The New and Improved Romie Futch (3 page)

She sat me down on a couch shaped like a tadpole, placed my packet on the funky plastic coffee table, and handed me a pen. Inside the folder was a map of the building, questionnaires about
my medical history, pamphlets containing rules and regulations, and consent forms galore. The consent forms had been e-mailed to me as PDF attachments, but of course I hadn't looked them over as carefully as I should've, busy as I was getting hammered each night, wondering if I should answer Crystal's booty-call texts. Score a few Xanax for the road. Feel the sweaty warmth of her motherly palm on my forehead one more time.

I had a single Xanax left, stashed between two Trojans in a balled-up sock and stuffed into a pocket of my duffel bag. It had taken every ounce of self-control I'd had to save this last ticket to Peace of Mind. I knew that night would be hell—first night sober in months, the strange locale, my brain on the verge of an overhaul. Over the last few days, I'd lifted the pill to my trembling lips countless times, but I'd somehow refrained from popping it.

“Are you ready yet?” said the receptionist. “Carl's here for the night shift and I've got to get home.”

Carl, the elf-like security guard stationed at the front desk, waved at me.

“He'll take you through the tunnel,” said the receptionist.

“Say what?”

“You'll see. Now, how about signing a form or ten?”

Halfway through the first paragraph of the first consent form, I'd already come up for air, scientific mumbo jumbo swirling in my head. My reading comprehension skills, never the best, were not up to par that evening. So I said fuck it, scrawled my signature at least a dozen times, and handed the receptionist a sloppy bundle of paper. Then I traveled through the security tunnel, a contraption straight out of
Star Wars
that highlighted every bone and organ in my body, every tooth in my mouth, every dirty piece of underwear in my duffel bag, every last mint in my box of Tic Tacs, but which, via some miracle, did not detect my precious last Xanax.

•  •

I could tell my roommate was a haunted motherfucker the second I walked into the room and caught him in tighty-whities, spinning around to throw karate moves at his mirror image. But what did I expect? Though I figured the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience might be packed with down-and-out SOBs, I hadn't given it much thought until I was face-to-face with a man who looked like the love child of Steven Tyler and one of those lizard creatures from the miniseries
V
. Regarding his spastic, frog-eyed face, I got the sense that a green reptile hid under his scabby human skin. I got the sense it might bust out any minute with a sputter of slime. I got the sense this creature might gnaw my head off while I was sleeping. Still, I introduced myself, politely offering my hand as my mother had taught me, remembering her advice:
No need to break anybody's fingers, Roman, but you don't want to hand them a dead fish
.

“Romie Futch.”

Last time I checked, I had a normal human hand—though my nails were bitten to the quick and my palms were stained from the epoxies and varnishes of my trade. But my new roommate backed toward the wall as though I'd offered him a rabid bat.

“Needle,” he muttered.

“That your nickname?” I said.

“That's my name.” Needle spun around to demonstrate a David Lee Roth karate kick. “Ask me again and I'll tell you the same. I'm from Cairo, Georgia. Got a black belt. Don't take shit from nobody.”

There was a strange shadow on his sunburned chest—a faded tattoo that was too murky to make out.

“I'm from South Carolina,” I said, trying to play it cool.

“South Carolina?” He winced and pretended to spit. “Look.” He grinned, revealing a case of meth mouth that gave me the serious creeps. “It's all good. What you got in that there bag?” He crept closer and I caught a whiff off him, rotting leaves and a stab of perfumed laundry detergent.

“You know, the usual—clothes and shit.”

“I was hoping you might have you some Scooby Snacks, maybe some Get Nekkid.”

He flashed his ghoul grin again. A special-effects artist could not have done better.

“What?”

“Nothin'. You got a smoke?”

“No.”

Needle started jogging in place like a cartoon spazz ready to rocket over a cliff, steam shooting from his ears. He was at least six feet tall and couldn't have weighed more than a hundred and ten.

“You got five dollars?”

“Why?”

“Vending machines.” He leapt toward the door and then jerked back like a leashed dog.

