Wordini walks up to where I’m seated, wires dangling off my head, and extends his hand: ‘You must be feely Frith. Isn’t this exciting?’
I shake his hand limply. Feely Frith – it sounds like a sideshow act.
‘And? How do I taste? I’m sweet aren’t I – like a cream puff? No, wait. I’m more complex than that… 1986 Château Lafite Rothschild? An extraordinary vintage.’
I shrug. What does he want from me? To pair him with a pheasant pithivier or pan-fried scallops? Has he forgotten that his work ensures that I probably couldn’t say that anyway? All that would come out is some drivel about the nutritive value of omega-3 fish oils. I refuse to answer.
‘Come, come – aren’t I a linguoso treat? Most people are thrilled to glitz to meet a copywriter.’ I can’t tell if he’s trying to win me over or if he’s just a child who wants to see the bear dance and fails to notice the stick and chain. I don’t want to perform. I want to crawl into a blanket fort of catatonia and try to decipher the shadows on the walls, but instead I have to come out and play nice. So I say, ‘I have no control over the formulation of oral supplements.’
‘Ah.’ He sounds disappointed. Stillwell makes use of the moment to catch the copywriter’s eye and point to his watch. ‘Science is always so sure there’s nothing to be learned from the consumer arts or conversation,’ Wordini snaps.
You’ve never wanted any part of the tastures – advertsorial deviancy – and You’ll not have your personality disordered by such an aberration. You put up a wall between us just as the tech slides a table with cubicle panels in front of me so that I’m boxed in – I can see neither my hands in my lap nor anything ahead or to my sides.
‘I call this a little game of tat for titillation. We place some old tat in your hands without you seeing what it is and you name the finger food, how intensely it titillates the taste buds on a scale of one to ten and whether it tattles on the tat,’ says Wordini, grinning. ‘A stimulating divertissement, don’t you think?’ He really could sell anything. Even having electrodes strapped to your head and not knowing what will happen when the switch is flipped. But the day so far has conditioned me with an animal distrust. I’m not going to lick his hand and let him pat my head. I manage to lift a lip enough to show a courteous fang.
‘Our tech Stillwell here is applying a secondary patch to give you a bit of a verbocharge.’
‘Is it slow-release preparation?’ The words come out before I can think. Wordini chortles with delight. I’d stupidly given him all the leverage he could ask for. Showing that I crave language, want more freedom of speech; he’s got me where he wants me.
‘Lamentably, no, my little word wanton. It’s fast acting but short lived. Specifically developed for research such as this.’
Before the first object – taste of menthol, four out of ten, a glass bottle – reaches my right hand, my left index and middle finger have also had electrodes taped to them.
‘Skin conductance response – measuring degree of emotional arousal,’ says Stillwell softly and adds, ‘Facial coding for complementary data readings on emotional state,’ in an embarrassed mumble when he notices me eyeing what is clearly a camera lens set into the back wall of the cubicle.
I can see they intend to empty my contents, upend drawers, toss the mattress. The strewings will all be roughly raked over in the search. For what? I don’t know and it hardly matters when there will be nothing left that hasn’t been pawed. What happens to people who no longer have any secret things nestled in dark places?
More objects pass across my tongue – cold ham, five out of ten, steel key. Then I suddenly feel a nettling burn at the electrodes on my head. They couldn’t have been switched on before. It’s only just beginning now. A new flavour forces itself on my hand – pumpernickel bread, eight out of ten, wooden spoon. Hunks of rye lodge unswallowed in my throat. Why is it so strong? But the spoon is already gone and my fingers are splayed open around something new – very dark chocolate, nine out of ten, glazed porcelain teacup. It’s such bitterly dark cacao. I don’t understand what’s happening. Are the tastures turning on me, like in an autoimmune response? The rubber ball is returned to my hand. The intensity is unbearable. My fingers rear back and then retreat inside my sleeves, gasping.
Somewhere behind me, Wordini’s voice says, ‘Yes, yes, spit it out. But in words please.’
‘Chilli, ten out of ten, rubber ball.’ I wonder whether I’ll even be able to taste anything else.
Still the objects keep pushing forward, crowding in on me with their restaurant-kitchen shouts. There’s a dullness to my palate as if it were scalded. The polyester of a sock is still milky but the peculiarly camel smack of it is weak, more a memory. And dry grasses, I feel their keen edges, a hair off a paper cut, but instead of the sharp chlorophylls of raw green peas they’re mushy, overcooked, lifeless – two out of ten. And then comes paper. More than the shock that somehow a disease carrier has found its way into the hospital and is being pressed into my hands by the staff is that it has no taste. Nothing at all. Nothing of the soft chickpea hours in the book repository. My mouth hangs open, empty.
‘Oh ho, is it a slip of the tongue?’ says Wordini’s disembodied head, which appears above the cubicle wall, ‘Or are you losing your touch? Let’s confirm you’ve no taste for tangibles.’ The invisible hand pulls free the paper and butts my fingers with a small smooth pellet – a gel capsule.
‘Multipill?’
‘A supplement and no fine dining?’ insists Wordini.
‘Yes.’
I have been taken apart like a transistor radio. I am in pieces, disconnected. This is a show of how deeply they can twist the screwdriver, these engineers of the human parole. How they can strip out my tastures as easily as they blew the circuit breaker of my language. And what am I left with? No real taste, no real food but the equivalent of a nutritional supplement – Multipill.
Stillwell is called over to wheel away the cubicle and remove the electrodes from my fingers and head.
He pats my hand after he has coiled up the creeping cables and says, ‘Baseline cortical excitability of the left anterior insula can be enhanced or attenuated by anodal and cathodal transcranial direct stimulation respectively. Apparently, cathodal stimulation reduces the signal-to-noise ratio, producing an elevation in your sensory cross-activation. The reverse occurs with anodal stimulation. But these effects are temporary.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course, we wouldn’t dream of robbing you of your acquired taste, my dear guinea prig,’ interrupts Wordini. ‘Quite the contrary, together you and I are going to pioneer a marketing fame changer, a new brandiloquence with tongue firmly in chic…’
Stillwell is staring intently at Wordini, trying to signal something. Looking up, the copywriter sees Dr Bromide has returned.
‘Attempting to inoculate my research subject against me?’ he says.
‘Not at all, I’m simply making my pitch, and market forces will prevail,’ replies Wordini. ‘Should our feely Frith prefer the flavour of a finger in my pie, she would receive a supply of unbranded LipService and remuneration commensurate to her mouth-watering gifts. But I’m sure, Doctor, that you, too, have a compelling offer.’
Still in my seat, I see the wind gusting violently through the doctor’s nasal thickets.
‘Ethical responsibility cannot be entrusted to the vagaries of market economics. You,’ he says pointing at me, ‘have an ethical responsibility to the field of neuroscience and the fight against a pandemic of cerebrovascular disease. But since you probably only understand metastasising materialism, I can arrange a cosmetic procedure of your choice.’