The New and Improved Romie Futch

by Julia Elliott

  “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.

  “A dab or two of clotting agent,” said Josh, “and you’ll be ready to rock.”

  “I trust you remember the details of the confidentiality statement you signed,” said Chloe.

  “Refresh my memory?”

  “You’re not supposed to discuss your treatments with other subjects”—there was that word again. “Nothing too complicated.”

  “No prob, right?” Josh gave me a thumbs-up.

  “No prob,” I said.

  • •

  I picked up a cold burger from the cafeteria, which was in shutdown mode, overturned chairs on the tables, the whole place reeking of ammonia, and headed back toward my room. I found it odd that the halls were still empty, not one fellow subject ambling in clueless limbo, his brain on the verge of a major transformation. The elevator was empty. The Richard Feynman Nanotechnology Lounge was empty. But, unfortunately, my room was not empty. There was Needle, snoring away, wearing a pair of see-through jogging shorts without underwear. Now I could see the crappy cartoon on his chest: a dragon with the freakishly small head of a furious Chihuahua. His tattoo motto—FUCK THE WORLD—was spelled out in a cursive so fancy that I could barely read it.

  I flicked off the overheads and sat in the dark, eating my grade-D burger, listening to the snap-crackle-pop of my transforming brain.

  • •

  The Biological Artificial Intelligence Transmission (BAIT) Lab was in the Right Lobe of the complex, behind the cafeteria and the infirmary, beyond a twisty series of hallways named after parts of the brain (Cerebellum Boulevard, Medulla Lane, Amygdala Street). The master computer was basically a floor-to-ceiling fish tank with a row of lava lamps pulsing on top. Inside the tank, strange-looking creatures—or parts of creatures—floated in water the color of a blue raspberry Slurpee. Some of the parts looked like mollusks. Some looked like eels. Others looked like slugs or leeches, tentacles or bundles of worms. According to Chloe, this computer was made out of bioengineered microorganisms and animal components: leech neurons, strings of bacteria, bat ribosomes, and assorted amino acids.

  “The nanobiotic components should harmonize with your own gray matter,” she said, motioning for me to go ahead and hop into the space-age lounge chair that sat in front of the glowing tank. “This will make your downloads a lot more seamless.” She left me lying there, getting increasingly creeped out by the creature parts, which, I noticed, would occasionally jerk as though in pain.

  At last, Dr. Morrow strolled into the room with his fresh face and perfect hair, tailed by Chloe and Josh.

  “How are you feeling, Mr. Futch?” he asked me.

  “Not so bad,” I said.

  “Any uncomfortable cerebral sensations?”

  “Say what?”

  “Headaches?” said Chloe.

  “Not really.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Maybe a little sinus trouble, like I’m fixing to get a headache.”

  With latex-gloved hands, Dr. Morrow fingered my BC transmitters. He pulled a tiny plastic wand from an instrument tray and stuck its nipple-like tip into each transmitter. Through a metal gadget that resembled a toy telescope, he took a look at the epoxy fillers that clogged the holes behind my ears.

  “Very good,” he said. “I think we’re ready, as you kids say, to rock and roll.”

  “Ready to rock suffices,” said Josh, shuffling over with a tube of ointment. He rubbed cold slime onto my BC transmitters.

  “This stuff kicks ass,” he said. “You won’t feel a thing.”

  Chloe hooked five wireless electrodes up to my scalp. Dr. Morrow typed something into a micropad, and then bam—a 3-D hologram of my brain popped up two feet from my face, each section a different color.

  “Neato?” said Chloe.

  “Cool,” I answered.

  “Just relax,” said Dr. Morrow. “This won’t hurt at all. You won’t feel the transmission of data. You’ll probably experience a random memory or a series of stray thoughts. And then you’ll fall into something that resembles a pleasant nap as your VPL signals are interrupted.”

  “Which refers to your ventral posterior lateral nucleus of the thalamus,” Chloe said very slowly while patting my arm.

  Funny thing was, I could actually see her voice whirling like feathers up there in the light as I sank into some sort of well. But then, flooded by a sudden vision of Helen, I left the BAIT Lab behind.

  There we
were one May night in the late ’80s, cruising the Hardee’s drive-through, grooving to a King Crimson cassette. A late bloomer, I’d finally filled out. I’d shed my pimpled skin and grown my hair into a lush, heavy-metal mane. At last, after years of lusting on the sidelines, I’d lured Helen Honeycutt into my Camaro.

