The New and Improved Romie Futch

by Julia Elliott

  “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.

  I vaguely remembered chuckling dismissively over this list when I’d scanned portions of the contract in the lobby of the Center, a seasoned ironist even before my brain overhaul. Like most twenty-first-century Americans, I was used to drug commercials featuring beautiful women frolicking through fields of sunflowers, high on the latest antidepressant, beatific and radiant despite warnings of blurred vision, decreased libido, and spastic colon. I ate GM Frankenfood bled of nutrients and “fortified” with vitamins, synthetic grub chock-full of pesticides, artificial compounds, and carcinogens. Nuclear power plants surrounded me on all sides, pulsing with toxic radiation. Ever since the ozone had been shot to hell, sunshine itself had turned evil, blighting my skin with dark, precancerous spots.

  Even if I were to sequester myself in a cabin deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains, live off game, wild plants, and creek water, I couldn’t escape the poisons of civilization. As National Geographic had recently informed me, even the most remote tributary of the Amazon River contained twenty-nine contaminants of various chemical groups.

  Our oceans were dying. Ice caps melting. Rain forests shrinking. A new species went extinct every 9.3 seconds. You could drive yourself crazy tallying them up. During the time I’d been reading this particular consent form, sipping Mountain Dew, and scratching my poor harrowed balls (the sperm counts of American men had declined by forty-five percent since 1950), 96.7 species had bitten the dust. I imagined the last kipunji monkey staggering through brush, coughing up blood, falling into death throes on the jungle floor as the sounds of chain saws droned in the distance, and jumbo jets roared through the sky, and cell phone towers rose upon Mount Kilimanjaro.

  I felt weak and scared. I wanted to call Helen. I wanted to hear her rich laugh veer into nasal tones. But she was probably enjoying the summer day with Boykin: picnicking, skinny-dipping in his pool, or worse—lounging in a postcoital torpor in a tank top and panties, eating Thai noodles while streaming Netflix.

  I could not call Helen.

  I turned back to my dismal contract:

  Because these procedures are experimental, their full range of side effects may be unknown. Some may be life threatening. Please inform the staff about any side effects you may experience.

  The staff had access to my medical records. The Center was equipped with surveillance equipment. There was a chance that our behavior might be monitored. The head doctor and his staff had the right to distribute information about us to research sponsors, employees, and/or owners of research sponsors as well as governmental agencies.

  I had a headache already and still hadn’t reached the section I was looking for. I wanted a drink. I kept glancing anxiously toward the Pep cooler, then around at various spots where microcameras might be stashed. At last, I found the section in question, titled “Compensation for Injury,” which explained that the study’s principal investigator would treat us as needed and dismiss us from the study if it was in our best interest. If we chose to leave the study early, we would be partially compensated on a prorated pay scale unless we violated any of the rules or regulations listed in clause 7.5, and finally, receipt of total stipend is dependent on full completion of download procedures and participation in follow-up tests. This hazy section concluded with a particularly ominous tidbit: research subjects will submit to any end-of-study procedures deemed necessary.

  Whatever the fuck that meant.

  I whipped out my phone, logged on to E-Live, and pulled up Helen’s profile. She was still IN A RELATIONSHIP. She still dug freaky marine life and Art. But she’d updated her profile pic. Gone was the vampire squid floating in a solipsistic dream at the bottom of the sea, its skin radiant with self-made light. Now my Helen was leaning against what looked like the porch railing of a fancy beach house. The ocean seethed behind her. The ancient, boiling sun sank with a hackneyed burst of gaudy flamingo light.

  I suspected that Boykin had snapped the picture. I feared that Boykin owned the oceanfront property at which my ex-wife dallied in such casual elegance like a lady of means. I recalled a morsel of wisdom from that dumpy womanizer a
nd war criminal Henry Kissinger, who looked like a bloated proboscis monkey but still got bookoo pussy: power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

  Power is money. Power is positional. Power is rooted in hierarchical observation.

  As I gazed at the snapshot of Helen, her sun-kissed body hazed in a nostalgic glow by some retro phone app, I felt the power draining from my body. I needed a drink. In a fit of paranoia, I went around the room affixing strips of masking tape to suspicious units of hardware and electronics—ceiling-mounted sprinkler heads, the blinking smoke alarm, the digital thermostat box—anything that might conceal a security camera. I removed my soiled undergarments from the top of our secret cooler, and dipped my plastic cup into the vat of Pep. I lay on my depressing twin bed, in my tiny cube, staring at the cinder-block wall and drinking Trippy’s prison swill.

