by Tammy Baikie
Stillwell arrives once a week at the close of business with his case of gear. I assume the doctor has arranged this so that I can be interviewed and my words compared with the chatter relayed by the spyware in my head. But since the session at the hospital when he put the MindSweeper system into operation, we haven’t talked much. He looks at me over his laptop. His remarkably long neck bows like the top spike of a Christmas tree under the excessive weight of a ponderous ornament. Is this still about the artificial skin? How can anyone who is so sensitive work in the medical professions? If he isn’t interested in spreading dominfear of body scientists into us carcasses, why does he do it?
‘Dr Bromide has instructed that I administer a course of intramuscular cyanocobalamin injections. I’ll need access to the deltoid,’ he says.
I pull my sleeve up over my shoulder and only remember too late that the skin of my arm is covered in my personal correspondence. His hand has already closed around my wrist; there’s no point in retracting now. He reads my expressions and I try to read his. Do the wordings on my arm (which are actually the end of what starts on my thighs) make me more knowable than I find him to be?
‘Mark me, too,’ he says.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Exercise your hypergraphia on my dermis.’
‘If you want to show it to Bromide and Wordini, just take a picture.’
‘No.’ He’s already rolled up his sleeve and slaps the opposite hand down on the bare forearm as if trying to coax a shy vein. ‘It’s not for them; it’s for me.’
‘Why do you want it?’
‘Because it’s idiopathic language – without any known commercial aetiology.’
If he is planning on turning missal-blower, I can’t stop him. What difference does it make how he reveals my bootleg and batwing letters? After he’s injected me a little too hurriedly, so that he leaves his bluish mark, I go and fetch the whiteboard pen. He lays his right forearm on the desk. Mine rests hand to elbow with his, as I replicate the language mutation.
It looks different on him, as though it could walk off into the world without me. I haven’t felt that about anything I’ve created since Faith and I sold Wardsback. For the first time, I think about the beards – that other unknowable people will take them and make what they want of them.
14
‘You have a persecutory belief bias. Perhaps because my self-disclosure has not been entirely reciprocal.’
I look up and stop penning in the day’s eloquention, shepherding the words from my limb into Stillwell’s limbo. I don’t know what he does with the armnotes and I haven’t told him that I clingingly wrap mine.
‘I think I’ve found a way to equalise the power differential. I’m giving you psychological leverage.’
He hands me a flash drive. On it, I find a series of classified biopsychosocial reports on my mother. First, there was the gift of the graft, and now he’s again offering me his professional skin. Giving these to me is in breach of medical obscurity. Would Bromide have risked career kamikaze in engineering this? I feel the rigged mortis of distrust leave my joints.
Resting my palm on the milkwarm skin of his supplicant arm, I say, ‘Thank you.’ He leaves the office so that I read alone in my cubicle.
The reports are trip-worded with EmPath LipService but not even that can stop my progress down the dark passages:
Thematic apperception testing (TAT) revealed narratives appropriately constructed on Frisson Froufrou brand mythology but with a disturbing recurrence of an idée fixe relating to mothering infants. Human chorionic gonadotropin levels indicate gravidity. Since cognitive dissonance is an inevitable consequence of these incompatible identities, further investigation is required. It is suspected that having offspring is a method of perceived control over a stressor.
Behavioural abnormalities recorded during observation in a locked ward have exposed the patient’s concealment of a persistent gustatory reflex hallucination precipitated by tactile stimulus. Sustained psychological pressure with concurrent neuroimaging led to an admission. The reproductive idée fixe is rationalised as a coping mechanism whereby the offspring would act as a vocaliser for the psychopathology. Although this represents a form of autistic thinking within the context of the Frisson Froufrou psych profile, the BMG Textile & Clothing Corporation has scored her highly on the identification index and considers rehabilitation financially viable. The BMG Cognitive & Behavioural Modelling Department has requested the predicted prognosis following a course of therapeutic groupthink.
Mother gave birth to me so that, as a child unconstrained by patch programming, I would give expression to her finger flavours. She conceived me as a LipService patch for tasture. So look, Mother dearest, look at me – aren’t I just what you hoped I would be? Indentured to a copywriter and mouthing finger foods. I suppose she only wanted what I want. Except that then she didn’t. So where does that leave me? Whenever Mother and I connect it’s always a bump to the funny bone.
And Stillwell, is he any better? He gives gifts that undo me like wrapping. It seems a Bromidean kindness to show me the records. The sort bestowed with blackhanded compliments that leave their mark. Yes, I have a ‘persecutory belief bias’, but that’s because I see the doctor’s shadow everywhere.
I’ve learned a little from Wordini about how copywriters work out on the unconscious, pumping levers as if on an elliptical trainer. I don’t have anything quite so subliminal in mind but I think I know how to get two birds to both atone. Mother will have that talking cure she once wanted and Stillwell’s going to get it for her.
‘I can’t walk the talk out of here. The guard will read the expression signature and stop me. But you can.’
I watch Stillwell’s face through the wrong end of binoculars. He seems far away. Until the lenses suddenly drop and he’s close, so close. There’s a wicked crinkle at his eye, like the folds I darned to delete a letter and subvertise a logo with the silents.
‘OK.’
‘You’ll do it?’ I didn’t expect him to accept so readily.
‘Yes. What do you want to dose for?’
‘It’s not for me.’ That surprises him. ‘Bring the patch to my place after you leave. I don’t need to tell you where I live, do I?’
He pauses but doesn’t answer the question. ‘I was a consultant on the scanner design. The guard will register that I’m carrying uncut LipService and not just EmPath. He’ll want to see authorisation from Wordini.’
‘I could forge it using his encrypted letterhead, if you can get it off his system for me.’
‘Good.’
We sit in silence for a moment mentally recalibrating our attitudes to each other.
I feel like it’s my turn to warm the bathwater we’re in. ‘Instead of copying my authorgraph, why don’t I give you something of your own?’ He wears a wide-eyed happiness like a daisy behind the ear. I pick up the marker pen from my desk and write: ‘The naked taste of your skin on bedtime milk rests sleepily at my fingers.’
Stillwell dropped off the unbranded transdermal last night and I hid it wrapped in plastic inside the cavity of one of a pair of roasted quail. No one came looking for it. Today’s Saturday and I’m taking the birds to Mother’s for lunch.
I haven’t seen her since starting at Wordini’s office, when I took the advance he had given me and asked for her help to redress my wrongs with a new wardrobe. She was all atwitter over her daughter in a couture pencil skirt working for a copywriter. As she flapped over the choice of heels, I felt like a shop mannequin with sealed fibreglass lips.
In an e-mail I’d sent from work, I had told her in broad chokes about the LipService abuse, seizure, decommunissioning and being headhunted by Wordini. I knew she could fill in the blanks – tasture and prospecting doctors. She’s intimate enough with the system. But, as usual, she chose to only see the Frisson Froufrou frills and not the debtshop workers with iris-less amphetamine eyes.
She even gifted me with a brand-new congratulatory Friss
on Froufrou bra to wear. That’s the first time she has given me any of her products since the days of the dressing-up box, and those were cast-offs.
I broke the rules, and as punishment those with say-so have given me the great dream of upward mobility. I’m starting to see their reasoning. A nobody can be a malcontent. But the consumer congregation will never forgive someone who spits out their lifestyle aspirations. So now I’ve been given the finest brand-y wine.
‘These briefs – they’re not what I’m used to,’ says Mother in her damsel-in-distress voice, except that it’s obvious she really is afraid of the unbranded patch.
I mime the ritual of stripping, doubling over and dispatching.
‘I have a headache, sweetheart.’ She extends the transdermal like a lace handkerchief.
Why does she always have to be in character? I should’ve known how she’d play it, from her romantically sheer peasant blouse and the rosebud bustier underneath it. In frustration, I tear the Frisson Froufrou patch from between her clavicles. There’s an awful gagging noise as if I’ve wrenched out her voice box, and she backs into the bathroom, locking the door. I sit on the couch and try to arrange and revise the questions written on uncooked fettuccine (The Hayrick’s, of course) that I prepared at the office. But my rage at being trapped in the role of bare-chested barbarian in her grope opera makes it hard for me to read.
Mother emerges from the bathroom.
‘Well darling, are you happy now you’ve ripped my bodice?’
Her cheeks are lashed with a tear-jerk of just enough accusatory streaks to require comforting but not to make her eyes look puffy. This riles me so much I forget my thwartification and notice that she has at least applied the unbranded patch. But why is she still speaking Frisson Froufrou? Hasn’t she realised that the stays have been loosened and she can say anything? I feed her my first piece of fettuccine anyway: I know you only had me as a mouthpiece for taste-touch hookups. I see the folies Froufrou drop from her like needles from a Christmas tree, leaving her barked and bare. Without a pause, I hand her the next piece: I want to know when you changed your mind and why.
‘I thought you understood by now that you can’t escape the fish nets.’
I bang my fist on the coffee table, making the fettuccine pieces jump as if in hot water.
‘I’m tired of doing the tanga with you over this,’ she says. ‘Frisson Froufrou is all the intimates that I need.’ She picks off the patch like a scab and hands it to me.
The unrepentant lingerie lush. Either she can’t or won’t swear off the brand speak, and I hate her for it. My free hand sweeps the remaining pasta onto the floor and my heel grinds its gist into nothing. I head for the front door, leaving the roast birds. She deserves them. Let her quail behind the FF feather boa constrictor. I’m washing my mouth of the word ‘mother’. I won’t talk of or to her. Her taste won’t touch me again.
Back in my flat, I don’t even want to apply the barely expressed unbranded patch. Instead I rub my entire body in a cyclist’s embrocation and let the cauterising capsaicin act as the white noise of tasture.
‘Did the unbranded transdermal have a remedial effect?’ asks Stillwell at our next meeting. The cables from the wand strapped to my head for the weekly download slap at my face as I shake my head.
‘Do you still have it quarantined?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’d like systemic exposure to the unadulterated transdermal, if … if, of course, you waive claims to it …’
Since I realised that my mum fatale is permanently made up, a figment of plasticised emotions, I hadn’t even considered giving the patch to anyone else. But I like the possibilities of this idea.
‘What if we emanciprated a second patch? So there’s one for me, one for you. Then we can talk.’
He rests a hand on my shoulder and at last I feel it – not just the coupling of two senses but two sensibilities riding tandem. So we smile and smile at each other.
Stillwell has brought the second unbranded patch to my flat. I’ve let him use the bathroom so he can be alone behind a closed door, watching himself in the mirror shape long-unspoken words like bits of bubblegum. Crouching in the kitchenette, I’ve taken the one that she wore. I’ve never patched into a transdermal that has divulged someone else before. It’s contraindicated. I turn my head away from recalling her spoiled tasture and lick the adhesive onto my upper arm without looking at it. The patch’s oily mouthfeel carries a backwash of scanties speech and indelicate terms for delicates. For the first time in many weeks, I’m afraid You have returned with a stinging snap of a bra strap. There’s a horrid sound of savaged fabric and then I realise it’s me – me wailing.
‘Frith, Frith,’ says Stillwell. His stilling hands are holding my temples. The Frisson Froufrou predations are over. On twisted rankles, I limp around my head but there’s no sign of menace.
‘I’m OK.’
We sit back to back on the rug. It’s comforting and he’s still muddled by hearing his thoughts unrefracted, so it’s easier if I’m not looking at him. He starts by trying to explain his gift of artificial skin.
‘So it’s not just that the dermal template tricks the cells into healing. It tricks them into regeneration rather than scar formation. But it also eventually dissolves. It’s a …’ His excitement outruns his shuffling words. ‘It’s a histological copywriter. It directs the expression of dermal tissue. And that’s not all. Did you, did you know? After the graft has taken, pain is the first sensation to return. Then touch. Cold. And finally warmth. Think … think of what it says about us … in, in evolutionary terms.’
