Some Assembly Required

by Michael Strelow

  When only the streetlights blew back the dark, there was a kind of standoff peace. I went inside to celebrate the standoff.

  Marnie answered my phone call. Good first step. She agreed to a sort of date where we could talk and re-take a beachhead or two. Late afternoon and public and at a place known for its bean soup. Who could not be amenable while eating bean soup?

  We could meet and eat, I figured, and then plan our response to Rex, and if there was no response possible, we’d find a cave somewhere to wait out the apocalypse engineered by unattenuated “horseplay.” I needed her good counsel on the subject of Dr. S, too. She had good sense. I had some sense but not much of it good. I was an enthusiastic bumbler of sorts and my only really fine quality was that I knew it. I knew it, and I knew what kind of trouble that kind of bumbling could get me. I knew to ask for help from the sensible people around me.

  And yet she arrived wearing a Judas Priest T-shirt. A sign, if I were to begin collecting signs and assembling them into a message from the fractured world. What would the next sign be? And the next? Marnie brought news.

  She had been cutting out articles for me from the New York Times. One I already knew about was on a cytomegalovirus. She thought I’d like the name alone. The fact that it was part of the herpes family was just frosting. She brought one about a sea snail, a nudibranch, that ate algae and then kept the algae alive in its gut and used the algae’s ability to photosynthesize as a food source for itself. It actually kept the algae alive in its gut longer than the algae would normally live. Ka-ching! She knew that kind of stuff perked up my ears, snatched my attention, and also rang my bell, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera (as the King of Siam was fond of saying).

  Was this kind of information admissible evidence regarding the whereabouts of Rex? Of course I thought it was. But one of the many reasons I wanted Marnie back was the good proportion she would provide my tendency to wickedness and my fondness for all partial evidence. She would say: I don’t think so. And she’d say: wait just a minute or let’s look at this closely and slowly. Or she’d fold her arms across her chest and say nothing but raise her eyebrows to get me to reconsider my half-cocked suppositions. She could make me reconsider, after a while, by merely raising one eyebrow.

  I valued her as a human being more fully evolved than I. If Rex ever became wise, he would use her as a model for where humans should go next on the evolutionary scale. I’d take it up with him next chance.

  The bean soup came and was beautiful. Marnie ate with the light coming through the window as if it wanted a taste of soup from her lips. She sipped. And the light sipped with her. I could tell she was trying to get a feeling for the degree of my wackiness, how far back I might have to come in order to qualify again as a boyfriend. At least I think that was the verbal dance we were doing. I was taken in by the light both on her and emanating from her. And, of course, after a very short while I had that oh-shit feeling of Rex’s presence, the same light-presence I’d seen coming off Dr. S.

  She said, “You’re looking well. All this Dr. S business doesn’t seem to have kept you from sleeping.”

  Then it occurred to me that I might also be putting out some light of my own. That would be so like Rex: Hmm, what if I turned them both up a few watts, just for the duration of the bean soup? Then I’ll make her lick her lips just a little, yes, like that, and then he’ll blush but won’t be able to take his eyes off her lips and then a truck will go past and the sunlight coming in the window will flash off and then back on so that she flickers in his eyes like a chimera that comes and goes and comes back. Then she watches him sit up straight in his chair, stretch a little, and she notices how the fabric of his shirt clings to his chest. He hasn’t been working out, but I’ll make it look like he has. Let’s see. Which one should I have stand up and have to pee. The other one will watch and see how the body moves, catch the walk, remember the day when they lay on the quilt…

  All it took was the first shove and the boat of my imagination scooted out into the current and was on its way downstream and toward the waterfall. I was listening to her but multitasking my way into a parallel scenario. I can repeat everything she said—the sales of the fractals, the next show and the troubles with one painter not getting paintings done on time, the bosses taking off for Barbados, the wall repaint, and the inquiries about the Event with Dr. S. But some kind of Rex business was afoot, too.

