The New and Improved Romie Futch Read online

  “Your boo’s a bo?” said Skeeter. “You gay? It’s all good.”

  “Not exactly,” said Al, who adhered to Foucault’s formulation of homosexuality as a medicalized identity invented during the nineteenth century. “There’s no such thing as a homosexual, only homosexual acts.”

  “Bisexual, queer, trans?” said Trippy.

  “I’m done with binaries, though I don’t want to reaffirm their dichotomies with some lame attempt at deconstruction either,” said Al. “I’m just me.”

  We were discussing whether or not maintaining straight identification while dabbling on the do-lo was heterosexist when in walked Vernon Lafayette Hooper III, ne’er-do-well and squanderer of trust funds. A debauched prep from Beaufort, South Carolina, Vernon had spent a year at Wofford partying but never managed to grace a classroom with his presence, or even officially enroll. He’d blown his daddy’s money on intoxicants instead.

  “Greetings,” said Vernon.

  Man boobs pressed voluptuously against the fabric of his lime polo. His plaid shorts boasted a chartreuse element. Like a broiled ham freshly removed from the oven and glossy with grease, his face burned above his green attire. Vernon’s DTs were still in force, long after the rest of the BAIT crew’s had subsided. He was still twitching, still had that clammy quality of a dude sweating out poisons.

  I gave Trippy a look that said, Should we share our Pep with this booze fiend? And Trippy gave me one that said, Let’s keep cool and play it by ear at this present point in time. So I smiled a fake smile and took a discreet sip of my drink.

  “What’s up, Vern?” said Skeeter.

  Now, Vernon’s replies were often long-winded, going above and beyond in the purple-prose department, intentionally cryptic, somewhat incoherent, but, for the most part, decipherable. Tonight was a different story.

  “Gouty sniffles,” said Vernon. “Always already impervious, gleety, sleety, and bloated with testicular quintessence.”

  “Say what?” said Trippy.

  Vernon plopped down on the red egg chair with a sigh that seemed to go on and on, air leaking slowly from his puffed physique. He snorted. Crossed his legs. Squeezed them together and uncrossed them again, spreading his knees wide as though to air his genitals.

  “The existential ylem of evil eely voles,” he attested. “Midnight precipitation of chthonic swagger. Hark! Mine bladder. Hark! Mine bonnets. Oozing into the Pleistocene.”

  “I feel you, man,” I said, going along with Vernon’s coy new game, thinking he was highlighting the uselessness of verbal communication, the slippage between signifier and signified. Which was cool. But still.

  “Gerbilisms,” Vernon hissed. “Difficult to parse. Dirigible oblong peasant follicles in blooming obscene granite.”

  “What’s with the jabberwocky, bo?” inquired Skeeter.

  Vernon didn’t even glance Skeeter’s way. He groaned with Shakespearean theatricality and pounced to his feet.

  “Trollish and ecclesiastical!” he cried. “Tumid as rain! Geiger gravy in herniated perpendicularity!”

  Strolling out of the lounge, Vernon mumbled something about the “ectoparasitism of baroque unshaven cantaloupes” while shuffling his strangely tiny feet, which were shod in ancient, tattered Top-Siders.

  • •

  The next night at supper, Vernon didn’t sit with the BAIT crew in the cafeteria as he usually did but, after piling his plate with nothing but salad bar carrots and croutons, plopped down randomly at a table of touchy roughnecks, which happened to include my dear roommate Needle, plus a few other meth-corroded bastards of his ilk. We could hear Vernon going at it two tables over—“the silly hegemonic dentistry of bioluminescent hominids”—in a breathless rasp. Meanwhile, Needle scowled, consuming his cheeseburger in grim silence while a couple of his fellow troglodytes tittered.

  “Pantomimic regurgitations and pre-Copernican vicissitudes of elephantiasic lace,” said Vernon.

  Needle actually growled, squashing a french fry with his fork.

  “Zoological farthingales discombobulated by poontang,” opined Vernon.

  One of Vernon’s tablemates, finally recognizing a word he knew, hooted in appreciation.

  “Phallogocentric gorgons of diabolical hirsutism,” argued Vernon, “silurid and whiskery with malicious obfuscation.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” said Needle, who, I’m almost sure, assumed that Vernon was taunting him with scholarly riddles beyond his ken.

