The New and Improved Romie Futch (14 page)

“What do you think's up with Vernon?” asked Trippy, breaking a round of silence.

“Probably wallowing in a ditch someplace,” I said. “Still spitting out endless streams of verbiage.”

“We all know the official story,” said Trippy. “Signed a release form, yada yada.”

“I smell a rat,” said Skeeter.

“Who knows?” said Trippy. “Maybe Vernon did have the balls to skip out.”

“Vernon doesn't strike me as particularly blessed in the testicle department,” said Skeeter, a lame attempt at levity. “I see his junk as mouse-like and bald, with a webbing of veins and reeking of baby powder.”

Everybody forced out a laugh except Al, who'd been strangely silent the whole time, and who now started sputtering as though a speech impediment was preventing the delivery of some urgent bit of information.

“Dtho, dtho, dtho,” he spat, bobbing his head like a chicken and clenching his fists in frustration. And then he went silent, leaned back in his chair, and gazed down at his last french fry, a twisted, burnt mutant that looked like some undead witch's pinkie. He plucked up the morsel. Took a rodent nibble. Swallowed. Frowned. Gingerly placed the remainder on the edge of his plastic plate.

“What's the matter, Al?” said Skeeter.

“What?” Al blinked.

“How you feeling, man?” said Trippy.

“Never been better,” Al replied, without enthusiasm.

“You being Ironic Man?” asked Skeeter.

“I am speaking in earnest,” said Al.

“What kind of download you scoping for tomorrow?” asked Trippy, trying to get us back into play.

“I have not yet perused the options,” said Al, taking a careful sip of Sprite.

“I'll prolly go with music,” said Trippy, giving me a covert what-the-fuck look. “Ever since I saw that Eurhythmics video in 1983—‘Sweet Dreams Are Made of This'—I always wanted to rock a cello, though back then I was too tough to admit it.”

“Talking 'bout that masked neo-romantic babe in the eerie cow pasture?” I said.

“Word,” said Trippy.

“I know what you mean, man.”

“Funny you should say that, bo,” said Skeeter. “I feel the same way about the violin, but it was ‘The Devil Went Down to Georgia' that put the fire under my ass. I've still got some postcolonial lit to get through, a half day at most, they said, and then I'll have my pick of arts modules.”

“Gnu, gnu, gnu,” said Al. “Gnu.”

“What's happening, man?” asked Trippy.

“Nothing.” Al stood up, scooped up his tray. “Now, if you'll please excuse me, gentlemen, I shall be returning to my room forthwith.”

Balancing an imaginary pile of books on his head, Al strode stiffly from the cafeteria.

•  •

“Yay!” squealed Chloe, looking even younger as she clapped her hands. “You decided to go for it! You won't be sorry.”

“What's up?” said Josh. “You ready to make your selection? It's all pretty cut-and-dried.”

He handed me yet another form, the usual consent sleaze, coupled with a list of
BAIT
categories:
Music: History, Theory, and Practic
e
;
Visual Arts: History, Theory, and Practic
e
;
Theater: History, Theory, and Practic
e
; and
Dance: History, Theory, and Practice
. After selecting visual arts, I had to choose among
Graphics and
Computing
,
3-D Design
, and
Illustration and Painting
. Without hesitation I went for 3-D design, scrawled my John Hancock beneath several dense blocks of fine print, and, with a devil-may-care toss of my thinning ponytail, climbed into the hot seat.

Josh initiated a high-five and pounded my tentatively raised palm. Chloe daubed my temples and cranial bald spots with especial gentleness. Brushing bagel crumbs from his chin, Dr. Morrow emerged from his sanctified office to do the honors of applying my electrodes. I still wanted to smash his chiseled jaw, but I pulled myself together.

Orbed in a halo of light, the neurologist receded as I began the familiar descent into the dark well that always preceded the onset of a
BAIT
session. I braced myself for whatever random memory would soon come swirling up from the obscure convolutions of my frontal cortex.