  I tried to lay out for Marnie what I thought constituted some kind of presence of Rex, or maybe the Rex principle now that Himself no longer actually appears. Told her about the “interview” when he spoke to me seemingly using my teeth as transmitters. That would be my first clue in a list of clues—that feeling. Then there was the “event” business where I knew he was afoot by the behavior of others—people, yes, but maybe birds and dogs and cats too. Then the glow thing—Dr. S’s posture and attitude, my own glib silver-tongued transformation. The newspaper articles that chronicled Rex abroad in the world: mutations, irregularities, atypicality, flora and fauna surprises. I asked Marnie to add to my list.

  “Fractals,” she volunteered. And then she sat back and looked so beautifully smug as if she’d said all there was to say. And then finally, “Fractals and fresh-baked bread. Fractals and when the bean soup is truly fine bean soup. You know, when the whatever gets to be great whatever: sunset, sex, rain running down a window. The times when these are the really fine versions of the regular versions that we don’t pay much mind. I mean who ever knows when sex is going to do that thing it does when you sort of black out from the fierceness of the climax. Is it Tuesdays? Four in the afternoon? No …” And she paused and raised her indicating finger to indicate, “It’s Rex. In residence. At home. Keeping promises!”

  I sat back and admired. The old fun, the new fun she was. She was being deliciously silly, but she was also onto something, maybe a Rex-tenet. Who could ever explain the variations and waverings in the fragile surface of the world?

  We sat and talked and talked. That simple. After Rex we returned to art, then journalism, then, finally, us—partners in crime fighting again. We’d give it a try. No crazies allowed.

  After the furniture moving (or returning), the bookshelves restocked, the kitchen cleaned, the closet organized again, we sat with the paper in the morning and saw that it had actually begun—Rex was manifesting everywhere at once.

  At first, it was the same science stuff that we’d been seeing: new species of millipedes, a toxic orchid, a nudibranch with new skills. Same old same old. But also an estimated hundred thousand people in Bangladesh assembled on a beach to watch a particularly spectacular sunset, and then after light had gone, most stayed well into the night singing and praying for no particular reason—no holiday, no festival. Religions mixed, customs flowed into each other without conflict. Some kind of weird peace had broken out. No one killed in a bridge stampede. Just an orderly recession back to where they had come from. There was great public puzzling and questioning the next day about what had actually happened. Clerics railed against “mixing” prayers. Some thought they saw glowing lights.

  I read the article to Marnie. She plotted it on her evidence chart that we both began to call, the “manifestations.” We plotted all the manifestations of Rex and order of certainty: pretty sure, a bunch that weren’t, ones that were actually our presumptive assigning of points where and when we assumed the world was being Rexed. We had a verb. We had plot points enough so that if we stood back from the chart, we observed a kind of dust effect at particular locations on the map. It made me want to connect the dots and see what duck or puppy appeared. But alas there were no numbers, no place to begin or end. You could connect the dots any way you wanted.

  We could have gone on like this, Marnie and I, playing and collecting and supposing and seriously fooling around. But one day I saw on her phone—I was snooping, I admit it—the digital residue of a recent call from Dr. S. I recognized the number immediately. Since she hadn’t said anything about the call and I couldn’t brin
g it up without re-qualifying as the crazy, jealous shit who suspected everyone and everything, I was stalled in my conflicted tracks. Among my people we have a saying for when no reasonable thing can be said: “shit and two are four.” I have always thought the saying got more and more useful the older I became, and I looked forward to the time as an old man when I would use it ten or fifteen times a day just to contain my dismay.

  Oh, Marnie. Oh, Marnie. Et tu?

  I thought the best thing to do in the short term was get out of the house, walk and walk. And walk. I headed toward my favorite park with its parcel of woods and pond, my refuge in the past. But on the way there I realized that if Rex was actually capable of being everywhere, messing with the world like a willful child, then there was no refuge. Maybe I should reexamine what I meant by refuge in the first place. There was no refuge from getting a cold. No refuge from twisted ankles, chapped lips, a stye, hemorrhoids, cancer—but I digress. No refuge, that was the important point. From bad luck, too. What the hell did I think I could do? I had read the Book of Revelation: run to the mountains, run to the sea—doesn’t matter because you can’t hide. Not from the apocalypse, not from Rex.

