Some Assembly Required

by Michael Strelow

  “It was always thus,” I pronounced biblically, waving away apocalypse. I felt as if I had lifted a burden from the doctor’s shoulders. From his look, I clearly hadn’t.

  He said slowly, “Don’t you see? I did this. I am responsible. This is on me. Rex is toxic. Is going to be toxic because he can’t be otherwise. Because he will because he can. Be toxic. Jake. We will soon be in the woe-is-me phase, I’m afraid. Some old prophecy come true to smite the wicked. Or we’ll think we were wicked, anyway.”

  “Smiting and wickedness? Really?” It was, of course, my fault for introducing the biblical “thus.” My fault entirely. The doctor was on the edge and going over.

  “Yes. All those metaphors for our nincompoopery, our inability to be good. Even the most obvious good—don’t hurt people, don’t hit children, don’t be mean. We couldn’t even do that. And then I made this thing out of zeroes and ones that will kick our asses whenever it wants to. It’s just warming up for the kicking, Jake. No mistake about it. Some kind of bible smiting is right around the corner.”

  There was no consolation for the doctor. He was slipping off into the land of Job’s wife and Eeyore. Throw up your hands, curse God and die, expect the worst. A sort of evil end-of-times with a few dog bites and nasty rashes first. And then the big ka-boom, the opposite of the big bang, as Rex undoes all creation.

  At least this was how I saw the doctor’s mind, his doomsday choiring of the filthy dusk of humankind. That phrase actually occurred to me. I wrote it down, looked it over, thought through the alternatives to it, crossed it out, wrote it again. Smiled. Goddamn it. It was Rex. It had to be. Knocking on my doors, crying at my windows. Damn it and damn it. The doctor was wrong. No Ka-boom. And also no whimper. No bang, no whimper. Just a bowl of oatmeal fucking with the kingdoms and orders and phyla and … the classes. Don’t forget fucking with the classes. I knew when I was amusing myself furtively like this that Rex was close by if not in residence. This is where the voices come in, but this time I heard only “hypotenuse.” It was like ordering a pizza. Someone called me up and instead of pizza gurgled the word hypotenuse. A first time for that word, but not for just a word, any random word occurring to me as if from a voice. But we’ve been through all that before.

  I needed Marnie. She would be my graph paper, my structure and reference. My x- and y-axes.

  I left Dr. Sewall grousing in his office about the form the end would take. He continued to insist that wrack would follow ruin and dem bones might not even rise again. There was no talking him into a more pleasant scenario. He seemed utterly defeated—a husk.

  By the time I found Marnie it was late afternoon, the hour, I had come to realize, that Rex loved for making himself manifest. I had also come to think of his appearances as unfolding of immanence. I also realized that I couldn’t just sit by passively; I had to look. And I wasn’t disappointed.

  There he was in full possession of Marnie as she saw me out the gallery window and rushed out to greet me. She hugged me with her whole body, almost lifted me off the ground. Kissed me. But I knew she was supercharged by Rex. He was fooling around, finding out, I suppose, how it felt to be emotionally human, sexy, in love (I hoped) and thoroughly female. I could feel her nipples through my shirt as the hug lingered.

  I had already thought through the consequences of Rex doing an afternoon unfolding in both of us at the same time; I expected it, looked forward to it. But I didn’t feel that frontal lobe thing he did to me, the thing that resulted in me writing “the doomsday choiring of the filthy dusk of humankind.” No silver plating of me. No extra charge. But Marnie was on fire.

  She burbled about the new show, how she had eaten some kind of tuna salad for lunch at the little café, you know the one, that had dried cranberries, walnuts and tarragon in it and one more thing, or maybe a couple of things that made it taste vaguely Middle Eastern and it was easily the finest of all tuna salads on earth. She pointed out to me how fine I was looking in the shirt she had given me two years ago, how I filled it out better now than I did when she first bought it.

  Hi Rex, I wanted to say, but didn’t. Thanks for the ego licks, the self-esteem snuffs, the strokes. But thanks most of all for the hug, the nipples, the way the whole afternoon light shifts spectrum and begins to include a couple wave lengths up there on the red end that we rarely get to see. And good work on the blue end, too. Some kind of filling in, fleshing out. Hi Rex.

