Some Assembly Required

by Michael Strelow

  Again I felt as if I had ended up in a Dr. Seuss story. Speaking to goo, what would YOU do? Look! Look! You’ve got some goo on your shoe! Cheese and rice, my old aunt used to say. Cheese and rice! But Dr. S seemed also sincere in his wish to introduce me to Rex. He took me by the hand and led me not to Rex himself but to a screen on a bench ten feet away from Rex. I glanced over at Rex heaped in the corner, stripes and all. I don’t know why, but I waved. The doctor seemed animated by some internal fire, some compelling mania like a drunk hailing you too loud from across the room.

  Dr. S started typing then stopped and ran a little program (as far as I could tell) and hit return. The wait was short. Dr. S turned to me and said, “Rex wants to tell you that though he’s been out—whatever that means—he would like to come all the way out and meet more people. I think by being ‘out’ he means that some part of him—he used the word spores when we talked about this before—has already been out there. He said that actually it’s been many, many times. Right since the beginning. First, by way of the animals here in the barn. Then later by me. Inadvertently, I assure you. And now he’s proposing that you take him out there”—he waved toward the office door in general—“and, I don’t know … meet people probably.” Dr. S waved his hand expansively toward “out there somewhere” I guessed. But he also seemed perfunctory, distracted by something more important than introducing me to Rex again. If that was part of his put-on, he was a fine actor too.

  I asked the doctor to explain what he had just input and what the program then did with it and what had come back and, of course, how it had come back. Right at this point I decided if I wasn’t going to just slowly back out of here and run for it, then I was along for the ride whether the doctor was putting me on, was nuts or was getting signals from the other side or really speaking to the goo. I quickly decided that speaking-to-the-goo was the best story. The Ag barn today was also particularly full of voices: moo, bah, and in the distance, quack. My own personal barnyard lay silent, apparently waiting to see what would happen.

  So here’s what he told me: He writes the questions in a Word program (thanks, Bill Gates) and then he writes a little Python program to undo the words back into his own version of zeroes and ones—a version consistent with his original algorithm that is (was) Rex, the pile of goo that wants to go for a walk, apparently. That’s all. Nothing tricky except for the original formula (like KFC’s secret herbs and spices, I figured). And he gets the answers back the same way, he said.

  Now I am beginning to think I have at least two stories here. First there’s Rex the … take your choice: talking dog, new life form, Pinocchio, alien who has abducted the poor old scientist. Second, there’s the whack-job scientist who has now entered his own frustrated delusion so heartily that (Norman Bates rears his head here) his world is thoroughly infiltrated by his own madness and a new reality has taken over. All other versions, to this reporter, seem to be variations on these two themes. In any case, there’s great stuff here and my job is to stay out of the way and let the story play out.

  Rex apparently wants to talk to me more. The flying fingers of Dr. S are at first asking my questions to Rex and getting his answers. Then Rex starts to ask me questions. But he, like a ventriloquist through his dummy, asks them through Dr. S.

  “Alfred,” Dr. S reports. “Ask the young man what he thinks Rex is, what he thinks I am.” And so Dr. S does. He asks.

  I reply, “I was first thinking you might be sort of a talking granola bar warmed up and piped in through a computer screen.” I had decided to go along with the Q&A format but keep a sort of snide skepticism to protect myself against the elaborate joke he might be playing. Fiction’s layers.

  “Then?”

  I said, “Well, then … now, that is, I am pleased to report that I find you a highly intelligent and caring granola bar warmed up …”

  “And piped through a computer screen?”

  “Well, yes. That’s how we’re doing this, aren’t we?”

  “Would you be more comfortable if we did this more directly?”

  “Would I have to eat something or hook up to something?” Let’s recap so far: KFC, Norman Bates, and now Alice in Wonderland.

  “No, I’d do the hooking up,” said Rex.

  And then Dr. S stopped typing but I continued to hear the questions. “And now, is that more comfortable for you?” I was hearing Rex’s tune directly on my nervous system.

