The Four Fingers of Death (90 page)

Black nationalists lived there, and these URB students were willing to put up with the occasional tarantula, or at least stories of the tarantula. These African American studies majors and their friends understood that the phrase on the side of the house on Sixth Street was from the Qur’an, and they even claimed to have
painted
the phrase on the building, though informal historians of Rio Blanco recognized that the slogan was painted before some of these students were out of diapers. Because of its spiritual
vibe
, these students made the house the center of their operations, where they began to attempt to bring their worldly, Western lives into accord with the precepts of that holy book, a classic of prophecy. Because there were students who lived this way, there was a sympathetic professor, and this professor was willing to offer courses with which they might refine and improve on their interpretation of the Qur’an. In the classes of this firebrand, language could do what culture could not, just by its utterance, just by the intent with which certain words were uttered,
how excellent is the recompense of paradise
, to utter certain words was to give proper reverence to Muhammad,
if there are twenty of you with determination they shall vanquish two hundred
, and soon there was a campus major in Islamic studies, and then there were doctorates, and then there were people who came from abroad,
whatever misfortune befalls you is a consequence of your deeds
, so as to hear about this interpretation of the Qur’an, which was the interpretation of the very word of God,
this is the Book free of doubt
, and the students were so committed that they had emblazoned their way of life on the side of their house, or at least the emblematic center of their studies, the house on Sixth Street, or so they said.

The Department of Islamic Studies and its student body hung on to the house for a while, perhaps until the time when the jihadist movement began to pick up steam halfway around the globe. At this point the Department of Islamic Studies seemed to scatter like dust dispersing in the Sahara. It was not instantaneous, but the Southwest was no longer the destination to which the Wahhabis reflexively turned. Upon the advent of death and mayhem a world away, the department began to lose its luster, and therefore the house on Sixth Street lay empty for a year, in an economic downturn. The neighborhood declined. There were shootings. Upon a reduction in rent advertised by a management company that would not identify the owner of the house, possession came to rest in the vegan community, the animal rights community, and so forth. The students of Harmonic Convergence, the men’s liberation movement, the Wiccans, all came through the house, the last of these commencing the operation of the food co-op on Fourth Avenue. And then there were some massage therapists, and some people who were into auras, a group that practiced overtone singing. It seemed, in these years, that the words
Happiness Is Submission to God
signified just another
lifestyle choice
. During this period of the orphic ascendancy of the house, it was possible to speak of the residency of, e.g., one Jerry McArdle, an activist who opposed investment in South Africa, and Elsa Black, the instructor in tribal dancing. These inhabitants offered all the complexities of real people ( Jerry collected guns; Elsa believed in
free love
but never read a book), and so the house no longer had magical properties, and that was the case for a long time, because this was a cultural era
after
miracles. There were no miracles, and no believers in miracles, because in the new millennium there was only commerce, and commerce depended on a system of goods and services that was more predictable than miracles, which could not have the universal pricing code affixed to them because miracles had no surfaces. The house on Sixth Street became just a house. A place where someone or some group of persons lived. A place where someone had an Internet programming console. A place where someone kept some of his or her stuff, and used the word
stuff
to describe it. The interior was repainted, and one wall was knocked out so that the living room would be a little bit larger. It was no longer important to try to have four entire units, which resembled tiny, poorly lit cells.

Into the age of the cessation of miracles, there came to the house this fellow from Indiana called Zachary Wheeler. He was the friend of the friend of somebody who lived in the house on Sixth Street. Later on, no one could agree on whose friend he was. One woman, the one who made candles, said it was the guy from Santa Cruz, who only lived on Sixth Street for seven weeks, all of them spent on the couch, who had invited Wheeler to stay. But the guy from Santa Cruz blamed Sheila, the tarot card reader. Zachary was there, for good or ill, and he helped control rent inflation, and everyone seemed to like him well enough, though he had an absence of qualities. No
there
there. This would later appear to be one of the hallmarks of the literature produced by the
omnium gatherum
, the notion that what was desired was
less self
, that the persons possessed of this diminished ego were pariahs to civilization at large because they did not attach themselves to the distractions of this world, such as dishes, hygiene, and taxes. Indeed, these were some of the complaints about Wheeler, that he was less than generous as a roommate or a housemate because he didn’t perform the weekly cleaning of the communal bathroom, which he had explicitly agreed to do by signing the schedule of chores on the refrigerator. Instead, he seemed to hover awkwardly around the periphery of any assembly of housemates, especially when guests were present.

He wanted, he said, when he said anything, to study ecstatic celebrations of the Plains Indians. He understood that these ecstatic celebrations, he said, could enable participants to concentrate better on the job, become more productive, have a more fulfilling sex life, rise to leadership roles in politics and the community.

