Selling LipService

by Tammy Baikie

  There’s bleeping and the carriage doors slam shut. The train lurches forward. Like a coin on the tracks, my belief in the redeeming power of unbranded language is flattened. These scratchings are nothing like the whirligig words in books.

  The lights in our carriage flash tonic-clonic and then fail. I hear the bruxism of feet on floor. Stillwell clicks on a pocket torch and makes a superior sagittal incision in the nearest box. He pulls out unbranded transdermals and returns to orthopneic position next to me. The torch is pinched between patellae and he appears to be tussling with himself, his right hand grappling with the left shoulder. ‘Probably a body identity disorder. Xenomelia? Neuroimaging of the parietal cortex could be instructive,’ You say. Suddenly, he produces his torn-off patch and holds it up in the torchlight before doubling it over and stuffing it in his lab coat pocket. So it was no mental disorder – he was just wrestling to get the patch off from under his clothing. But You’re quick to retort, ‘Eliminating one pathology doesn’t exclude the presence of another.’

  Stillwell drops an unbranded transdermal into my lap before sliding off his seat onto his hands and knees on the carriage floor. You note dyspnoea. But his breathing gradually returns to normal. He rocks back on his heels and props himself against the wall, making no attempt to get back on the fold-down seat.

  The torch is off and the darkness heavily bandages my eyes. There is only the dialysis-machine rush and clack of our movement along the track. With no presenting problems, no symptoms or observable behaviours to attach to, You are an embolus adrift, unable to block my natural flow. I make use of the opportunity to pull off the EmPath patch and apply the one Stillwell gave me from the box. I wait for raw language to seep into my skin.

  We reach a station and the light screeches into my eyes as the brakes are applied. Stillwell squints at me. ‘That patch. You should know … He did it – your cross-talk. Between sensory systems.’

  ‘Hmmmm,’ I say, still in the blurbage between patches.

  ‘Tastures. You call it tastures. Bromide has managed to cook them into his experimental transdermal.’

  The word-fuzz is gone. I stare at him.

  ‘When I said certain things before, like “prosthetic languages”, or thought them loudly enough. There was a gustatory hallucination … tastes in my mouth.’

  His voice is low, stooping beneath hearing until it’s struck down mute. Two dumb picker-packers come wheeling into our carriage and start loading boxes onto trolleys. We try not to look at the plundered one. As if not looking will have the same effect on them as their silence has on us. The men leave. We are still stiffened in feigned boredom when the train starts to move again.

  I get up and push the incriminating box so it slips back, half toppling onto a shorter stack behind it. When I turn around again, he’s not following my movements, not flame-faced for failing to hide the box immediately after opening it. Anger rises like a peppery tasture. Again the tunnel black is absolute; all my sentience is in my skin. It reminds me of the blind tastings I did. I stumble towards the wall and Stillwell.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, ‘I came apart under the patch’s aversion therapy. Even speaking EmPath, it was as if my mouth was fixed to the end of a hospital suction hose and the gargle of necrotic flesh, pus, blood or mucus … it decomposed me. Every time I used marginal, barely permissible words like “role play” or thought unspeakable ones. Every time I focused on what we’re doing. I gulped at the sickening stuff.’

  ‘Why would Bromide make a patch with horrible tastures? Not even true ebrandgelists would buy into it. There’ll be no market for it.’

  ‘Of course, there were rewards when I stuck closely to EmPath script.’

  ‘Just desserts.’

  ‘Yes, custard and doughnuts. But with what we’re doing, what we’re planning, it was all heaving retchingness. I couldn’t go on.’

  ‘It’s the perfect way to subjumate minds to a brand. Any failure to keep to the lines is punishable by potty mouth.’

  ‘Dr Bromide will be able to retire on this transdermal technology. The corporations will be queuing up.’

  I reach out for the body heat that is the life behind his voice. ‘That’s why we’re doing this. So everyone can see there are other ways with words.’

