggers.
Koo called after him, called after the person who, after all, had been sprung from his wife, who had some of her sardonic humor, some of her excessive self-love, some of her autodidactic pretensions, and whom he was therefore about to lose as though he were losing his wife a second time, or a third time, if we consider what was about to happen to her body, back in the garage. Morton, please! Morton, please come back! But how many were the ways in which he was now powe
rless. They had stopped traffic on the way up the mountain pass, and they had stopped it from going down by reason of rubbernecking, and even if Koo had believed that there was something he could do, some bit of suasion that could bring back his most promising experiment, he just did not have the time in which to do it. In a cacophony of horns and shouts, Koo and the others climbed back into the van.
And what did Noelle see now? What was it that Noelle saw fleeing down the mountain pass, carrying two left arms in a rucksack, wearing a scrap of clown costume, dried blood around his mouth, and sporting a maniacal grin?
She saw Mister Right.
It was much later that she realized it, of course. The linguistic niceties with which you describe loss come later. It was with this bodily perception locked into place that Noelle returned herself to the van, and it was with this bodily perception that she and the rest in the van rode, in silence, across the pass, into the next valley, and then south, toward the Santa Ritas, toward the last great mountain range on this side of the border.
They were a good fifteen or twenty miles out of the city itself, without having encountered any kind of military perimeter, when they saw the great light. It wasn’t, in truth, a light that you saw. They were bludgeoned by the light, and the sound. The desert was lit up, as it had been, periodically, with atomic perturbances in decades past. The ominous cloud was above them, stretching out its smoldering immemorial extremities in every direction, saying this is what we had to do, though it never failed to be the case that there were things that might have been done otherwise.
Morton made his choice. He’d tasted civilization. And he’d found that it consisted of large helpings of desperation, petroleum by-products, fat substitutes, sweeteners, sewage storage issues, stolen and stripped automobiles, vapor trails, good intentions, bad follow-through, selfishness, red itchy eyes, sentimentality, mold, poor logical reasoning, halfhearted orgasms, advertising, household pests, regrets, mendacities, thorns, haberdasheries, computer programming, lower-back pain, xenophobia, legally binding arbitration, cheesy buildup, racial profiling, press-on nails, the seventh-inning stretch, roundtable discussions, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, perineal pain, individually wrapped slices, road rage, and unfounded speculation, and he had decided that it was completely reasonable that he would turn his back on this civilization. What that must have felt like! Noelle considered the idea that there was an outside of civilization, and she concluded that she could never know what it was, because she had always been inside, because wherever two or more were gathered, there were all the pitfalls, all the disappointments. But when Morton turned his back on the van and ran back toward the omnium gatherum, toward, she supposed, incineration, he was heading back in the direction of something he had never possessed, but which, she thought, he intuitively knew, simply because of who he was. That it appeared to him to lie in the direction of a lot of naked and half-naked middle-class white kids, mixing it up with the Union of Homeless Citizens, not to mention the Maoist party of the Sonoran Desert and a lot of Mexican infiltrators, that was just an accident of history. What Morton wanted was simpler than all of that. Morton longed for the wild.
The End
* Astute fans of the genre in whose field I am plowing (people who are familiar with the just-released film The Four Fingers of Death) will notice I have already taken liberties in one very basic way. I mean, if it is my responsibility to render exactly the film in question, I have failed. All of this backstory about the Mars shot, on which I have just expended a number of pages, does not actually appear in the film. I plead guilty on this point. But do I need to defend myself? I realized that I could not effectively write the second half of the story if I didn’t know a little more about the protagonist, M. thanatobacillus, the bacteria that causes all the damage. I couldn’t write about the bacteria unless I described those first afflicted with it. And writing about those poor, sick astronauts involved doing the unthinkable, really, moving the action onto the planet Mars, which is only hinted at in the actual film. Similarly, in the film The Four Fingers of Death the entire action takes place in the San Diego area. I felt I had no choice but to remove the story to a location I know more about—Rio Blanco itself. One ought to write about what one knows, correct? The desert of my part of the world, after all, is more like Mars, which always forces one to reflect back on when it might have had water, as it once apparently did. That’s what makes deserts so satisfying. They have a geological nostalgia about them. They are always struggling, always threatening the careless with their dramatics. That’s why I moved to the desert myself. So the Mars of The Four Fingers of Death is really just the contemporary American Southwest, the Southwest of 2025 or thereabouts, with its parboiled economy, its negative population growth, its environmental destruction, its deforestation, its smoldering political rage. Readers may ask how I felt so comfortable inventing characters out of whole cloth, when only one or two characters in this first section of my novelization actually appear in the film version of The Four Fingers of Death, and my answer to that is that they aren’t paying me enough to keep me from writing my own version of this story. Well, actually, they are paying me enough, because they have, in fact, asked me to cut the first section, but you will know, if you have this book in your hand, that I prevailed in this particular argument. I have nothing more to lose, and I’m not cowed by threats of a litigious nature, threats the fly-by-night publisher is so happy to invoke whenever there’s an argument between us. Never fear, readers. I actually think that the disputed nature of the manuscript offers you some interesting possibilities. You can actually buy two copies of the book, preserve one, and you can take the second one and just lop off the first half. The part you just read. And then you can read the second half as though that were the entire book. In fact, I divided it into two sections for this very reason. So if you have two copies of the old-fashioned softcover paperback, or if you have copies of the book on your digital reader, or perhaps on your wrist assistant, you can easily just erase the first half. Those who have somehow stumbled on this note before reading the first half of the book, well, all the better for you, because you are in a position to imagine what the second half would be like without this first half. In fact, the novelization as a whole might be improved in a digital reading type of environment, because then you could perform the interesting experiment of swapping the first half and the second half, so that first you know what happens with the bacterium on Earth, and then you could go backward and learn about the origin of the bacterium and the trip to Mars afterward. I’m trying not to give away too many plot points as I make these suggestions about the structure of the book, and I hope that is clear. Moreover, I suppose if you needed to buy three copies of the book, in order to have these three different versions (the one that is as shown here, the one without the first section, and the one in which the order of the first and second books is reversed), you could do that, and there is, I should point out, also a fourth possible structure for the book, namely the book in which only the sections about myself, Montese Crandall, appear. Because it has certainly occurred to me that there is a more conventional narrative here, namely the story of my life unencumbered by all this futurist stuff, and you could also just have that version of the book, in which there is only the apparatus, the textual apparatus. I suppose this would be the length of a short novel. This all suggests that you have, in fact, four books in one, all of them assembled by you, and none privileged by me, as the writer, nor by the movie tie-in publishing company, but really constructed or unconstructed and reassembled by you the reader. You are free to do this reassembly in any way that pleases you, and if this perfect freedom requires you to buy a couple of extra copies of the book, well, who is counting? You might be wondering how I came up with this idea to have a book that really is three and a half books in one. And the truth is that it came to me in a dream. I really was having trouble sleeping, as I often do, and I took some of those extra-strength sleep aids you can get now, the kind that you’re suppose
d to use on those long business trips to the East. Anyway, I slept about sixteen hours and missed a morning shift at the flea market, and then at some point in the middle of the afternoon, when I must have run the course of the medication and slipped into a more REM-oriented state, I fell into evaluating four different possible approaches to the The Four Fingers of Death, in my sleep, without being able to resolve them. Indeed, in my sleep, the resolution would be at my peril, or so the dream muses said. The promptings of the subconscious, I explained to my publishers, are such that one must heed them. And anyway, this innovative structure might result in a higher volume of sales, each of the four versions with its distinctively colored and designed cover.—M. C.