The New and Improved Romie Futch (27 page)

Sleep-deprived and bottomless, sneaky as a chimp's, constantly on the lookout for that mythic beast that existed in some twilight wood, just at the edge of human consciousness.

Hogzilla the mutant, winged and bald, nightmare beast of
the future
.

My
Hogzilla.

TEN

A windy storm swept in and stripped the last leaves from the trees, killed the lingering crickets, put those lovely autumnal butterflies out of business. I had a bad cough, sipped from a bottle of Robitussin DM, and fell into the throes of a psychedelic fever. Cocooned in a comforter that still held traces of Helen's waterproof sunscreen (it would not wash out), I lay on the couch, falling in and out of dreams. Sometimes I'd wake convulsed with chills. Other times I'd come to sweating, my skin on fire, figments of dreams still bustling around the room. Dr. Morrow haunted this latest round of dreams, a disembodied presence who occasionally offered commentary in his midnight-radio baritone:
Subject 48FRD only vaguely responding to phase-five stimuli
—whatever the fuck that meant.

Was I hearing voices? Or was this the stuff of dreams? Dream stuff, I decided—definitely dream stuff.

But then one night, after chasing Hogzilla over a barren arctic landscape in an ATV, I woke to find Dr. Morrow seated at the foot of my couch, dressed in a lab coat. When I reached out to touch his strangely puffy left leg, my hand passed through his marshmallow flesh.
Subject
48FRD
has responded to an intraneurological
stage-five facsimile
, said Dr. Morrow,
though I must say, my legs need work
.

Tittering, he scattered into luminous pixels.

I had to admit that this definitely qualified not only as a voice in the head but also as a bona fide hallucination, though I
did
have a fever. I
had
consumed excessive quantities of dextromethorphan. I sat up. I tried to remember where I'd left my phone. I had to text Trippy immediately. Maybe he'd break his latest round of icy silence if I admitted that okay, I
was
hearing something that might qualify as a
voice
.
Talking
.
Inside my lunatic head
. I wondered if Trippy was seeing things too (he'd said nothing about hallucinations during our brief phone conversation). But I couldn't find my phone. Plus, I was distracted by a more pressing problem: my throbbing finger, sharp pain shooting from the tip down into the bone. I didn't peek under my bandage. I dared not gaze upon my maimed digit just yet.

I threw back another shot of Robitussin. I was saving my last few Demerols for some deeper crisis. I'd stashed them in a vitamin bottle, the bottle encased in a balled-up sock, the sock stuffed into an old suitcase, the suitcase buried under a pile of hunting equipment.

I sipped at a medicinal tumbler of bourbon until my finger went numb and the room pulsed with womb-like warmth. Deep in the pocket of my cargo pants, I felt the hopeful vibration of my phone. Ah, there it was, in the most obvious place.

It was Helen.

I pressed the phone to my ear. Waited. Breathed.

“It's me,” she finally said. “I'm in the neighborhood. Do you have a minute?”

“I have a fever,” I said. “But also a minute. Endless minutes. Not on my phone, but in person. And yes, I'm a little tipsy.” I tamped
down the bouncing elation in my heart, sent it plummeting to my stomach, where it bobbed hopefully before plunging into nausea.

“That's okay,” said Helen. “Do you mind if I stop by? I've got to talk to you about something.”

I needed to brush my teeth. I needed to smear some deodorant into the musky hollows of my armpits in case she took me into her arms in a sudden rush of emotion, ready to try again. But I had no time. The room smelled of my sickness, but I couldn't get up from the couch. And then she waltzed right into our old living room as though she still lived here (did she still have a key?). She paced around in a pair of expensive-looking riding boots that gave her the air of a miniseries aristocrat.

My dust would hear her and beat, had I lain for a century dead
.

I sat up on the couch, keening toward her.

She would not sit down, kept fidgeting, inspecting various iconic objects from our mutual past.

“Poor Romie,” she said. “What did you do to your finger?”

“Lawn mower accident. Just a nick. Nothing serious.”

“Well, that's good.”

“What brings you to this neck of the woods?”

“Oh, Romie. I hate to come to you like this, but I didn't want you to hear it from somebody else and think that you . . .”

“That I?”