Nine years old, shirtless, I padded down the hallway of our old ranch house, the algae-green carpet spongy beneath my bare feet, my head stuffed with unsettling dreams. My mother was at the end of the hall in her sewing room, bent over a chugging Singer, her hair a glossy spill, the deep auburn of dry pine needles. She looked up at me, smiled slyly, and held up a tiny pair of trousers for Dad's new novelty line. The bookcase behind her displayed a variety of miniature squirrel athletes: a gray squirrel hurling a football, a brown squirrel shooting hoops, a rare white squirrel from the North Carolina mountains teeing off with a tiny club. Mom pressed the fairy-size britches against Dad's golfer squirrel and chuckled.

Her laughter filled the room like a cloud of furry moths. I was still coltish, silk-skinned, could still press myself against her mammalian warmth without shame. When she hugged me, I got a deep whiff of lavender talc, plus obscure pheromones that calmed me. She never rushed me back to bed. Never complained about the insomnia that'd started to torture her after she hit thirty-five.

I curled up on the floor beside the window, crickets throbbing behind the dark screen, paean to the endless summer night. The
chug, chug
of her sewing machine started up again. She laughed softly, then sang one of her nonsense songs in perfect pitch, dark treacle that soothed me back to sleep:

Poor old Mister Lizard
,

Who had cancer of the gizzard
,

Stumbled through a blizzard
,

To meet the local wizard
.

I fell asleep marveling at the craftsmanship of Mom and Dad's most elaborate diorama—a bucolic scene with rodents playing croquet and enjoying picnics on blankets. The animals' tails shimmered with vitality. Their eyes gleamed like warm molasses. And I was bowled over by the clothes Mom had sewn in her sleepless delirium: frock coats and brocade vests, Gibson girl skirts and velvet riding jackets.

And then I woke up, a thousand years of Art with a capital
A
weighing heavily upon my brain. My occipital cortex, hippocampus, and amygdala crackled with visionary electricity as I imagined a taxidermy diorama as elaborate as an Elizabethan masque. I saw animatronic animals created from a variety of artistic media. I saw a wide-screen backdrop employing elements of stop-motion animation, film, music, sound effects—you name it. I saw a diorama that the viewer could actually step into.

I'd display my work at some fancy gallery that knew what was what in terms of obsolete highbrow/lowbrow dichotomies. Fuck Hampton County—I was talking Columbia, Charleston, maybe even Hotlanta. Down in the dingy dollar cinema of my mind, I saw Helen walk into the gallery. Saw her drop the clammy hand
of her lame boyfriend as she, overwhelmed by my talent, stumbled around in a daze of delight.

I'd create the most ass-kicking diorama in the history of taxidermy.

NINE

We were in the Nano Lounge, overhead fluorescents deadened, the room enveloped in a Rembrandtian glow via strategically placed floor lamps. Somehow, the air smelled of rosewater and old ivory. Skeeter, small and wizened, clad in an ancient Danzig tee, held a beautiful chestnut violin under his chin. He summoned bewitching melodies with his bow. Trippy, his head swathed in a nylon do-rag reminiscent of Renaissance piratical adventure, his ripped arms pulsing, sawed at a mahogany cello.

After administering their
BAIT
downloads in
Music: History, Theory, and Practice
, the Center had provided them with rental instruments, which were necessary for their post-
BAIT
tests. And every night since, they'd filled the Richard Feynman Nanotechnology Lounge with gentle concertos, études, and stately waltzes from days of yore.

That night I sat at the snack table, basking in their music as I sculpted mythological creatures out of a microwavable polymer clay product. The Center was not equipped with glazes, clay, and a kiln, so I made do with Sculpey and a box of acrylic paints. Lulled by the gentle rhythms of Alexander Bakshi's “Winter in Moscow,”
I shaped exquisite miniatures for a neo-baroque surrealist diorama that I envisioned as a kind of 3-D Rubens on acid, painted in pop-art colors and set into motion by basic animatronics.

Transformation was my theme: men and women caught in the agonizing ecstasies of morphing into magical beasts. A satyr with hairy goat thighs thrust his massive caprine cock toward the heavens. A nightingale bobbed heavily through the air, burdened by human boobs that swelled pornographically from her rich plumage.

I laughed at the ease of it all, how nimbly my fingers pinched out each creature and etched it with makeshift carving tools.

