Some Assembly Required

by Michael Strelow

  So, hang on a second. I want to add in here another conversation, kind of a hearing-of-voices, but out loud in the regular way of talking to someone. I read that there was a huge starfish die-off in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of Washington. I was drinking beer with a friend, and I offered that, of course, aliens had come down to take the starfish’s ability to reproduce its limbs. I had heard the whip-tailed lizard and other critters could do the same thing, and we should be aware in case the lizards were next. I figured (okay, three beers later) that humans would be taken last because we couldn’t do what even the lowly plant could do—reproduce ourselves out of a fragment. So the starfish die-off—had to be aliens … “Oh, but seriously, why can’t we make new parts?” And he says, “Well, theoretically, we can. We can make them … but the real problem is installation, I guess.” Turns out some kind of petri-dish cookery will make lots of human parts but something is missing. Doctors can’t make them stay. My bad knee needs a new meniscus. So they grow me one and when they try to install it, the new part wanders off. It doesn’t know where to stay or what to do. Not enough information got transferred in growing the new part? And then the royal scientific “we,” he says, “We don’t know why it won’t work. We can’t address it. Probably some proteins missing, amino acid blocks. Who knows?” I think that my voices would know; they just wouldn’t tell me. Damn their ethereal hides! Why can’t they just give me the word, solve this world for me? I never wanted anything from them but entertainment when I was a kid. But now I want meaning. Isn’t that the shits! Same voices: it’s me who wants something different. It’s my rising longing after the world that screws up the sweet relationship we had when I was a kid.

  So I suggest that I know a guy who…

  Let me start again. I know a guy who thinks that the only problem in this whole business of replacement parts is just better information. And that’s exactly what my beer-drinking science-friend thinks too. But Dr. S is—theoretically again—cooking up the gray blob that might get the job done. So welcome to my world where my lady friend and my Dr. S connive like actors in a play to assemble something compelling. Chekov’s gun in the first act is required to go off by the fifth act. I want, I want and the voices demur. I wait patiently for them to prove useful. Why else are they wired in my head in the on position? In the wild, would they warn me about the beast stalking me and save me and themselves?

  I have to get back to Dr. S. He doesn’t write; he doesn’t call. Though I’ve courted him like a lover, he rejects my suit. So instead, I finish listening to Marnie’s Modernism talk and applaud.

  I say, “Socks will be knocked off. There will be socks ten deep across the floor.”

  She says, “I’m supposed to deliver this while partway up a ladder. The director wants me doing something the Modernists would approve of, and he came up with the ladder in lieu of my refusal to do it naked. Did you ever climb a ladder in high heels?”

  “Stepladder?”

  “I think so, but …”

  “Okay, so here’s my ladder-wise advice. Go up only far enough so you can rest your notes or even your elbows on the top. You can put a glass of water on the little shelf that sticks out—be sure that’s all the way out; it’s what makes the ladder stable. And so that is the entire store of my ladder information. You’re on your own for the rest. Why not naked?”

  “Only for you I do naked speeches.” She turned away, that way she has, that turning-away thing she does that makes me go jelly inside and smile. And I’m pretty sure she knows it too.

  We make love without chasing around. We make love, and it occurs to me, though just fleetingly, that making love is just the right information at the right time. The whole human critter is set up for sex to be the right information at exactly the right time. Even done badly.

  Marnie’s introduction is a fine success, ladder and all. She’s up there in her high heels using the top as a podium. A minor Max Ernst is just behind her head: some plant or leaf drawing with typing on it. I can’t get over the way this information thing is stuck in my head, how it now colors everything I see and do. It joins the mask business. The whole notion of the tyranny of binary. Yeah, Pythagoras. Why haven’t the whole numbers of zeroes and ones been split—like fractions? My computer friends explain that zero and one are really just off and on, or even more really just a micro-voltage difference between what designates the zero and the one. Sure, but all that mush between? Isn’t that what Dr. S is proposing that all the mush between is chockful of information we need? Isn’t that why a homegrown meniscus won’t stay? Is there a dent in my DNA that turned on the voices and their iterations and cosmic echoes? A crappy shred of protein that hooks up “wrong?” Why didn’t I get the vision of an eagle instead? The whole subject of superpowers occurs to me. As it should. Was Modernism really just a 20th century awakening to let in alternative realities? I should have listened closer to Marnie’s intro. It would have prepared me for the alternatives I was about to bang into headfirst.

