Some Assembly Required

by Michael Strelow

  I cut out the three articles and set them on the coffee table separated by a sea of dark oak. I waited to see if they would squirm and then join up and then stick their collective tongue out. I brought a beer to the party. Then another and another while I waited for the scraps of articles to give me the word. Come on Rex, bring it on.

  But like any god worth his mysteriousness, he did nothing more for a while than pick off my girlfriend. Marnie and Dr. S became an item. I guessed this by hiding out behind parked cars just across the street from the art gallery. I was hiding out long enough so that a Korean grocer came out and asked me if he could help me find what I seemed to be looking for under the cars parked in front of his grocery. I told him I was looking for my way. Inscrutable shit that he was, he tells me if I hadn’t found my way the last three days, my way was certainly not here in front of his store. And that maybe I should look for my way in another place.

  Dr. S was cutting quite the figure these days. He was sporting the skinny suit and tie, a little tweedy in the scarf area, some kind of Italian shoes that looked more like buttery slippers. Marnie too shone.

  I became sure that Rex was behind and in front and around and in all this. Rex was a panoply of prepositions. I needed a plan.

  How do you root out a genetic thief who actually hides out in the cells of your putative enemy? And what part of Rex had been inserted in what parts of my girlfriend and now was resident there too?

  These rhetorical questions at first drove me to one of those adolescent plans I had always been prone to—the apocalyptic gesture. I would quit the whole fucking world and get gear. Then I would slide off into the closest wilderness area and wait while Rex and whatever cohorts he could concoct took over humanity and humiliated them into being cosmic slaves. I wash my hands. I’m refusing to even participate in the battle. Bye!

  But those great teen-age angst-ridden (back of hand to forehead here) gestures never last long in me, so I waited it out. Second wave was adult. I would pry that bowl of farina from his hiding places with all the resources available to me, and I would save myself and (not incidentally) humankind. I knew there was middle ground between the two, but my way, unlike the mature Buddha’s, was never the middle way. I had to start with Marnie, I thought. Love was the way. I should have been listening to Tina Turner, however: what’s love got to do with it?

  Chapter VIII

  I searched literature for a model: beauty and the beast? Anna Karenina? The bitch of Bucharest? Frau Blucher? Daisy Miller? Isolde? And so forth. I thought if I could find the ancient story, and then the new version of the primal utterance, then I could get Marnie back and begin the assault on Rex. I was still convinced that my possession theory was the only way to explain Dr. S’s transformation. Fat government grants could not have done what I was seeing. I decided that the closest I could get to what happened was the idea of enchantment, that Marnie was an unwilling participant in the uncanny. Her will and, indeed, her very soul were not her own. As was my habit in times of chaos, I wrote down what my plans were to see how they looked on paper. That last phrase, “indeed, her very soul [was] not her own” stopped me cold. I could never have written that, at least without putting a quick line through it, before this Rex adventure. The prose wasn’t mine. Was I part of the problem? Was I infested with Rex-ness too? I was trying to move the earth with no place to stand; I was the earth.

  I decided that way lay madness. I had papers all over the kitchen table by this point and scrunched them all together and tossed them out. I was overcomplicating a really simple thing: if Rex were alive, he could also become dead. First order was to find Rex.

  I tried calling Marnie. I claimed she had accidently taken a couple books I needed. No response. Then I began to stalk her, and finally “bumped into” her on the street. She kept looking at her phone to get the time, or to see an incoming text or something. But I asked her, for old time’s sake if we couldn’t have a quick coffee. I was trying out all my theories at once: possession, coercion, enchantment. She was clearly in a hurry to meet someone, him, or else just driven off by my ill manners—what love falls to when it’s no longer love.

  Did she feel okay? She looked wan. Was she eating well? I was coming off like her mother, but I had to start someplace.

  “To answer all your questions at once,” she said slowly, “I’m fine, eating well, regular bowel movements, enough sleep. Thank you very much.” She tapped on the face of her phone seeming to say: next question.

  “Um, are you seeing a lot of Dr. Sewall?” I thought I’d jump in.

  “Next question.”

