Some Assembly Required Read online

  Talk about warm storage. Here’s the disk with grandma and the flash drive with grandpa. We’ll put them together for the weekend and a have a picnic, just like the old days. And there I went. Taking off. My editor would bring it back to earth; that’s why they got the big bucks. Gonzo journalism hadn’t made it into science reporting just yet, but there was room.

  The next day I searched the conference high and low to find Dr. Sewall and couldn’t raise hide nor hair, spit nor image. Cold trail. So I went back to the conference publication and found out he taught and worked at the agriculture university across town. Maybe he was talking about cattle herds or goose flocks or sheep. But my recording had the he pronoun, once in a while a she. I’m sure he was talking about people. He groused about not having the funding to try out any but the most basic amino-acid conversion. He said, he mumbled, that he could do it. But the scale for larger conversions would take lots of National Science Foundation dough. And then something about Dr. Frankenstein having his own money to work with. Pause for a laugh that never came.

  I got what would be useful from the conference: epigenetics, so-called blank genes, and even CSI stuff (the most well attended speakers). The Dr. S material didn’t seem to fit anywhere. It was computer science slash cell biology slash bio-chem slash genetics and then a few more AI slashes. No wonder he couldn’t get funding. That place for the short description at the top of the application form—what the hell would he put there? How about: I want to make virtual people? Gimme money. Or even better: How to get mom and dad out of the nursing home and onto a hard drive.

  How much fun was this going to be! I’d write the outline of the contracted article and then go see Dr. S on my own. I had no idea what that would lead to, but I did know that the expenses would be tax deductible.

  I went home, and Marnie was there, my crime-fighting partner. She was legs-up on the couch in an old sweatshirt—our preferred crime-fighting costumes—and after the usual Kato-Green Hornet banter, I told her about Dr. Sewall. The whole crime-fighting joke started so long ago neither of us remembers the beginning. It just seemed infinitely extendable and useful for everything from sex to domestic disputes. So we kept it. I told her that Dr. S was a mad scientist who I had to pursue to the ends of his Ag-lair, bring him back alive, debrief him even if he wore boxers. That sort of stuff. She was an artist and prone to bouts of seriousness. While I, I Jake James—two first names, no baggage please but a set of eternal voices occupying my head—I found high seriousness nearly incomprehensible and certainly unsustainable for any length of time. She once called me the Labrador puppy of attention deficit. I took it as a compliment and claimed many butts sniffed.

  The rain and wind had slivered the air. The first load of fall leaves had taken over the sidewalks outside our apartment and adhered like decoupage. There was that wonderful disorder between seasons when weather sloughs back and forth as if inviting applause for its outrageous special effects. There was a char on the air and no insects. I would sometimes find Marnie watching out the window like a cat, and then she would point out the colors and hues just like my voices did.

  I’m going to tell the next part out of order, so get ready.

  The first conversation I had with Dr. S went like this.

  Dr. S, apparently in mid-rant already, “… that’s why the English have such bad teeth. Their mothers gorge on sugar through the rainy winters and compromise the baby’s dental arch. The sugar binges narrow the dental arch in utero and their teeth don’t fit. Worse yet, the narrow dental arch is almost impossible to fit with decent false teeth or bridges. So the whole damn country’s full of bad teeth because of self-indulgence during pregnancy. Let’s not even get started on the German delight in discovering thalidomide to get rid of nausea during pregnancy. And it worked! No nausea—just babies with flippers. You know, it’s not even like this is secret information—what you put in your body gets into the baby. Full stop. Put in food and water. Another stop. Lots of chemicals and a couple of glasses of wine? That’s what I call a scientific experiment on a fetus. And it’s amazing how many are willing participants in that shitty science. Blame? Fuck that. The word ‘stupidity’ excludes the word blame. No blame. Just stupid.”

  Me: “So your experiments have shown that …”

  Dr. S: “My experiments? My experiments? I’m just trying to round up the information into packages that can be stored. That’s it. Very modest. And, alas, that’s why the NSF doesn’t give a shit about my work.”

