Some Assembly Required

by Michael Strelow

  And then the discourse broke off the same way it does when I’m writing. It faded and it was up to me to make it go again, reconstitute it out of what came before. So I asked Rex back.

  The light flicker was now, it seemed, about ten times what it had been. As when you begin to hear a fan or a steady squeak somewhere, then you can’t stop hearing it. And it gets louder and more insistent. I began again hearing Rex, his apologia.

  “You want reasons? I’ll give you reasons as soon as you show me where reason lies. I’ll dig it out if you’ll point it out. Don’t even start with me. I just came back to see what I can see. I’m using the light fixture as a power source. Really just screwing around. I could just as well use you as use the light bulb—what’s the difference really? But florescent light is kind of a carnival ride for things like me. The swooping and humming and buzzing—great fun. The time had come, you see.”

  I should have gone into interview mode, but I didn’t. I should have questioned him closely about the metal/oil business, would it be back? I should have at least run him into a few corners and made him put up or shut up. What were his plans for world domination? Was there a weakness we could exploit? (Okay, I should have saved that one for a subtext of the questioning.) What were his politics? Good one. Everyone would want to know that—whose side he was on. Did he plan to reproduce? Another good one—sex sells even if it’s asexual reproduction or something even slicker.

  Time went by, and I was staring into the corner. The light had become steady in that garish way of tube lights. I blinked and blinked to get a better view. I found myself alone. I wanted to ask him if I could see him again somehow, call him up for a proper interview, be my Commissioner Gordon to his Batman, Jimmy Olsen to his Superman. All I could hear eventually was mooing with the occasional poultry exclamation. I felt sleepy, like I’d just worked out and needed a nap.

  My plan was to begin from my new zero. I had Marnie to find; I needed someone—my crime-fighting partner—who would believe what I thought was going on. I had Dr. S to find. Would he be whole or the version that was essentially an ambulatory ranch for Rex? And I needed to know if Rex were, to quote the Wizard of Oz, a good witch or a bad witch. I didn’t realize the third possibility until later, and I should have, because it was the next line, Dorothy’s: “Why, I’m not a witch at all.”

  Chapter X

  By the time I got all the way out of the Ag building and back to my car, my head was clear again. Not that a clear head is necessary for most of my business. I find the confused state, the “at sea,” to be best in most journalistic circumstances. I work with contingencies better if I’m on my guard and confused. But being visited by Rex always seemed to leave me somehow refreshed as if the cobwebs had been swept and the furniture arranged properly. Rex left me feeling like a tidy room.

  I immediately realized that my problem as an interlocutor or any kind of interviewer was the particulars of “where.” You always had to meet your subject somewhere: where they felt comfortable and would spill the beans, or where the beans were themselves but the subject uncomfortable, or combinations thereof. Problem was: where is Rex? And one of the answers that came to me was that Rex was anywhere he wanted to be at any time. I could go to Dr. S and wait for Rex to show up, buy some doughnuts and set up a TV-cop stakeout. The doughnuts would be the best part of that plan.

  What I could not do—as my youthful experience with the voices proved—would be to go to any sort of authority with my story: not the press, not the doctor’s colleagues, not the police, not the United Nations, not Bishop Desmond Tutu, not … that is, not any form of what “adult” was to me as a youngster—nobody who’d roll their eyes even metaphorically, no patronizing there-there, tell-me-how-you-feel sort at all. Been there and not going back. I would avoid the white coats, the blue uniforms, and the booby-hatch professionals. I had to get Marnie back on my side.

  I made a plan. I made a list of all the things in the world we had liked together: things to do or eat or do to or with each other or running jokes or silent winkless sighs together. All the sex things, of course. But the nether things too, the ones that make the love things possible. Cold hands, cold feet, for example. She always had one or the other and after much volunteering on my part, she simply offered them to me one at a time for warming. Cold feet in bed—the natural one. Put them right there. Yeah, like that. But as she takes her coat off and brings the cold outside into the room with her, I pull up my shirt and offer my warm belly. That was on the list.

