The New and Improved Romie Futch (11 page)

“This thing right here is known as a
lei
,” Irvin said gently. “The Hawaiian word for
garland
.”

Al removed his lei, bunched it up in his hands, studied the lilac plastic mass, and tossed it into the garbage. He sat down on the edge of the sectional.

“How about a cup of Pep?” he said to Trippy.

“Sure thing.” Trippy pulled out the sacred milk jug, gave it a brisk shake, and then sloshed a few inches of hooch into a Styrofoam cup and handed it to Al.

“I've been thinking about your theory, Irvin,” said Skeeter, charging into a new subject to clear the air.

“Which one?” said Irvin.

“About the different eras of porn and the ineluctable modality of the visual—”

“Gentlemen,” interrupted Al, and then he rose from the couch, strolled to the center of the floor, and held his drink aloft like a chap with a crystal tumbler in a Chivas Regal ad.

“Let's be frank,” he said in a New England accent with a detectable midwestern undertow—vaguely academic, the television voice of scientific reason.

“Every man worries about the size of his member.” Al winked. “So let's be honest. Even if you're John Holmes, you still feel inadequate, still want that extra inch of prowess, that erection of triple-alloyed tungsten that makes the ladies howl.”

Al winked.

“Take my penis, for example. The pitiful appendage used to be about two inches long, a Napoleonic cocktail weenie that was downright cherubic—until I started using Priapus. Priapus is a state-of-the-art gene-therapy program bioengineered by scientists from MIT. In a revolutionary new process, nanobots deliver gene therapy through the patient's bloodstream, using RNA interference to block growth inhibitors. As microscopic polymer robots reprogram penile building blocks on a subatomic level, stem cells recalibrate to pubertal levels that lead to rapid genital growth in less than thirty days! Guaranteed! Or your money back. Call 1-866-P-R-I-A-P-U-S, and you'll be a ballin' lothario in no time!”

And then, as though nothing had happened, Al returned to his chair and took a slurp of Pep.

“You feel okay, man?” said Skeeter. “You joshing, right?”

Al frowned, glanced from face to face.

“I get it.” Trippy flashed a fake smile. “Pop-up-like random commercials, a postmodern parody of spam, yeah?”

“What are you talking about, Willis?” Al tried to smile, but a tremor overtook him, crumpling his face. He dropped his cup, clutched his head, and groaned.

“What's the matter, man?” said Irvin.

“Headache,” growled Al. “Motherfucking übermigraine.” Al whimpered and rubbed his temples.

Skeeter stood up, his enormous eyes swimming with sympathy, and patted him on the back. “Want to go to the infirmary, bo?” he said.

“Uggrh,” said Al.

Then he straightened himself, blinked at us. “It's gone,” he said. “Just like that.
Poof
.”

SEVEN

Later in my room I fell into a strange half sleep as traffic from the interstate beeped and droned outside the sliding glass door. Needle was still gone, but I kept sensing him there, looming over me with his invisible samurai sword.

I flicked on the light, glanced around.

Nothing.

It must be the Pep
, I thought.

I got out of bed, walked to the window, and looked out at the corporate landscaping: fountain, Bradford pear trees, sickle moon hanging over the parking lot. I had a headache. I took two Advils and lay down again.

First thing next morning I'd ask them point-blank what the hell was going on. I'd tell them we knew about Vernon's suspicious release. Ask them what the deal was with Al. I'd refuse any more downloads until they gave me a satisfying answer. I'd even go home if I had to—screw the six thousand dollars I so desperately needed. I'd called my dad a few times since arriving to stave off suspicion but otherwise hadn't communicated with anybody. I'd sent out a volley of cryptic e-mails predeparture, hinting at a retreat to some
remote detox facility, telling people not to worry about my incommunicado state, and now I wondered if I ought to tell someone exactly where I was just in case I needed an emergency escape plan. I pictured my little vinyl-sided house, ninety-eight percent of it owned by Bank of America after my ruinous postdivorce refinance. I could see Helen cutting zinnias out in the yard, waving at me, eager to give me a second chance. Ten years ago we were happy, though I didn't know it then: happy enough to be ingrates about our happiness, happy enough to spend long Saturdays working in the yard together, planting a vegetable garden, working our bodies until felled by delicious fatigue. We'd collapse into lawn chairs as the sun sank, buzzed but not drunk, discussing heirloom tomatoes. One summer Helen was trying to track down this species her grandfather used to plant, the perfect tomato, according to her: not too big, not too little, not too firm, not too squishy, somewhere on the spectrum between Cherokee Purple and Black Prince. She wanted to plant a “Goth garden,” all deep purple and dusky blooms, and she pulled me into her obsession, made me her coconspirator.

