‘Mark me, too,’ he says.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Exercise your hypergraphia on my dermis.’
‘If you want to show it to Bromide and Wordini, just take a picture.’
‘No.’ He’s already rolled up his sleeve and slaps the opposite hand down on the bare forearm as if trying to coax a shy vein. ‘It’s not for them; it’s for me.’
‘Why do you want it?’
‘Because it’s idiopathic language – without any known commercial aetiology.’
If he is planning on turning missal-blower, I can’t stop him. What difference does it make how he reveals my bootleg and batwing letters? After he’s injected me a little too hurriedly, so that he leaves his bluish mark, I go and fetch the whiteboard pen. He lays his right forearm on the desk. Mine rests hand to elbow with his, as I replicate the language mutation.
It looks different on him, as though it could walk off into the world without me. I haven’t felt that about anything I’ve created since Faith and I sold Wardsback. For the first time, I think about the beards – that other unknowable people will take them and make what they want of them.
14
‘You have a persecutory belief bias. Perhaps because my self-disclosure has not been entirely reciprocal.’
I look up and stop penning in the day’s eloquention, shepherding the words from my limb into Stillwell’s limbo. I don’t know what he does with the armnotes and I haven’t told him that I clingingly wrap mine.
‘I think I’ve found a way to equalise the power differential. I’m giving you psychological leverage.’
He hands me a flash drive. On it, I find a series of classified biopsychosocial reports on my mother. First, there was the gift of the graft, and now he’s again offering me his professional skin. Giving these to me is in breach of medical obscurity. Would Bromide have risked career kamikaze in engineering this? I feel the rigged mortis of distrust leave my joints.
Resting my palm on the milkwarm skin of his supplicant arm, I say, ‘Thank you.’ He leaves the office so that I read alone in my cubicle.
The reports are trip-worded with EmPath LipService but not even that can stop my progress down the dark passages:
Thematic apperception testing (TAT) revealed narratives appropriately constructed on Frisson Froufrou brand mythology but with a disturbing recurrence of an idée fixe relating to mothering infants. Human chorionic gonadotropin levels indicate gravidity. Since cognitive dissonance is an inevitable consequence of these incompatible identities, further investigation is required. It is suspected that having offspring is a method of perceived control over a stressor.
Behavioural abnormalities recorded during observation in a locked ward have exposed the patient’s concealment of a persistent gustatory reflex hallucination precipitated by tactile stimulus. Sustained psychological pressure with concurrent neuroimaging led to an admission. The reproductive idée fixe is rationalised as a coping mechanism whereby the offspring would act as a vocaliser for the psychopathology. Although this represents a form of autistic thinking within the context of the Frisson Froufrou psych profile, the BMG Textile & Clothing Corporation has scored her highly on the identification index and considers rehabilitation financially viable. The BMG Cognitive & Behavioural Modelling Department has requested the predicted prognosis following a course of therapeutic groupthink.
Mother gave birth to me so that, as a child unconstrained by patch programming, I would give expression to her finger flavours. She conceived me as a LipService patch for tasture. So look, Mother dearest, look at me – aren’t I just what you hoped I would be? Indentured to a copywriter and mouthing finger foods. I suppose she only wanted what I want. Except that then she didn’t. So where does that leave me? Whenever Mother and I connect it’s always a bump to the funny bone.
And Stillwell, is he any better? He gives gifts that undo me like wrapping. It seems a Bromidean kindness to show me the records. The sort bestowed with blackhanded compliments that leave their mark. Yes, I have a ‘persecutory belief bias’, but that’s because I see the doctor’s shadow everywhere.
I’ve learned a little from Wordini about how copywriters work out on the unconscious, pumping levers as if on an elliptical trainer. I don’t have anything quite so subliminal in mind but I think I know how to get two birds to both atone. Mother will have that talking cure she once wanted and Stillwell’s going to get it for her.
‘I can’t walk the talk out of here. The guard will read the expression signature and stop me. But you can.’
I watch Stillwell’s face through the wrong end of binoculars. He seems far away. Until the lenses suddenly drop and he’s close, so close. There’s a wicked crinkle at his eye, like the folds I darned to delete a letter and subvertise a logo with the silents.
‘OK.’
‘You’ll do it?’ I didn’t expect him to accept so readily.
‘Yes. What do you want to dose for?’
‘It’s not for me.’ That surprises him. ‘Bring the patch to my place after you leave. I don’t need to tell you where I live, do I?’
He pauses but doesn’t answer the question. ‘I was a consultant on the scanner design. The guard will register that I’m carrying uncut LipService and not just EmPath. He’ll want to see authorisation from Wordini.’
‘I could forge it using his encrypted letterhead, if you can get it off his system for me.’
‘Good.’
We sit in silence for a moment mentally recalibrating our attitudes to each other.
I feel like it’s my turn to warm the bathwater we’re in. ‘Instead of copying my authorgraph, why don’t I give you something of your own?’ He wears a wide-eyed happiness like a daisy behind the ear. I pick up the marker pen from my desk and write: ‘The naked taste of your skin on bedtime milk rests sleepily at my fingers.’
Stillwell dropped off the unbranded transdermal last night and I hid it wrapped in plastic inside the cavity of one of a pair of roasted quail. No one came looking for it. Today’s Saturday and I’m taking the birds to Mother’s for lunch.
I haven’t seen her since starting at Wordini’s office, when I took the advance he had given me and asked for her help to redress my wrongs with a new wardrobe. She was all atwitter over her daughter in a couture pencil skirt working for a copywriter. As she flapped over the choice of heels, I felt like a shop mannequin with sealed fibreglass lips.
In an e-mail I’d sent from work, I had told her in broad chokes about the LipService abuse, seizure, decommunissioning and being headhunted by Wordini. I knew she could fill in the blanks – tasture and prospecting doctors. She’s intimate enough with the system. But, as usual, she chose to only see the Frisson Froufrou frills and not the debtshop workers with iris-less amphetamine eyes.
She even gifted me with a brand-new congratulatory Frisson Froufrou bra to wear. That’s the first time she has given me any of her products since the days of the dressing-up box, and those were cast-offs.
I broke the rules, and as punishment those with say-so have given me the great dream of upward mobility. I’m starting to see their reasoning. A nobody can be a malcontent. But the consumer congregation will never forgive someone who spits out their lifestyle aspirations. So now I’ve been given the finest brand-y wine.
‘These briefs – they’re not what I’m used to,’ says Mother in her damsel-in-distress voice, except that it’s obvious she really is afraid of the unbranded patch.