  Then the less visceral stuff. Don’t ask where she’s been unless she brings it up. Before Rex, BR, I had leaned away from the jealous boyfriend business of tracking her movements. AR, of course, is where I fucked everything up like some kind of psycho FBI agent of jealousy. You’d think women would like the attention of being stalked, doubted, and interrogated. Go figure. They don’t. Write that down somewhere. It’s true.

  So I made a point of passing Marnie’s apartment hoping to see the lights blaring into the night. Night after night, no blare. She was gone, and she was going to be an essential part of my plan to bring Rex under control.

  Maybe not under control. What exactly did I think I wanted to do with Rex? Return him to his oatmeal bowl? Harness him for the power of good. Evil? Not my style; I had an overdeveloped conscience and would just make myself miserable. I wish I could be Lex Luthor. It just seems it would be so exhausting every day in every way to be all evil.

  And then one night the lights were on. She was holding the night at bay with glorious watt after glorious watt of incandescent worship. The cathedral was alight.

  My next move was to somehow be of use to her: service, volunteerism (for art), maybe just take her library books back.

  Somewhere between stalking and wooing, that’s where I headed. There would be time to re-woo later on I figured. I would have to keep one eye on Rex and Rex-doings as reported in the papers. I would have to interpolate or extrapolate from the wire service information. Rex cures AIDS. Rex wrecks the interstate highway system. Rex makes a deer fall in love with a Holstein—offspring TBA. I had been reading about a virus named human cytomegalovirus or HCM, aka Herpes. It’s been cruising around in humans since the beginning of time apparently making bumps here, lumps there, and lesions everywhere. But more important, it seems to nod off and just go dormant until it feels like taking a walk again in any particular human being (add monkeys and other mammals by changing a few designating letters and numbers). Now I ask the rhetorical question(s), is Rex acting like a virus? (Is Mickey a mouse or a rat? Is Pluto Goofy’s offspring but can’t talk? Would Arthur Schopenhauer star in a rock band if he were alive today? Is there a God?) Am I asking all the wrong questions about Rex and about Marnie? Where did I go wrong? What are the other angst-filled questions I should be asking but am just too obtuse and inane to ask? Where’s Kafka when you need him?

  Oh, that felt good. I return to the fractals and add Brownian motion. No I don’t. What lies that way? Is all this a short version of “To be or not to be” and variations on the themes. “Who would these Fardels bear?” Damn right. Who would bear what Fardels indeed? Rex is a particular pack of Fardels tied up with string.

  I decide that fractals are my way back—fractals the natural point of view. That is plan A. Plan B is that Rex is a monster (unnatural) and should be destroyed, like in the movies, like in the books, like in our nightmares.

  Plan A: Rex is nothing more than a fragment of an infinitely repeated segment of nature called “life.” If we zoomed back from Rex, we should be able to see a much larger Rex constituting not only Rex but all the other Rexes. Reload: Rex is a design principle, and infinite iterations of this design are the stuff of life. At least that one doesn’t have to have quote marks. How about this: “Rex, is that you?”

  “Yes, it’s me and us.”

  “How many of you are there?”

  “Oh, and don’t forget, you too. It’s you, too. We are legion.”

  “What are your plans for us
?

  “The plan is the same as it always was.”

  “Which is … ?

  “There hasn’t been any change at all. Who would change it? What would it even be changed to?”

  “You’re not answering the question.”

  “I am too. Before asking me about a plan, what did you think “the plan” was? That’s still the plan.”

  “Sophistry and evasion. You are a false god.”

  “Now you’re talkin’. Among false gods I am neither the least nor the greatest.”

  And here the rhetoric in my head gets self-congratulatory and frankly medieval, right on the edge of thou and thee and one great shining sword. So I stop the interview.

