The New and Improved Romie Futch (7 page)

“A two-dimensional facsimile?”

“You got me there. A three-dimensional facsimile.”

“Same skills, man. Funkabilly, hep hop, zamrock jazz. Whatever. Never did like labels. Fusion's the only genre that works for me on a semantic level.”

“I reckon there's something to that.”

“Damn straight there is.”

Caught up in a hermetic reverie, Irvin went to work on his salad. It occurred to me that his dreadlocks were vaguely Medusan. It occurred to me that his goatee made him look like the quintessential philosopher king. There had been a time in my life when I'd briefly considered the artistic possibilities of taxidermy, though I'd always characterized anything falling outside the naturalistic tradition as a novelty stunt, and hence, not Art with a capital
A
. And this dichotomy had stifled the kind of artistic expression that might've saved my ass from the clutches of Bacchus.

“Well,” said Irvin, tossing one last crouton into his mouth, “I'll catch you on the flip side. Got to close the shades. Got an early date with Hypnos tonight. Phantasos, you trippy old head, please be kind to me during this round of slumber!”

Irvin shook my hand. And then the gray-haired senex strolled off with his tray, leaving me alone in Tartarus, a place so low that a bronze anvil dropped from Earth would fall for nine days before reaching the cursed realm.

•  •

“Congrats,” said Josh as he scanned my multiple-choice rhetoric test. “You killed it, dude.”

“What was my score?”

“Classified.” Chloe winked like a Bond villainess and then tested my BC transmitters with her fairy wand.

“One more download, and you'll be ready for phase two,” she said.

“Where's Dr. Morrow?”

“With another subject,” said Josh, “but he'll be here ASAP.”

Although Dr. Morrow was often
with another subject
, I hadn't yet run into anybody in the tiny waiting room of the
BAIT
Lab, the retro vibe of which evoked the subtly funky 1970s office of my childhood pediatrician (olive plastic chairs; pumpkin vinyl couch; macramé owls that gazed into my soul with huge wooden eyes)—an association that made me envision the '70s incarnation of my mother with her sleek, long hair, bell-bottom jeans, and loud-print, neo-peasant blouses fabricated from petroleum products. She kept it real, never lied about what would happen in the depths of the doctor's office.

“Yes, you'll get a shot today,” she'd say, “but it'll be over quick. Just a bee sting, nothing you can't handle.” She looked away when I got the shot, bit her bottom lip as though she could feel the needle prick. She'd take me out for a Happy Meal afterward.

“Pure-T trash,” she'd say, “but you earned it.”

Now, as I waited in the
BAIT
Lab, I got the feeling that I'd traveled, à la
Fantastic Voyage
, into some psychedelic chamber of a dreaming giant's brain. In the windowless room, which had that ineffable hospital disinfectant smell, I felt the beginnings of a panic attack. I hoped that Dr. Morrow would soon appear like Hermes to reconfigure my mortal brain, and then I'd be distracted by some random memory tugged from an obscure fold of my temporal lobe.

I recalled a game Helen and I used to play, in which we'd vow to remember a particular incident for the rest of our lives—like the time an ancient woman had appeared in the park, a tiny silky monkey perched on her shoulder, its fur iridescent in the summer sun.

“Gremlin,” Helen whispered, taking my hand. When the woman vanished into the rose garden, we vowed to remember her and her monkey for the rest of our lives. So far, none of the set pieces had appeared, and I began to wonder if the originals were stashed in my head after all, or even copies of copies from all the forced remembering that Helen and I had done over the years, a process that I'd once seen a show about on the Discovery Channel. Now I couldn't remember how it all worked. The room felt cold. And the hospital smell was filling my system with mild dread, the fear that my body would be cut open, that some essential organ would be removed.

“Roman Futch,” said Dr. Morrow, looking even taller than usual. “Sorry you had to wait.”

Chloe was back too, this time without Josh, looking like a priestess in her pale blue smock. She fiddled with her micropad.

“How do you feel?” the doctor asked.

“A touch of anxiety.”

“To be expected. Any depersonalization? Derealization?”

“A little of both, I reckon.”

“Do you ever regard yourself from a distance, as though you are outside of your body and watching a movie of yourself?”

“Every time I get a
BAIT
download.” I pointed at the hologram of my brain, which rotated in its usual spot.

“Naturally, but otherwise?”

“Only when dreaming.”

“Have you had any trouble recognizing yourself in the mirror?”

“Unfortunately not.”

Dr. Morrow chuckled politely, a kind of fake musical cough. He regarded the floating image of my brain, studying it from several angles and typing notes.

“Have you experienced any garbled speech, spoonerisms in particular?”

“Like,
the Lord is a shoving leopar
d
?”

“Exactly.”

“Not that I can remember.”

“Josh says you
aced
this morning's test.”

“Yes, but he was rather hazy about the numbers.”

“I do believe we are ready to rock and roll,” Dr. Morrow said, ignoring my comment.

Quick as Hermes, the doctor fingered his sacred tablet. And I sank, bracing myself for whatever image would materialize in the darkness.

