The New and Improved Romie Futch

by Julia Elliott

  • •

  When I came to, I was strapped to the hotel bed, the rockabilly creature talking on his phone. He turned to regard me, and I closed my eyes, trying to remain limp.

  “That’s right. The third BC transmitter. I already tried that. Lemme check.”

  The young man cradled my skull, poked it with something.

  “Now I see it,” he said. “Clockwise? Yep. Got it. Yes, boss, he’s out cold. I already checked his PCCDs. He’ll be back on your network within the hour. And the vis-scanner app is ready to roll. You’ll be watching his dreams in living color tonight. Okay. Later.”

  I couldn’t move because I was straitjacketed by an intricate network of straps. But when I opened my eyes and saw the familiar hologram of my brain rotating two feet from my face, its regions mapped in rainbow colors, I panicked. When I saw the asshole typing into his micropad, I squirmed with all my might, writhing like some flying thing in a cocoon. The boy jerked around, eyes wide with shock. But it was too late. I was already sinking into the familiar well that preceded a download, the young man’s appalled face above me in the distant circle of light. From the deep dark well of my unconscious, a random memory flooded my mind.

  Tucked into the depths of the cavernous Future Dragon Chinese Buffet, Helen sat beside me in the booth, my mother and father across from us. Mom’s plate was heaped with sweet things: cookies and banana pudding, deep-fried meats glistening with corn syrup. She was so far gone that Dad had ceased to reason with her. Mom ate fast, like a dog, lipstick smeared around the edges of her mouth. Her eyes sparkled with manic ecstasy, and her irises seemed unmoored, jangling like those plastic googly eyes the Hobby Lobby sold. I felt a deep sickness of the soul, a general cellular entropy.

  “You are so beautiful,” Mom said, patting Helen’s hand. “Everything about you is perfect: your hair, your eyes, your lips.”

  This was Mom’s latest mantra. As language began to fail her, the phenomenal world had emerged in blazing, elemental beauty—all objects etched in psychedelic detail, aglow with miraculous presence. And Mom was no longer afraid of anything. Just the week before, she’d picked up a snake—a harmless garter, but still, it’d startled my father to see her moving over the lawn with a serpent in her hands.

  “So beautiful,” she kept repeating, and then she dropped the writhing creature, squatted to watch it slither away, calling after it: “Beautiful, beautiful, beautiful.”

  “What’s beautiful?” Dad had asked.

  “The long short crawler,” Mom had said.

  “Where’s my keys?” Mom said now, pushing her plate away.

  “She’s talking about her cigarettes,” Dad said. “Every tool is a key now: a fork, a hairbrush, a cigarette.”

  “Where’s my keys?” Mom said sharply.

  “You can’t smoke in here,” said Dad, who had long since ceased to lecture her on the dangers of her cigarette habit, a vice that thrived in the dark, loamy soil of her dementia. My mother had always been a covert smoker, hiding at the edge of our yard where azalea shrubs thickened into jungle. She’d smoked at night when she had insomnia, between sewing projects, out on the carport under the moon. Her smoking had seemed like a mysterious facet of her being, a secret roguishness to her matter-of-fact personality. But now she smoked one after another at home, out in the Florida room at a wicker table while playing solitaire.

  “Where’s my keys?” Mom cried, frantic for the key that would spike her blood with nicotine.

  “We have to pay the bill, leave the tip.” Dad frowned and fished for his wallet.

  “I want my keys,” said Mom.

  “The tip, Betsy.” Dad waved a fan of cash in the air.

  Mom snatched a dollar from his hand, jumped up from the table. She stood, scanning the room like a huntress. She zeroed in on the gangly teen who was swapping out a tub of moo goo gai pan. The boy, caught up in the ghastly metamorphosis of puberty, was a slouching, scrawny lad with acne in full bloom. And when my mother ran over and touched his sleeve, he looked confused. When she stroked his arm, he grinned, terrified.

  “I want you to have this,” Mom barked, stuffing a dollar into the teen’s hand.

  Helen and I winced, but my father sighed, his face grim, resolute. He stood up like a jaded, dyspeptic general who’d just lunched on rancid salt pork, and who was about to stroll out onto the battlefield to count his dead.

  “Betsy,” he said, “your keys are in the car.”

