Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

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.

Denny needed to explain it all to his father, even if the invitations had already gone out, because it was never effective to mount large-scale omnium gatherum activities without telling his father first. His father had some kind of sixth sense for these types of maneuvers, for the ebbing and flowing of institutional power, and would quickly rouse himself from semiconsciousness to complain and to condemn.

Denny took Lenz with him, because Lenz was the heart and soul of the operation. Lenz had a rice cooker, and Lenz knew how to read tea leaves. Lenz had a computer program that threw joss sticks automatically, and, first thing in the morning, Lenz read out the day’s prospects, almost always good. The Fourth Morning of the Pestilence, Lenz called and woke Denny. Denny’s cranially implanted communications time-saver stabbed him in the scalp to wake him.

“The wise man prepares for the end of everything that is, dancing.”

When Denny affixed the external screen attachment onto his face, he saw Lenz’s sallow visage, behind ringlets of dyed blue hair. What did Lenz’s mother think?

“Didn’t you do that one recently? Can’t be the end of everything every day.”

“I’m just the messenger.”

“We do have to go see the old man.”

It was Lenz’s idea that they add the clothing-optional clause to the invitation. Though Denny liked seeing a lot of naked people around as much as anyone else, it would be easier to evaluate the medical condition of the participants of the omnium gatherum if a lot of them were dressed in skimpy rags. If there were bodies disassembling , as Denny had heard, then he wanted to know ahead of time, before the crowds became too excited and too intoxicated. They talked through this piece of the festivities on the way over to his dad’s place.

The route to the auto body shop was along Grant Avenue, a major thoroughfare in Rio Blanco until the Minimum Wage Riots of the first decade of the century, when people from South of the Border, who were by that time more than half of the population in Rio Blanco, had protested the repeal of the minimum wage by blowing up portions of one of the town’s major roads. Grant was rutted with gigantic sinkholes, some of them going down hundreds of feet into the aquifer that had once lain beneath this desert. Easy to collapse. Grant was therefore considered a dangerous route across town. Denny and Lenz rode motorized skateboards, even though Denny was keen to try the jet packs he had procured from a hobbyist out by the lowlands where the event would take place.

They had effectively blanketed the community with small plastic arms announcing the performance, and you could tell because they saw them by the side of what used to be Grant Avenue. It was as if some sweatshop from the Sino-Indian Economic Compact had invaded Rio Blanco and air-dropped little arms out of a biplane, Good people of America, please repair to your homes. Our only quarrel is with your government. We apologize for the lead-based paints on this toy, and for the fact that many young persons were injured in its manufacture .

The paradox of modern Rio Blanco was that it could be a relatively populous urban region, and still you could be standing in the center of town, as Denny and Lenz were, and see no one . The town part of Rio Blanco was the part that was no town at all, and if they had been breaking and entering, they would have done so with impunity. No one would have found the wrack and ruin of their mayhem for days afterward, if ever.