The New and Improved Romie Futch Read online

  Attempting an expression of infinite existential boredom, I slapped my coupon on the counter.

  “Suicide,” I said.

  As Larry filled my paper cup with Mountain Dew, Coke, Dr. Pepper, Diet Coke, Sprite, and orange Crush, the stinging fluorescent lights popped on, which meant that it was almost eleven, that hour when the skating rink shut down for the night. “I Will Survive” was still playing (Dr. Funk, merciful after all, always queued a rallying song for the jilted before tossing them out into the cold). I blinked like a mole and scowled. Suicide in hand, I rolled off toward the front desk, where my shoes were stowed.

  Out in the night my sleepy father waited in his idling truck, the radio set on oldies. His clothes smelled of tanning agents and formaldehyde. The creases on his face were deep. As the ice in my Suicide melted, my paper cup went limp, dissolving as we drove in silence through the empty streets of Hampton. It was January. We didn’t speak. I pressed my cheek against the cold glass and gazed up at the swarm of winter stars.

  That’s where that particular memory ended—neat as a vignette—and darkness shrouded my mind. My third BAIT download was The Bedford Anthology of World Literature, and I lay stunned as incandescent pulses of knowledge flowed through my unconscious mind. I don’t recall any sensation of data transmission, only waking up with lines from The Iliad dancing through my brain:

  With these words the goddess set in Helen’s heart

  sweet longing for her former husband, city, parents.

  Covering herself with a white shawl,

  she left the house, shedding tears.

  FIVE

  Three weeks and a hundred downloads later, I sat in the Richard Feynman Nanotechnology Lounge drinking fermented Dr. Pepper with Trippy J, my brain exploding with newfangled thoughts. We were discussing Thomas Bernhard’s tendency to assume privileged academic personas in his novels, while his memoir, Gathering Evidence, evoked his impoverished upbringing with an emotional intensity that his fiction tended to shy away from.

  “Except maybe Wittgenstein’s Nephew, which keeps it real, but with significantly more game,” said Trippy, whose real name was Ernest Jeffords.

  Trippy rubbed his temples, which were still crusted with BC gel. In keeping with the bio nature of the technology, Chloe had proudly informed me, the goop was composed of slug slime and some enzyme from a GM goat’s gut.

  “Nasty-ass, postindustrial, trans-bio ectoplasm,” Trippy said, scratching at his brow with a fingernail.

  Trippy was an aging player with ripped arms and a slight gut that he hid under voluminous sports jerseys. He perpetually donned a do-rag to cover his receding hairline. Neck and neck in the same BAIT schedule, we’d met during our first week at the Center, when we’d run into each other in a rare moment of unscheduled overlap between sessions. Since week two we’d been hanging in the Nano Lounge, hashing out our learning in lively scholarly debate, our tongues going full throttle like outboard motors.

  Bernhard’s entire oeuvre had just been uploaded into our brains. And we were digging the dude. In addition to laughing our asses off at his dark humor, we enjoyed his musical verbal motifs and antinationalist rants. We thought Bernhard kicked Thomas Mann’s pretentious swollen ass up and down the street.

  “Knocks his fuckin’ bourgeois mustache off,” I said.

  “Wanted to haul off and slap that old dithering bitch in Death in Venice,” said Trippy. “And not ’cause I’m homophobic either, dog. Lolita did the whole obsession-with-youth thing much better, went way beyond flirting with taboo. Homie can spit. Probed the whole titillating nightmare. Got down into the pink throbbing horror with black humor and spasms of genuine despair.”

  “Yeah, but Lolita ain’t homoerotic.”

  “True that. If the nymphet had been a catamite, that shit would have never flown.”

  In addition to the Bernhard, our brains were swimming from the slew of more theoretical “texts” covered in that day’s BAIT downloads: Gender Trouble by Judith Butler; Of Grammatology by Jacques Derrida; Postmodernism: The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson; Simulacra and Simulation by Jean Baudrillard; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison by Michel Foucault; and Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature by Donna Haraway.

  We had shit to talk. Our brains were on fire. And we still had at least a hundred downloads to go before reaching full cognitive capacity (FCC).

  “Fuck that punk Derrida,” said Trippy. “Got game in his flow but no heat.”

  “He had a few moments,” I said, “but, yeah, fuck that noise.”

  Moreover, this was the first night that Trippy and I tapped into our vat of Pep. We’d dumped a whole box of Dixie Crystals packets into a hundred-quart cooler of Dr. Pepper, added Robitussin and herbs, yeasting the elixir with a wild growth Trippy’d cultured in a quick-noodles cup. At last, the yeast cells had gone to town, and we had booze to swill. We were keeping it on the down low for obvious reasons, discreetly enjoying our heady swill in the Nano Lounge. Nothing stronger than ibuprofen was allowed at the Center, with the exception of the pharmaceuticals prescribed by Dr. Morrow, who’d recently weaned me off Sophiquel.

  We’d stashed the cooler in my dorm room in spite of Needle’s drug-hound nose. We could totally see that tweaking freak sticking his head into our vat hog-fashion to swill up our precious Pep. Nevertheless, we also intuited that the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience, despite its progressive lip service, would be more likely to ferret our vino in a black ex-con’s room. So we hid our cooler under my dirty laundry, careful to block the security camera with a piece of paper. Plus, we crowned the laundry pile with some Fruit of the Looms we’d smeared with chocolate ice cream. Trippy had learned this trick at Georgia State—not the university but the maximum-security prison in Tattnall County, where he’d done a few stints since his late teens for weed-related escapades: bullshit like intent to distribute, possession within one hundred feet of a park (a barren lot featuring an unused jungle gym that he didn’t know existed), and distributing to a minor (some seventeen-year-old at a party who he never even saw that night).

  “Ain’t nobody gonna touch your unmentionables if they think they’re smeared in feces,” Trippy advised. “The most taboo, most abject biological substance in the human catalog of thou shalt nots.”

  So far, Needle had stayed clear of that area, avoiding it as he would a biohazard-stickered waste bin.

  Trippy had also mastered the ancient art of alcohol fermentation at the clink. He could manufacture all kinds of intoxicating substances out of common household chemicals, food scraps, human biological effluvia, and herbs of the field gathered from the prison yard. That’s why peeps called him Trippy J. He was famous for a brew called Cobra—concocted from various pain-relief pills, gasoline, powdered lightbulb tungsten, and red phosphorous scratched from matchbox strikes, mellowed with dandelion root and a dash of lemon balm. The recipe had come to him at Georgia State, when he’d discovered a moldy nineteenth-century edition of Culpeper’s Complete Herbal in the library and Christmas lights started blinking in his head. He remembered his grandmother, who’d spent her life on Daufuskie Island bent over a hoe. She seemed to know all kinds of shit without the aid of books.

  “You think I absorbed one word of her bumpin’ herbal knowledge?” he asked me. I shook my head and smiled sadly, remembering my own freckled Meemaw fussing with her okra patch. She used to point out clumps of peckerweed in the woods, told me it was good for arthritis and male potency.

  “Course I didn’t get in on my grandma’s game,” said Trippy. “Thought myself too fly, missed out on a wealth of lore that might’ve kept my ass from supersliding down into the River Styx.”

  We chatted into the night, sprawled on the Nano Lounge’s endless IKEA sectional, sipping Pep as our cerebral networks sizzled with the electric blurps and neuro-alchemy of our most recent downloads. A plasma TV, mounted over the vending machines, presented the talking head of our president. A fake hick Tea Party jackass wi
th an Ivy League degree, he spit out sound bites about the war in Syria. Halfway into our second cups of Pep, the fluorescent overheads started to throb. So we switched them off, turned on the floor lamps, enveloped the room in a mellower mood.

  Test subjects drifted in and out, defeated males every one. While we figured there were at least thirty mortal men at the Center (judging by the cafeteria crowd), there were only six of us BAITs, as far as we knew, our heads on fire with enlightenment. Since the downloads were glaringly obvious in our speech, we could tell the difference between us and the others right after the phase-one BAIT downloads began. Plus, you could recognize a BAIT learner by the perfectly symmetrical bald spots on our cranial crowns, our subdermal transmitters spaced exactly like finger holes on bowling balls. By week two we’d all broken our confidentiality contracts, comparing notes about our experiences.

  We each got between four and six downloads a day, depending on our Cognitive Capacity levels and state of neuronal health. Meanwhile, we had learned, the other dudes from the various control groups (whom we called slow learners) digested a negligible percentage of the shit they pored over for eight hours a day, suffering a boredom-shame combo they hadn’t felt since taking rudimentary high school courses in rural ghettos and backwater towns. By eavesdropping in the cafeteria, we figured out that the non-BAITs either (1) received no lessons whatsoever but had access to a reading room full of old-school hard-copy texts, (2) sat through eight hours of tedious computer tutorials (CTs) daily, or (3) endured excruciating sessions with so-called licensed pedagogical practitioners (LPPs), i.e., male PhD-track students from Emory who already had master’s degrees. After less than a week, most of the LPP learners (including my dear roommate Needle) hated the fuck out of their tutors, breaching their contracts to shit-talk the young bastards from Emory. Their hostility only grew as they watched us BAITs blossom into brains.

  The living arrangements enhanced the dichotomy, pairing BAIT learners with slow learners, so that each of us BAITs had a sulky roommate, some poor loser who struggled daily with a more archaic form of pedagogy. The powers that be also coupled black dudes with black and white with white, expecting redneck racists and brothers seething with black rage, a potentially volatile mix, and they weren’t completely wrong. Needle, for example, liked to hiss the word nigger, as though, borne on a sputter of his acid spittle, the slur might burn any black face that got too close. And Charles Jasmine, a CT learner and crackhead from Cope, South Carolina, did threaten to “cut any cracker” who passed through the force field of his personal proxemics bubble. A couple of black–white altercations had escalated into fistfights, but so far, only two perpetrators had been removed from the facility.

  Most of the tension was not of the racial variety, however, but between BAITs and slow learners. As soon as they heard us talking our fancy talk in the cafeteria or Nano Lounge, they seethed with resentment and bonded together against us.

  By the end of week two, we six BAITs were clumped at our own elite table, gibbering spastically, our speech peppered with polysyllables and arcane academic cant. We started off simple, imagining professional wrestling matches between Aristotle and Plato, for example, or tallying up the number of atrocities in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus. Words like Machiavellian and sprezzatura were bandied about. By week three, we’d worked our way through classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, the whole kit and caboodle of European Renaissances, Reformation, Enlightenment, yada yada yada, zipping up through the nineteenth century to the false climax of high modernism, where, right after we got our bearings, our minds were promptly blown with all the posts (-modernism, -structuralism, -humanism, -colonialism). Thereupon, our Babel towers began to buzz with cacophonous tongues, mortar crumbling, brick chunks hurtling miles downward from heights beyond the stratosphere. The whole concept of a tower, of progress, is always already undermined by its own aporia, and that night we were reeling.

  After 9:00 PM, the rest of the BAITs began to pop in.

  “How’s your hammer hanging?” said Skeeter Rabin.

  A miniature hesher with long stringy hair and the enormous spooked eyes of a nocturnal monkey, Skeeter had also done time for weed-related shenanigans, which had derailed his career as a vinyl siding installation consultant and led him to the halls of this hallowed institution. Alvin Gooding, aka Al, was a Desert Storm vet and unemployed security guard from Goose Creek. With his horn-rimmed specs, stiff posture, and impeccably trimmed beard, Al looked like he could be on the cover of Black Enterprise magazine. Just like all of us, he had a history of substance abuse, though he was mostly into prescription meds (being a vet with chronic pain issues gave him a better excuse).

  After securing their eternal secrecy, Trippy whipped out our milk jug of Pep, which we’d stashed behind the sectional. Al took a hesitant sip.

  “Now we’re talking,” he said. “Trippy here has engineered a pretty decent bug juice—just what I need to clean the fizz out of my neuronal networks.”

  But who knew what went on within our actual neural tissue? Though we were getting “smarter” by the minute, we didn’t have much training in physiology. The technicians never gave us scientific downloads, mostly stuffing our heads with highfalutin humanities data. The closest we got to the hard sciences was through philosophy of science or cultural materialist critiques.

  “Y’all get Discipline and Punish yet?” asked Skeeter, his huge eyes aglow with enlightenment.

  “Aw hell,” said Trippy. “Don’t get me started on the Panopticon, the perfect metaphor for my punked state of subjection, my socially constructed soul bugging under the weight of hierarchical observation, the prison guard internalized. The Man inside of the man, man. Just watch any male of color walking down the street, eyes on the lookout for the hobgoblin Man, frequently materializing in the form of an armed cop. The prison guard’s inside you, dog.”

  “Pair that text with Angela Davis,” said Al, “and it’s a brain barrage. Makes me reevaluate my ordeal with Gulf War syndrome. Getting ganked by the gov and the medical bureaucracy. Had a boil on my leg the size of a tennis ball. What boil? they said. Took me six months, reams of paperwork, and eighty-five calls to the VA to get access to a doctor who didn’t know his ass from a hole in the wall.”

  “Word,” said Trippy. “I can tell you from personal experience that Davis nailed it: the prison-industrial complex, the punitive corporatization, the commodification of punishment. The police force is there to keep the underclass down. Prisons need warm human bodies to make bank. Brutal combo if there ever was.”

  Skeeter and I stared at our shoes—we were wretches, yes, and Skeeter had even done time, but we still enjoyed some of the perks of white privilege, particularly the luxury of growing up without constantly watching our backs. Plus, there was no telling what kind of deeply embedded racist societal shit tainted our unconscious minds.

  “Yeah, bo.” Skeeter shifted the subject, glancing up at the security camera we’d blocked with a potted plant. “Try adding micro-surveillance to the mix. The electronic trail any poor fucker leaves every time he surfs the net, uses a credit card, or calls somebody.”

  “And here we sit in an institution par excellence, punked subjects,” said Trippy, “our fucktard brains commodified.”

  “What you talkin’ ’bout, Willis?” said Skeeter.

  “What I mean is . . .”

  “I know: I am Ironic Man.”

  Skeeter always spoke this phrase in a Black Sabbath robot voice whenever we failed to detect his sarcasm. He was up out of his knockoff egg chair, pacing like a terrier, his Styrofoam cup sloshing with Pep.

  “Killer buzz,” he said. “I haven’t experienced this kind of killer upper-downer combo since my Tussin-weed-Adderall trio in the spring of 1999.”

  “You party like it was Y2K? Who with?” asked Al.

  “Girl named Rocky Revels.”

  “That’s a fake name if I ever heard one,” I said.

  “Swear on my mama’s grave.”

  �
��She ain’t got no grave,” said Trippy.

  “Actually, she does, bo, though her body ain’t in it yet: pre-need—Newspeak coined by the funeral industry. Mama ponied up for a two-for-one double plot at Sunset Memory Gardens in Stuckey.”

  “And you swear on this hallowed square footage that the girl’s name was Rocky Revels?” I said.

  “Cross my heart and hope to die. Her name was Rocky Revels. She had a wondrous ass, bleached hair the color of polar bear fur, the pallor of which was heightened by her orange suntan. We were groovin’ to Steve Miller out on her trailer porch, watching a meteor shower.”

  “Aw shit, dogs,” said Trippy, for we’d started up on women again, our longing heightened by the late evening hour and our delightful reintroduction to inebriation.

  Each of us had, stashed in the sacred cabinet of his chest like a nesting doll, some Laura, some Beatrice, some Lady Dulcinea del Toboso, beauteous beyond compare. I had my Helen, the face that launched a thousand ships. Skeeter had Rocky Revels, a girl he did drugs with during the late ’90s, who eventually left him to rot on a sagging sofa while she got her shit together and earned a paralegal degree. Trippy had Lady L, a DJ from Atlanta who’d interviewed Prince, a club hopper too sophisticated for the Trippy of that era, three shades lighter on the color caste hierarchy, suburb-bred and college-educated. He was a small-town hustler three weeks off a Greyhound when he’d first laid eyes on her dazzling form. He still carried her pic in his wallet. Would pull it out and raptly gaze. Showed it to me once and only once: a 1980s shopping-mall glam shot, immortalizing Lady L in a teal blazer.

  He let me gawk for two seconds before snatching it from my hand.

  “Part of the reason I subjected my sorry brain to this overhaul,” Trippy said quietly.

  Al was more cryptic about his true love, shrouding her nebulous image in dry-ice fog. For weeks he’d kept her cloaked in the mists of abstraction—pulchritudinous, incandescent, ethereal—wispy as a succubus, until, tongue loosened by Pep, he finally revealed that his succubus was an incubus, one special air-bear named Will Jones.