The New and Improved Romie Futch (10 page)

“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
BAIT
s 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.”

I e-mailed the essay to myself for posterity.

•  •

At lunch I discovered that the rest of the
BAIT
crew had also spent the morning writing essays. Everybody but Al (who'd wanted to write about queer theory) had selected the same question I had, and had also erupted into angry passion over the ironic connections to our own pitiful states of subjectivity, with the exception of Irvin, who usually maintained an aura of Zen-like calm. We spent most of our lunch break rabidly discussing our essays, until Irvin rapped his plastic knife against his Coke can to silence us.

“Why's everybody ignoring the mastodon in the room?” he said. “Big hairy son of a bitch up on its hind legs roaring. They suddenly decide to forgo the usual download schedule and fake us out with an essay test the morning after Vernon's brain blows a fuse and he checks out of Dodge, supposedly on his own volition? WTF? Do you copy?”

“Roger,” said Al. “Let's just wait and see what they do after lunch.”

“And tomorrow's Sunday,” said Skeeter. “A whole 'nother day download-free.”

“No way Vernon had the competency to sign a release form,” I said.

“He's out on the street for all we know,” said Al.

“Something's rotten in the state of Denmark, dogs,” said Trippy, drawing a piece of sushi to his nostrils and taking a good whiff.

•  •

Sure enough, our postlunch sessions involved nothing but multiple-choice tests, featuring such tedious brainteasers as the following:

Women, LGBTQ people, people of color, people with disabilities, and ________________ are often defined in binary opposition to dominant groups.

A) Other others

B) othered others

C) other Others

D) each Other's other

E) each other's Other

On and on the idiotic questioning went, entrapping me in busywork for nearly three hours before I was released—brain numbed, fingers cramped, left foot prickling with pins and needles. I stumbled down the empty hallway to the pisser. There I ran into Trippy,
and we strolled toward the Nano Lounge for a quick cup of preprandial Pep.

•  •

It was Hawaiian night in the dining hall, 1950s exotica on the sound system, elderly cafeteria ladies wearing plastic leis and grass skirts as they dished out huli huli chicken and loco moco. The powers that be, who lacked imagination, tried to spice things up with predictable Saturday-night theme meals (like Disco Daze!), which most of us ignored. Over by the grub line, the head dietician stood grimly with an armful of plastic hibiscus garlands. Every now and then, she'd catch the eye of some ghoul-faced wretch and attempt to bedeck his neck with flowers. But most of the men steered clear of her, or else tossed their leis into the trash. They reviled the lame Muzak. They picked chunks of canned pineapple from their pre-grilled frozen chicken breasts and defiantly thumped them onto the floor.

To our left, a table of compulsive gamblers discussed a recent cockroach race, their yet-to-be-cashed stipend checks already divvied up in an intricate array of IOUs. To our right, various druggies gathered around Big Eduardo, who supposedly had a line on some generic OC.

“Despite the potency of our beloved Pep,” I said, “I wouldn't mind a short jaunt to Ocean City—just a weekend in some swank time-share.”

“Word.” Trippy sighed. “Except Big Eduardo's punking their asses.”

Al walked up, followed by Irvin and Skeeter. They sat down and started hacking at their leathery chicken breasts with plastic knives.

“Hey, Trippy,” said Skeeter, “we still on for cocktails tonight?”

“Sure thing. Got that cask of amontillado chilling in my wine cellar.”

“Hey, anybody get Percival Everett yet?” said Trippy.

“
Erasure
,” I said. “Holy fucking shit. Brilliant.”

“You get
Glyph
too?”

“Yep,” I said. “Kind of a philosophical echo of our particular situation, relationship with the power structure, I mean.”

“Exactly,” said Trippy, “with the deconstructionist infant writing smack to his pedantic parents and all. You'd think that—”

“My fellow carnivores,” said Al, “your chicken taste like jerky too?”

“Frankenfood, bo,” said Skeeter. “Pretty damn depressing.”

Al dropped his plastic knife. His hand crimped into a raptor claw from some kind of palsy. His eyes rolled back into their sockets demon-possession-style. He belched out a few guttural bullfrog croaks. But then he recovered, smiled politely, and dabbed at his lips with a paper napkin.

In a posh New England accent he said, “Do you ever feel the weight of sadness bearing down upon your meaningless existence?”

“Wait 'til you're my age, youngblood,” said Irvin.

“Do you ever feel an overwhelming sense of hopeless despair, as though your flabby body contains no soul, as though your life is a tedious series of meaningless reps: eating processed food, shitting processed food, fucking on automatic pilot, shuffling data in an office cube? You may no longer enjoy activities that used to give you joy—like watching television, walking your dog, or playing Zombie Babe Attack on Xbox One. These are some symptoms of depression, my friends, a serious medical condition afflicting over twenty million Americans.”

“What the hell?” said Skeeter.

“Depression may be caused by an imbalance of natural chemicals between nerve cells of the brain,” Al continued. “And prescription Nepenthe works to correct this imbalance. Side effects may include urethral aplasia, sleep paralysis, hirsutism of the eye, and anal hemorrhaging. Nepenthe is not habit-forming. Call 1-800-N-E-P-E-N-T-H for more information. Get ready to strap on your parachute and jump back into life!”

Al flashed a twitchy smile. His glasses were crooked. His buzz cut was looking a little bushy. His beard, usually fastidiously trimmed and groomed, was losing its shape. A convulsion shook his broad shoulders. He stared into space for a few seconds, his lower lip drooping. Then he snapped out of it. Swallowed. Shook his head and plucked a tater tot from his plate.

We all smiled uneasily.

“You all right, Al?” said Trippy. “That was, like, a parody, right?”

“What you talkin' 'bout, Willis?” said Al.

Chewing a cube of processed potato product, Al glanced around at our flushed faces.

“Seriously,” he said, “what?”

He shrugged, then squirted another blob of Heinz 57 onto his plate.

•  •

That night in the Nano Lounge, we were all dishing about our friend's odd dinner theater, hoping his quirks were an intentional parody but fearing some delayed manifestation of Gulf War syndrome.

“Some kind of biological warfare bugging,” said Trippy.

“Maybe the biowarfare is a bad mix with the
BAIT
downloads,” I said, “like mixing liquor and beer.”

“Y'all don't think he's joshing us?” said Skeeter.

“Don't know,” said Irvin. “Maybe.”

Just then, Al came striding into the room sporting a plastic lei.

“You got
leid
, bo?” Skeeter quipped, and we all groaned like Inquisition victims on the rack.

“What?” Al blinked.

“That garland of plastic orchids around your neck,” I said.

“Orchid means
testicle
in Latin,” said Trippy. “You got plastic bollocks round your neck, dog.”

“What you talkin' 'bout, Willis?” said Al, whereupon Irvin rose from his chair to tug on Al's floral wreath.