“Good riddance,” hissed Jarvis, who stood in the forest gloom, eating a Fruit Roll-Up.
Before GenExcel showed up for damage control, the YouTube video had five hundred hits. The story had been retweeted eighty-six times. As I watched my E-Live page blow up with notifications, messages, and friendship requests, my blood ran high. At last, I was trending. After forty-three years of virtual nonexistence, I was surfing a zeitgeist wave.
“I know you’re tired,” said the GenExcel agent, also an eerie variation on the Bill Gates type (Anglo, bespectacled, deceptively innocuous), which made me wonder if I was dreaming again. “But I need you to answer a few questions.”
I sat in a folding camp chair and answered questions as the winter day waned. Cold fog oozed out of the darkening woods. Portable halogen lamps popped on, shrouding Hogzilla’s corpse in theatrical light. Other agents crept from the darkness into the surreal orb of light: reps from the FDA, SCDHEC, SCDNR, and GenExcel.
Exhausted, I negotiated with various parties as Jarvis stood in the limbo between light and darkness, Merlin-like, his face scrunched with wisdom.
My story was already a viral YouTube clip before the various agencies began to butt heads over what to do with the colossal rotting biohazard of Hogzilla’s body. I’d already raised two thousand dollars on Kickstarter.com before Hogzilla was transferred by refrigerated truck to some remote facility arbitrated by the FDA and SCDHEC, which, pushed by the clamor of the masses, signed a contract with me, giving me the funds to stuff the gargantuan beast, which would, thereafter, become state property to be displayed at such illustrious institutions as the South Carolina State Museum for the edification of the taxpaying public. I even managed to negotiate a clause allowing me, upon completion, to display said taxidermic product as an installation piece in various arts venues for a period of up to three years, after which I’d wash the hog stench off my hands for good and the state would take possession of the stuffed marvel.
PART THREE
ONE
It was February already, sunlight deprivation taking its toll, vitamin D reserves low, postholiday malaise thickening into an absurdist indoor drama with no exit, the skeletal trees downright existential. But I was gearing up for my debut show in Columbia, a high-concept taxidermic installation that would be displayed in a gallery called the Bomb, a renovated Confederate ammo warehouse—not the Columbia Museum of Art, alas. But at least I had something lined up, and according to the gallery manager, my show was building a considerable amount of hype.
I was in my studio with the space heater cranked, sipping green tea, toiling Jonah-like inside the huge corpse of Hogzilla, hollowing out his form to make him lighter, prepping the monster for flight. Technically, the creature I tinkered with was not Hogzilla per se but a modified polyurethane rhino form upholstered with Hogzilla’s hide. The pig’s hot-pink hue had faded to mauve, despite the double oiling I’d applied, but I’d touched it up with some Life Tone paint. And the razorback was coming to life. I stepped out to take another look.
Posed in the charging position, right hoof lifted, Hogzilla roared at me, mouth agape as though caught in a condescending guffaw. His bug eyes protruded ferociously. I tweaked his left tusk, which I hadn’t yet glued into place, and fluffed the whiskers around his maw. I’d had to saw off the rhino head and reattach a form I’d molded from Hogzilla’s skull, installing a jaw set I’d sculpted myself, accessorizing with original teeth. When I got the wiring hooked up, his eyes would roll; his slaver-slick tongue would quiver; spumes of foam would spurt from apertures tucked between gum and tongue. Most important, his weird wings would spread and flap as the uncanny beast lurched into clumsy flight.
The monster was currently wingless; however, his patagia hung from a hook on the wall, original bones in place. Just as I’d suspected, the wing bones were light, hollow, aerodynamic like a bat’s. I’d tanned the original membranes with a softening oil, and they gave off a fleshy gleam. Pretty soon I’d get down to the intricate business of wiring Hogzilla’s wings, a tedious process involving the consultation of electrical manuals and constant Googling. But I was done for the night, ready to crack open a beer and hit up HogWild.com, see if I might, at last, hear a peep out of PigSlayer.
When I’d conquered Hogzilla, the cyber hog-hunting scene had exploded with chatter. Every hunter in the state had put in his or her two cents about my colossal kill—whether it was real or fake, whether it was possible for a taxidermist to preserve an animal that huge, whether the beast was a mutant or a genetically modified creature hatched in a mad scientist’s lab. And I, like an emperor disguised as a beggar, had swelled with pride as I crept among the envious mortals whose lives had not been transubstantiated by heroic adventure. Feeling bold and confident, I was itching to pounce upon any e-encounter with PigSlayer, ready to bring it to fruition in the three-dimensional world.