“Black Lace elderberry,” she said one evening, licking her lovely lips, passing the sweat-crimped catalog from her lap to mine. “Black Lightning iris and eggplant calla lilies. And you could do some kind of wacked-out garden sculpture, Romie, just to freak the neighbors out.”

With this peaceful domestic vision, I drifted off again, into a dream.

I was playing an instrument—a trumpet, I think, which I've never picked up in my life. In a high school band room, surrounded by white and black dorks, most of them dressed in ornate polyester '70s shirts and bell-bottom jeans, I blasted away with mad skill. Under the direction of a spastic, clammy honky, we rocked that room. We filled it with glorious tunes, pumped it with the heady musk of
adolescence—twenty sweaty bodies of different shapes, sizes, hues, and genders, creating a synesthetic miasma of hormones and noise.

I caught the eye of a pretty girl with glinting specs, her demure Afro as perfectly round as a vinyl LP. She raised her eyebrows while tootling her flute, traipsed through a delicate solo that left me weak-kneed. Next it was my turn to cut a figure in phallic brass. I darted with ease like a metallic dragonfly. I glittered and soared, the instrument fused to my respiratory system. And then it was over. I pulled the horn from my mouth, felt the pull of a slobber strand. Wiping drool from my lips, I noted the deep chestnut tone of my arm. I was a black dude in the final stretches of a crazy growth spurt, shedding the last of my baby fat. I liked to slouch in corners and watch the world's ado with an air of contrived nonchalance. I could see the reflection of my Afro in the golden luster of my horn, my face too distorted to recognize.

“One more time,” said the band director, his wet mustache gleaming like a centipede.

And we went at it again, played until the bell rang. Then we slapped our instruments into their coffin-like cases and pressed out into the hall. The flautist strode in front of me, a slender reed of a girl decked in autumnal plaid, gold hoops in her delicate earlobes. When she smiled at me, I noted braces on her teeth—thought
rich girl
. But I had to ask her something.

I could feel the question burning in my chest.

“Hey, Linda,” I coughed. She spun around, smirked like my zipper was down. I checked it. Shit was cool.

I said, with affected huskiness, “You want to hit that cheesy dance together?”

I was talking about some Halloween carnival, some hell-themed disco inferno that was going down in the school gym that Friday night.

“That would be nice,” she said. “I'm in the phone book,” she said. “Check ya later,” she said, before flouncing off toward the chemistry lab.

My heart pattered fast as a jackrabbit's. I needed a smoke. So I slipped into the bathroom and lit up, regarding my face in the mirror as my nostrils tusked smoke, noting something familiar about my eyebrows, the way they flared in surprise. And then the dream shifted, and I was
outside
my body, looking down at Irvin—for it was Irvin—half rake, half nerd, sixteen years old, perfecting his exhalation before the mirror.

•  •

Touched by weird dreams, I slept on and off past noon, then scrambled into my pants to catch lunch. The
BAIT
crew, all assembled save for Al and Vernon, looked pretty zombified.
Must be the Pep
, I thought as we ate in sulky silence, wondering where the hell Al was, fearing that he, too, had been forced to sign a release form and now wandered the streets in a robotic daze.

“Anybody seen Al today?” I asked.

“Saw him in the Nano Lounge,” said Irvin. “Greeted me rather formally but otherwise seemed okay.”

“That's a relief,” said Trippy. “Need to keep an eye on the man.”

Skeeter glanced up from his pizza and said, “Romie, bo, I had a weird dream about you last night.”

“Yeah?”

“I dreamt I
was
you, man—like, total immersion in your identity.”

“And what happened, exactly?”

“Well, you were with your daddy in his taxidermy shop, and he was teaching you how to mount a boar's head. Made you do the work while he leaned over you in coach mode, talking into
your left ear, so close I could smell the pickles on his breath. I could smell formaldehyde and rancid carcass. Plus, the Speed Stick you'd just started smearing your hairless pits with, even though you didn't need it. And I could hear the radio whining out mellow '70s tunes your father dug, songs you deemed too pussified for your burgeoning badassery.”

