The New and Improved Romie Futch Read online

  “Don’t know,” Irvin said.

  “You didn’t get any, um, like, medicinal, I mean, pharmacological helpers? Shit, I wasn’t supposed to say that.”

  “I was psyching you out.” Irvin spoke quickly. “I got the dope.”

  We laughed. We did a high-five gesture but did not slap skin. And then Irvin went to work on his sushi for a minute or two.

  “So,” he said rapidly, “what brings you to this questionable institution?”

  “Divorce,” I spat. “Financial difficulties, chronic intoxication.”

  “I dig. I dig.”

  “How ’bout you?”

  “Credit-card debt, doobie saturation point, my band of a decade folded.”

  “You a musician?”

  “Trumpet.”

  “That’s cool. What kind of music you play?”

  “Fusion, uh, uh, amalgam, uh, I mean, uh, alloy, shit, uh, jazz, jive, bop, boogie-woogie. What the fuck? That’s wacked, man. Didn’t mean to say that cheesy scat.”

  Irvin clutched his cranium and worked his feral eyebrows up and down.

  “See you on the flip side.” Irvin stood up. “Got to take refuge, uh, uh, I mean, abscond, uh, crash in my, my, uh, pad, I mean cubicle, uh, chamber. Damn. So, uh, yeah.”

  Irvin picked up his tray and hustled toward the Rubenesque woman who rinsed off our filthy trays. She toiled in a gloomy room behind a window—plump and swathed in steam. I looked away from her, but the words would not stop. Nurturing, fecund, maternal, fructiferous. Voluptuous, lactiferous, primeval, rich. I could not stop verbally wallowing in her roseate fleshiness, rollicking in her succulence. I longed to slither into the humid room and nestle my head between her mammaries, bask in sensation like an infant, drinking in the synesthetic riot of sight-smell-sound-touch. But I hurried over and dropped off my tray. Averting my gaze, I fled to my room.

  • •

  My room, of course, was no place of refuge. There was Needle, smoking a cigarette, pacing to the final throes of some death-metal paroxysm, packing the tiny space with smoke and his signature odor of rotted leaves and laundry perfume. And there was another weird olfactory undernote, something chemical that, I theorized, issued from his meth-addled flesh. The Center had provided him with pills to ease the withdrawal pangs, thank God, and a plastic bottle lay overturned on his dresser, surrounded by Dr. Pepper cans and crushed Marlboro packs.

  He regarded me with a sneer.

  “Shit ain’t workin’!” He waved his clenched fist. “I done took at least ten pills.”

  “Probably, um, like, an excessive, I mean, extravagant dosage,” I offered.

  “What?”

  “Too many pills!” I shouted.

  “I can’t hear you!” he shrieked.

  Of course he couldn’t. His MP3 volume was so amped that I could decipher some of the lyrics spurting out (I’ll drink your blood and eat your bones and shit you out when you are gone). Needle shot me a lewd, cannibalistic grin and turned off his player.

  “Fuckin’ vocabinary words,” he muttered. “I’ll ream them up your asses.”

  “Vocabulary words?” I asked him. “What do you mean?”

  “Vocapilary.” He eased closer to me, his zombie maw gaping. “I ain’t supposed to talk about it if I’m gonna get my cash. But they got some pip-squeak college dork teaching me how to talk.”

  “That’s cool.” I backed toward my bed. “It’s all good, um, commendable, um, like, goddammit, exceptional.”

  Needle scowled and seemed on the verge of jumping me. But then his eyes went wonky and he sat on his bed.

  “Hey, I think this shit’s working now. Ah yeah.”

  He stripped off his shirt (the poor fucker was perpetually overheated, despite the excessive air-conditioning), tossed it onto the floor, and sprawled out on his bed.

  I walked down to the communal restroom to pop my Sophiquel in peace. When I returned, the reptilian cretin had fallen into something like slumber, though Needle never ceased to fidget and mutter.

  I lay down on my bed. I closed my eyes. As I scanned the day’s events in my head, words continued to assault me from every angle. I recalled Josh leaning over me to adjust one of my BC transmitters, his ephebic mustache shining like angelic down. I envisioned Chloe, nubile and fecund, dewy as a damn daisy, caressing my cranium with her soft hands. I dallied with visions of her opalescent thighs, her delectable neck, her red, nectarous mouth. I would have resorted to onanism had Needle not been three feet away, a handy anaphrodisiac. And the Sophiquel seemed to be working, subduing the swarms of words.

  I reviewed my experience in the laboratory, trying to remember when, exactly, I’d felt language stirring in the depths of my soul like a vast flock of birds in a dark forest. I remembered the dream I’d had just before going under—not simply a dream but a bona fide flashback of Helen—vibrant, animated, pulsating with life.

  I could still recall the elusive smell of my Camaro’s moldy interior. I could hear the frogs singing. I could almost taste Helen—booze and Bubblicious and a faint hint of snot. I remembered how shame over my relative inexperience had melted away as I’d gotten lost in that endless first kiss, which brought on a whole new heap of memories about the best summer of my life.

  Helen had lost her virginity to a ferret-faced asshole named Farrell Sims, but I became her first true lover. Within a month after first hooking up, we’d fallen deep into the spasmodic throes of teen coitus. Every second of every minute we dreamed of the raptures we’d taste during our free hours, in the back of my car, in forests and swamps, in air-conditioned bedrooms whenever we were lucky enough to find ourselves in an empty house. No matter what we were doing, our minds remained fixed on the bliss we’d snatch, like the crosshairs of a rifle poised brutally on a flower, some delicate concoction of dew and scent that we’d blast to sodden mash.

  We fucked in graveyards, under bleachers, in the plywood-smelling skeletons of houses half-built. We fucked in patches of woods too scant to host a squirrel, in toolsheds reeking of motor oil, on the roofs of our own houses as our parents sat narcotized before televisions. No place was too humble or too gross to house the portable Eden of our mutual desire. We could not refrain from touching each other, no matter where we were—buying condoms at Revco, caught up in a Fritos-or-Cheetos dilemma at the Piggly Wiggly, or, while attending the visitation of Helen’s dear Aunt Doody, stealing a few caresses in the janitor’s closet of Shives Funeral Home.

  Our bodies brimmed with the sap of adolescence, the same stuff that dripped from pimples and shot through veins to bring on sudden fits of angst. Sometimes we seemed as helpless as coupling rabbits, guided by pheromones and neurochemicals, robotically seeking that exquisite brain burst of oxytocin, dopamine, and adrenaline that obliterates the universe for a few seconds, or makes you one with the universe, or makes you become the universe as you behold the entire whirling cosmos in that sweet warbling vortex that blooms from a pesky genital itch.

  So, yes, we were addicted to each other biochemically, like the musky young animal machines we were. But we were careful. I shot my spunk into countless tubes of latex. Zillions of sperm, each one endowed with its own mysterious genetic cachet, bit the dust. And each month Helen’s hopeful egg dissolved into goo and passed from her body.

  Our ceaseless carnal acrobatics were accompanied by declarations of eternal love. Our love was so huge that only tumid ballads like “Nights in White Satin” could halfway express the swooniness of it all. Our love was so formidable that we felt confident it would conquer everything in its path, like a horde of Visigoths sweeping over the globe, obliterating villages, cities, entire civilizations.

  Our love outlasted our senior year. Our love continued when Helen went off to Columbia to attend USC while I piddled at Trident Tech. Our love survived her dalliance with an art student and my trysts with sweet, laughing Crystal Flemming, a girl with innocent panda eyes and sparkly nail polish. Our love flourished through the madness of my mother and the suicide of Helen�
��s father and her bitter return home, marine biology degree half-finished. Our love burned on as I dropped out of Tech and took on my father’s trade. Our love prospered as Helen earned a phlebotomy certificate and began her tedious employment at Palmetto Blood Plasma Donation Center. Our love thrived into our late thirties, prevailing in the wake of Helen’s miscarriages and fertility treatments, my alcoholism and Xanax addiction, the clusterfuck of the twenty-first century, with its terrorists and nanobots, its chat rooms and dark matter, cyber wars and wikis and genetically modified meats.

  Our love kept on ticking, like a fluffy, robotic bunny trudging in circles in an empty room, until one ashen afternoon in January, when I was taking inventory in my shop, reviewing unpaid accounts, assessing the buck heads and mallards that Hampton County’s poor fuckups could not afford to pay off, Helen walked in with her job-interview face on and announced that she had leased an apartment. She would be moving out in a week. She hoped our disentanglement (she did not use this word) would not be too messy (her word, precisely).

  I took three Xanax, drank a pint of Beam, and slept in the lobby of my shop, without a pillow, on the ancient vinyl couch. I spent the next year in a drunken dream, trudging from freezer to microwave, from TV to shitter, from living room couch to the bedroom, and, after gazing at the bed that Helen and I had once shared, I’d trudge back to the couch and crash there because I couldn’t tolerate the thought of smelling a ghostly trace of her scent on the sheets, nor could I muster the energy to wash said sheets, nor buy new ones, nor locate an alternate set in the house. So I crashed on the sofa, sans covers in the summer, under an ancient electric blanket when winter reared its fugly albino head.

  Which is why I was now in the clutches of a mad scientist, my brain souped up with nanobots, trying to fall asleep three feet from a muttering meth head. When I finally nodded off, the words were still coming, clustered around images of Helen.

  From the Greek, Eλνη, Helene, her name went way back, was probably the appellation of an ancient vegetation goddess and symbolic of fertility and life. I could picture her, verdant and fructiferous, asprawl in some lush, emerald valley, bedecked with flowers and offering her melons to the sky.

  But as I slipped into sleep, I saw her popping a beer, pulling a pan of home fries from the oven, filling our tattered kitchen with life. I saw her squirming closer to me on the couch, snorting over the lies of some talking-head politician on TV.

  “Listen to this idiot, pretending like he’s human,” she said, conspiring with me, mindlessly massaging my arm—her love ordinary, reflexive, miraculous.

  FOUR

  I was back in the BAIT Lab, waiting for Dr. Morrow, surrounded by pulsing, luminescent ectoplasm. I sat in the hot seat, watching the organic components of the biocomputer undulate and twitch. Although the liquid was an electric blue, the biotech organisms steeped in it were distinctly fleshy, fraught with nervous tissue, covered in veiny rinds and wavering a thousand cilia. They reminded me of those obscure ocean animals Helen once dreamed of studying, those alien creatures that gathered around deep-sea vents to suck sulfur, strange organisms that manufactured their own light. We spent many a night watching documentaries on the deepest part of the ocean, those depths where the sun did not penetrate, where the pressure was insane, the water unfathomably cold and isothermal. We’d drink beer and sink into mysteries of the deep, Helen speaking quietly about the reclusive animals, almost whispering, as though she didn’t want to disturb them. And then she’d go silent and sad, thinking about her unfinished marine biology degree, the different life she could’ve had. Back then she’d still sink into me, nuzzle my neck with her wet-eyed face, letting me know without saying it that I was enough for her.

  I was trying to remember the last time this had happened when Dr. Morrow strolled in wiping crumbs from his perfect chin. Chloe and Josh were hot on his tail.

  “How are we doing this morning?” the doctor asked.

  Chloe flicked on my brain hologram.

  I watched my multicolored brain rotate.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Guess I’m feeling kind of uncanny.”

  “Uncanny, eh?” said Dr. Morrow. “That’s it? Not mystified or preternatural or anything else?”

  “Those aren’t bad words, but uncanny seems more apt.”

  “You’re not feeling overwhelmed by verbiage this morning?”

  “Not really.”

  “Any conceptual delays or gaps in your thinking?”

  “Nah. I’m actually having trouble distinguishing between the old and new diction.”

  “That’s a good thing. Headaches?”

  “Not at the moment. I had one last night, briefly, though it might’ve been the MSG in my lo mein.”

  “Dissociative identity or cognitive dissonance?” Dr. Morrow tested my BC transmitters with his little wand.

  “Actually, now that you mention it.”

  “Don’t worry, a little DI and CD are both perfectly normal as you adjust to the BAIT downloads. Now, Chloe, let’s have the phase one verbal.”

  “Just a little test,” said Chloe, placing a micropad before me, the screen displaying a series of multiple-choice questions. “You scroll through like this and touch your answers.”

  She fingered the screen.

  “I know how to work it.” I huffed, feeling a familiar sense of dread, the desire to flee a high school classroom, take refuge in my Camaro, and cower in a cloud of weed smoke.

  “Good for you.” She clapped her hands and retreated, pausing at the door to give me an encouraging smile.

  “Just press the red SUBMIT button at the end.” She slipped out of the room.

  I stared down at the first question, my panic subsiding as I read through it with ease:

  Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and knowing that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that though groves of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to spout thick blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for again in unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied jet would once more be seen.

  1. The passage implies which of the following about the White Whale?

  A) The White Whale is dead, for its sides have been impaled with numerous spears, and the animal has spurted gallons of blood into the ocean.

  B) The White Whale is the name of a slow cruise ship, and it is far quicker to travel by airplane.

  C) The White Whale is unkillable, and even if the animal appeared to be gravely wounded, filling the ocean with blood, it would pop up alive and happy in some other part of the sea, its spume clean and healthy.

  D) The White Whale is a magical island, and fruit trees have been planted on its body.

  I zipped through the test in thirty minutes, answering reading-comprehension, fill-in-the-blank, and sentence-equivalence questions. When I pressed the red button, Chloe breezed in, beaming. She plucked up the micropad.

  “Very good,” she said.

  “How many did I get?”

  “Dude,” said Josh, rushing out from Dr. Morrow’s lair. “You aced it!”

  “Not a bad start,” said Dr. Morrow, cruising in with his own personal micropad, a model I’d never seen. “Though the numerical aspect is confidential. Just know that you are doing well. And now I do believe we are ready to rock and roll.”

  “What’s on the docket today?” asked Josh.

  Dr. Morrow read the titles listed on his screen. “The Art of Rhetoric, Bulfinch’s Mythology, and Rhetorica ad Herennium.”

  “Cool,” replied the hobbledehoy.

  Josh smeared my BC transmitters with gel. As Chloe leaned over to install my electrodes, Dr. Morrow typed something onto his keypad, and I sank into a well of darkness again
, the three of them peering down at me over a distant circle of light.

  Then I was in the Swamp Fox High art room, an airy space with a darkroom and special alcoves for artists deemed gifted—not officially by BSAPs or IQ tests but by Mrs. Breen, our art teacher, an aging hippie who wore paint-spattered wraparound denim skirts with suede boots. Mrs. Breen coddled my talent, gave me free rein of the kilns and darkroom, the glazes and oil paints. Each school day between two and three I sat in Advanced Art, in a small room sequestered from the dabblers and hacks, with two other students: a hot Goth named Alexandra Cunningham, who’d been accepted to Duke on a full scholarship, and my fellow stoner Lee Decker. (Mrs. Breen, bless her heart, had a soft spot for stoners.)

  While Alexandra painted brutal abstract images that looked like mangled and dripping bits of flesh, Lee attempted the epic task of representing every song on Led Zeppelin IV in oil paints. Meanwhile, I fashioned hand-built clay sculptures of grotesque hybrid beings—part human, part animal, part mythological entity.

  I could see myself, the young artist at work, my dark Byronic mullet flowing over the collar of my King Crimson T-shirt as my hands caressed a lump of wet porcelain clay. I pinched it into the likeness of a voluptuous female nude with a fish’s lower body and hair cascading past her ass. She resembled Helen, with her sly simper. I spent hours stippling her fish parts with a pipette to produce scales, which I glazed a deep black green and brushed with a shimmer of gold. I adorned her hair with actual hummingbird feathers and glued a set of epoxied luna-moth wings to her delicate shoulder blades. I created a magical diorama in which she dwelt with chubby octopus men and leering sea monsters. I even installed black lights, a tiny fan that made Mylar ribbons waver like psychedelic seaweed, and, upon the recommendation of Lee Decker, a cassette player (secreted in the display’s hollow wood base) that submerged the whole scene in the ambience of “The Ocean.”

  “I’m not stealing your thunder by using Zeppelin?” I asked him.

  “Naw, man,” he said. “It’s like a movement, you know? Like the Dadaists or the abstract expressionists.”