  Mom turned upon the battered heel of her patent-leather pump. The teen boy fled. Mom darted toward the door, and we hurried after her. We exited the arctic air-conditioning of the restaurant and slumped out into the hothouse mugginess of a July afternoon. Mom skipped around their Buick, checking the doors. When Dad opened the passenger side, she slipped in, retrieved her cancer sticks from the glove compartment, and lit up. She sat puffing in the car like a withered teen hoodlum.

  We all got in. When Dad started the car, Billy Joel bellowed from the speakers: “We Didn’t Start the Fire” from Mom’s Greatest Hits cassette. When her dementia had come on, she’d fixated on this cassette, insisted on playing it whenever she was in their car. We’d been listening to the same cassette for two years now, and Mom still knew all the lyrics:

  Joseph Stalin, Malenkov, Nasser and Prokofiev,

  Rockefeller, Campanella, Communist Bloc,

  Roy Cohn, Juan Peron, Toscanini, Dacron,

  Dien Bien Phu Falls, Rock Around the Clock

  She sang, slurring the words together. In the backseat, Helen took my hand and treated me to a tender gaze. She still loved me then.

  “Billy Joel is so beautiful,” Mom said, turning toward us, puffing smoke into the backseat. “This song is so beautiful.”

  Dad, Helen, and I all groaned in unison when “Piano Man” came on, the familiar syrup oozing into our ears. How many times had we driven through the empty Sunday streets of Hampton while listening to “Piano Man,” our stomachs leaden with buffet food, queasy from Mom’s cigarette smoke? We passed an abandoned tanning salon, its windows boarded up, crude palm trees painted on its walls. A bloated sun smiled demonically from its dead neon sign.

  “Everything is beautiful,” Mom said.

  • •

  That’s where the memory left me, “Piano Man” trickling through the circuitry of my brain. I woke in the empty hotel room, no sign of the rockabilly hipster save for the smell of his fruity hair gel. The half-opened aqua curtains revealed a nocturnal parking lot awash with LED light. I lay there testing my brain, running through a series of meandering thoughts, probing for a flash of new insight, some cerebral quirk hitherto missing—the ability to grasp calculus, for instance, or to decipher the precise note, pitch, and tempo of the dripping faucet. When I tried to sit up, I detected a wash of static in my head. I heard a familiar voice, that mellow meld of god and game-show host.

  While Subject 48FRD’s thought waves may not be as of yet recognizable, the brain-grid app should eventually produce a crude video stream.

  The voice faded and I lay there, vowing once and for all to find a lawyer and begin legal proceedings against the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience.

  You’ll be watching his dreams in living color tonight, the young man had said, presumably to Dr. Morrow, and I had the odd sensation that my thoughts were being siphoned, bottled, reconfigured. But then again, according to the voice I’d heard, the brain-grid app should eventually produce a crude video stream, some symbolic representation that had not yet fully materialized and could not provide full access to me. I lay in the darkness, listening to the distant roar of the interstate and scanning my inner world for signs of static, odd twists of thought, evidence of an alien presence hiding in the convoluted tissues of my brain.

  • •

  Morning came soon. I felt oddly comforted by the imminent need to eat, a concrete goal that propelled me from my rented bed, out of the Econo Lodge, into the windy spring morning. Two yellow butterflies cavorted over flowering weeds that had muscled
their way through the asphalt. Salmon clouds shimmered in the bright sky. But I couldn’t settle into the simple pleasures of a spring day. I glanced around with the feeling that the world was full of cameras, hidden in the clouds and trees. Every flower contained a miniature electronic eye.

  The words of Trippy J popped into my head, giving me a reality check: The prison guard’s inside you, dog. Perhaps my very cells had been reconfigured into cameras, my identity imploded, rippling through cybernetworks.

  I climbed into my truck and drove with the windows down, wondering if they could feel the wind on my cheeks. Such an intimate thing became an obscenity when broadcast, yet another form of porn. But I drove. I processed contemporary fast food signage. When I spotted a cinder-block dive called Kuntry Kafé, I imagined smug young techies ridiculing my lack of gustatory sophistication—or perhaps they applauded my rejection of corporate non-food.