Al twirled shyly in, his buzz cut sleek, his beard impeccably trimmed, his eyes flashing alertly behind glasses as though he were ready to swing a real-estate deal or argue a case in court. But he wore a leotard, a nylon bodysuit the sickly prosthetic pink of “Crayola Flesh.” He performed a series of strange contortions only vaguely recognizable as dance. He'd opted for
Dance: History, Theory, and Practice
(or perhaps, guided by racial and sexual stereotypes, the powers that be had made this decision for him), and his routines were baffling. He jumped in place for a solid minute, got down on all fours and skittered like a crab, and then wrenched his shoulders in a series of micromovements. His motions were strangely arrhythmic, as though his brain didn't register the tunes Skeeter and Trippy pumped out, as though he marched to the beat of some demented Lilliputian drummer who pounded skins inside the soundproof chamber of his brain. As far as we knew, Al was busting modern moves too complex for our untrained sensibilities. Or perhaps his
BAIT
s hadn't taken, and his dancing was the equivalent of choreographic stuttering.

“How's it going, Al?” said Skeeter, pausing between tunes.

“Fine,” he replied with icy formality. “Your concern is appreciated.”

And then he bounded out into the hallway with a twitchy fouetté jeté.

This is how we had passed our final week. Though Dr. Morrow kept us busy with tedious tests until noon, afternoons were designated studio time. Even though we knew our efforts were being monitored, even though we could feel institutional eyes upon us, we couldn't help ourselves: our brains bristled with new skills. We itched to strut our stuff. As I sat before my grotesque yet strangely beautiful little Sculpey figures, I thought about the creations I'd fashion upon returning to my shop. For the first time in twenty years I could feel
the future
, curled in pupal expectation inside my heart, pumping charged chemicals into my bloodstream.

I'd return home, clean up my act, buckle down, and get to work. I'd rise at six, meditate, go jogging, then eat a bowl of oatmeal with fresh fruit. Sipping green tea, I'd tend to the demands of what clients I had left, expanding my customer base through word of mouth. After supper each night, my humble taxidermy shop would transform into an atelier. I'd invest what was left of my seven thousand dollars on supplies and tools, including animatronic parts, a whole new fleet of Quick Pupil digital eyeballs, plus paints, epoxies, dyes, and finishing powders that would enable me to turn ordinary game animals into mythic beasts of wonder.

In my mind's eye I could see them inhabiting Boschian worlds that bloomed in the fertile darkness of my imagination. I caught glimmers of their sleek odd bodies scampering through forests unknown. I saw their robotic eyes twinkling in the black void. I heard the ghostly buzz of their electronic hearts. Saw their teeth, lustrous with fixative. Saw their latex tongues, pink and dewy with polyurethane spit.

I saw them roaring and flapping in a giant terrarium, bounding through velveteen foliage, nibbling at plastic fruit. They sat on
their haunches, leonine and golden, under an artificial moon the color of Mello Yello.

•  •

Our last breakfast together was a melancholy affair—remnants of a summer thunderstorm trickling down the floor-to-ceiling windows, the light outside a seasick green. Four middle-aged men slumped over scrambled eggs and toaster pastries, bracing our asses for return to the draconian whims of reality. The cafeteria was half-empty, most of the subjects having left already. Vernon was gone. Irvin was gone. Al was gone in spirit, inhabiting his chair with impeccable posture, forking eggs into his mouth with Victorian fussiness, spitting out robotic tidbits of polite conversation. But his pupils were dilated, his eyes filmed with an unwholesome sheen, hinting at some secret distress. And now his body was seizing up again, caught in a tremor. His hands trembled. His fingers crimped. He dropped his fork.

We all stared at the fork, its leftmost prong lancing a gobbet of greasy egg, an abject morsel that made me turn my eyes toward the window. I thought of Kristeva's
Powers of Horror
and its catalog of abject fluids: blood, pus, snot, piss, and shit—flowing and clotting, oozing and crusting. Remembering her obsessive description of the coagulated skin of proteins that forms on the surface of warm milk, I wondered if it was true that all of these things brought us in touch with our semiotic mothers, those prelinguistic, milk-bearing women whom we'd attempted to banish from our minds.

I thought of my own mother, tried to remember the nubile version who'd suckled me, the one I'd greedily clung to as an infant and toddler, snuffling and licking, pinching and groping. But all I
could envision was a pair of tanned legs clad in olive Bermudas, a set of pretty feet with wriggling simian toes.

A plastic kiddie pool glowed aqua behind her. Flowers swayed in warm wind. A lost world.