  It has occurred to me that if Rex can occupy Dr. Sewall, then he can certainly occupy me. Or Marnie. Or the robin on the lawn. Who’s next, I figure, would depend on what Rex wants. Does Rex want? Yearn after things? Again I split up the logic to see how he (He) might be at work in the world. He could want dominion of all things and all time. This is the sci-fi monster scenario. But he could already occupy everything he wanted: by spore, by whatever he used on me and Dr. S, by trained mitochondria rampaging through our DNA for all I know. Talk about your omnipresent!

  The other half of the split is, I think, much more in keeping with what’s been going on. Rex is just playing. Maybe he’s playing to find out who he is—exactly why children play. He’s building a case for himself—his infinite mercy, his infinite disinterest in humans altogether. His ethereal and perfect disregard.

  All this while preparing my next move. Rex could have me committed to a mental institution quite easily. I have left a trail, in my life, of significant evidence that could be used at any moment for an institutional commitment ceremony. Into the home for the bewildered. Into the booby hatch. Marnie was right. I had gone off only one of the many deep ends that are part of my tenuous self.

  My only real problem is that I’m alone: Marnie is not (yet) on my side, Dr. S could be an ally if I could catch him again when Rex lets him out for a walk, and the rest of the world (including his colleagues) thinks whatever happens in the world is perfectly unconnected to an entity called Rex. Rex the crumbling brownie, the bowl of oatmeal, the spore-traveling thrill seeker. Rex the cheese, the big cheese.

  So clearly, my first job is to get one more on my side.

  I begin to stalk Marnie from behind trees and cars again. And, of course, since she’s so much smarter than I am, she’s on to me almost immediately. She sneaks up on me not a full week into my stalking period.

  “And so, Mr. James.” She a-has me from behind. I had been using a café down the street from the gallery to get glimpses of her coming and going. She must have come in some back door—she’s known the owners for years, it turns out—and done the tiptoe to get right behind me as I sat spying out the window. She asks, “Vat is your business here? Let me zee you-r papers, pleeze.”

  The German accent was a longstanding shtick between us. A good sign. The next line was: “Ve-er are you-r papers—schnell!” I waited. She patted three fingers into the palm of her hand to indicate the schnell-ness of the paper demand. I reached into my back pocket, produced my wallet and gave it to her. As scripted, she riffled the contents and pronounced that they seemed to be in order. The whole thing smacked of forgiveness with each segment of our shared German-soldier-on-a-train during a WWII movie. My only problem was whether to tell her everything at once, or let slip the details little by little. I decided quickly on the incremental approach.

  I was so happy to have her back, even provisionally, as she made clear. I was not exactly on probation, but we were going to take it slowly, slowly, and that meant keeping two places to live. I had to find Dr. S also. Turned out that was easy.

  On a Wednesday afternoon (Wednesday’s child is full of woe), Doctor Sewall called a press conference. He also alerted the local news stations and apparently every AI and sci-fi and comic-con and computer-geek organization his assistants could find. The scene reminded me of a grand opening of a shopping center. The air was thick with commercial funk: ribbons, banners, flowers, a giant scissors, pretty girls and a display of tech gear of some sort. The press was there but not sure why. It was ado and folderol, and shenanigans all at the same time. Dr. S raised his hand for silence.

  “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you everyone for coming out this afternoon for only the promise of something interesting, maybe some good news, maybe a breakthrough of some sort. I want to thank our hosts, Radio Shack, Intel Futures Division, and Netgear. Each has some part in our display of what the future holds in store.”

  Then he stopped talking, still holding the microphone, looking out over the crowd as if someone had pulled his plug. He stood perfectly still for a long, long time. The crowd began to make noises and shuffle as if getting ready to flee. Then just before the crowd got so restless it would break up, he suddenly began talking. More animated this time.

  “And,” he began again, as if he had never paused. “And each of our sponsors for today will be thoroughly displaced, their business ruined, by what I have to unveil today.” He laughed, a sort of cackle and snort at once. “So be sure to dump your tech stocks on the way home. Oh look there. That guy’s already doing just that from his phone. Sell. Sell. Sell!”

