Soon she realized that she was in fact in the recesses of some kind of mining operation. What the apothecary apparently led into — she must have misjudged one of the early doorways, missed where she was intended to stop and wait — was a disused mine. It wasn’t out of the realm of possibility, since there had once been a lot of mining in Rio Blanco, nickel and copper, for example. But along with claustrophobia was her fear of large interior spaces, reminding her of one she’d visited in Europe, a cavern into which a small Italian town had thrown all of its trash for over a thousand years. It was the thousand years of trash that frightened her most. All that neglect for all that time. There were probably people who’d been flung in — alive — and never heard from again, for a thousand years. How far could she go into this cavern, herself, how far down into the unvisited past of the Southwest, before she was officially lost and needed to turn back, assuming that if she just turned 180 degrees she would in fact eventually find the front door of the apothecary’s shop, which would in turn lead to the omnium gatherum, and back to her original problem, which was finding Morton, and finding the arm, and getting out of here?
It was hard to tell, at last, if the light up ahead was a legitimate light, not some phantom of her migrainous family of symptoms or just something to distract from the narrowing of the reinforced rock around her, the smell of water used to flush away the acids and the tailings. What remained of the light in this darkest of places could have been self-generated, or it could have been some actual exit, or it could have been the light of some benevolent personage, some miner who had been living in here, sneaking out through the apothecary under cover of night, when the tourists weren’t around, in search of rotgut and Sterno. Noelle waited for sound, for the reassurances of sound, in order to verify that the light was not hallucinatory, but that sound didn’t come. She called out again and heard nothing in reply. And yet instead of turning back and trying to retrace her steps, she trudged on toward where she imagined the light awaited her, around a gentle bend in the corridor. She’d only been walking five or ten minutes! It wasn’t as if she’d walked a mile down here into the mine! It wasn’t as if she were walking under the mountains and back into geologic prehistory, and was going to come out among dinosaurs rampaging on the veldt.
The room, when at last it opened up in front of her, was grand. A large group of the wrestlers was waiting. In a taciturn repose. They sat against one wall, all of them silent, and they all looked as though they’d been taking a lot of whatever there was to take upstairs at the omnium gatherum.
When her eyes adjusted, she saw the arm, against the far wall, struggling to crawl along its base toward the end of the room, where yet another corridor led off into the infernal blackness. When the arm drew near to the way out, one of the wrestlers would lift up a Taser and fire in that direction, and the arm would recoil from the blast, flop over onto one side, and lie quiet for a moment or two, before gathering its strength and setting off in the opposite direction. Like a cornered scorpion. There was much hilarity involved in this game, it seemed, as her eyes adjusted. The wrestlers were moved by the arm, by its inability to give up. Any number of Tasers were discharged (and cartridges quickly replaced) before Noelle attempted to intervene in order to establish a conversation.
“Any of you actually touch the arm?”
Was this question addressed to the leadership? Their organization, to Noelle, was more like a school board or a prom subcommittee — something without anything like a fearless leader. And so it was hard to get an answer. In the meantime, the arm, its fingers agitating as though it were practicing piano scales or doing exercises to alleviate a repetitive stress injury, turned itself around, with remarkable ease, and began moving toward where Noelle stood. Almost as if it heard her somehow.
“Touched it?” a voice murmured, though it was unclear which of the wrestlers had said it. Now she could see in the illumination of the battery-powered flashlights that few if any of the Mexican wrestlers were actually Mexican. The possibility had only just occurred to her. And why would they be? The people on the other side of the border had things to do, places to go. The people of Mexico had jobs. The wrestlers, instead, were a heterozygous lot, a multiethnic melting pot of bad vibes. What they liked about Mexican wrestling was the superheroic violence.
“It’s contagious, you know.”
“You mean because it’s got like all that stuff dripping off the end and flesh hanging off and pus?”
“You know where it came from, right?”
“From the Wheelers’ tent.”
“I guess that’s how you got hold of it, huh?”
“Those people just aren’t good to their volunteer staff.”
“The thing about the arm,” Noelle said, “is that it’s infected with highly contagious bacteria that has probably come from Mars, and I’m guessing it’s highly contagious just from skin contact, and if you get the symptoms of the disease, well, it’s fatal, so far, anyway, and from what I’ve heard the symptoms are pretty awful. So is there anyone who’s touched it?”
One of the wrestlers got up, walked to where Noelle was standing, and began pushing her over toward the arm. It was that simple, really, and when it began, she felt as though all of the day had been leading to this moment. She had been so unwise, so foolish, about what the day would bring, because she hadn’t expected it to include coercion and intimidation. She was so unwise because she hadn’t expected the omnium gatherum to end with the application of force. And now that it was happening, she saw that it had always been there. Force was there. When you went to the fast-food restaurant and ordered your hamburger with a side of microbiological contaminants, you had the police force of the marketplace behind you. The force that ensured that people like this, Mexican wrestlers, were never able to mobilize into some kind of general strike, or agitprop theater company, or tutoring organization; force, undergirding the shouted hello of the deliveryman as he goes past your house; force, as the neighbor’s dog dashes up the walk to lick your hand; force, making it possible that the big, chaotic populations out there didn’t get into your safe-deposit box; force, which through some miscalculation or some systematic series of miscalculations made possible the Sino-Indian Economic Compact, which now had its own army and its own propaganda machinery. Force. Noelle didn’t address the issue exhaustively during the millisecond in which the wrestler guy — thinning hair, unwashed physique, aubergine tights, gin blossoms, halitosis — began to edge her toward the contagious arm; she experienced convulsive little images of understanding and misunderstanding, all intuitive, upon her like a white-light experience, and she began to shout things, though she didn’t really register what she was shouting, nor did she understand exactly what it was she was shouting about, as she began to push back against the wrestler, and she was shouting, though nothing was stopping him, and his confederate (in Green Lantern costume, maybe, or something similar) now joined in the madness, to insure that there wasn’t any danger of her repelling the two of them; it was all just about the gladiatorial aspect of the thing, woman versus disembodied arm, although she did hear someone say, Where’s the monkey? You make sure that the monkey is tied up, and even in the midst of her struggle, she did want to say that it wasn’t a monkey, he wasn’t a monkey, he was a great ape, just like the thugs attempting to push her toward the arm, one big primate family, and she knew as soon as she heard them say that, that her rescuer was out there, nearby.