“Can you locate yourself relative to everyone else? Imagine how useful this might be, all you meat chips lined up into the first step of real organization. On your left, you have cooperation. On your right, cooperation.”
The group began to buzz. Some on the edges where it was easier to step out of line, brgan to wander then quick-step back into line, anxiety erased. Then out. Anxious. Back in. Comfortable.
“Ah, isn’t that better? See how more comfortable you are when you cooperate? Thank you for your attendance today and for your … your cooperation. The meat chip is on its way to a device of your choice. Thank you. I will take questions at the email address on the handout. Let’s chat!”
And he was gone, like the wizard disappearing back through the curtain. The crowd milled and churned and asked what had just happened. One redhead from the front row said we had imagined the lining up. One blond from the back row said no, we were definitely lined up; he could see the x-axis and the y-axis, the file, the formation, the ranks. The rows were gone instantly as perhaps a hundred people milled. There were a number of explanations circulating about what had just happened. The illusion of order is very easy, one announced. Another insisted that all order was illusion. Then the metaphysicians rose up and into the abstract gaps: we had been projections or maybe Platonic shadows of our own need for order in a world of chaos. And my instant favorite: we had for a moment all realized together that we are essentially one and all separation is the illusion.
Doctor Sewall had floated off leaving us to buzz and speculate—just what he wanted apparently.
Then came the cyber-buzz. The “chat” he promised created what became known as Yasgur’s-farm syndrome. Woodstock, on Yasgur’s farm, apparently held hundreds of times the number of people that it could actually hold, if one were to believe all the people who reported they were there twenty years later. Yearning to have been there counted as attendance. And why not? As with Woodstock, Dr. S’s séance (as I began to call it) was not so much about actually having been there as it was about understanding or theorizing what might have gone on. In time, the full Yasgur’s-farm syndrome would manifest itself, and maybe, just maybe, everybody in the state would have been there, everybody in the surrounding states, too.
Chapter XI
I needed my partner, my crime-fighting associate. Marnie. This wasn’t going to be easy, I figured, and I was right. I ruled out all the madman stalker techniques I had seen in the movies. Women and men both loved attention. But crazy-person attention was not very close to the attracting kind of attention. Where to draw the line? I needed considerate and passionate without wacky and creepy. If I could do what Rex does, I’d just drop out of a tree like wafting pollen on the evening air, she’d accidentally snuff me up her nose, I’d work toward the brain—some lower centers at first, some amygdala or hippocampus—then zip on up to the frontal lobes for the reunion. Party hats. Noisemakers. There’d be cake!
But no. No such skill set, alas. She was back at work after her sabbatical to god-knows-where, so I thought I’d start there at the gallery. The fractal show was in its last week. I went there on an early afternoon, pretty casual, glance here, long look there. I knew she was in the back and could see on CCTV who as out in the gallery. She could send out one of the other girls. She could come out herself after a while. She could slip out the back door and go home for the day with a headache. She could greet me again with a German accent. She could call the police. She could…
“Jake,” she says. “Nice to see you again. Still pondering the fractal way?”
We had talked and talked the fractal, the natural nature of the concocted algorithm of the scale of reality and the reiterative nature of the … that kind of love-nibble stuff, sitting on the couch our thighs touching and untouching. Me working toward licking around the rim of her ear with my pronunciation of “algorithm.” It seemed like a good idea at the time, and it was. We could always morph that kind of discussion into something in the bedroom or on the couch. Then, alas, came crazy Jake and his all-jealous circus. She hated that circus. The clowns especially. Well, the main clown.
So I knew where I had to start again. With me. But I also had the sneaking suspicion that the “Me” I was going to rehab was, what … ? Now somehow a compounded me. A me with a tincture of Rex. A soupcon. Rex, is, I realized, running some part of my frontal lobes where the blah, blah, blah of words comes from. Was he showing off for Marnie? Was this word-jazz that started to come out of me just Rex fooling around or was it the equivalent of a twelve-year-old male doing a cartwheel for the girl over there across the playground?