  We used to play at interviewer/interviewee after I’d come home with tales of trying to get people to talk about their work, their lives, their opinions for articles. The classic one-word answers, like children give: yes, no, okay. Nope. I tried laughing it off.

  “Okay, okay. Would you see me again if: (a) the end of the world was announced? (b) I did a cartwheel for you on the street? (c) I wrote a song then sang it publically for you while hopping on one foot?”

  This business used to work, get her out of a funk, get me off whatever hook I’d hung myself on. She’d smile and it was done. Sometimes she’d make me sing some of the song I’d written for her. I’d make it up on the spot. She tapped her phone faster, staring right through me. Did I see Rex looking back at me? What wasn’t funny about how I used to be funny?

  “Look,” she said. “I put up with a lot from you for a long time. It just wore out. Suddenly it just, I don’t know … you know, wore out. It was like I was okay, just okay, and then I wasn’t. I needed to go, get away. That’s as clear as I can be.” Tap. Tap. Tap.

  What’s love got to do with it? I was seeing in her face the reiterative quality of the fractal. It was a mask but a new mask. The same over and over again on all scales. I wound up the encounter with best wishes and happy holidays and stretched out a little toward her birthday. I huffed and puffed, and she was gone. And I was no closer. Dr. S had to be next. I’d assault the very fortress in which dwelt the King.

  I skulked around, I’ll admit—more than just the car business. In fact, I was skulking late one evening outside Marnie’s apartment waiting for her to come home. And there wandering the street, probably waiting for her too I figured, was Dr. S. He was looking not so erect and studly, however. Some of the slump had returned. As he paced under the streetlight, he had a pallor to his skin I remembered from when he and his experiments resided in the Noah’s Ark of the Ag building. He seemed confused. I thought, what the hell, let’s see. What more do I have to lose?

  The streetlight was making a perfect noir-novel cone of light and Dr. S passed in and out and then finally stopped directly in the middle of the cone, like a movie director would instruct him to do. I briefly hoped he might be beamed up into the streetlamp, and my tribulations would be finished. I came toward him from across the street.

  “Good evening, Dr. Sewall,” I said, as airily as I could. I was in the oh-hi-there mode, just walking down the street and by gosh there you were. I had hoped I had left all my skulk face on the other side of the street.

  “Well, well, well …” he said. “I’m just…… you know …” Where the glib chat? Where the strut?

  “She’s not home yet. She always turns on all the lights in the place when she’s there alone at night. Hell of an electric bill. But the tradeoffs were …” I stopped. Dr. S was looking down at his shoes as if he had lost a jewel down there.

  Finally, he said slowly while looking up, “He lets me out sometimes. For a walk, he calls it. I go for a walk by myself. I always end up here. I thought he had some other business, but I don’t know how it works. If he’s not with me, where is he?”

  The doctor looked at me, puzzled. As if I were supposed to know immediately what the hell he was talking about. And then … of course, Rex. Rex let him out. So I said, “Rex.” Not a question, just establishing the subject.

  “Yes, directs the show, you know.” He looked at me as if I should know
about this show that is being directed.

  “Tell me about the show.”

  “You know, the way he does things with me. Uses me to … what? To lift stuff. I’m his hands, so to speak. How could he lift anything without me? His fingers, don’t you know. His radius. And his ulna.” He laughed a sort of cackle, the kind he had when he sat in his old office chair with his feet up like a child.

  “How long are you out for? Does he come and get you when he wants you back? Could you run away? How does he … ?” My interviewer skills all gone to pieces. All the questions at once—bad technique. Each question has an inside and you ask the outside one in order to get at the inside one. Then you ask your way into that one.

  The doctor sighed. “I just know when I have to be back. That’s all. I just know, and then I go back. I feel I have to. Have to be responsible to … what he wants. And then when we’re together again, it’s like we never were apart. Something like that. There’s so much I don’t know about the how. I knew. At first I knew everything. Rex was lines of code and … and … that other stuff, too. The agar-agar … and the booga-booga.” The cackle again. “And the mojo …” He trailed off. “I believe you mentioned the mojo one time when you visited. Visited. That’s what I do now. I visit. Then he visits. Then I get visited. Then …”

  The light flickered like voices far away. And there we stood: I, waiting for something from him that wasn’t really just a sigh; he, waiting to be called back by Rex. We waited. The world waited.

