Some Assembly Required Page 11

  Dr. S set down his empty drink and signaled for another. I indicated I was fine by covering up my glass. He continued, “Interesting question, I think. Decommissioned … or gone? On some level, those would be the same thing, of course. Back into constituent piles of ingredients. Sort of a reverse recipe, you might say. But if you think of Rex as a series of instructions—a peculiarly successful series of instructions. Because nobody else seems to have … Not exactly, anyway. Just wait a minute. Some of my colleagues have done some engaging concocting themselves …”

  “But no Rex’s. No bride of Franken—”

  “—No. NO! We try never to use that word in my world.”

  The second “no” was, it occurred to me, way out of proportion in loudness to the rest of the conversation. Like a child’s foot-stomping protest. Like mentioning Macbeth in a theater greenroom.

  Calmed, the doctor continued after a good slug of his drink. One more of those, I thought, and we’d have vodka talking, and I knew from experience that sometimes that made great interview material. “So, Jake, as I said, Rex, a set of instructions—okay, and a little proprietary magic—was a transition figure in the world of AI. My colleagues had largely been thinking in terms of machines and code and self-improving programs, and complexity. Not many of us were thinking: simple, organic, replications, gender, related genus, you know, the meat route. Turned out Rex was not meat, though. Well, you saw, didn’t you? Rex was a timely accident who looked something like porridge. You have to admit that he was impressive at first and then quickly, I think, not very interesting.”

  “Oh, I can tell you that the talking part was interesting, no matter what kind of self-delusion you suggest. In any case, it was very engaging to hallucinate in the presence of a doctor and his creation, and have the whole thing confirmed.”

  “Alas, no longer with us.” He looked at his expensive watch as if he had to be somewhere else.

  “And how did you terminate Rex? Do you say terminate? Pull the plug? Return the ingredients to the shelf?” (I was writing out loud, again.)

  “To tell the truth, and I largely do tell the truth these days, you may have noticed, Rex is not really terminated or gone in the sense you mean. I think you mean dead. Maybe inorganic? In any case, I think it would be prudent to put it something like … Rex is reabsorbed into life—not without life—just indistinguishable now from life itself, in general. Does that make sense? Oh look, here they come from the last session. Meet-and-greet time. Have a wonderful time at our conference, Jake. Your student badge should work for everything, but if you have any problems, just let me know and I’ll see you get a press pass. You might have done that from the beginning.”

  And he was subsumed into the admiring crowd beginning to slurp up lubricating liquor loudly. I backed off to the interstitial buzz by the door then, and finally, after getting an overall view of the mob of theoretical acumen, I slunk away.

  Chapter VII

  Doctor Sewall had changed and kept changing like a flower blooming. He held sway; he was the bold expression. He manifested himself in ever more fruitful ways. He was like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “great and crescive self”—the 19th century ideal for American Romanticism. I was trying out all this for the article, the article, by the way, that I still had no idea where it was headed. I started out in one direction with Rex-the-cute as center. Moving on then to the slaughter-of-the-innocents new center with Rex blasting over the human consciousness like the PA system in Brave New World.

  At the beginning of my journalism-for-money career, I had a tendency to get interested in my topics and then wander off into self-indulgent research that was going no place in particular. I ended up with articles that were the parings of stacks of research and compilations of endless hours I chased around in a particular topic—chased my tail it turned out. I met a journalist who did only what was necessary for each article—interviews, research, background—and made three times the money I was making. I was having my own kind of fun to get a living, I suppose, by straying constantly from the point. So I self-corrected and got better and better at, as they say in grade school, staying on task. The voices would seem irrelevant here, but they weren’t. I recognized fairly early on that some of the voices were showing me the stuff that was off task, the ever-branching subjects that led me further and further afield from … the task. I also realized, but not so quickly, that the task itself was negotiable. Someone else was supplying the task while the voices were jolly and irrational in directing me to anything else, everything else.

