Some Assembly Required Read online

  He pondered whether to take the second meeting with the lady. No. He didn’t need the money even though he really didn’t want to be idle either. Like everything else there was a season to his business. He had met a surgeon at an event once and the surgeon said there was clearly a seasonal component to his work. Christmas season was especially busy for elective surgery. January and February were busy for Robert. He thought the phenomenon could be explained by the post-holidays-blues syndrome reported in all newspapers, the letdown and melancholy of January, the high suicide rates of February. Leaden skies. Leaden souls. And in some people the blues begat rage and rage always looked for some place to attach itself. Rage alone was mere unhappiness. Rage at something, someone—now that felt like something.

  How old would a person have to be before rage went away? Robert had encountered Dylan Thomas’s poem, “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night,” but “rage, rage against the dying of the light.” What old person had the energy left? The poem was about a young man thinking about what it was like for an old man to die. But it was the young man’s rage. Robert had always found in poetry a convenient compendium of human emotions, a kind of encyclopedia of what he supposed were legitimate human responses. The legitimacy came, Robert deduced, through the fact that the poem had been first published and then anthologized. And those two things could only happen if a number of people agreed that the poem really did capture what it was to be a human being. To Robert, many of the findings in the poems seemed like abstractions: the sacredness of human life, grief over the loss of a loved one, absence as a powerful wrenching of the human psyche, love or yearning after that distorted reality—it all seemed so inconvenient, but Robert knew that if he didn’t try to understand this business, he would not be able to plan his murders.

  Ah, Rex. Wherefore art thou in this thing of love? I’d be willing to listen long and hard to your disquisition on the subject. I’d sit quietly, hands on my knees. Rapt. You could tell me about love and I would interrogate the universe on the subject. Okay. Maybe that’s getting away from me.

  For a short time, Robert thought of his end product as “eliminations,” ridding the world of another competing hunger for scarce supplies—a kind of Malthusian scourge. But very quickly he returned to the actual word murder, as the best and least deceptive. The way to succeed in his business, Robert figured, was to deceive oneself as little as possible, cut though the dross to the actual while others—police, revenge seekers—were running around in worlds of illusion and fraudulent surfaces and misdirection trying to find the hand in the sleight-of-hand.

  After a walk along the river to settle the mac-and-cheese, he decided: he would not see the woman again unless she called to present a valid case for not hiring him during the first encounter. Lack of funds for the payoff would be valid. Maybe the victim really didn’t deserve to die, would not be valid.

  Once some years ago, Robert had received an urgent message after the payment had been made, the deal consummated. The message said he could keep half the money but shouldn’t carry out the killing. The client had changed his mind. Robert thought: changed his mind about what? Robert laughed to himself. Maybe I should just wing the hit, like in the cowboy movies. Shoot the victim in the hand, and then send back half the money. Or maybe I should just fire a couple warning shots in the air. Or, no, even better, I should catch the victim unawares and give him a good, hard slap in the face. Followed by a good talking-to. Followed by…

  He shot the contracted-for man directly in the side of the head—a bee sting as clean as the wrath of God. And just as ineffable. A deal was a deal.

  This version of a Rex-world had already occurred to me. And it had certainly occurred to Dr. S. The last meeting in his new digs—new lab coat not withstanding—Dr. S had exhibited a vague uneasiness over what Rex was up to, might get up to eventually and the nothing he was able to do about it. Dr. S has seemed sideways with his creation and maybe even with creation itself. The traffic seemed to burp and pass gas all at once. And begin to move.

  The woman had left messages in the designated manner. She wanted to meet again. Why? he asked her, by the same message post. She had all the money now, she said. And Robert allowed as she had given the correct response to earn a second meeting.

