My full set of right fingerprints is scanned for the contract with Wordini. The icy menthol of the device’s glass surface is a knitting needle stabbing up a nostril into the brain. Maybe it’s just psychosomatic – after all, I’m consenting to having my skull punctured. In order to sign my release forms, Dr Bromide is insisting that I have electrodes implanted for ongoing neurological research. My contribution to science is in lieu of payment of medical costs incurred as a result of deliberate self-harming behaviour. Wordini was prepared to settle all accounts, but Bromide refused, saying that he didn’t expect a copywriter to understand moral responsibility but offenders must perform their community service.
We are in Bromide’s office and the doctor is toying with the hand that he’s unhooked from the model skeleton in the corner of the room. He appears impatient with the signing process and roughly curls and unfurls the phalanges until one breaks off. He pushes the hand aside in annoyance. ‘The subject should be prepped for surgery now. This is cutting into my OR booking, and time management is not an elective procedure here.’
‘And now, the index finger here, here, here and here,’ says the lawyer representing Wordini. No one gives me a chance to read anything I sign. I’m speechless so it’s assumed I’m in a state of shell shock. I try to remember what I know and pretend this is just a little quid pro owe – that Bromide gets to saw my head open and I’ll be allowed to use the unbranded LipService while at Wordini’s offices but not after hours. I still don’t know what I’ll be doing for him. Or what other forceps finagle Bromide will perform under cover of the surgical drapes. I tell myself that at least the electrodes should just lurk, unlike You. I’m hoping that with unbranded language You’ll have no identity – like a product not on any shelves, You’ll just disappear from my consciousness. And I’ll be able to write myself back into being, shape myself into a story that can look back at me.
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.’
I’m resigned to enjoying my work. Despite trying to doghouse the sentiment, it won’t sit and stay. Wordini pitched tasturising marketing to The Hayrick, makers of gourmet condiments. They approved the proposal, so my desk has been pantrified with pots of mesquite and stout ale mustard, black cherry and anise jam, radish greens pesto, honeyed chestnut spread and more. Now, I have to find a way to make The Hayrick gourmandisers feed on a fondling that’s more than in the mouth – a touch that sets the products apart.
I can’t make anyone else experience tastures as I do, but I can create an association between non-food tactility and a flavour. Wordini thinks it’s enough of a noveltease to experience strange strokings while eating. And I can write tasting notes, copy that binds taste and touch in the mind.
By fashioning sleeves of leather, woven straw and wool to slip over the handles of spoons and forks, I want to take advantage of that moment when the hand and mouth are connected by the implement so that the taste of The Hayrick’s brandied nectarines is Siamese twinned with the stroke of satin. I weigh the spoons’ balance and heft, adding a bulb below the bowl that hangs ponderous like honey and feels like a lollipop in the mouth. One spoon has a calabash-shaped ladle with a small opening over its gourd so that sipping from it is flutteringly slurpy; another has nodules along its lip – like studs along an ear. Fashioning the spoons from modelling clay, my fingers pull up slips of peppery watercress. Each spoon raises a megaphone to the lips for sweet, salty, bitter, sour or umami. I have planned that a specific spoon will be packaged with certain products, plus an insert describing tricks of taste and buffet-play.
The problem is that most of The Hayrick’s products aren’t really the kind tucked into with cutlery. So I’ve moved on from spoons to facial hair in my attempts to recreate tasture. They’re fake beards with elastic ear loops to hold them in place and a notch for the nose to remain uncovered, as well as a large hole for the mouth. I called them beards because, aside from covering the same area as face fuzz, one of the first was made of shearling. Actually, the woolly side is worn in, so that it automatically starts muzzle-nuzzling when the wearer’s jaws are in action. The Italian beard is made of lace because for me the walnut openwork is a colander for the flavours of pasta, basil, artichokes and tomato. There’s also a delicate chain-mail French beard that hams up nouvelle cuisine and traditional cassoulet. Wordini calls them the feedbags but I think that’s unfair.
At the end of each working day, I have to moult language and leave my exoskeleton of words behind in my cubicle. The guard at the building entrance has received instructions to scan me for expression – the transdermal’s signature – before allowing me to leave. What he doesn’t know about is my authorgraph – the writing on my inner thigh that I add to with each bathroom visit during the day. When I get home I trace the letters onto cling wrap. I trip over their humps and tails, unable to form sensetences. My pen staggers blindly forward until I look back over its path to see meaning reassemble around recognisable words. I insert the film between the pages of my book. Words overlaying words.
In those first few days after starting at Wordini’s office, I mainly just write lists of words. I don’t want to scrub them off in the shower, though I keep reminding myself that they won’t be lost – their imprint is on the sheets in the book. As the weeks go by, the expectation that some meddler will snatch away the unbranded LipService loosens itself from me with every washing-off of marker ink. The lists turn into lines, impressions, tastures. Sometimes I come home with both thighs authorgraphed and words clamber-clamouring up my left arm. Sometimes there’s just a single phrase.
Stillwell arrives once a week at the close of business with his case of gear. I assume the doctor has arranged this so that I can be interviewed and my words compared with the chatter relayed by the spyware in my head. But since the session at the hospital when he put the MindSweeper system into operation, we haven’t talked much. He looks at me over his laptop. His remarkably long neck bows like the top spike of a Christmas tree under the excessive weight of a ponderous ornament. Is this still about the artificial skin? How can anyone who is so sensitive work in the medical professions? If he isn’t interested in spreading dominfear of body scientists into us carcasses, why does he do it?
‘Dr Bromide has instructed that I administer a course of intramuscular cyanocobalamin injections. I’ll need access to the deltoid,’ he says.
I pull my sleeve up over my shoulder and only remember too late that the skin of my arm is covered in my personal correspondence. His hand has already closed around my wrist; there’s no point in retracting now. He reads my expressions and I try to read his. Do the wordings on my arm (which are actually the end of what starts on my thighs) make me more knowable than I find him to be?
‘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.