  Of course, I never said a word to Marnie and was still plotting how exactly to bring up this peripatetic multitasking Rex was doing. How would I ask her to help me plan for some negative possibilities suggested by Dr. S while she was high on Rex juice? And then she whispered in my ear that she could get off early and we might, just might, like to spend all the rest of the afternoon making love and not put on clothes until a late dinner at the Italian place we loved. You know, she said, just to keep our strength up.

  And when we got home and began throwing clothes here and there, put on the music, I felt him too. He was going to make love to himself. Rex on Rex. I knew immediately that I would do exactly the same thing if I were Rex. The possession was gentle and joyful at first but then fierce and funny, and for a second I wondered what he would do with the rising feeling, that hormonal fire, the blood heat. Maybe he’d try flowing back and forth between us, going male to female to male to female again and again. Or just do both at the same time like a god-ride for Tiresias.

  We took out the peaches Marnie had brought home the day before. There would be a lot of laundry to do later. We slurped and ate the peaches off every surface the human body would allow peaches. Somehow the peaches that weren’t near ripe the day before suddenly became fully peach-soft ripe and juicy.

  She tied one of my hands to headboard but left the other one free to touch. The peaches couldn’t stay inside their skins; we couldn’t stay in ours. The afternoon light reddened with peach and the world was a single and full-throated yes. Yes. Yes.

  Even afterward, the lingering waves of feeling stayed on beyond nature’s regular way of saying, “well done.” We were both caught in a flood that wouldn’t let our nerves return to the business of the world. I couldn’t actually do anything that resembled thinking. Rex was trying out some variations on both of us; we could clearly remember and were fully stuck in the climax. It didn’t go away. We could remember it like a phone number or where we’d left the car keys. We lay tasting and re-tasting the entire climax. Both of them.

  I looked over at Marnie and saw she was as thoroughly idiot-brained as I was. Rex has fucked us both. No, that’s not the right way to say it. He had used us both at the same time to fuck.… Not that either. He was both our climaxes and then he gave us the gift of remembering them. Not even that. It was just such a hell of thing all together.

  So we went again, came again, played again and again until the Rex principle had had enough. I fell asleep and slept, I don’t know how long. I awoke to Marnie sitting upright in bed with her legs crossed staring at me like Venus in that Botticelli painting of Venus and Mars where Mars is spent and asleep, Venus awake with desire and four satyrs playing with a phallic wakeup call. Let’s do that again, the whole picture says. Marnie needed only that Venus braid that binds her out into nature with her yearning. Marnie was yearning.

  But apparently Rex had left me while lingering in Marnie. Only way I can say it. I was left washed up on the beach, Marnie still afloat.

  There were peaches and peach parts everywhere. A more thorough stickiness would be hard to imagine. Both nooks and crannies were sticky. Hills, dales, glens, vales—that’s the idea. We were a landscape of laundry nightmare. But clearly, the laundry strategy was only occurring to me, not Marnie. I tried. I tried but kept falling asleep as if Rex had decided to stand on my eyelids just to see what Marnie would do about it. Maybe asleep is not the right word. I was nearly devoid of words. Drugged: that’s close.

  When I awoke again, Marnie was sleeping next to me; we were covered and stuck to every inch of the sheets.
Rex must have grown tired of the experiment and left us both on the beach finally. And as I came to, I began to wonder just what he found out. Did he discover the fundamental urge? The Urge that ran the human lust machine? How we all got here two hundred thousand years later? Did he get a peek at the thing itself? The great want-to?