  Max Ernst was doing just that, Marnie informs me back at home, after hearing my new obsession. He was fascinated by the irrational, the Freudian sub- and pre- and un-consciousnesses. He painted out of his refugee status—refugee from his father’s art, from war, from consciousness, from the fraudulent surfaces of what he thought were passing for reality in Europe.

  So now I had Max and Albert, Ernst and Sewall. This thing going around and around in my head. I knew the way to get it out was write it out. I had to talk to Dr. S again, but it seemed the only way to do that was to go to the university and stalk him.

  Chapter III

  I thought that the way in with Dr. S would be to study his world, but it turned out he was in his own world all right, but a world largely inaccessible to others. No one else in science seemed to be doing what he was doing, for one thing. And the second thing was that he is such a … what? I want to say “crabby fuck,” but that’s a gloss on what he is. Maybe he’s a cartoon crabby fuck with curmudgeon tendencies and misanthrope moons rising to his conflicted disdain for all human activity. Oh, Jesus, Mary and Joseph. See. That’s still only part of it. I have to add that he seemed to be in pain in at least one of his undiagnosed organelles. In the old Li’l Abner cartoons, a character was described as “his goodness glands was squoze.” Something like that maybe. A distress that wouldn’t go away.

  Yet, I pictured him there in his lab tending like a kindly farmer to some gray-brown thing in a bluish-orange light.

  I went to his lab again and peeked in at the thing, the blob. It seemed to be resting comfortably. I thought: Hi, thing. I get the feeling you and I are going to get to know each other sometime in the future. Whither goest thou? I thought maybe it was biblical or going to be biblical and might speak King James. Prophetic, apocalyptic—there would be smiting, of course. But there was no action in the Lucite corner, so I went to plan B: attend Dr. S’s classes. I hit up my newfound secretary contact for a schedule of his classes and sat in.

  As I walked toward his class building, it seemed the university paths floated with all the possibilities in the world. Besides the few cellphone dropouts from reality pasted to their tiny screens and walking the zombie walk, most students chatted at each other with a young-adult frenzy fueled by hormones and pheromones and sweet-smelling soaps and caffeine. They seemed to tick with possibilities: of mating, of rearranging the dreary evil-smelling reality of their parents into the world of logical-positive idealism of their classes. They cooked in their own joy and angst. All possible worlds were possible. I could almost hear their hundreds of voices rattling as I walked with them. But I had my own voices and didn’t need or want theirs. The morning sun coated us all, sinner and sinned against, voiced and voicelessly blessed without prejudice. One of my voices pointed out that patina of gold momentarily outlining the Fine Arts building’s Italianate façade. I know, I say. I know; I see it already.

  I was writing, of course. I always wrote when I walked with strangers as if I were receiving their energy
like sunlight on my shoulders. I delighted in the tiny cracks that appeared in the dull surface of the world, cracks that let in other possibilities, especially the possibility of the whole sham of surfaces falling away with ceremonial clamor and trumpets—peeking under the masks. The shams didn’t fall. But I felt ready anyway, more prepared for the great sloughing into truth than anyone.

  I entered the big lecture room just in time to hear Dr. S extolling the virtues of the mechanisms—there are many, it turns out—that kill us.

  “… they make room. For more. For more of us, more cells, more and different everything. The key fact is that there are a number of built-in failures in living tissue. I’m not just talking about the errors that produce cancers or birth defects or hereditary disease. That’s all very interesting and a topic for another day. What I’m referring to is the tendency of cells or collections of cells to fail. I like to think of them as collaborations of cells and one of the failures is at the level of that collaboration. Imagine a meeting that begins with great civility and pomp and even ritual. But pretty soon one of the participants fires a rubber band across the table at the person across from him. Then, in time, someone else starts chucking pencils at the ceiling to see if he can make one stick, but the pencils start to rain down on the proceedings. And then … well, you can see where this is going. Pretty soon—the edge of chaos. Then chaos itself. The meeting’s over.”

