The New and Improved Romie Futch (36 page)

•  •

One day in early March, that florist-shop whiff of early spring in the air, I brushed over PigSlayer's HogWild profile out of mindless compunction, shocked to note that she'd changed her profile pic from an image of an Anza knife to an actual head-and-shoulders shot. A shimmering creature with dark hair partially concealing her face, she radiated a quiet wisdom combined with a delightful mischievousness. I could envision this woman not only in a white cotton frock enjoying a summer picnic but also in bloodstained camo, chasing a feral boar through a biohazardous swamp. And the very same woman might spend her weekdays teaching high school students about queer subtexts in
Moby-Dick
. In a word, she was the only woman who could understand the New and Improved Roman Futch.

But did she exist?

Or was this photo foisted by some imposter who wished to ensnare me? Whoever was behind it had also added a few suspiciously perfect biographical notes:
hog hunter, rabid reader, reluctant educator
.

But what if she did exist? I was out of my chair, pacing scuffed floors, wondering if she'd read the
State
paper's long-ass profile on me. Had she followed HogWild's fanatical chattering about my coronation as King Hoghunter? Most important, did she suspect that PorkDork and Romie Futch were one and the same? And finally, would she perhaps show up at my show in Columbia in April?

In my excitement I clicked on the instant message feature. Inside the little box, all conversations between PigSlayer and PorkDork were recorded for posterity, or at least until some server cluster malfunctioned, leading to widespread data loss, wails of anguish echoing through cyberspace as a zillion baby pics vanished. I reread our
previous conversations, finding them much shorter and less intimate than I'd remembered. I tried to think of some elegant way to reveal my identity, slyly, self-effacingly.

—
So how 'bout that dickhead taxidermist who slew Hogzilla?

Before I could think twice, I clicked send. I spent the rest of the evening agonizing over what I'd written, vacillating between gloating (
fuck yeah, I killed him
) and shame (
grossest humblebrag ever
), trudging from fridge to computer, fetching beers, and then checking for a reply. It had been almost two hours, and the lady, alas, had not yet responded, probably disgusted by my vanity, sniffing a sociopathic narcissist from a mile away. But at least I still had Hogzilla to occupy my trembling hands.

I popped another Miller. Traversed the well-worn path between my house and Noah's Ark Taxidermy. Slipped my old key into its ancient, archetypal lock, the metal keyhole plate scratched and nicked from over a decade of drunken fumbling. I slogged over worn linoleum, flicked on the shop lights, and beheld my embalmed monster for the umpteenth time.

The chortling old bastard was in a charging pose, wings retracted. I plucked a digital remote from a shelf and pressed the touch screen, which featured a diagram of Hogzilla's body. I fingered the remote and Hogzilla's eyes rolled, insane, hungry for carnage. I thumbed the diagram's dorsal section, and out popped Hogzilla's wings, otherworldly, the dusky hue of aged scrota.

Terrific
, whispered the ghost of my mother.
But you need to touch up his bright spots with magenta highlights, catch the play of sun on his body
. I could almost feel her standing behind me, lit cigarette concealed inside her cupped palm, a thing she did when I stumbled upon her smoking. I could almost hear her laughing, the deep jolly growl of a storybook mother bear. I picked up my paint set and went back to work.

•  •

By the time I got home it was past ten and I was starved. So I scrounged up a sandwich, compulsively sat down in front of my laptop, and ate. My screen emitted a swell of light. And behold: there in black and white, throbbing, pulsing, was an IM from my beloved PigSlayer, dropped a mere three minutes ago.

—
Hi Roman
.

My cheeks burned as I gazed into the little box, an intimate three-inch-by-three-inch space, a tiny private room in which we might get to know each other a little better. A nutshell. An infinite space.

—
Hi
, said I.
C'est moi!

—
Read a preview of your show in the State and thought that's GOT to be PorkDork. Been wanting to tell you how brilliant I think your work sounds, playful yet profound, esp given the naïve predominance of an archaic form of naturalism in the taxidermic arts
.

Be still my beating heart! Who was this woman who used words like
predominance
and held her own on hog-hunting message boards? How sweet the world would be if her claims turned out to be true and she really was a feisty English teacher who hunted swine during her downtime.