Conclusion: In all the possible cases, there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. So just get on with the re-courtship even if I have a passenger, a parasite, a voyeur plunked on my shoulder waiting for us to have sex so he can watch. And prime directive: don’t tell Marnie about being possessed, occupied, inhabited.
Marnie cocked her head and looked at me as if looking for signs. “You’ve been working a lot, haven’t you?” She laughed. “I can always tell when you’ve been stuffing yourself with research. You get that … that tanking-up look, like a hungry man about to eat.”
“I’m just still chasing Dr. Seuss. It’s kind of turned into a fulltime job. The story keeps growing.”
“I saw that. On the news they had footage of the event, the gathering downtown led by Dr. S. I kept looking for Horton and a Grinch. Red fish, blue fish …”
I have to say in the next ten minutes I found myself more charming than I ever remember myself being. Flirt charming. Eye charming. Listen charming. Oh yeah, and body contour charming, you know, the way you can shape your body to what the object of your affection is doing without touching. She concave, you convex. Rex, are you there? I wanted to call him out. Was he pushing buttons and pulling levers? Could I be this charming on my own? I finally had the distinct impression that I should break this off while it was going well, grab my laurels and run before I wreck something by overdoing or underdoing; it’s such a delicate thing, this sex-schmoozing.
I think I’ll check my watch as an exit move. But I can’t. I mean I actually can’t. Rex won’t let me. In his exalted opinion I shouldn’t check my watch in order to excuse myself. Well then, how about a coughing fit? A muscle cramp? A sudden case of diarrhea? Marnie is saying: “The fractal show is just about sold out. We did the ‘price adjustment’ thing at the end, of course. The prices became more and more negotiable there at the end, but we sold out.”
I said, “I try to imagine all that math hanging on people’s walls screaming squares and n plus ones and the coastline of England.” Marnie looked at me puzzled. Well, I did it, went off some deep end. The coastline of England? Oh yeah, she’ll remember. Mandelbrot pondering the actual coastline of England comes up with fractals. Something like that. “The coastline of England. Um, how that works. The ins and the outs? The bays and … points and projections … the isthmuses and the fjords …”
“I don’t think England has fjords. But Scotland has firths, I think.” She laughs.
“Does England have firths then?”
“Maybe they’re the same thing.”
I hear Rex gathering up his notes and making for the door of my psyche. Or maybe he had taken up residency in my soul. Where is the soul located? The thymus I’m pretty sure. I try tying my shoe and it works. Spell broken. Marnie looks at her watch and says she has to scoot.
I debrief myself at home. What was happening with Marnie? Was Rex dabbling in my love life? Fooling around? Why couldn’t I look at my watch when I wanted to? Maybe I realized the move was wrong, realized in some subterranean chamber of my experience storehouse that the watch-move is always clunky. And I was sailing along so beautifully the watch-thing would have been a fart in the elevator of my intensions. My frontal lobes were all a-tingle as if some celebrity had passed through, waved, and was gone.
I had to get a new interview with Dr. S. Somehow an interview would help me sort out the wiggles and waggles of th
is business.
I returned to the journalist’s prime directive that secretaries know everything and can both make possible or make impossible all fruitful inquiries.
I found Dr. Sewall by applying only the first move in my secretary jujitsu. I showed up at his outer, outer office hoping to work my way in through the layers of diffusion and obfuscation to the man himself. But the secretary said just a minute before I could launch a full-scale schmooze and then said he’s got a few minutes right now if you’d like to go right in. That was Plan B.
The doctor was in. He sat with his feet up on his desk, back to the door. A radio was on low, almost inaudible. Big band sound from the 40s maybe. His office seemed lit internally somehow as if actual light bulbs were not required. Every surface seemed to give off a little light so the total effect was of luminosity rather than light source.
“Let me guess,” he said, without turning. “You want to know about Rex.” He took his feet off the desk, turned. “There is no Rex. Not the way you knew Rex at the beginning.” There is no Rex; I could only hope. But that would make my voices truly delusional, institutional, case-study-able. The office light I had studied on the way in now began to … hug me, caress me, maybe comfort me. Tactile light saying something like, “there, there. It’s okay.” A Mom of a light saying everything will be fine just wait and see. Infantalizing light.
