‘Turn him onto his side when it stops,’ says Stillwell, who is sitting over the second programmer. ‘Then bind his hands with this,’ he continues, tossing a cable tie. ‘You can also remove the patch. They’ll experience extreme somnolence and not wake for at least an hour. The restraints are just to be safe.’
‘Why did it work faster than when I double-patched?’
‘Well, you used two commercially edited transdermals, not pure language. Plus, you had done a lot of brand switching.’
We leave the two programmers lying spent on the floor, turned on their sides facing away from the terminals. I’m tasked with scanning Eda-Lyn’s pages for input while Stillwell builds to the keystroke that will let literature bleed into a batch of patches. Eda-Lyn is inky in my fingers. I think of all the tongues that I’ll turn black with her printed words. And what comes over me is grand mal of glee – a beatific neural fire.
18
Two days later and we’re celebrating successfully sabotaging LipService by gorging ourselves on blini, sour cream, caviar and pure language. At Reactor Station, we filled Stillwell’s boxes with the literary patches and returned to the dubway, where we swapped them for the contents of unbranded patches destined for copywriters.
‘I heard that a copywriter came in today accusing the manufactory of “putting a spoke in his speak” by programming unbranded patches,’ says Stillwell.
My mouth is full of beluga, so all I can do is wriggle my roes and squeak in excitement that my lit service is working.
‘You’re not glad. You can’t be. This is not what we wanted.’ He looks at me but my schadenfreude takes a scarred-line attitude. ‘What about showing them “the other ways with words” – what can be done with language free of branding?’
‘It’s just one copywriter, Stillwell. They weren’t all going to say along with the literary programming.’
‘What if there’s an investigation?’ he asks.
‘There’s always an investigation. Mother wants a child – there’s an investigation. Mandatory post CVA-testing – an investigation. Electrodes in the brain – an investigation. I spit on your investigations.’
He scoops eggs on a finger and bubbles burst black in his mouth.
Two weeks later, Stillwell tells me about the mirror-mired. I think he is trying to get me as panicked stationary as he is. Then I see one at the mall. A woman standing in front of a mirror in a fashion retailer. She’s wearing the A-Way car rentals uniform and swaying to and fro. As the patch between her eyes almost touches the glass, she spits indecipherables, then retreats into more distant mutterings. I can’t hear what she’s saying but I don’t need to. I can read her forewords and aft’words. The A-Way copywriter is suckling our literary LipService, so her brand speak has become imp-patched. She’s trying to summon her A-Way self because she has no I without You. Stillwell says there are more and more of them. I’m too succour-punched to watch but then remember this could easily be Mother. I look up to see the woman slam her forehead into the mirror. It cracks and splits the transdermal on her head.
I am back at work but this is my armafelon, my riotous end of phrase. Sooner or later Dr Bromide will come for me and take me away, contractually bound and gagged. It’s an inevitability. So why should I put my words to the flame and burn myself out for Wordini? No, I’m on a glow slow. I keep my flickerings up my sleeve as armnotes. The copywriter gave me a new project yesterday, to create sensory hook-ups for an investment portfolio. I’m not sure if it’s even a real assignment or just a contradiction in tastures he has devised to get me chasing my fail. I’ve made a few notes about the challenges involved. I don’t plan on doing more.
I’m preparing my last words and testament, what I’ll bequeath to my unsaid self. Wordini’s shadow scuds across my cubicle’s screen wall. Stepping through the opening, he stands pinching at the vertical crease in his trousers as if trying to convince himself of its reality.
‘The copies, the copies,’ he says, adding urgently, ‘We are going to examine them.’
What copy? I haven’t written any. Then I notice that the single uptight pleat has now transferred itself to his forehead. I suppose he means the investment portfolio job but it’s clear his defining line is evading him. I hesitate to answer.
‘Is it not an indispensable part of a scrivener’s business to verify the accuracy of her copy, word by word?’ He does his best to sound threatening, but any interrogatory force whiplashes back over the language that lacks all copywriterly ka-pow. I have an oh-ho of recognition – Wordini’s lit-servicing Herman Melville’s story Bartleby. He’s word-for-wording the narrator’s lines. The sharp crease is now ironed into his tongue. And I put it there with my Herman Malevillent. It gives me a donkey anar-kick of ‘mulish vagary’.
Since I still haven’t replied, Wordini says, ‘You are decided, then, not to comply with my request – a request made according to common usage and common sense?’
It’s no longer important whether or not he’s trying to ask about the investment portfolio job. For once I know the script to his patch, while he can make as little head of its tale as the narrator. I delight in answering as the copyist Bartleby: ‘I would prefer not to.’
‘Why do you refuse?’
‘I would prefer not to.’
I imagine the patch’s narratively conditioned responses projected as luminous surtitles flashing up across the proscenium of his forehead. Right now it probably reads, ‘I begin to stagger in my own plainest faith. I begin, as it were, vaguely to surmise that, wonderful as it may be, all the justice and all the reason is on the other side.’
He is bewildered at how my words can trap him in this theatre. He hasn’t worked it out yet. So he musters new lexicality but is disarrayed again by what comes out of his mouth.
‘Say now that in a day or two you will begin to be a little reasonable.’
‘At present I would prefer not to be a little reasonable,’ I reply in as cadaverous a tone as I can.
He is beginning to understand that he is staring at a dead brick wall of language, and, despite that, it holds him in a reverie. So much so that he walks off muttering ‘prefer not to’. Prefer not to, prefer not to, prefer not to, prefer not to. He repeats this so often that the meaning of the words collapses under the weight of their sound. Pri-fur-not-to.
Long after Wordini has gone, I wonder if he receives the ministrations of a literary You. And what literary You is like. I thrill to think that You are finally a manifestation of me. That would be a mole reversal. Me as the burrowing vox provocatrix in copywriters’ heads. After all those times I was heckled by corpyrited ventriloquism, that would go some way to settling the sore. Ah, shivers of a dish best served scold.
I tell Stillwell about Wordini parroting the copyist’s refrain. Exultant, I lark through my report, adding swooping-highs and diving-lows. So there’s a bit of embellpolish but that’s because Stillwell isn’t rousing to my tale.