“Only because, well. I already explained myself.”
Of course it was Adam, which explained her defensiveness. My mind already had a stock of paranoid imagery to draw from. For the hundredth time, I pictured them skinny-dipping in Boykin’s pool. For the hundredth time, I pictured them fucking under a succulent summer moon. I pictured the boy’s hairless Adonis ass dimpling as he plied my spread-eagled ex-wife. But this time I added a new dimension to my torture. I saw a fleet of Adam’s sperm churning like fierce barracudas toward Helen’s placid egg—thick as a tadpole army, fast as futuristic aquatic missiles, each sperm gleaming with the morphological perfection of youth. I saw the lead swimmer leap into her old egg with an electric crackle and jump-start it into zygotic life. As a thousand flickering cells divided, the egg glowed and swelled. The lump of life sprouted limbs and lungs, nerves and gonads. Its tiny brain ripened like a veiny fruit. In the blink of an eye, a naked hipster with white Warholian hair floated inside Helen’s womb.
The fetus waved its little newt hand and smirked at me.
“Adam,” I said.
“God, Romie, are you insane? We should not be having this conversation.”
Helen smiled tensely, jaw tendons tight, but her body spoke a secret language. As she swished around the room, her hips seemed heavier, the gentle swell of her belly poignant with secret life. And her breasts looked more voluptuous. Her hair lush and wild, streaming behind her like a dark bridal veil.
Her lips, enflamed with estrogen, brought to mind sunlit plums.
I thought of the Demerol stashed in my closet. I would take one tonight and try to hang onto the other two until morning, when acidic light crept through my grubby windows to illuminate the dust bunnies that frolicked across my filthy floor. My buzz was gone. I felt stark sober.
“I should go,” Helen said. “I’m so sorry about this. I should’ve never—I see now what a horrible mistake this was. It’s just that I thought you should know given our history, just in case you misconstrued—”
“Thank you so much for sharing.”
“Romie, I—”
“Don’t sweat it.”
“Romie, please forgive me. I’m an idiot.”
She actually tried to touch me. On the shoulder.
I shook her off. Turned away from her to gaze into the poly-cotton basket weave of the couch she’d once spent three months shopping for.
“Romie.”
“Quit saying my name. It makes me feel insane.”
“Okay, then, I’ll go.”
She puttered around for a few minutes, gathering things—coat, hat, scarf, purse—and finally left. It was still cold outside, I guess. But I was burning up. I wanted to be back in the sunken den of my old familial ranch house, eating the invalid food my mother fixed when I was sick: Campbell’s tomato soup and grilled cheese. But my mother was dead. She’d weighed seventy-five pounds when she took her last breath—a puppet version of her old self, made of dried bones and spotted skin. She’d looked gaunt but eerily girlish at the very end, her skin radiant with a strange sheen as her organs began to shut down. As my dad held her hand like a forlorn lover, I could imagine them as youths, way before I floated in a subaquatic dream in Mom’s belly, my first perfect home, transitional holding tank that I couldn’t remember but that, according to the hokum of various theorists, I pined for, particularly in times of great need or trauma—like now.
Huge surges of nausea passed through me in greenish waves. My pinkie was throbbing again. For the first time in days, I eased the crusted bandage off. I gazed upon an alien thing, swollen and red as though a half-inflated balloon had been slipped over my digit. The stitches, embedded in the puffy scarlet flesh of my fingertip, seeped an off-white dew.
I thought about calling Helen and summoning her back, asking her to drive me to the emergency room. But the thought of venturing out into the cold night made me shiver. I decided to wait until morning and drive myself.
I crawled from my blanket, a naked, crooked creature, and hobbled toward the closet. With one hand, I clawed through piles of junk, strewing the floor with arrows and knives and camouflage clothes, until I spotted my parents’ old avocado-green Samsonite. When I opened it, I smelled a strangely familiar mildew spiked with Mom’s lavender talc. I retrieved the treasure I’d tucked under a collection of hideous 1990s jeans. I opened the One A Day Men’s multivitamin bottle I’d stuffed into a sock. Shook two Demerol into my sweaty palm and swallowed them dry.
