The omnium gatherum, because of its interest in the primeval, staked a claim to the night sky. Here in the desert. People went over the mountain pass to the great emptiness beyond, west of Rio Blanco, and they abandoned their cars and their bikes by the national forest, which was no kind of forest at all, but just a long stretch of saguaros and cholla. And they walked a mile or two into the Valley of the Slaughtered Calf for the night sky, and for the particular entertainment of that night, which was the Apotheosis of the Arm. Volunteers had roped off a portion of the valley, and the Bureau of Land Management, which was protective of local mining claims, became suddenly, on this night in the beginning of the cooler part of autumn, with the stars spilling into the sky, all but absent. They waived a number of permits. Unaccountably. There was a police cruiser or two at the front entrance of the Valley of the Slaughtered Calf, but no one could tell whether there was an officer of the peace resting within the cars or not, and so the disaffected streamed past, the disaffected, the forgotten, the homeless, the religious zealots, the disabled (in their motorized wheelchairs), the conspiracy theorists, the abused, the ambulatory masses who were hardly so huddled, they came to the Valley of the Slaughtered Calf because they believed that something unforeseen might take place here, or because, at the very least, they believed that they could dope themselves here, which was revolution for its own sake, and in doping themselves they wouldn’t have to reconsider and revisit their misfortunes any longer. The fighter jets had lifted off at the air force base, and the sky had fallen into a certain portentous silence. The partygoers were wearing festive garb, when they were wearing garb, although it was mostly just the OxyPlus addicts from the local fraternities (those who had not yet failed) who willingly came naked, or in loincloths, wearing headbands and sunglasses but otherwise with their nether parts dangling in the penumbra, flailing as they began to dance, not even recognizing the not-at-all-tribal metronomic battery of dead girlfriend as it pummeled the public-address system, admixed with the recordings of the calls of the last remaining humpback whales, sounds of slot machines from the nearby reservation casinos, high-tension lines amplified. Their nakedness was dazzling to themselves, and what women were present would long for these fraternity men, at least in the masculine imagination this was the case, the imagination of those who didn’t end up falling asleep or vomiting and passing out.
In the café downtown, meanwhile, Noelle and Morton spent half an hour discussing their greatest personal fears. Morton was the one to bring it up. He’d been reading an online advice column: how to have the healthiest relationship, and he’d paid for a download (charging it to Dr. Koo’s credit card), The Healthiest Relationship: Ten Preliminary Steps. Here he’d learned many things. The contemporary man needed to make himself open and vulnerable, to reveal his innards for intimacy with patience and quiet confidence. And the way to make himself vulnerable, according to The Healthiest Relationship, by Deep Singh, PhD, was to talk about his greatest personal fears and his need for caring. Noelle was well aware that Morton, sipping chai latte, was unsettling to most of the patrons of the café, but never more so than when he said, audibly, “All my biggest personal fears, if I’m being honest, have to do with vivisection.”
Noelle ventured, witlessly, “Why is that, do you think?”
An incredibly stupid thing to say, really, because, actually, she could never know what he’d lived through, the ordeal of serving as a medical experimental subject his entire life, from the first instant of his primate consciousness (as opposed to his recently awakened human consciousness). His whole life had been about having various electrodes affixed to him, or having pieces cut off, often without anesthetic, or having various things injected into him, illnesses cultured in petri dishes from places like Congo and New Guinea. Morton had survived this only through good luck. From the moment he’d been weaned, this was what Morton had known. If, in his new consciousness, he didn’t remember those early days, with their experimental regimens, he must have somewhere stored up their trauma.