  I could feel eyes upon me: the bulging, deadpan eyes of the night-time residence hall monitor, the beautiful young eyes of the tech assistants, the green eyes of Dr. Morrow, which sparkled with childish curiosity despite their crow’s-feet, and finally, the eyes of the nameless suits from BioFutures Incorporated who’d financed this study. I could feel them staring at me, their eyes huge and opaque, without depth or irises—the blank reptilian eyes of Sleestaks.

  I toyed with the idea of heading down to the Nano Lounge for some company but decided to wallow in the cozy pigsty of my misery while shuffling through Helen’s pics and scanning her Wall for evidence of her new life. Rifling through her roster of 256 “friends,” I couldn’t find Boykin, whose last name I didn’t know and whose first could be some form of sobriquet. So I image-Googled Hampton County attorneys, alighting, at last, upon his headshot. The fucker was wearing a bow tie with a sweater vest. He smiled like a possum.

  Boykin Wallace Hagman had graduated from Furman University and Charleston School of Law. He was in real estate, naturally, and belonged to a firm called Hagman and Banes. He had a weak chin. A thin, long nose. His eyes were squinty, rodential, and scheming. An unwholesome, fleshy growth dangled from his left lower eyelid. He looked vaguely clammy, sun-damaged, and pink. He had to be at least fifty-five when this pic was snapped, despite his suspiciously thick gray mane, which looked like it had been cosmetically enhanced with silver-fox highlights.

  He was a member of the Edisto Island Historic Preservation Society. He owned an Irish setter and loved sailing. He supported the Arts.

  This was all I could gather from his short bio.

  I downed another cup of Pep. Glared at his image until it started to vibrate demonically. When I finally stood up, I felt the drunkenness fluttering inside my body like plastic flakes in a shaken snow globe. I stumbled down the hall to call Helen.

  • •

  At the end of the hall, the reading room got decent reception, so I hunkered down in a fake Barcelona chair for the task at hand. My heart sputtered as I shuffled through my contacts, located Helen Honeycutt, and pressed DIAL.

  “Romie!” she answered, ambushing me with her deceptively intimate voice—a big surprise since she usually banished me to the limbo of voice mail. “Where the hell are you?”

  “In an undisclosed location.”

  “Romie,” she said gently, reminding me a little of Chloe, “are you in rehab?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I think that’s a wonderful thing, and so does Lee. I talked to him the other day. He and Chip were worried—thought you might be doing time at a mental hospital someplace.”

  “All institutions—rehab, mental hospitals, public schools—pretty much follow the prison model, using hierarchical observation to socially construct docile bodies.”

  “Excuse me? What are you talking about?”

  “Never mind. Just wanted to ask you a few things.”

  “Wait a minute. Are you drunk?”

  “Not really. Why?”

  “You’re slurring. You said Jush wanted to ash you a few tings.”

  “I am Ironic Man, referencing drunkenness to create a deceptively comic subtext for our extremely sober conversation and thereby deconstruct the binary opposition between drunk and sober.”

  “You are definitely inebriated.”

  “Listen. Remember when you used to say that most real estate lawyers you knew were either glorified accountants or hustlers?”

  “Romie.”

  “Well, do you remember saying that?”

  “I said most, not all. I know what you’re driving at, buster, and I don’t appreciate it.”

  “Buster. That’s funny. But listen, just listen to me.”

  I paused, hoping to be calmed by the whispery metronome of her breathing, lulled into a state of pseudo-comfort by the illusion of intimacy. Of all people on this shit-ball planet, Helen was the only one I felt close to, and I still sensed that we functioned as a unit, telepathically intermeshed on some subcellular level—despite her budding relationship with Boykin Wallace Hagman.

  “I was wondering why,” I said, “after upholding more or less feminist ideologies your entire life, unselfconsciously, which is a beautiful thing, you now submit to an old-school paternalistic, perhaps even mercenary, sexual relationship?”

  “Mercenary? What the hell? Look, Romie. You’re drunk. I’m worried about you. But this is bullshit. I hope you’re okay. I’ve got to go.”

  “Wait, Helen. I may be in trouble.”

  I hated to use this hackneyed cinematic line, felt disgusted when I heard my voice going all squeaky on the word trouble, quivering with emotion and dropping dramatically into a void of silence. But it worked. And maybe it was true. Maybe I was in trouble.