  When I was eight years old, I first heard the phrase, “mind over matter.” And being the literalist I was, I thought that if some people could do that, whatever it was, then I could. I went into the basement and let the helium out of a birthday-party balloon until it just hung in the air, going neither up nor down. Then I stared at it, elevated it, willed it up, hoped it up, threatened it up. There is, I thought, some thing you do to make your mind move matter. It must be like reading. At first you can’t do it, then you can do it a little, and then you can do as well or better than anyone else. I remember it was something like a half hour later, my vision was getting blurred from staring. My wanting and yearning was wearing out from being yearned. And like those words on the page before I could read, nothing. Nothing! Eventually the balloon began to fall. I had succeeded in what … ? I thought. In pissing it off maybe. Did that count? Was that mind over matter?

  Dr. S whirled suddenly and screwed up his face. “It’s time. It’s time. I have to get back. Nice seeing you. We’ll have to do this again. Goodbye.” And he walked off quickly lighting up at each cone of light until he was out of sight and diminished in the night.

  What mind over matter was that, I asked myself? When I was eight, I remember feeling very foolish when I learned that humans could think their way to solutions to material problems—mind over matter. But I was also disappointed that the phrase meant something so drab and preachy. Oh that I could learn my way into some exclusive group that could move the world around with my mind. Apparently Rex had accomplished that trick, and Dr. S was now a mobile device that Rex rode around in like a meat taxi.

  The article I was going to write was spattered across the night like a Whistler fireworks painting. I still had nothing to take to an editor, less than I had before. And Marnie came walking down the street.

  She had apparently seen me as I stood and pondered what I had just experienced.

  “Good evening. And good night, Jake. Are you stalking me?”

  “I just ran into Sewall. Right here under this light. We had a talk.”

  “About?” She shifted her considerable purse to the other shoulder. It was a maneuver I had witnessed many times. We’d meet someone on the street, someone I knew and she didn’t, and she’d begin the encounter with the shift: the big bag swung across her body like she was clearing space, ready for the dance of introductions. This swing had the snap of frying the air between us and establishing the new distance of ex-lovers.

  I asked, “Do you two, you and Sewall, ever talk about Rex? You remember Rex, don’t you?” Try out that gambit.

  She clutched the purse to her body like armor. And then finally said, “Yes, I do. I remember Rex. You told me a lot about Rex.”

  “But did Sewall tell you about Rex? Did he tell you about how Rex …” Where would I go with this? How weird was I allowed to get? I was on very thin ice with her in any case. Should I just put on a clown nose, skip off throwing daisies, have her call the white coats? “Well, about Rex the experiment? Or Rex the entity … ?” Not that way. Not that way. “Or Rex the DNA code, the RNA instructions?”

  She said, “He told me about Rex in a sort of abstract way. Why? Is there something wrong with … with the Rex principle? I guess, that was my impression of Rex—a principle that was the basis for much of his work. Look, I have an early day tomorrow. Did you want to say something to me? Don’t ask me to come back. Or does that jump ahead too fast?”

  “No. I get it. Crazy acting makes everyone uncomfortable. Doesn’t get anything solved. I just wanted to say that, well, that Se wall is having trouble with Rex—the principle, the idea, maybe. So keep that in mind when you two—”

  “Us two? You think we’re a couple now? Nice one. I should jump from one whacky to another whacky? I’ll tell you what.” The purse swung by on its way to the other shoulder. “I’m doing just fine, thank you very much. Just fine. I’m enjoying the loneliness. Yes. The loneliness. I get lonely and then sort of fit myself around it. It’s nice in the same way the energy in a good painting is nice—disturbing but full of energy. Like that. So if you don’t have anything else to say, I’d like to get to bed.”

