Some Assembly Required Page 7

  I turned from one fractal and noticed there were the symmetric ones and the asymmetric ones. I read the labels and they were respectively based on Mandelbrot and Julia sets. These mathematicians made what might be thought of as the RNA of the art, the set of instructions for the raw materials—the DNA of color. The fractals were consistent—the same—on all scales so that if you zoomed in, or even looked very closely, you could see the repetition. The label used the word “iteration.” To me they looked like garishly colored islands seething with color and then kaleidoscopic. Fractals were designs that the art world had snatched from the mathematicians and then tarted up. Math equations going to the prom. High drag for maps (I was searching), stony 70s movies in stop frame. Psychedelic algebra. Yikes!

  And that set me off back to Rex. Was Rex an iteration? Dr. S set him off with the original algorithm and that set of instructions got parlayed through some polynomial equation of the doctor’s into loquacious but unstable Rex. And what did Rex mean by using me to get around and see the world? I could feel myself over wrought and overwriting as if Rex had left skid marks on the underwear of my brain. Rex the infinite iteration of a simple gob of algebra. What would a Rex fractal look like? Would he choose his own colors? These math sets that hung on the gallery wall were really just concoctions, group efforts as slick as five-color printing could negotiate. Rex the same?

  Marnie was at my side watching me watch.

  “Which one do you like best?” she hummed.

  “Trick question? You know I like you the best.” Small points scored but that’s how to build up the big score. I got a breast squeezed into my arm for my effort.

  “No, you know, the art?”

  I pondered, as if I hadn’t already made up my mind and assigned Rex’s name to one of the art pieces. “The blue one,” I answered, though there were a couple of different blue ones. But one was BLUE, an unnatural blue that faded in and out across the shape that contained it. It exploded on the canvas, like LED lights in a Christmas string, like God’s eyes out of which blasted seraphim in gales of pure love. Like … She knew immediately which blue one I was talking about. I asked, “How does the artist get that blue?”

  She laughed. “Remember when you had 256 colors on computers? Then more and more and now a computer can do infinite variations on colors, some variations so small you can’t tell the difference unless you look at the designation, the formula. This artist is very good at playing the computer.”

  “Like God on the very first day? Pretty much fun.”

  “More like an artist in an electronic studio fiddling the dials.”

  I loved the way she said “fiddling” and told her so. She used to think I was not taking her seriously when I said things like that. But now she knows I take her more seriously than I take anything in the world. That’s love, I guess. “When you say ‘fiddling’ my whole spine goes soft. You know that, don’t you?”

  “No more wine for you. I’m cutting you off.” She pushed me away and made her way off toward a potential customer who came for the art and wasn’t always thinking of new ways to get in her pants.

  I pondered the blue. The BLUE. The blue that was everywhere in the piece of art but nowhere in the world. And there was Rex again.

  It wasn’t the wine, either. Rex was recursive, reiterative, infinitely regressing—everywhere the same. He had to be. Dr. S had said about the instructions that made Rex, “I just wrote the basic string, and then Rex repeated it until it was enough.” Enough what? I had asked. “Enough information, I think,” the good doctor said.

  And it was the “I think” part that had bothered me at the time, the lack of a scientist’s control. The guessing part in the face of not enough information to understand what exactly he’d done by creating Rex. On the other hand, there was a distinct possibility that Dr. S knew exactly what he was doing right from the get-go. That was scarier, maybe, but not as interesting a narrative line (really just the old mad scientist story). The other story, that Rex had taken over once he had “enough information,” that was money. The newspaper the next day gave me the idea it had turned out to be the later.