  Me: “But at the conference …”

  Dr. S: “Oh the conference? So you were there when my esteemed colleagues realized the valuable consequences of my work. How my work could further their work. How … what to say about my colleagues? A little story: the algorithm that made Google founders billionaires was originally designed to seek out names on the web, to find academics whose names were referenced in their colleagues’ work, so that the number of times referenced could be submitted to a university committee for retention, tenure and promotion to full professor. It is a cunning algorithm. It’s a capitalist’s wet dream is what it is. And that is the business of science in America today—capitalism. Promotion and tenure everywhere.”

  I let him talk because I had no other choice. His gray hair began a dance early on, a tango I think. Then with the Google business he began to nod and there was something like a waltz occurring on his head … two three. He used his glasses in his hand like a series of punctuation marks. The combined effect was kinetic and riveting, and more than a little unnerving as if his eyes might get cartoon-spirals and his ears begin to spin and emit smoke. From dental arches to Google to capitalism, I hung on for the ride to see where we’d end up. The doctor conducting a workshop in can-you-follow-me? This was a different guy from the one I watched mumble at the conference.

  Dr. S: “… the garden, you see, becomes a physical manifestation of the gardener after a time: a simulacrum in which thought and habit is made manifest by the growing plants.” He seemed to be lecturing somewhere over my shoulder. “So the shaping takes place out of the information available to shape. The early errors of a gardener are more important than the later errors. The dental arch is relatively late. A bad brain relatively early. But here’s the key: the entire arrangement is one of contingencies, and with good information, you get good conformation. Take a tree. A blue spruce with all the right air, sun, water, nutrients and space will grow true in color and, most important, conformation. It will be shaped ideally: to capture more light, to reproduce, etc. The space and air and sun are early information too. Very important. Any lacking there and the entire project of growth is at risk.”

  It didn’t seem to bother him that I had put down my paper and pen. It only seemed to matter that I was listening, looking at him talk. And I was getting the idea better by just listening than by trying to write it down. He wafted back and forth between the fucks and shits and words like “genetic contingencies.” I found the wafting to be great comfort and in sync with my own juggling mind.

  Here’s how the whole conversation got started.

  I had asked a secretary in the first building I came to where I might find Dr. Sewall. She didn’t recognize the name but looked him up for me, gave me a campus map and circled the Ag complex. Always be nice to secretaries; my mantra: they know everything and can make things easy or difficult for you.

  I found the Ag complex at his university by asking the first student I saw wearing a flannel shirt in the light rain. The animal barns were on the edge of campus, so the prevailing winds carried the manure smell off toward the experimental forest. The barns reminded me of state fairs and my grandfather’s horse barn. From out of the rain into the barn, wet into dry, light into dark, I stood letting my eyes get used to the gloom punctuated by a few hanging lights. A student was sleeping on two hay bales. I walked by the row of cows where each animal had a decoration of plastic ear tags as if decked out for a parade—yellow, orange, red, blue. I could hear poultry but not see any. I tried to look li
ke I knew where I was going, figuring somebody here would stop me and ask my business. But nobody did. I waved at one student and he waved back, so I kept touring. I was wandering a complicated barn that was full up with Noah’s own bestiary and the voices of the Ark babbled all around. Dr. S apparently had experimental digs out in the zoo section of the university where I expected Charlotte’s web hanging from the next rafter with a message on it for me.

  The stalls were truncated by cross-corridors. Air seemed to be kept moving by some hidden fans, and the walk became pleasant and surreal. The light and smell and steady thump of my shoes on the concrete floor was like a soundtrack. Now there were horses. Then sheep, noisier but like altos singing with the growing sopranos of the poultry. I knew I was getting closer to poultry by the acrid tinge to the air. I turned another corridor, and there was a string of doors, people doors, I figured. They could be offices or labs. One had a light on so I knocked. A grad student told me he thought Dr. S had digs in the next building, and I should just wend that way until I couldn’t hear the sheep anymore and that would be about where he was. Dr. S was not really considered an Ag guy, anyway. The student didn’t know what he even did, but said he came around the Ag building wearing a suit, so everyone knew who he was, that he didn’t really belong. And then, the student gave a quick assessment of the value of wearing ties in an agricultural setting: catching it in a threshing machine, having an animal go for it. He told me most of the critters around us here bite. I don’t think he had talked to anyone for a while, so he and his voice babbled on like my voices but with less passion: “They don’t all the time, but every damn one of them do, once in a while, bite.” He went on. “You’d think chickens would be exempt, but they’re not. Don’t even get me started on ducks. I went into this looking for something that didn’t bite, or most rarely. You’d think there was something, wouldn’t you? Domesticated animals. Domesticated! But no. Every damn one of them wants a piece of you. I saw a cow eat a guy’s Nikon once. Just grabbed it and bit the lens off and spit it out. Thought it might be something to eat. That’s how they all operate. Something to eat, something to bite. Oh, yeah. And then something to fuck. I don’t know why I keep doing this—oh yeah, I do, a job. My mother wanted me to play the piano, but would I practice … ?” I thought he seemed, as I often did, to be listening to some rambling discourse in his brain and letting part of it run out his mouth. I pondered giving him the high-five of the brotherhood of voices but decided no and backed away. Clearly, his voices had backed up and were waiting for an audience. He hadn’t learned to talk to the animals, I guessed.

  I thanked him and scurried away from the sound of sheep. Eventually I found the office of Dr. Sewall tucked into a complicated set of rooms and locked doors as if someone had concocted a video game of doors. Get around the locked ones and see what’s in the unlocked ones. I found one marked Dr. Sewall and knocked. Silence. I tried the door thinking I might enter an anteroom or find a secretary. But I found the lair of Dr. S, just as I would in a monster movie. But no Dr. S.

  The lab was small but intensely crowded. A bank of computers, some kind of oscilloscopes, a stack of centrifuges, what looked like an empty kennel, and, in the corner, a warm orange glow from a sealed acrylic box with small, silvery ducts leading in and out of it. There was a barely perceptible hum. Maybe a low D. There were no other lights on, but I could see well enough by the bluish light of a high window, and the lab looked to be densely efficient. Efficient at what? I got closer to the box.

  In one corner was a dark gray-brown mass. I thought it looked like a plant of some kind, but it had no vertical structure. It was a lump. But I thought I saw the lump move. The light was so weird that I distrusted what I thought I saw. I waited. It didn’t move again, at least not like the first time. I got the feeling I was in a place I had no business, but the door had been open. I thought I better call out, see if anyone was around. Maybe a grad student, maybe a shepherd. I called out, and from what seemed far away, a voice answered, a dry high voice. I called again. Again the answer—just “over here.” So, of course, voice-ready all my life, I went back to the blob in the glow to see if I was talking to it.

  When I was twelve and began to have solid opinions about the world, my voices solidified too, as if they somehow became more substantial and hardened by hormones. So conversing here with a bowl of oatmeal, though not my everyday experience, was easily within the realm of possibility. I had been prepared for the “other” all my life. Like St. Francis for the wildlife. Like Ahab for the taste of saltwater. At age twelve, hormones and voices produced a concert unmatched in the rest of my short life. I remember I couldn’t wait to wake up and listen to the world both in and out of my head. Sometimes I wanted to jump straight up and never come down.

  I had seen all the blob movies from the actual, The Blob, on to all the viscous liquid-like moving things that ate the world. I was ready to parley with this one. My only regret was that Marnie wouldn’t be here at the moment of contact. “Over in 201.” So, okay, that’s not going to be a blob talking. I retraced my steps and found 201 and the small dry voice—another grad student who also, it seemed, hadn’t talked to anyone in days. I had come into a desert of sorts where humans were spaced out among the animals and rolled tumbleweeds of hay.

  I told him who I was looking for. He waited. So I told him why. “Oh, he’d be glad to tell you about what he’s doing. None of the rest of us think it’s worth listening to. But a reporter—sure. Most of the rest of us are Ag people with a smattering of bird and fish people. You can tell them by their hats for some reason. The bird people always wear …”

  I thanked him, got directions to where I might find Dr. S and worked my way out of the maze. He had a regular office but wasn’t there. A note on the door said he was in the cafeteria if anyone wanted to find him.

  Then, in the cafeteria, we had that first conversation, or what I came to think of as the listening. I didn’t mention that I’d been to his lab uninvited. He seemed the standard amount of crabby I expected from the conference, but not the wide-ranging crabby, the omni-crabby, of a dissolute philosopher—English women and dental arches, Google, etc. I wanted to ask him about the gray-brown thing that moved, but I didn’t. I asked him if I could see his lab sometime. He said no. There was nothing there I’d be interested in. I said let me be the judge of that, and he said no and got up, went to his office and that was that. Or would have been that.

  I drove back home preparing my tale for Marnie—the lights, the sounds, the weird denizens of the Ag complex, the blob, the animal voices, the movement. The movement. It moved, shifted really. Or it didn’t. Perfect tautology.

  It all—Ag building, grad students, sheep sounds—got me to thinking how I’d write the article. It could be about masks, the ones we wear, the ones the world wears, and how interesting it is to pull back an edge and start to peek under. What delicious surprises there are. Also what devastating surprises there are. Still, we must peek, and peek we do. I’d write about the peeking.

  Chapter II

  Marnie was burbling full of Modernism. She was preparing a speech, or an introduction rather, to an art opening at her gallery. The main attraction was part of the collection of a local businessman—nether Modernists plus lesser pieces by more famous Modernists. The gist of her speech was that the Modernists had tried to revolutionize the art world at the beginning of the 20th century by introducing more information into art: not new, but more. Paintings, instead of the regular colors would be alternative colors (Fauvists), or instead of regular perspective consistent with a real world would be the fusion of several different perspectives from different times and angles (Cubists). But the Modernist movement(s) with all its beginnings was really just a disenchantment with what they thought was art’s poor sampling of reality. They asked: When we looked at the world, didn’t we also fuse our memories and desires along with what our senses picked up from the canvas or sculpture? Didn’t we, in the act of seeing art, bring different times and places an
d colors and even imaginative interpretations to the very act of looking? Shouldn’t art keep up with this human multitasking? She went on like this, but all I heard was Dr. S (who, by this time, I had thoroughly rendered as Dr. Seuss in my brain—“This one has a little car, this one has a little star. Oh, what a lot of things there are.”). Dr. S ranting, Dr. S keeping his critter secret until he could blow away the world. Marnie said Juan Gris was the most underrated of them all because he died young; Picasso the most highly rated because he died very old. But it was Gris, Picasso’s countryman, who cracked open the old mold of the shopworn literal: haystacks in the sunlight, the hazy impression of a rainy street scene. Gris made the jump, and I kept thinking that Dr. S was making the jump, if I understood him right. Modernism was the movement that opened the door to, for example, abstract impressionism and the paintings that claimed a higher and realer expression of human emotions in paint. Jackson Pollock and Kandinsky and Tobey and Ernst—they cracked the code in the second phase. Dr. S was really saying that the next level of information is now available, like Juan Gris did. The door’s open. Did that thing really move in his lab? So what? Was it new information or old information just reconstituted?

  I began the swirl back and forth between Marnie’s Modernism—a new real—and Dr. S’s theoretical claims that life was just a package of information and was infinitely extendable. Maybe my voices were just the aural equivalence of the Modernist painter’s vision. Maybe it was the same gift. Maybe, like them, I should develop a manifesto so I could tell the world about my vision, my additions to puny, everyday consciousness? Talk about inviting medication! I would just be asking for the “there-there,” the “how do you feel about …” the condescending arm rub of comfort. I guess all that stuff stuck in my craw more than I realized. I listened to Marnie try out her Modernism spiel on me. As a listener—maybe it’s the voices and their sometimes running commentary—I’m likely to latch onto a piece of information and run off with it, over there behind the shrubs where I can gnaw on it a little, make goo-goo eyes at it, interrogate it more closely. Not ideal, I know. I needed to focus and follow, focus and follow.