  I say this but I can’t stop worrying at the scabby inscriptions on the wall of the station where we boarded. My own counterargument is that people didn’t know then how narrow the passages of language could become. Not like us. That’s why we’ll do better. We must do better.

  We sit together in the sombre sightlessness without speaking, like words lodged in a dark throat. Even with the unbranded LipService, neither of us seems to want to talk. We wait to reach Reactor Station where we’ll burst forth with our new lyricism.

  Stillwell has chosen Reactor Station as our destination because, like the chemicals manufacturer that is its namesake and the programming hub’s biggest corporate client, most of the other businesses served are also industrials with limited LipService needs. As a result there are only two permanent programmers who execute patch edits. One for each of us to take on.

  ‘There’s no other way for us to get them to slurrender the language-programming consoles?’ I ask as the lights of Reactor Station appear at the end of the tunnel.

  ‘No. It’s better if they’re not just incapacitated but unconscious. And they’ll recover – just like you did. Besides being minimally invasive, this procedure produces cryptogenic results – anyone using the dubway, including operators and mute picker-packers, could be responsible.’

  I notice he keeps slipping into EmPath even though we’re both patched into unbranded LipService.

  In the goods lift up from the platform, we take off the white coats and pack them into the boxes that Stillwell is still carrying. When the doors open, we step into an automated receiving area. Idle conveyor belts run through gates in a wall where the boxes are scanned for damage and their barcodes checked against the manifest. There’s no one around.

  I can’t see how we can get to the programming terminals from here, but Stillwell has already stepped forward to the keypad alongside a door in a corner of the receiving area. He has pulled out his tablet and his fingers row over the black pond like long-legged water striders. He has beautiful fingers.

  ‘I’ve entered your biometrics into the access system,’ he says. ‘Press your ear into the gel pad and the door will open. When it does, you’ll have to be quick.’

  I look at the greenish jelly in a square dish that is attached to the wall by an electrical wire. As my ear sinks into the slime, it oozes soapily into my orifices. I want to spit up the tasture but the door has clicked open and Stillwell is pushing me through it.

  My arm pumps the air as I charge across the small office to the programmer furthest from the door. With its backing peeled off, the unbranded transdermal whirbrates whhyyyyy in my hand. He half turns on his chair to see me in a headlong howling to plant the patch on his neck. It sticks, but now his arms are up and we are both tangled in a scrabbling, scratching scrap as he tries to tear if off and I try to stop him. Maybe it’s the adrenaline or the two-patch chemistry, but his skin is quinine bitter and I clamp my jaw against the urge to spill him out from the lock of teeth and arms. Then I feel him pull taut as a snagged thread, his legs extend straight and the air grunts out its escape from his constricted chest. As I pull him clear of the chair and onto the floor, the clonic phase of the seizure starts. His eyes have turned into his skull to search for the poltergeist in the brain that jerks and slams limbs and twitches the curtains of the face. It’s better that way. This is how I must’ve looked in the book repository reception. I wouldn’t want to watch my body do this.

  ‘Turn him onto his side when it stops,’ says Stillwell, who is sitting over the second programmer. ‘Then bind his hands with this,’ he continues, tossing a cable tie. ‘You can also remove the patch. They’ll experience extreme somnolence and not wake for at least an hour. The restraints are jus
t to be safe.’

  ‘Why did it work faster than when I double-patched?’

  ‘Well, you used two commercially edited transdermals, not pure language. Plus, you had done a lot of brand switching.’

  We leave the two programmers lying spent on the floor, turned on their sides facing away from the terminals. I’m tasked with scanning Eda-Lyn’s pages for input while Stillwell builds to the keystroke that will let literature bleed into a batch of patches. Eda-Lyn is inky in my fingers. I think of all the tongues that I’ll turn black with her printed words. And what comes over me is grand mal of glee – a beatific neural fire.

  18

  Two days later and we’re celebrating successfully sabotaging LipService by gorging ourselves on blini, sour cream, caviar and pure language. At Reactor Station, we filled Stillwell’s boxes with the literary patches and returned to the dubway, where we swapped them for the contents of unbranded patches destined for copywriters.

  ‘I heard that a copywriter came in today accusing the manufactory of “putting a spoke in his speak” by programming unbranded patches,’ says Stillwell.

  My mouth is full of beluga, so all I can do is wriggle my roes and squeak in excitement that my lit service is working.

  ‘You’re not glad. You can’t be. This is not what we wanted.’ He looks at me but my schadenfreude takes a scarred-line attitude. ‘What about showing them “the other ways with words” – what can be done with language free of branding?’

  ‘It’s just one copywriter, Stillwell. They weren’t all going to say along with the literary programming.’

  ‘What if there’s an investigation?’ he asks.

  ‘There’s always an investigation. Mother wants a child – there’s an investigation. Mandatory post CVA-testing – an investigation. Electrodes in the brain – an investigation. I spit on your investigations.’

  He scoops eggs on a finger and bubbles burst black in his mouth.

  Two weeks later, Stillwell tells me about the mirror-mired. I think he is trying to get me as panicked stationary as he is. Then I see one at the mall. A woman standing in front of a mirror in a fashion retailer. She’s wearing the A-Way car rentals uniform and swaying to and fro. As the patch between her eyes almost touches the glass, she spits indecipherables, then retreats into more distant mutterings. I can’t hear what she’s saying but I don’t need to. I can read her forewords and aft’words. The A-Way copywriter is suckling our literary LipService, so her brand speak has become imp-patched. She’s trying to summon her A-Way self because she has no I without You. Stillwell says there are more and more of them. I’m too succour-punched to watch but then remember this could easily be Mother. I look up to see the woman slam her forehead into the mirror. It cracks and splits the transdermal on her head.

  I am back at work but this is my armafelon, my riotous end of phrase. Sooner or later Dr Bromide will come for me and take me away, contractually bound and gagged. It’s an inevitability. So why should I put my words to the flame and burn myself out for Wordini? No, I’m on a glow slow. I keep my flickerings up my sleeve as armnotes. The copywriter gave me a new project yesterday, to create sensory hook-ups for an investment portfolio. I’m not sure if it’s even a real assignment or just a contradiction in tastures he has devised to get me chasing my fail. I’ve made a few notes about the challenges involved. I don’t plan on doing more.

  I’m preparing my last words and testament, what I’ll bequeath to my unsaid self. Wordini’s shadow scuds across my cubicle’s screen wall. Stepping through the opening, he stands pinching at the vertical crease in his trousers as if trying to convince himself of its reality.

  ‘The copies, the copies,’ he says, adding urgently, ‘We are going to examine them.’

  What copy? I haven’t written any. Then I notice that the single uptight pleat has now transferred itself to his forehead. I suppose he means the investment portfolio job but it’s clear his defining line is evading him. I hesitate to answer.

  ‘Is it not an indispensable part of a scrivener’s business to verify the accuracy of her copy, word by word?’ He does his best to sound threatening, but any interrogatory force whiplashes back over the language that lacks all copywriterly ka-pow. I have an oh-ho of recognition – Wordini’s lit-servicing Herman Melville’s story Bartleby. He’s word-for-wording the narrator’s lines. The sharp crease is now ironed into his tongue. And I put it there with my Herman Malevillent. It gives me a donkey anar-kick of ‘mulish vagary’.

  Since I still haven’t replied, Wordini says, ‘You are decided, then, not to comply with my request – a request made according to common usage and common sense?’

  It’s no longer important whether or not he’s trying to ask about the investment portfolio job. For once I know the script to his patch, while he can make as little head of its tale as the narrator. I delight in answering as the copyist Bartleby: ‘I would prefer not to.’

  ‘Why do you refuse?’

  ‘I would prefer not to.’

