The New and Improved Romie Futch (31 page)

—
No shit. That's fascinating. Where do you find such specimens?

—
Out and about
.

—
Near the GenExcel lab, right?

—
How did you know?

—
Duh. No brainer. How close did you get to the lab? I'm just curious
.

—
Not that close
.

—
Did you get past the security fence?

—
How would I do that? Pretty serious fence
.

—
Where there's a will there's a way. You approach from north or south?

—
South, toward the Combahee
.

—
Pretty forested. Could you see much beyond the trees?

—
Nothing
.

Something about her relentless questioning, despite her casualness, reminded me of my recent interrogation, and my interlocutor morphed into yet another identity. This time I imagined the FDA agent (the tall, thin one) sitting stiffly at a Days Inn desk. But now s/he resembled Tilda Swinton. Dressed in ivory silk pajamas, short hair slicked from the shower, s/he studied my file, latching on to particular quirks and peculiarities. She wore no bra. Small breasts pressed against the silk of her pajama top, her dainty nipples alert like the snouts of minks.

—
You still there?

—
Yup. Just thinking
.

—
About what?

—
GenExcel
.

—
No telling what's going on in that lab. I would love to take a look, wouldn't you?

—
What do you mean?

—
We'll have to talk about that later. Got to scurry off to meet some friends
.

As she vanished into cyberspace, I wondered what she meant by that last line, wondered if she wanted to get together or if she meant the usual textual chatter. I spent the rest of the night trolling the websites of regional high schools, searching for English teachers that fit “Vic's” bill, scrolling through a thousand head shots of my state's intrepid educators until my head sank to my desk.

•  •

The following morning I woke past eleven. The residue of a few weird dreams lingered. I tasted strange chemicals in my mouth—as though I'd taken a huff of Aqua Net hair spray. And strangest of all, there was mud on my bare feet.

Sitting before a stark cup of black coffee, a vision flashed in my head: I saw an empty kitchen with warped linoleum, a brown-paper package sitting on a Formica counter. The kitchen was familiar yet peculiar: stained floor, smells of pet deodorizer and leaky plumbing accentuated by rain—
uncanny
, as Freud would say—and I shivered. I saw myself reaching to pluck the package from the counter. Saw myself clawing it open. Saw thick bundles of cash spilling out—orange $500 Monopoly bills held together with rubber bands. Husky masculine laughter echoed inside my head (I must have been asleep after all).

And now we will erase the experience by dissolving key synaptic connections in diverse areas of the brain
, said a familiar voice, a glib manly voice that blended the growl of a bear with the sultry insinuations of a lounge singer.
Subject 48
FRD
will not remember transferring the bills from location A to location B, though we're still working out a few kinks
.

And then
poof
—the vision was gone, hopefully a figment of last night's forgotten dreams, served up by my overwrought imagination. But there was mud on my feet. I couldn't ignore the mud, though I
had
gone through sleepwalking phases before: once as a child and once much later, when my mother's dementia took a turn for the worse. The first round had happened when I was nine, right about the time Mom had started suffering from insomnia. I had a vague memory of Mom opening the car door and pulling me out (I'd crawled into the driver's seat and curled up on the Naugahyde).
I remembered standing in pajamas on the freezing driveway, Mom slapping my cheeks with her hands.

“Earth to Romie; Earth to Romie,” she'd said, smiling to reassure me, but I could see the worry in her eyes.

Decades later, on one of my visits, Mom sat on the porch, absorbed in an intense round of solitaire. When she looked up at me with a smile of recognition, I knew we'd made a mistake. She was not as bad off as we'd thought. She'd been suffering a temporary setback (she'd recently tried to eat a lightbulb, cutting her mouth), but now she looked like her old self.

“What's up?” she said.

“Hey, Mom. Do you know who I am?”

Her green eyes scanned my face. She frowned. “Walmart?” she said, a triumphant grin erupting.

That night Helen found me outside, making my steady way toward the gorge that swept down toward my childhood home.

“Fuck,” she said after she'd roused me. “One more step and you would've fallen in.”