  Aye, there’s the rub, Hamlet reported. Man who hears voices, again hears voices. I know. I know. But this had to happen. Which voices was I hearing? My own life-long companions—my team? Or just because the channels were nice and open in my particular case, was I susceptible to someone piping in outside voices? And finally, was this business, as Dr. S claimed, really Rex the oatmeal lump coming out to the world via a startled reporter? I refused to take my pick, opting instead for all-at-once no matter how conflicted the logic became. Not either/or, but both/and. In direct contact with Rex I am flooded with early voice strategies. Having escaped the counselor’s suffocating empathy in my youth, I concocted ways to not respond to the voices, even the startling one that just called my name. I wanted to scream: “Does everything have to mean something? No no no no,” etc.

  “So. What would you like to see invented?” Rex said in my head.

  I did a kind of mental double take to get into the mental-only mode. “Say what?” I said out loud. Dr. S laughed and said (out loud), “You don’t have to say it you know.”

  So I tried just thinking it, and Rex apparently got everything. He said, “Just what I asked. What would you like to see in the coming years? Let’s just jump over world peace and harmony—not that it’s off the table, but everything in its good time; there would have to be some MAJOR adjustments for that to happen and there’d be resistance like you wouldn’t believe to the preconditions to world peace. So let’s just get on with it.”

  Rex’s voice was very like my other voices, I’ll admit, but had more continuity, more gravitas. I was reaching. More sincerity, maybe. Harder to ignore with my blah-blah-blah rejection. It was something like when you put one earbud in and then add the other and the stereo kicks in and the voice happens right in your old medulla oblongata and surfing upward.

  “Flying cars?” I proffered to give myself more time. And right away the Jetsons flew through my mind—all of them in their flying car with their dog, Astro. I felt trapped in a moment of Dr. S’s making. What was he doing to manipulate me? How was he pulling this off? Where oh where was the center of this experience: in my head, in the computer, in the bowl of goo? “Nice one. Yeah. That’s going on the list.” Rex somehow managed to have me understand that he was rolling his eyes. “And … ?”

  This was kind of fun, though. I had been preparing for this my whole life. No freaking out, just listen to the voices. The voice. But the odd part was having an observer, Dr. S. It was like having someone watch you have sex. There he sat smirking while I talked with Rex. Clearly, Dr. S was not hearing either side of the conversation.

  I went on. “Okay, so I’d like to charge my phone and iPad without hooking up to wires. Maybe just lay them on a device and they’d be charging. Oh, and then, maybe getting rid of all electric wires for transmission of power. That would be done with the new device that would send the power in packages, maybe radio waves, to be stored in—while you’re at it—some new kind of batteries that would not discharge by themselves, would last forever if they’re not being used. Got that?”

  “Okay. That’s better.”

  Dr. S was slouching in his chair with his legs swinging back and forth, and he was grinning like the Cheshire cat. That cat was an apropos image, given that I was talking to a bowl of striped, sassy oatmeal. Funny I don’t remember smoking anything, unlike Alice. Jefferson Airplane joined the cacophony in my frontal lobes, and then some other lobes too. “One pill makes you bigger, one pill makes you small. And the pills your mother gives you don’t do anything at all. Go ask Alice … when you’re ten
feet tall.” The whole business was seamless in my head—music, questions and answers. It felt as if my head were filling like a glass of water where the noise rises in pitch as the glass fills. The whole shebang was simultaneous, one thing on top of the other but distinguishable multitasking. Good boy, Rex.

  Rex went on. “And what else? Maybe something in the healthcare line?”

  “Sure. How about viruses that could be trained to attack cancer growths, and just cancer growths, and then after they took out the cancer they’d fly up their own assholes and disappear from the bloodstream. Like Doberman Pinschers. But with the asshole-flying-up part added. Or … or the viruses just unmask the cancer and your own immune system takes over.”

  It wasn’t exactly a laugh. But then I didn’t really hear it either. But the laugh idea was there in the layers going on in my head. I had made Rex laugh. Dr. S asked me if Rex laughed. I should tell him if I made Rex laugh. I held up one finger and said I just had done exactly that.

  “He must like you,” said the doctor, “although I’m not sure what there is to like in such a one as you.” I allowed as how I found that true myself once in a while. Rex was undeterred.