“The bowl of oatmeal,” I said.
“Striped bowl of oatmeal. I like to think of that as the essential Rex. He was like a cliché there at the beginning. Or maybe like a stereotype—an essentialist reduction of certain aspects of being alive. My contribution was, as I see it now, taking orders from the universe—the One.”
Oh, shit, I thought. The doctor is fleeing reality after a trauma. The One in a conversation, in my experience, was always a bad sign. There wasn’t really anywhere to go after The One. Phenomenology gone feral.
But he seemed to sense my unease, my dis-ease. “Jacob. May I call you Jacob?”
“Jake. My sister calls me Jacob.”
“Okay, Jake. Let me begin with the event the other day, the gathering.”
“And forced march—”
“Am I going to get to talk? I thought that interviews were about …”
“Yes, of course, Doctor Sewall. Please.” I offered my open hand as capitulation to his story. “You first. I’ll ask questions later.”
“I’m sure you will. So Jake, do you know how jasmine smells wafting across an evening garden? But if you get close to the jasmine flower the smell is overwhelming, actually pretty stinky. There’s kind of a principle here about beauty in nature—sunsets, jasmine—don’t get close. So—and I’m only just pretty sure about this—Rex has morphed into beauty, or some kind of principle of beauty. Don’t misunderstand me. Rex is not beauty itself. That would be an easy mistake to make. Maybe better put is that Rex has become beautiful. And playful. Maybe childlike, but not childish. Above all, there will be no interview with Rex, if that was part of your plan. An interview of any sort is quite impossible at this point.”
“At this point?”
“Please, let me try to get this all out the best I can.” I nodded. It was hard not to jump in for clarification, but I would be the first to admit the load of prejudice I was carrying by now would have constricted the conversation badly. I still felt Rex as a tingle in my frontal lobes, a ringing in my fillings. It was hard to let go of that invaded feeling, not to mention all those alien-invasion movies that rattled around in my youth. The doctor continued. “It became clear to me early on that Rex was not … what? Not stable. Not going to be the same thing the next day. The stripes were the first indication. Why stripes? Why not polka dots? Why not little stars and moons as decoration? And the answer became clear eventually. Any of those were just as possible as the stripes. And then when the stripes were done—well, you saw the crumbled-brownie thing he left behind when he began to travel. Maybe travel is not the right word. When he began to be ubiquitous. When Rex went everywhere, then he became nowhere. Okay, better said is that Rex went out of the stripes and never came back. The event the other day? That was some part of Rex that didn’t even need the rest of Rex, wherever else he was. He is now the wind, maybe. He is now the jungle and the desert, the ocean and the …”
He stopped and scratched his head then abruptly sat down. He slumped into a kind of defeated gray mass, the kind I saw giving the paper at the conference when I first met him. I raised my hand as if I were a student in class. He nodded.
“Maybe he’s dead. Or gone. Or on vacation?”
“Nice try. I even thought that for a short while. But the event and the lining up and the rows and structure—all that was Rex back showing off.”
“And is there a defense of some sort?”
“Defense! You’re not getting the picture, are you? Defense? What would you defend yourself against? What could we do? We could outlaw horsing around. That’d be a place to start because that’s what Rex does mostly—horsing around. Then maybe we could hit the playgrounds with a whip in hand and outlaw fooling around, play in specific and general. Can’t you see that Rex has found a home in what we are, or at least what we are when we are young. Or in lots of cases old, too.”
Shit, I was thinking. It’s very cool in lots of ways what Rex has become. But in lots of other ways it scares the shit out of me if it’s true. “So what do we do?”
“Do? We don’t do anything. We can’t do anything. If you wanted to conquer some other tribe, the most effective way would be to marry them and breed them into yourself. The Vikings, Alexander the Great’s men both practiced fuck-diplomacy. Fuck everything that moves and then on your way back through town in a few years later you get a daddy’s welcome. The Normans in twelfth-century Ireland even brought their own roosters with them and killed and ate the local roosters. When they came back, they came back to eat their own chickens.”