  Maybe Rex was just fooling around—playing. The newspaper article noted that an industrial painting company reported that it had finished painting an entire trucking company with a combination of colors, reflective silver for the rooftops and an easy-to-clean bluish gray for the walls with a slightly darker blue trim. The color scheme was worked out ahead of time with the help of a computer simulation and the approval of the company’s board of directors. When the painters finished, overnight the colors had changed. At first they suspected some kind of sabotage, some tricky paint mixing by a disgruntled employee. But they inspected the empty cans, the sprayers, interviewed workmen, ran tests, prodded and poked, and still there was no explanation as to why: the roof turned beet red, the walls a deep Mediterranean blue, and trim bright yellow—a gigantic Mexican restaurant. It looked altogether like an enormous and expensive prank by a Cristo-like artist who was trying to comment on the military industrial complex. Maybe assault by pigment. I don’t know why—probably the art show the night before—but immediately I thought of Rex saying he wanted to get out more.

  I imagined how the second Rex interview would go. This was a longstanding practice of mine, an interview technique really. I thoroughly imagined not only my own questions for an interview but the answers too. Then, listening carefully during the interview, I would redirect the parts that didn’t fit my imagined answers, and that often led me to what I called “the good stuff.”

  “So … Rex, how you been?”

  “Not so bad, yourself?”

  “Been out and about, have you?”

  “Some. Why do you ask?”

  “Thought maybe you wanted to try a little en plein air painting.”

  And here I imagine he goes into a recitation of how colors are actually not what we see with our human eyes. For example, trees are actually blue and humans are seeing the reflected light or what the tree leaf is not when we say the leaf is green. It’s blue. It’s blue and that’s what you mean to say when you say it’s green. The leaf knows. Computers know. Scientists actually know this. But you persist in saying it’s green.”

  “It’s the yellow trim on the trucking company that I’d like to discuss.”

  “Yellow to you, anyway.”

  And this conversation goes on like this, I imagine, until Rex overheats again and Dr. S has to lower his light, lower his temperature. Of course the real burning issue here is, how. How did Rex get out (A) and (B) how did Rex change the colors?

  I thought the best strategy would be to look around the paper for more signs that Rex had been out playing. Immediately I found in the newspaper another, then another, then another. I realized that the following all qualify: lady finds all her garden gnomes are missing and they turn up on a monastery lawn fifty miles away; eight-year-old drives his parents’ car to visit a cousin in a town twenty miles away; cheese maker finds in his aging cave that one of the bigger cheeses has “eaten” all his smaller cheeses; and, well … insert assorted world-weirdnesses here.

  Postulate: Rex out playing actually made more sense of the world than just considering the world without Rex.

  Now that was a service to mankind: angels, ghosts, transubstantiation, starfish plagues where they all turn to mush, Ouija boards, Madame Blavatsky, phantom rickshaws, the monkey’s paw … okay, I digress. But there it is—an oubliette down which we can chuck all the unexplained.

  I had written myself completely out of an article. Too big a rubber bag. But Rex remained, and certainly another interview was in order. I was pretty sure I didn’t now have any idea what the actual story would be. Maybe I should have told more people about the voices.

  I promised Marnie that I’d just be obsessed with this for a couple days. A kiss for luck. Then another. It was nice that neither of us worked regular hours. Then another.

  I wrote in my head the preliminary interview the way I always
did. In the Ag building past the now familiar cows and sheep—hi there, guys and gals—I went straight to Dr. S’s cave. It wasn’t there. He wasn’t there. His office and lab had been repurposed as a storage facility piled with sacks of grain, shelves of chemicals, a tack room. I double checked to make sure where I was. And wither goeth Dr. S, there goeth Rex. Ruth in the alien corn.

  I pursued my new tangent by seeking out the power position of the secretary who seemed to know everything. The high priestess, I thought of her. She told me that the doctor and his lab had new digs now actually in the biology building. So down the halls past chemistry emergency washing stations, around the corner where ranks and file of offices were beset by slouched students impaled on their earbuds, then across a sky bridge and the errant molecules of formaldehyde announcing bio and bio-chem and micro-bio and the thrumming home of an electron microscope. All these replaced the chickens, cows and sheep. I wandered in the new maze listening for Rex on my nervous system, hoping I might tune in on him unaware, sneak up on his algorithm so to speak. No such luck. I rambled down the assigned labs the secretary had told me about. I looked for the “big one” she said Dr. S had been assigned, but they were all small. And then, there … there it was, the reward for his having made great scientific strides, I guessed. A palace of a lab. A Xanadu of a lab.