  “That’s not bad, and not that hard to do, either. There are people already messing around with this. What they don’t have is the knack to address the virus critters. They’re just a couple steps away. I should probably shoot one of them the way to do that—maybe a dream like Kekule’s snake with its tail in its mouth—the benzene ring.”

  “So, wait. You’ve been around for a hundred years?”

  “No, I was just cooked up by my associate here. Oh, the time thing. All I’ll tell you now is: Negotiable! The whole time thing’s negotiable. Was, is. Go went gone. Now the subjunctive—that’s much closer. Contrary to fact, wished for, yearned after but written with a tweak to the grammar as if it is—was, were. But that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish,’ as my doctor friend here says.”

  Dr. S nods vigorously, and I wonder if he actually is in on the conversation. But then I think he’s just cheering me on somehow.

  “Let’s see,” I say, just to get on with it. “Let’s talk about feet. Ankles too. I see so many old folks hobbling around and sometimes they’ll say ‘knees’ if I ask. But mostly they say feet, and ankles. Could we do something about the feet in pain?”

  Rex, I think, pauses. “You see, there you’ve got another one of those deals where we’d have to change so many other things that there’d be an uproar, a revolt, even though the pain in the feet would be gone. Here’s the rub: the original design—Darwin notwithstanding—is still the standard for humans. Bone density, soft tissue, damnable ACLs and all that, those were meant to last about thirty-five years, long enough to breed and then die and get out of the way. So you take this basic model and you stretch it to eighty years … what the hell do you expect? Even the best ones are worn out at double the original thirty. So we can go back to the beginning … ah, see, this is where you get the resistance, of course. But what you really want is the dip. I’ve been thinking, the feet, cancer stuff, and all the rest of the mistakes bodies start to make after a while, all this could be fixed with a regularly scheduled dip. You’d go in to the shop every six weeks or so—I’ve got a longer version too, but I think the six-week interval is good. Keeps people aware of the repairs and doesn’t let any of the mistakes get much of a start on the body. So, you’d go in and for a fee—tied to the price of basic cable so that anyone could afford the dip by canceling cable for a month—you’d take off your clothes and get dipped in the fixer. I know there’s a better name out there but it hasn’t come to me yet. The fixer goo—get that heel too, Achilles!—would reset all the little biological errors and you’d be good to go. How’s that sound?” The “mistakes” business, the cell failure, the built in obsolescence—all had a familiar ring from his class lecture. Dr. S, are you there? Am I talking to a puppet?

  I say, “Goo? Does it have to be goo? Couldn’t it be like an aromatic spray, maybe with a little rosemary oil or … I’ve got it, the smell of a baby’s head. Sure, and there’d be a mist in a shower stall, then you’d walk out. Is goo really necessary?” I found myself shifting in my seat, tugging at an earlobe, scratching my nose. Outside the wind was blowing and the barn smells shifted and seemed all flowing through the doctor’s office—cow, sheep, chicken, horse, cow again. Rex is breathing.

  “Here’s the reasoning behind the goo. Every six weeks you’d have to make a decision to get the goo all over you, a kind of commitment, that would, well … commit you, see what I mean? It couldn’t be too easy or pleasant or people would be in there lining up for a naked dip every week or ten days. Nope, it’s got to be an event. The goo makes it an event.”

  “So, is this negotiable too? Like time?”

  “Actually, everything’s negotiable—like time. Taxes, death, war, tides, gender, glaciers—all negotiable too. You people are pretty slow about this. Pretty slow about way too many things, actually. But, as I said, we’d have to change some basic structures to change these. And nothing pisses off humans more than changing the basic structures. Alien invasion! they yell. Zombies! Jesus, Mary and Joseph, you people can’t grasp the basic principle that’s in front of your noses every day—when you change one thing, everything changes. It’s a fucking spreadsheet, man! Darwin already told you.”