So I doled out five dollars, just to have a minute's peace. Needle, after peering left and right several times, dashed down the hallway in his underwear. I took a look around, grooving on the college-dorm vibe, which reminded me of the time I'd visited Helen at the University of South Carolina at least two decades ago. I recalled the two of us, entwined on her twin bed, waiting for her super-dork roommate to skedaddle. In particular, I remembered how, when the roommate finally heaved off with her enormous backpack, we didn't pounce on each other like starved leopards. We stared at each other, electricity zinging back and forth between our
eyeballs so intensely you could almost hear a crackle in the air. We gulped. We eased into it slowly. But soon, we almost fell off her ridiculously narrow bed.

These beds weren't much bigger. A twin with a headboard that doubled as a desk hugged each wall. Teeny closets flanked the entryway. The cinder-block walls were painted the strange orange beige of prosthetic limbs. I put my duffel on my dresser, sat down on the cheap mattress, and attempted to study the map the receptionist had given me.

But there was my roommate, stomping back in with two Dr. Peppers, a tube of Oreos, and a pack of Marlboro Reds. Fortunately, he ignored me: plugged himself into his MP3 player and zoned out to some death-metal filth—Nightrage or Fleshcrawl—tracks that make Metallica's darkest jams sound like Disney tunes. Guzzling Dr. Pepper and smoking an illegal cigarette (according to the map, there was a smoking patio downstairs with ionic smokeless ashtrays), Needle rocked to his dismal music, releasing a tortured moan every five minutes. His bed was about three feet from mine. A plastic BI-LO bag jammed with clothes sat on his dresser. We had a sliding glass door with a cramped balcony that overlooked the parking lot, and even though it was open wide to the summer night, the tiny room was filled with smoke. At the rate he was going, Needle would work through that pack of Reds in a few hours.

And then what?

I shuddered to think.

I unpacked my duffel and went to check out the Richard Feynman Nanotechnology Lounge, which, according to my map, was just at the end of our hall beyond the reading room. Vending machines glowed eerily in the dim lounge. Not a single human being was relaxing on the IKEA sectional. Not one down-and-out bastard was milling around in the hallway outside. And I wondered if
Needle and I were the only poor fools desperate enough to let mad scientists tinker with our brains.

When I returned with my supper (Diet Coke, Snickers, a pack of Nip Chee crackers), Needle looked a bit more relaxed. His long body sprawled over his bed, troll feet dangling off the end. His smile was not what I'd call peaceful, though it was way less manic than the grin he'd first greeted me with.

I inserted my earbuds and scarfed down my pathetic supper while listening to
Aqualung
. Thank Jesus for Xanax, I thought as I fumbled for my green socks. I might have been a sorry son of a bitch who hadn't quite managed to get his shit together, but I had a thing about balling my socks just so. So when I found my green socks with the toes sticking out, I knew something was up. The Trojans were still there, just not taped together like they had been. And my ticket to relaxation was gone. Needle, a bloodhound for substance of any sort, had sniffed out my last yellow bus and gobbled it up.

I slumped on my bed, feeling my balls deflate at the thought of confronting a meth head who dabbled in the martial arts. I wondered if I should just hightail it—gun it down I-20 and be back in Hampton by midnight. But the thought of spending one more minute as the old Romie Futch was enough to keep me cramming tasteless crackers into my mouth, listening to the faint hum of the fluorescent overheads as my lizard-faced roommate lapsed into twitchy sleep.

When I got back to Hampton, I'd have 6K in my pocket. I'd have a brand-new brain. Maybe I'd have the get-up-and-go to do something with my life. Chip would turn hot pink with hypertension and envy. Helen would take one look at the New and Improved Romie Futch and dump her stuffed shirt of a boyfriend. My retired father would get off my case for once in his life about
running
his
taxidermy shop into the ground. And my dead mother would look down from whatever limbo she inhabited and, seeing that her son had finally grown up, ascend to the fourth dimension or merge with a thousand other shining souls on some distant astral plane. I could envision her up there, some kind of lavender ectoplasm, hovering, all-knowing, shooting beams of love down at her lost son.

It'll be okay, Romie. You'll make good in the end
.

THREE

Chloe, a pretty female technician not much older than twenty, leaned over me, warming my face with her minty breath. She wore a blue paper cap that matched her eyes and made her look like a Mennonite.