  Language had become a touchy subject with Needle. When forced to spend time with him, I was careful to use the simplest diction possible—the syntax of toddlers, the grunts of Neanderthals—so as not to set him off.

  “The quiddity of quidnuncs and squid,” ejaculated Vernon. Speaking louder, he went on: “Bamboozled by syphilitic logodaedalians.”

  Seemingly unaware of his surroundings, he spewed words, mostly obscure Latinate polysyllables. His voice grew louder, more annoyingly rhythmic, a tad more high-pitched. By this point, Needle was clutching a plastic fork in his white-knuckled fist. Al and Skeeter had both risen tentatively from their chairs, sensing that some violence was afoot but not committed to thwarting it just yet. In the blink of an eye, Needle’s fork prongs were impaled in Vernon’s neck. French fries were flying through the air. The cafeteria echoed with Vernon’s shrieks, the clatter of falling trays, the buzz of male voices crying out in what-the-fuck bewilderment.

  There were guards, of course, haunting the shadowy margins of our cheerful cafeteria. And they rushed into the light, darkly uniformed, reminding us that this was no vacation, no summer-camp jaunt, but an institutional operation, hierarchically structured, equipped with surveillance cameras and a well-trained security staff in keeping with that of a correctional facility. And we were just a bunch of thugs. We were low-life losers prone to violent episodes, each of us gridlocked into his particular subject position—race, class, gender, sexuality—squirming like some pathetic pinned insect. Kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species—the archeology of knowledge pressed heavily upon our socially constructed souls.

  One of the guards put Needle in a headlock. Two others took Vernon’s arms, gently lifting him as they guided him toward the exit. Although his stab wound trickled enthusiastically, it didn’t appear to be in a fatal place.

  And still he muttered, swiping absently at his gory neck. “Heliotropic hamadryas hurtling toward heinous hootenannies,” I thought I heard him say as he was escorted from the premises.

  • •

  After supper, Vernon didn’t drop by the Nano Lounge as he usually did. It was the same gang of four as the previous night, until Irvin Mood arrived to make it a quintet.

  “What it is, youngbloods?” he said. “Who’s got the skinny on Vernon?”

  Irvin had been AWOL the previous night and all day that day. He was over a decade older than the rest of us—fifty-four—and occasionally spent mealtimes and evenings noodling some reggae-funk fusion on his horn, a process that had not been significantly enriched by his downloads, because, according to Irvin, the kind of bullshit lollygagging they stuffed our heads with didn’t have jack to do with real art.

  “My roommate was at that table with Needle and his jiggy crew,” Irvin said. “Told me Vernon got shanked with a plastic fork. Said he was jive-talking too much grandiose bull.”

  “I’m pretty sure it was just gibberish,” said Al.

  “I don’t know, bo,” said Skeeter. “Maybe he’s in deeper than Derrida, or James Joyce during his Finnegans Wake stage. Maybe we ain’t advanced enough to decipher his shit—not on the first read, at least. Dude needs footnotes, marginal annotations, exegetical appendices.”

  “Or maybe his brain just busted out,” said Trippy. “Stuffed beyond his cognitive capacity.”

  “Jelly brain,” said Irvin.

  “Maybe he caught a virus,” I joked. “And some kind of bug lacing one of the downloads is fucking with his hard drive, wiping out data, sabotaging the language centers of his brai
n.”

  Every man in the room turned a shade lighter.

  “Wack,” said Trippy. He glanced toward the security camera. He whispered, “How the fuck is it that with all the nights we spend in here tripping on dialectic, the concept of a brain virus has not once entered our discourse?”

  “Maybe we been engineered not to think of it,” I said.

  “But where would a virus come from?” said Skeeter. “If the Center rigs its own downloads like the contract says.”

  “That’s no safeguard,” said Irvin. “And not necessarily straight either. Even if they are using in-house bio components for everything, the actual data has to come from someplace, right? E-books, electronic indices, even the lawless World Wild West of the Internet, all of it converted from old-school digital into wetware.”

  “Vernon was a freak to begin with, though,” said Al. “Never been good at a two-way convo of the collaborative sort. Thinks he’s smarter than the rest of us because he almost went to college. Wears his white privilege on his oxford sleeve.”