  We bought Big Gulps and jumbo fries. We spiked our Cokes with my dad’s Jim Beam and drove out past Sky City Discount store. I gunned it past Whitmire’s Sand and Gravel, past the SPCA, past the juvenile correction facility and the wastewater treatment plant, refusing to stop until I found a setting that lived up to Helen’s beauty. When I finally yanked up my emergency brake, we were a half mile into Caw Caw Swamp, windows rolled down, the funk of black water in our nostrils. The frogs were belting it out. The moon floated above the cypress trees. And just as our whiskey buzz came on and “I Talk to the Wind” slipped into its flute solo, lightning bugs rose up from the swamp, glittering in weird patterns.

  We could not help but kiss at that moment. Like a humming-bird sticking its beak into a flower, I crammed my tongue into the sweet pinkness of Helen Honeycutt. I had no idea what I was doing. I’d kissed three other girls. She pulled away from me, wiped my mouth, and smiled. Ever so gently prying my lips apart with the slippery dart of her tongue, she taught me how to kiss.

  I’d seen a show on Nature about a zoo seal that was released into the sea. The animal knew exactly what to do. What to eat. How to find a mate.

  That’s what it was like for me after five minutes of kissing Helen.

  We kissed, and the lightning bugs kept coming. Turned out it was their season. They’d just hatched from the worm state and were rising en masse to mate, something scientists and photographers traveled to the swamp to see. Helen explained the whole thing to me that night. She’d read about it in the Hampton Herald. We kissed again as fireflies coupled in luminous clouds.

  I woke with the word luminous in my head, Dr. Morrow’s soap-opera face coming into gauzy focus. Chloe hovered angelically behind him. My brain had that fizzy feeling again.

  “Hi there.” Chloe waved at me.

  “Um, like, salutations,” I said, using a word I didn’t know I knew.

  “Subject showing verbal signs of cerebral optimization immediately upon gaining consciousness,” Dr. Morrow enunciated into a wireless mic. “New activity in the superior and middle temporal gyri confirms this.”

  I sort of understood what he meant for once. He was talking about specific parts of my multicolored brain. There it was, twirling before my eyes, lit up like a psychedelic novelty toy from Spencer Gifts. As Chloe turned to retrieve her micropad, it occurred to me that she was a callipygian nymph with pulchritude to burn, and that Josh, the pathetic ectomorphic dork, was smitten with her. His desire, however, was unrequited. Every time I thought about something, SAT words popped into my head. The computer was bioluminescent, for example, palpitating with neural tissues. Dr. Morrow was unctuous and virile and subtly malodorous. My ergonomic medical recliner was so well designed I felt like I was in utero.

  “Holy shit!” I said. Josh chuckled and rubbed his hands like a mantis.

  “Why don’t you say a few words for the record?” He thrust a mic into my personal space.

  “Like what?”

  “Absolutely anything. It’s all good.”

  “I’m, um, like, ravenous,” I said. “Um, um, like, um, famished, um—what the fuck—rapacious. I could eat a hecatomb of hamburgers.”

  “What’s a hecatomb?” Josh looked amused.

  “Says here.” Chloe typed into her micropad. “A Grecian sacrifice to the gods.”

  “I don’t get it,” said Josh.

  “Oh,” said Chloe. “A sacrifice of one hundred cattle. That makes sense.”

  “That’s awesome!” exclaimed Josh. “After one OED download and Roget’s Thesaurus, Roman’s a poet. Watch out, Shakespeare.”

  I engaged in a high five with the affable hobbledehoy. I saw myself stumping Chip and dazzling Helen with my newfound gift of gab. I saw Helen snorting like she used to when I said something clever.

  “For a while you’ll feel verbally overwhelmed,” said Dr. Morrow. “But your mind will settle after a good night’s sleep. Here’s a Sophiquel sample to help quiet your thoughts.”

  The good doctor handed me a capsule packet (nine pills), which I promptly pocketed.

  “Now you’d better get down to the cafeteria before it closes. Try to eat some green leafy vegetables and berries if you can. Avoid hydrogenated oils, as they are horrible for your neurons. And remember, you must not discuss your treatments with anyone.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I won’t. Not that I’ve had an opportunity to anyway.”

  “You will tonight.” Dr. Morrow smirked like a jaded god. “And I ask you to please remember section 2, clause 6.5 of contract 3 if you feel the urge to share your experiences with another subject.”

