Stillwell points to the passage about job burnout. ‘That’s the neurological pattern I saw emerging from the implant data.’ Talking more to himself than me, he adds, ‘He didn’t expect that I’d abstract the data to reach that conclusion. Thought he could keep the procedure of contracting out your aversion therapy clinically silent. But I heard the arterial murmurs.’ He pauses. ‘If it weren’t for your minor head trauma, my prognosis is that you would’ve reached the symptomatic tipping point fairly soon. Dr Bromide’s treatment strategy is remarkable… He would have successfully triggered a chronic inflammatory response to language through its association with the detachment, cynicism and impaired empathy of burnout. By using the copywriter to act as an intermediate host to incubate his antigens, he avoids the adverse effects of white coat hypertension. And liability risks.’
I tug at his sleeve to tell him to go slow on the Gorgon-like med-user talk. It takes more sleeve snatching, but eventually I understand. Wordini is supposed to work me to word weariness, nonosyllabic indifference. So that when he returns me to Dr Bromide I’m cured of caring and go meekly to dissection. What grates is Stillwell’s admiration for the doctor. So maybe Bromide out-conknifed Wordini? The cut and thrust never touches them. But on a bright day, I can see the lacerations the two of them have left in my shadow. Does it matter which one of them sliced at my throat or who left the silhouette of my fingers hanging by a thread? I despise them both. And I want him to hate them, too.
Stillwell leaves in a hurry but he says he will be back. The door closes behind him. I am alone with my parasitprized possessions, and I’m starting to feel like a tongue caught behind the clenched teeth of my trappings of success. How very LipServiceable that the success is illusory but the trappings aren’t.
Before I can properly reason through what the contract means for me, the horror of its implications sends tremors through me, as if a patch jolt were stirring my tectonic states. I have to bite-knuckle through the falling mental plaster to think clearly. I’ll be sent back to Bromide and there’ll be no more pure LipService. Will he even bother to give me any language at all? It won’t be like going to stay with the mutes. There’ll be no tell trail to return to. That really rattles loose the quaking. Stillwell would probably tell me this is just part of the concussion. But I don’t believe that. I want Mother’s suede purse so I can hold on to the taste of seaweed through the heaving, the way I used to when repatching into branded LipService. Scrabbling across the floor on hands and knees, I go searching for it. But I don’t know where among the boxes and merchandise it has gotten to. There are too many things. Stillwell was right about that, I have to rid myself of these special effects. I stop looking for the purse, sinking hopelessly into the well-aged rind of the nasty carpet.
It takes a few minutes sunk in the funk of stinky feet before my mind settles like dust on what I really want, what I’ve always wanted. And I know where to find it. Inside the broom cupboard is a broken robotic vacuum cleaner. I open its bin and take out Eda-Lyn from her hiding place. It has been a long time since I held her. I slide my hand up the leather arch of her spine, and my skin sops up the taste of squid ink. It swirls across my palate and behind my eyes, blotting out the world and all my hoardings. Now if I slip my fingers into her and the forbidden tang of paper, the dark cloud will resolve into sepia lettering in a rush of words over the page. But I wait. I hold back. I wait in the ink well with only the sound of my breathing. The primordial sepia soup fills my mouth, my throat, my lungs. Teeming, teasing within it are single cellular ink blots and a restlessly recombinant DNA alphabet. At last, I slide into the soft chickpea warmth of a page and feel the words released into me. They shout so loudly I almost believe I’ve spoken them.
I lie on the linoleum of the kitchen floor, although it’s more like I’m levitating because I’m unaware of its raw onion flavour. There’s only Eda-Lyn’s sweaty brininess as I throb to the echo of a silent ejaculation. The ‘contumour goods’ have shrunk back now; there’s more space in the flat. With Eda-Lyn, I have the answers. She is the answer.
‘Is that really a, a…?’ asks Stillwell.
‘Yes, it’s a book.’ I hold out Eda-Lyn for him to look at.
His hand reaches tentatively, as if uncertain whether the tanned hide is just playing dead.
‘I’ve had it for years. You won’t get sick,’ I say.
We’ve both patched into the unbranded transdermals but there’s not much talk left in them. It would’ve been too suspicious if Stillwell tried to smuggle out new ones while I’m off work, so we have to keep it short and of import. There’s a lot I have to explain, and I’m afraid I’ll end in stutter failure before it’s all said. That’s why I need Eda-Lyn to speak for herself.
I let him start by reading the frontispiece – the story of how a doctor cured Eda-Lyn after she died in the almshouse, so she could serve as a trophy of his discovery of the pork tapeworm in the human body. He stuffed her full of his EmPath.
The thing is, Stillwell is sEmPathetic. He believes in the medicause. He doesn’t just see it as the sticky side of the LipService patch, the equally essential reverse of the logoed face. So I don’t know what the words in the book will mean to him. Among the mutes, new words were as much a contagion as books are to the branded. I call up the memory of the subvertised billboard with my armnote on it and try to hold it in my mind’s eye, but the thought of how he marvelled at Bromide’s skulldiggery pulls me away like the movement of the bus I was on when I saw it. He did come to warn me about the burnout, I tell myself. He did.
Stillwell has finished reading the frontispiece and is rubbing the book’s leather binding against his cheek, as intensely absorbed as a twitcher listening for a rare bird’s call. He’s paged past the horror that I first felt at her mortal remains and gone straight to taking her between the thrum and forefinger of fascination. Is it his laborhetorical thinking or just that he’s someone who makes gifts of engineered graft tissue?
‘I can’t feel the difference,’ he says.
‘I can.’ Eda-Lyn could never be like any other leather. We look at each other. He looks away first and, even though he must know it’s a dangerous professligacy, wasting what’s left of his patch, he says, ‘Does it give you a horripilation?’ and grins. ‘I’ve been wanting to give that to you. The word, I mean. It describes the bristling of follicles. It’s good, isn’t it? Even if it’s EmPath.’
‘Yes, yes, it’s good.’ I laugh and remember who he is and his light touch, his stroke of genius, which makes me forgive him everything. And this time he ran a word over my skin and all the hairs stood on end. So maybe it wasn’t professligacy because now I’m ready to tell him everything, the whole plan.
‘Stillwell,’ I say, ‘that doctor robbed Eda-Lyn of her hide and dressed it in his words.’ I point to the gold lettering, Elementary Treatise on Human Anatomy, on the book cover. ‘My father pinched her, woke her up to her own story by pasting in the Fork in the Medicine Tree.’
He looks perplexed and then says, ‘Your father took illegal possession of the book?’
‘Yes.’
‘And The Fork in the Medicine Tree is…’
‘A history of the rivalry between physicians and surgeons for corpuses.’
He looks excited at that, but I can’t pause now. ‘With Eda-Lyn I stole away from silence. Now I need to break and enter a new language.’