Selling LipService

by Tammy Baikie

  Suddenly I see the parka jump and twitch. I’m so afraid of the return of the proxy-mate that it takes a moment for me to connect the jacket’s spasms with the banging sound. Someone is beating at the door.

  Stillwell comes in. I wasn’t expecting to see him; he must’ve snuck off on his lunch break. He’s flustuttering so much that I can hardly understand him. I pull out the unbranded patch from a drawer and offer it to him.

  ‘Can’t, can’t … must ration doses based on priority determinants,’ he says, waving away the patch. ‘Now, now … I, I need your full stethoscopic auscultation. No attention deflit-um-um-deficits, please.’

  I nod with deliberateness, as if the action can slow the syllables’ tripping feet.

  He takes a breath. ‘You see, I consulted with Dr Bromide.’

  That name – it’s like a glinting in the glass eyes of stuffed animals. I think Stillwell notices but he ploughs on anyway: ‘Your recent occupational readings show decreased activity in the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and right middle frontal gyrus during presumed phases of reflection, while activity increases in the right posterior cingulate cortex and the right middle frontal gyrus during phases of inferred problem-solving. This presents a classic neurological pattern – clinically unmistakable.’

  The EmPath LipService is taking him to the dry cleaners. I imagine him plastic clad, swooshing along the motorised conveyor, hustling along a closed loop of meaning. I know that’s ungenerous of me.

  He snaps his fingers at me in annoyance. ‘You’re allocating insufficient neural processing resources to my articulations. This is important.’

  I use mute point to indicate that I don’t understand.

  ‘Then read for yourself,’ he says in exasperation.

  On the tablet he hands me is a screenshot of a document. It’s the agreement that I signed in Bromide’s office. But now I see that I was never one of the contracting parties: only Wordini and the doctor are. I was the subject of the transaction. Stillwell points to a clause headed ‘Planned obsolescence’. It’s written in the usual legal fata arcana that shimmers on the horizon of apprehension. Wordini is granted the mind rights for exploitation to the point of depletion, at which time the human resource reverts to the original owner, the medical professions syndicate and the management of Dr E Bromide. Depletion is defined according to the Maslach Burnout Inventory, with special reference to the emotional exhaustion and depersonalisation scales. The implanted intracranial EEG readings should correlate with job burnout and validate the stress-dependent disruption of prefrontal function.

  Stillwell points to the passage about job burnout. ‘That’s the neurological pattern I saw emerging from the implant data.’ Talking more to himself than me, he adds, ‘He didn’t expect that I’d abstract the data to reach that conclusion. Thought he could keep the procedure of contracting out your aversion therapy clinically silent. But I heard the arterial murmurs.’ He pauses. ‘If it weren’t for your minor head trauma, my prognosis is that you would’ve reached the symptomatic tipping point fairly soon. Dr Bromide’s treatment strategy is remarkable … He would have successfully triggered a chronic inflammatory response to language through its association with the detachment, cynicism and impaired empathy of burnout. By using the copywriter to act as an intermediate host to incubate his antigens, he avoids the adverse effects of white coat hypertension. And liability risks.’

  I tug at his sleeve to tell him to go slow on the Gorgon-like med-user talk. It takes more sleeve snatching, but eventually I understand. Wordini is supposed to work me to word weariness, nonosyllabic indifference. So that when he returns me to Dr Bromide I’m cured of caring and go meekly to dissection. What grates is Stillwell’s admiration for the doctor. So maybe Bromide out-conknifed Wordini? The cut and thrust never touches them. But on a bright day, I can see the lacerations the two of them have left in my shadow. Does it matter which one of them sliced at my throat or who left the silhouette of my fingers hanging by a thread? I despise them both. And I want him to hate them, too.

  Stillwell leaves in a hurry but he says he will be back. The door closes behind him. I am alone with my parasitprized possessions, and I’m starting to feel like a tongue caught behind the clenched teeth of my trappings of success. How very LipServiceable that the success is illusory but the trappings aren’t.

  Before I can properly reason through what the contract means for me, the horror of its implications sends tremors through me, as if a patch jolt were stirring my tectonic states. I have to bite-knuckle through the falling mental plaster to think clearly. I’ll be sent back to Bromide and there’ll be no more pure LipService. Will he even bother to give me any language at all? It won’t be like going to stay with the mutes. There’ll be no tell trail to return to. That really rattles loose the quaking. Stillwell would probably tell me this is just part of the concussion. But I don’t believe that. I want Mother’s suede purse so I can hold on to the taste of seaweed through the heaving, the way I used to when repatching into branded LipService. Scrabbling across the floor on hands and knees, I go searching for it. But I don’t know where among the boxes and merchandise it has gotten to. There are too many things. Stillwell was right about that, I have to rid myself of these special effects. I stop looking for the purse, sinking hopelessly into the well-aged rind of the nasty carpet.

  It takes a few minutes sunk in the funk of stinky feet before my mind settles like dust on what I really want, what I’ve always wanted. And I know where to find it. Inside the broom cupboard is a broken robotic vacuum cleaner. I open its bin and take out Eda-Lyn from her hiding place. It has been a long time since I held her. I slide my hand up the leather arch of her spine, and my skin sops up the taste of squid ink. It swirls across my palate and behind my eyes, blotting out the world and all my hoardings. Now if I slip my fingers into her and the forbidden tang of paper, the dark cloud will resolve into sepia lettering in a rush of words over the page. But I wait. I hold back. I wait in the ink well with only the sound of my breathing. The primordial sepia soup fills my mouth, my throat, my lungs. Teeming, teasing within it are single cellular ink blots and a restlessly recombinant DNA alphabet. At last, I slide into the soft chickpea warmth of a page and feel the words released into me. They shout so loudly I almost believe I’ve spoken them.

  I lie on the linoleum of the kitchen floor, although it’s more like I’m levitating because I’m unaware of its raw onion flavour. There’s only Eda-Lyn’s sweaty brininess as I throb to the echo of a silent ejaculation. The ‘contumour goods’ have shrunk back now; there’s more space in the flat. With Eda-Lyn, I have the answers. She is the answer.

  ‘Is that really a, a …?’ asks Stillwell.

  ‘Yes, it’s a book.’ I hold out Eda-Lyn for him to look at.

  His hand reaches tentatively, as if uncertain whether the tanned hide is just playing dead.

  ‘I’ve had it for years. You won’t get sick,’ I say.

  We’ve both patched into the unbranded transdermals but there’s not much talk left in them. It would’ve been too suspicious if Stillwell tried to smuggle out new ones while I’m off work, so we have to keep it short and of import. There’s a lot I have to explain, and I’m afraid I’ll end in stutter failure before it’s all said. That’s why I need Eda-Lyn to speak for herself.

  I let him start by reading the frontispiece – the story of how a doctor cured Eda-Lyn after she died in the almshouse, so she could serve as a trophy of his discovery of the pork tapeworm in the human body. He stuffed her full of his EmPath.

  The thing is, Stillwell is sEmPathetic. He believes in the medicause. He doesn’t just see it as the sticky side of the LipService patch, the equally essential reverse of the logoed face. So I don’t know what the words in the book will mean to him. Among the mutes, new words were as much a contagion as books are to the branded. I call up the memory of the subvertised billboard with my armnote on it and try to hold it in my mind’s eye, but the thought of how he marvelled at Bromide’s sku
lldiggery pulls me away like the movement of the bus I was on when I saw it. He did come to warn me about the burnout, I tell myself. He did.

  Stillwell has finished reading the frontispiece and is rubbing the book’s leather binding against his cheek, as intensely absorbed as a twitcher listening for a rare bird’s call. He’s paged past the horror that I first felt at her mortal remains and gone straight to taking her between the thrum and forefinger of fascination. Is it his laborhetorical thinking or just that he’s someone who makes gifts of engineered graft tissue?

  ‘I can’t feel the difference,’ he says.

  ‘I can.’ Eda-Lyn could never be like any other leather. We look at each other. He looks away first and, even though he must know it’s a dangerous professligacy, wasting what’s left of his patch, he says, ‘Does it give you a horripilation?’ and grins. ‘I’ve been wanting to give that to you. The word, I mean. It describes the bristling of follicles. It’s good, isn’t it? Even if it’s EmPath.’

  ‘Yes, yes, it’s good.’ I laugh and remember who he is and his light touch, his stroke of genius, which makes me forgive him everything. And this time he ran a word over my skin and all the hairs stood on end. So maybe it wasn’t professligacy because now I’m ready to tell him everything, the whole plan.

  ‘Stillwell,’ I say, ‘that doctor robbed Eda-Lyn of her hide and dressed it in his words.’ I point to the gold lettering, Elementary Treatise on Human Anatomy, on the book cover. ‘My father pinched her, woke her up to her own story by pasting in the Fork in the Medicine Tree.’

  He looks perplexed and then says, ‘Your father took illegal possession of the book?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And The Fork in the Medicine Tree is …’

  ‘A history of the rivalry between physicians and surgeons for corpuses.’

  He looks excited at that, but I can’t pause now. ‘With Eda-Lyn I stole away from silence. Now I need to break and enter a new language.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he says.

  ‘We need to thieve unbranded LipService. Not just enough for us. A whole consignment.’

  ‘We can’t just get that from Wordini … we’d have to …’

  ‘I know – breach production.’

  The idea worms a trail through the fruit of his brain. ‘What do you want with so many patches?’

  ‘Programme them.’

  ‘With what?’

  ‘Literat … urge …’ There’s a latch in my throat and it’s closing. The patch is drained.

  Compared to the grand kleptocrazy planned, a bit of LipService fraud is a pilfering affair, reasons Stillwell. He’s suggested I patch into EmPath. Then at least it won’t be so obvious if we run into anyone that I’m from ‘the other side of the bed curtain’. Luckily, Bromide has recently issued a limited number of tweaked patches for peer review before the reformulation’s submission for beta testing on the brand market. The test transdermal would still be programmed for EmPath, and Stillwell said he doubted the latest quip van wrinkle was much more than a ‘triggered stimulant release’ Bromide had been working on. That was until the doctor personally expressed his professional delight at the lab tech’s participation in the testing. Now Stillwell isn’t so sure about the tweak. But since he has to write the report on it, it’s probably still best if he uses the trial and terror transdermal and I take the conventional one from his allocated supply.

  I’ve locked myself in the bathroom because I don’t want him to see how his transdermal gives me anxieties. ‘Physician reveal thyself. Physician reveal thyself,’ runs like a chant daring the bogeyman to appear in the mirror instead of my own face. Will You rise from the bled anew, transformed into a blood-letter? If I think about it any more I’ll lose my vagus nerve. There is no other way; I must go undercover of the patch.

  I lose my gravitational moorings in the vomit comet of disorientation but that passes faster than usual. Already, this patch feels different to the consumer brands. There’s a cloy-alloy to its oily tasture that moves down my neck like a multiplying series of brass collars, telescoping my head away from my shoulders. The plinth of metal chokers my chin rests on disconnects me from the soft organic squelchings of my body. I am aware of my cross-modal interactions and gustatory hallucination but am detached from such things. From up here, I coolly survey the bathroom. I observe its intubated systems, their metabolic mechanics and borborygmi. So vice-like is their hold on my attention that I don’t even notice You at my shoulder until You say, ‘Now you see with a clinician’s hyperopia.’

  Outside the bathroom, I see Stillwell, or at least the interacting biochemical stewings that go by that name. I note an increased respiratory rate and pupil dilation. This unexpected metabolic shift doesn’t escape my surgical scrutiny. ‘Adverse effects?’ I ask.

  ‘With prosthetic languages, the leaking of silicone contents into the tissues is as common as with mammoplasty augmentation,’ says the imbalanced organism, which then appears to suffer retroperistalsis. It recovers, thrusts something at me and says, ‘Remember the aims of this operation?’

  Eda-Lyn’s black-ink tentacles slide over my skin and draw me down from my abstracted anatomical attitude. During the bus ride to the hospital manufactory, I keep my hand inside my canvas bag, resting on the damp squid of her hide to remind me how medicine’s nitrous-oxide highs are my downfall. It’s harder than I thought to resist that cerebral serene – even You are content to be drawn into its perfect analytical composure. How does Stillwell manage? I reach to taste the warm milk of human kindness in his hand.

  17

  We walk across the hospital manufactory grounds. Because Stillwell might be recognised, I’ll have to discourse as the senior clinician. He’ll be the faceless flunky with his head hidden behind a load of boxes he’s carrying that are labelled as Bromide’s reformulated transdermal. I don’t know how he arranged for those to be ready for him at the manufactory depot or how he got my fake identity card. I had no way to ask before patching into EmPath, and now he’s instructed me to ‘Engage in echolalia as it’ll assist in overlearning’. So I repeat my doctor’s script after him, memorise his apparatchat. He’s afraid that, despite being conversant in health care, I might not use the right tourniquet of phrase at the right moment.

  I pall into silence as we approach the entrance to the dubway – the underground railway that transports unbranded patches from the hospital manufactory to programming sites. I’ve tried so many patch brands but I never really managed to stay in character. I doubt I can doctor my persona now.

  Stillwell peeps around his tower of boxes. ‘It’s not acculturation, Frith. Just role play.’ There’s that bilious bobbing in his throat again as he says it. I want to ask him about his presenting problem but we’re already at the transdermal scanners.

  They’re much the same as the one at Wordini’s office for detecting patch signatures. Stillwell promised that, with our EmPath patches, getting through them would be as easy as freezing a verruca. And it is. After I’ve passed through, I watch him come through behind his box camoufaçade. It occurs to me for the first time that the containers will register as empty, as he’s told me they are. But they don’t. The guard waves him through without looking at him, and I see the computer terminal register the contents as ‘EmPath/experimental’. I can’t begin to understand how he did it. I had never before really grasped the power Stillwell has to talk to and command machines.

  The registration counter is ahead. This causes extreme vasoconstriction of my peripheral vessels, and tachycardia. The fear makes me slip into counting beats per minute. I resist but then let the pulses of the sinoatrial node thump everything into affectlessness. It’s a step forward to the counter but back from myself.

  I announce myself: ‘Dr Limsey. These experimental transdermals and I require neurotransmission across the synaptic gap to communicate with programming staff.’

  ‘Research project code?’ asks the foreign culture from inside the Petri dish cubicle.

  Stil
lwell drilled me on this even while I was disenlangauged, making me repeat the eleven-digit code silently in my mind so that my head was as full of meaningless noise as my useless voice.

  ‘No booking has been recorded for that code.’

  I lean into the window and I’m surprised at my own – our own – authoritarian menace. ‘You’re not going to impede scientific progress with a case of hysterical paralysis caused by psychogenic conflict with your hypochondriacial protocols, are you?’ The guard sits transfixed by your and my double glare. We are the twin serpents of the caduceus, entwined around the medic’s staff. He still appears utterly immobile but there is a click as the electric doors down to the platform slide open. I stride through without a backward glance at Stillwell. But I hear his soft voice.

  ‘Just as Dr Bromide would’ve done it.’

  The train is already at the station being loaded by workmen. One or two move a muffling hand to mouth, making the mute sign in deference to a doctor. It kindles the remember-ember of Poppy at Lost Property and I snap out of your pathological tunnel vision.

  ‘Stop the visual fixation,’ hisses Stillwell as I continue to stare at the tongue-denied workers. ‘It’s a contractual requirement. If they’re not refractory aphasics, they receive intravenous language blockers – as a security measure. A doctor would know that.’

  We board the carriage directly behind the driver’s cab, where only a small space isn’t loaded with unbranded LipService and we can sit on fold-down seats. Neither of us says anything. I look out the open door at the track on the other side of the platform and notice scrawlings on the wall: ‘Fuck politics’, ‘Wait here for further instructions’ and ‘Your mum smell’. Stillwell follows my glaze and says, ‘Pre Lingua Quietus.’ It can’t be. No one who had never come of haemorrh-age would write such spitty speech gobs. Why would they? They could write anything. Besides, these were the people who wrote books.