Some Assembly Required

by Michael Strelow

  My son thinks the lines were a landing field and whatever it was took off. Kids! He loved the dynamics of loading up and getting out of here. But I still think I’m right, and this whole business happens more than we care to admit: there’s a new combo in town, it flourishes for a while, it goes extinct. I think rather than “goes” extinct, there are lots of them that just quit. Not all life forms have our yearning after reproductive success. I think the dust just smiled, said good enough, and waved goodbye.

  Our new house is not on a creek. But the word is that there was a nineteenth century dump around here somewhere because the excavations unearthed some very small apothecary bottles and vials. It had the collectors out in droves. Some of the bottles had corks and bee’s wax seals and liquid still inside. I like to think of these bottles as the next Johnson Creek floodwaters and my bottle of bleach. I’ll keep an eye out and tell you how this works out.

  Yeah, yeah, I know how much Dr. S business has crept in to this. It’s the same goddamned story but let out on a different leash. The story is my voice that deals with what the world is telling me. How now brown Rex? I took me an extra hour to get home.

  Chapter IV

  The dust news item was a little sketchy but the final report had come in from the government and everything “had returned to normal,” it seemed. Move along, apparently. Nothing to see here.

  Marnie told me she had saved the piece because it seemed vaguely related to the stories I had told her about the good doctor. But what she really wanted to talk about was the new show she was installing—fractals made into art. I didn’t see the connection at the time, but I do now—the fractals, that is, not the dust.

  It seems—and I suspect that everyone has also suspected this at one time or another—that the natural world has a penchant for patterns. I found one guy, astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington, who conversely said that these patterns were actually the manifestation of the human means of measuring. That is, there is no reality, just that what we find is a product of the means we have to search out and measure it—our own minds especially.

  Here’s the Wikipedia entry—a little more recondite, but to the point.

  Sir Arthur Eddington wrote in his book The Nature of the Physical World that “The stuff of the world is mind-stuff.”

  The mind-stuff of the world is, of course, something more general than our individual conscious minds.… The mind-stuff is not spread in space and time; these are part of the cyclic scheme ultimately derived out of it.… It is necessary to keep reminding ourselves that all knowledge of our environment from which the world of physics is constructed, has entered in the form of messages transmitted along the nerves to the seat of consciousness.… Consciousness is not sharply defined, but fades into subconsciousness; and beyond that we must postulate something indefinite but yet continuous with our mental nature.… It is difficult for the matter-of-fact physicist to accept the view that the substratum of everything is of mental character. But no one can deny that mind is the first and most direct thing in our experience, and all else is remote inference.”

  —Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World, 276-81.

  But most scientists and especially mathematicians, have found pattern after pattern. Fractals—especially Julia and Mandelbrot sets—are the designs made by a mathematical set of instructions (sort of like RNA). Color them any way you want, and you’ve got: art, algorithms made manifest in colors, the fingerprints of God, the face of God. More choices available. How about Dr. S’s little set of instructions that come to lurk in an air-conditioned box in the Ag building? What little re-iterative algorithms are slouching toward Bethlehem to be born? Rex, as Dr. S described him to me, seemed to have a lot in common with the fractals—they were a set of repeating instructions.

  So there’s the tension—articles are always better with tensions: Eddington is on the money with his great extension of relativity—we see everything in the universe through the lens of human consciousness; the nature of neurons is the beginning of reality. Or … what I like to think of as the Robert Lewis Stevenson postulate: “The world is so full of a number of things, I’m sure that we’ll all be as happy as kings.” Said without irony, things are everywhere waiting for us to find or invent them.

  These two camps have beautiful variations on the central themes. The bell curve is big and fat.

  A second conversation with Dr. S, a number of weeks later when my article had grown way too long and lugubrious—the article that consumed itself and much of its surroundings. The article that was not to be, I came to think. The damn thing spread out and began to consume not only my every waking hour, but it sent tentacles in my wool gathering, my semiconscious day dreaming, my idle hours of writing up the article of the whole world.