•  •

I sat in my yard in a lawn chair, pondering the voices I'd been hearing, methodically working through a case of Miller. Eyes fixed on the gibbous moon, I stared as though it might wax full any minute now, washing the planet with magnetic magic, goading the blood of beasts. I could picture Hogzilla, hot pink in moonlight, his eyes lit with bloodlust and pining for home. When he trotted down obscure trails to the locale of his birth, I'd be waiting somewhere in the vicinity, odorless and stealthy as death, a Savage .270 Winchester cradled in my arms.

I felt a prickle in my phantom pinkie finger, a keening of imaginary blood. I felt a pain deep in the bone. As I ached for this lost
part of myself, my missing finger became a synecdoche for all lost things in my life—women and mothers, youth and full-scalp coverage, soberness and the bliss of solid sleep. Most of all, I ached for
the future
as a shimmering, distant thing.

The night was quiet. I heard staccato dog barks and wind rattling through the dead gorge. It was not wind, I realized, but some sizable animal, scrambling up through dried wildflowers. I jumped to my feet, ready for whatever rabid thing would charge me—coyote or fox or feral dog. But then a shadowy human head popped up from the dark abyss.

“Romie,” a familiar voice hissed. “It's me.”

“Who?”

A man scampered up through the weeds, his face shrouded in shadow.

When, at last, my long-lost friend Trippy stepped onto level ground, my heart hammered with a warrior's love. There he stood on the open plain, my fellow trooper, the battlefield strewn with hacked human parts, corpses of horses, bloody bullet slugs. We embraced on the sad field.

“Trippy.” I stood back to get a look at him. He wore a dark knitted skullcap pulled down over his ears.

“Shhhh,” he whispered, scoping the yard. “Let's go inside.”

As he loped toward the porch light, I saw that his left leg dragged from some injury, that his jeans were mud-stained and torn. And I felt a sore place in my heart.

•  •

At last, I had Trippy J seated at my kitchen table, a can of Miller in his trembling hand. At Trippy's insistence, we both wore stainless-steel mixing bowls on our heads to scramble the nonstop barrage
of wireless signals that, Trippy claimed, pelted our souped-up brains. Trippy's skullcap sat on the table, surrounded by scraps of aluminum foil, the shield he'd concocted in a panic before fleeing his sister's basement.

The dude looked shell-shocked, ghoul-eyed. Ashy-skinned, brittle-haired, dry-lipped, and thin. Bedeviled by voices. Sapped by insomnia.

“What's going on, man?” I said.

“Where to fucking start? First things first, though: the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience no longer exists.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, I finally hauled my ass over there to see what was up, and the whole place is now Blue Cross Blue Shield.”

“An insurance office?”

“Judging by appearances. The building now has this big-ass crucifix on the side, hypocritical signage of the usurious institution in question. I quizzed the robot at the desk. I even snuck around a bit—nothing but straight-up office shit, as far as I could see. The whole interior had been remodeled, though the old Nano Lounge was still there, cubicle moles wolfing down instant noodles in a somnambulistic daze—no test subjects, no labs, no dorms, nothing.”

Trippy was troubled but still witty somehow, still rattling off streams of purple verbiage that were wine to my parched ears. We compared notes on blackouts and dreams, hallucinations and synesthetic episodes, uncanny sensations and acute déjà vu. Trippy, too, had suffered bouts of feverish, visionary creativity. He'd spent most of his postexperiment time in his sister's Atlanta basement, sawing at his cello, noodling on a thrift-store Casio, composing experimental pieces that he recorded on an eight-track analog Tascam.

“Started off sober,” he said, “sipping home-brewed kombucha, an ancient Chinese elixir concocted from fermented green tea. Then I
upped the ante with bhang tea and goji wine, which had my ass tripping old-school, heat in my flow, game in my tunes. Spent the wee hours grooving to the likes of Alfred Schnittke, Lindsay Cooper, and Sun Ra, constellations exploding inside my skull, white dwarves collapsing into pulsars, black holes evaginating into white-hot universes, dog. I was on a fucking roll.”

“But then the voices.”