  Robert watched her at the café table for a half hour. He noted all the people on the street, who passed by, who lingered, if any came back again, if any changed clothes and came back to loiter. One elderly man went in and out of a shop, stopped on the sidewalk, looked in the window, went in again, came out again. Finally, Robert decided that he was the one, whether the accidental dithering of an old man or the police officer designated to arrest him, it didn’t matter. He was the anomaly that blew the deal. It only took one. Robert felt quite accomplished leaving the woman the message that declared the null and the void. No business. Goodbye.

  Robert thought that being more careful than anyone else could even conceive would allow him to retire someday. He had even thought about what he could do in retirement: he would move to a small town and become an exterminator of unwanted pests: skunks under the house, raccoons raiding fishponds, squirrels in the attic, a bee swarm on the front porch. “What’s the difference?” he thought. He would just take on interesting jobs when he felt like it, jobs that made the community a better place to live. And he would read poetry and discover the human condition. Pretty soon now he would have enough.

  Ah, now this one might be interesting. Robert found a park bench and cracked open the newspaper. Partners in an art gallery had come to public blows over how each thought the other had skimmed funds and … oh, here was a better one yet. Two brothers, longtime partners in land deals all over the world, had gone to court to disentangle their finances and go their separate ways. Both men had found the judgment unacceptable and unfair. Robert thought, wouldn’t that be the indication that the judgment really worked? Both parties aggrieved equally? But no, the brothers planned to tie up the separation in complex, global-financing ways to keep the other from getting on with his financial life. Perfect, thought Robert. He’d flip a coin to decide which brother to contact.

  But before he began negotiations, Robert thought he might have one more round of that mac-and-cheese.

  Rex not eating anything, apparently, might have set off the whole mac-and-cheese thing. Rex as judge and jury eventually set off another part. Rex’s choice of colors for the trucking company made these first two all the more frightening. Bad boy, Rex. Bad boy.

  The coroner found that the Italian sausage cured for six weeks hanging in a humidity controlled room to grow the proper mold covering—one batch of that sausage had somehow been infected by a rogue pathogen when the electricity had failed briefly. The pathogen had been isolated; it shouldn’t have been there in the sausage cure. It was found dead but apparently had been alive for a short time in the sausages. Attempts to identify it had included microbiologists from a nearby university who declared it “new and deadly toxic.” Their report had indicated that the toxin it produced might leave in a victim the equivalent signature of a heart attack. But a quick bloom of the pathogen would certainly be deadly in certain individuals with European DNA. It seemed less toxic in Asian or African DNA. It seemed the “new” pathogen was a single accident of mutation—short lived and deadly, but found nowhere else.

  The sausage maker had lost his food license until authorities could make sure that his particular “old world” process didn’t contribute to the mutation. There was only one known death from the tainted sausage: Robert Neff found slumped on a park bench along the river esplanade.

  Miraculously the traffic broke as if a plug had been pulled and let the carbon-consumers roll on their various ways across the city—to love, to loneliness, the suffering and joy.

  Chapter VI

  Marnie and I tried to shake off our hectic week by going out to dinner (no movie), getting a couple bottles of wine and just drinking and talking the night away. Forget Dr. S, forget fractal art and the slurp of whit
e wine while standing up in the gallery. We started with phones off, a fine layer of meal with the first bottle, and then the second bottle was for on top, for the laughing and forgetting the crazy week. I hadn’t told her about speaking to Rex. I knew I would have to sometime, but I had to be sure what the “speaking” part actually was. Did Dr. S arrange the whole thing like the Wizard of Oz from behind a curtain? As I said, even that version was a great twist on the mad-scientist story, a potential article more interesting than DNA, mitochondria, broken genetic material. The talking bowl of oatmeal wouldn’t fly by itself—too much ground work and backstory before an editor would even countenance it. But a wacked-out scientist with an elaborate puppet show, that was immediately great stuff if we got to look behind the curtain. Problem was, I still couldn’t find the curtain.

