The New and Improved Romie Futch (6 page)

I was trying to remember the last time this had happened when Dr. Morrow strolled in wiping crumbs from his perfect chin. Chloe and Josh were hot on his tail.

“How are we doing this morning?” the doctor asked.

Chloe flicked on my brain hologram.

I watched my multicolored brain rotate.

“I don't know,” I said. “Guess I'm feeling kind of uncanny.”

“Uncanny, eh?” said Dr. Morrow. “That's it? Not mystified or preternatural or anything else?”

“Those aren't bad words, but uncanny seems more apt.”

“You're not feeling overwhelmed by verbiage this morning?”

“Not really.”

“Any conceptual delays or gaps in your thinking?”

“Nah. I'm actually having trouble distinguishing between the old and new diction.”

“That's a good thing. Headaches?”

“Not at the moment. I had one last night, briefly, though it might've been the
MSG
in my lo mein.”

“Dissociative identity or cognitive dissonance?” Dr. Morrow tested my BC transmitters with his little wand.

“Actually, now that you mention it.”

“Don't worry, a little DI and CD are both perfectly normal as you adjust to the
BAIT
downloads. Now, Chloe, let's have the phase one verbal.”

“Just a little test,” said Chloe, placing a micropad before me, the screen displaying a series of multiple-choice questions. “You scroll through like this and touch your answers.”

She fingered the screen.

“I know how to work it.” I huffed, feeling a familiar sense of dread, the desire to flee a high school classroom, take refuge in my Camaro, and cower in a cloud of weed smoke.

“Good for you.” She clapped her hands and retreated, pausing at the door to give me an encouraging smile.

“Just press the red SUBMIT button at the end.” She slipped out of the room.

I stared down at the first question, my panic subsiding as I read through it with ease:

Forced into familiarity, then, with such prodigies as these; and knowing that after repeated, intrepid assaults, the White Whale had escaped alive; it cannot be much matter of surprise that some whalemen should go still further in their superstitions; declaring Moby Dick not only ubiquitous, but immortal (for immortality is but ubiquity in time); that though groves of spears should be planted in his flanks, he would still swim away unharmed; or if indeed he should ever be made to spout thick blood, such a sight would be but a ghastly deception; for again in unensanguined billows hundreds of leagues away, his unsullied jet would once more be seen
.

1. The passage implies which of the following about the White Whale?

A) The White Whale is dead, for its sides have been impaled with numerous spears, and the animal has spurted gallons of blood into the ocean.

B) The White Whale is the name of a slow cruise ship, and it is far quicker to travel by airplane.

C) The White Whale is unkillable, and even if the animal appeared to be gravely wounded, filling the ocean with blood, it would pop up alive and happy in some other part of the sea, its spume clean and healthy.

D) The White Whale is a magical island, and fruit trees have been planted on its body.

I zipped through the test in thirty minutes, answering reading-comprehension, fill-in-the-blank, and sentence-equivalence questions. When I pressed the red button, Chloe breezed in, beaming. She plucked up the micropad.

“Very good,” she said.

“How many did I get?”

“Dude,” said Josh, rushing out from Dr. Morrow's lair. “You aced it!”

“Not a bad start,” said Dr. Morrow, cruising in with his own personal micropad, a model I'd never seen. “Though the numerical aspect is confidential. Just know that you are doing well. And now I do believe we are ready to rock and roll.”

“What's on the docket today?” asked Josh.

Dr. Morrow read the titles listed on his screen. “
The Art of Rhetoric
,
Bulfinch's Mythology
, and
Rhetorica ad Herennium
.”

“Cool,” replied the hobbledehoy.

Josh smeared my BC transmitters with gel. As Chloe leaned over to install my electrodes, Dr. Morrow typed something onto his keypad, and I sank into a well of darkness again, the three of them peering down at me over a distant circle of light.

