It was five or six years past that Wheeler finally decided to stage his own disappearance, in a snakebite ceremony, in which he was supposed to have allowed a sidewinder to bite him on the face — after which he was taken to the University of Rio Blanco Medical Center. Gangrene set in! Was he so badly disfigured that he needed to wear a mask? Or some kind of veil? Had he died in the snakebite ritual? Were dental records required? Or was he just tired of the whole thing and wanting to move into consulting on corporate productivity? His disappearance only insured his centrality to the omnium gatherum as it moved forward to field its first political candidates and to seize control of some deconsecrated churches in Rio Blanco, which it used as gallery spaces and warehouses for the treasures of past events. Some of the gallery exhibits concerned Wheeler’s trips across the border to study up on Yaqui peyote rituals. In some accounts, he had become a coyote. Whichever version of the truth you believed, assuming one of them referred to that hazy quantity the truth, Wheeler removed himself from any visible role in omnium gatherum operations. Official meetings of omnium gatherum became more unpredictable.
In this way, they began to concentrate on nomadism. The omnium gatherum, just three years ago, began to assert that nomadism was the most effective use of the Earth’s resources and that private property, as such, represented theft of the land. The Roma, the Plains Indians, the Mongol shepherds, these became idols for the rootless and centerless inquiry of the omnium gatherum, and it came to pass, because that is how things happened with the omnium gatherum, they came to pass, that homelessness emerged as an integral part of the omnium gatherum course of study, homelessness and nomadism living right next door to each other, as it were, nomadism being the proper pre- and post-apocalypsis lifestyle, and so homeless members of the group, who were especially drawn to some of the healthy snack foods available at omnium gatherum events, became integral. They were valued, esteemed, and their difficulties were dealt with within the family. Certain impressionable members of the omnium gatherum, which is to say runaways and young people whose parents had lost their livelihoods during the recession, believed that they had seen Wheeler, and that he was himself embarked on riding the freight trains in order to recruit from among the robust population of rail nomads, or they believed that he had organized a motorcycle gang of some kind, which moved from town to town stealing from the rich, or they believed that he was now an emergency medical technician, and that he was out in the field, trying to cure an outbreak of some streptococcal menace, or they believed that he was border patrol, and despite his intense rhetoric on the elimination of all border fences in all nations, that he was secretly aiding and abetting the repatriation of undocumented persons attempting to flee this country, or omnium gatherum had never existed in the first place but was just a series of studies in opposition.
How was it financed? The last important question in this history of the omnium gatherum. It was financed entirely by donations, and the better part of these donations were made by the rank and file, members of the group just like you and me, who were able to give fifty dollars, or a hundred dollars, or nothing more than a quarter. You just gave what you were able to give, and if that was no more than a quarter, then that was what you gave. There was web-related advertising, naturally, and there were online sales of artworks that were generated by various omnium gatherum events, and recently they had made a little money in real estate, by purchasing worthless or foreclosed properties and holding them for a while. But the donations were the better part of what they had taken in, and as time went on, as the omnium gatherum became a legitimate, or a semi-legitimate, ideological system, one that fielded its own tattoo artists, its own massage therapists, its own cocounseling workshops, its own demon-extraction rituals, its own waste-management operations, its own agricultural products, its own farm markets, the possibility for profit grew, and as the potential for profit grew, the greater were the gifts from the employees of corporations, the fellow travelers. Most of the collecting happened through the omnium gatherum web site, which was not affiliated with any official employee, because there was none. The IT manager was also the publicist, who claimed not to know Zach Wheeler, nor where to find him, but who may have been identical with him. According to this publicist, the federal government had, in the era after Social Security, defaulted on its obligations, and the omnium gatherum was prepared to step in as a shadow government. Responsible and affluent persons needed to consider whether a donation to the group would be more reliable than taxes paid to a central government, that despoiler, because the omnium gatherum was better able to look after the citizens and was therefore more deserving of tax money. This argument worked, it turned out, and it was breathed into life by Denny Wheeler, Zach’s son, who was at Stanford, and who made the appeal as part of his senior thesis on alternative political systems.
It was into this phenomenal and nearly unforeseeable socio-religious success that a certain disembodied hand crawled.
The downtown rally for the Union of Homeless Citizens was heavily attended by members of the omnium gatherum, or perhaps it’s more exact to say that there was much interpenetration between the two communities: the homeless and the spiritual adepts. Hard to tell the one from the other. They both subscribed to the tenets of nomadism. Who could say which was which?
An inquiry by some high school students who had attended the rally, the rally of the Union of Homeless Citizens, who had watched as the police descended on the lawfully gathering nomads, noted that in many of their interviews the rally participants asked such questions, whether in Spanish, English, or Spanglish, as “Did you get a look at that goddamned arm?” “Whoa, brother, I was carrying the arm for a while.” “The thing had this way that it moved.… It was kind of a dancing arm… moving all around while you held it.” “I swear the thing was trying to talk, and I had this running buddy, man, couldn’t say no words at all, only spoke like with some kinds of sign language, and I swear to you the hand was trying to talk, just like this guy.”
The theory of nomadism described statistically the behavior of very large numbers of people, and therefore the theory relied on unruly crowds and their inevitable assault on private property. Accordingly, it was impossible to say precisely who held the arm when, just because of luck, one high school kid, Nicky Hays, who was trying to write something for his school paper about the rally, happened upon it. Didn’t matter who. Someone claimed to have had the arm for a day or two, and to have traded it to another guy who had a large supply of polyamphetamine pills, and this was a bad trade, because these pills did not contain true polyamphetamine, and this addict spent the night throwing up in an alley behind one of the adult-book stores. Hays followed his tip, in the thirty-six hours after the rally, into the dark and sinister world of polyamphetamine dealers, who were mainly high school and college kids with parents who were clinging by a few unraveling threads to the middle class. And it turned out that someone Nicky knew, Moose Mansourian, controlled the arm, after a long, rather dormant day in which it was mainly a trophy. He’d locked it in a terrarium, where, through some indolence or exhaustion, it sat at length. He’d tried to feed it slices of orange, tried to get it interested in a hamster wheel made out of bicycle tires.