  Marnie was celebrating lots of sales of the fractals. The artist in each case was actually a collaboration of mathematician and designer or color person who decided on color values. One set of prints came from a Japanese mathematician who made his own color schemes. All the rest were collaborations. And each collaboration had its own deal or split of the profit. In some cases, the mathematician got the lion’s share because the cunning reiteration of the polynomial was deemed by the cooperating pair as the most important part—the ground work, the RNA set of instructions. In other cases, the color schemes or values assigned within the formula was understood to be the key. Marnie told me she had spreadsheets for the complicated deals each artist-pair set up. Sometimes, she said, the split changed with the size of the canvas or reproduction. She couldn’t figure out exactly why, but apparently the collaborators knew.

  This whole collaborative business in art had a National Science Foundation ring to it. Dr. S worked in a barn with a Lucite box and a bowl of oatmeal until he hit the collaborative jackpot with the NSF. Or some great money sump, anyway, that emptied out into his suite of offices. My first inclination is to suspect the military that has endless funds to throw at projects of potential strategic value. What kind of killing advantage would Rex give them? Could Rex blow shit up? Would he make a good soldier? If, like a fractal, any part of him was exactly like the whole of him, wouldn’t that make generating a gazillion of him a mere button-push away? Talk about hearing voices! The perversely inquiring part of me, the apocalypse-curious part, would love to be seated in the front row right after that button push. Blah, blah, blah indeed.

  At dinner, one bottle gone, the next on its way, we toasted life’s crazy fullness.

  “To life’s crazy fullness,” I proposed. We drank what was left in our glasses.

  “To how heartbreakingly beautiful life is sometimes,” Marnie toasted after the next bottle arrived. “Maybe we should drink to that in pieces,” she added. “You know, first to heartbreaking beauty, then to … what?”

  “To sometimes,” I tried. She liked that, and we drank to sometimes.

  We had a game we played in which we’d answer each other as different literary characters (or artists, she insisted, so we put that in) during regular conversation. She’d do Anna Karenina on the subject of dinner guests for next weekend.

  “They all know, of course. Except the countess. She doesn’t know anything.”

  “Ever?”

  “Ever! But the others, they all know and talk behind my back.”

  Understand that this was well into the second bottle. At the end of the bottle, I felt I had to tell Marnie that I’d been speaking to Rex, and now he’d fallen silent—sort of. I should have either explained the jump better or prepared her for my confession because she thought we were still in the game. Maybe we were.

  “So …” The pause, as I look back, was supposed to be the signal that we’d changed out of the game. Maybe it wasn’t long enough.

  “So …” I said. “This guy I’ve been interviewing, the DNA experimenter guy. Anyway, he let me talk to his experiment—not the last time but the time before. The last time Rex wouldn’t talk at all.… Wait. Let me back up.”

  Without a hitch Marnie began to do an impression of Georgia O’Keefe. She did an Irish-Hungarian Wisconsin dairy farmer accent that is difficult to replicate because the wine brought in a few more eastern European nuances with an occasional Swede in the low spots. Marnie is a very funny woman. Then she soared. I waited it out until she began cracking herself up and the neighboring tables began to look over at us in unison. I should have saved Rex for another time but, alas, didn’t, and continued after Marnie had done her thing.

  “So …” I said, “I was talking to him about his work, and he asked me if I’d like to speak directly to Rex. I had met Rex before, you know, the couple of early interviews. Well, met in the sense that I saw him there in the corner, sulking, I thought.”

  “And how did you know he vas a he?” Still half transformed into the Irish-Hungarian, but coming around.

  “I was assuming from the name, and then Dr. S always used the male pronoun referring to goo in the corner. So I said, sure, I’d like to talk to Rex as directly as possible.” Then I told her about the computer version, then—pause—finally, the sense that Rex was inside my head, like having earbuds on. But no earbuds, I think. Maybe the doctor had some way of doing this, some form of stunt he was pulling.”

  “You’re serious? The blob talked in your head?” She laughed. I don’t think she laughed at me, but at the talking blob image she’d made.

  “That’s right. I played along, you know, just to see where it would go. And the more I sort of consented to the whole charade, the more reasonable it became. Does that make any sense?”