  Fit for a Rex, I thought. But I kept hearing the word, “perturbation,” while standing outside, waiting for an audience with them both. Maybe I was hearing it through the glass. I knocked. It should, by rights, have been a dark and stormy night. But the office was well lit, well ventilated, well appointed. I knocked again. The doctor had a graduate assistant who came to the door to ask my business: a clean, nice-smelling, bright-eyed female in a lab coat with “Joan” blue-stitched on, the university’s name beneath. It all smacked of NSF money and proper sufficiency of garb, of equipment, of etiquette.

  “I’m interviewing Dr. Sewall,” I said, as importantly as I could.

  “I’ll see if he has time to talk to you. Do you have an appointment?”

  Appointment? I thought I might stop and scratch a Holstein’s ear before I talked to him, ask a sheep how it is to be shorn. “No,” I said. And she just-a-minuted me.

  I was left in the anteroom listening for Rex piping his song. Are you there, Rex? I asked. “Perturbations,” came back again.

  When Dr. S came out to give me an audience, he was remade: haircut, Ralph Lauren tie with little sailboats on it, better lab coat than Joan’s with more writing on it, and the shoes: slick brown Italian jobs that purred. All accomplished in just a few days. Wow.

  “Doctor Sewall, I presume,” I opened with. Nice shoes would have been my second choice.

  “Ah, the young man with the inquisitive habits,” said the doctor. I thought there was also some hint of a British accent, some kind of John Cleese put-on. “What can I do for you today?”

  Where to start? He sat down in a chair like any old human being. Then he offered to have his assistant get me tea or coffee. He dangled one brown Italian over a knee. He might have had a peel and scrub. He glowed. “Could I continue my interview with Rex?”

  Dr. Sewall laughed. “Rex has been in a kind of secretive mode recently. He reports that he’s spending a lot of energy on outside projects, and he, well … demands more and better food.”

  “Sounds like an unhappy prisoner.”

  “Young man, Rex is no prisoner. If anything, we are the prisoners. All this is his world.” The doctor waved expansively around the room, but I suspect he meant something larger than just these digs. Rex, by the way, was nowhere in sight, and I kept sneaking peeks around to see if there was a box of goo in some corner or other. Far away a siren, just audible, wailed and wailed. I should have seen it as a sign. It seemed to me that Dr. S was speaking through layers of gauze to me, through some kind of chicane maybe in which mirrors delivered his speech from some far away fortress. He continued, “I ought to mention that I’m not sure exactly what number Rex we have by now. Remember the addition of stripes. It seems that stripes was some kind of ‘choice’ Rex made, sort of sartorial, like wearing an ascot. I use the term ‘choice’ advisedly, though. Same caveats apply as in our original interview. On the other hand, you see the changes around you, I assume.” He swept to the office with his hand. “Somebody up there likes Rex now. And the manna comes raining down.” He rained manna high to low with waving hands.

  I was watching him talk, like someone had taken the old Dr. S out of the Seuss book and put him in a Tolstoy novel, the world-weary Anna Karenina just before she jumps in front of the train. And it occurred to me, siren fading now, that Rex had somehow melded with the doctor in order to get his “better food.” At least that was what I hoped. What a hell of a story that would be. The talking oatmeal leaps the bonds of goo-hood and occupies the body of a scientist—his own father. The Invasion of the Body Snatchers meets Frankenstein, meets The Blob, meets the Borg meets Keanu Reeves just back from the Matrix. Jeez, this is good stuff.

  “Well, is there any way I can still talk to Rex?”