  But this Dr. S business had me back into old habits. First, I wanted to chase down the whole intellectual hybrid of computers and DNA replication. Then, there was the cult of personality: Dr. S’s apotheosis to the head of the class, the scholars’ internecine jealousies and backbiting as reputations rose and fell with finer and finer distinctions in the disciplines. The pecking order. The ladder up and who was standing on whose shoulders. What Nobel Prize was slowly descending from the clouds and choosing one aspirant for immortality. Then there was also the comedy of Rex the cosmic goof. That’s a Jack Kerouac term, if I remember right. The cosmic goof that consumes all high seriousness into the True. Dharma meets karma meets Abbott and Costello. Rex as high comedian was the real story I wanted to pursue, but also the hardest to write and damned hard to sell no matter how entertaining I made it. I knew that the best shot at a sale was what I came to call, “It’s alive!” Man makes critter and amazes the scientific and philosophical world. Period. Skip the hijinks.

  Marnie to the rescue—at first. She helps me redirect and focus. She talks me out of the cosmic goof scenario (though privately I harbor a lingering fondness for this dead end), and then she declares that she wants to come with me to meet Dr. S.

  Thinking back on this meeting, I wonder about the whole subject of volition. Did she actually want to meet him or did he decide he wanted to meet her? I mentioned her to him a couple times in our various conversations, so her existence was known to Dr. S, to Dr. S and his new partner, as I think of it now.

  Anyway, the meeting: I took her along to the debriefing session about the conference—what got accomplished, what’s new, what’s shaking in general. And instead of being met by his beautiful assistant, Dr. S himself comes out of his inner sanctum all ablaze in his fresh doctor coat with its intricate stitching that identifies his scientific pedigrees and his new grant money: National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) and wherever he got the conference money … But wait, there’s more. I immediately think of this phrase from late-night TV ads as Dr. S appears. The more is a kind of glow by now as if someone had completed the makeover and then polished up the results and then repackaged … Wait, there’s more. The doctor has cheekbones and done something to his hair that makes it look like a $400 haircut. The slump is completely gone, the skin tight, the teeth whiter, the gut flatter, and … he’s taller. Worse yet, he ignores me and begins to charm the undies off Marnie, never letting his gaze flag, seeming to caress her with laughs and wit and voice-licks. I stand by helplessly watching this guy seduce my girl. I try to get a word in, start the interview, and Dr. S reaches over and lays his hand gently on my shoulder while he prattles on to Marnie, and I swear I stood there paralyzed by his touch. I was a fish caught in the jellyfish tentacle. I tried to speak, tried to walk out of the gentle grip on my shoulder. I couldn’t. I listened while he got her babbling about her art world, then shot her a few references to get her to expand on her art knowledge, then.… Well, the entire seduction symphony, all the instruments from the flute trills to the big basses filling the soundscape with sexy growls and far away roars. French horns. Violas. Banks of violins.

  Finally, after he’d made his music run up and down her spinal cord, after he’d twanged a while on her central nervous system, he took his hand off my shoulder and I could talk again. I stumbled into the interview after separating him from Marnie, got my information, all the while feeling I had just yanked Juliette away from R
omeo and kicked her down the stairs. As we left, again his gaze lapped her face like a lab puppy does a stick of butter. Outside his office Marnie seemed in a trance of some sort. I guessed she hadn’t been so thoroughly chatted up and courted since I plied her with my proletarian version, lo those years ago. But Dr. S did a pro job, I admitted. All the moves, nothing left out.

  She said later that she “liked him.” And that all I had told her about the schlumpy mad-scientist didn’t seem to fit the real guy.

