Free The New and Improved Romie Futch by Julia Elliott Page B

altercations had escalated into fistfights, but so far, only two perpetrators had been removed from the facility.
    Most of the tension was not of the racial variety, however, but between BAIT s and slow learners. As soon as they heard us talking our fancy talk in the cafeteria or Nano Lounge, they seethed with resentment and bonded together against us.
    By the end of week two, we six BAIT s were clumped at our own elite table, gibbering spastically, our speech peppered with polysyllables and arcane academic cant. We started off simple, imagining professional wrestling matches between Aristotle and Plato, for example, or tallying up the number of atrocities in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus . Words like Machiavellian and sprezzatura were bandied about. By week three, we’d worked our way through classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, the whole kit and caboodle of European Renaissances, Reformation, Enlightenment, yada yada yada, zipping up through the nineteenth century to the false climax of high modernism, where, right after we got our bearings, our minds werepromptly blown with all the posts (-modernism, -structuralism, -humanism, -colonialism). Thereupon, our Babel towers began to buzz with cacophonous tongues, mortar crumbling, brick chunks hurtling miles downward from heights beyond the stratosphere. The whole concept of a tower, of progress, is always already undermined by its own aporia, and that night we were reeling.
    After 9:00 PM, the rest of the BAIT s began to pop in.
    â€œHow’s your hammer hanging?” said Skeeter Rabin.
    A miniature hesher with long stringy hair and the enormous spooked eyes of a nocturnal monkey, Skeeter had also done time for weed-related shenanigans, which had derailed his career as a vinyl siding installation consultant and led him to the halls of this hallowed institution. Alvin Gooding, aka Al, was a Desert Storm vet and unemployed security guard from Goose Creek. With his horn-rimmed specs, stiff posture, and impeccably trimmed beard, Al looked like he could be on the cover of Black Enterprise magazine. Just like all of us, he had a history of substance abuse, though he was mostly into prescription meds (being a vet with chronic pain issues gave him a better excuse).
    After securing their eternal secrecy, Trippy whipped out our milk jug of Pep, which we’d stashed behind the sectional. Al took a hesitant sip.
    â€œNow we’re talking,” he said. “Trippy here has engineered a pretty decent bug juice—just what I need to clean the fizz out of my neuronal networks.”
    But who knew what went on within our actual neural tissue? Though we were getting “smarter” by the minute, we didn’t have much training in physiology. The technicians never gave us scientific downloads, mostly stuffing our heads with highfalutin humanities data. The closest we got to the hard sciences was through philosophy of science or cultural materialist critiques.
    â€œY’all get Discipline and Punish yet?” asked Skeeter, his huge eyes aglow with enlightenment.
    â€œAw hell,” said Trippy. “Don’t get me started on the Panopticon, the perfect metaphor for my punked state of subjection, my socially constructed soul bugging under the weight of hierarchical observation, the prison guard internalized. The Man inside of the man, man. Just watch any male of color walking down the street, eyes on the lookout for the hobgoblin Man, frequently materializing in the form of an armed cop. The prison guard’s inside you, dog.”
    â€œPair that text with Angela Davis,” said Al, “and it’s a brain barrage. Makes me reevaluate my ordeal with Gulf War syndrome. Getting ganked by the gov and the medical bureaucracy. Had a boil on my leg the size of a tennis ball. What boil? they said. Took me six months, reams of paperwork, and eighty-five calls to the VA to get access to a doctor who didn’t know his ass from a hole in the