“It’s funny you say that, because I happen to know some folks who have actually made contact with the arm—”
“Everyone says that they know someone personally who has had contact with the arm. But where is that person, right? The person who had contact? Can you deliver that person to me now to give me this so-called firsthand account?”
“What about a talking chimpanzee, have you seen a talking chimpanzee in the last twenty minutes or so? Coming by this way?”
But he was back on the bullhorn almost instantly, sloganeering, and again Noelle found herself being pushed southerly, toward the part of the desert that was given over to a reconstruction of an old Western village, a stage set that had been used in various Hollywood genre pictures, back in the day. Old Rio Blanco, it was called. It was a simulation of a simulation — a re-creation of a Hollywood stage set that had once re-created Rio Blanco, or so said the local advertisements and tattered billboards. Unfortunately, no one, any longer, had a clear memory of the history of Rio Blanco. There was some appropriateness to the omnium gatherum electing to situate its events out here, in the Valley of the Slaughtered Calf, the valley of the simulation of the simulation, through which one labored to reach the truth but found instead that doubt and the misappropriation (of things from their sources) ruled the day. The fringes of the event would naturally end up in Old Rio Blanco, therefore. And then there would be some sort of shoot-out. Because what else could there be.
Despite the very large numbers of attendants at the omnium gatherum events, you soon found that you were seeing the same people over and over again, and sometimes even seeing them in the same sequence, and in no place was this more likely than at the village of lightweight portable human waste vacuum-containment systems, through which Noelle would have to travel, this allée of waste disposal, if she was going to end up in Old Rio Blanco. She had no choice but to encounter the large groups of people she didn’t want to think about in relation to waste production, here among the individual modules that were arrayed in a wide V-shaped formation outward from the gate, so as to take care of the waste needs of the largest number of omnium gatherum attendants. Whether you liked it or not, no outlay of capital manpower was more significant to the community than that invested in waste collection, and the organizers, or the volunteers, or the organizers and the volunteers, were forever coming up with more arcane and more fervent rules to organize the collection of waste, especially in order to spare the desert floor the kinds of gray water that might, for example, wipe out the last of the desert tortoises. It had happened in the past, large-scale uremic pollution, and the omnium gatherum had found that this didn’t go over well with neighbors, human and nonhuman. And so they had purchased the latest in waste-collection devices, the American-made vacuum-containment systems, which were widely used by the government in its tent communities at the borders. Vacuum-containment systems, by coincidence, had also been used on the Mars mission, if you were naive enough to believe in the Mars mission. “Look!” the government seemed to cry. “We have vacuum technology, including funnels for the ladies, that will make waste removal far easier than it has ever been before. What other nation could bring you a waste-containment system that leaves no residue behind, and which ultimately produces a solid peat-like fertilizer free of bacterial agents that can be used on any home or industrial garden!”
Yes, there was something humiliating about the waste-containment systems, Noelle thought, and generally she avoided food and water before omnium gatherum events in an attempt to steer clear of the V-shaped bank of vacuum-containment modules. However, she’d noticed that it was precisely when you believed you wouldn’t have to relieve yourself that you found you needed to do exactly that, and, also, that if there was someone you didn’t want to run into, someone with whom you did not want, at all, to share a conversation of several minutes while wreathed in the earthy perfume of such places, you would definitely run into that person. The opportunity for humbling always lay right around the corner, and its perfume was cloacal.
And so this was where she ran into her coworker Larry. He was wearing a purple feather boa, and some cutoff shorts dyed black, and she could tell, almost instantly, that he was on some kind of hallucinogen, because in the half-light of the lamps by the vacuum-containment modules, she could see his monstrously dilated pupils. Moreover, when she spoke to him, there was a long delay in his reply, as if a great number of gears, and the little gnomes who turned these gears, had to be put into play for him to come up with the polite response. It seemed, at first, that he didn’t even recognize her, and they had to go around and around with the introductions.
“It’s me, Noelle. Your coworker. You see me every day?”
“I do?… Oh… hey… Noelle!”
“At the lab! I can’t believe you—”
“Noelle?” he said, as if testing out the syllables. “Noelle?”
“What are you doing here?”
“Noelle, that’s a woman I work with—”
She couldn’t figure out, at first, if this was an attempt at humor.
“—a big omnium gatherum person. I decided to come have a look.”
“Met anyone? Interesting, I mean. Talked to anyone?”
“Talked?”
“To anyone.”
“Oh, right. Yeah. I…”
“Listen, Larry, I’m wondering if it would be okay for me to change the subject and—”
“Did we have… a subject?”
“I guess we didn’t, really. The thing is, Larry, I brought Morton out here, according to Dr. Koo’s instructions, because we thought he’d be effective undercover, and he was just carried off.”
“Morton was…”
“Carried off.”
“Morton, the…”
“Chimpanzee.”
“Oh! Talking chimpanzee. Bad frigging temper.”
“These guys in wrestling costumes came by, and it was like they already knew who he was, and it was like they hog-tied him, and before I could even figure out what to do, he was carried off.”
“Excuse me for a second, Noelle.” Because one of the vacuum-containment privacy modules had opened up, and when opportunity presented itself, one had to grab it. The little privacy station seemed to belch forth a customer, a relieved customer, in this case a youngster, one of those tweenagers who went by the designation board rat, for the fact that he was basically surgically attached to a motorized board and had, moreover, brought the board with him into the privacy module, as if it were the board that needed to be evacuated. This board rat slunk out of the privacy module as though he didn’t want anyone to notice him and his stringy figure-eight earlobes, and indeed Larry didn’t notice him. Larry noticed only the open door, where he saw his salvation. “I’ll be right out,” he called over his shoulder, but Noelle knew that he wouldn’t be right out. He would be in there, in the vacuum-containment privacy module, for as long as it took for her to move on. The feather boa just wasn’t the kind of personal expression that Larry wanted to share, and he would stay in there, checking through the little two-way mirror, for as long as it took. Some parts of us (Noelle hoped to jot this down in her journal) were really only available to strangers. Should she wait? Should she go?
While she deliberated, the most demoralizing quadrant of the Valley of the Slaughtered Calf, a small group of gunslingers dressed in some of the props of the old American West, dashed into the V-shaped concatenation of privacy modules and began firing off their Tasers. No doubt they were heading for Old Rio Blanco, with the aim of obliterating some blotch of sunburned guys playing the roles of the Tohono O’odham or the Hopi, and it would all be very simulated and very childish, this reenactment of how the genocide was won, but it would be a fine prolegomenon for the explosive displays of the later evening.