  “Of course you ‘liked him,’” I whined. “He did everything but lay you down and give you a full oil-up body massage and then stuff hundred dollar bills in your panties.” I could hear my whine but couldn’t stop myself. I could see her eyes narrowing at my icky jealousy but couldn’t stop myself. I was taken over by my own unpleasantness. So I went on. “Couldn’t you see what he was trying to do? Couldn’t you? Why are women so …” And here I knew I was blowing it big time. Never begin an inquiry with these four words. There is nowhere to go, no possible language that could follow these four. No logical sequence possible that will get you out of it. And yet I heard myself continue as she took a step back, narrowed her eyes, crossed her arms over her breasts—all the contraindications like an ordered set in mathematics that lead in only one direction. I said, “… so, prone, so unaware, so apt”—oh, I was digging the hole—“so insensate to blither, the blather, the insincere …” I should have fallen silent, defeated by language, but I was driven onward by some imp of the self-destructive perverse, some imp I hadn’t encountered before in myself. “.… so oblivious,” I said triumphantly, “to the patent fraud of some silver-tongued devil creeping up their metaphoric leg toward their …” I paused. I couldn’t even guess at where I’d left daylight behind now. “Why are women so fey, so blithe, so egotistical as to believe …”

  Ah, the loss of life. Not the Hindenburg but the black plague. I slumped into a chair having wrung out my life onto the floor and then stepped in it.

  “Are you through?” she asked coolly.

  Right here is where, in the past, I would have taken off with my best comedy routine about being possessed by evil spirits, about “how could I?”, about prostration and unremitting repentance and lifelong indentured servitude I owed her for being such a reprobate one as I. I knew the words, she respected the riff, but nothing came out. My silence—the guillotine’s swish. Off with my head.

  Dr. S began haunting the gallery. He’d show up at first at the evening openings and made sure to greet me. “How’s the article coming?” That was his standard, but he quickly turned to Marnie and alternately fawned, flattered and cooled it—the deadly trio. Then he began, she reported at first, dropping in during the day. Then Marnie stopped reporting that he’d show up during regular gallery hours. That was the beginning of the end, I think, because I helped out the ending.

  Here’s how I helped out. Jealousy, closely questioning her daily routine, and then pouting. It’s the only way to describe what I did—teenage pouting. Nails in the coffin. But I couldn’t stop. I knew every wrong move I was making, how it was driving her away, but I seemed incapable of stopping. Headlong, stumbling toward what I thought at the time was my own stupid, self-centered, immature reaction to Dr. S’s interest in my Marnie. I think back now to his hand on my shoulder, my paralysis. That’s when he planted this idiocy in me. It had to be. Somehow he rang all my bells, pushed all my buttons, and blew up my infrastructure all at the same time and reduced me, his competition for Marnie, to a thorough going nincompoop.

  As she was packing up her things in boxes, I put all the pieces together, an act of inspired paranoia that, looking back, was really not that hard to figure out. That is, not hard to figure out if you will make the leaps of logic necessary for a bowl of gruel to inhabit an outlier scientist who then conceives of a lust for my girl and develops the superpowers to pull off the erotic coup. Now that I put it that way, I’m claiming insanity brought about by airborne spores and not enough exercise.

  As I watched her tape up the final box, I asked where she was going to live. She informed me coldly that information of that sort would be henceforth (she didn’t say “henceforth,” of course) classified (she didn’t say “classified”). She blew out the door saying she’d send for whatever she’d forgotten.

  And there I was. Rex had won. Paradigm switch. The least (in terms of lines of complex code) had become the most. I went quickly through the “fuck this, fuck that” phase I had read about in books and seen on TV soaps. The existential crisis of loss of self was thorough, but mercifully brief.

  From the fuck-it stage, I quickly began plotting my revenge. If I was going to believe that the Rex I knew first as a lump of goo had actually become the puppet master, then by God I was going to act within that realm of reality. A lump of goo had racial memory too—that was number one. Number two was that whatever had been done could be undone if I could get my shit together and do the doing. Number three, I’d assume that Marnie too had been replaced by Rex-tainted biochemical magic and not just grown tired of my kvetching. And finally, and this one was a supposition based on the whole weird logic of the affair, that Rex might grow tired of Marnie as he had those adventures in mutation that the paper kept reporting from around the world—mutant paint, roaring orchids, sentient dust, golden ponds. And that would be my advantage. I would never grow tired of getting back at that son of a bitch and his cavalier experiments on my species.