  • •

  Sure enough, the cafeteria was buzzing that night, some thirty-odd men grabbing grub or clustering at the laminate tables—crackheads, meth heads, potheads, and speed freaks, pill-popping maniacs and bloated alcoholics, aging heshers and ramshackle players, washed-up men on the down side of life. It was as though Dr. Morrow had snapped his fingers and—behold—a crowd of male human specimens had materialized in the cafeteria, each one modeling a particular flourish of middle-aged decrepitude. I noted all manner of potbellies, diverse patterns of baldness, various shades and stages of graying hair. Though there were some solid working-class types who must’ve been suffering bad patches, most of the subjects were clearly of the debauched variety.

  Debauched.

  Now, there was a useful word. From the Middle French débaucher, which meant to turn away from one’s duty.

  Debauched creatures lurked in the fluorescent light with their molded plastic trays. Debauched creatures hunched over classic cafeteria food—burgers, fries, corn dogs, tater tots, and victuals of that ilk. Debauched creatures grumbled and brooded. Debauched creatures stared sullenly. Just about all of these debauched creatures (including me) were in withdrawal mode and, hence, not in the best of spirits. They seemed to avoid one another, each withdrawing into his own bubble of personal space and staring out at the world with shell-shocked eyes. I wondered if the Center was providing heavy-duty pharmaceutical assistance to the more drug-addled among them.

  Addled.

  There was another useful word. From the Old English noun adela (liquid filth), addled was synonymous with spoiled, corrupted, rotten, putrescent.

  Mephitic, loathsome, fetid, foul.

  Tainted, noisome, moldering, putrid.

  I felt vaguely nauseated, as though the words themselves were festering in my head, lodged like parasites in the slimy tissues of my brain. Still, I made it through the grub line, collected a plate of lo mein, and absconded to a remote table at the edge of the room, where I could endure the streams of verbiage in peace.

  Feculent, noxious, rancid, fecal.

  Like the birds in that Hitchcock movie, the words kept coming. I’d be sitting there, eating my noodles, trying to have a normal thought about something. And then bleep—after a mental hiccup, a new word, shiny and strange, would fly into my head. The skinny fucker sitting at the table on my right was lupine, for example, hirsute in the extreme, downright lycanthropic. He was eating french fries with a fork and muttering to himself. Another dude, sulking over a bowl of soup, looked ursine and melancholic. Another had this clammy ecclesiastic quality, plump, pallid, and dank, like he’d been dwelling indoors from day one of his life.

  I couldn’t decide if all these words were helping me think or preventing me from thinking. Maybe they were just hijacking my thoughts, taking them in new directions. According to Dr. Morrow, I wouldn’t retain every single info unit from each download, though it usually took a night or two of sleep to sort it all out. In the meantime, I felt uncomfortable, mentally constipated, like I needed to express (squeeze out; convey by words or gesture) somet
hing.

  Bespeak, broach, communicate, convey.

  Pontificate. Proclaim. Vent.

  That’s why I was talking to myself, I guess. That’s why this older hepcat with hoary dreadlocks backtracked with his tray of sushi and sat down at my table.

  “What it is?” he said. “You got the dog, or the dog got you?”

  “The dog’s got me,” I said. “Most definitely.”

  “Irvin Mood,” he said, extending his hand. “Elloree, South Carolina.”

  “Romie Futch.” We shook. “Hampton.”

  “I’ll get right to the skinny,” he said. “Reason I sat down here is because I heard you using some polysyllabic diction, some, uh, I mean, uh, lofty lingo, some, uh, uh, uh, I mean, crusty academese. Do you copy?”

  “I certainly do.”

  “Now, I’m hip to the confidentiality statement, don’t get me wrong.”

  “As long as we don’t talk directly about the procedure, the, um, agenda, um, um, like, goddammit, modus operandi,” I said, “it’s all good.”

  “Your dome feel kind of effervescent, uh, carbonated, uh, uh, I mean, uh, spumous?”

  “If by dome you mean cranium, um, like, you know, brainpan, um, skull, man, then that’s about right. Kind of fizzy.”

  “Right on, youngblood. Ought to call it the fizz. Kind of like the mental equivalent of the fuzz. You copy?”

  “I do.”

  “In addition to the fizz, my brain’s too zippy, too jiggy, but not in a funky way. Can’t think without some Latinate polysyllable, or, uh, I mean, some bone-jacked Chaucerism jumping my dome.”

  “Hey, Irvin, you’ve hijacked my lexicon, my palaver, um, like, you know, um, um—shit won’t stop. My motherfucking word hoard. Talking real fast is the only way to beat it.”

  “Dr. Whodunit said a decent night of slumber would mellow the manic logorrhea,” Irvin muttered briskly.

  “Yeah, but the problem is, how do you achieve, uh, fuck, dormancy, um, um, you know, fucking quiescence, like, alleviation when your brain won’t chill the fuck out?”