‘Oh, evolution-devilution,’ I swipe. ‘Pain first? Sounds like a doctor’s order of infliction.’
He doesn’t respond but his back becomes a hard boulder.
‘You aren’t like Bromide. Why would you want to be in the medical professions?’
‘My parents are in the medical professions,’ he says too quickly. He’s quiet for a while but fidgets about, playing dodgem cars with my back.
‘Actually, they were worried … about the necessary med-side manner. Because of my disability. I had chronic vocal tic disorder.’
‘What’s that?’
‘It started when I was about eight. With the Snuggle-Ups digital pet slogan. I’d burst out with it. Burst out in a high-pitched voice. I didn’t want to. But it came out. Had to come out. Pent-up, pent-up words shook loose. Bit like now.’
For the first time, I consider that giving up EmPath also meant giving up his wordulous fluency.
‘In an aneurysm preparedness class, I yelped “Stoked on strokes!” I was almost expelled. Lucky. Just lucky I had been recently diagnosed and that I was in the EmPath community. If my family had been with one of the corporates, it would’ve been the profane asylum for me. If the tics are coprolalic. That’s what happens.’
I feel his body release the ticcing bomb and relax. He speaks more easily.
‘The tics quietened down before I came of haemorrh-age. When I ruptured, they disappeared completely. Because they were always taglines or sonic logos, I knew. I knew the … the oafishness of transdermal language programming long before anyone else my age. And the urge to tic – it’s not so different from compulsive consumerism. But no one can hold out against the consumptive tic forever. Everyone capitalates to it in the end. Everyone.’
His back is heavy against mine as if the spine has crumbled. He turns and rolls onto his side on the carpet and I can’t tell if his eyes are even open. I’m about to tell him that I haven’t capitalated but then remember that I’m still wearing the day’s business bedeckings dictated by the season froufrou.
‘You shouldn’t think medicine was just a default choice,’ he continues. ‘I spent a lot of time in consulting rooms. In habit reversal training. In biofeedback machines. I know what doctors are like. But look at you. You with your cross-modal interaction. And look at Mrs Waxwing who has palinopsia. Yesterday she saw a persistent afterimage. The Nice Slice emblem from t
he hoarding over the restaurant. It’s across from the bus stop. For an hour after catching the bus, the pizza sainted anyone she spoke to. “A thin-crust halo”, she called it. And there’s the fourteen-year-old Holbein boy. His hearing is impaired but he has auditory hallucinations of jingles – especially the symptoms jingle. Sung by an eerie children’s choir. These are the human conditions that people my days. You remind me that biology rejects grafted brand identities.’
‘It might be the secret brandshake of a professional rather than a consumer tribe, but EmPath still enforces an identity,’ I interrupt.
‘I know.’
He sits up again and shakes the pins and needles out of an arm.
‘But that’s what I was saying. About pain. Pain is the first sensation to return for burn victims. You can’t be la femme Frisson Froufrou or … Prince coffee royalty or … a doctor. Not with real pain. Then you can only be yourself. I’m good at what I do. Because I understand that.’ His head is lifted on its long neck now and with the light behind the wispy haze of blonde curls, his head is like a thistle on a stalk.
‘But you’d be even better if you didn’t have to speak EmPath?’
It’s a few days since Stillwell and I spoke unbranded LipService. There’s been an accident, and the bus I ride to work is taking a different route to its usual one. It turns onto the motorway and passes a large Frisson Froufrou billboard. Leopard crawling over what appears to be bearskin, the underwear model looks out at us with that startled-deer expression. She’s partially obscured by an outburst of graffiti: ‘Where to hide when your hide is a patch of lies?’ It’s one of my authorgraphs. The row seated next to the window turns to gape at the sign.
‘What brand is that?’ asks the woman next to me.
I shrug and bite my cheek to stop myself grinning. How did he get up there to write it? It must’ve required ropes and harnesses and daring. I wonder if there are more. While I’m tucking my armnotes away, he’s been writing them large.