  Dr. S was apparently in fine fettle, sawing the air like a Shakespearean ham. Ernest. He was Alfred—but he was also earnest, and the students were getting it. This was his element, unlike the academic conference. He seemed to have the script for this gig—the pauses, the eye rollings, the little dance as he spun toward the board. He used the light switches to portray the off and on signals of the cell mechanisms; he lobbed a small piece of chalk at the sleeper in the first row. He continued.

  “Well, the cells are loaded with delinquent possibilities. The design of the cells is fraught with the potential for error. And it’s more than just the old maxim about complexity inviting error. No. The design itself is like a cosmic joke of sorts. A joke about death and failure and cellular incompetence. Or, put in a more hopeful context, the design invites re-design. By peering into cellular shenanigans, we are challenged to make the whole business better. The design-to-fail says to the scientist: ‘Bet you can’t make a better one. Go ahead. I dare you. Go ahead. You think you’re so smart? If you fix this, it’ll break that. See? Don’t screw with the amino acids! I’m warning you. Go ahead and clone, and you’ll find some key ingredient missing.’ Remember the sheep named Dolly?”

  Did Rex just get a pedigree, I wondered? Was the doctor laying out his recipe for gray oatmeal? I pictured the orange glow of Rex’s Lucite lair, pictured him rearing up on hind … okay, so pseudopods, and then squirting out the breathing holes and declaring himself free. I was off.

  And he was off. This lecture was completely different from the conference fiasco; this had sound and fury. I sat smiling at this master-of-the-mind-getting-off-on-itself. Dr. S was just like me and my ADHD but in an awful suit with an awful tie and a stick up his butt. He paced as he spoke, came to the end of some invisible tether, spun around and paced back. The pacing had a touch of Groucho Marx to it. I again thought of the blob of oatmeal, amino acids sulking in the Lucite corner of his cage. Maybe that was the solution to the design-to-fail Dr. S was describing. Had the doctor eliminated the fail? Even if it just sat there and didn’t fail, that would certainly be something better than the proverbially sliced bread.

  “That sheep was only partial. What was missing? We’ll get to the particulars of that later, but for now: what was missing was the elegance of what I call the ‘failure system.’ It’s the way the system fails that is the key to its vitality at the cellular level. Do we have to put up with death? No. Not really. We can accept the challenge to re-design the thing. But that will be the subject of a four hundred level course and this is a two hundred level.

  “So one last thing. A scientist asks what is the mechanism of cell failure, and as I said, it turns out there are many. The cosmic joke of death. Yes. But also in the long run—the very long sine-wave if you will—there is a general culling of the old in favor of the new: cell, individual, species, genus, etc. Nature favors the newest version in general. So that challenge—to make it new—is really inherent already in the system. You can fiddle with the particulars but be sure to honor the general.” The newest version? The blob in the cage?

  He paced. He pulled on an ear lobe. He put his hands together in front of him making a church—here’s the church, here’s the steeple, open the door and see all the people? I pictured his lab in the hay bales, Rex boxed in glow; was this cell lecture working itself out into some kind of pabulum of immortality?

  “Mitochondria, for instance, was once a free-range critter that for some fortuitous reason found a home in the human replication system. Now it goes to work schlepping materials to the nucleus, never stopping for lunch. But also added its own error-prone system to the already error-ridden business of reproduction. Be sure to feed your mitochondria—keep them happy—so that the rest of the system can get reproducing.

  “For Tuesday: memorize the terms on the handout sheet. They’re basic to where we go next with this stuff. Come prepared.

  “Oh, and how do you tell a male chromosome from a female chromosome? That’s right. Pull their genes down.” The laughter that was missing from the conference joke.

  I waited for the auditorium to clear to catch him on his way back to his office. But he disappeared out a door in the front of the room before I could get down to him. I went around outside the building and saw him booking it across the campus toward the Ag buildings.