  “I think you can, but the question is will he? He seems to think, and again ‘think’ is used with a looseness I can only begin to hint at, he seems to think he’s said what there is to say. And then there’s that other set of conditions you were witness to—the anger, the overheating, the outstripping his food supply. He may have solved that problem without commenting on the fact.” The doctor sighed and looked at his significant watch, some kind of ten-grand Piaget. I was getting the feeling of approaching a carousel on which the horses and other animals had begun to squirm off their poles and eye me. Ride anyone?

  “I’d like to try, though, just for old time’s sake.”

  “Go ahead.” And the doctor got up and opened a door to a dimly lit room. In a corner similar to his original corner in the Ag building, was Rex in his Lucite box with holes poked in it like a bug jar in some kid’s bedroom.

  I gave it a shot: leading questions (both thought and aloud), accusations about his messing with life forms many hundreds of miles away, then the pastiche of movie clichés, how he’d come to occupy the doctor’s body, re-coloring the trucking company, and finally insults about his coloration and loss of stripes and dull brown coat. Nothing. I had persisted long enough to begin to feel more than a little foolish talking to a brown lump in a plastic box. Someone has to be filming this for a PBS special. I whipped out my cell and filmed the blob. I pretended to upload everywhere, ticking them off—Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, etc.—to see if I could get a rise out of Rex. Silence. Then silence broken by the doctor laughing behind me.

  “See? Rex has gone to the proverbial cave at the top of the mountain that we see in so many New Yorker cartoons. We must make a pilgrimage to him. Sacrifice, trial, travail, hardship—we must pay a price for audience. Especially sacrifice, I think. And then, maybe, enlightenment.”

  Was that the doctor talking, or Rex? The blob wasn’t talking. It sulked, I think. Like a grouchy teen. He looked no bigger, no better than the last time. The doctor laughed again. I offered: “Maybe you should stop feeding him and see if that gets him to break his silence. He’ll blab like crazy if he’s hungry enough.”

  The doctor smiled and led the way back into the lighted rooms. His watch gleamed again. “Now why would I endanger my own project? Stop feeding him. Good one. I haven’t fed him in six weeks. I put the food out, but I think he’s gone beyond food. Or he’s taking miniscule amounts and metabolizing it fantastically, getting energy from next to nothing. Maybe like an air plant, some kind of orchid. I weigh the food carefully and it seems to remain all there. But he could be taking such small amounts that …”

  Doctor Sewall was leading me toward the door to the anteroom where he’d hand me to Joan who’d show me out. But I wasn’t done yet. I had feeling that I was being bum-rushed away from the best and weirdest story and/or hoax that I would ever encounter as a journalist. Pulitzer. Is there a Nobel for journalism?

  And
I was out the door with the lovely Joan schlepping me toward my reward—a cup of espresso freshly brewed and my choice of flavor syrups.

  “Joan,” I asked. “Does Doctor Sewall have any other journalists visiting him? Other colleagues working on his experiments with him? Co-authors on his papers?”

  Joan smiled and tugged her new lab coat straight. “I don’t know,” she said, as if pondering that particular string of language for the first time.

  While Joan concocted coffee, I sat in the waiting room and picked up a newspaper. I was attracted by a brief “bus plunge” article, you know, the kind that in one line declares that a “bus plunged” off a cliff in India, Mexico, Indonesia, etc., and everyone in the wedding party, school outing, family picnic was killed. I had a friend who collected these in a scrapbook. But below this brief article was an expose of the local meatpacking industry featuring a sausage maker not indicted by a grand jury but cited for careless and unsanitary practices in his company.

  I took the coffee with me. Joan smelled nice and bid me out the door. On the way to my car, I first calculated my next move with Dr. S. How did I get into the sanctum sanctorum where he pulled strings and arranged the mirrors and stoked the smoke machine? “What dreams may come when we have shuffled off this mortal coil …” occurred to me first; bless you Hamlet. Then I began to process the sausage company and Rex with my populated writing world. In the car, stuck in traffic, the resolution came.

  I moved Dr. S over one notch on the belt of weirdness. What would that be? A hit man. I wrote in the car again, this time in traffic. The Hit Man: