“The first one was dead, some kind of rhesus monkey, but not pickled. Then they brought in a live one. I could hear it shrieking in the cage in the next room. Course, it was anesthetized when they spread it out on the table, but that didn’t make it any easier. I flat out refused to do it, and then that little shit Josh tased me like it was nothing. Next time around, I was more cooperative. Proud to say the monkey successfully recovered from open-heart surgery.”
“You Ironic Man?” said Trippy.
“I’m serious. Not the most seamless surgery ever, and there was nothing pathological in the monkey’s heart. I didn’t have to do anything to it, just incise the chest, saw through the sternum, spread the two halves with a retractor, survive the freakishly violent sight of a raw heart beating in open air, wire the sternum back together, and stitch up the incision.”
“Fuck,” I said. “How you know the monkey survived?”
“Heard it moaning in the next room as it came to, and then they took it away. Just this morning they started up with the human anatomy shit. And I praise the Lord God Almighty—don’t laugh at me, you agnostic motherfuckers—that you two arrived before they made me . . .”
Skeeter shuddered, took a big gulp of beer. He gazed at our faces like he could see beneath our skin, scoping those delicate muscles that raised our brows, wriggled our noses, and jerked our lips open. Like he could view tiny valves fluttering inside our eyeballs, ossicles beating within the arcane canals of our ears, mucus-smeared cilia wavering like windswept grass inside our nasal passages.
“But it’s all over, dog,” said Trippy, a note of forced optimism in his voice.
“Hope so,” said Skeeter, shuddering like he was trying to shake a ghost off his back.
“Speaking of that,” I said, “who’s gonna make the call?”
Skeeter had wanted to leave our prisoners taped and bound, insisting they’d bust free on their own; I was undecided; but Trippy had insisted that we find an archaic pay phone somewhere and report a burglary, just in case they didn’t. That way the police would show up and make sure those bastards didn’t starve to death, make sure we weren’t on par with common murderers, no better than the corporate goons who’d tortured us.
“I’ll do it,” said Trippy. “Since I know my way around Atlanta. There’s an old bowling alley not too far away: still got a functioning pay phone outside if my memory serves.”
When our entrées arrived, we dug into mounds of grilled meat and greasy carbs, which took us back to the Center cafeteria, when the whole BAIT crew had hashed it out over tots and chicken tenders. Al and Vernon were still AWOL, though Trippy had talked to Irvin that one time.
“Had his number in the phone I threw into a pond,” said Trippy. “Along with yours, Romie. Bet you he’s doing fine. Maybe he got out before Morrow installed whatever he’s been tracking us with.”
“I pray that the connection’s now busted,” said Skeeter.
“Even if they got our data stored in the cloud,” said Trippy, “bet you we set them back so far it’d be hell to get started again.”
“Totally,” I said. “They appeared to be operating on a low budget, no longer funded by a mega-conglomerate like BioFutures.”
“But don’t forget what the contract said,” said Trippy. “They can sell their research to the highest bidder. Sit on it for years until the market’s ripe. Speaking of contracts, must be something in the fine print that covers the shit they’ve been doing to us. Otherwise, why wouldn’t they just get new subjects, nab some homeless people?”
“Also cost to consider,” said Skeeter. “We’ve already got the hardware installed in our skulls, pretty much forever, I reckon.”
My cell rang. It was Frisky Fish Marina. I solemnly slid Skeeter the phone. He took the call, spoke to Kelly Ann Flemming in soothing tones as he hurried outside. He had not told her about his stint at the Center, and she was likely freaked by his three-day disappearance, the discovery of his abandoned Corolla at Blue Bay Hardware and Feed.
“What the fuck will he tell her?” I asked Trippy.
“Hey, hon,” said Trippy, “I’ve been receiving anatomical BAIT downloads and performing compulsory surgeries on baboons, what’s up with you?” Trippy wheezed out a half-assed laugh and shook his head mournfully. “Shit’s convoluted. How to explain it to the woman in your life?”
And then I told Trippy about PigSlayer.
“For all I know,” I said, “this woman—if she is a woman—could be in cahoots with BioFutures, keeping tabs on me all this time by worming her way into my heart.”
“You’ll want to keep an eye on her either way,” said Trippy. “Right?”
“True.”
He told me he was in a semirelationship with Lady L, who went by Lorraine now and had a master’s degree in public health. While delighted by his new smarts, she was also baffled, particularly since he had no diplomas to speak of.
“Told her I was dabbling in online education. Doing free coursework with Academic Earth, knowledge for knowledge’s sake.”
We both sniggered fiercely at this and then fortified ourselves with fresh gulps of beer.
“Reach rock bottom of your life,” I said, “place body and brain at the disposal of a corrupt research organization, get your mind tricked out by a mad scientist, and still, a man wants companionship.”
“’Tis the nature of humanity.” Trippy sighed. “To seek love. Love is a word, another kind of open—as a diamond comes into a knot of flame.”
We sat in silence, watching Skeeter pace along the sidewalk outside the window, his mouth moving, spitting out heaven-knows-what kind of fool narrative. His face looked ashen, etched with new wrinkles, but his eyes shot out rays of hope. You could see it plain as day, beaming out of his skull like an SOS signal from a corroded, sinking battleship.
• •
I’d hit a stretch of woods on I-20, the dark roadside haunted with eerie swaths of fog, glowing like a host of bioluminescent plankton. The sky had cleared. The moon was fat, so maybe the phenomenon was just a trick of vapor and lunar light. But I felt half-asleep, lulled by five beers and the illusion of freedom.
The image of Skeeter and Trippy standing in the Applebee’s parking lot already felt like a snapshot, tagged and dated, affixed to the E-Live Wall of my life. We’d exchanged contact info yet again, this time plotting to meet up monthly, pick each other’s brains, make sure Morrow wasn’t stationed in the Panopticon’s central tower. And I hoped that this time the promises would stick. This time we’d track down Irvin and Al, maybe even Vernon, get them in on our game plan, see what our posthuman brothers were up to.
Courtesy of Trippy, I was still on a Delia Derbyshire kick, and ’60s electronica purred from my dashboard speakers. Eerie swells of sphärophon rose like some emanation from the fog, slithering through old-school synths and melodic static, the perfect medium for my strange and hopeful mood. I could almost feel my soul expanding, filling the cab of my truck like some kind of ectoplasm, curling out of my partially open windows and floating into the infinity of night.
CODA
I stood, coffee cup in hand, staring down at the old gorge where hydra-headed vines grew so fast I could almost see them slithering like snakes. It was wild berry season, that brief and lovely spell before summer went rancid. A flock of birds had descended into the gulch, and everywhere I looked, some industrious feathered thing was scrabbling through brush to peck at ripe black fruit.
I felt halfway decent, had suffered no blackouts or migraines since the shakedown at Future Solutions United, was communicating regularly with Trippy and occasionally with Skeeter, who sometimes called me from Kelly’s phone. Plus, firing across various sections of my tricked-out brain was a new vision. I saw a gallery space painted a shimmering violet. I saw swarms of winged pigs, zipping and whirling in the air. I saw art lovers walking into the hullabaloo, their hearts pounding as demonic swine darted toward them. And better yet, Trippy had agreed to compose a score befitting the majesty o
f Hog Hell.
Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven, he’d quipped in a text that morning.
I took another sip of coffee and smiled, for my vision was good and true. I’d head back out into forest and fields to tromp through mist with a rifle in my grip. I’d slay a slew of newfangled swine. I’d stuff them. I’d give them a second life with animatronic parts, smear their tusks with Day-Glo gore, give their skin an unearthly gleam. Rejecting the ironic dead end of snark, I’d draw poetically upon the 1980s head-shop psychedelia that had moved me in my youth.
I’d been cruising HogWild.com for the past few weeks, drinking in the latest rumors about the new fleet of Hogzillas that supposedly teemed in the swamp near GenExcel. So far, no hunter had made a kill of the hogs in question. Hogzilla’s brethren still inhabited that hazy realm between rumor and reality—hatchlings of the mind, all smoke and neuron. I’d been communicating with PigSlayer on the board, hashing out the intricacies of for-profit research, postnatural hunting, the clusterfuck corruption of the agri-industrial complex. Each evening we crept toward each other, entangled our ideologies, and then scooted back. I was still suspicious of her, fearing that she wasn’t who she claimed to be. And she, too, went hot and cold, sometimes seeming like a flesh-and-blood woman cautious about romantic entanglement, other times transforming into a Machiavellian cynic who gamed me with coy IMs.
My neighbor’s yard dog released a long, neurotic whimper that spoke to my depressive tendencies. But my soul floated like a red plastic fishing bob on the polluted pond of my life, because I had a new project to obsess over. The morning felt balmy. It was Saturday. And I had a refrigerator full of beer. I walked inside, planning to spend my morning researching the latest round of feral hog sightings. Perhaps I’d tromp out to the swamp that very afternoon, take a look around, get a feel for the land, sniff the air for signs of musky monsters on the loose.
I sat down at my desk. My message icon flashed. I maximized the little box.
—Hey, said PigSlayer. Attending a conference in Charleston next Friday. Passing through Hampton. Want to meet up to talk GM hogs, possible excursion in the GenExcel area?
I started to whistle. Serotonin saturated my poor parched brain as my neurons flickered with beautiful thoughts, like the snack bars of my youth and girls at the skating rink in tight Gloria Vanderbilt jeans. I saw rows of bright mallards in my father’s freezer. I saw my mother’s yellow bandana, which matched the butterflies and the walls of her favorite room. I saw my warrior father hoisting his chain saw and disappearing into the gorge. And O the gurgling of desire, and O the idle creeks of my boyhood and the toxic sunsets and the fig trees and the okra patches, yes, and all the peculiar little streets and the voodoo-blue houses and the azaleas and the magnolias and the Confederate jasmine . . .
—And yes I said yes I will Yes.
But then I checked myself. I swallowed my hot-pink euphoria, which went down bitterly, like Pepto-Bismol, and backspaced over my reply. I wanted to sound cool and casual, off the cuff, not saturated with what seemed like light-years of loneliness, a universe of longing howling in some star-spangled void.
—Yeah. Sure thing. When’s a good time for you?
• •
We were meeting at Frances Ann’s Front Porch for lunch, a strip-mall joint disguised as an antebellum house, its fake columns entwined with plastic wisteria. The waitresses wore gingham frocks. On Fridays, Frances Ann herself appeared, sashaying in a hoop skirt as she replenished the biscuit baskets. She’d just dropped by my table, in fact, telling me to smile, honey, and tickling my proto-jowl with her brightly polished nails.
Did I look worried?
PigSlayer was ten minutes late.
Moreover, tucked into a corner, skulking behind sunglasses, taking small rodent-like bites of cornbread was an unfamiliar species of hipster. Like the rockabilly hipster, he was pale. But his dark hair was sheered into a monastic bowl cut, and he sported a thin, clammy mustache. He wore a Dickies jumpsuit with combat boots and some kind of studded tool belt.
Did he seem to be peering over his menu to check me out? Yes, but I was something of a local legend, wasn’t I? Perhaps he recognized me from the newspaper.
Did he stand out ridiculously in this greasy spoon? Yes, but I’d seen hip kids popping up all over town, gonzo foodies who photographed their entrées, their style quirks unreadable.
Could he possibly be another Morrow minion sent to monkey with my brain? Perhaps, but while the rockabilly hipster’s overstyled costume had made sense (he’d been trying to fit in at an art opening), why would Morrow send another faux eccentric after me? That would be idiotic. And Morrow was no idiot. Unless the jumpsuit and tool belt were tricked out with sinister equipment.
I checked my phone again. Now PigSlayer was twenty minutes late. I’d already devoured several grotesquely fat buttermilk biscuits and downed a cup of coffee. I’d already checked my phone ten times. Just when I started to doubt PigSlayer’s existence again, I received a text (we had, at last, exchanged numbers, and a more intimate version of her pulsed within the coordinates of my Oracle6).
—Running late. Got lost in the boondocks of Allendale. Razorback country. CUMB.
I too was cussing under my breath. I ordered another coffee. My left knee vibrated.
