Disgust, certainly, had led the young people to put the arm in the back of the van, where they wouldn’t have to look at it, where it was secured to the side wall of the van with a further surplus of duct tape. Disgust was natural under the circumstances. But the arm, without any consciousness to itself, was more than efficient at the exploitation of this disgust. Many are the living things that find disgust to be their sacred ally. The arm moved swiftly in the destruction of duct tape, with its jagged blues-picking fingernails, and as the young lovers enumerated the kinds of disgust they felt about the arm, the arm steadily improved its circumstances so that, as soon as was feasible, it could wave its appendages wildly, scratching against the wall of the van, scoring the interior finish, abrading whichever surface it applied itself to. For some time, in this way, the hand resembled a wildly waving child at a parade, hastening to catch the attention of any bugling militarist that chanced by. All this would have seemed, to the casual observer, to be in vain, because the arm was still affixed to the side of the van with multiple strips of NAFTA-made duct tape. But such a reading would have been to misunderstand how freedom carries with it a certain mayhem, as the summer sun follows the torrents of spring. The hand, by waving and flapping like a wild beast, managed, whether intentionally or not, to shake loose the first strip of duct tape that held it against the wall of the van.
Where was the van, exactly? The van was on its way back into town and was passing, just then, the great alpaca farm that had once stretched out beneath the mountains, and from which, when its owners had been murdered by piratas, the alpacas had spread wide into the high desert. The van passed the farm, and then it passed some of the abandoned malls and shops along the road known as Oracle, and then it passed some of the gated communities. The term was an understatement. The van passed some of these gated communities, heading toward the dark center of the city, the unvisited centro, the part where most people feared to tread and where there were few vehicles, fewer still that were not abandoned. The young lovers were somewhat reassured. This was the city as they knew it.
The arm had managed to unstick yet another length of duct tape, which hung like some strange, triage-related bandage from its side, and it was now swinging upside down, like a pendulum, by the last length of duct tape that bound it in place. It was only a matter of time. The first bump in the road would free it. The van swerved around a wreck, a pair of flaming tires. The van decelerated into the right lane as a cortege of emergency vehicles raced past, wailing. The van stopped short, because of the sloppy driving of a sedan in front of it, and thereupon the arm was flung, by the laws of physics, from the wall, and with it a couple of lengths of duct tape yet clinging. There was the sound of projectiles bouncing from surface to surface in the back of the van, but with the radio on and the young lovers talking nervously between themselves, the commotion went unheard.
The arm then set about its most beloved task, which was the task of creeping. Creeping kept the arm from any awareness of its limitations. Creeping enabled the arm to continue to infect, which was high on its list. And so it began clawing its way over empty cans of WD-40 and soda bottles, scraps of blanket and tarps, a couple of fantasy novels in paperback, until it had gotten as far into the rear of the van as it could get. Did the arm somehow know how rusted out the van was? Had the arm somehow surveyed the vehicle before it began exploring the bodies of its young friends? Did it know that there was a patch so rusted out in the back of the van that you could see the double lines passing underneath? Somehow, whether by process of elimination or by some uncanny sense as to how it might secure its freedom, the arm discovered the rusty, serrated hole at the back of the van, and it began trying to pick apart the leafy curls of metal until it knew it could go down through the hole. Within minutes the fingers were covered in cuts, but apparently tetanus was no worry for the arm, because it was already a field guide to germs, as the young lovers would have noticed had they not been so stymied by the sheer fact of the arm. Tetanus was nothing in addition to what the arm already harbored. Despite the spurting of globules of infected blood, it managed to crawl out the hole, from which it grasped the bottom edge of the rear bumper there. For almost a quarter mile, like something out of an action film, the arm hung.
In the van, the young lovers found themselves meanwhile improved. The satellite radio was on, and the radio was a comfort, because it was often staffed by people from the milieu of the young — sullen, underemployed middle-class people with violently passionate opinions. This while the arm clung to the bumper, as bits of its protuberant ulna and its supinator were scorched against the pavement. But since the arm had no nerve center, its nerves fired only haphazardly, with a kind of bittersweet nostalgia. It was afraid of nothing, and no pain bothered it. It hung on not because it was waiting for the perfect time to let go, but just because. Because there were only so many approaches to the world, grasping and scrabbling being two of them. Given the chance, occasionally, to cling with single-minded tenacity, the arm did so. But when the van came to a stop at a traffic light, somewhere around the 6000 north block, the arm dropped off and rolled like a tossed newspaper of old until it found itself by the side of the road. Freed from confinement.
Not distant, at least for those who were able-bodied or who had access to a vehicle, lay the Ina Estates, one of the most exclusive gated communities in the Rio Blanco area. Its red adobe was repainted every other year by repeat offenders among the would-be emigrant population. Following a pattern made popular in the early part of the century, the Ina Estates had actually seceded from Rio Blanco. The estates refused to pay taxes to the city proper, and since they had their own police and security, the city had not yet mustered the resolve to call in the National Guard. Ina Estates had its own school, its own development agency, a weekly farmers’ market, and a library that thoroughly vetted its collections. There was even a helipad, so that if the Ina Estates needed to lock the gates in order to prevent contact with the unruly region around it, it could do so and still fly in locally grown produce.
The Ina Estates, that is, were waiting it out. Waiting out eight consecutive years of a constricting gross domestic product, seven years of declining employment, which now stood at a bracing 17 percent, seven years of inflation and ballooning national debt, six and a half years of declining college enrollment, rising numbers in larceny, in particular grand theft auto, rising numbers of violent crimes, rapes and murders (and especially rising numbers of murders of strangers), increases in every kind of drug use, in vagrancy, in homelessness, in emigration. The Ina Estates, and the other city-states like it, were about waiting all this out, about awaiting another American century, in the unlikely event that one should present itself. The estates could handle a few foreclosures, since they had saved well in the flush days, and since no man or woman was allowed to purchase a unit without sufficient savings to cover the cost of the mortgage at present. Things being what they were, however, the Ina Estates could not always insure that its employee base was up to the task, since these were hard times for wage earners. The regional workforce was noteworthy for its hopelessness, and the security guy out front of the Ina Estates, loitering on his personal transporter, was no exception. The security guy, André, had been speed-dialing his ex-girlfriend, while trying not to overturn his vehicle or to disturb its gyroscope, to say that he really would try, he really would try, he was desperate to try to quit playing around with a certain multiuser virtual environment known as Tajikistan. He was going to give it up, he was going to give it up, he swore, and it was all because he had himself seen things in the tribal areas that no man should see.