At this point the whole crew had stopped stuffing their faces, each man swallowing a last mouthful with an uncomfortable gulp and leaning forward on tensed forearms.

“Lord Tusky the Second,” I whispered.

“Who?” said Skeeter.

Lord Tusky the Second was the wild boar I helped my daddy stuff in 1984, the year I first fell for Helen at Concrete Pond, the year Reagan trumped Mondale, that year of Orwellian foreboding when the new wave crested and some psychopath opened fire in a McDonald's, slaughtering twenty-one innocent fast-food consumers—a banner year for DNA fingerprinting, Macintosh computers, and the AIDS virus.

“That really happened,” I said. “That's an actual memory, Skeeter. What the fuck?”

As I told them about my dream, Irvin shook his head, creased his forehead in puzzlement, and worked his feral eyebrows up and down.

“Also a memory,” he said. “Right down to the braces on Linda Green's teeth.”

We all started babbling at once about our night of strange dreams, until Irvin yelled, “Be still!”

“One at a time,” he said. “You next, Trippy.”

Trippy had dreamed of Skeeter, while Irvin had dreamed of Trippy, a perfect shuffling of identities as though we were enmeshed in some parlor game, some pomo variation on telephone
or musical chairs. Again, we erupted into panicked babble. Again, Irvin, who often played the elder Socrates in our symposia, commanded our silence. Despite our rising panic, he managed to ref an orderly debate that yielded the following theories:

1. During our
BAIT
downloads, we each left residual memories in the system, contagious memories that others could pick up. In that case, the transfer of memories probably reflected the order of our
BAIT
sessions.

2. Our identities were fusing into a network, a form of file sharing that formed a kind of collective consciousness.

3. The memory swap was evidence of a virus, perhaps even an intentional aspect of the
BAIT
program, and our brains were in the process of being hijacked to disastrous results, just as Al's and Vernon's had been.

“I wouldn't put anything past BioFutures Incorporated,” said Irvin.

“What the hell is Biofutures Incorporated?” asked Skeeter.

“The contract research organization funding this study, man. Guarantee you they don't give a rat's ass about our personal well-being.”

“How you know who's funding the study?” asked Trippy.

“It's right there in the contract if you got eyes in your head,” said Irvin, “though it is in the fine print, so I had to pull out my bifocals to read it.”

“I'm still a bit fuzzy as to the nature of the so-called research organization,” said Skeeter.

“According to Google,” said Irvin, “BioFutures is a jack-of-all-trades outsourced mega-conglomerate, with money as the bottom line and no central authority in line to regulate. They dabble in all kinds of shit: neuropharmaceuticals, biotechnology, even telecommunications. At least that's what I gather from the Internet, which
is out there for the world to see. Nothing but your own apathy and laziness stopping you from digging it up. No telling what kind of dark shenanigans go on behind the scenes.”

“Bet you they sell their research to the highest bidder too,” said Trippy, “decontextualized and repackaged.”

“You got it, youngblood. Some sinister jive,” said Irvin. “Can't help but think about the Tuskegee syphilis experiment or the MK-ULTRA LSD research. They could be yanking our chains. Tearing our brains up just to put them back together, y'all copy? I say we go to our cribs and examine our consent forms. I say we read the fine print. See how much they got us by the balls.”

•  •

I sat in my overchilled room, sliding glass door open to let some balmy air in. The summer breeze was tainted with car exhaust. Sighing, sipping Mountain Dew, I turned to the dismal task of contract reading. I snorted at the statement
This consent form may contain words with which you are unfamiliar. Please ask a member of the staff to explain any terminology you do not understand
.

I read through an explanation of the purpose of the
BAIT
study. I read through a jargony description of the download prep process, installation of transmitters, injection of nanobot serums, yada yada yada, and then on through an exhaustive account of the procedures I'd been undergoing for the past four weeks—water under the fucking bridge. I briefly gave pause over the possible administration of
random drug and alcohol tests
, which I had not noticed upon my first attempt at reading the contract. At last, I reached a juicy section titled “Risks and Discomforts,” a bulleted list of over fifty side effects suffered by one in forty subjects from similar tests, ranging from
mild headaches
and
feelings
of dissociation
to
intracranial hemorrhaging, anomic aphasia, and atonic seizures
.