  I scurried through the cows and their calm farting, the sheep and their baleful eyes peering out of the dark pens, the heavy breathing of pigs. Somehow Dr. S got into his lab well ahead of me and was already busy as if he had transported himself directly or knew of some back way under the maze of animals.

  “What?” he asked when I knocked on the open door. “Oh. You again.”

  “I wanted to talk to you if you have time. About your work. Your ideas.”

  “I don’t have ideas. I have work. I’m a builder.”

  But I could see he was still on a roll from class and wouldn’t mind, I thought, talking a little more about what he did. “So what exactly do you build?” I glanced at the blob in the back of the lab. He followed my glance.

  “So you’ve met Rex? I don’t lock the door. I probably should. So let’s say you’ve met Rex.”

  “Not really. Though I guess I’ve what? Maybe, peered at him. And wondered. Why a him?”

  “He’s actually nothing and everything. I just liked the idea of Rex, you know. Like Oedipus Rex or Rex a dog, a king of things in general. But ironically, of course. More like Oedipus than Rin-Tin-Tin.”

  I kept looking at Dr. S for signs. Where was he coming from? Talking to him was like talking to someone on the phone: the facial clues were not there. Or maybe, the opposite, there were too many clues: eye twinkles, look-aways, sniffs and snorts, head-scratchings with his middle finger. That sort of stuff.

  Marnie and I had a whole middle-finger system. “Sure I’d like to go shopping for art supplies”—middle finger scratch—“Sure, we can double date with them; they seem like nice people”—finger-gun to head: two shots, middle-finger scratch. I was sure Dr. S and his Lorax named Rex were in on the game.

  “So, Rex? Does he do any tricks?” Interviewing brilliance, I thought. Where could we go from here?

  “Yes, tricks. So far just one good one. He seems to leave some gray powder there in the corner of his cage sometimes. Like I’m supposed to clean up after him. I always think of this residue as broken zeroes and ones, you know. Part of a circle, a half a line. But very small, of course. Since Rex is really a series of computer commands, what could he poop out? Maybe ions. Maybe his cellular mistakes. That’s what I hope, of course. That he’s fixing hims
elf, repairing … Who knows? It looked like gray dust, even under a microscope. Oh, a little like spores too. That was spooky.”

  Dr. S paced back to where Rex huddled in his corner. Huddled? He had me thinking that way, now. Then the doctor pulled out his shirttail and waved it at Rex. Really? I thought.

  Dr. S said, “I always like to let him know that I’m his friend—not that whole Geppetto mistake. That I-made-you-so-listen-up. That mistake. I’m just saying hi. Do you need anything? How’s it going?” He flapped his shirttail again. Rex remained silent and in his corner. Was Dr. S giving me the complete goof trip? He continued: “The only interesting thing I’ve done here is get the basic set of instructions partly right. I have no illusions about getting very many instructions right, just a few basic ones. Dr. Frankenstein shouting, ‘It’s alive!’ Nothing like that. But I think in some really fundamental way, it is alive.” The doctor peered into the blob. “Good boy, Rex,” he said. “Good boy.”

  And so he sat down and gave me all the caveats. There was no spinal cord, the nerves were rudimentary (more like a cartoon version of real nerves, he added) and, alas, no mitochondrial reproduction. Then the poet in him came out, the great quotes for my article: “No Yin to its Yang, no Cheech to its Chong.” That was the best. Also: moon/sun, shimmy/shammy and boku/maru (I looked it up later; it’s a Kurt Vonnegut reference).

  The doctor kicked back in his chair, feet on his desk. “And that’s that. I mean I couldn’t get the time of day with this at the conference. Colleagues? Did you stay long enough to hear the crap they were interested in?” This in stentorian tones, announcer style. “‘Folding and protein transcription in RNA copying.’ Yep, I said to myself. It sure does. Yup. Nobody is doing anything like Rex.” He glanced over at Rex. “I’ll tell you who is though. Sci-fi magazines, that’s who. The most interesting genetics is being done in sci-fi mags, not in laboratories.”