  I stayed under the streetlight until all the lights in her apartment were ablaze and staving off the night spirits and swampy miasmas. I followed Dr. S’s route down the street toward home.

  About halfway back home, I saw Dr. S ahead standing, swaying slightly between streetlights. I stopped and watched. He was caught between two lights and cast a shadow in both directions, like he was propped up on the two oval shadows. I watched him for a full minute then walked slowly toward him. He didn’t see me coming because as I got closer I could see his eyes were closed. He seemed to dance to unheard music, his face a kind of beatific smirk like the oldest of Buddhas. I stood very close to him to see if he would sense me. But no, he continued the dance. I cleared my throat, and slowly, slowly he opened his eyes as if awakening.

  “Oh, hi Jake,” he said like a stoner coming to. “Nice night.”

  I stepped back and watched him come all the way out. He stopped swaying and stood with his hands on his hips.

  “Yeah, nice night,” I said too. We had established that it was a nice night. “Where were you just now?”

  “I was … let’s see. I was … hum. Maybe not where. Maybe what. No, how. How is where I was.” He laughed, swayed a little as if to remember better. “I was … occupied. I was being occupied! I was moving back in.”

  The slump was gone. The charm back. The glow, the mojo—all that stuff. Rex was back, I assumed. But it was like the doctor was drunk, his system overloaded by some drug, and he was holding on to his equilibrium just by threads. So I thought I’d go directly for the interview.

  “Rex, if I might be so bold? How do you do that? Occupy? How’d you move back in? I was talking to Dr. Sewall very recently, and he told me he had been let out for a while by himself.”

  There was a considerable pause, and he looked at me without blinking, maybe screwing with me for the zombie effect. His hair that had been flying off Einstein-style twenty minutes earlier was now well behaved and civil. And the biggest difference besides the slump-absence was the skin glow. Occupied, indeed. There was somebody else in there, somebody with much better skin than Doctor Sewall.

  “Oh, Jake,” he began, apostrophe forward. “Jake, Jake, Jake. You act as if Rex and Sewall are two different things. They’re not. Try to think additively. Is nine different from five plus four? They’re both nine. Nine this. Nine that. See? Let’s
try again. Seven plus two?”

  My first reaction to his condescension was to call him a condescending prick. Of course. But there was nothing after that. Where would I go then?

  He took me by the arm and started to walk me toward the next streetlight. “How Rex always worked—since the beginning—was by adding himself to something else. Your head voices. A slime mold. An orchid in the jungle. A duck.” He kept looking at me to see if I was following.

  “And … ?” This was an old interviewing trick implying there was more to be said on the subject, a sub-subtext waiting to be unearthed.

  “Soooo. So, I think you can see that Rex needs something to be added to. Otherwise, well, he’s a rudimentary set of instructions. He needs the multiplier! The complexity of a host. Have you ever wanted, say, for five minutes to be a lion?” Then the actor came out; he crouched. “Bringing down that wildebeest, that first crunch through the neck, the thing still quivering, the warm blood taste going all the way into your spine with delight? Or if that doesn’t appeal to you, how about just a hummingbird swooping up into a vertical climb doing the mating flight, hanging there for a second, then slamming toward the earth to swoop and do it again. Now take the slime mold.” He was still airborne, a hummingbird then swooped into slime mold.

  We walked along. He assumed a rich, paternal, teacher voice, and I the acolyte alongside. “Ah, the slime mold,” I said. “Got to be less interesting.”

  “But no. No. Not less interesting at all. Come with me. Nope, I shouldn’t take you.” He looked me in the eye. “Yet.” And he laughed. “But imagine with me the slime mold casting back and forth between animal and plant. Right at the second when the entire organic substance goes one way or the other to survive. Wow. But even more wow is if you could be there and go back and forth, back and forth—just fooling around, mind you—just to feel it over and over. Plant. Animal. Plant. Animal. Look out realms and empires! The slime mold itself can’t … doesn’t have to do that flashing back and forth. But, what if you could? Wouldn’t you do it like self-indulgence of the highest order? Whee! I’m a plant. I’m an animal. Cosmic masturbation, I tell you. It feels so fine.”