My head is shaved for the operation. As the blades chew through my hair, I feel the metal skim my cranium with a saliva of cold ham. Taste has never swilled over my scalp before; my hair protected me. Being bald makes me feel even more naked than the backless theatre gown. On the gurney carrying me to the theatre, my head sinks into pillowy yoghurt that threatens to smother me. Soon the tasting skin will be stripped away, too.
My skull cap slurps off, leaving my shy cerebral folds bared to the surgical lamps.
‘Craniotomy completed. Now let’s get the homunculus twitching,’ says Bromide to the two other masked men.
I know because I have to be conscious to assist with the brain mapping. My lip jumps or I feel a prickling on my cheek as a spot is electrically stimulated, and I have to toggle a switch upwards to indicate the stimulation of movement and downwards for ‘somatic sensation’.
A doctor intones ‘motor cortex’, or ‘Brodmann’s three’.
There is no pain, just the rheumatic sadness of a dumb creature. But maybe that is also just the probe scraping the furrow that creases the brow.
When they hit a spot that triggers a tasture, Bromide is instantly transformed by a waggadocio reminiscent of Wordini’s.
Waving the probe under my nose, he says, ‘Still so sure an independent construal of self can be based on a response that I can induce at will?’
To prove his point he prods at my brain with the electrode, cueing tasture like billiard balls into the pockets of my hand and mouth.
‘Patients suffer from collective amnesia about the ownership of their bodies. We, the syndicated medical professions, administer antithrombotics to control intracranial haematoma and limit lesion size. We provide the therapeutic measures to correct loss of cortical function in the language centre. We own the physical human apparatus – it is merely leased via a client consciousness to the corporates, until on death it reverts to us. As a shareholder in this carcass,’ he points at me, ‘I am entitled to dispose of its physiological anomalies to the syndicate’s advantage.’
He leans in close and I can’t turn my head away because it is held in a clamp. ‘That pathologically narcissistic copywriter had better hope that the subject is more commercially viable than her neuroscientific value alone. Because once I synthesise gustatory hallucination in conjunction with branded cutaneous stimulation – as well as auditory and visual cross-activations – and offer it in transdermal format, who and what will you be then?’
Although it is the first time he hasn’t referred to me in the third person as ‘the subject’, it feels more than ever as if formaldehyde is closing in around me. I have become little more than a specimen in a jar on his desk. Now that the implants record my neural activity, Bromide believes he can reduce my touch-taste hook-ups to reproducible chemistry and electricity.
The implant is inserted and I register the pressure and impact of the staples tacking my scalp back down. My flesh is dead to me. And I think, the monsters are no longer under the bed but under the covers with me.
I’ve spent most of the week sleeping, not wanting to know, not wanting to think. Earlier today a nurse took out the staples. Now Stillwell arrives to test the telemetry and recording functions of the neural implants. He fits an elastic band holding a small device in position over the implant. My stubbly head itches and I insert a fingernail under the strap to scratch.
‘There’s no reason you can’t have long keratinised filaments again. The wand,’ says Stillwell, tapping at the device on the elastic band, ‘will still interface with the implant.’
I nod. I haven’t spoken since the seizure because no one in the hospital will give me LipService. Not that I’ve really tried to get a patch. Learning to communicate using the mute point when I was with the silents has made things easier, although the nurses seldom try to understand.
‘I’m going to initiate MindSweeper. It shouldn’t stimulate any nervous response,’ he says.
My body raises and rattles its porcupine suspicions. But I don’t feel anything. I watch Stillwell’s hands moving on finger stilts over the keys of his computer and remember his touching parley in the canteen. How do I make sense of the tender raiding of what’s in my temples?
Stillwell looks up. ‘Good. Now, let’s test the real-time reading of your sensory cross-activation. But first, I want to uh articulate…’ He bends to rummage in his bag. ‘Uh I mean to say, I hope we can form an interpersonal bond.’
I’m almost grateful I have no LipService because I honestly have no words. This is Bromide’s creature who’ll be prying into my dark matter once a week for the foreseeable future, and what, he thinks we should be friends?
Making a second attempt on the bag, he says, ‘I realise that I might currently induce a belief-bias effect in you which is why I hope that this altruistic donation of engineered graft tissue will establish an in-situ attachment.’
He’s holding out a square of wet whitish film lifted out of a tray of liquid. I keep my hands folded in my lap.
‘It’s produced in the burns unit lab from shark cartilage and bovine collagen as a scaffold for regrowing blood vessels and the dermal layer. It isn’t supposed to leave the premises due to the risk of industrial espionage, but I thought it would be an interesting stimulus for testing tactile-difference thresholds.’