  I had found his office again, this time calling the animals by name, “Hi ya, Rosie. How’s your udder?” And there sat Dr. S looking at graphs on his screen. In the corner was Rex, or so I thought.

  I greeted the doctor and then greeted Rex with a wave and a hi.

  “Correction,” said my host. “That is not Rex. If you look closely, you’ll see a kind of color variant on the original, Rex Prime. It’s the same set of instructions but not the same critter. Very interesting. I kept thinking contamination of chemicals at first. CP, chemically pure, is only so pure, it seems. After the 99.99 percent is where the humor of the universe is located, apparently. Look at him.”

  We both went to Rex’s lair and the doctor turned on a light. The blob was indeed both striated and speckled within the stripes like some rare African antelope only seen on Tuesdays under a full moon. So I asked what Rex II ate. And it seems the answer was also right out of Dr. Seuss: “Agar-agar.”

  “And some other stuff too,” he said. “I see where you’re going. He is what he eats. And eat he does. Did I mention that the remains, the feces so to speak, is just dust. He seems to metabolize very thoroughly. And look how slim he stays. I can put out food, really just dip him in it, and the food is gone and dust remains. I may have invented a perfect eating machine. I was going to give him a half slice of pepperoni pizza one day but thought better of it. I could make another one, of course, but it’s a pain-in-the-ass long process. Rex Prime I think died for one of two reasons. He had either reached the end of his metabolic clock—got old and died per cellular instructions. Or—I somehow killed him with instructions or with food. Anyway, I keep Rex II on strict agar-agar to give him a fighting chance. What do you think? Should I start him on PB and J and then move up to pizza? Oh, and there’s another possibility too. Rex Prime may just have left the premises, you know, like Elvis. I don’t like to entertain what that one means, you know. He just got up and left? Got bored and is out there looking around for stuff to do? I hope not, but maybe … I am, after all, a scientist and must be open to all avenues that I haven’t logically eliminated. Alas, there are all those NSF protocols about recombinant critters, protocols I didn’t follow since Rex really wasn’t a bacteria or virus.”

  The doctor was in. And on. He had gotten into class-humor mode with me. And now there was no stopping him.

  “So … What is it again, what you’re interested in? You’re doing an article on what?”

  I wasn’t sure. The whole business of Rex sulking in the corner, the Ag building alive with barn sounds, the goofy professor resigned to his hole-in-the-wall science, Marnie’s fractal art somehow babbling up behind this stuff, my editor like some cigar-chomping Perry White fuming at Jimmy Olson, the entire R. L. Stevenson “happy as kings” line—ah, life at its best messiness, its beautiful messiness. I should have started with “left the premises.”

  I asked if I could photograph Rex, and Dr. S said yes, but no flash. I whipped out my phone and approached Rex still piled in the corner of his container like a stack of dirty laundry. “What’s his good side?” I joked to the doctor. “Does he have a back side? Is it the same as his front? Could we un-pile him out of the corner?” I was used to the reporter’s impertinence. It came easy to me
now. The questions about how people feel in tragic situations, the question that goes over the line when people are fragile—all saleable, alas. The way of the biz, I figure. I couldn’t have anticipated Dr. S’s response.

  “Okay, get the fuck out of here. I’ve had enough.” It was the response many of my interviewees should have come up with but never did. The good doctor went right to the point. He figured I wanted to poke Rex with a stick—like enraging a circus lion to get a better picture. He didn’t get my half-joke as I approached Rex with my invading lens. Or maybe, and here’s the one I’ve come to think is the real reason I got told to fuck off: the parental instinct kicked in. Though the doctor had written the program and made a blob, it was his blob by God, his coded pile of genetic information. His child.

  I left while trying to explain that I was only kidding, but the doctor wasn’t buying it, or was sick of my intrusion or … yes, wanted to be alone with his creation, do whatever B horror-movie thing he did with Rex. Pygmalion, Eliza Doolittle. Slop some bleach on him and see what happens.