If Wheeler was not, according to later profiles, successful at recruiting his housemates, he did, in his isolation, undertake to think carefully about the slogan
Happiness Is Submission to God
. He wrote poems, recorded New Age—style music featuring the panpipe, and, by his own description, he refrained from masturbation for a period of years. What he discovered, according to one of the self-published
omnium gatherum
books, was that
submission
was, in fact, essential to a happy and fulfilling life in this post-millennial world. His revelation was as follows. There was a night, according to Wheeler, in which he waked certain that there was again a scorpion in his bed with him. Perhaps he dreamed of the scorpion. Or it dreamed of him. However it came to be, Wheeler knew that the scorpion was in the bed with him, and, as he retold the story, he carefully peeled back the threadbare sheet that covered him, and he gazed upon the scorpion, and without hesitation he presented his arm to be bitten. And yet the scorpion, which was looking for a warm, secluded place in which to settle itself, instead crept into the ravine between Wheeler’s arm and his chest, and it tickled him as it traveled up into the crevice. Wheeler’s first impulse was to jump up and shake off the bug, but he didn’t give in to this impulse. He waited, and so did the scorpion. Wheeler, according to his beliefs, submitted to the scorpion, which likewise submitted to him, and the two of them waited, symbiotically, for what was to be revealed. It turned out it was rather a long night for Wheeler, whose arm was deprived of blood flow while he refrained from motion. A slick of perspiration formed on his forehead and tracked down face and neck, pooling especially in the armpit, where he imagined that the scorpion slaked its thirst upon his moisture. In the morning, in the first ray of light, the scorpion emerged from the warm sweaty spot in Wheeler’s armpit, took one good look at him while perched on his chest, and stung him repeatedly. The scorpion laid it on. It did not hold back. Worried about waking roommates who didn’t even like him much, Wheeler refrained from screaming, and he waited out the scorpion, which scuttled off to the corner of the room and disappeared beneath a baseboard that was both entrance and exit.

How this simple act of submission, and the several days of recovery that were required thereafter, the ice and ibuprofen, served as the beginning of the
omnium gatherum
, you would know only if you were an inductee into that loosely organized spiritual movement. For the uninitiated, it was clear that this moment had to do with submission, and with
revealing
, for somehow the scorpion, as a symbol, came to represent the desperate circumstances of civilization on the brink of
moving into the new
. Wheeler, in the period of recovery from the scorpion stings, during the predictable depression that often coexists with the expulsion of toxins, leaned on the notion of
revealing
as a comfort, and this gave him the idea to synthesize all the apparent apocalyptic strains from the faiths major and minor, and to argue that apocalypse, which is all about
revealing
, satisfies an important part of human psychology, one that must be embraced and celebrated.
Apocalypsis
can serve as a
lifestyle opportunity
. Apocalypse implies change, and the possibility of great, unpredictable change, as well as the moral certainty that other people will be consigned to oblivion, these things can really make life more tolerable.

The first
omnium gatherum
, a study group organized by Wheeler with members of one of the mega-churches in Rio Blanco, at which Wheeler occasionally took communion even though he didn’t have much faith in the decidedly practical mysticisms of Protestantism, was notable for its absence of
omnium
. Turnout, that is, was light. Every convert to the cause was hand selected, and with great effort. According to the literature of these early pre-institutional days, the group consisted of a woman with a type II bipolar diagnosis, Christine, whose husband was really uncomfortable with all of her Wheeler-inspired babbling; a death metal vocalist from the suburbs, called Stig; and one of Wheeler’s best friends, a quiet and retiring mathematician called Louise Anselm, who felt that
apocalypsis
was probably mathematical more than anything else, and who wanted to study it as a kind of teleological reply to the numerical excesses of infinity. Wheeler assigned reading to each of these participants from one of the mystery cults or from heretical sects such as might be found in the Nag Hammadi papyruses,
come to that which God has revealed
, the idea being to generate some kind of reservoir for all possible descriptions of apocalypse,
yet man says will I live again
, and to begin to organize these in a database of apocalyptic imagery and longing. The original members of the group were uncommitted to the project, but they were good people, and they were four, which is a numeral of genuine interest, describing, for example, the square, and each of the four, each of the line segments of the square of
omnium gatherum
, the superstructure in which the group would be built, exemplified the dictum
Happiness Is Submission to God
. Coincidences abounded!

Stig, whose vocal polyps had temporarily sidelined him, resulting in his being forced out of the band he had formed himself, gave the first presentation at the
omnium gatherum
, namely a paper on connections between Joachim of Fiore, the twelfth-century architect of numerical
exegesis
, and the number of words in the fragments of the Oxyrhynchus 1224 Gospel, with special attention to the first line fragment: “… in every… To you I swear…” These six words, according to Stig’s very serviceable paper, indicated revelatory strains that ran straight from the dawn of civilization up through the canonizing impulse of early Christianity, rising to a pinnacle in the twelfth century, where these six words collided with Joachim and his numerical obsessions, whereupon the particular numerical sequence, as well as the devotional importance of the word
every
, likewise the avowal of “To you I swear,” with its carnal implications, were suppressed for several centuries while Europe bathed itself in blood and plague, not to appear again until discovered by the decadents of the end of the nineteenth century, who equated, according to Stig, love and
le petit mort
with the end of civilization, at which point the impulse was again suppressed, according to Stig, until the soul music from the late twentieth century, beginning with the African American jazz-soul singer Nina Simone, traveling through some old-fashioned hip-hop and neo-soul, these generations-old soul music evocations, according to Stig, presenting both a carnal and a revolutionary fervor, as in the Trotskyite upheavals of early-twenty-first-century Kazakhstan. Stig’s reasoning, it was clear, was not terribly sophisticated, and there were improbable leaps whose rhetorical force would not be immediately apparent to readers who weren’t already informed on matters of the
apocalypsis
, but for thumbnail history it wasn’t bad, and it’s important to note that Stig, when he destroyed his voice for good, became a religious-studies professor, one of the first popularizers of
omnium gatherum
in the religious left; see, for example, his wealth of papers on the decentered and anti-authoritarian structure of governance in
omnium gatherum
, its emphasis on service and rotating leadership, its oral tradition, its attempts to generate its own language and alphabet, its resistance to traditional ritual. These position papers became so central to the public relations of the
omnium gatherum
that there was a schismatic subdivision of the group that insisted that Stig was the de facto founder and institutional genius behind everything that was and has been lasting about
omnium gatherum
.