But just after my conquest, PigSlayer mysteriously vanished from the hog-hunting message boards, making me wonder if she was some kind of agent after all—a flesh-and-blood human, maybe, but not a woman keen to solve the masculine mystery of Romie Futch. Nevertheless, I still kept a weak flame guttering in a leathery hollow of my heart. Though I occasionally hit the message boards with a flirty smile, I eventually stopped trying. I tried not to dwell on Helen, avoided the thought of Chip Watts’s bloated mug rendered into fetal flesh, and threw myself into my work.
Thinking with a clear head again, I spent my days tinkering with Hogzilla’s deconstructed parts as experimental music tootled cerebrally from my iPod speaker, jams recommended by my old friend Trippy, who, alas, was still AWOL, still running from the wireless range of the Center, as far as I knew. Having suffered zero blackouts or phantom voices since my hunting adventure, I theorized that some remote connection had been broken by my three-day dalliance in the boondocks. I hoped against hope that Dr. Morrow would wash his hands of me and leave me to my own devices.
And now, as I took one last look at my masterwork, I felt an old familiar sensation within me, queasily alive with hope: the future squirming with larval potential in my chest—a feeling that zipped me back to high school, five days before graduation at Swamp Fox High’s awards day ceremony.
After toking up in my Camaro, Helen, Lee, and I sat in the gymnasium, tucked into a corner near the door, poised for an easy exit. We sniggered as geeks, grade grubbers, and the occasional golden jock strolled to the podium to accept some plaque or certificate: the James Marion Sims Biology Award, the Strom Thurmond Ethics Scholarship. The herd around us stamped its hooves and bellowed its approval as Swamp Fox High’s elites, bound for fancy state schools and the lesser Ivies, plucked the fruits of their academic toil. I watched with interest as Mrs. Breen approached the podium and adjusted the mic.
“Swamp Fox reynards and vixens,” she said, “I congratulate you on your honors. With pride I announce a new award for excellence in the visual arts: the Frida Kahlo Golden Paintbrush Award. This year, I am privileged to present this award to Roman Morrison Futch.”
There I sat, blanched of blood, unable to move, suspecting that my stoned mind had hallucinated the whole thing. But there was Helen, kicking me in the leg with her patent-leather pump. There was Lee, his palm raised to receive a high five. I slapped his hand feebly and stumbled from my bleacher seat. Descending the tricky stairs, I almost tripped. The podium looked impossibly distant.
The principal stood there sternly, his iron-gray buzz cut evocative of military and police officers. He sniffed. I wondered if he could smell the pot on me. But there was Mrs. Breen, beaming maternally, trying to hand me some slender, twinkling thing: a gilded paintbrush with my name on it, what appeared to be a check rubber-banded to its shaft.
My heart surged as I accepted the award. I made it back to my chair without incident, catching sight of my mother and father among the crowd. After a covert telephone call from Mrs. Breen, they’d been smoldering with the secret for an entire week—not only the gold-plated fetish object but also the three-hundre
d-dollar check. At last, they could release their elation. My father slapped his palms together, his lips pulled from their habitual scowl into a smirk. My mother held her clapping hands over her head. And the crowd erupted: thugs and heshers and losers, lurkers and dorky rappers, border rovers and freaks, all the kids, black and white, who didn’t fit into the academic or athletic sets. As they howled in unison like some hive-minded monkey species, I felt it too, bursting up from my heart into my throat: the spontaneous desire to ululate.
• •
One day in early March, that florist-shop whiff of early spring in the air, I brushed over PigSlayer’s HogWild profile out of mindless compunction, shocked to note that she’d changed her profile pic from an image of an Anza knife to an actual head-and-shoulders shot. A shimmering creature with dark hair partially concealing her face, she radiated a quiet wisdom combined with a delightful mischievousness. I could envision this woman not only in a white cotton frock enjoying a summer picnic but also in bloodstained camo, chasing a feral boar through a biohazardous swamp. And the very same woman might spend her weekdays teaching high school students about queer subtexts in Moby-Dick. In a word, she was the only woman who could understand the New and Improved Roman Futch.