Then I was in the Swamp Fox High art room, an airy space with a darkroom and special alcoves for artists deemed gifted—not officially by
BSAP
s or
IQ
tests but by Mrs. Breen, our art teacher, an aging hippie who wore paint-spattered wraparound denim skirts with suede boots. Mrs. Breen coddled my talent, gave me free rein of the kilns and darkroom, the glazes and oil paints. Each school day between two and three I sat in Advanced Art, in a small room sequestered from the dabblers and hacks, with two other students:
a hot Goth named Alexandra Cunningham, who'd been accepted to Duke on a full scholarship, and my fellow stoner Lee Decker. (Mrs. Breen, bless her heart, had a soft spot for stoners.)

While Alexandra painted brutal abstract images that looked like mangled and dripping bits of flesh, Lee attempted the epic task of representing every song on
Led Zeppelin IV
in oil paints. Meanwhile, I fashioned hand-built clay sculptures of grotesque hybrid beings—part human, part animal, part mythological entity.

I could see myself, the young artist at work, my dark Byronic mullet flowing over the collar of my King Crimson T-shirt as my hands caressed a lump of wet porcelain clay. I pinched it into the likeness of a voluptuous female nude with a fish's lower body and hair cascading past her ass. She resembled Helen, with her sly simper. I spent hours stippling her fish parts with a pipette to produce scales, which I glazed a deep black green and brushed with a shimmer of gold. I adorned her hair with actual hummingbird feathers and glued a set of epoxied luna-moth wings to her delicate shoulder blades. I created a magical diorama in which she dwelt with chubby octopus men and leering sea monsters. I even installed black lights, a tiny fan that made Mylar ribbons waver like psychedelic seaweed, and, upon the recommendation of Lee Decker, a cassette player (secreted in the display's hollow wood base) that submerged the whole scene in the ambience of “The Ocean.”

“I'm not stealing your thunder by using Zeppelin?” I asked him.

“Naw, man,” he said. “It's like a movement, you know? Like the Dadaists or the abstract expressionists.”

“Totally.”

We went out to the student parking lot to burn one in my Camaro. We relished a Yes cassette and strolled back into the prison-like building to groove on our creations. Lee's giant painting of a red medieval castle taking off like a rocket looked kinetic as all
get-out, though I told him he needed a touch of yellow to make the vapor trail truly fiery. He agreed.

I queued my forty-minute loop of “The Ocean” and dimmed the overheads. We stood before my diorama, steeped in its otherworldliness, bewitched by the beauty of the mermaid, the oily grotesquery of the sea mutants swarming lasciviously in her midst.

“Killer,” Lee whispered.

“If only the creatures
moved
,” I said, trying to think of the right word (which was
undulate
, though I didn't know it back then).

“Surreal,” said Mrs. Breen, who'd slipped from her office to admire my creation. “Are you still thinking about majoring in art?”

I nodded. I swallowed. We were talking about something more ethereal than my diorama, something that made my stomach knot up, something that brought the taste of pennies to the back of my throat. We were talking about
the future
. At that moment, I still had one. I could feel
the future
squirming larva-like inside my chest as Mrs. Breen admired my diorama. Alexandra Cunningham muttered the words “naïve redneck art,” but I didn't let that bother me. Especially when Helen cut calculus and came whirring into the art studio, her permed hair bouncing in a thousand chestnut ringlets, cleavage spilling from her décolleté top like a double scoop of butter pecan. Checking out my sculpture, she smiled with pride.

Poor Lee trembled in her presence. I didn't begrudge him his crush and wished sincerely that he'd find his own portal to the more ineffable pleasures of life, some pretty, multifaceted female who understood his vision as Helen did mine.

I snatched an envelope of negatives I'd developed (of Helen frolicking naked in the strange blue waters of the kaolin mine pond) and led my beloved to the darkroom. I held her hand as we leaned over the chemical trays, relishing each moment she'd emerge from the murk, my beaming muse.

There she was, twinkling in images, emanations from my visionary brain. And there she was, standing beside me in the safe-light, her breath warming my earlobe.

I peeled down her acid-washed jeans and unbuckled mine and we coupled on the floor in a narcissistic teenage frenzy, surrounded by images that not only immortalized her at the height of her nubile beauty but also attested to my own manly artistic genius, something that, if I played my cards right, would land me a
future
. I concentrated on
the future
to stall those initial convulsions that prick a man on toward melting oblivion. I closed my eyes and saw
the future
, a red, fleshy blob pupating in dark fluid like something in a mad scientist's incubator. I saw strange organs throbbing beneath its translucent shell. Saw
the future
bust from its chrysalis in scattering blazes of diamond light, winged and glistening, already flitting out the window, darting off toward the horizon before I could get a good look at it.