  She returned to her heaviest accent, whatever it was, to demonstrate that, of course, this is exactly what we’ve been talking about with the game we played. The longer the better.

  “And I talked to Rex about this whole being-and-becoming business. Again, sort of. And he let me know that we, humans that is, wouldn’t like it if he changed things into what we think they should be. He implied our ideals were impractical. No, maybe just false or unrealistic. That if we were changed into what was necessary for everything to be ideal—you, know, peace, justice, kindness, that stuff—then he’d have to do away with the way we are.” It was coming out tangled in the wine, the game, and Marnie’s beautiful eyes that were getting wider and wider.

  “Wine or not, you’ve gotta be shitting me,” she said with some flourish. “Dr. Seuss has you believing that the blob talks to you inside your head. Number one. And number deux, the blob is a combination of Wittgenstein and Kierkegaard. Care to add Hunter S. Thompson?”

  I loved the way she laughed at her own jokes, a chuckle starting low and then overtaking her and shaking her whole body. It made funny even funnier. More wine.

  She continued when she got the laughing stopped. “And … and what’s it like when the blob’s in your head?”

  “Rex.”

  “Okay, Rex. Is it like God talking to you? Like being possessed?”

  “Like wearing earbuds. Like Pandora. Like those announcements in train stations that come on and seem to come from everywhere at once. Maybe he’d talk to you too. Wanna come along some time? He’d like you, I think. But then there’s the whole shutting up thing. He seems to have shut up in his new digs. And speaking of new digs—”

  “So Rex has taken some kind of vow of silence?” She started to giggle again. “Who would he be vowing to? Now that seems like an interesting question. The disembodied head takes a monk’s vow, except … except …”

  She can’t keep it in anymore and has to talk through the giggles.

  “Except …” She holds up one hand to stop herself from laughing. Wine.

  “Okay, okay.” Big breath. “Except that it’s like an identity thing, his vow. He has to vow to … to …” Not again. “To his algorithm. No, to his agar-agar. No, to his zeroes and to his—”

  “Yeah, ones.” I may as well get in here. But I’m so pleased by her giggle-fest that I can’t get annoyed by her self-indulgent silliness. “On the other hand,” I begin,
to change directions slightly. “What kind of religious experience must I be having. Huh? Huh? I mean having direct contact with the beginning of the end? With the messianic oatmeal blob goo? How cool is that? I think you should get in on this as soon as possible. I don’t want to be the only one besides the doctor who can hear this voice. Can’t really tape record the inside of my own head. Since I love you so much I’m sure you’ll be included in a package deal with me.”

  “Speak, Rex! Speak!” She says. And more wine. I think she’s the funniest person on earth. So, at this moment, does she.

  Marnie’s off to work early. I’m lagging into breakfast bit by bit, caffeine first. The Tuesday New York Times is open on the table and beginning to draw me into the world. And like my friend’s bus-plunge notations, there they are: action-at-a-distance, remote control, matter being mind-moved. The times they are a-changing.

  Item: Amazonian expedition comes back with a ground plant that takes up heavy metals from the soil and renders them into unstable proteins that break down in soil to provide fertilizer.

  Item: Three new fungi discovered that live on clean glass, eating nothing but silicon in the glass itself. All glass forms apparently can be metabolized by the new species. Some discussion about adding a new phylum. Phylogeneticists on alert. New branch of fungi.

  Item: (And here I’m working with the direction already provided by the first two, but I’m susceptible, suggestion prone.) Child born without sinus cavities in Brazil has grown older and now displays an ability to, instead of smell, somehow intuit odors through some combination of visual and tactile clues. He says he “knows” odors in the context of his constant headaches.

  Item: Local invasive species, teasel (dipsacus), has displayed carnivorous characteristics, consuming insects that get caught in rainwater deposits that accumulate along its stem. While not a new observation, the teasel observed has formed hard spikes in the seedpods that have begun to display some of the characteristics of alloys of metals.