ELEVEN
Lying in the recovery room, I kept looking at my hand and thinking of the three-fingered sloth, making its groggy way through the jungle. The incision from the metatarsal ray resection procedure was very neat. When the scabs healed to scar tissue, the legacy of my pinkie finger would be gone—half of it digested by a feral hog, the other half dropped into a basin and spirited off to some biohazard receptacle full of festering human parts.
Though I was awake for the surgery, drugged with a mild antipsychotic, my hand numbed by a local anesthetic, I remembered only bits and pieces of the ordeal. I recalled the nurse’s hiss of surprise as she removed my soggy bandage to inspect my tainted finger. I recalled a hasty round of X-rays. I recalled the neurosurgeon scolding me as he casually mapped incision lines with a special pen. If I’d waited another hour, he said, I would have lost my whole hand. And then he bantered about a boxing match as he selected a dainty, futuristic saw.
The spinning blade whined as it cut through bone. The surgeon’s eyes glinted as he sliced into my flesh with the jaunty composure of a television chef quartering a quail. The punch line of his sports-themed joke occurred just as he plucked the severed digit from my hand and made a game of tossing it into a stainless-steel bowl that might have been part of an elegant sushi set. I imagined my lone nub, unrecognizable as a finger or even a piece of finger—a morsel of scarlet meat, an elegant hors d’oeuvre for an ogre.
• •
By mid-December my hand had healed, the puckered pink scar slowly fading to white. I’d gobbled up my last Demerol refill and gone through a writhing, sweaty withdrawal punctuated by mild blackouts during which Dr. Morrow occasionally offered cryptic commentary: Subject 48FRD suffering a setback due to bodily trauma, not responding to facsimiles of yours truly; investigating the effects of possible neurological damage on wireless BC transmitters.
I succumbed to cozy alcoholism, steadily drinking a six-pack each night, wine upon occasion, ignoring the calls of Chip and Lee, warding off visits from Dad and Marlene, shooting a volley of unanswered texts at Trippy as wan winter settled in.
Santa Claus, that sinister glutton and surveillance king, was everywhere, the world strewn with tinselly trash. Demonic elves chanted from the television, urging me to buy, buy, buy. And every day I opened my mailbox to find a new medical bill hiding amid glossy Christmas junk mail hawking Oracle9s, fuzzy synthetic sweaters, and diamonds hacked from the dark satanic mines of Botswana.
But at least I was back in my studio, stuffing buck heads and wild turkeys, whatever business I could get. I was back to piddling with my Panopticon diorama, slowly filling each prison cell with mutant squirrels and frogs, trying to get the hang of molding and stitching without the convenience of a right-hand pinkie finger. I was back to e-mailing the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience, describing my migraines and blackouts, alluding to my awareness of the sinister presence of Dr. Morrow, evoking an imaginary lawyer and threatening lawsuits. When I got really drunk, I found myself trolling Helen’s E-Live page, waiting for that moment when she’d announce her pregnancy to the world and her status update would grow like a tapeworm with a thousand congratulatory comments. But she’d been dead quiet. By now her fetus would be about two months old, I calculated, a bean-size neckless alien with gills, a mad scientist’s big-ass forehead, those spooky button eyes.
On certain magical holiday nights, lulled by a bourbon buzz and the mellow glow of vintage Christmas cartoons, I’d get this gut feeling that the child was mine. I felt almost certain
that Helen had used my sperm sample—why else would she have barged into my house that stormy evening to unburden herself?
When she gazed upon her newborn, she’d see my face blinking up at her. She’d see me, transformed into a helpless infant, snuffling for her teat. Flush with postnatal hormones, her body would soften. Her heart would turn to mush. She’d come slithering back to me like a boneless slug.
• •
One drizzly, gray winter night, back on the hog-hunting message boards, I found my beloved PigSlayer again—I’d forgotten all about my brainy Amazon warrior. There she was on my computer screen, dropping a link about Hogzilla at 10:10 PM. The link was like a steaming pile of animal spoor, evidence of PigSlayer’s warm biological existence. I smelled her scent on the wind. I caught flashes of her sleek body, dashing among the vibrant winter pines. I oiled my weaponry. I gave chase.