I was smack-dab in the quintessential twenty-first-century predicament, a man of the future, awaiting the incarnation of my elusive cybercrush. I wondered how many other poor souls on the planet were in similar circumstances at this exact moment. I pictured men and women sitting in restaurants, checking their gadgets, assessing, for the umpteenth time, the familiar, almost iconic image of the persona with whom they’d been communicating, wondering if the pic was up to date, wondering if it’d been Photoshopped, looking up from their screens and feeling the undertow of disappointment as the fleshy version of the person they’d envisioned walked into the room, plumper or shorter than expected, wrinkles around the eyes and mouth that placed them in a higher age bracket than professed. Or worse, what if the persona in question was much hotter than anticipated, intimidatingly young, beautiful, radiant, rich, tall, glamorous?
I could picture disappointment flickering in PigSlayer’s eyes as she took in the sad sight of me, slumped in my chair with my receding hairline and stained Nikes, a fortysomething man with diseased gums and incipient age spots on his forearms, a taxidermist with hands the color of raw hamburger, an aging hesher with an unsophisticated haircut and drooping buttocks. But I did have nice, expressive eyes (or so I’d been told) that burned like will-o’-the-wisps above my sincere, yellow smile, windows to my fathomless soul, a soul questionably upgraded at the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience, ready to mingle with the beautiful soul of a mysterious woman with dark hair and obvious intelligence, who perhaps hunted wild hogs as a hobby and taught English to unappreciative teens, or perhaps worked as a spy for some government agency or private research organization, which was still sexy—though Dangerous with a capital D.
I gazed down at her profile pic, again glanced up at the door.
There she was at last, standing beneath a trellis decked with fake vines, wearing khaki capris and a sleeveless navy blouse. Her hair was even darker than expected, a skunky streak of gray at the temple. She was small, just as I’d imagined, in her mid to late thirties, I figured. She was a real person walking among tendrils of plastic wisteria, greeting me with a nervous smile and a birdlike way of cocking her head as she stopped at my table to size me up.
Her eyes were hazel, etched with faint crow’s-feet. Beautiful. Inscrutable. Perhaps these eyes contained cameras that offered remote viewers a vision of my twitchy smile. Perhaps these warm eyes concealed the cynicism of a seasoned agent. Perhaps these lovely eyes conveyed the guarded curiosity of an intelligent, world-weary English teacher who, miraculously, still believed that love was possible.
“You’re Romie Futch,” she said, offering her hand.
“Guilty,” I said, thinking of my mother as I pressed her s
oft fingers, not too firmly, not too weakly.
Insecure men always come on too strong, whispered Mom’s ghost, which seemed to billow behind me in the fan-blustered air.
When PigSlayer sat down I noticed the hipster in the corner craning forward to gawk. Surely, if he were an agent, he would not be so obvious. He was just a smug asshole with youth to burn, amused by our courtship, tittering over two seasoned people trying to squeeze a drop of nectar from the parched husks of their lives.
“And you’re, uh, PigSlayer.”
She laughed. “Call me Beth.”
“A nice compact name.”
“No frills.” When she smiled, a small indentation appeared in the tip of her nose. She sat down. We studied our menus, stealing glances over the laminated pages, calculating, assessing.
“Yep,” I said, suddenly tongue-tied.
“So congrats, for the umpteenth time, on your exhibition,” she said. “Reminds me of Renaissance-era spectacle, a kind of post-modern masque. I thought this instantly when I read the article. Sorry I couldn’t make your opening.”
Her smooth syntax, her command of the diction spectrum, her obvious intelligence combined with a casual earthiness that deflected pretension. The spark of mischief in her kind eyes. The way she worked her napkin with restless fingers. And something unstated, possibly pheromonal, oozing from her glands and breath, made me feel present in my skin. My blood pulsed with oxygen. Data flowed into my sensory organs: light rays, sound waves, particles of scent. Tiny papillae throbbed as too-sweet coffee trickled over my tongue.
We both ordered the special: country-fried chicken with butter beans and rice, a side of collards for her, okra for me.
We sipped coffee.
We chatted about Renaissance lit as we awaited our food. We both had an affinity for Jacobean drama, a fondness for Aphra Behn. She’d read The Anatomy of Melancholy. She had a working knowledge of pre-Copernican cosmology, anatomy theater, the great chain of being that hilariously placed oysters and clams beneath minerals and sand. She zipped back and forth between the sublime and the absurd with ease.
The New and Improved Romie Futch Page 31
