The New and Improved Romie Futch Read online

  I curled up on the floor beside the window, crickets throbbing behind the dark screen, paean to the endless summer night. The chug, chug of her sewing machine started up again. She laughed softly, then sang one of her nonsense songs in perfect pitch, dark treacle that soothed me back to sleep:

  Poor old Mister Lizard,

  Who had cancer of the gizzard,

  Stumbled through a blizzard,

  To meet the local wizard.

  I fell asleep marveling at the craftsmanship of Mom and Dad’s most elaborate diorama—a bucolic scene with rodents playing croquet and enjoying picnics on blankets. The animals’ tails shimmered with vitality. Their eyes gleamed like warm molasses. And I was bowled over by the clothes Mom had sewn in her sleepless delirium: frock coats and brocade vests, Gibson girl skirts and velvet riding jackets.

  And then I woke up, a thousand years of Art with a capital A weighing heavily upon my brain. My occipital cortex, hippocampus, and amygdala crackled with visionary electricity as I imagined a taxidermy diorama as elaborate as an Elizabethan masque. I saw animatronic animals created from a variety of artistic media. I saw a wide-screen backdrop employing elements of stop-motion animation, film, music, sound effects—you name it. I saw a diorama that the viewer could actually step into.

  I’d display my work at some fancy gallery that knew what was what in terms of obsolete highbrow/lowbrow dichotomies. Fuck Hampton County—I was talking Columbia, Charleston, maybe even Hotlanta. Down in the dingy dollar cinema of my mind, I saw Helen walk into the gallery. Saw her drop the clammy hand of her lame boyfriend as she, overwhelmed by my talent, stumbled around in a daze of delight.

  I’d create the most ass-kicking diorama in the history of taxidermy.

  NINE

  We were in the Nano Lounge, overhead fluorescents deadened, the room enveloped in a Rembrandtian glow via strategically placed floor lamps. Somehow, the air smelled of rosewater and old ivory. Skeeter, small and wizened, clad in an ancient Danzig tee, held a beautiful chestnut violin under his chin. He summoned bewitching melodies with his bow. Trippy, his head swathed in a nylon do-rag reminiscent of Renaissance piratical adventure, his ripped arms pulsing, sawed at a mahogany cello.

  After administering their BAIT downloads in Music: History, Theory, and Practice, the Center had provided them with rental instruments, which were necessary for their post-BAIT tests. And every night since, they’d filled the Richard Feynman Nanotechnology Lounge with gentle concertos, études, and stately waltzes from days of yore.

  That night I sat at the snack table, basking in their music as I sculpted mythological creatures out of a microwavable polymer clay product. The Center was not equipped with glazes, clay, and a kiln, so I made do with Sculpey and a box of acrylic paints. Lulled by the gentle rhythms of Alexander Bakshi’s “Winter in Moscow,” I shaped exquisite miniatures for a neo-baroque surrealist diorama that I envisioned as a kind of 3-D Rubens on acid, painted in pop-art colors and set into motion by basic animatronics.

  Transformation was my theme: men and women caught in the agonizing ecstasies of morphing into magical beasts. A satyr with hairy goat thighs thrust his massive caprine cock toward the heavens. A nightingale bobbed heavily through the air, burdened by human boobs that swelled pornographically from her rich plumage.

  I laughed at the ease of it all, how nimbly my fingers pinched out each creature and etched it with makeshift carving tools.

  Al twirled shyly in, his buzz cut sleek, his beard impeccably trimmed, his eyes flashing alertly behind glasses as though he were ready to swing a real-estate deal or argue a case in court. But he wore a leotard, a nylon bodysuit the sickly prosthetic pink of “Crayola Flesh.” He performed a series of strange contortions only vaguely recognizable as dance. He’d opted for Dance: History, Theory, and Practice (or perhaps, guided by racial and sexual stereotypes, the powers that be had made this decision for him), and his routines were baffling. He jumped in place for a solid minute, got down on all fours and skittered like a crab, and then wrenched his shoulders in a series of micromovements. His motions were strangely arrhythmic, as though his brain didn’t register the tunes Skeeter and Trippy pumped out, as though he marched to the beat of some demented Lilliputian drummer who pounded skins inside the soundproof chamber of his brain. As far as we knew, Al was busting modern moves too complex for our untrained sensibilities. Or perhaps his BAITs hadn’t taken, and his dancing was the equivalent of choreographic stuttering.

  “How’s it going, Al?” said Skeeter, pausing between tunes.

  “Fine,” he replied with icy formality. “Your concern is appreciated.”

  And then he bounded out into the hallway with a twitchy fouetté jeté.

  This is how we had passed our final week. Though Dr. Morrow kept us busy with tedious tests until noon, afternoons were designated studio time. Even though we knew our efforts were being monitored, even though we could feel institutional eyes upon us, we couldn’t help ourselves: our brains bristled with new skills. We itched to strut our stuff. As I sat before my grotesque yet strangely beautiful little Sculpey figures, I thought about the creations I’d fashion upon returning to my shop. For the first time in twenty years I could feel the future, curled in pupal expectation inside my heart, pumping charged chemicals into my bloodstream.

  I’d return home, clean up my act, buckle down, and get to work. I’d rise at six, meditate, go jogging, then eat a bowl of oatmeal with fresh fruit. Sipping green tea, I’d tend to the demands of what clients I had left, expanding my customer base through word of mouth. After supper each night, my humble taxidermy shop would transform into an atelier. I’d invest what was left of my seven thousand dollars on supplies and tools, including animatronic parts, a whole new fleet of Quick Pupil digital eyeballs, plus paints, epoxies, dyes, and finishing powders that would enable me to turn ordinary game animals into mythic beasts of wonder.

  In my mind’s eye I could see them inhabiting Boschian worlds that bloomed in the fertile darkness of my imagination. I caught glimmers of their sleek odd bodies scampering through forests unknown. I saw their robotic eyes twinkling in the black void. I heard the ghostly buzz of their electronic hearts. Saw their teeth, lustrous with fixative. Saw their latex tongues, pink and dewy with polyurethane spit.

  I saw them roaring and flapping in a giant terrarium, bounding through velveteen foliage, nibbling at plastic fruit. They sat on their haunches, leonine and golden, under an artificial moon the color of Mello Yello.

  • •

  Our last breakfast together was a melancholy affair—remnants of a summer thunderstorm trickling down the floor-to-ceiling windows, the light outside a seasick green. Four middle-aged men slumped over scrambled eggs and toaster pastries, bracing our asses for return to the draconian whims of reality. The cafeteria was half-empty, most of the subjects having left already. Vernon was gone. Irvin was gone. Al was gone in spirit, inhabiting his chair with impeccable posture, forking eggs into his mouth with Victorian fussiness, spitting out robotic tidbits of polite conversation. But his pupils were dilated, his eyes filmed with an unwholesome sheen, hinting at some secret distress. And now his body was seizing up again, caught in a tremor. His hands trembled. His fingers crimped. He dropped his fork.

  We all stared at the fork, its leftmost prong lancing a gobbet of greasy egg, an abject morsel that made me turn my eyes toward the window. I thought of Kristeva’s Powers of Horror and its catalog of abject fluids: blood, pus, snot, piss, and shit—flowing and clotting, oozing and crusting. Remembering her obsessive description of the coagulated skin of proteins that forms on the surface of warm milk, I wondered if it was true that all of these things brought us in touch with our semiotic mothers, those prelinguistic, milk-bearing women whom we’d attempted to banish from our minds.

  I thought of my own mother, tried to remember the nubile version who’d suckled me, the one I’d greedily clung to as an infant and toddler, snuffling and licking, pinching and groping. But all I could envision was a pair
of tanned legs clad in olive Bermudas, a set of pretty feet with wriggling simian toes.

  A plastic kiddie pool glowed aqua behind her. Flowers swayed in warm wind. A lost world.

  “You all right, dog?” Trippy finally said.

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “Talking about Al.” Trippy chuckled.

  Al recovered himself, plucked up his fork, removed the egg bit with his napkin, and discarded the tiny bundle of filth. He spread a fresh napkin and resumed eating.

  “So,” I said, “we ought to get each other’s digits, stay in touch, you know.”

  “Right,” said Trippy, who immediately scrawled his number and e-mail on napkins for each of us. I did the same.

  “I’m kind of between phones right now,” said Skeeter, “and can’t seem to remember my e-mail password, but I’ll be in touch when I get that shit settled.”

  “Al?” I said.

  But he was already out of his chair, striding with his tray toward that window beyond which a plump, maternal woman toiled in steam, scraping abject substances from our plates before inserting them into the orderly symbolic grid of an industrial dishwasher, a machine that obliterated every last trace of flesh and grease.

  PART TWO

  ONE

  The parking lot was mostly empty, just as it had been when I’d arrived. Looking up at the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience, a faux brutalist monolith of precast concrete inset with greenish glass, I wondered if the whole ordeal had been a hallucination, the people I’d met figments, with no fleshy presence out in the world. I slipped on my aviators, stood listening to the tangled howl of traffic, and climbed into my truck.

  I cranked the engine, heard its familiar rumble, clutched the worn phallic gearshift, and breathed in smells of musty velour. I watched two seagulls spin above a dumpster only partially concealed by sculpted shrubs. And then I pulled out into the sprawl of Atlanta, a hodgepodge of medical parks and chain restaurants, and found my on-ramp. Though it was a straight shot down I-20, the sun was in my eyes most of the way home, and I felt like a man in a desert, squinting at a ball of fire, adjusting my car visor to no avail while cursing the broken mirror flap that forced me into existential battle with my own ugly face.

  Wincing at an onslaught of classic-rock clichés, I drove four hours without stopping, back to the little vinyl-sided house Helen and I had bought ten years before, now brutally refinanced in my name, mildew-speckled and in need of a new roof. I sat in my truck, not quite ready to jump back into my old life again.

  At last, as dusk came on, I hauled my old body out into the muggy air of my yard. Mosquitoes veered in to suck my blood. They bred in a drainage ditch that didn’t drain, its pipe clogged with detritus and slime—one of the problems I’d put on hold when flying off to revamp my brain. But there it was now: something I’d have to deal with.

  I walked up the pea-gravel drive, unlocked my door, took a deep breath, and stepped into my house. I smelled mold, leaking refrigerator chemicals, and lingering traces of Helen—the tropical tang of her waterproof sunscreen, the crisp lemon scent of her laundry soap, stubborn fragrances whose molecules had once stuck to her warm body, now empty of life—fruity chimera of the twenty-first-century olfactory-industrial complex, dead and haunting the dusty air.

  • •

  The next day, after cashing my check, I decided to drop by Emerald City Retirement Village and surprise my father by coolly slipping him five hundred dollars—a drop in the bucket of what I owed him but a sign of my new and improved life.

  Dad opened his back door cautiously, even though he’d gotten a good scan of me through the peephole. He’d taken to wearing suspenders on account of his stubborn potbelly and thinning frame, completing the jaunty look with midnight-blue cutoff Rustlers and Reebok EasyTones, puffy silver clodhoppers that made it look like he had robot feet.

  “Well, well, well,” he said. “Look who finally rose from the dead. Where have you been, son?”

  “Out of town,” I said.

  “Stopped by your place last week and the week before.”

  “Sorry you didn’t catch me at home.”

  “Shut the door quick. The AC’s running.”

  “Marble heavy, a bag full of God, ghastly statue with one gray toe.”

  “What was that, son?” Dad tilted his head like a hen. “This hearing aid is crap.”

  And then he ushered me into the deep interior of his prefab Cape Cod—seventy degrees, forty percent humidity, the draped windows sealed with caulk and insulated foam. I stepped into the ineffable miasma of his indoor lifestyle: the outgassing carpet, obscure air-conditioning molds, microwave-cooking effluvia, and scores of artificially scented products. In the blinding light of their kitchen, my stepmother, Marlene, a retired hairdresser, was thawing chicken in the microwave, adding a gamy tang of meat. Beyond the gleaming kitchen was the darker fluorescence of the living room. And Dad stood poised between the two realms, listening to the siren song of his wide-screen.

  “Romie! Long time no see.” Marlene enveloped me in a perfumed embrace. “He’s on nerve pills,” she whispered. “So his mind’s all over.”

  “What did you say, woman?” barked Dad, but then the TV pulled him back in. He stepped into the dimness of the living room, gravitating toward his futuristic La-Z-Boy. Because he had a guest, he did not sit down.

  “It’s that spot he had removed,” whispered Marlene.

  “What spot?”

  “He didn’t tell you? On his arm. Dark in the middle, uneven edges with a strange shape. The girl at the dermatologist said it might take a week for the tests to come back, and he’s a nervous wreck, swears it’s a melanoma that’s spread to his blood—so we got him on nerve pills.”

  Marlene resembled Robert Smith, the Cure’s lead singer, during his post-glam pudgy years when his cockatoo hair became a crunchy mess, his eyeliner perpetually smeared. She even favored tunics bordering on Goth—black lacy numbers with sequins and bows—which she wore with stretch pants and bedazzled sneakers.

  “Maybe you can help take his mind off it all,” she said.

  “I doubt it,” I said. “You know he’s a committed hypochondriac.”

  Marlene added a layer of frozen broccoli to a tier of chicken niblets, sprinkled on some grated cheddar, and swung around dramatically, eyes full of water, to clutch my arm.

  “It’s good to see you, Romie. You seem different. What you been up to?”

  “I have sailed this way and come to the holy city of Byzantium.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Nothing.” I shrugged.

  “I wish we could all go out to supper tonight,” she said. “There’s this new place out by the mall called Chuckling Newt Café. It’s different. Slow food fast. But you know how he is about his routine.”

  “I’m sure whatever you’re making will be delicious.”

  “Sweetheart.” Marlene cupped my chin with her hand and gazed soulfully into my eyes. Just when I feared she’d kiss me, she let me go. “Get your butt in here, Bob,” she yelled.

  • •

  At supper, the elders enjoyed mugs of Metamucil with their casserole, which was plated with whole-wheat pasta and crinkle-cut frozen carrots glazed with margarine.

  “So what’s new, Dad?” I said.

  “Did Marlene tell you about my melanoma?”

  “I doubt it’s an actual melanoma,” I said.

  Dad pointed at me with his fork, a carrot lanced upon it. “Melanoma’s no joke,” he said.

  In the bright kitchen light, Dad looked ancient as Tiresias. I could see green veins in the craterous flesh of his enormous nose. His eyes looked panicky, the pupils dilated, the bags beneath them heavy. His teeth were huge and yellow, darkening to umber near the receding gums. But his hair was thick, an iron-gray buzz cut Marlene kept impeccably trimmed.

  “Were you aware that you can get melanomas on your eyeballs?” Dad said. He speared a few fusilli with his fork, dragged the pasta through the casserole’s che
esy ooze, ate the morsel, chewed slowly, swallowed, and took a cautious sip of Metamucil.

  “I dreamed it got down into my lymph nodes, son. Turned my blood black as motor oil. I cut my finger: out dripped something that looked like molasses.”

  “Have you seen that show,” said Marlene, “where dogs do karaoke?”

  “In the dream I hovered above my body,” said Dad, “watched them cut me open. Just like the surgery channel.”

  “But the dogs aren’t really singing,” said Marlene. “It just looks like they are.”

  “I saw tumors all over my heart,” said Dad. “Looked like smoked oysters.”

  “The dogs wear clothes and wigs,” said Marlene. “It’s the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  The fluorescent strip lights flickered. The stainless-steel kitchen appliances cast sparks. The ceiling fan shot shadows onto the walls.

  I felt dizzy. I took a swig of iced tea sweetened with some chemical that had a bite. Dad’s skin glistened. The light was a strange blue white.

  “Some of the dogs can sing real good,” said Marlene, “but some of them are horrible.”

  Dad stood up. “You never know what’s inside you,” he said. “Where’s my flaxseed?”

  “Same place it always is,” said Marlene. “But I’ll get it. You sit down.”

  Dad refused to sit until Marlene had fetched his flaxseed. He shifted his weight from leg to leg and rubbed his ornery coccyx.

  “The largest tumor on record weighed over three hundred pounds,” he said.

  As Dad described the monster tumor, removed from the ovary of a thirty-year-old woman in 2010, I saw lightning flash in the kitchen. It shot from the refrigerator to the stove.

  And then I saw an image from the past: my father dressed in Carhartt coveralls, donning protective gloves, a helmet, boots. Lips pinched into a line, he descended into the gorge beyond our backyard, chain saw in hand. He’d be out there until dusk, fighting the jungle that, he insisted, threatened to encroach our house.