  The same self-consciousness plagued me as I scanned the menu and ordered, but I drowned these thoughts in a delirium of eating. I devoured pancakes and bacon. The pile of industrial meat product glistened with grease. Remembering Ned, that sportive codger I’d met at Gators months before who’d celebrated his heart transplant with a pound of bacon, I chuckled to myself, albeit self-consciously, with too much volume, wishing that I had someone to share such yarns with, remembering with a sick jolt that I was probably sharing this yarn now via some crude form of telepathy. I tried not to think about anything serious and read the label on a bottle of imitation maple syrup.

  But I could not stop myself from thinking, remembering, even hoping.

  I recalled Brooke, adorable in her infantile romper printed with ironic kittens, excited about fake pork, skipping to her Peugeot, ready to turn somersaults on the dewy lawn. I saw her naked, reclined, perky of breast and concave of tummy. Remembered her frowning as she assessed my face in the cruel sunlight. I thought of sweet Crystal Flemming, taking a noontide bong hit and laughing raspily. And then there was Helen, ripe with child, ready to burst. Imagining her crumpling beatifically as the first contractions shook her, I felt almost nothing—a shiver of obscure feeling, the residue of love. I turned to PigSlayer, envisioning her in all of her manifestations: Amazon goddess, frumpy schoolmarm, sniggering nerdboy, sexy spy. I had no idea who PigSlayer was, but she was in my brain again, an amorphous presence on display, perhaps, for them. Or maybe she was in on the evil network that plagued me. Maybe she was tittering at this very moment, listening, watching, judging me.

  I made my way out into the humid day, where the interstate droned and the sun festered like a boil beneath a bandage of clouds. Out of context, I had no meaning. A floating signifier, I drifted across the parking lot. I climbed into my truck, streaming amorphous sensations: the smell of moldy polyester upholstery, the weight of the carbs I’d consumed, the heaviness of meat in my belly. The weather was turning again, squalls of rain blowing in from the east. And my tank was almost empty: another concrete goal to accomplish. Find a gas station. Tank up. Drive home. And then what?

  • •

  As soon as I pulled into an Exxon station, I saw it, the black Ford Focus parked beside pump number six. And I saw him, the rockabilly hipster, strolling out of the store with a Red Bull, a smug expression of mindless cool on his face. His ducktail was gone. He’d shaved off his stupid sideburns. He wore khakis with a non-descript plaid shirt—no longer a cartoonish hipster but clearly the same guy—with the same subaquatic pallor, same jut of forehead and rosebud mouth. He didn’t walk to his car. He frowned, swiftly rounded the corner, booked it to the side of the building toward the outdoor restrooms, and hurried into the men’s room.

  I had to think fast. I would follow him, yes, but I had to get gas. My hand trembled as I slid my credit card in and out, until the machine started thinking, crunching numbers. I punched in my zip code. My heart pounded as I awaited authorization. Perhaps they were already watching, listening. Perhaps they knew my co-ordinates.

  Burning eyes fixed on the restroom, I pumped gas, hoping that a certain person (whom I tried not to visualize) was suffering severe diarrhea, hoping said person was an obsessive hand washer, a compulsive user of multiple paper towels, a narcissist who enjoyed gazing at his reflection in restroom mirrors, grooving on his image in a different kind of light. I concentrated on numbers, calculating the ratio of gallons to cost.

  I attempted to remain neutral, philosophical, as I eased my truck into the back parking lot. I hummed Crimson songs: “Cadence and Cascade” as I crept into the store, where I purchased a cup of coffee and a box of aluminum foil; “21st Century Schizoid Man” as I shrouded my skull in heavy-duty Reynolds Wrap, securing my helmet with a camouflage trucker’s hat; “Formentera Lady” as I scrounged through the junk piled in the back of my truck, locating a boar spear that I’d never had the pleasure of using: ash handle, feather-shaped blade with twin cutting edges, a cross guard to keep a furious, punctured beast from charging up the five-foot shaft.

  THREE

  I found myself on that endless stretch of I-20 again, driving through a storm, heading toward my maker, I hoped, that banal, corporate neo-Frankenstein who’d gazed into my soul with cold curiosity while nibbling a toasted bagel. I was a petty monster, alone in the world, my brain tricked out with worthless thoughts, coil upon coil of nonsense folding in on itself. Every now and then, a zigzag of gothic lightning ripped across the horizon. Rain pattered my windshield. Wipers swished at high speed.