I place the artificial skin in the spoon of my palm and sup on the woodsy savour of huitlacoche. As the membrane clings to me with its sweaty film, it acts like a suction cup, pulling at memories of dermal contact – the book that Dad gave me bound in Eda-Lyn’s hide, Stillwell’s touch. I want to like him but the cord from the device strapped to my head dribbles down my neck in a reminder that his gift has the effect of a cattle prod on my neurons – producing just the data Bromide wants. I hand the skin back. He looks hurt but returns it to its tray and slides the container into the drawer next to my bed.
‘Tomorrow, you’ll be discharged. The day after, you must report to the copywriter. I will schedule weekly times with him to clear your cache and perform data mining. Perhaps we can engage in dialogue then.’
Wordini’s offices are in a loft, with unfiltered light coming from clerestory windows above the fixed screens facing out over the streets. The entire floor is crisscrossed with runners for frosted sliding screens that can be arranged to create cubicles or partially enclosed meeting areas. Logos and brand imagery are projected onto some of these walls.
As I sit waiting for Wordini, it occurs to me that, for all this place’s self-conscious aesthetics, I’ve exchanged being boxed into Lost Property for another coop without a view. Why does it matter, when I’m getting unbranded LipService? I don’t know but I feel my centre sag like a flopped cake.
A woman appears with a silver tray. She looks at my clothes and shorn head and walks straight out again. She returns a few minutes later with the resentful expression of a child made to apologise, clatters the tray down on the table and leaves in silence. On the tray is a patch. Its transparency is uninterrupted by logos or taglines. Only along the edge is small print: ‘Use without accreditation by the Copywriters’ Association is liable to be prosecuted as a criminal offence.’ Also on the tray is an identity card in my name endorsed by the Copywriters’ Association. Next to LipService Pro status, it says, ‘For professional use under supervision only’.
For the first time since the surgery, I’m not thinking about the eyes in the back of my head or Dr Bromide giving me notice of eviction from my own body. There’s the ticklish excitement of a hamster up my sleeve. Its cheeks are stuffed with hoarded words.
I peel off the patch’s backing and smack it onto my upper arm. Out of habit, I find myself holding my breath against You and the rancid grease that clings to palate and arm. But although it’s oily, the awful putty note is gone. You are gone. I take a moment and then start whispering to myself – things unspoken for years, such as the word ‘dwell’ from Dad’s echo of Ovid. It’s a word with a soft dell at its centre that I sink into like a beanbag chair. And ‘relishes rare rhetoric’ from the riddle I gave Oona to read. And ‘tasture’.
‘So that’s what you call it.’ I look up to see that Wordini is standing over me. ‘Not a bad lexicallure. We might hook them with that.’ Please, no, he can’t take my pet word and let it be teased into endless yapping. He notices my expression and says with a surprising lack of enthusiasm, ‘You’re now in the world of the lingua banker. If your coinage is not out there earning interest, you risk losing currency and ultimately your rights to unbranded LipService. It’s a highly competitive business. Let me show you to your word station.’
Walking between the hazy screens is like flying through cloud; occasionally a break appears in the whiteness and I’m introduced to another junior copywriter. They all look at me with the same disdain as the tray bearer.
When we reach the cubicle that is intended for me, Wordini says, ‘I’ve transferred an advance on your wages. Use it so you aren’t always hung by your threads.’
The copywriter’s ebrulliance isn’t what it was at our previous meetings. It’s as if I’m suddenly noticing the gloss of a too-hot iron on his fabric – the inevitable consequence of that implacable crease in his trousers. Of course, Wordini would never actually wear anything with a shabby sheen. But I see his smoothness differently now, as if he knows what it is to be pressed so that the fibres of his being melt.
So I speak openly: ‘Dr Bromide is making a patch that will induce branded tastures. I don’t know what I can do here to make that redundant.’ I’m caught yack-jawed by my own directness – because I still half expect You to intervene and because the last person I heard talk without any brand bingo was Oona.
‘I’m aware of Bromide’s activities,’ he says with a barely suppressed heartwheel of his former animation. ‘Even if the doctor can chemjure forth skingestions, who says anyone’s buying? They weren’t with unbranded LipService.’
He looks at me, enjoying the impact he’s made. ‘Given the choice, focus groups preferred a whip-sharp quip to the old ad-lib. They liked being able to twinpoint members of their own social tribe.’ He pauses and then continues: ‘Anyway, getting people to want what is much like a sixth finger requires psychosell – managing the entire experience cycle by tapping the power of association and memory at all touchpoints. That’s what you’re going to do – give meaning to taste-tactile pairings.’