Some Assembly Required
Page 20
“We noticed that. Are you … on vacation? Resting up?”
He laughed the laugh I heard in his office on the first day, a kind of kid laugh with a barking chuckle at the end. He leaned back and put his feet up on the rail. “Jake. I’m sorry about the phone call, the panic and all. I was in a kind of … what? A loss of information, I call it. I couldn’t figure out what was going on.”
“With Rex?”
“Well, with Rex. And with other things. You know when you’re doing an experiment and gathering data, and then all the data crashes together on you? What I mean is, it doesn’t make any sense. All you’ve got is numbers in columns. Well, like that. Nothing makes any sense, but you still have to go forward.”
Marnie returned with three more gin lubricants.
The doctor continued. Marnie said she could hear from the kitchen. Keep going. “That’s where I was, anyway. I had lots of information about Rex but none made sense. It was just … information. It didn’t mean anything. It wasn’t leading anywhere, you know. It was as if I got a bunch of information randomly from different experiments … projects. And all that info just rattled around and went nowhere. Pointed nowhere either. No trail to follow. No hypothesis. Remember GIGO?—garbage in, garbage out? Early computer days. Programmer’s lament. We’d sit around with gallons of coffee writing basic code that sometimes just collapsed on itself.”
I couldn’t remember the doctor going on like this before. When he was Rex-occupied he always was eloquent. When he was himself, he was crabby or silly. He took a long pull on his G-and-T and continued.
“I was blaming myself for the whole Rex fiasco, of course. Thinking he had gotten completely out of hand—an inexcusable lack of standard scientific protocol on my part. You just don’t do experiments with live things that can get away from you. Proper safeguards. Lab procedures. CDC precautions.” He was ticking off his errors on his fingers, speaking more to the lake than to us. “But the university wouldn’t give me any clean rooms or labs with proper facilities. I was just the IT guy, the AI theorist. Why would he need a lab? What, the zeroes are going to get away and infect the ones? I heard shit like that all the time. Every time I asked for a lab with some proper protections for live experiments. So it’s as much their fault.… No it isn’t. I should never have cooked up Rex without safeguards. The university has policies; I helped write them a long time ago. Policies about human subjects, policies about infectious disease, about pathogens and dangerous chemicals. My fault. The phone call. That’s when you got me with the phone call. Rex had grown silent, or I thought he had. I didn’t know where he was, what he was doing. I thought … I feared he would do bad things and then worse things and then even worse things. Now, I don’t know why I thought he would be evil. There was no way he could be evil. He was just a string …” Here insert a sigh. A sigh like I hadn’t ever heard in my life. We sat in silence waiting for him to go on. Instead the sigh hung in the air over the lake, maybe made its way to the oracle’s porch some hundred yards away and there emptied out all the sadness and regret and loneliness of the world. We waited. And waited. I thought, what the hell, I’d take a chance coming off as crazy with Marnie. I had to.
“Professor Sewall, I have the feeling that Rex is not so much gone as dissipated. I mean gone everywhere. Or at least found a home. In fact, the home-theory is my current favorite. Do you remember how you came to know about the cabin next door? Have you ever been here before?” Marnie, in my humble opinion, pricked up her ears, but, I think, she left the crazy-ometer off.
“I can’t remember. But when I went looking for a place to go, to get out of Dodge you know, I looked up the rental number for this place. I thought I remembered it from some other time. Maybe not. Why do you ask?”
“Because I think you got it from me. I think Rex rustled around in my brain, then rustled around in yours. Left traces in the wrinkles, I think.” And the second gin and tonic kicked in here so I’ll try to adjust for that. “Left, like burrs collected in one thicket and deposited in another. Bird dog or something.” I hadn’t thought this through entirely, was being chased through my own mind by wild metaphors.
“Bird dog,” he said.
“Bird dog?” Marnie said.
“Yeah, but the bird part is irrelevant. Let me work on the relevance. Maybe better is that Rex’s shoes picked up dust bunnies from my brain and then he wiped his feet in your …” Boy, this was not getting better.
“Okay,” they both muttered in different ways. We get what you’re talking about. Rex left traces.
“Rex left traces,” I said and rattled my ice cubes. And here the doctor raised his hand like a student in class.
“Yes, Professor Sewall.” I called on him and laughed.