She sat down on the edge of the couch. Her entire body convulsed with emotion. She looked into me with her X-ray eyes, saw my heart, repulsive and swollen as a bullfrog in its lust, and looked away. She whimpered. Nibbled her thumbnail. Shivered. And then finally came out with it.

“I'm pregnant,” she said. “Can you believe it after all these . . .” She bit her tongue. She blushed. “And I didn't want you to think . . .”

“Think what?”

“That it was you.”

“Me? What the fuck?
How
?”

I'd seen Helen only twice in the last year, had not even touched her, much less . . .

“Your material, I mean.”

“My material?”

“Your sample.” She released a long, slow hiss of air.

Remembering the sample I'd spurted into a cup at Live Oak Fertility Clinic, I imagined a swarm of my hopeful swimmers frozen, the iced chunk of my genetic legacy stashed in some capsule at the bottom of a cryogenic storage tank with hundreds of others, emblazoned with identification numbers linking it to me, Romie Morrison Futch, 251-87-9087-SC-2348576-DNA-55748FRD.

“Why would I think
tha
t
?”

Helen avoided the intense gaze I'd attempted to muster.

“I don't even know what the legalities would be,” she muttered. “Were I to use it,” she added hastily, which made me wonder.

“
Use
it?”

“God, not that I would. I mean, not that there's anything wrong with . . . But the thing is, I just didn't want you to hear about this from somebody else and start thinking that, you know.”

She turned away so that I could not read her face, could not see what I imagined as a subtly gloating expression letting me know that she was fertile after all, that our childless marriage was not her fault.

“I shouldn't have come here.” She stood up. “I'm an idiot. I should go.”

She walked over to the stuffed bass that hung over our old television. I'd caught the fish as a boy. Under the micromanaging eye of my father, I'd stuffed it myself. My first project, it looked too cylindrical, like a sausage. And its left eyeball had fallen out.

She touched the fish and turned to look at me.

“I'm sorry, Romie. I made a mistake. I see that now.”

I felt like the blood in my body had been replaced with cherry slushie, but it could've been the fever. My fingertips felt numb. All moisture had vacated my mouth. I wanted to burrow deep into my blanket and pupate into some other kind of creature. Something winged and bright that could hightail it out of this shit-hole town, flit down to South America, find some patch of rain forest that hadn't been chainsawed down to a desolate moonscape, and feast on opiate flowers until every last human memory I had was obliterated.

“Boykin?” I managed to say, my voice a hideous croak.

“What?” She turned with a sudden jerk. “That's none of your fucking business.”

“But you're the one who came over here. You're the one who . . .”

“Only because, well. I already explained myself.”

Of course it was Adam, which explained her defensiveness. My mind already had a stock of paranoid imagery to draw from. For the hundredth time, I pictured them skinny-dipping in Boykin's pool. For the hundredth time, I pictured them fucking under a succulent summer moon. I pictured the boy's hairless Adonis ass dimpling as he plied my spread-eagled ex-wife. But this time I added a new dimension to my torture. I saw a fleet of Adam's sperm churning like fierce barracudas toward Helen's placid egg—thick as a tadpole army, fast as futuristic aquatic missiles, each sperm gleaming with the morphological perfection of youth. I saw the lead swimmer leap into her old egg with an electric crackle and jump-start it into zygotic life. As a thousand flickering cells divided, the egg glowed and swelled. The lump of life sprouted limbs and lungs, nerves and gonads. Its tiny brain ripened like a veiny fruit. In the blink of an eye, a naked hipster with white Warholian hair floated inside Helen's womb.

The fetus waved its little newt hand and smirked at me.

“Adam,” I said.

“God, Romie, are you insane? We should not be having this conversation.”

Helen smiled tensely, jaw tendons tight, but her body spoke a secret language. As she swished around the room, her hips seemed heavier, the gentle swell of her belly poignant with secret life. And her breasts looked more voluptuous. Her hair lush and wild, streaming behind her like a dark bridal veil.

Her lips, enflamed with estrogen, brought to mind sunlit plums.

I thought of the Demerol stashed in my closet. I would take one tonight and try to hang onto the other two until morning, when acidic light crept through my grubby windows to illuminate the dust bunnies that frolicked across my filthy floor. My buzz was gone. I felt stark sober.

