by Rick Moody
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.
As additional converts began attending meetings, Zachary Wheeler began to conceive of the omnium gatherum, despite its scriptural, textual, and interpretive zeal, as something that had to be accomplished in real time, which is to say that it needed to take place only at actual gatherings, not in people’s homes, not in solitude. It needed to have a dramatic, communal, performative modality. This emphasis came to repel certain kinds of Christian folks, though the omnium gatherum declared itself in harmony with their practices. The Christians, it seemed, mainly wanted to talk about the Book of Revelation. They had been led to believe that only certain interpretations were authorized with respect to their text. Zachary Wheeler was chagrined to lose, in the larger omnium gatherum community, the more obsessive members of the evangelical world—especially evangelical persons with a history of psychotic symptoms, since Wheeler be
lieved that psychosis was an important ideological tool, one that needed to be included in the dialogue of faith.
Then: snakes. The continuum of vermin. Beginning with sewer roaches, moving up through scorpions, and the tarantulas, perhaps including the coyote and the javelina, the brown recluse spider, the diamondback rattlesnake. If Zach Wheeler never woke to find a snake in his bed, or a snake waiting for him in the bathroom, it was only by chance, because who didn’t come here, to the desert, but to reckon with the sound of the rattlesnake and the application of its venom to a calf or an ankle? Who didn’t find himself, or herself, listening for the sound of the rattlesnake? The omnium gatherum was ephemeral, was lightweight, if it didn’t involve snakes, if it didn’t have workshops where there would be biting, where there would be willing victims of rattlesnakes and a period of waiting before the antivenin was administered. Wheeler himself was the first to volunteer, and he invited people from the community to watch, which only emboldened his estranged sister, a social worker in Oregon, to note in the press that Wheeler had always been “sick, egomaniacal, and passive-aggressive,” and that, as a child, he’d performed for his ex-military father by playing with electrical sockets. Students of snakebite ecstasy will have noted that the venom of local snakes, Sonoran snakes, has been mutating over the years, and that the sidewinder and the diamondback have both graduated to a level of poisonousness that has led the local police to attempt to intercede when, at least, they have been tipped off about wildlife encounters.
Wheeler, however, had made a lifetime study of the creation of ecstatic religious groups, and he’d gone to the mega-churches, and he knew that he stood for something. It was important to get people around him who could look after the organizational details of the omnium gatherum, such as the creation of foundational documents, so that he might simply go out into the desert, as all the great monastic thinkers had done, and organize his party, year in and year out, allowing for sculpture, for ritual burning, for music, for performance. It was as if the slogan Happiness Is Submission to God wrote its history in situ. The omnium gatherum, like its founder, was unruly, badly scripted, had no rules, and was often thought to be more theme park than philosophical system. Perversely, it grew more quickly during bad times.
It was five or six years past that Wheeler finally decided to stage his own disappearance, in a snakebite ceremony, in which he was supposed to have allowed a sidewinder to bite him on the face—after which he was taken to the University of Rio Blanco Medical Center. Gangrene set in! Was he so badly disfigured that he needed to wear a mask? Or some kind of veil? Had he died in the snakebite ritual? Were dental records required? Or was he just tired of the whole thing and wanting to move into consulting on corporate productivity? His disappearance only insured his centrality to the omnium gatherum as it moved forward to field its first political candidates and to seize control of some deconsecrated churches in Rio Blanco, which it used as gallery spaces and warehouses for the treasures of past events. Some of the gallery exhibits concerned Wheeler’s trips across the border to study up on Yaqui peyote rituals. In some accounts, he had become a coyote. Whichever version of the truth you believed, assuming one of them referred to that hazy quantity the truth, Wheeler removed himself from any visible role in omnium gatherum operations. Official meetings of omnium gatherum became more unpredictable.
In this way, they began to concentrate on nomadism. The omnium gatherum, just three years ago, began to assert that nomadism was the most effective use of the Earth’s resources and that private property, as such, represented theft of the land. The Roma, the Plains Indians, the Mongol shepherds, these became idols for the rootless and centerless inquiry of the omnium gatherum, and it came to pass, because that is how things happened with the omnium gatherum, they came to pass, that homelessness emerged as an integral part of the omnium gatherum course of study, homelessness and nomadism living right next door to each other, as it were, nomadism being the proper pre- and post-apocalypsis lifestyle, and so homeless members of the group, who were especially drawn to some of the healthy snack foods available at omnium gatherum events, became integral. They were valued, esteemed, and their difficulties were dealt with within the family. Certain impressionable members of the omnium gatherum, which is to say runaways and young people whose parents had lost their livelihoods during the recession, believed that they had seen Wheeler, and that he was himself embarked on riding the freight trains in order to recruit from among the robust population of rail nomads, or they believed that he had organized a motorcycle gang of some kind, which moved from town to town stealing from the rich, or they believed that he was now an emergency medical technician, and that he was out in the field, trying to cure an outbreak of some streptococcal menace, or they believed that he was border patrol, and despite his intense rhetoric on the elimination of all border fences in all nations, that he was secretly aiding and abetting the repatriation of undocumented persons attempting to flee this country, or omnium gatherum had never existed in the first place but was just a series of studies in opposition.