  I imagine the patch’s narratively conditioned responses projected as luminous surtitles flashing up across the proscenium of his forehead. Right now it probably reads, ‘I begin to stagger in my own plainest faith. I begin, as it were, vaguely to surmise that, wonderful as it may be, all the justice and all the reason is on the other side.’

  He is bewildered at how my words can trap him in this theatre. He hasn’t worked it out yet. So he musters new lexicality but is disarrayed again by what comes out of his mouth.

  ‘Say now that in a day or two you will begin to be a little reasonable.’

  ‘At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable,’ I reply in as cadaverous a tone as I can.

  He is beginning to understand that he is staring at a dead brick wall of language, and, despite that, it holds him in a reverie. So much so that he walks off muttering ‘prefer not to’. Prefer not to, prefer not to, prefer not to, prefer not to. He repeats this so often that the meaning of the words collapses under the weight of their sound. Pri-fur-not-to.

  Long after Wordini has gone, I wonder if he receives the ministrations of a literary You. And what literary You is like. I thrill to think that You are finally a manifestation of me. That would be a mole reversal. Me as the burrowing vox provocatrix in copywriters’ heads. After all those times I was heckled by corpyrited ventriloquism, that would go some way to settling the sore. Ah, shivers of a dish best served scold.

  I tell Stillwell about Wordini parroting the copyist’s refrain. Exultant, I lark through my report, adding swooping-highs and diving-lows. So there’s a bit of embellpolish but that’s because Stillwell isn’t rousing to my tale.

  ‘You don’t think Wordini deswerves to miss the point, the way the rest of us with patchwork language do – when he’s the one pushing us off terse?’

  ‘It’s not that. It’s … you’re as trapped in this copyist story as he is. Why can’t we be the story?’ he asks.

  ‘What, you mean you and me?’

  ‘I mean whichever people talk to each other.’

  ‘And you think their narrowtives matter more?’

  ‘To them they do. More than a brand narrative or a law scrivener story.’

  ‘My mother proves you’re wrong,’ I snap.

  His voice is soft as a smotherer’s cushion. ‘But you know that isn’t what she always wanted. She adapted to sur–’

  ‘Yes, she originally wanted to use me as a LipServant. So her story mattered more than mine.’

  ‘But it doesn’t have to be like that,’ he says.

  There’s a long silence, a great divide between words. Stillwell speaks again first, trying to keep his tone as delicate as gauze, but my wounds went sceptic long ago.

  ‘I know you have over-cathected the book and …’

  He’s slipped into EmPath and he knows it. I can’t tell what he sees but my facial muscles feel like a series of tripwires pulled taut. Any release in tension will be explosive.

  ‘Frith, please, I’m sorry. I
shouldn’t have said it like that. Let me explain. You see, Wordini’s not the only one.’

  I know what he’s trying to do, wrapping me in his pashmina pleas. But I’m not shawling for it. I just look away and say nothing.

  ‘More and more copywriters are being brought in to the hospital. Usually by corporate clients or associates. All of them with your book patches. They come quite willingly. They want, they’re desperate for conversations where someone else is in control, someone else steers the talk.’

  I’m listening now, toeing the storyline, impatiently anticipacing the plot’s beats. He continues more confident. ‘I didn’t understand why. Our studies show …’

  I can hear him consciously taking the scenic route around the easy EmPath.

  ‘I mean, we find that people who don’t identify with their transdermal’s brand tend to say less, not more. So when I saw one sitting in a hallway, waiting to consult with a specialist, I sat down with him. I was in a white coat and had my tablet with me. Maybe he thought I was assigned to his case; maybe he didn’t care. He was happy to talk. I think I know what’s happening now.’

  Stillwell pauses for a dramatic reflect and I want to laugh – not at him but at the lab tech who has learned to tell stories and not just crunch data.

  ‘When you apply a trademarked patch for the first time, you and everyone you communicate with is already familiar with the brand personality and narrative. It’s why we can … uh … parse LipService drift. Because we know the product and selling points.’

  ‘But no one knows the stories from my book.’