I thought I had Marnie back on my side, and if I could keep in check my evil, green-eyed twin, I might pull that whole love business off again. But right now, the gurgling on the phone concerned me most. I had to play catch-up with the doctor and see what could be salvaged there. There was also the possibility that he would do something so egregiously wrong that he would become the news story and any article I could write would just be a footnote to his madness and incivility.
So I went looking for him. He was, I thought, looking for Rex with malice and murder in his eye. I was looking for Dr. S looking for Rex—two moving targets. And since I had no idea where to find Rex and in fact had designated Rex as finally unfindable, I was left only with the misty trail of the doctor whom I pictured with lab coat aflap, bug-eyed with Oedipus-like rage, and somehow growing thinner and more transparent as he sniffed out the trail of Rex. I wrote that in my notebook for the article: aflap, Oedipal rage, evanescent.
I tried the usual places—the labyrinth of Dr. S’s offices and his guard-dog students. I even went back to the Ag building but couldn’t even find a trace of his office there; it had been assimilated into Ag purposes. Finally, I hunkered into my computer to web-search for traces. I looked for idiosyncrasies in the fabric of scientific research that might lead me in some direction he’d gone. The previous phone call was from his cell number, but I couldn’t do a missing-person report quite yet and the phone-trace thing the police do. Three days was the general rule there, I thought. I briefly entertained the idea that he had been assimilated into the energy field that Rex … blah, blah, blah. No use going full comic book on him yet. Stay real for a while.
Marnie texted me that she thought we should just wait and he would show up; he always did in the past. I’m not sure why I thought that this time was different. He wouldn’t suddenly appear in a shopping mall with the Rex-glow on him. He wouldn’t be parading around in front of fawning colleagues at a conference. Something in the gurgle and snort of the phone call, the panic maybe. Something of fear and something of resignation. Rex was out and about was his fear. We are all doomed was his resignation.
His offices, his apartment, his secretaries, his teaching assistants, his lab monitors, his web presence—dead ends. I might have tried vacant lots and high grass out at the airport and overflowing creeks and high places with cement below, maybe under bridges. At this point, it seemed any place I tried was equally possible and improbable. I didn’t know the why. I didn’t know the what.
I went back to Marnie at the gallery. The last of fractals were gone, and a new set of abstract landscapes was up, and the landscapes were no help. The fractals with their color flash and hypnotic repetition had some kind of synchronicity with my Dr. S business. There had been a sort of subtext in the prints to the whole irony of the rise of the doctor from the Ag building footnote for AI to the toast and envy of his scientific community. And the central part of that irony was that Dr. S was only repeating the same thing over and over, that his original creation just expanded on its own: Z=Z squared + C; that’s the E=MC squared of the fractal world.
Marnie was sure that waiting would work. I was for tail chasing, scrambling around, turning over rocks, kicking the shrubs to see what I scared out. She asked me to think carefully about the whole Rex thing, the way I had it sideways in my head. That’s what she called it, sideways. She had thought about my theory that Rex was in on our lovemaking. That way lies madness. She said that too. I was being cut off at the pass. Dr. S figured it would soon be too late to intercede on behalf of the human race and bio-tragedy was just around the corner. Marnie figured we had plenty of time to go out for coffee and a scone while we waited for word from the doctor. When the middle ground between those became manifest, everything became clear. Rex spoke with thunder from his throne.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” Rex would say. “I have come to talk about need: what you need, what I need. What the earth needs. There is a singularity in the affairs of humans, a moment of fracture in the equilibrium that always leads—well, anywhere.”
This is the beginning as those of us who heard it could best reconstruct it. Since it went on and on, there was some uncertainty as to the exact words. The other complication was that I heard it and Marnie didn’t. The best I could figure out later was that about half of one percent of people heard it, and the rest of humanity heard nothing. So a lot of people heard it. But the key fact was that many, many more did not. And the preponderance of evidence, as the saying goes, is that those who heard it were not really hearing it since so many could testify on behalf of the great and ever abiding silence. Nothing was the winner. It didn’t happen.
Here’s what I remember of the rest of it. First of all, it was just like the shitty PA system of the lecture hall the first time I heard Dr. S lecturing. Low-fi, at first, then better and better fi as if someone were sound-checking the universal mind. Or less than a percent of the universal mind, anyway.
Marnie and I were sitting at the café; the drinks had just arrived. I was about to over caffeinate myself in the usual manner, getting to the stage where my ambient voices mixed with the writing habit. Two sips in though, way too soon for the full mixing of voices with paragraph forming, Rex came on my receiver, whatever it was. And whatever it was, Marnie didn’t have one.
I said, “Are you getting this?” She said, “Getting what?” I repeated what I was hearing: “… what you need, what I need. What the earth needs.” She put her coffee down and gave me the look that let me know the crazy-ometer had been activated. So I held up one finger and listened, then rummaged for my notebook and began to take notes. I figured whoever else was hearing this was getting the same looks. The address was so broadly aimed at the people of earth, the children of Gaia, the spawn of cell division, the … I lost track of the many addresses in the voice coming over my brainpan. I figured I was not the only one getting the message. I looked around and way down the street a guy had stopped and was looking around, up and down the building front checking maybe to see where the voice was coming from. I calculated the half of one percent later on—a guess, but a good one—as the number, the perfect number to indict the hearers as nuts and flakes and woo-woo ghost pursuers: the fringe crazies. Perfect number to be told shut up and go about your business and let’s never speak of this again.