I stalked PigSlayer through an endless thread of comments (re: the rumor that Hogzilla had bitten off a Little League baseball champion’s arm). Right before my eyes, she posted a link to the Varnville Herald’s article. My heart raced as I read:
The ten-year-old Varnville resident’s arm was torn off at the shoulder. The child’s thirty-two-year-old father, a refrigerator repairman, frightened the pig with gunshots, salvaged the arm, and rushed the brave boy to Columbia, where neurosurgeons reattached the limb. Despite the success of the operation, the child’s future as a professional baseball player is not in the stars.
The message board was enraged.
A thousand patriotic boar hunters were crawling out of the wirework of cyberspace to declare revenge upon the diabolical beast. Imagining hordes of angry hunters crowding local forests and fields, I felt panicky. I needed to get back out there, bag my beast before somebody else did. I contemplated my maimed hand. Yes, I felt petty vowing revenge over a lost little finger when a young athlete’s arm had been ripped off. Nevertheless, recalling the burning words of Ahab, I swore I’d chase that motherfucking hog over all sides of the earth, till he spouted black blood. I’d do it for the Little League slugger. I’d do it for me and my pinkie finger. And also for PigSlayer, who’d be mighty impressed.
At 11:55 PM she dropped another link. This time the article was from an obscure permaculture site called CircleofLife.com. It described how corporate genetics laboratories were setting up shop in the backwoods towns of down-and-out Republican states like South Carolina and Alabama. After conducting backroom deals with sleazy governors, the companies performed unregulated, ethically questionable experiments with recombinant DNA, which involved the production of nightmarish farm animals.
It was no coincidence that in a backwater hole of Alabama a poultry farmer woke one night upon hearing a hullaballoo in his chicken house. Therein he found, attempting to rape his hens, a featherless rooster with enormous pecs, four wings, and greenish skin. This nightmare beast was part of the Incredible Hulk line produced by GenExcel, a subsidiary of Monsanto and BioFutures Incorporated.
I paused in my reading, stared at the word BioFutures, remembering that this was the corporation that had stoked the Center for Cybernetic Neuroscience with cash. Googling BioFutures, I located its optimistic website, which featured smiling scientists saving the world: staving off starvation with GM crops, rewiring the brains of stroke victims, enhancing the intelligence of a chimpanzee named Hal, who at this very moment was zooming through space in a satellite called Prometheus 6, its Ku-band transponders pointed toward the darkness of Eastern Europe. On an obscure link I found some whitewashed info on BioFutures’ dalliance with Monsanto. According to its own website, it was perfecting a variety of enhanced livestock, including Incredible Hulk chickens, which boasted a spinach gene for high vitamin content, plus a salmon gene for omega-3 oil production and cold tolerance. The world wanted bigger, healthier chicken breasts, bursting with savory grease. And because chicken wings were all the rage in this land of chain sports bars and alehouses, the more wings per organism the better.
On the HogWild message board, PigSlayer posted another comment, pointing out that it was no coincidence that BioFutures had also set up a biotech lab called GenExcel on the outskirts of Yemassee. In a godforsaken zone between a medical waste dump and a juvenile correctional facility, she said, a place that, ironically, was once a sacred hunting ground of the Yemassee Indian tribe. In PigSlayer’s humble opinion, Hogzilla was a GM monster who’d busted out of the GenExcel lab. This explained not only his enormous size but also his half baldness and freaky color, his elusive wings and strangely corrosive saliva. And for all we knew, this genetically engineered beast might be knocking up wild sows all over the county, impregnating them with his demon seed. Our feral-hog problem might soon veer into overdrive as hundreds of little Hogzillas hit puberty and began their own cycles of destruction, humping their way into a twenty-first century that would, quoth PigSlayer, make The Island of Dr. Moreau look like a petting zoo.
My heart melted over the Island of Dr. Moreau reference. I imagined teaming up with PigSlayer in a postapocalyptic wasteland, some swamp beyond the Thunderdome where monster hogs bounded across the earth like herds of mastodon. In a fox-fur bikini and suede thigh-highs, PigSlayer resembled Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C.
I took a slug of Beam to put some fire into my beer buzz. Heart pounding, I clicked on PigSlayer’s profile pic (stock image of an Anza knife) and hit HogWild.com’s instant message feature. In the lower left corner of my screen, the little box appeared, pulsing with ominous emptiness, brandishing my dumb username: PorkDork.