But did she exist?
Or was this photo foisted by some imposter who wished to ensnare me? Whoever was behind it had also added a few suspiciously perfect biographical notes: hog hunter, rabid reader, reluctant educator.
But what if she did exist? I was out of my chair, pacing scuffed floors, wondering if she’d read the State paper’s long-ass profile on me. Had she followed HogWild’s fanatical chattering about my coronation as King Hoghunter? Most important, did she suspect that PorkDork and Romie Futch were one and the same? And finally, would she perhaps show up at my show in Columbia in April?
In my excitement I clicked on the instant message feature. Inside the little box, all conversations between PigSlayer and PorkDork were recorded for posterity, or at least until some server cluster malfunctioned, leading to widespread data loss, wails of anguish echoing through cyberspace as a zillion baby pics vanished. I reread our previous conversations, finding them much shorter and less intimate than I’d remembered. I tried to think of some elegant way to reveal my identity, slyly, self-effacingly.
—So how ’bout that dickhead taxidermist who slew Hogzilla?
Before I could think twice, I clicked send. I spent the rest of the evening agonizing over what I’d written, vacillating between gloating (fuck yeah, I killed him) and shame (grossest humblebrag ever), trudging from fridge to computer, fetching beers, and then checking for a reply. It had been almost two hours, and the lady, alas, had not yet responded, probably disgusted by my vanity, sniffing a sociopathic narcissist from a mile away. But at least I still had Hogzilla to occupy my trembling hands.
I popped another Miller. Traversed the well-worn path between my house and Noah’s Ark Taxidermy. Slipped my old key into its ancient, archetypal lock, the metal keyhole plate scratched and nicked from over a decade of drunken fumbling. I slogged over worn linoleum, flicked on the shop lights, and beheld my embalmed monster for the umpteenth time.
The chortling old bastard was in a charging pose, wings retracted. I plucked a digital remote from a shelf and pressed the touch screen, which featured a diagram of Hogzilla’s body. I fingered the remote and Hogzilla’s eyes rolled, insane, hungry for carnage. I thumbed the diagram’s dorsal section, and out popped Hogzilla’s wings, otherworldly, the dusky hue of aged scrota.
Terrific, whispered the ghost of my mother. But you need to touch up his bright spots with magenta highlights, catch the play of sun on his body. I could almost feel her standing behind me, lit cigarette concealed inside her cupped palm, a thing she did when I stumbled upon her smoking. I could almost hear her laughing, the deep jolly growl of a storybook mother bear. I picked up my paint set and went back to work.
• •
By the time I got home it was past ten and I was starved. So I scrounged up a sandwich, compulsively sat down in front of my laptop, and ate. My screen emitted a swell of light. And behold: there in black and white, throbbing, pulsing, was an IM from my beloved PigSlayer, dropped a mere three minutes ago.
—Hi Roman.
My cheeks burned as I gazed into the little box, an intimate three-inch-by-three-inch space, a tiny private room in which we might get to know each other a little better. A nutshell. An infinite space.
—Hi, said I. C’est moi!
—Read a preview of your show in the State and thought that’s GOT to be PorkDork. Been wanting to tell you how brilliant I think your work sounds, playful yet profound, esp given the naïve predominance of an archaic form of naturalism in the taxidermic arts.
Be still my beating heart! Who was this woman who used words like predominance and held her own on hog-hunting message boards? How sweet the world would be if her claims turned out to be true and she really was a feisty English teacher who hunted swine during her downtime.
—Ought to come to my opening, I typed. It’s at this gallery in Columbia called the Bomb, April 9th, if you find yourself in the neighborhood. Come see the infamous Hogzilla firsthand.
—You mean the mummified version?
—Right.
—Speaking of the discrepancy between live game animals and their taxidermic reps, where’d you bag the monster?
—In the neighborhood of GenExcel.
—Swamp side or pine forest side?
—Swamp.
There it was again, the sudden lapse from friendly banter into interrogation mode, making me think she could be an agent, possibly affiliated with the FDA, or even, in the darkest of dark worlds, BioFutures. Maybe she was a minion of Dr. Morrow. Or perhaps she was an activist of sorts, a vigilante English teacher in search of ecological justice. I wanted to believe the latter, longing as I did for the company of a good woman, the deceptive referentiality of a relationship, the cozy binary of he and she.
—Why?