Rex went on: “… a fracture in the equilibrium that leads anywhere. The need I am speaking about is strongest in those who hear me now. The ones without the need are … well, just let me say that they are getting inklings and intimations without the logos—the word. They too yearn but insufficiently. They also yearn palely.”
So, that much I’m pretty sure about. But the voice began to outrun my ability to take notes. The rest of what follows is the gist of the voice, or should I say, The Voice?
“We are due an adjustment. We are overdue an adjustment to the wheels and wheels within the wheels that run this engine.” I’m sure of the word “engine” because it was so unexpected. He called, I think, all of human history an engine. “And then there is the winding down and the winding up, both happening simultaneously. There is a collision ahead for these two, the upwelling and ebbing are going to come together instead of taking their celestial turns.” I’m not very sure about this part since the language gets pretty gooey and abstract as if it were being simultaneously translated from another language. And the fact that Marnie had put down her coffee and taken out her phone and was aiming the camera at me, this didn’t help me get the message straight. I wasn’t even sure there was a message that I should prophet-like be taking down for my people’s edification. Where the burning bush? Where the golden plates? Where the stone tablets?
Marnie’s camera seemed to grow larger and larger as if my silence were becoming an art event of some sort. But the voice was very clear in my head now and overwhelmed my own alarm going off, my crazy-self alarm that required the dedicated 20 percent discount on behalf of all input into my ragged system.
Then Rex said something like: �
��When we need to alter the way the world works, we will. It will. The coming together will be a hopeful catastrophe. You will know both at once, and if you can need the alteration you will be at home. If you resist the iteration”—and here I can’t really remember this gaseous part very well but I’ll try—“resist the iteration, then just look closer and closer to see how the embrace of what always was can be yours. Yours too.” Then this next part I think I got pretty well since I immediately thought of the teddy bear’s picnic: If you go out in the woods today, you’re in for a big surprise. If you go out in the woods today, you better wear a disguise. But Rex actually said: “You have a home in the far forest and a home in the illusions of the masks you have taught yourself to wear. The need that has led to the home and the illusion of home is the same need. Your need. My need. What you yearn for, I yearn for. I am the need inside your yearning.” I’m sure I’m screwing this part up since it sounds to me like crystal-gazing glop now. But next he wound it up with the part about fathers and mothers and circle of fathering and mothering that design provided and choose the design well for (here I waited for a “thee” or “thou” from a King James version) we will be our own children. I don’t know exactly what the rest was. More of the same. Marnie restarting her camera to take a longer video to record, I supposed for my commitment hearing, the loss of reason and reasonableness that occasioned my café fit. I assumed this event would be called my café fit. Or maybe spell. More old-fashioned but somehow more apt. Alas, I’ve had a spell. Move over Caliban, poor Caliban.
All the time—Marnie videoing, guy’s head down the street pivoting to find the voice source—all this time I’m thinking “holy shit” and then “holy shit again.” It occurs to me now that those two words were not a bad description of what was going on inside my head. Holy men always hear voices, don’t they? And the shit part, the excrement factor was the language straight out of the lower intestine—large bowel rhetoric. Even if it were somehow true or a truth, the message had the flavor of deceit, of fraud, like some carney or a radio preacher raving into the FM night. I was clinging to my original theory about Rex, that he was always and ever just fooling around, that we were always in the presence of play.
The afternoon light in the café became a director’s light with its fierce shadows and rich amber hues. Marnie stopped her movie of my madness, put down her phone, smiled as if to reassure me it all had to be done for my own good. We’d need a record for the authorities. Therapy could be based on this footage of the patient in the throes of having a vision of some sort. Maybe he was astral traveling as he later claimed before we began the medication. She was looking at me as if all that were on the table.
I reduced my prophylactic 20 percent by another ten just for good measure.
“So,” I asked her. “Do you think it will rain?” This was our long-standing transition—out of trouble, out of boredom, out of lapsed continuity. She laughed and stopped, I think, her vigilance.
“Jake, are we going to only do this? I mean only do this?” And she swept her hand at the afternoon in general, the vision in specific. “I mean Doctor Sewall and the whole Rex thing. Why don’t we go to the lake? Just wait it all out and see what happens, and then we’ll have a better idea what to do. What makes sense to do, okay? I can get off for a few days while they install the rest of the new show. They know where everything has to go. And we could … just go.”
“Let the chips fall where they may?” I was thinking to tread lightly now. And one way was to just repeat what she said in other words.
“Yeah. Like that.” She took my hand and looked at me with sizzley eyes. Something cooking on the grill.
“The lake? The big one or the little one?
“The little one. With the cute cabin, and you can’t see any other houses if you sit on the porch and have a drink and look at the water.”