“I should go,” Helen said. “I'm so sorry about this. I should've never—I see now what a horrible mistake this was. It's just that I thought you should know given our history, just in case you misconstrued—”

“Thank you so much for sharing.”

“Romie, I—”

“Don't sweat it.”

“Romie, please forgive me. I'm an idiot.”

She actually tried to touch me. On the shoulder.

I shook her off. Turned away from her to gaze into the poly-cotton basket weave of the couch she'd once spent three months shopping for.

“Romie.”

“Quit saying my name. It makes me feel insane.”

“Okay, then, I'll go.”

She puttered around for a few minutes, gathering things—coat, hat, scarf, purse—and finally left. It was still cold outside, I guess. But
I was burning up. I wanted to be back in the sunken den of my old familial ranch house, eating the invalid food my mother fixed when I was sick: Campbell's tomato soup and grilled cheese. But my mother was dead. She'd weighed seventy-five pounds when she took her last breath—a puppet version of her old self, made of dried bones and spotted skin. She'd looked gaunt but eerily girlish at the very end, her skin radiant with a strange sheen as her organs began to shut down. As my dad held her hand like a forlorn lover, I could imagine them as youths, way before I floated in a subaquatic dream in Mom's belly, my first perfect home, transitional holding tank that I couldn't remember but that, according to the hokum of various theorists, I pined for, particularly in times of great need or trauma—like now.

Huge surges of nausea passed through me in greenish waves. My pinkie was throbbing again. For the first time in days, I eased the crusted bandage off. I gazed upon an alien thing, swollen and red as though a half-inflated balloon had been slipped over my digit. The stitches, embedded in the puffy scarlet flesh of my fingertip, seeped an off-white dew.

I thought about calling Helen and summoning her back, asking her to drive me to the emergency room. But the thought of venturing out into the cold night made me shiver. I decided to wait until morning and drive myself.

I crawled from my blanket, a naked, crooked creature, and hobbled toward the closet. With one hand, I clawed through piles of junk, strewing the floor with arrows and knives and camouflage clothes, until I spotted my parents' old avocado-green Samsonite. When I opened it, I smelled a strangely familiar mildew spiked with Mom's lavender talc. I retrieved the treasure I'd tucked under a collection of hideous 1990s jeans. I opened the One A Day Men's multivitamin bottle I'd stuffed into a sock. Shook two Demerol into my sweaty palm and swallowed them dry.

ELEVEN

Lying in the recovery room, I kept looking at my hand and thinking of the three-fingered sloth, making its groggy way through the jungle. The incision from the metatarsal ray resection procedure was very neat. When the scabs healed to scar tissue, the legacy of my pinkie finger would be gone—half of it digested by a feral hog, the other half dropped into a basin and spirited off to some biohazard receptacle full of festering human parts.

Though I was awake for the surgery, drugged with a mild antipsychotic, my hand numbed by a local anesthetic, I remembered only bits and pieces of the ordeal. I recalled the nurse's hiss of surprise as she removed my soggy bandage to inspect my tainted finger. I recalled a hasty round of X-rays. I recalled the neurosurgeon scolding me as he casually mapped incision lines with a special pen. If I'd waited another hour, he said, I would have lost my whole hand. And then he bantered about a boxing match as he selected a dainty, futuristic saw.

The spinning blade whined as it cut through bone. The surgeon's eyes glinted as he sliced into my flesh with the jaunty composure of a television chef quartering a quail. The punch line of his sports-themed joke occurred just as he plucked the severed digit from my
hand and made a game of tossing it into a stainless-steel bowl that might have been part of an elegant sushi set. I imagined my lone nub, unrecognizable as a finger or even a piece of finger—a morsel of scarlet meat, an elegant hors d'oeuvre for an ogre.

•  •

By mid-December my hand had healed, the puckered pink scar slowly fading to white. I'd gobbled up my last Demerol refill and gone through a writhing, sweaty withdrawal punctuated by mild blackouts during which Dr. Morrow occasionally offered cryptic commentary:
Subject 48FRD suffering a setback due to bodily trauma, not responding to facsimiles of yours truly; investigating the effects of possible neurological damage on wireless BC transmitters
.