“I helped with the design,” Lenz said.
“You made toy arms.”
The thing that made Zachary so threatening was that he lived the omnium gatherum story, and as a result he could always see it ramifying before him. It could go this way, and did, and then at the same time there might be a completely different set of possibilities, and it seemed that all these possibilities were simultaneous, and though it would be nice, would be more convenient, if there were just one story, just one omnium gatherum, Zachary Wheeler knew that there was not. It was almost as if the omnium gatherum, Denny thought, when confronted with his father, had no single, indisputable meaning. It was more like something that could be claimed by anyone. And Zachary’s approach, which was perhaps what had brought him to this bleak spot, centered on the possible interpretations. This was why Zachary, in the end, didn’t much care if his son treated the omnium gatherum as a possibility for copyright, trademarking, or branding. That was one way of defining the omnium gatherum. His father’s was the madness that resulted from hearing all the voices. His father believed all the clamoring voices, with their insistences and their tragedies.
“What about City Hall?” his father said.
“City Hall?”
“Who’s going to be looking after City Hall?”
“Who’s usually looking after City Hall?”
“The police,” Zachary said, “are going to be looking after you, policing your event. So that means—”
“Means what?”
“Means that we could take control of City Hall. Just keep a detachment of people separate, and when the time comes, you escort the mayor from City Hall, take him to the site of the festivities, or to a black site, and then you leave a few guys behind. In City Hall.”
Denny had so much to learn.
Among the many unflattering stages of M. thanatobacillus infection, according to the observations of Dr. Woo Lee Koo, as he bore witness to these in his son, was a stage in which the infected party behaved like a great ape. Indeed, Jean-Paul, his legitimate son, his biological son, had begun exhibiting many of the characteristics of Morton, his adoptive son — uninhibited scratching, chest-thumping, grunting, aggressive and childlike behavior, public masturbation. In fact, his son seemed to go about with an unconcealed erection whenever he was not resting. Jean-Paul seemed to feel it appropriate that he should rub himself erotically against any surface available — the side of an armchair, a large appliance. The sleek curves of an old-fashioned electric-cell automobile out front of the unit also proved very useful in this regard, even if the quarantined Jean-Paul should not have been outside. When Koo had attempted to get him up and around for this brief interval of fresh air, Jean-Paul had a spontaneous orgasm just from lying on the front hood of that automobile. Soon after, he began spontaneously hemorrhaging from his eye sockets and his ears, but this didn’t inhibit sexual feeling, as Koo dictated in his notes that evening: The patient seems to have very little pain. I notice considerable distension in the patient’s genitals. Perhaps the infection itself is somehow engorging the genital region. Would orgasm as experienced by the patient result in a new route of contagion? That is, does the infection have a venereal route of transmission, in addition to its blood-borne routes? This has not been much considered by the medical community thus far, but it seems important, especially as the patient is clearly experiencing erectile sensation of a pleasurable sort.
Koo made sure to install cameras in the bedroom of his son. The erotic frenzy of tertiary infection would have challenged any dispassionate medical practitioner, even more so if the viewer happened to be the father of the infected party; nevertheless, the cameras enabled Koo to watch Jean-Paul around the clock, and to see the frustration, the wordlessness, the disinhibition, and the desperation that the boy was exhibiting as he began to understand that his cognition, indeed, even the ability of his larynx, pharynx, and vocal cords to produce sound, was failing with each passing hour. Jean-Paul had taken to pointing at things when he needed them, and much of the time, in fact, he was simply pointing at Vienna Roberts, his frequent visitor, and making sounds that could only be interpreted as weeping. Koo the Elder, who was administering intravenous antibiotics around the clock, found himself in a constant state of conflicted sentiment — the scientific interest of the case was overwhelming. But his son was withering before his eyes.
And this was not the only conflict. At some point soon, Jean-Paul, his father recognized, would be, if he was not already, clinically dead, and yet still mobile. The inexplicable course of the infection was now known. Jean-Paul would have no recognizable pulse, but would still be alive for several days, maybe even more. At this point, in a postmortem state, his son’s tissue would be of paramount use for medical experiment, not to mention, though Koo was not a person who much mentioned these things, that he could not bear what was to come. Koo had, by staying in touch with some of the other medical researchers in the area, Lecompte et al., learned that there were now upwards of twenty advanced cases of M. thanatobacillus quarantined in the hospitals of the region. Several more among medical personnel who had become infected through ignorance of the danger or through unsanitary practices. Preventive vivisection of the advanced cases was now common, and there were therefore, in various laboratories, pieces of several persons, citizens of Rio Blanco, who had come in contact with the crawling hand and had contracted its pathogen. And this had all happened so quickly! In just four days! It was undeniable, how the pathogen thrived in the warmer Earth climes, with deadly results. Some of Koo’s colleagues, friends, enemies, acquaintances, were already subjecting the extremities of patients — here a toe, here a human ear, here a severed head that still managed to make the most hideous caterwauling (according to the clinic on the South Side) — to various kinds of tests. But Koo himself remained convinced that none as yet had attempted to perform any large-scale experiments relating to the ongoing problem of reanimation.
Koo, if he were willing to make the journey into the dangerous outdoors, could probably obtain some other infected tissue sample for his own experiment. Was he willing to travel on this account? Koo preferred not to use his son for any experimentation, because it wasn’t ethically sound, because his family was in a dire condition. On the other hand, Jean-Paul’s blood type was a match, and his son was very nearly beyond the state when he, Koo, or anyone else could help him. Wouldn’t Jean-Paul, the brilliant and promising entrepreneur, the best son any father could have, want to participate in the experiment that Koo had in mind, the experiment having to do with the cryogenic freezer in his garage, especially in view of his illness? During the postmortem phase of M. thanatobacillus infection, Woo Lee Koo could plausibly begin implanting some of the infected tissue from Jean-Paul into the body of his wife, at least that was how the medical researcher in him thought about it.
There were as many ways of thinking about the medical ethics here as there were ways of thinking, and thus without arriving at any conclusion, Koo watched his son on the monitor in his study as the boy attempted to pry loose from Vienna Roberts some romantic reassurance. Was there nothing more he could do for Jean-Paul? The courses of antibiotics seemed to make no difference at all. Koo’s friend Ryan Levy over at the Northwest Medical Center had tried the same with his own patients, from the simplest organic compounds that still worked on syphilis, up through the newest synthetic antibiotics, without conclusive results. Even finding a vein for the intravenous drip was hard, since Jean-Paul’s arms now resembled gangrenous or decomposing tissue. It was impossible to tell whether oxygen-rich blood circulated through the boy’s sludgy vessels into that damaged, infected tissue. Koo’s ruminations on treatment ran to the far-fetched: transplantation of some extremities. Could they transplant into Jean-Paul? With the body in the state it was in, Jean-Paul was unlikely to have a problem with tissue rejection, and wouldn’t the elimination of some portions of the infected tissue slow the progress of the pathogen? At least for a few hours? This would be feasible only if Jean-Paul’s limbs were not yet in the advanced stages of detachment.