“Are you comfortable, Mr. Futch?”

“Yes, ma'am. I'm just glad y'all didn't shave my head.”

“No.” She smiled, revealing beautiful teeth, except for one weird yellow fang, which was kind of sexy. “That won't be necessary.”

“Thank God. I mean, that would've sucked.”

Despite the framed paintings of flowering meadows and a potted tree, the room had a hospital vibe—blue walls, rolling shelves of medical equipment, a disinfectant funk. The technicians, hip variations on the chess-club types I remembered from high school, explained everything to me in patient Mr. Rogers voices. There was Chloe, with her pale blue eyes. There was Josh, with his hipster 'stache. I could see Chip dork-baiting both of them—dissing Josh's piddly facial hair, mimicking Chloe's Yankee accent while checking out her ass. There was also Dr. Morrow—the head honcho—but he was busy with another
subject
(a word that basically meant
guinea pig
).

“We're going to implant your wet chips today.” Chloe clapped her hands like a kindergarten teacher. “A simple procedure involving the insertion of five biocomputer transmitters just beneath the skin—one on each temple, three on the crown of your head.”

They'd already burned the bald spots with a laser—just a bleep of pain, and then it was over. But, Chloe explained, they'd knock me out for the
intracerebroventricular injections
, when they'd drill tiny holes into my skull just behind my ears and pump serum into my brain. She went on as though my brain were some hatchback they were souping up with a badass turbocharger and platinum hubcap spinners.

She lifted the vial of violet serum, which glowed like something out of
Frankenstein
. An army of nanobots swarmed in the fluid. These microscopic creatures, she explained, concocted from
N. fowleri
amoeba genes, would revamp my brain, whipping it into shape for the downloads.

“Creating the neurological infrastructure necessary for nanobiotic data transmission,” Chloe said. “Now we're going to administer a premedication.”

“That's cool.” I turned to avoid the sight of the needle.

“Five cc of clonidine, an alpha-two-adrenergic agonist,” said Josh.

“There,” said Chloe. “One more to go.”

“And now a hit of propofol,” said Josh. “Ouch. Yikes. That's it.”

Just as the walls turned to sky and I felt myself dissolving, Dr. Morrow strolled in—long and lean, with thick gray hair, his face blandly handsome, his voice a mellow mix of God and game-show host.

“You must be Roman Futch,” he said. “How are you?”

“Frine,” I said. And then I couldn't speak, my tongue a lump of dead meat, though I could still hear every word they said about me.

“What did you gas him with?” Dr. Morrow asked.

“P,” said Chloe.

“LOBNH.” Dr. Morrow waved his hand over my face. “How did his tox screen look?”

“About like you'd expect,” said Josh. “AOB, benzos, cannabinoids.”

Dr. Morrow loomed over me, his smile endless, whitened teeth multiplying, tombstones extending into infinity.

He commented on my decreased heart rate as I drifted into a dream about cleaning fish. Dad kept finding hundred-dollar bills in the guts of bass, and Mom was hanging slimy money on the clothes-line to dry. Brisk and efficient, she focused on the task of making us filthy rich. The woods had grown thick again. We could feel animals watching, big-eyed and growling in a forest that went on and on, dense and green and stretching past Main Street and City Hall, past the Palmetto Shopping Center, all the way out past Dixie City Fashion Mall—the world as I knew it covered in trees.

“We finally got some money, but there's nowhere to spend it,” Mom said. “That's what my English teacher used to call ‘irony.'” She chuckled as I settled into the crook of her arm, which seemed designed to hold my small body. And I basked in the safe warmth of her laughter—the everyday joy that held darkness at bay.

When I woke up, my brain felt like a lathered sponge. A few floaters bobbed in my peripheral vision. Chloe assured me they'd be gone within hours, and so would that fizzy brain feeling, which she asked me to describe. I spoke into a microphone attached to an Oracle micropad that automatically put my words into text.

“It's kind of like a mental Alka-Seltzer,” I said. “A zillion little bubbles and pops. I can feel them and hear them. Know what I mean?”

Chloe nodded and patted my arm. “All we've got to do now is fill those holes with some bioengineered epoxy,” she said.