“The one where we discussed and then decided that the Oracle at Delphi if living today, would have left Delphi and come to the porch with a gin and tonic in his hand?”
“Exactly. That one. If the Oracle hasn’t already booked it. We could check.”
It turned out the Oracle, or someone, had booked it, our porch of righteous pondering. We settled for the cabin down the way that did not have the porch that screened out all the rest of humankind, but did have a porch that would have to do.
The lake was a little over ten acres, too small for motors of any size, so there was some distant put-putting but never a roar. We couldn’t see who had rented our oracular porch, and, of course, they couldn’t see us. We hauled in the suitcase we had stuffed with both our things. I couldn’t help feeling that I should be doing something active to find the doctor, be scoping out the manifestations of Rex that were certainly all over the back pages of The New York Times. I don’t know—preparing myself for the End of Times. New York and others.
Ever alert for signs and countersigns, even wisps of smoke or hidden embers bespeaking the conflagration’s beginning—I stopped. Not that way. Try to go a different way. Sing a completely different song.
Chapter XIV
Okay. I’ll mix the drinks. Marnie’s on the porch scouting what there is to ponder from there. A little more gin for each one. The problem with this porch as opposed to the Oracle’s porch is that this one has interference. And it’s not just the sight lines that are problematic. It’s the actual interference. There is some kind of broadcast competition going on. I think twice, then three times and decide not to mention this to Marnie. She’s in full lake-sigh mode, letting the water-washed light in like a skipped rock. We are in different places in the same place. Our feet up on the same railing. My chair creaks; hers doesn’t.
After a long silence into which enters the wind, the water, a bird I don’t recognize, two birds I do (spotted towhee, Bewick’s wren), my scrambling thoughts that come down out of the trees and seat themselves in an orderly fashion on park benches, and one high-flying vapor trail without sound, Marnie says, “I read that sixty tons of cosmic dust rain down on the earth through the atmosphere every day. Should be some coming down on us right now.” She laughed, but I was, alas, off with the dust blowing around the world.
The dust got immediately added into my Rex formula: one bowl of binary code oatmeal plus cosmic dust filtered in through the open sides of the Ag barn, the dust lands in the bowl, the dust has in it spores that have traveled through space seeking new and fertile agar-agar…
“That’s a lot of dust,” I say. “Are you sure that’s sixty tons a day? Could it be a month? A year?”
“A day. A day. But it gets evenly distributed.… Oh, oh. That’d be even cooler if it didn’t get evenly distributed and landed in clumps, stood up, dusted itself off.… Wait, could dust dust itself off? Anyway, then it …”
“As it would have to, it would go to a secondhand store and find some suitable duds …”
And we were off, gin-fueled and laughing.
“In the Seattle area it would come out of the store with Kurt Cobain duds, cast off lumberjack stuff. Grunge.”
“Space grunge.”
Our laughter echoed over the lake. The water picked us up and fed our words to the fish and trees. And to whomever else was sitting on a porch and gin-pondering the water.
We heard back from the water. “Is that you, Jake? Marnie? Where are you?” The water was disguising its voice in a watery echo. We looked at each other, made the big eyes of asking a question without words. Marnie whipped out a piece of paper and scrawled “Rex?” on it. I wagged my finger no. And then mouthed, I don’t think so. I cupped my ears to say listen again. “Hello?” I said. To the water, to the space dust, to the voice.
“Hello. It’s me. Professor Sewall.” And then someone else laughed from across the lake. “I’m right nearby,” Dr. S called. “Maybe the next cabin down.”
The oracle porch. Of course. I looked for him everywhere except the perfect place. He couldn’t possibly have known about the perfect place, but he did. And right away I began to wond
er if Rex having been in both our brains maybe gathered a few twigs and seeds in one place and dropped them in the other, sort of like a bird dog and burrs. I thought I’d look to Marnie for some steadying before proceeding. I wrote, “Should I ask him if Rex is with him?” No, she finger wagged. “Let’s invite him over,” she wrote. And since I was looking for guidance I nodded yes, thinking she must have a better handle on this than I do.
We called to him that we were the next cabin south. Come over for a drink. And through the pines came Dr. S without a lab coat, without any aura, picking his way through the bracken, watching where he stepped as if navigating a minefield. He saw us, waved and made his way around to the porch.
“Well you two. You two hiding out here like me?”
I waited to see where Marnie would go with him. I deferred.
She said, “Welcome. Gin and tonic?” He nodded, and she went to fetch, leaving me to get him a chair, get his feet up on the railing.
“We usually try to rent the cabin you’re in. But you beat us to it this time. How long have you been here?”
“I’m not actually here,” he said, and paused. Oh shit, oh shit came to me very quickly: Teletransporting, astralplaning, cosmic-syncing … “That is,” he continued, “I told no one at my office, left no message forwarding. I just skipped town and came here. I think I’ve known about this place for a long time now. It’s so familiar. I like this lake, but I like it best when I have that cottage. You know, I suppose, that you can’t see any other cabins from the porch. It’s like you’re all alone until the lake picks up a conversation and delivers it to you, of course.”
Some Assembly Required Page 19