“What does it have to do with—”
“And they’re going to be the ones who launch the arm. They’re going to put the arm into a jet pack and fire some missiles at it in order to incinerate it completely. They’ve got some kind of remote-controlled launch pad. And they’re going to launch in the middle of some big pyrotechnical display. Or I guess that’s the idea. Always with the fireworks. So juvenile.”
Traffic on the mountain pass had come to a halt, and standing on the side of the road, looking ornery, looking as though they reeked with some immemorial death musk, were the javelinas. The sage and prickly pear growing there kept them fat and happy. It was as if the javelinas were watching the cars, waiting for the convoy to inch by so that they might resume ownership. Their tusks had a Holocene menace. They waited as the traffic over the pass snaked its way through a dozen or so switchbacks; they waited amid the encampments of migrants, the undocumented trying to make their way south to Nogales. They waited through the fellow travelers, middle-class kids wearing all the right footgear, the goggles, the highly reflective outerwear, all of them foaming at the mouth with whatever cocktail of medications they had managed to ingest. Noelle watched, too, as a helix of turkey vultures next appeared, in the last of the light, and began to swirl above the action, waiting for the mortality on those sandy shoulders to reveal itself.
“Our plan,” Noelle said. “Let’s see. Let’s discuss our plan. Do you want to discuss our plan? Do we have one? Our plan is first for you to contact Dr. Koo, tell him that we’re almost near the event site, and then our plan is to try to make contact with some higher-up types at the omnium gatherum, some of whom I know a tiny bit, like Denny Wheeler, and then we’re going to try to get as near as we can to the arm, and somehow we’re going to try to substitute another arm in its place. How’s that sound?”
It was fair to say, she acknowledged, that she not only wasn’t sure she could follow through on the plan, but she wasn’t sure she wanted to. She believed in the omnium gatherum, if it was possible to believe in something that was so riddled with contradictions, something so earthly and finite, something so profligate, and if she occasionally had a few critical things to say about them, that was only in the spirit of loyal opposition. She didn’t even know, really, what Koo wanted to do with the arm, in terms of his ongoing experiments. He said that it was important to secure the arm to keep it from spreading its menace across the populace, and especially in a big group like the omnium gatherum, but it was clear that this was not all he was after.
“You have an arm to substitute?”
“I do,” said Noelle.
“Which you got where, exactly?”
“Anatomy classes at the medical center. They’re disposing of those cadavers all the time. Dr. Koo has special privileges where cadavers are concerned, because he has an endowed chair, and if Dr. Koo needs an arm for an experiment he’s doing, then no one is going to tell him he can’t have an arm. So one of the anatomy classes…”
“They—”
“Cut the arm off especially for us. But we had to remove the finger ourselves.”
“You removed the middle finger yourself.”
“I know how to cut at the knuckle.”
“What did you do with the finger?” Morton asked.
“It’s in the rucksack with the arm. I guess I should throw it out somewhere. But you can’t just throw a finger anywhere.”
“I could do it for you, if you like.”
“That’s why I have the windows open. Well, plus, I don’t believe in air-conditioning. Air-conditioning is when a nation becomes weak. Decadent. This arm is only a little decayed, though. That’s the good news. From what I’ve heard about the contagious arm, it’s more than a little decayed. You know, the hardest part of this whole thing was finding a wedding ring that would fit properly on the substitute arm’s hand.”
Maybe Morton had gone wistful and sentimental over the mention of a wedding ring. She couldn’t be sure. Over the period of caring for Morton, she’d decided that postures and expressions that seemed precisely human didn’t always mean what you thought. Sometimes chimpanzees pulled faces that seemed gentle, sympathetic, and then they tried to club you to the ground. Morton was probably just looking at the valley below them, nothing more, because now they had come to the saddle of the mountain pass. She swore you could see Venus on the lip of the night sky, because the sun’s last few beams were disappearing behind the peaks in the west. And in front of them, in the broad expanse of the valley, was the answering light, the nation-state of omnium gatherum, which seemed to have erected instantly a fairground, or an amusement park, or a tent city, all these kinetic forms intent on proving that the sun revolved around the Earth.
“I got it at a pawnshop,” Noelle said, “in case you were wondering. Were you wondering? Is there something wrong?”
“I’ll get upset if I want to get upset,” Morton said. “How many talking chimpanzees are there in the world? Wait, let me think about this for a second. The number is not zero, and it’s not two. That must mean that the number of talking chimpanzees is one. And I am that talking chimpanzee. I do what I want. Do you know that there are probably television talk show hosts, right now, who would want to hear whatever it was that I had to say? If I had some kind of… representative… If I had a representative, right now, she or he could book me on some kind of talk show, and they would ask me questions like did I favor bananas, that sort of thing, and I could demonstrate to them how I knew the basics of trigonometry, and I’d tell them my higher power was probably in my own image and not in man’s image. They would think whatever I said on the subject was scintillating, earth-shattering. I have no problem. What is your problem?”
“I don’t have—” she said.
“Is it my business alone if, upon hearing about a wedding ring, I can think only of how good I’d be for you?”
“Look, we have a lot we need to do. Let’s not—”
“You’ve got an arm in a bag that you cut off a corpse in the hospital basement, and you found a wedding ring from some marriage that’s gone bad because the people in the marriage didn’t love each other as much as I love you, and you put that wedding ring on the severed arm, and somehow we’re going to attempt to substitute this arm for the infected one, and you’re doing all this for that butcher at the university. I don’t understand why you—”
Morton’s voice was getting more and more shrill, like a chimpanzee in the forest, in fact, and he was banging on the dashboard of the van, and as the windows were rolled down, there were people on foot listening and watching, an army of adherents of omnium gatherum. One guy mumbled, Nice costume, as they went past.
She said, “It’s not for Koo that we’re here.”
“I’m here for you,” he said, “so speak for yourself. Koo doesn’t care about anyone but himself and his reputation in the medical community. Do you love him? Is he the one who’s in the way of your having a fulfilling and maturing love relationship with me? In The Healthiest Relationship, it says that the first rule of a maturing relationship is correct concentration. If there’s someone else you’re thinking about, some other person with whom you have unfinished business, then you’re never going to commit to this relationship robustly and—”