  Several young men in the back behind the doctor began to look at each other wide-eyed. I assume they were the reps from the tech stocks the doctor was about to blow up. More phones came out. Calls being made, stocks being traded. The tapping of phone faces was audible and like the sound of a gentle wind in trees far away.

  “In fact, there will be lots of tech stocks on the brink of uselessness.” He shifted voice like the movements in the Gettysburg Address. “Maybe some of you oldsters remember that years ago, maybe forty or so, there was much speculative talk about what the next chip set would look like. Would it even be a chip? What was the future of memory in a larger sense? Some may recall the ‘meat chip.’ It would use the architecture of human DNA as memory circuits. You might sit down at your computer and spit in a slot and have all the fresh memory the computer could handle. Pretty much fun, huh?”

  The crowd now was in full babble and snort. Whispering had become full on scatting at the first minutes of the apocalypse. Pharaoh’s army was about to be drowned.

  “The meat chip is here and its name is …” The doctor paused dramatically. Rex, I thought. His name is Rex. Now everyone will know.

  “… Legion. Its name is Everyman. Its name is Jean, John, Johannes, Ian, Ivan, Joan, Jeannie, Jane.… You, my friends, will be the new chips. You won’t even have to say yes. The yes is already implied. You won’t need to join up or enroll. You can’t say yes and you can’t say no. You will be and you will gladly be. That’s the best part. No assembly required. Spread the good word. From this day forth, you will be the meat chips waking and sleeping, drunk or sober, Protestant, Catholic, Muslim or Jew. Welcome every one. Welcome home.”

  And suddenly I realized what was going on. Rex was going to try a group what … ? Invasion. Intervention. Possession.

  Jake to Rex. Jake to Rex. Come in Rex. Talk to me. It’s me, Jake. Make me your henchman, Rex. Let me help you. You’ll need lieutenants. And commanders. And colonels. Make me a colonel, Rex. A general. Make me a general.

  I had seen the power of Plan B for the world: Rex at play. No silly governments or megalomaniacal goofballs would be able to “rule” anybody for their own good. No Second Coming. The Coming will already have been. We’ll all play together, and that alone will be the point—play.

  The front of the crowd had backed away from Dr. Sewall. He had entered a trance again, staring over the audience as if studying something far away. He seemed to be reloading like a video with slow bandwidth. I was thinking that at any minute Plan B would be announced. But nothing came out of Dr. S’s mouth. Are you there, Rex? It was as if the good doctor were taking time to re-think his rhetorical strategy. Ahem, um, in other words … and then he began to talk again, slower, l
ower, without the microphone. There appeared the sheen of sweat on his forehead and upper lip.

  “I’m here today to announce a breakthrough of some significance.” He clearly had begun again from some early point—reset. “What we have known as memory since the advent of the binary system has served us very well. But it has recently been holding us back too. I believe its song has finished. Zeroes and ones have always represented a rounded-off version of the actual complexity they were supposed to represent. Musicians knew this early on. Digital recordings were really only samplings of the actual sound—not the full sound itself that was available on analog recordings—pop, wow and hiss included free of charge.”

  The partially dispersed crowd was wandering back to hear the doctor.

  “But still we shot payloads into space, photographed the heavens, mapped the human genome with our faithful servants, zero and one, giving their best approximation of the real. Now we will have the next step. Today we can reproduce the full complexity of sound, photo, any algorithm with full representation. It took something akin to the actual human brain to do it. Mathematics gave us—always—versions, representations, maps. What if you could now work with the actual city rather than a map? The actual circuits rather than the schematic diagram?”

  The crowd that had reassembled was now stirring as if wafted by some unseen wind. I stood at the back and watched the crowd arrange itself, at first into lumpy groups, then very quickly into rows, phalanxes: the shuffling of feet, the squaring of shoulders. I could look down the rows now like orchard trees planted by GPS into exact lines, first this way, then also that way. I felt the need to line up at the end of one row. Very quickly, as soon as I lined up, I felt no more compulsion. I had reached the place I belonged. I was at rest. The crowd rows aligned and stopped. Dr. S smiled and paused and looked over what he had wrought.