  “Totally,” I said. “Maybe his brain was always already too fried; no infrastructure for the data to stick to.”

  There we sat, sipping our Pep like medicine, our buzz deeply spooked. I was pretty sure that, just like me, the others were imagining rogue nanobots wreaking havoc in their brains, GM amoebae running renegade, munching through neurons like Pac-men. I was pretty sure they also imagined microscopic parasites mutating, changing their function, releasing terrorist electric signals, and slurping up neurochemicals. Maybe, as we sat there in the Nano Lounge drinking our crunk Dr. Pepper, we were changing into new creatures: posthuman cyborgs with no self-reflexivity, dupes of the Power Structure, thoughtless patsies of the Matrix.

  “Mucho wackoid,” said Irvin. “We got to find Vernon. See what they’re doing with him. See if he’s got anything solid to say.”

  • •

  First, we swung by Vernon’s room, where a poker game was in progress. Vernon’s roommate, Frankie, held court, chewing a cinnamon toothpick into splintery goo.

  “Haven’t seen him since supper,” he said. “Didn’t come back after he got shanked.”

  “When did you start noticing his peculiar behavior?” asked Skeeter.

  “From day one.” Frankie squinted over his cards, his lazy right eye caught in a mild tic. “Always been a weirdo. But two days ago is when he started up with the nonsense. Sounds like he’s reading the dictionary.”

  Next, we hit the infirmary, where Big Eduardo, a sprinkler-installation consultant from Vienna, Georgia, was getting an ingrown toenail looked at.

  “I seen nobody,” he said. We checked the laundry facilities, the reading room, every nook and cranny where ice or vending machines were stashed. We roved the dorm halls, knocking on the door of every last room, eighteen total, and asked questions. Nobody had laid eyes on Vernon Lafayette Hooper III since he got shanked.

  “Should we hit up Barney Fife?” asked Skeeter, referring to the residence hall monitor who manned the dorm security desk, a fellow who vaguely resembled Don Knotts (a hint of comic panic in his bulging eyes).

  “You know he’ll just be evasive,” said Trippy. “And immediately inform Dr. M that we’re sniffing around.”

  “You think they took him to the hospital?” said Al.

  “How about the BAIT Lab?” asked Trippy. “We haven’t scoped that.”

  So we headed downstairs, skirted past the cafeteria, and made our way through the eerie, empty halls toward the business end of the Center, the so-called Right Lobe, that warren of labs and cubicles where Dr. Morrow crammed our brains like sausages each day. The main door was locked. But when we pressed our ears against the reinforced stainless steel, we thought we heard rumblings, officious shuffling, muffled tech speak. We sensed the animal presence of human bodies. Huddled in an unlocked janitorial closet, we waited for almost two hours, slumped on the floor, breathing in disinfectant cleaner fumes. We whispered witticisms, sputtered with laughter, and devolved into scatological humor as we lost our Pep buzz, until, at last, we heard someone emerge from the lab complex and walk right past our door.

  “I don’t know if this guy Vernon is competent enough for release,” said Chloe, “given the state of his dendrites and those horrifying arachnoid cysts.”

  “Pretty gross,” said Josh. “Dude was competent enough to sign a release form, though, so the scan must’ve done something.”

  “Not exactly a state-of-the art program,” said Chloe. “And Dr. Morrow expects us to finish the new scans by next week?”

  “We can knock it out with a few all-nighters.” Josh sighed. “Got any Adderall?”

  “For a price,” Chloe said, her feminine contralto fluting upward into singsong before erupting with a terse giggle.

  We waited in the dark until we heard the pneumatic groan of the heavy exit door, a brief surge of crickets, and then: thick institutional silence, the hum of vents and pumps, fans and motors, obscure machinery tucked away above the ceiling and below ground, behind walls, going about its preprogrammed business in dark, utilitarian labyrinths.

  SIX

  That night, Needle didn’t retire to our dorm room to sleep in that fitful way of his, his skinny legs bedeviled by cramps, mouth sputtering with groans and threats (like, I’ll break your fucking neck). Though I was concerned about his sudden departure, I didn’t miss his harrowed ass.

