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.
Upon their entrance, Zachary Wheeler stumbled to his feet, awkwardly, his hands and feet and hair covered with dirt. He squinted against the sunlight that was allowed into his lair.
“Pop, you remember Lenz.”
“You have something planned for later this week,” Zachary said. “And you…”
In the corner of the room, the workstation that Zachary used for his complicated role-playing assignations flickered in the dark, as if scrolling through the news sites of the day according to an algorithm. Denny felt what he always felt around his father, some desire to protect Zachary from himself, and a desire to push him down on the ground and administer a number of swift kicks to spleen and pancreas. There was probably a woman, or a number of women, and maybe a few automated comfort programs, beseeching him on the computer all at once, and none of them knew who Zachary Wheeler was, or that there were people in the Rio Blanco area who revered Zachary Wheeler and would have followed him anywhere, down into the center of the world, if necessary. And here he was in the auto body shop, shooting up and trying to get it on with the women of the web.
Denny said, “We’re keeping you up-to-date.”
“What’s the scale of your—”
“A couple thousand, maybe more.”
“Something’s—”
“There’s trouble—”
Lenz added, “Federal agents already in the city.”
“Always with the federal agents…”
“We’re going to try to shoot the arm back into—”
His father lurched unsteadily forward, only to wobble against the plaster, collapsing into a seated posture.
“The arm?”
“There’s this arm.”
Zachary asked, “Do you have it with you?”
“It’s with our people, Pop. It’s safe. We’re trying to keep it in a meat locker where possible. It’s kind of decaying a little bit. It smells really bad. Do you want to come out and watch? I got jet packs.”
“Jet packs?”
“The telemetry is much more impressive now. It has self-guiding properties. Now you can easily use one to climb up over the city.”
“How far do you plan to shoot the… thing?”
“We’re going incinerate the arm with laser-guided missiles. We’ve got some sitting on the top of the pass over the canyon.”
Lenz said, “It’s from next door over in space. From Mars.”
“The whole thing, I don’t know, maybe you’re not thinking big enough.”
“How much bigger do you want me to think? We’re having a major pyrotechnical display on the outside of town, where we’re going to rid the town of this major pandemic, this thing from outer space, and we’re going to celebrate space while we’re at it, and there are a number of angles I’m pursuing in terms of making sure that we are getting high-profile attention, some broadcasting royalties. We got an in-kind donation from a toy-manufacturing facility South of the Border who, uh, designed this little toy arm for us—”