Two seconds later, I was at Concrete Pond, a feed warehouse transformed into a magical skating rink in 1984. I could smell corn dogs and popcorn, the limbic alchemy of polyurethane floor shellac and nylon utility carpeting. I could hear the cheesy DJ Dr. Funk, tucked mysteriously behind his window of smoked Plexiglas, calling all foxy ladies to the rink for Ladies' Special Skate.

I sweated adrenaline. A drop of testosterone trembled upon each of my myriad zits, the pustules themselves aflame with purple triumph. After strutting my stuff to “Mr. Roboto,” I'd been declared champion of Guys' Special Skate. I'd ended my routine with a bold jump over the fallen toad-shaped body of Brent Stein, a clammy math whiz with a cryptic smile and Coke-bottle glasses. I'd earned not only a three-dollar snack-bar tab but also the privilege of taking the hand of the Ladies' Skate Queen during Couples Only.

And now Helen, aka Hell on Wheels, was gliding onto the floor for Ladies' Special. She froze, closed her eyes, waited for the beat to rouse her from her mannequin pose. Clad in a pair of painted-on Gloria Vanderbilts, sporting a flimsy top the color of Gatorade that highlighted her incipient breasts, she pumped her narrow hips as the intoxicating bass riff of “Maneater” began. In the flashing disco light, she twirled and leapt and thrust her delicate pelvis,
interspersing
Solid Gold
moves with elegant ballet. Embodying all that was sexy and feline, she became the quintessential man-eater.

Dr. Funk declared Helen the Queen of Friday Night. Following the DJ's instructions, I rolled bashfully forth, took her sweaty hand into my own sweaty hand, and led her to the proverbial dance floor. Dr. Funk dimmed the lights and slowed the strobe. He immersed the rink in a rosy glow. Round and round we rolled, hands clasped, as Lionel Richie and Diana Ross sang ecstatically of “Endless Love.” I had problems looking directly at Helen. Her profile hovered just to my left, hazy and angelic. And then the song ended.

“Later, alligator.” Helen pivoted on her back left heel and skated away. Eviscerated with emotion, I rolled to the boys room (its door marked with a sparkly sign that read STUDS) and almost threw up. I'd eaten two hot dogs and three Butterfingers. I'd tossed back shots of Mountain Dew with sizzling jolts of Space Dust on my tongue.

Sneering at my stupid face in the mirror, I adjusted a crunchy strand of gelled hair, took a deep breath, and went out to find Helen. What I'd say to her was anybody's guess.

The lights on the rink had deepened to an eerie purple black. Skeezy older guys with mustaches were milling around the video games. “Hungry Like the Wolf” was on, Simon Le Bon panting as he chased a sleek panther woman through the jungle of his desire. I spotted Helen, hunched over the Ms. Pac-Man game, caught up in a maze, eating dots. To her right, slumping with sexy ennui in black jeans and a jacket of fringed suede, his blond hair resembling the crest of a cotton-top tamarin, was Farrell Sims. Reputed to smoke weed, sip from a flask, and bang married women, he was a bad boy par excellence. He drove a Trans Am as black as Satan's goatee. And there he was, eyeing Helen's
taut little ass. She was thirteen. He was seventeen. She was likely a virgin, while he, according to rumor, had spent the afternoon dallying with a plumber's wife, taking bong hits while listening to Fleetwood Mac.

I'd seen such movies as
The Karate Kid
, however, in which the Macchio men of the world prevailed over the macho—those confident assholes with pectoral muscles and fancy cars. So I maneuvered toward them. Stood on the other side of Helen. Watched her squeal as her fourth Pac-woman got melted by a ghost. And then she, without even glancing my way, rolled off with Farrell Sims.

I watched them share a plate of nachos. Watched her mock slap him when he put his hand on her knee. Watched them roll out onto the rink for the next Couples Only, Farrell skating backward with the effortless aplomb of a pro while stooping to receive Helen's embrace. My girl laced her slender arms around his manly neck as “Love Lifts Us Up Where We Belong” caressed them with gentle melodies. Sitting on a rink-side bench, I took in the whole sickening spectacle. After the song reached its soaring climax, eagles crying from mountain cliffs as poor wretches watched in awe from the earth below, I saw them leave together.

I imagined him whisking her off in his Trans Am, deflowering her in some seedy parking lot. As soft porn flickered inside my skull, I watched Brent Stein skate alone, hands clasped behind his back, a look of intellectual constipation on his face as he rolled around in the gloom. I fought back tears as “Total Eclipse of the Heart” plunged me into exquisite depths of degradation and despair. Dr. Funk knew what he was doing. Now I can see him for what he was, a washed-up disco duck from the funkalicious '70s, a demented Oz figure chuckling behind his Plexiglas screen, pulling the heartstrings of overwrought teens with the latest Top 40 schmaltz. After the final Couples Only, knowing that
tortured souls skulked in the shadows, racked with envy as lovers came together in bliss, Dr. Funk always played a song of heartbroken despair.

Feeling a total eclipse of the heart, I staggered toward the snack bar with my three-dollar prize coupon. There was Larry, awash in eerie light like the ghost bartender in
The Shining
. Larry, with his puffy worn face and devil-may-care feathered hair.

“What's yer poison?” Larry drawled, as though we were in some badass movie together.

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.