  Driving home I thought of how I’d blown it. But blown what? Were there these guys all over the country making algorithms live? Was the whole basic-meat thing about to be solved, and Dr. S was only the recent snowfall on top of the tip of the iceberg? All kinds of speculative literature had been musing about this for the last fifty years. Then the scientific literature took over and began to show how some of the parts might be constructed. Mel Brooks made fun of it before it really happened—genius.

  Maybe I should forget about Rex and go looking for the other ones that had to be out there. The scientific literature would have the keys to who was doing what experiments where. I felt the warmth of a trail—a journalist’s wet dream just beginning. As I drove, I realized why no one was interested in Dr. S’s paper at the conference—besides the sound system, that is—and the reason was that probably nobody there was doing this kind of thing. Make something sort of alive with lines of code to no particular end. And the corollary was that Dr. S had a room in the Ag building for exactly the same reason. No NSF or drug company money, no research assistant, no fancy apparatus. The doctor’s equipment had looked exactly like the set of a very bad sci-fi movie: an oscilloscope, a centrifuge, a box or two with plenty of knobs, some kind of toaster oven to warm stuff, a refrigerator to cool stuff (and keep his lunch cold), some digital counters, books and detritus spread around so it looked like a mad-scientist’s den. One chair. Maybe Igor was kept in cage back with the cows.

  What I was pondering was the state of modern science whereby all experimentation of note was by definition very expensive and again, by definition, would be vetted by committees who doled out money, government or private, and defined what was worth doing, what was not—asking cowboys how sheep were to be shorn. The scientific paradigm was worth writing about. Dr. S was probably worth writing about but going to be difficult to recapture. The making of life was worth a shot but fraught with Frankenstein boilerplate. All these had different audiences, all had to be written in different styles. The question that has guided my career so far: Which direction should I take to get a paycheck and have some fun?

  When I got home, Marnie made me shower and dress for the art opening. Once there I got my glass of cheap white wine and stood in my navy corduroy jacket with the elbow patches and was introduced to many clean faces. Everyone smelled nice.

  But as I looked at the fractal art, I kept seeing versions of Rex. Rex at ease, Rex alert, Rex running through a graphics program like fairy in a field of daisies. I was reminded, standing there, that James Thurber’s wife was reported (by him) to have jabbed him in the ribs as he stood at a party holding a glass of (cheap white?) wine looking out over the crowd, and after the jab she said, “Thurber, stop writing.”

  So I’m ruminating on reiterating polynomials, Julia and Mandelbrot sets, the stuff I picked up from the art opening—thinking about how time works in the generating of fractals, what the entry into the equation is for time (or distance? maybe). Early Mandelbrot sets were designed to approximate the coastline of England, and they looked just like the coastline of England. And I can’t help thinking about Rex, his pouting in the corner and what this has to do with fractals, with anything. Somehow the two—fractals and Rex—have engaged me in that kind of “get shit done” mode I have as a writer of magazine articles. This thing over here talks to that thing over there. And if I listen in I get to hear what they say to each other, the connections, and report it. And while I’m again obsessing between these two poles, I remember another news item in the paper.

  In Poland, in a factory settling-pond left over from the Sovietera disregard for the environment, there appeared to several observers a sort of religious experience. While they sat and ate their lunches near the pond, the surface turned black, though the day was sunny and clear. Then after some minutes of perfect blackness, the surface of the pond turned gold, like gold foil used in the gilding process. And the gold stayed and stayed and stayed, until one worker stood up and heaved a rock into the gold. The splash erupted and gold flew up and gold rings pulsed out from the center. One worker later said the rock rose up suddenly and disappeared into the sky, but none of the others would bear him out on this account. The pulsing rings stopped then and the surface returned to gold for some minutes. Then suddenly it went back to the dun-colored waste pond they had known before. One of the workers, though it wasn’t clear from the article if it was the same guy who saw the apotheosis of the rock, left immediately after announcing his life had been changed, and he was leaving to spread the word. He left so suddenly, the article went on, that his fellow workers didn’t know exactly what word he was going to spread. There was discussion among the workers about what had just happened, what word there was to be spread. They agreed to a story that contained just the facts, the color changes, the rock, the leaving of their friend. Each one repeated it in nearly the same words as the others. Some outsiders came to set up a vigil near the pond, but the black to gold change didn’t occur again. The end. XXX