  I realized as I woke up more that I was making the Dr. S mistake. I was guessing that Rex had all kinds of complicated reasons, threads of reason beyond our poor comprehension, for exploring the world. And then all would go horribly wrong and we’d be plunged into the toxic undoing of all we had known of the world. Wrong Dr. S. I was going to stay with Rex-at-play. He wanted (I know I would, just like with the turtle) to feel it. Feel how good it feels. There would be no more perfect thing a god could do than just use people to feel the pleasure of being alive, ring those delight-bells over and over until the fragile metal began to crack and the great bells flew off over the horizon.… But I begin to Rex-up my own language. Wait a minute. I sat up in bed and became aware just how puny the human pleasure centers are compared to the pain we can endure. Pleasure just wears out, and we have to wait for the nerves to restock. But pain can go on day after day like a sere sourness that never relents or burns itself out. This pain is what Dr. S saw as inevitable in his monster. Rex would need to use people to see what pain, ineffable pain, would feel like. He’d need more than an afternoon and peaches to find that out. I think it was there in a bed sticky with peaches that I realized I had chosen the playful and juicy and delightful and lovely Rex over the painful and mean and toxic Rex. And it was really only a choice. Maybe just my own temperament imposed on Rex-ness. He couldn’t just plague us just to watch us die and then walk away. He could. He wouldn’t. Why set whatever zombie-apocalypse upon us in whatever form that could take—bacteria, virus, the undead—when we were much more fun slathered in peach juice lapping at each other’s pleasure parts? Maybe the Old Testament God would plague and flood and burn us to keep us in line. Not Rex. Not MY Rex.

  The light was gone. We showered, gathered up the sheets for the laundry, and went to eat Italian. I had osso bucco; Marnie pasta primavera, just like Venus would have.

  Chapter XIII

  I heard from Dr. Sewall that he wanted to kill Rex. He detailed his plan to undo what he thought he had done—sort of an anti-bowl of oatmeal. He wrote on email that he couldn’t lay out the entire scheme because Rex would be reading his email. He also said that he had begun lining a baseball cap with tin foil so that Rex could not get into his head when he had his defenses down. “Defenses? What defenses?” I wrote back. “I have defenses,” he shot back. We will all need defenses soon. Rex will come soon.”

  Shit, I thought self-indulgently. I do believe Rex may have had all the coming he can handle for a while. He’s got to try out being an owl or something else now. Swooping down through the evening and scooping up a tasty mouse for his young. That’s got to be nearly as good: warm meat, filling the scheme of nurturing progeny. I began to think Dr. S may be the bigger problem if he cranked up his algorithmic genius to produce a counter-force to the playful Rex. What slab of heated breakfast cereal is slouching toward Bethlehem to be born? Etcetera.

  Marnie was no worse for the wear the next day, the day after what I began to refer as the Great Peach Exaltation. The GPE now lay between us as a new standard in our relationship. We could refer to it without, we agreed, trying in vain to reproduce it. We could see it over there as an historical event without being bullied by its magnificence. We did now have ants in our bedroom where there had never been ants before. Be more careful with the peaches next time—that was the lesson.

  Marnie and I discussed what to do about Dr. S. Was he the danger? Was she on the same page with me about Rex?

  Turned out she imputed much less, okay, none, of our afternoon delight to Rex. We were indeed on very different pages. She was all for a rational explanation: very fine make-up sex. We had stored up our … affection for each other and lavished it on a single extended hoo-ha of an afternoon. I thought I could let it go at that. I should have let it go at that. I didn’t.

  “So … that was great stuff yesterday afternoon. Knocked my socks off, anyway.” I should have stopped right there. Didn’t.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Socks everywhere. Plenty of socks for sure. Oh, did you pick up the dry cleaning. I think they were going to close early for some holiday I didn’t recognize.” Marnie sorted through the mail. “Bill, bill, bill.”

  “But maybe it was the afternoon light or something. It was like it would never stop. Or even slow down.”

  “Yeah, I love it when that happens.”

  “Oh, well, that really never happens for me. Not like that. Not to be too cheesy about it, but did you do some kind of extra mojo thing? Just asking so you might do it again if I’m really nice to you.”

  “Regular mojo.” She laughed. “On the other hand, define ‘really nice.’ Maybe I will admit to some special secret thing only I know how to do. It’s …” She was not going the direction I’d hoped for. But a nice direction, anyway. “It’s really not a thing I can show you. It’s, well, an internal thing, if you know what I mean. You either have it or you don’t. I have it.”

  She shuffled the bills, threw them back onto the bill tray. I tried another way toward Rex. “And a beautiful thing it is. Even if I can’t see it. You made me a believer. Still, it was like there was something even more spectacular going on, don’t you think? Like there was almost a … presence, an emanation of some sort going on. Or … yes, like someone else, maybe a ghost, was in the room helping us out.”