  Of course Dr. S and Marnie were in cahoots, but what kind of cahoots? And there it is—the cahoots principle. All things, all people, all winds fair or foul were in cahoots. My personal 20 percent discount—reduce the threat level at least 20 percent all the time—was designed by me for my own protection. Because if there were no discount, the world would be unlivable—too much collusion, too much cahoots, too much crazy. Wouldn’t get anything done. I’d be swatting away at all the flies, all the gnats and no-see-ums, all the things that want to fly up my nose or lay eggs in my brain—the certain plot that dirt has, to bring me on down and eat me up.

  I found my cottonwood trees. These wrinkled beasts that ate up the dirt, these hanging trees of the Old West, not because they were particularly good for hanging someone, but because you couldn’t find a decent oak for miles, and there was always a cottonwood right over there. They stood in a row as if planted fifty years ago by some lover of their artificial snowstorm every spring, their cotton drifting and floating and looking to make the world into one big cottonwood farm. The bark was rich gray with deep crevasses adding black shadow so that as you stepped away, the trunk shimmered. And like teenagers, the trees scattered detritus around as if claiming space by pure dint of chaos.

  And just beyond their untidiness was the pond, and if I was early, and if I was quiet, and if I was lucky, a box turtle would be sunning itself on the end of a log sticking out into the water. Turtles are always wary, of coyotes I supposed; if I came on too fast, it would one-step into the pond. Today, there were two turtles lined up like solar arrays processing the sun. I got close. Each was trusting the other to bolt first. Had Rex tried out the mind of a turtle? I certainly would if I could. It would be fun to feel the sun starting up my engines ray by ray, feel the torpor slough out of my limbs, my brain kick into warm mode then plunge myself back into the dark pond to feed. I watched the two turtles tanking up on sunlight. They seemed asleep until behind me a dog wallowed into the woods looking for a drink at the pond. I turned to check the dog, looked back, and the turtles were gone. There were no ripples on the pond. I asked myself if the turtles were actually there and decided that the question itself belonged in the 20 percent cause/effect discount rate the world deserved. I deserved.

  I spent the afternoon shifting around the park asking myself Thoreau-like questions: what does the thin layer of the natural world mean to tell us about being alive in it? What does the next layer deeper want to give us as metaphor? And then, once again, the Tina Turner question: what’s love got to do with it? I found a hotdog vendor at the far end of the park and was tempted to ask him to “make me one with everything.” Marnie and I loved that joke and contrived to use it whenever possible. We supposed that hotdog vendors all over the world were tired of it, but we did it anyway. Eventually cottonwood, turtle, dog, pond, hotdog slowly relieved my brain congestion, self-doubt, cosmic angst.

  Only the Dr. S conspiracy remained. Why would he call her and why would that call not be part of our conversation after we had … we had made … we had what? There was, apparently, no after. Mend the thing slowly. Back the hell off, I reminded myself.

  But I found at home a message on my phone from Dr. Sewall. Have to see you, he texted. Come at once.

  I found him retreated to the inner most chamber of his offices. He had one leg up under himself on the chair as he often did in the early days. He looked like a worried man.

  “Out the window,” he said, without looking up himself. I went to his window. There was a fishpond in a courtyard, benches around, stonework, scattered students.

  “What am I looking for?”

  “The pond, look at the fish.”

  The goldfish were clearly visible even from this height. They had arrayed themselves in a perfect circle in increasing and then decreasing size. What are the chances? They seemed to be vaguely in motion, maybe feeding on something, some insect life on the surface.

  “The fish? The circle of fish?”

  “Yes but look closer, over to the right. In the shadows.”