Trippy sighed. His shoulders sank. The passion leaked from him.

“That and my stipend scratch was dwindling, even though I had weekly gigs lined up in this live karaoke band, an outfit that Irvin hooked me up with.”

“You talked to Irvin?”

“Just a few times. Put me in touch with this guy he knows. Solid work but beyond lame, playing for drunk college brats. Plus, I was starting to get paranoid about going out.”

Trippy described the voices that regularly broke through—a chorus of shrieking harpies, a flirty feminine giggle, but mostly this cheesy clinical baritone he presumed was
Dr. Morrow, gibbering medical mumbo jumbo, perhaps speaking to some corporate zombies, maybe reciting notes into a voice recorder.

“Shit got real when I realized I'd left my apartment one night,” Trippy said. “I could deal with voices, blackouts, lost chunks of time. But then I woke up covered in dog hair. Now, my sister, a middle-class prig and a germophile, hates dogs. As you may recall, I myself am deeply disturbed by the master-slave nuances embedded in the human-pet power struggle, the sadomasochism and mutual dependence that naturally flowers when a wolf forgoes wildness for the perks of domesticity. Reminds me too much of the human condition, I guess, but anyway, I digress: in short, I don't dig dogs, dog. Waking up after what felt like a dream, covered in dog hair, with Dr. Morrow gibbering away inside my dome made me think they're starting to play around with remote control.”

“Remote control?”

“You know, programmable human flunkies. Making us
do
shit.”

“Like what, assassinating spies and whatnot?” I forced out a croak of laughter.

“Don't get me wrong,” said Trippy. “I don't think there's necessarily any rhyme or reason to these experiments—just the lollygagging medical-industrial complex dicking around with their equipment. But the experiment continues, badly designed as it is.”

“Which means?”

“That Dr. Morrow and crew still have access. And they're fucking around with it. Just to see what they can make us do.”

“Access?”

“Wireless access. Not as reliable as before, but access for whatever so-called research their punk-ass souls can dream up. Which means that any interested parties could, conceivably, gain access to our commodified minds. And though I'd long suspected that they were checking in on us here and there, I didn't get too freaked out until the dog-hair incident.”

“When was that?”

“About a month ago. That's when I started experimenting with signal interruption, shamefully donning the proverbial tinfoil hat. And then, just yesterday, I had what felt like a dream in which I was investigating some kind of underground sewer area. When I discovered fecal matter on my shoes, that was it: I swaddled my skull in tinfoil, hid it discreetly under a hat, and headed straight to the Center.”

“To do what?”

“I don't know, check out the scene, see what was up, but my intentions were moot, because, as you know, the whole kit and
caboodle has shut down without a trace. So I hopped a Greyhound to Hampton to track down your ass.”

“It's about fucking time, man.”

“The tinfoil worked pretty well until I was in the bus station. Heard the damn voices again, seeping through the cracks, something that seems to happen in public places, key locales of the grid. What I needed was a stainless-steel bowl, but I still got a shred of dignity. Not gonna go traipsing in public with crockery on my head.”

“I hear you,” I said, not sharing my own story about the Monopoly money and the mud on my feet, fearing that Trippy's paranoia might be contagious, that I might soon become a member of the fabled tinfoil-hat set myself, a border that I did not wish to cross.

“You talked to Skeeter, perchance?”

“AWOL,” said Trippy. “Has been ever since we ditched the Center. Irvin hasn't heard from him either. I'm sure he's laid his hands on some kind of phone by now, and he's got our digits.”

“Only on paper, which is easy to misplace.”

“True that, but you can find people online—you know that. Even you've got a website. Maybe he just wants to shake the experience. Like getting out of prison—put the bad dream behind and get a fresh start. But still, once inside the prison-industrial complex”—Trippy took a solemn sip of beer—“you're in for life, dog. You got an internalized guard pacing in your brainpan, boots echoing, like, forever.”

When I reached for my beer, Trippy eyed my maimed hand, shot me some what-the-fuck bug eyes.

“So, like, I
just noticed
you were one finger shy of a full set.”

“Just noticed, huh?”