  My article, of course, could contain none of this. My editor would call the men in white coats, and I’d be finished. I had to write up the article as if the world of science had a new star, Doctor Sewall, who with his new girlfriend on his arm, was taking the pre-Nobel bows at parties around the world. No, no, that was not going to get it done. I would solve the problem only by not acknowledging the problem. Never take on cosmic powers directly. That should be written over a doorway somewhere. Come at an angle. Sidle up. Insinuate and, like yon Cassius with his lean and hungry look, plot.

  Racial memory: how much of the pre-striped incipience did Rex remember? Did he remember the fundamental simplicity of his original code? I decided that he would be so fascinated by the keen and superior intelligence he’d come to be that he would not have the slightest interest in his origin myths, his days spent close to his aboriginal mud. He’d be drunk, I figured, with his seemingly endless possibilities. And I was right. It was a small article, again, but the logic was perfectly extendable out of Rex’s etiology. The bastard couldn’t help but just play around with his new realm. I was starting to use words like that, words I knew no editor would let me leave in. I realized that Rex-dust remained in me from the night that began it all. I’d have to watch out for more of that stuff.

  Over the next week, I found three newspaper articles that I believed to be Rex at work. Or Rex playing around? Rex amusing himself? All of the above. Or at least in light of Marnie moving out, and I was pretty sure seeing Rex in the evenings, I attributed these three to Rex. One: A park ranger spotted then trapped what turned out to be a thirty-pound mallard duck. A four-pound mallard would be a big one. They ran mitochondrial DNA on it thinking it was the result of some crossbreeding with a Muscovy or larger duck. A large Muscovy male could weigh nearly twenty pounds. The extra ten pounds, though, had never been seen before. The science guys duly recorded it as a record, and, not incidentally, did not find Muscovy DNA in the giant mallard.

  I thought, Hi there, Rex. Out fooling around at the duck pond? Where did you get the time with all that conference running, that girl stealing? The voices, yes. But this one was my own voice and merely pissed off.

  Two and three: A dog was born in Mexico measuring two inches high, about half the previous record. Dogs have the greatest size variation of any mammal, and people since the domestication have been going for bigger and smaller. But always increments before this one. A little smaller, a little bigger. Then this Chihuahua the size of a cockroach. And that was number three on my list, the cockroach. The article declared it a “r
iding cockroach” measuring eight inches long. Again a quantum leap in size over the previous scale. Big duck, small dog, big cockroach—so what’s the big deal? Nature (and by extension breeders) is always fooling around with the originals. A friend told me ur-pigs were great swimmers but that some hybrid modern versions have such short legs that they cut their own throats when they try to swim. English bulldogs have to have caesarean sections because they bred the birth canal out of the critter trying to make it look like Winston Churchill. Blah, blah, blah.

  So? Coincidence you think? Big one, small one, big one—happens all the time. The Guinness Book of World Records lives off this stuff. I think it was the compression, these three in one week, me ready to see Rex in the biome, Rex the wooer, Rex the trickster. So I asked myself, why wouldn’t he make a flock of thirty-pound mallards? I know I would. I’d cover the fucking sky with them and let the little humans quake below. I’d make the little dog vicious, the cockroaches legion and on the march across the Madagascar landscape eating villagers. I’d … sure I would. Me and all the horror filmmakers.

  But Rex was perspicacious. Rex was just seeing what he could do. I’m sure everything Rex was responsible for was just for the sake of seeing it happen. He means us no harm. He just wants to be our benefactor. He loves us. He will send his only begotten … He will send His grace unto us and show us that we are His own.

  Okay, I went that way for a while. I thought mythical, then biblical, then, finally, biological. I read a book many years ago by J. P. Donleavy called, Meet My Maker the Mad Molecule. Stories and sketches by the author, but the idea always appealed to me: all of human history is a cosmic joke—yes, the goof. And so, here we are free to gnaw our legs off trying to get out of various traps we’ve concocted for ourselves, or free to fondle ourselves to death in repeated orgasms because orgasm is all we really know of godhead. Or freedom, as Rex has shown us, to make thirty-pound mallards, two-inch dogs and riding cockroaches.