  I saw a small, redheaded man standing as if he had just stepped out of the bushes near the pond. He seemed to be conducting as if he had an orchestra in front of him, an invisible orchestra. But the beat was slow, very slow. Up, down, up, down. And the fish slowly circled clockwise first, then reversed direction. I had to watch for some minutes to see the whole business because it was so slow. I could see now that the man had a red goatee and was wearing a heavy leather belt with a big buckle. A troll, I thought. A leprechaun maybe. A musical troll! A ringmaster leprechaun. There was something beautiful and fascinating about it. I couldn’t look away.

  “It’s beautiful,” I said slowly, to myself more than to the doctor. “That guy … who is that guy?”

  When he didn’t reply, I looked over at him, and he shrugged. Then shrugged again. Finally he said, “Some guy. It doesn’t matter—”

  I interrupted. “But he looks like a leprechaun. Or a troll or something.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Dr. S sounded defeated. I was almost giddy with the show going on out the window. “It doesn’t matter because every day it’s somebody different. I’ve been watching all week. Sometimes a coed, sometimes just a kid passing through with his skateboard. One time a very big dog—I don’t know what kind of dog is that big—just sat where the guy is today, just sat there and didn’t move and the fish did the same thing … their ballet or whatever it is. Then pretty soon a guy calls the dog and the dog runs off and the ballet stops.” Then the doctor fell silent again and sighed.

  “Rex?”

  “Rex. Of course, Rex.”

  “How can you be sure it’s Rex?”

  “It’s the same business as the event at the mall. Make some weird order and then stop. Then do it again. Like he was just playing with something, but we can’t see the toy, just what happens in the world, what gets manipulated. You think it’s beautiful? Bullshit. It’s not. It’s just the preliminaries to some really bad stuff coming up. This is the dress rehearsal, Jake. The play opening out of town.”

  “Or,” I offered hoping to spin this a more positive way, “Or Rex, is just exercising new muscles. Working out. Finding his way. Learning his song.”

  “You can’t be that stupid. You’ve seen enough by now, haven’t you? This is not a person in any sense of the word. This is a … a principle working its way out in the world. It’s a perfectly natural principle, and it frankly doesn’t give one shit about us or anything else. It doesn’t have the giving-a-shit capacity. It doesn’t need that capacity for anything it’s doing.”

  I looked back out the window. A few people had gathered around the pond to watch the fish perform. They were calling to friends to come look. The small man conducting took a step back slowly and disappeared into the bushes. I noticed that his clothing was the same gr
een hue as the bushes, and he fit perfectly into the height of the shrubs. Then the fish swam off randomly.

  “It’s over. It’s done I think.”

  Dr. Sewall laughed his kind of cackle, sort of an unpleasant sound. A laugh of no charm whatsoever. “It’s not done. Not by a long shot. It’s barely begun. This has been happening every day for a week. Next week? What? You think this display is cute. Beautiful, you said. It’s dangerous, I’m trying to tell you. It’s an escalation of the level of competence. Maybe competence is the wrong word. Level of … of … potency. That’s it. We’re talking about power. A level of power that’s just beginning.” He put his head in his hands.

  I wondered if I should finish off his despair with the chart Marnie and I were keeping: the nudibranchs, the orchids, the German autobahn disasters. Should I tell him: You have no idea, Dr. S, how far this has gone beyond the fishpond. And how the fishpond and any number of simultaneous events could be going on while Rex was also fooling around in the realms of human passion? No give-a-shit capacity? Au contraire, doctor. Rex had become a bundle of giving a shit, but that bundle just didn’t match up with what we happened to give a shit about. And probably never would. So, dangerous? Absolutely. But also absolutely nothing to be done about it except to dance the dance that was coming up. By my estimation the dance was just as likely to be delightful as it was to be horrible. And maybe the in-between also had a good chance: a little of everything.

  Instead I told the doctor my take on the evolution of Rex, how he had gone out of the barn—literally—a long time ago, probably riding a sheep fleece like Ulysses or a load of manure the first time. He had gone toward the light out of the dingy barn and never really come back. Now what should we do about it? I reminded him of the Africanized bees that escaped an experimental genetic cross in South America. Couldn’t get the bees back into the tipped over hive. Accidents happen. Shit happens. There you are. Whatareyougonnado?