—
Ought to come to my opening
, I typed.
It's at this gallery in Columbia called the Bomb, April 9th, if you find yourself in the neighborhood. Come see the infamous Hogzilla firsthand
.

—
You mean the mummified version?

—
Right
.

—
Speaking of the discrepancy between live game animals and their taxidermic reps, where'd you bag the monster?

—
In the neighborhood of GenExcel
.

—
Swamp side or pine forest side?

—
Swamp
.

There it was again, the sudden lapse from friendly banter into interrogation mode, making me think she could be an agent, possibly affiliated with the FDA, or even, in the darkest of dark worlds, BioFutures. Maybe she was a minion of Dr. Morrow. Or perhaps she was an activist of sorts, a vigilante English teacher in search of ecological justice. I wanted to believe the latter, longing as I did for the company of a good woman, the deceptive referentiality of a relationship, the cozy binary of he and she.

—
Why?

—
Have you been keeping up with the board lately?

—
Not really
.

—
Fresh crop of sightings. Seems to be at least one, maybe more, other Hogzillas out there. Why would there be just one? It's a lab, right?

—
Hogs with freaky traits or just big-ass ferals?

—
Mostly big-ass ferals, but a couple of people have claimed they saw wings
.

—
Could be their imaginations kicking in, with all the hype out about the real Hogzilla
.

The thought of a Hogzilla factory, which belittled my conquest, depressed me.

—
Don't know, Romie, but I'd like to know more. I'd like to take a look sometime but ideally with a guide. Since you know your way around that part of the swamp, I thought
. . .

—
That'd be so cool!

My renegade hands compulsively typed this adolescent exclamation and then hovered like raptor claws over the keyboard.

—
We'll be in touch. But now I've got to bail. Get some shut-eye
.

—
We?

—
I meant me; was using the royal “we” again
.

—
Gotcha
.

She left me alone in the little e-room with the residue of our conversation, our spent words dead and lusterless like the skins of snakes. I scanned our exchange again, wondering why she'd been AWOL for months.

I stayed up Googling backwater public schools county by county, poring over the pics of English teachers young and old, male and female, frumpy and smoking hot, all to no avail. And then I pulled up sites on BioFutures, skipping from link to link like a drunken bee, until I found myself in the hinterlands of the Internet on poorly designed websites with flashy fonts and bad grammar, reading about Stalin's 1926 plot to build an army of human-ape hybrids. According to a site called Darkseed.com, BioFutures was resurrecting Stalin's vision with GM war pigs, the CIA and the Department of Defense in cahoots with the plan.

Closing my eyes, I imagined this absurd prospect. I saw a great sounder of swine, some three thousand strong, trotting down an industrial runway and taking flight. The sky darkened as they flapped and soared. The heavens thundered with the beating of myriad wings. I could almost hear the raspy voice of Jarvis Riddle, imbuing this spectacle with apocalyptic profundity:
And in the darkest hours of Man, swine shall take to the air
.

TWO

I was hiding outside the Bomb gallery. On a patio tucked away behind fragrant shrubs, I drained a beer, waiting to make my appearance for the opening night of
When Pigs Fly: Irony and Self-Reflexivity in Postnatural Wildlife Simulacra
, a taxidermic installation by Roman Morrison Futch. Now that the big night had finally come, I longed to be within the boundaries of my comfort zone, in my backyard lounger, downing a six-pack under the stars.

But there stood Brooke Burns, the Bomb's young assistant director, peering at me through her asymmetrical cascade of black new-wave bangs. She was a scrumptious nymph in filmy disco polyester, all jutting clavicles and poppy lips. Her plastic earrings resembled Ruffles potato chips.

She handed me a mason jar full of bourbon. She patted my arm.

“All's cool,” she said. “There's just this amazing band playing on the other side of town, and I know we'll get more traffic after their first set. I'm texting my friend Olivia. She says, like, fifty people are about to head over. So we'll just push the unveiling back to 9:30.”

Brooke glanced at the chunky men's watch that hung from her spectral wrist. And I felt a damp heat deep in my groin, smoldering
like fire under wet leaves. The bourbon was sinking into my gullet. Now I was hitting my groove. Now a beautiful girl who'd called my work
brill
in multiple text messages was stroking my arm. Now she was tugging me toward the door.

Inside, clutches of hip youth brooded in corners of the vast industrial space, sipping artisanal bourbon from mason jars, their subdued convos echoing like the meek mutterings of pigeons in an abandoned cathedral. My smaller pieces were displayed on refurbished lab tables like forlorn science projects: my mutant squirrel wedding diorama (titled
The History of Marriage
), my cyclopean possum (
Old One-Eye
), my squirrel and frog Panopticon, now enhanced with GM rat guards who possessed eyes in their backs (
Be Goo
d
), as well as a dozen other small pieces, including
Electric Solipsism
, which featured an albino coyote playing solitaire on an old Macintosh desktop (a sly allusion to the classic dogs-playing-cards trope), and
The Sultan in His Labyrinth
, which depicted an obese raccoon slumped at a miniature desk eating cheese puffs while watching a loop of mating wild raccoons on a Dell laptop. My coup de grâce Hogzilla diorama, wrapped in black polyethylene, hung from the exposed beams like a thundercloud.

We stood in the shadow of the cloud. Brooke looked up with an ominous wince. Then she smiled and stroked my arm.

Some kind of shuddering electronica, interspersed with ghostly animal bleating, pulsed from a wall of vintage speakers, mostly 1970s monsters in faux woodgrain.

“Cool tunes,” I said. “Who is it?”

Brooke squinted at me. “Yeah, totally. It's Narcolepsy, this recluse from Finland.” And then she turned back to her little screen.

Buzzing on bourbon, I idled over to the wild-game-themed food table, where venison jerky and trout-and-turnip crudités were coupled with pickled okra and deviled eggs. On my right, a pair
of pretties in '50s crinolines were checking out my Panopticon diorama. On my left, a dark dork in a black mohair cardigan grimly examined
The History of Marriage
. And just behind me, tucked behind the antique bourbon barrel, was some kind of rockabilly hipster, his hair swirled up into a glossy ducktail, his skin eerily pallid, his T-shirt and jeans so form-fitting that he looked like an action figure made of molded plastic.

The rockabilly hipster grinned at me, raised his mason jar. And Brooke hurried back over, her smile tense.

“See that guy in the seersucker suit?” She nodded toward a lushly bearded man in his thirties who stood before
The Sultan in His Labyrinth
, squinting, ruminating. “Art writer for
Dead Parrot
,” she whispered. “Please remain chill.”

I studied him, trying to comprehend the juxtaposition of Grizzly Adams facial fur and old-boy seersucker, thinking a fussy goatee would be more fitting. And he studied me, eyeing me through twinkling nineteenth-century specs, assessing, I feared, my lame haircut and aged hide, trying to peg me culturally, calculating the ratio of naïveté and urbanity that fueled my art. I was the oldest person in the room, and I longed for the cozy obscurity of my Lord Tusky mask.

But the bourbon was working its magic. Brooke Burns was stroking my arm again. At last, fashionable people were streaming in from the summer night, dressed in the clothes of bygone eras, sporting interesting coiffures and curious clusters of facial hair, every species of mustache, beard, and muttonchops represented. And there were older people among them too, frumpier, not as chicly dressed. The bourbon barrel was a hit. Within fifteen minutes, the room filled with a respectable level of festive chatter. A photographer snapped away, sleek as a seal in his all-black ensemble, multiplying my image and sending a hundred Romie
Futches rocketing through cyberspace. Meanwhile, familiar faces materialized among the strangers like dream figments.

Lee Decker shuffled forth to shake my hand. “Totally killer,” he said. “I knew you were a genius back in high school.”

Marlene teetered tipsily in a midnight-blue muumuu, her coiffure extra-teased for the occasion, and pressed her perfumed plumpness against me.

“Your father's so proud of you,” she cooed. “Even if he won't say so.”

“She had one too many at dinner,” said Dad, who dawdled behind her, looking shrunken and yellow amid the youthful throng. From a remote drawer, he'd dug a pair of ill-fitting dress slacks, which he sported with suspenders and a new plaid shirt.