  I could see Rex was getting pretty worked up all of a sudden. I’m still not sure what set him off, but I thought the interview was probably getting to the end for today. My head was filled and overflowing out my ears. He had tagged up in all of my lobes by now. Did he just call life a fucking spreadsheet? Was he heading toward giving me the brush off the same way Dr. S did? The sudden get-the-fuck out of here? I have to admit to no fear, no substantial weirding out, no discomfort or malaise of any sort. I could keep this up. Bring on more voices, bring in a Souza band, bring in NASCAR in the background. I’d been training for this all my life. Bring in the King Lear storm and the battle of the Maginot line and the kettle calling the pot…

  But I say, “Okay. Okay. Just one more thing then. If I make up a full list of things to change—feet, cancer, viruses, electrical storage, all that stuff, will you give me some kind of plan we could maybe work on, a little at a time?”

  “You’re not listening to me. You’re not listening to me. Are you? Why aren’t you listening to me? What part of this whole ‘fix it’ business don’t you understand? That one thing changes everything? Or that no one wants everything changed? Anything, really.”

  Agitated, I’d call it. He was agitating the inside of my head until I felt his agitation and the cosmos knocking on my brain door. Here was salvation for all humankind, but he was agitated, pre-pissed off at us all. Take that Jesus. Salvation and surcease from pain all at his sticky, gooey fingertips, and Rex can’t keep his oatmeal-shit together. The barn now in sympathy sounds like some crescendo of the “Halleluiah Chorus.” Rex, quack, moo, grunt, Rex, cluck, and the waves of sound inside and outside my head seem to weave themselves together. And the barn smells, the swinging legs of Dr. S. like a large child, the orange glow of Rex’s Lucite box, the hum of the computer hard drive that’s now louder and louder—I am filled up, thorough. Completed.

  Doctor S said quietly that we should turn down his light now, set his heat a little lower and give him a rest. He had a tendency to “heat up” and also grow himself out of his food supply. Dr. S claimed that the food supply was the only real control in this experiment. And if Rex somehow became able to get his own food, well, the experiment part would be over and the next stage would be delivering ourselves from an angry god—old story. Every culture had some version. Not good times, those angry-god stories.

  I sat in the car afterward wondering what the hell I had just been though. The fact that I had been doing voices in my head for as long as I could remember couldn’t quite contain what I’d been through. When I asked Dr. S if he had conversations with Rex he said that he did, “sort of,” and that he wouldn’t real
ly call them conversations. Maybe more like mind nuzzles. He used the word “nuzzle.” Dr. S asked me what kind of nuzzle I had got from Rex, and I, of course, wasn’t going to tell him a damn thing, same as I had always told people in white coats. I told him it was sort of a foggy connection. Dr. S gave me nuzzle; I gave him back foggy.

  Rex, at this point, seemed to me an amalgamation of leftovers from all my life, some kind of psychic breaking of great wind. Was all that futuristic stuff just the sloppy leavings of my own concerns? I have always thought there’s a kind of mind-sump that Freud never really got to, the dregs down there you really didn’t want to stir up very much. The stuff that should just be left alone. Bird calls from the thicket, you know. Just leave them. My metaphors chased each other round and round until they tired, and I drove babbling home.

  The fractal art was still up at Marnie’s gallery. There would be several “openings” for the show—Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights—to sell the art. Red dots on the description of each piece indicated “sold.” I learned from Marnie that sometimes galleries would put on the dots even if a piece wasn’t sold—usually on the least likely to sell—just to make the others seem more desirable. Apparently, the shill worked. Red dots everywhere. Marnie schmoozed. I stood in the middle again with the cheap, white wine lubricant. Rex wouldn’t leave me alone.

  After I left Rex and Dr. S in the barn, I wondered how duped I was. Did the mad doctor fiddle the whole adventure on his computer? I had to admit that I preferred my own adventure to having a psychokinetic blob that could pre- and post-cognate with me on my own nervous system—marvelous bullshit that sounds like. But I had to admit also that I was fully aware that the doctor knew that I was writing an article bound to be read by the same community he felt might shunt grant money his way, and he was perfectly capable mentally of outthinking us all for any given period of time. He could well be at the end of his intellectual rope: first he thought his work itself would get him the money to continue, then he found out nobody gave a shit unless there was a “wow factor.” Enter Rex, vocal and magnificent.