  Finally, while standing in front of an eight-foot by six-foot fractal colored by an artist (i.e. an artist selected the colors) but generated by a mathematician, I thought I heard the story of dust, the fractals and the story of black and gold all calling to me through my vision of Rex slumped in the corner of the cage. What is Rex doing? Rex I and Rex II, do you know the dust people? The surface of the pond and all its incumbent chemistry? Some fractals, it turns out, take the shape of dragons. Or shields, or coastlines. Or lumps of oatmeal whose surface is everywhere a reiteration of his shape at all levels of magnification. I’m going with “the fingerprints of God” for my behemoth article. It has that kick in the solar-plexus authority. Take that, Cosmic Mystery!

  My voices: the last link that was also the first link. How’s that tautology? As a kid, I had to sit in a room painted in desperate light green. It seemed hard to breathe, but I think that was just that I knew what was coming. The counselor ushered me into her office with all her patronizing concern torqued into her face. Eyes big in sympathy, brow furled in concern. Mouth held at neutral smile to make me feel … what? I remember feeling that I was about to be cheated out of something. Sold something I didn’t want. I knew I had to stay with her and respond politely. But really I wanted to flee. Run and run and run until the drip of psych-babble peeled away from me in the wind. The counselor urged, and smarmed and solicited. “They went away,” I finally blurted. “Maybe I was just … just hearing … somebody else talking to myself. I was talking to myself.” When they finally let me be, I thought it was probably that moment, the talking-to-myself claim that set me loose. I stuck to it, and became a big fan of what I later called enabling fictions. The world is full of seams where we’ve stitched it together. Dr. S, the fractals, the fine dust. Rex was becoming a beautiful seam up the middle of my world.

  Good boy, Rex.

  I had run across the term “phenomenology” where it was defined as an ever larger umbrella so that when yo
u thought you could see the edges of the umbrella, its gigantic spread and cover, well, then the umbrella got even larger. Suspend all judgment about whatever it is until all the information is in. It’s never all in. Grow old and die. Then nothing will matter anyway. And that’s where I found myself in the Rex-based conundrum: how is all this stuff part of the same thing?

  Chapter V

  Dr. S perched on the edge of his chair like an eagle overlooking his aerie. He saw me coming along the corridor but kept his perch until I rounded the corner into his office. “Rex has been asking for you,” he announced. “He must have taken a liking to you somehow along the way. How’s your article coming?” I waited for the repercussions of his last fuck-off, but they seemed forgotten. Or at least hidden. I wondered only briefly at the change of heart. I’d been doing this long enough to take what the interview would give me. Ask questions, be impertinent as needed, let them talk, and the article would write itself. I could assemble from any wreckage.

  I was still parsing that Rex had asked for me, so I stumbled on the article question. “Fine. Yeah. No, not so good. What? Rex what?” I was going to try to avoid the sudden “fuck off” this time if I could. Once bitten. Behave myself, sort of.

  “Well, I think he asked for you. You would be the ‘question guy’ he was referring to. He said, if I remember right, that we should let the question guy in on the talking. Something like that. You know how hard it is to understand goo.” And then he cackled, a real cackle, and came out of the perch mode and sat in his chair. I wasn’t sure what the hell or even what the fuck. I thought the doctor fully capable of jiving the shit out me at extended and profound depth, pulling my leg so long and hard that my arms would shorten.