It was the Norman chickens that made me suddenly wonder if I was interviewing the doctor or Rex. Was he—either one — just making shit up now? That would qualify as play, I guess. I looked closely at his eyes as he raved on to see if there were signs of possession. I found myself wishing Marnie were here so we could sit down afterward and parse this whole speech, discuss nuances of sanity. The Marx brothers “sanity clause” occurred to me. “Everybody knows there’s no sanity clause,” Chico says. Marnie would know what to look for. I spent so much time with fringy people that the weird came to seem perfectly normal. Marnie worked with artists who were actually much saner than the general population, she claimed. They were focused and passionate and really predictable after you got to know them. I was working through Dr. S’s proposition that Rex was everywhere now and so was actually nowhere. Omniscient, omnipotent, OM Shanti OM. Namu Myoho Renge Kyo. The Lotus Sutra. The Lord’s Prayer. The inevitable call to worship in all cultures, the call from somewhere to everywhere. To nowhere. To leave our puny selves and go out into the … into the … into the…
Dr. S was winding up. “Jake, there are, of course, so many ways of looking at Rex at this point. I’ve just tried to suggest a few. He was one thing and now, alas, I don’t exactly know what he’s become. Or where. So you see your question about defending ourselves, it’s absurd. Nothing wrong with the absurd, but as a man of science I don’t do absurd. I do paradox. I do theories in contention. I even do the discursive and the seemingly impossible that’s yet to be explained. Schrödinger’s cat, Kekule’s dream of a snake with its tail in its mouth.”
And then Dr. Sewall sighed from somewhere deep inside, the sigh not of resignation but of capitulation. He had, it seemed, exhausted for the present, all words that might explain what had been Rex and had become something more disparate and ethereal. Some transmigration of soul-lessness. I’d be sure to use that phrase in my article eventually. I wrote it on my notepad. The doctor had paused but also closed his eyes and was maybe asleep. I left quietly.
Chapter XII
The way a finch moves along a branch identifi
es it. The way a tree sways tells us which way the wind is blowing. The waves on the sand tell the tide. I was trying to know and then tell people about something that was true for only me and Dr. S. If just the two of us had any handle on Rex, any handle whatsoever, we would develop a shorthand, a code that only we could really understand. And we were doomed to only blither into the void and nod to each other. On the other hand, was the distinct possibility that Dr. S and I should just shut the fuck up. Take his last sigh and call it good. Wait to see if Rex rained down out of the heavens on us or decided to wipe out humanity (playfully, of course) or just for the hell of it, cure cancer. Could go either way. Wait for the signs. Watch the heavens. Eviscerate a few birds and read the entrails. Pray for guidance. Set up a flow chart. Do the hokey-pokey and you turn yourself around…
Marnie became a necessary adjunct, a guidepost before I slipped off into Dr. S land.
It was the evenings when I found myself most likely to encounter signs of Rex, so I tried to stick to days outside. The evenings became full of variations on the natural that I had to impute to Rex or Rex-like concoctions of my own brain. I think it was the fading light that invited all kinds of fancied versions of the real. The streetlights when they first ignited themselves hummed and emitted partial spectrum light that carved the weird into the waiting world. The blue-green light transitioning to a tired orange then the full on blare that kept the night at bay. I would walk under the lights and many times one would go out. Or it would restart, so that I began to think I was doing it. I took to waving my hand at the light, then a step and it would go out. Sometimes not. But just enough times the light would falter, stop, start again from the blue-green and work its way up again. Just beyond the light, everything was possible.
Things rustled and went bump. Things scurried and scuttled all rat-faced and whiskery in the duff. And though Rex had no fear of the limelight apparently, I think he lived mostly there in the shadow world, smelling of loam and half rot. That’s where stuff was getting done, I figured. That’s where Rex was most Rex.
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