He lowered his hand. “Not only do I know what you mean, but I have something I’d like to add if I may. And that is, he never left. And I speak for myself of course, but if you’d like to nod or something if it’s also your experience, then do. Please. So I was saying, he never left. I don’t think he’s gone.”
I thought only briefly about it and then nodded.
He continued, “Not only never left, but never will. Maybe I’m talking about permanent damage there in the occupied parts, but that might be the same thing as occupied. He left a trail. Okay, footprints.” I sighed instead of nodded. “So we are both occupied in a way. Marnie, did you ever …”
Marnie held up her glass. “Here’s to occupation. Does it count if I never say—said—anything about it? Does the … does the tree still fall in the forest?”
We all laughed and then fell silent. The lake fell silent too.
After a while, a while that included splashing in the shallows halfway around the lake, included a sliver of a day moon, Doctor Se wall spoke quietly. “I really don’t know what I did. I am beginning to suspect that I did absolutely nothing. I wasn’t even the unwitting dupe for a cosmic occurrence. That’s what I thought for a while. Imagine! My arrogance extended to being the right hand of God working out the next stage in His plans for the universe.” He laughed; the cackle was gone now, the tee-hee too. “I had that ole archangel feelin’—there should be a song somewhere in it. Michael with his sword driving the sinners from the garden, Ezekiel and the burning wheel, and yours truly, Albert Benedict Se wall PhD with a fist full of fractals—an historical series.”
“Fractal?” Marnie asked. “How fractals?”
“Well, there was a fractal base to Rex at the beginning. It’s really pretty easy to do. You just circle the zeroes and ones around four numeric bases, only make sure they only add and multiply. That’s all really. Oh, and when to actually stop. They can’t just keep going like real fractals. Rex had … what? Stop signs. At first, anyway. Stop signs to say that there could be truncation. I began to think of the truncation as shaping or just—” The doctor broke off and smiled. Then, “You see the way the light is changing, how the water is playing off the sky but can’t quite catch up. Or like that …” He pointed. “How it goes off on its own like it has its own color palette.”
We all sat and looked. The light did indeed seem to be fooling around on the surface of the lake gathering the tree colors to the sky colors. Marnie was sitting between us, all three with our feet on the rail. Marnie reached and took each of us by the hand and said nothing. The doctor, I noticed accepted her hand like a lover.
All the while she held our hands no one spoke. Then just as suddenly, she let go and put her hands in her lap. When she was holding my hand I swear for a second I felt as if Rex were about to speak over my neurons, like the first time in the doctor’s Ag building office. Maybe it was only how surprising and nice it felt sitting here, the three of us. Then I thought, the four of us?
I didn’t bring it up right away because of the light, the moment, the warm hands, the glow. But I was thinking I would have to eventually. I’d have to ask Marnie again about her occupation, the occupation she scoffed at for the peach sex. The occupation the doctor and I knew very well, or at least cou
ld attest to as a cause for our strange actions. Our excuses. The whole set of evidence for Rex-occupation diminished and like two converging lines went away somewhere over there on the horizon.
No I wasn’t going to bring it up. Ever.
It took all my will power to keep from fishing for her hand again to see if Rex was with us. And then, like a bird that squawks just before it takes off, as the light was going flat across the lake and the sky went pewter, I think we all saw the same thing because we all looked at each other at the same time.
It was a trick, of course. A good trick though. Somehow, and I go all the way out on the limb here, Rex made all three of our faces appear on the surface of the water like a momentary sharp image from a giant projector. Just our faces clearly and brightly filling the surface of the lake. We looked at each other to be sure the others had seen it too. Marnie just said, “Yes. I saw it.”
The doctor sighed. “There are ways of explaining what we saw. The optics of water and sunset are notorious for creating illusions …” He trailed off. “I don’t suppose anyone wants to hear the formula … no. I didn’t think so.” He bracketed the offer with another sigh.
Marnie smiled and said nothing. My crazy voice-hearing jealous-shit self wanted to speak at length, but didn’t. Gin and tonic meds. But I couldn’t help adding: “He just said goodbye, I think.”
“I think he’s over on the other porch being oracular now,” Marnie said slowly. And we all laughed.
And then, as if to prove the show was still going to go on, all the light in the sky and on the lake became two notches brighter, and a large, single fish jumped in the exact middle of the water, and the ripples rolled out in perfect concentric circles.
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