  The next morning, when I appeared in the BAIT Lab for my nine o’clock session, I had my excuse ready. According to Irvin, our consent form had advised us to inform the technicians should we experience any unceasing headaches, seizures, blackouts, tremors, involuntary movements, and/or uncharacteristic nervous tics. There was no way in hell I was about to risk a brain virus, even if my poor noodle had already been stuffed like ravioli with dangerous organisms that, at that very minute, were reorganizing my gray matter according to their evil designs.

  I was about to tell Chloe I’d been racked with a migraine all night, the kind of vomit-inducing nightmare headache that reduces you to a pure blob of pain burrowing through endless minutes like a maggot through shit. But before I could speak, she disarmed me with her best kindergarten-teacher smile, though her eyes were bloodshot, encased in puffy, discolored flesh.

  “No BAITs today!” she sang. “After your test, you’ll be good to go.”

  “No downloads?”

  “Nope. Just an old-fashioned computer essay exam, the kind you took in high school.”

  “When I was in high school, we still scribbled with archaic apparati like ballpoint Bics.”

  “Cool,” she said, motioning for me to follow her. “Retro chic.”

  She led me into a gray grid of soft-wall cubicles, each one equipped with a desk, a chair, a tablet. After pointing out the micropad’s touch-sensitive keypad attachment, she shut the FiberCore door behind her. And there I sat until lunch, typing my poor heart out, pathetically longing to dumbfound whatever faceless authority figure would be reading the streams of words I wrung from my guts.

  The essay question that I chose from a lame list of five options was probably written by one of the grad students who toiled daily with the slow-witted subjects of the LPP control group:

  According to postmodernists, there’s no such thing as a stable, coherent identity, only socially constructed subjects whose realities are context bound and subject to change. Using the interconnected categories of race, class, gender, and sexuality, consider how Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), “Bloodchild” (Octavia Butler), and “St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves” (Karen Russell) each explore the concept of socially constructed, alienated identities.

  Upon first reading this question, I laughed—the feverish, what-the-fuck laugh of a ruined king at the beginning of act 5, two scenes before his spectacular decapitation. Each of the fictional works in question described subjected creatures brainwashed by authority figures of questionable objectivity. There were power struggles involved: hierarchies, class wars, bitter clashes
of ideology. The binary of civilized and uncivilized was questioned in each work and, to different degrees, tragically reaffirmed.

  I loved all three of these rich, dark narratives and was eager to strut my stuff. Realizing that the test designers were mocking my own recently acquired sense of postmodern self-reflexivity, however, I sneered bitterly. Those smug little bastards! They didn’t know who they were messing with!

  I could see them, sniggering as they dreamed up their trifling essay questions, positioning us as savages, cheerfully aligning themselves with the oppressive institutions that filled us poor beasts with specious educational light. I could see them, crammed three to an office at Emory, fussing with their computers as nubile undergraduates drifted in to shoot the shit. I could see them in nerdish dishabille, clothed by catalogs, bespectacled and suburb reared, strolling across swaths of campus green, oases of order and fertility amid the honking, dingy clusterfuck of Atlanta. I could see them as adolescents, talking smack to their poorly paid private-school teachers—these privileged bastards who could afford to blow two hundred thou of parental funds on fucking humanities degrees. These coddled creatures who dabbled in Marxism. These dog-walking brunch eaters who piddled with essays on the alterity of the colonized.

  And so I wrote. With slavering gusts of animal rage, I wrote—howling like a wolf, bellowing like a patchwork creature composed of stinking corpse parts, my monster face distorted with fury, my skin straining against the crude black stitches that affixed it to the pulsing musculature beneath. I was alive! Every nerve within me sparked with rage.

  Thankfully, I’d taken Basic Keyboarding at Swamp Fox High and could type seventy words a minute. By the time my three-hour allotment had ended and I lay my poor spent noggin upon the desk, just as I used to do during Miss Bussy’s fourth-period study hall, I had written a twenty-page essay. And it was good, especially the chilling conclusion:

  Unlike Frankenstein’s monster, I’ll never waste my time dithering over sophomoric Oedipal ontologies, the kind dreamed up by dinky-souled pseudointellectuals with balls like pellets of dirty, industrial ice. I’ll bolt this hellhole, leave you to a lifetime of Sisyphean institutional (and I use this signifier with full Foucauldian force) hoop-jumping. As Beckett put it, “Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.”