—Hi, I wrote (a lame beginning). Thanks for the link on the Little League guy who lost his poor arm.
My heart beat fast as I eyed the box, rereading my idiotic words with an acute sense of shame.
—No prob, she finally replied.
—You think it’s weird that HogZ was frightened by gunshot? Thought that SOB was pretty fearless.
—Did cross my mind, esp since ordinary ferals have been known to rip off limbs.
—And that stuff on GenExcel—good Gd—I live twenty miles from that shit.
—I think GenExcel just had that article removed from The V Herald’s site, BTW. Trying to keep HogZ hush-hush.
—It’s gone?
—Just vanished. You a hunter?
—Amateur. But I’ve seen the beast. Agree he might be a Frankenhog. Swear the creature has wings, but I think retractable or something, possibly from dorsal cavity.
I felt giddy.
—I’m Romie, BTW.
—Nice to meet you, Romie. Call me Vic.
—Short for Victoria?
—Maybe.
A strange sensation swept over me as I imagined a nerdy adolescent named Victor cowering in his dark bedroom. I could smell his boy cave—the fermented testosterone and greasy Taco Bell wrappers, the stale sadness of his crusty sheets. I could see the gaming posters on his wall, featuring Amazonian babes from the digital world, voluptuous butts and boobs popping out of futuristic body armor. I saw the boy’s zitty face grinning with self-congratulatory pleasure as he chose his elusive, gender-ambiguous alias. I sensed the boredom and longing that oozed from his pores, filling his room like a fug.
—Are you from Hampton County? I asked.
—Sorta kinda.
—A hunter, right?
—I dabble in lots of different hobbies.
—Renaissance woman.
I thought of those Renaissance plays in which preadolescent boys played maidens disguised as men. As I recalled, the heroine of Victor Victoria was a woman playing a male female impersonator.
—What’s your weapon of choice for FHs over 500? I asked.
—We talking poundage or yrs old?
—Ha. How would you go about killing a 500 yr old feral?
—Like if I traveled to the future via wormhole and encountered an escaped lab hog that’d been used in life-extension experiments?
My heart sank. The quirky dorkiness of this hypothetical indicated that I was dealing with a nerdboy.
<
br /> —Exactly.
I could almost hear the hobbledehoy sniggering. Could see him feeding from a bag of Doritos, smearing his keyboard with grease and crumbs as he launched his snide answer.
—Aw shit, Romie. Got to skedaddle. Nice chatting.
—OK. Later.
What kind of teen boy used words like skedaddle? I wondered as I gazed at the box.
Our strange conversation floated there in cyberspace, a small blinking star among endless constellations. I spent the next hour scrolling through it over and over, analyzing my interlocutor’s text for telltale signs of age and gender. I popped my sixth beer. I pondered the theory of Judith Butler. Cyberspace was the perfect venue for gender performance, I thought, imagining Victor hobbling though a dystopian cityscape in a pair of broken stripper’s heels.
After cornering him in an alley littered with rusty robot parts, I peeled off his flimsy cocktail dress—a scrap of polyester gossamer as thin as a dream—and gazed upon the mystery of his body. I saw a thing of molded plastic, only vaguely flared at the hips, a blank nub between the legs. I saw the incipient swells of nippleless breasts. I saw cheekbones enhanced with swipes of blusher, erotically flaring nostrils, a luxurious ’80s hair-band mane. I felt the stirrings of arousal, like an undertow, seething in the silty depths of my unconscious.
• •
I woke up with my pants down, head hanging off the couch, the upside-down view of my laptop screen offering me an unspeakable image from the hinterlands of Internet porn. I did not remember accessing this taboo-busting monstrosity the night before. As I back-scrolled my browsing history, I meandered through at least two hours’ worth of freaky shit, none of which looked the slightest bit familiar to me, and some of which had required a credit card number to access.
I had a migraine, as I often did after a night of particularly dense sleep. I wondered if last night’s lost time could be classified as a blackout or if it was just old-fashioned drunkenness. I vaguely remembered a night tainted by staticky mirth, some kind of distorted laugh track blaring randomly inside my head. I sat up. Massaged my skull.
The New and Improved Romie Futch Page 21