  “Romie?”

  Her voice softened. I heard movement. Perhaps she was relocating to a place out of Boykin’s earshot. I could picture him in the background, quivering his snout while feigning nonchalance, pretending to be absorbed in a TV commercial or riveted to his laptop, flipping idly through his stock portfolio, basking in the warmth of his assets.

  “Romie, what’s going on? You can talk to me.”

  I felt conned by the familiar conspiratorial dip of her voice, the lapse into throatiness—her private voice, her domestic voice, the voice she’d used when we had serious talks on the couch and she’d wriggle close, entwining her limbs with mine, sending waves of heat from her flesh to my flesh. Like the time when my mother’s diagnosis finally came in, MRI scans featuring dark spots on key areas of her brain, blighted tissue, atrophy of the frontal and temporal lobes. In my parents’ living room, Mom had smiled nervously, her mouth smeared with thick, bright lipstick, as Dad broke the news.

  “I’m having some memory problems,” Mom kept saying, still able to talk then, still able to balance a checkbook, still able to drive.

  At home, afterward, I drank three beers that might as well have been water and paced around the house until Helen sat me down.

  “We’ll get through this, Romie,” she’d said, reminding me of those dark months after her father killed himself by eating all of the pesticide samples in his Monsanto kit—a messy end—and the ordeal had taken us to a darker, closer place.

  “Romie,” Helen said now, sounding sterner, “are you still there?”

  And then I had another savage headache, same as last time, as though my brain wanted to break free, to burst out with a sputtering of gore like the larval creature from Alien. “My brain wants to jump out of its—I mean my, goddammit—skull.”

  “What? Stop groaning, Romie. Talk to me, please. Tell me where you are.”

  And then I saw, clear as day, my father sitting grimly at the kitchen table as my mother served him a raw pork chop. A raw pork chop also sat on my plate, stark and pink beside a mound of undercooked rice, and on Helen’s as well.

  By this point, Mom’s Pick’s disease had progressed, but my father’s coping tactic was to act as though everything were normal, letting her do her thing. She could no longer drive and her cooking had grown strange. Her vocabulary was dwindling rapidly, and she forgot who people were. Though she’d always
been a conservative dresser, she became an eccentric fashionista that summer, sporting, that evening, a 1980s purple power blazer with coral warm-up pants. Her penciled-on eyebrows gave her face a Kabuki vibe. The sight of her, shuffling around the kitchen in clownish clothes, this woman who’d once snorted at dolled-up women, hurt, because I knew she was gone. Her smoking habit, once a secret vice, had grown fierce. A butt fumed in her ashtray, and yet she held a freshly lit Camel in her hand. She took a drag and winked at me.

  “Is it delicious?” Mom said.

  “Betsy,” said my father, “this meat’s raw.”

  “It’s delicious,” Mom said.

  “You need to cook it,” said Dad.

  “It’s delicious.”

  “Raw,” Dad pronounced, taking his meat slab up with a fork. “Not cooked. We could get salmonella poisoning, trichinosis, yersiniosis.”

  Leave it to Dad, who owned three different medical dictionaries, to name a disease we’d never heard of. He pinched his thin lips into a line, intensifying his iguanoid features. It was not so much his slightly bulging eyes and burgeoning neck wattle that made him resemble the lizard as the horny emotional husk that separated him from the rest of the world.

  As Dad gathered our pork chops on a plate, Mom shuffled around him in an anxious jig.

  “It’s delicious,” she said.

  “I’ve got to cook it, Betsy,” Dad said, “or we could get sick.”

  Mom lunged for the plate, attempted to snatch it out of his hand. When Dad lifted the pork chops high over his head, she jumped like a terrier for a Milk-Bone. Giggling, she dropped her cigarette, which sprayed sparks as it bounced across the butter-yellow linoleum.

  Helen gritted her teeth, something she did when she was upset but wanted to hide her feelings. She fussed with her fork. She reached for my hand. Our sadness fused into a mutual mood.

  And then a gust of blackness swept through the bright kitchen, obliterating the scene.

  EIGHT

  When I emerged from this oblivion, I was in the BAIT Lab, strapped into the familiar ergonomic medical lounger of blue Naugahyde, a sheet of wax paper crackling under my damp body. Dr. Morrow plucked wireless electrodes from my scalp. He frowned at each slimy unit as though it were an engorged tick before dropping it into a metal bowl.