The loneliness of large crowds has been voluminously covered in the literature and poetry of the twenty-first century, so let us no more speak of it, instead noting that the omnium gatherum actually had a singles night that it offered at one of the bars on Fourth Avenue, during high summer months when no official events were scheduled. And what bar could be better than the establishment called the Surly Wench? When there seemed to be precious little omnium, just gatherum, when men, mostly men, wandered in the crowd, mumbling to themselves, gazing on the partially naked or mostly naked twenty-one-year-olds as though these were the phlogiston required for their own internal combustion, then you needed the Surly Wench and polyamphetamine with absinthe chaser, the kind of intoxication in which these men couldn’t tell the sky from a paper cup. Then you could beat back the very loneliness that Noelle felt, coming to these events without a companion, the loneliness you felt when your only friend, the friend that you brought along, the friend you apparently took for granted, is carried away by a group of Mexican professional wrestlers. In this loneliness, you naturally found yourself in a group of elderly women wearing candy striper outfits who were volunteering to treat sunburn, scratches, mild sprains, contusions, and other celebration-related medical problems. They kept calling out, these elderly women, “Registered nurses!” And holding up signs.
“Did you see that?” Noelle shouted to one of the women, in the thick of the lonely crowd.
“See what, honey?”
“They just carried off my friend.”
“Honey, if you have a minor scrape, I could help you with that.”
The candy striper held up a jar containing a yellow-green fluorescence that was probably a topical anti-infective. This was supposed to be inviting to the people who had minor scrapes. But as a line began to form in front of the candy stripers (each with her toothless grin), Noelle looked into the faces of those assembling and what she thought she saw everywhere was a fever. Was it her imagination? Was she imagining a pandemic, in which every human had an infection? Mercurochrome was not going to do the trick.
“They carried off my friend into the crowd. I mean, I know that there aren’t supposed to be any police here or anything, but they carried him off. And he isn’t really equipped to take care of himself.”
“Most of those kinds of problems, honey, get solved quietly within the community. I’m sure the wrestlers just meant it in good fun. The group will take care of it, though you never can tell how long that’s going to take, because the community has its own time frame for these things.”
Had Noelle said anything about the wrestlers? She was sure she had not.
“What’s your symptom?” the candy striper asked.
“My symptom?” Noelle said. “I read into whatever is happening around me and I imagine that it all has something to do with my life, even the big sociopolitical stuff—”
A rail-thin young guy with long unwashed hair that had a blue streak stuck out his tongue and pronounced a brace of vowels.
“You didn’t have any contact with a severed arm today,” Noelle said to the kid, “did you?”
“A severed arm?”
“Yeah, you didn’t see any kind of severed arm? Or did you hear about it?”
“You mean like the kind of arm that they’re going to… I thought that was all—”
“One of your friends, or maybe a friend of a friend say anything to you about keeping company with that kind of arm?”
The boy’s blank stare was no indication of anything. It was as if he heard the words, but he didn’t understand the necessity of response. The best he could do was repeat the phrase exactly, which he tried before saying:
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“No, I guess you don’t.” To the candy striper, she added, “How about you? Anyone in here talking about an arm?”
“Only the ones that are still attached to their bodies,” said the candy striper.
“Well, you really ought to start wearing surgical gloves, if you ask me, and I work in the field. Don’t touch any wounds, and if you see anyone who has a hemorrhagic complaint — you know what hemorrhagic means?”
“I was cleaning up after outbreaks of typhoid in Africa when your mother was in diapers,” the candy striper said, and her professional smile faded.
“Then you know that sometimes the first responders go down with a serious infection. There is a serious infection going around, and that’s all I’m saying about it.”
“Honey, go look after your friend, see if you can’t find him. I’ll look after the sick kids with my friends here.”
The crowd did seem to push in a southerly direction, the crowd in which Noelle next found herself, and the candy stripers were going north, and while the conversation in question was taking place, its participants were being pushed farther away from one another, and Noelle was growing more and more distant from the skeptical candy striper.
The nurses were followed, in close proximity, by the Mars Mission Skepticism Society. For some reason, there were a lot of canes, crutches, and walkers among the Mars mission skeptics. Their designated spokesman was shouting into a bullhorn about how the mission had been fabricated in order to distract citizens of NAFTA from the grave economic problems that faced them, that faced all of the Western democracies. But at least the Mars Mission Skepticism Society was articulate, which was a quality strangely lacking in omnium gatherum participants, whether they were educated in the lackluster public schools or at the voucher-only elhi schools, or homeschooled. “Simulacrum!” the barker pronounced. “Cultural hoax! Join us as we explore the theoretical foundations of space fraud! Your tax dollars buy you a group of drug addicts being filmed in polyurethane outfits in this very desert! And why? In order to persuade the Sino-Indian Economic Compact to spend thousands of billions of dollars on a space race that will bankrupt their economies! Long live the Sino-Indian Compact! The Mars mission is a tool of NAFTA intelligence agents! It has no purpose but to distract!”
Whenever the disabled skeptics bumped into someone, as they seemed to do with great regularity, they apologized profusely, as if, for all their doubts about space exploration and international relations, they were nonetheless polite. These were the kinds of people, Noelle supposed, who went on the occasional killing spree, but when they did so, they were always careful to apologize to the victims before dismembering them, saying it could not be helped, and when they surrendered to police, they pointed out that they never meant to harm anyone at all. With this in mind, she said to one of the skeptics, a bald guy with really thick glasses and an incompletely grown-in mustache, “Say, you guys haven’t heard anything about where they’re storing the arm for the launch tonight, have you? Have you heard anyone talking about the arm?”
“The arm is just a bunch of bullshit,” the bald guy replied without hesitation. “There’s no arm, because there was no Mars mission. And if you want to know the truth, the whole omnium gatherum is being staffed and underwritten by the air force base across town. We’re here at great risk to our persons and our property, and we only do it in order to get the message out to the people.”