Rick Moody - The Four Fingers of Death

It was a question that Noelle had thought about but hadn’t yet exhausted. And she would have addressed it further if the two of them had not, at that moment, arrived at the gate, such as it was. The gate to the Valley of the Slaughtered Calf, west of the city of Rio Blanco. To which all regional pilgrimages led. The site of the Apotheosis of the Arm . The gate, such as it was, consisted of a couple of police cruisers, as indicated previously, lights lazily turning on their roofs. And there was a young woman wearing nothing but reflective tape over the formerly controversial parts of her body, collecting tickets and shining a flashlight into the drivers’ windows of passing vehicles, asking the drivers if they were here for omnium gatherum and, if not, didn’t they want to turn around and head back into town, because there was liable to be a rather enormous traffic snarl ahead. Scooters, pedestrians, motorbikes, downed jet packs, and so on. The activity here would make it impossible to pass through the Valley of the Slaughtered Calf and make it out to the west, on the road that led to Southern California.

At once, with the admissions-related conversation transacted, Noelle and Morton found themselves in a different nation, a nation of the fanciful and pointless, where there were streamers, and people on stilts, and a great number of naked middle-aged men with sagging and woebegone scrota wobbly beneath them, a nation of golf carts kitted out like sharks or whales or pirate ships, a nation of handmade signs proclaiming the local Belly Dancers Union, or classes in abstruse varieties of kundalini, unlock your animal unconsciousness, or give yourself the gift of colonic irrigation. How was it there was no proper transition between that world and this, through a cave, behind a waterfall, into a wardrobe? In Rio Blanco, where there wasn’t an economic model for the miraculous, Noelle supposed, there was nothing to do but go over the mountain pass and down a few switchbacks, and here it was, the kind of elsewhere that is considered not-yet-exploited by local miners, the kind of elsewhere that can furnish a miracle, if by miraculous you mean a platoon of Catholic schoolgirls, or someone giving a lecture on shamanic strategies, or a band of serenading minstrels wearing clown makeup, or a Singing Bowl Ensemble, lucid dreamers, players of the jaw harp. It was a city of alternative therapies and cultures sitting idly by, awaiting word from the planning commission of the whimsical.

Morton was mumbling to himself, or rather making a variety of non- or preverbal grunts and squeaks that Noelle presumed meant more in the chimpanzee argot than in the human tongue, as their URB van was subsumed into the swelling and eddying of drug-addled countercultural citizens. Someone was crying out, “Burn your ID! Burn your ID!” and Noelle watched in quiet admiration as a complement of those from nearby did pull out driver’s licenses and credit cards, even entire wallets, lofting them onto a bonfire near the gate. Meanwhile, as in some medieval square, a rival group of miscreants was erecting a sculpture, or so it seemed, just beyond the police cars by the gate, and this sculpture was studded with nails and screws and bits of glass designed to cause a flat tire in any attempt by the state and local authorities to drive onto the central plain of the festival itself.

Part of the layout of the omnium gatherum was fractal: there was no sector that was any more vital or less important than the whole, so that there was no center, no organizing principle. With this in mind, Noelle and Morton couldn’t locate any central staging area at all. Things were often miles upon miles farther off than they appeared, and here appearances were obscured by waves of pyrotechnical displays, rockets and fireworks flaming this way and that. There was a staging area somewhere, where the jet packs were attached to a plywood framework, in the middle of which, Noelle guessed, they would place the arm when the time came. It was just a matter of stumbling on it by, more or less, heading away.

Where did people get all the money for this shit, or was it just the case that somewhere out there was a kid, in the neighborhood, who’d learned that the raw materials for backyard explosives were easily come by, especially on the family farm; this kid who was onto the specific variety of fertilizers and ethanols and oxygen tanks that would launch just about anything into the air? When a temporary cloud of these explosions dissipated and the canopy of stars connecting all the summits of the mountains again appeared, Noelle and Morton, who were parking the car somewhere, nowhere, could see, lit in haphazard flashlights, maybe a half mile hence, the circle of homemade rocket launchers.

“That really looks like a real chimpanzee,” someone said, moving past.

Noelle’s embarrassing anxiety was that she resembled nothing so much as an undercover policewoman. The omnium gatherum had long known that all its events were infiltrated by the constabulary, and revolutionaries disputed the best way to recognize them. Would they be dressed rather obviously like police attempting to pass? Would they look too clean? Or would they go overboard and wear elaborate costumes, ones that failed to have a handmade dimension? Noelle, as they walked along, almost unconsciously began making pigtails at the top of her head, pigtails that would look, she hoped, like antennae, and though Morton was talking to her, was asking questions about how all of this was possible , she wasn’t paying attention, but was thinking: that one is kinda cute, that one has a nice outfit, that one is probably a rapist , while attempting to get her hair up on top of her head. And when her hair was up on the top of her head, looking, she hoped, cute in a kind of Venusian way, she pulled the blouse she had worn to work that morning from her body, just pulled it right off, buttons snapping everywhere, and then shredded it into long shreds by biting into one end and yanking. From these strips she made a headband for Morton and one for herself, and now she was a woman wearing sandals, denim cutoff shorts, and a black bra, partially obscured by the straps of the rucksack (with the extra arm in it), and some kind of strange, shredded headband. She was a woman who looked as if she were about to metamorphose into something else, into a nomad, not really a woman who was one with the fashion aesthetics of the omnium gatherum , but this outfit would have to do unless she felt like taking off her bra, which she didn’t really want to do, because Morton was looking at her like she was nothing but a receiving agent for chimpanzee spermatazoa. She didn’t want him to get lost in the mayhem of the event, but she didn’t want him to feel like this was their omnium gatherum assignation either. She should have sent him into the tent marked Men’s Erotic Massage back a ways and left him there, until she figured out what was what.

By chance, an axial road appeared before them — really just a set of tracks where some semi had driven, perhaps indicating a route toward the staging area, and she pointed at it, and they set off as expeditiously as they could in that direction. The traffic closed around them, unicyclists, a woman holding leashes to dozens of Chihuahuas. Noelle attempted to tell Morton why they were heading toward the center, shouting above some of the chanting and the various homemade musical instruments (the zenexton , a gigantic rolling pipe organ manufactured with PVC tubing, e.g.), shouting about the Wheelers, father and son, about how they had to rotate addresses every four or five hours in the days before the events, and then once the events were convened, they moved from tent to tent every hour, wearing disguises.