Helen lay on the linoleum, her face flushed. Alexandra Cunningham was pounding on the door. We scrambled into our jeans, slipped our soft porn into a manila file, and stumbled from wombish darkness into stark fluorescence. Strolling from the institutional air-conditioning into the tropical freedom of spring, we hopped into my Camaro and gunned it.
The future
lay dormant within us, protozoan in our cells.

I woke up with the taste of Helen in my mouth, aware now of the highfalutin aspect of her name, the Helen of Troy allusion bestowed unknowingly by her mother, a certified medical assistant, and her father, a melancholy Monsanto sales rep who trafficked in poisons.

O Helen, Helen, Helen!

Sunbeam
.

Zeus's mortal daughter
.

The face that launched a thousand ships
.

“Roman,” said a voice.

The goofy grin of Josh materialized before my eyes. And there was Dr. Morrow, probing the mysteries of his left ear with a paper clip. And Chloe, beautiful Chloe, not as beautiful as Helen in her prime, but very pretty, with a luscious bottom and an unnerving habit of brushing against me as she performed her scientific chores.

“Describe this paper clip,” said Dr. Morrow, thrusting forth the implement with which he'd just been picking his ear.

“Poor paper clip,” I joked. “How rudely you have been used. Forged by Vulcan to serve some noble purpose, like securing a ream of poetry, you have been forced to retrieve detritus from this man's ear canal.”

Dr. Morrow smiled and muttered into his micropad mic. “Evidence of cerebral enhancement immediately apparent in verbal communication. Fanciful rhetorical tropes, if I'm not mistaken. References to what must be a mythological figure. Chloe? Did you get the data on that ref?”

“Vulcan,” said Chloe. “Roman god of fire. Depicted as a blacksmith.”

“Awesome,” said Josh, grinning like a lowly adolescent satyr at Pan's loveliest nymph.

•  •

Despite its excessive brightness, the cafeteria, with its garish orange walls, was the lowest vale in Hades—Tartarus, to be exact. Wretched shades trudged to and fro. Muttering to themselves, trembling with DTs and more sinister withdrawal spasms, they toted trays of slop. A loner by nature, I took up my usual spot at the edge of the action, thinking of Sisyphus as I watched the imprisoned souls grub up in the food line. But not all was gloom and doom. A lively crew at
the table to my left was chatting about sports. I thought I heard the word
serendipity
pop out of one dude's mouth, and I wondered if he was on the same
BAIT
track as me. I was about to break character, walk over, and initiate a convo when I spotted Irvin cruising my way, sacred fruits of Demeter piled up on his plastic tray.

“What it is?” He sat down. “You got Cerberus, or Cerberus got you?”

“Freaky,” I said. “I was just thinking I was in Tartarus. Every time I think I got the dog underfoot, that hellhound bastard pops another head.”

“I feel you.” Irvin picked a green olive from his salad and set it aside. “Don't know about you, but the flashbacks have been a bug-out to an otherwise groovy ride. Mnemosyne's a bitch. Don't much feel like tripping down particular memory lanes, if you copy.”

“I copy. Being reacquainted with the glorious teenage flesh of my ex-wife is kind of like groping after Persephone in the dark.”

“Right on. Just when you pinch her ass, she vanishes into mist.”

“Like that
SOB
Tantalus, with his water and grapes. Though it's not all bad. I'd forgotten how awesome high school art class was. I reckon I used to be a sculptor.”

“Thought you still were. Didn't you say you were a taxidermist?”

“That's a whole 'nother animal, pun intended.”

“Why? What is sculpture?” Irvin shot me a sly, Socratic smile.

“I don't know. The creation of three-dimensional art forms, I guess.”

“And what is taxidermy?”

“The preservation of animals.”

“Are you preserving the actual flesh-and-blood animal as it is?”

“No, I'm basically re-creating a facsimile of the creature with molds and hide scraps and fake parts.”