The Department of Islamic Studies and its student body hung on to the house for a while, perhaps until the time when the jihadist movement began to pick up steam halfway around the globe. At this point the Department of Islamic Studies seemed to scatter like dust dispersing in the Sahara. It was not instantaneous, but the Southwest was no longer the destination to which the Wahhabis reflexively turned. Upon the advent of death and mayhem a world away, the department began to lose its luster, and therefore the house on Sixth Street lay empty for a year, in an economic downturn. The neighborhood declined. There were shootings. Upon a reduction in rent advertised by a management company that would not identify the owner of the house, possession came to rest in the vegan community, the animal rights community, and so forth. The students of Harmonic Convergence, the men’s liberation movement, the Wiccans, all came through the house, the last of these commencing the operation of the food co-op on Fourth Avenue. And then there were some massage therapists, and some people who were into auras, a group that practiced overtone singing. It seemed, in these years, that the words Happiness Is Submission to God signified just another lifestyle choice. During this period of the orphic ascendancy of the house, it was possible to speak of the residency of, e.g., one Jerry McArdle, an activist who opposed investment in South Africa, and Elsa Black, the instructor in tribal dancing. These inhabitants offered all the complexities of real people (Jerry collected guns; Elsa believed in free love but never read a book), and so the house no longer had magical properties, and that was the case for a long time, because this was a cultural era after miracles. There were no miracles, and no believers in miracles, because in the new millennium there was only commerce, and commerce depended on a system of goods and services that was more predictable than miracles, which could not have the universal pricing code affixed to them because miracles had no surfaces. The house on Sixth Street became just a house. A place where someone or some group of persons lived. A place where someone had an Internet programming console. A place where someone kept some of his or her stuff, and used the word stuff to describe it. The interior was repainted, and one wall was knocked out so that the living room would be a little bit larger. It was no longer important to try to have four entire units, which resembled tiny, poorly lit cells.
Into the age of the cessation of miracles, there came to the house this fellow from Indiana called Zachary Wheeler. He was the friend of the friend of somebody who lived in the house on Sixth Street. Later on, no one could agree on whose friend he was. One woman, the one who made candles, said it was the guy from Santa Cruz, who only lived on Sixth Street for seven weeks, all of them spent on the couch, who had invited Wheeler to stay. But the guy from Santa Cruz blamed Sheila, the tarot card reader. Zachary was there, for good or ill, and he helped control rent inflation, and everyone seemed to like him well enough, though he had an absence of qualities. No there there. This would later appear to be one of the hallmarks of the literature produced by the omnium gatherum, the notion that what was desired was less self, that the persons possessed of this diminished ego were pariahs to civilization at large because they did not attach themselves to the distractions of this world, such as dishes, hygiene, and taxes. Indeed, these were some of the complaints about Wheeler, that he was less than generous as a roommate or a housemate because he didn’t perform the weekly cleaning of the communal bathroom, which he had explicitly agreed to do by signing the schedule of chores on the refrigerator. Instead, he seemed to hover awkwardly around the periphery of any assembly of housemates, especially when guests were present.
He wanted, he said, when he said anything, to study ecstatic celebrations of the Plains Indians. He understood that these ecstatic celebrations, he said, could enable participants to concentrate better on the job, become more productive, have a more fulfilling sex life, rise to leadership roles in politics and the community.
If Wheeler was not, according to later profiles, successful at recruiting his housemates, he did, in his isolation, undertake to think carefully about the slogan Happiness Is Submission to God. He wrote poems, recorded New Age — style music featuring the panpipe, and, by his own description, he refrained from masturbation for a period of years. What he discovered, according to one of the self-published omnium gatherum books, was that submission was, in fact, essential to a happy and fulfilling life in this post-millennial world. His revelation was as follows. There was a night, according to Wheeler, in which he waked certain that there was again a scorpion in his bed with him. Perhaps he dreamed of the scorpion. Or it dreamed of him. However it came to be, Wheeler knew that the scorpion was in the bed with him, and, as he retold the story, he carefully peeled back the threadbare sheet that covered him, and he gazed upon the scorpion, and without hesitation he presented his arm to be bitten. And yet the scorpion, which was looking for a warm, secluded place in which to settle itself, instead crept into the ravine between Wheeler’s arm and his chest, and it tickled him as it traveled up into the crevice. Wheeler’s first impulse was to jump up and shake off the bug, but he didn’t give in to this impulse. He waited, and so did the scorpion. Wheeler, according to his beliefs, submitted to the scorpion, which likewise submitted to him, and the two of them waited, symbiotically, for what was to be revealed. It turned out it was rather a long night for Wheeler, whose arm was deprived of blood flow while he refrained from motion. A slick of perspiration formed on his forehead and tracked down face and neck, pooling especially in the armpit, where he imagined that the scorpion slaked its thirst upon his moisture. In the morning, in the first ray of light, the scorpion emerged from the warm sweaty spot in Wheeler’s armpit, took one good look at him while perched on his chest, and stung him repeatedly. The scorpion laid it on. It did not hold back. Worried about waking roommates who didn’t even like him much, Wheeler refrained from screaming, and he waited out the scorpion, which scuttled off to the corner of the room and disappeared beneath a baseboard that was both entrance and exit.
How this simple act of submission, and the several days of recovery that were required thereafter, the ice and ibuprofen, served as the beginning of the omnium gatherum, you would know only if you were an inductee into that loosely organized spiritual movement. For the uninitiated, it was clear that this moment had to do with submission, and with revealing, for somehow the scorpion, as a symbol, came to represent the desperate circumstances of civilization on the brink of moving into the new. Wheeler, in the period of recovery from the scorpion stings, during the predictable depression that often coexists with the expulsion of toxins, leaned on the notion of revealing as a comfort, and this gave him the idea to synthesize all the apparent apocalyptic strains from the faiths major and minor, and to argue that apocalypse, which is all about revealing, satisfies an important part of human psychology, one that must be embraced and celebrated. Apocalypsis can serve as a lifestyle opportunity. Apocalypse implies change, and the possibility of great, unpredictable change, as well as the moral certainty that other people will be consigned to oblivion, these things can really make life more tolerable.