  She went to toss out the junk mail and turned to me. “A ghost? You mean like a real ghost? Or more like …” And here she gave me that over-the-shoulder look as if she were checking for signs of crazy, as if the crazy-ometer had just been turned on. “Or more like a bowl-of-oatmeal-gone-rogue kind of ghost?” She waited; I waited; I bit my lip.

  “Sure. Something like that? What do you think?”

  She studied me, crazy-ometer running, gathering data. “Okay. Say Rex could jump in like that. Did he ‘occupy’ you or me?”

  This was the tipping point. I could slide out the side door. I could say whacky shit. Somewhere between the two was going to be the right way, I thought. “I was just thinking if Rex could pull off the AI event, you know, the lining people up, why wouldn’t he, why couldn’t he jump into somebody’s lovemaking.”

  “Just a minute. So you’re saying it couldn’t be my special skills.” And here she patted herself obscenely but with good humor too. “Couldn’t be that special ‘thang’ that I do, huh?”

  And I found myself pedaling but not going anywhere. It was a moment best defined by the elephant/down joke. How do you get down from an elephant? Ladder/goose answers. Either one. She had me where I had to go with ladder or goose. She raised her eyebrows waiting for the answer. And I went with the goose, so to speak. The fowl answer, anyway. I chickened out and said: “What I mean to say is, the whole afternoon was otherworldly. Out of this world.”

  She considered my position on the subject. She checked the data on the crazy recorder. She, I think, also considered whether I might have a case in the Rex-presence theory, but she didn’t say it. She said, “Yeah.” And then after what seemed to me to be a very long time, though I’m sure now it was not untowardly, she added, “Do you think we could get ahold of Rex? Invite him to the party sometime and see what we get? But peaches are as far as I go. I don’t do oatmeal. And I don’t … well … I reserve the right … my orifices are … you know. My own.”

  I was thinking we had no choice in the presence or absence or Rex but wisely kept it to myself. I was also thinking about where our sex life was headed if we had to ceremoniously invoke some string of zeroes and ones to come and ménage-à-trois with us. That way lies madness, clearly. But damn that was fine the way the feeling stayed and stayed and stayed as if someone left the lights on.

  The following weeks we didn’t even have to check the new
spaper to see Rex at work. The local news without knowing it had become Rex’s personal reality show. I started keeping track, submitting my findings to the jury of Marnie for vetting. Is it Rex or is it just the weirdness of the world? Rex was becoming his own GMO show: modifying, putting in, taking out, inventing new cheeses, new wine in old bottles.

  And this business could have gone on a long time if not for a panicked phone call from Doctor Sewall. The gist of the call was that if we don’t do something about confronting Rex soon, we will not be able to do anything about him and his evil plans. Yes, evil. He used the word evil, and it rang right out of the comics. Villainous evil. Two-face and wrath-of-Kahn evil. As before, I thought my best move would be to try to talk him out of his tree, onto the ground, and then sit him down on the metaphorical park bench where we could begin a sane conversation. Not this time. He was spurting and babbling and non-compos mentis. On the phone he sounded as if his eggs were thoroughly scrambled. Rex and not-Rex occurred to me. Which one was I dealing with?

  The doctor had been moving in this direction for some time. Maybe having Rex in his brain had weakened his infrastructure, loosened his pilings so that the whole edifice of self was wobbling now. On the other hand, how stable had that building ever been? What had he written in those early lines of code that could have (accidentally?) created the ur-Rex? The Rex that then had iterated himself into the infinite complexity I now suspected—the omnipresent, omniscient. Rex not as God him-, her-, itself. But God’s fingerprint, the fractal of God.

  First things first: Dr. S in pursuit of his faculties and me still in pursuit of my article. These goals, it occurred to me, were in some ways incompatible. I wanted to write an article and the “crazy doctor, mad scientist” angle, though truly hackneyed, really just needed a little complexity at the edges, an angle that portrayed the doctor not as that sad dupe Frankenstein, but played up the stroke of luck in the combination of codes that made up Rex, made up in the sense of invented and also constituted. Luck as an idea seemed all over the scientific world suddenly. Cancer was, in many cases, being described as fundamentally bad luck at the cellular level. Luck was replacing chance and chaos—very sexy stuff in the past—and even Schrödinger’s cat that was both alive and dead simultaneously. Apparently the dice that Einstein said God does not play at? Well … God does.