—Have you been keeping up with the board lately?
—Not really.
—Fresh crop of sightings. Seems to be at least one, maybe more, other Hogzillas out there. Why would there be just one? It’s a lab, right?
—Hogs with freaky traits or just big-ass ferals?
—Mostly big-ass ferals, but a couple of people have claimed they saw wings.
—Could be their imaginations kicking in, with all the hype out about the real Hogzilla.
The thought of a Hogzilla factory, which belittled my conquest, depressed me.
—Don’t know, Romie, but I’d like to know more. I’d like to take a look sometime but ideally with a guide. Since you know your way around that part of the swamp, I thought . . .
—That’d be so cool!
My renegade hands compulsively typed this adolescent exclamation and then hovered like raptor claws over the keyboard.
—We’ll be in touch. But now I’ve got to bail. Get some shut-eye.
—We?
—I meant me; was using the royal “we” again.
—Gotcha.
She left me alone in the little e-room with the residue of our conversation, our spent words dead and lusterless like the skins of snakes. I scanned our exchange again, wondering why she’d been AWOL for months.
I stayed up Googling backwater public schools county by county, poring over the pics of English teachers young and old, male and female, frumpy and smoking hot, all to no avail. And then I pulled up sites on BioFutures, skipping from link to link like a drunken bee, until I found myself in the hinterlands of the Internet on poorly designed websites with flashy fonts and bad grammar, reading about Stalin’s 1926 plot to build an army of human-ape hybrids. According to a site called Darkseed.com, BioFutures was resurrecting Stalin’s vision with GM war pigs, the CIA and the Department of Defense in cahoots with the plan.
Closing my eyes, I imagined this absurd prospect. I saw a great sounder of swine, some three thousand strong, trotting down an
industrial runway and taking flight. The sky darkened as they flapped and soared. The heavens thundered with the beating of myriad wings. I could almost hear the raspy voice of Jarvis Riddle, imbuing this spectacle with apocalyptic profundity: And in the darkest hours of Man, swine shall take to the air.
TWO
I was hiding outside the Bomb gallery. On a patio tucked away behind fragrant shrubs, I drained a beer, waiting to make my appearance for the opening night of When Pigs Fly: Irony and Self-Reflexivity in Postnatural Wildlife Simulacra, a taxidermic installation by Roman Morrison Futch. Now that the big night had finally come, I longed to be within the boundaries of my comfort zone, in my backyard lounger, downing a six-pack under the stars.
But there stood Brooke Burns, the Bomb’s young assistant director, peering at me through her asymmetrical cascade of black new-wave bangs. She was a scrumptious nymph in filmy disco polyester, all jutting clavicles and poppy lips. Her plastic earrings resembled Ruffles potato chips.
She handed me a mason jar full of bourbon. She patted my arm.
“All’s cool,” she said. “There’s just this amazing band playing on the other side of town, and I know we’ll get more traffic after their first set. I’m texting my friend Olivia. She says, like, fifty people are about to head over. So we’ll just push the unveiling back to 9:30.”
Brooke glanced at the chunky men’s watch that hung from her spectral wrist. And I felt a damp heat deep in my groin, smoldering like fire under wet leaves. The bourbon was sinking into my gullet. Now I was hitting my groove. Now a beautiful girl who’d called my work brill in multiple text messages was stroking my arm. Now she was tugging me toward the door.
Inside, clutches of hip youth brooded in corners of the vast industrial space, sipping artisanal bourbon from mason jars, their subdued convos echoing like the meek mutterings of pigeons in an abandoned cathedral. My smaller pieces were displayed on refurbished lab tables like forlorn science projects: my mutant squirrel wedding diorama (titled The History of Marriage), my cyclopean possum (Old One-Eye), my squirrel and frog Panopticon, now enhanced with GM rat guards who possessed eyes in their backs (Be Good), as well as a dozen other small pieces, including Electric Solipsism, which featured an albino coyote playing solitaire on an old Macintosh desktop (a sly allusion to the classic dogs-playing-cards trope), and The Sultan in His Labyrinth, which depicted an obese raccoon slumped at a miniature desk eating cheese puffs while watching a loop of mating wild raccoons on a Dell laptop. My coup de grâce Hogzilla diorama, wrapped in black polyethylene, hung from the exposed beams like a thundercloud.
The New and Improved Romie Futch Page 27