  Despite the dangerous weather, Morrow’s lackey drove ninety, hyped on Red Bull, young enough to feel invincible. I struggled to keep up with him, always at least one car between us, the landscape blurred by rain. The rain that spattered my car, part of the world’s water system, was spiked with human contaminants, I knew. And I occupied myself with lists: lead, mercury, fluoride, chlorine. Petroleum products, industrial agricultural nitrates, an endless series of pharmaceuticals. I pictured toxic streams trickling, poisoned rivers roaring into tributaries. Steam rose from overheated oceans and thickened into clouds, swaddling the planet like a dirty gray blanket. Polluted clouds hovered over cities, mixed with emissions, coagulated into hot filthy masses, cooled, and condensed, seeping a zillion dirty drops. Water treatment plants seethed with feces and industrial waste, pumped chlorinated water into underground pipes that fed gigantic water towers. The same water trickled through my bloodstream, kept my organs lubricated in their soft rinds, my cells hydrated. My brain floated in a bone tank of fluid like some kind of fancy jellyfish. I sweated. I salivated. Wastewater trickled from my liver into my swollen bladder, and I needed to piss.

  But I kept driving, onward through the storm for two more hours, relieved that the rain kept coming, enveloping me in a shroud of mist, concealing my truck from Morrow’s minion, who didn’t slow down until he’d reached the outer sprawl of Atlanta. He took the Lithonia exit, and I feared he’d lead me to his apartment, that I’d have to stalk him for days before he guided me to Morrow’s lair.

  He turned left, right, and then right again, onto a highway flanked with car dealerships. The storm was slacking off, sunlight lasering through clouds, glittering upon armies of rain-slicked cars. At last, the black Ford Focus turned left into a shabby office park—dingy beige three-story structures, the parking lot crumbling to rubble at the edges—and pulled up to a building that looked abandoned. Idling behind a clump of feral boxwood shrubs, I watched the young man exit his vehicle, open his trunk, pull out a large gray plastic suitcase, and lug it inside.

  • •

  In the lobby, the teal industrial carpet smelled moldy. No air-conditioning system chugged away to give the illusion of sanitation. There was no furniture arranged into clusters of pseudo-coziness. Two fake ficus trees huddled together in a corner, vestiges of more hospitable times. The peach vertical blinds were sallow from the sun.

  Leaning my spear against the wall, I stood beside the elevator, a warrior at rest, scanning the mostly empty office directory: Gray and Brown Dental Financial Strategists (first
floor), Prime Hospital Receivable Services, Inc. (second), Clickbait Digital Media Co. (second), and Future Solutions United (third).

  Future Solutions United had the penthouse suite to itself.

  I snorted at the bland corporate optimism of the title, the co-operative gesture, the vague acknowledgement that there were problems that needed fixing. Was this an outpost of BioFutures, I wondered, or had Dr. Morrow gone rogue, setting up shop in this obscure locale to conduct his research undisturbed, chasing that Promethean flame of pure scientific knowledge?

  I gripped my boar spear: the blade cold-forged from high-carbon steel, designed to flex upon penetration, to yield to the flailing fury of a stabbed boar. I didn’t take the elevator, but quietly climbed a side stairwell, my brain calm and focused in its tinfoil rind.

  I stepped onto the third floor, noting dry, chilly air, a current-model window unit purring efficiently at the end of the hallway. I heard voices, not inside my head but toward the opposite end of the hall—masculine, plodding. I crept halfway down the hall, slipped into a dark office, and listened. I recognized Dr. Morrow’s voice.

  “Are you sure you recalibrated the third BC transmitter correctly? Because not only is the stream not appearing, but he’s off grid again.”

  “Maybe he’s hunting,” said the rockabilly hipster, “out in the sticks.”

  “I doubt he’d be up for that, but even if he were, we’d have a trace of something from earlier this morning.”

  “Dr. Morrow,” said a female voice, but it was not Chloe, unless Chloe was intentionally speaking at a lower pitch, without her typical elementary-education smarminess. “62367FRD is still not taking the vis-scanner app.”