How was it financed? The last important question in this history of the omnium gatherum. It was financed entirely by donations, and the better part of these donations were made by the rank and file, members of the group just like you and me, who were able to give fifty dollars, or a hundred dollars, or nothing more than a quarter. You just gave what you were able to give, and if that was no more than a quarter, then that was what you gave. There was web-related advertising, naturally, and there were online sales of artworks that were generated by various omnium gatherum events, and recently they had made a little money in real estate, by purchasing worthless or foreclosed properties and holding them for a while. But the donations were the better part of what they had taken in, and as time went on, as the omnium gatherum became a legitimate, or a semi-legitimate, ideological system, one that fielded its own tattoo artists, its own massage therapists, its own cocounseling workshops, its own demon-extraction rituals, its own waste-management operations, its own agricultural products, its own farm markets, the possibility for profit grew, and as the potential for profit grew, the greater were the gifts from the employees of corporations, the fellow travelers. Most of the collecting happened through the omnium gatherum web site, which was not affiliated with any official employee, because there was none. The IT manager was also the publicist, who claimed not to know Zach Wheeler, nor where to find him, but who may have been identical with him. According to this publicist, the federal government had, in the era after Social Security, defaulted on its obligations, and the omnium gatherum was prepared to step in as a shadow government. Responsible and affluent persons needed to consider whether a donation to the group would be more reliable than taxes paid to a central government, that despoiler, because the omnium gatherum was better able to look after the citizens and was therefore more deserving of tax money. This argument worked, it turned out, and it was breathed into life by Denny Wheeler, Zach’s son, who was at Stanford, and who made the appeal as part of his senior thesis on alternative political systems.
It was into this phenomenal and nearly unforeseeable socio-religious success that a certain disembodied hand crawled.
The downtown rally for the Union of Homeless Citizens was heavily attended by members of the omnium gatherum, or perhaps it’s more exact to say that there was much interpenetration between the two communities: the homeless and the spiritual adepts. Hard to tell the one from the other. They both subscribed to the tenets of nomadism. Who could say which was which?
An inquiry by some high school students who had attended the rally, the rally of the Union of Homeless Citizens, who had watched as the police descended on the lawfully gathering nomads, noted that in many of their interviews the rally participants asked such questions, whether in Spanish, English, or Spanglish, as “Did you get a look at that goddamned arm?” “Whoa, brother, I was carrying the arm for a while.” “The thing had this way that it moved.… It was kind of a dancing arm… moving a
ll around while you held it.” “I swear the thing was trying to talk, and I had this running buddy, man, couldn’t say no words at all, only spoke like with some kinds of sign language, and I swear to you the hand was trying to talk, just like this guy.”
The theory of nomadism described statistically the behavior of very large numbers of people, and therefore the theory relied on unruly crowds and their inevitable assault on private property. Accordingly, it was impossible to say precisely who held the arm when, just because of luck, one high school kid, Nicky Hays, who was trying to write something for his school paper about the rally, happened upon it. Didn’t matter who. Someone claimed to have had the arm for a day or two, and to have traded it to another guy who had a large supply of polyamphetamine pills, and this was a bad trade, because these pills did not contain true polyamphetamine, and this addict spent the night throwing up in an alley behind one of the adult-book stores. Hays followed his tip, in the thirty-six hours after the rally, into the dark and sinister world of polyamphetamine dealers, who were mainly high school and college kids with parents who were clinging by a few unraveling threads to the middle class. And it turned out that someone Nicky knew, Moose Mansourian, controlled the arm, after a long, rather dormant day in which it was mainly a trophy. He’d locked it in a terrarium, where, through some indolence or exhaustion, it sat at length. He’d tried to feed it slices of orange, tried to get it interested in a hamster wheel made out of bicycle tires.
Hays sensed that perhaps the crawling hand was not a beneficent presence in the landscape of Rio Blanco. So when he figured out that Moose had stiffed a homeless guy on the polyamphetamine and thereby obtained the arm, he made a beeline for the Mansourian residence, which was on the South Side. Moose’s father worked at the coal plant. His mother had abandoned Moose and his brother, Corey, who had an extra supply of genetic material. Apparently, Moose believed that Corey was really going to like the arm, because Corey was interested in all kinds of weird stuff, though he was basically a gentle kid, and Moose liked trying to do things that he thought would amuse Corey, and so he took the arm and sold the addict guy a bunch of laxative pills, claiming they were polyamphetamine, and Nicky was so shocked at what he was learning, just with a little flash recorder that he’d borrowed from school, and a notepad, that he couldn’t stop calling people to tell them the story. One of the people he called was his old girlfriend, well, not his girlfriend, really, but they had known each other in a carnal way, a hooking-up way, and her name was Vienna Roberts. The conversation was like this:
