Some Assembly Required Read online

  I madly scribbled, reached into my pocket to turn on my recorder, went from pencil to pen. I thought, Good boy, Rex. Good boy.

  I left Dr. S with my article percolating in my brain. I always percolated before imposing any order on the thing. The order would come out of the percolating action, I think. All the way back in the car I wrote in my head.

  Marnie had left me a text. In the time it took me to drive home, a news item caught her eye: it was about the EPA investigating some guy’s claim that his house had been invaded by some kind of slime that he had tried to kill with bleach and then the whole thing changed to gray dust and went everywhere in his house. He was a vacuum cleaner salesman—that was the part that was newsworthy. Vacuum cleaner salesman overcome by dust. Dust one, vacuum industry zero.

  I drove along, took the slow way home, wrote the story in my head—listened for it and made it into a story.

  I sell vacuums for a living. Not door to door in the cartoon salesman sense. I am the manager of a substantial sales force. I have experience, expertise. I know suction. I know amps. And cubic feet per second, good plastic from bad plastic. I consider myself a reasonable person, but I have to say that the irony was not lost on me—I sell vacuums and I am assaulted by dust. What the hell am I supposed to do with that? I am a person of regular habits and an adequate imaginary life. I respect the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus as cultural requirements for a sound childhood. To science fiction I prefer engineering. A vacuum cleaner is, looked at properly, the tool that has allowed us to live inside in healthy conditions. The vacuum is responsible for civilization in key ways. And then came the dust.

  I was going to turn on the car radio but stopped and let the story fructify itself out the windshield. But I did hum along with the story as the words came tumbling to me.

  It had always been there.

  I think now that it was like stacking boxes in order to get at something up high. The first box alone won’t get you far enough. But a couple more and there you are. There they are. The pieces had always been near each other but it took a flood—a minor flood at that—and the perfect temporary disorder swirling brown water can cause. Then the rearrangement happened, probably always would have happened. There was nothing to be done about it, either. The ingredients were patient. Only we are impatient in the world, rushing around to get things temporarily done. While there and there, and over there again are all those parts just waiting to come together.

  That’s how it happened. The water joined what was lying around in the landscape. Again: vacuums, dust, water—I get it, I get it.

  I was sure Darwin had written something on the subject, and I went about digging through his works looking to see if he had anticipated this assembling business. I thought since he noticed that Nature continually altered its various critters out of constant necessity, out of the demand of life to survive, that he certainly would have written about all the potential forms of life just lying around in constituent pieces waiting on the universe’s shelf. And then … I think a big wind might also have worked as well as water. Or something biblical—a whirlwind, a burning bush, the lion’s den. But the flood was nothing more than Johnson Creek rising as it always had in the spring, rising through the grasses, then up to the tree line and then through the rip-rap we’d installed to keep the bank, and finally, as it did every ten years or so, up to the back porch. No farther. Not in my memory. The back porch was memory’s high water.

  I edited out a bunch of other Darwin stuff here. It was just getting in the way. I meandered. Like a river. Like the babbling in the river, the babbling voices that every river has. You don’t even have to listen very closely. There’s just this talking and talking and talking going on.

  My son first pointed it out. He thought it was some kind of growth. We looked up “slime mold” together to see if that’s what it was. Turns out that slime mold can be either a plant or an animal depending on the amount of food available to it. At the cellular level it will be single-celled in times of abundance, and then in times of famine, the cells will aggregate and go in search of food. We talked about how convenient this would be, how much fun to “go plant” for a while on the couch with a giant bag of potato chips. Then combine cells and wander off to find new bags—FunYuns maybe.

  Since the blob occurred right where the water had come to, we thought maybe the flood had brought it food. The next day it was bigger and the day after that we thought maybe we should try a little bleach on it before it got into the beams under the porch. Apparently, as I see now, it had waited since the Big Bang for someone to pour bleach on it, waited with open interstices in its DNA. So sodium hypochlorite, bleach, it seems was the salt necessary to make the thing—the box stacked on top that allowed the thing to finally reach out to time. And be.

  In general, I consider myself sympathetic to all forms of life—smelly ones, icky ones, stinging ones, ugly ones, even vicious ones. We’re all in this together. We all want to succeed in our own way. Leave me alone, I’ll leave you alone. But that doesn’t seem to be the plan. The leaving alone part. Alas.

  Darwin again; we compete. Even when we’re not immediately competing, it seems, something in us knows that we will eventually need the same food as everything else around us. So sooner or later we take on the fight for that food. It knew at some level. I knew, probably at the same level.

  This gaseous stuff I’d have to fix later if I wrote this down to keep. The edge of town, really the long way home, but I was getting interested in seeing how the story turned out. I kept going away from home to get the thing out and written in my head.

  So it was no more an alien than I was. Both of us were just a matter of the required assembly, and the only thing heroic about the whole business was that we coincided in time. I think many heroes go out to slay dragons. Only a few of us actually find a dragon to slay or be slain by. It took a while, but eventually I realized how lucky I was to find one.

  Dragon? Back to the action. Red barns, the smell of manure, a patch of premature daffodils along a fence row—dragon slaying. Regular stuff where there are dragons.

  My son and I thought we had kept it out of the house with the bleach and were going to bury the rest of it and hope it made good fertilizer. But as I said, the bleach completed it, and it no longer looked the same. The blob that appeared as slime mold did disappear—job done. But the new thing was not a blob anymore. It was hungry. Wouldn’t you be if you had waited for all of time? To be or not to be? What a stupid question, Hamlet. To be of course. How long to be, now there’s a different question, and that’s the real question regarding suicide.

  My son filled a jar with the old goo because he wanted to take it to school. The old stuff was really just the snakeskin sloughed off, but the “snake” was still in there. It took less than a week to realize we had failed with the bleach and the thing had indeed made its way into the house. Everywhere in the house.

  This time it looked like a fine white dust nearly indistinguishable from our regular dust. But the while dust was uniform in size, smaller than regular dust that would clump up when scraped together, and if you looked closely you could see that moving some of dust also moved other dust without touching it. There was a sympathy, somehow, between any part of the dust and the rest of the dust. Still we lived with it at first until it began to move things in the house: lamps on tabletops, silverware left on the kitchen counter. We found out later it was doing the equivalent of making itself comfortable, and moving things in some aggregate way, some extension of the sympathy one speck had for the others. I brought home a new Dyson, about five-hundred bucks worth retail. I fired it up and sucked and rolled the ball around chasing the dust. Though dust showed up in the whirlwind tunnels of the Dyson, the dust on the floor didn’t decrease noticeably. Then we did all the other obvious things: called exterminators, enlisted the county extension agent, consulted with university professors (a mycologist and a DNA specialist). We took to the Internet to see if there were any references to it; the
re weren’t. And the Internet searches came up crazy because there was no pattern to detect. We were experiencing the first one. So we knew it was new if the Internet didn’t know about it yet. My son took on the job of telling the zeroes and ones.

  Results: it was finer than talc; it could cause respiratory problems; its DNA was less interesting than its RNA; it wasn’t a known fungus; the sympathetic movement between particles was clearly demonstrable but not explainable unless it was electromagnetic (but no charge could be detected). It didn’t have a name (never mind order phylum, class, order, genus and species). It was alive only in the sense that the particles seemed to somehow know about each other, and the knowing part constituted for more than one scientist the designation of “alive.” Another scientist quietly brought out two magnetic Scottie dogs, one black, the other white, put them together on the table and the one moved the other or joined with the other depending on the pole of its magnet. But the discussion didn’t close there. The phenomena of moving objects—slowly, but nonetheless moving—was the final piece of evidence for sentience. It had mitochondria at the cell level, and it seemed very efficient at moving energy around in the cell walls.

  Tendency to wander off here on the Christmas I actually received the magnetic Scottie dogs and what happened to them. So … irrelevant but, of course, in the big scheme of things an absolutely necessary part of the greater and ever-rolling story wherein all narrative possibilities are inseparable from each other. I always did have problems keeping them separate; it seemed so hemorrhaging clear that there was only one pool and we dipped all stories out of it.

  My family and I moved out of the house by now. Each day the dust seemed to reproduce and, more exciting, apparently randomly move objects in the house. Eventually we found out what it was doing with the objects, moving them out of the way. But at the time one exterminator suggested burning down the house immediately before the dust got out. Get science people to save some in a jar, he suggested. Study it later in safe laboratory conditions. Fungicide fogs didn’t work. What we also didn’t know was that the white powder was waiting, getting things out of the way, setting up for the next stage.

  The geneticists found that at one level, it had cells, but cells constructed differently from standard cells. The walls were very thin and seemingly much more fragile than normal cells, but they didn’t depend on moisture to either maintain rigidity or pass genetic materials. So the RNA—the nuclear material, the instructions for the assembly of DNA (RNA is the is-ness, as one researcher said)—was fully running the cellular show, the ringmaster. And, as opposed to regular cells, these depended on dryness. If you wet them they didn’t cease to exist exactly; they just turned to a kind of nucleic mud that waited to dry out to become active again.

  My house has been sealed off as a biohazard until the state extension agents can get this under control. Under control seems to mean that they can name it. Name it and there will be a collective sigh of relief, apparently. They used gray tape around the windows and doors—a containment tape. The proposition of burning the whole thing to the ground is still valid. The pest control guy talked to the extension agent, and then they both talked to the police who called the university people. They called me in to check my insurance policy and that settled it. There was no pay off for purposely burning down the house even if the fate of the state, the earth, the universe was at stake. So unless the state went through the whole condemnation process, not to mention the compensation process, the house stayed. The dust stayed. Besides the containment tape, there was some kind of plastic goo they sprayed around all the openings to seal it further. They sent guys in biohazard suits to cut a viewing port in the living room wall. More sealing. That was followed by peering in, shining ultraviolet light in, and then low-grade radiation and some hush-hush strategies they wouldn’t tell me about. I immediately realized I wouldn’t be sitting in my living room chair any time soon—probably never. I waxed nostalgic. Why me? Alas. Alack. Like that. And more.

  The dust—let’s call it the new being—was reorganizing my living room by some kinetic agreement between its parts. The furniture was being arranged around the perimeter as if there was going to be a dance. Privately, because I didn’t want my kids to hear this, I called it the “shit’s happening” mode. The dust was getting ready for some serious hokey-pokey.

  What did you think it would look like, an invasion from space? Oh my God, we’re not alone! Hell, we have never been alone, turns out. We’ve fallen in love with little green guys or the ones with the Spielberg finger pods phoning home. Klaatu barada niktu. But no, it came from Johnson Creek (try that out as a movie title) and I, well, my son and I, dumped bleach on it to bring it to life. For the historical record, it was my son’s idea.

  Personally, I was in favor of waiting for the dance to begin, so to speak. My furniture was all up against the walls and the dust growing deeper on the dance floor. Here’s where the authorities say they’re taking over. For the safety of the community. For the civilian population. For the love of God! I apparently was the only one for twenty miles around that was not assuming the dust had nefarious purposes. I suggested it just might want to say hello and then be on its way. That brought the suggestion that I seek some professional help at the counseling center. The words contra naturum came up. It would have to be destroyed because it was not natural and, I thought, but kept it to myself, that it was moving furniture around in a manner not sanctified by any local church or authority—not the sacred or the profane or the scientific community. Dust is one thing; moving furniture in an unnatural manner quite another. Augustine noted miracles were not so much against nature as against what was presently known about nature. Different thing altogether.

  Authority, authorize, authentic, author: somewhere in the center of all these is the sense of power. Who gets to do what to whom? Who gets the last word? Who gets to peer through the viewing port at the new guy (Guys? Gals? I came quickly to favor gals and parthenogenesis, but maybe that’s just because I’m a modern guy. Maybe because of the furniture moving). The government guy who took over had a tonsure of hair like a monk, wore a gray suit that exactly matched the containment tape (coincidence?) and a blue knit tie, a tie the likes of which I hadn’t seen in twenty-five years. He had an assistant who carried a clipboard and smacked it on his thigh with gusto before raising it to write down what the authorized guy said he should write.

  I know I can’t keep this in but it was fun anyway—all the authority stuff. Dr. S is the author of Rex. Rex the author of … ? We’ll find out, I’m pretty sure. And, right now, right here, I’m the author of all of them. I went farther into the country; there were sheep with letters stained on their sides—alphabet sheep. Is that a sign? A bunch of signs?

  I began to see my house as a cosmic zoo. Maybe because I’d given up ever playing Monopoly again in my living room with the kids. Maybe because I was growing fond of the Holiday Inn the insurance company moved us in to: pool, spa, workout room, free continental breakfast. I thought it was time my people and I got together to name our houseguests, and maybe even welcome them. My eight-year-old thought this might make a fine class project at school, but we talked him out of it. Better keep it in the family.

  Who knows, if we’re friendly and the authorities piss it off, maybe we’ll get to be the start of a new human race. So our gene pool has a little scum around the edges: some nut allergies, a little more than our share of insanity, that thing that grew on my grandma’s chin, the great uncle who experienced what he called “angelism”—whatever that was—and the two-different-colored eyes syndrome that many people outside our family found charming. I, for one, would welcome some external vigor into our pasty gene pool. Some sentience that could move stuff around with dust and line up the furniture against the wall.

  The jar my son took to school did the two things the visitor did to my house: the goo-to-dust transition, then the dust that could organize. Then, and I blame not poking holes in the jar (or whatever the equivalence of this a
ct in the case of rapid mutation), the classroom jar went blank. I say blank because the elegant white of the dust in the house, that slightly violet cast that suggested vitality inside the dust, went out of the dust as if someone had flipped a switch. Some dust remained, but it was clearly dead and not organizing a damn thing.

  In time the house observers noted that something happened in the cleared space in my living room. There were lines of peculiar arches like electromagnets make with iron filings. The lines were clearer in the dark and lit with black light they said. I kept my musings to myself, but I can report now that I immediately thought the dust might have set up some kind of discotheque—black light, cleared floor. That was a silly notion when I thought it. But now, I’m thinking maybe…

  I used the term visitor a little earlier, but what I meant was visitor to my house, not visitor to the earth. I am more convinced each day that whoever they are, they are already here in constituent pieces. And we are the visitors, one in the possible arrangements of mad molecules flaunting our carbon.

  You think?

  Somebody at the university got an NSF grant to buy my house and land. They planned, I think, to seal up the whole thing and make it a study center with portals and safe rooms and protocols. A lot of protocols. I wasn’t privileged to the whole proposal, just the big, fat check. I said, sure. Let me know how it works out.

  I know now the real deal with the dust. I figured it out. And just after I cashed the government check, after the magnetic-looking lines occurred, the final stage happened. All the cell scientists noted the powerful exchange of energy within the cell. One told me that energy serviced by mitochondria schlepping back and forth for a piece of the food action, that energy was stronger than any he’d recorded. So here’s what I think. It came together, it reorganized itself, and then decided, enough. Or maybe, enough already! Like when you play a video game for a while and you can kind of see where the whole thing’s going and you quit. Like that.