The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) (2 page)

    In order to wear this garment of a body, you’ll need to take the bones out. Bones function essentially as hangers and shoe trees. So filet first, then get in.

Once you’re in, I’m out.

My soul is released.

But don’t worry. It’s cool. This was my intention. It’s why I wrote this book.

You see, the soul can outrace light. (They’ve clocked souls leaving bodies at somewhere around 190,000 miles per second.) So while you’re trudging around in my body, my soul will be on that distant planetoid, sitting on a couch in front of the telescope’s monitor, drinking a beer, eating a mortadella, prosciutto, and provolone hero—watching the reruns of my past. Laughing, crying, belching.

    Some night, when you’re all alone and feeling particularly alienated and forsaken, close your eyes and cup your hands to your ears. You’ll hear a kind of muffled roar. That’s the cumulative sound of 30 billion souls—one from each human body that’s ever walked the earth; each now alone on its own individual tiny desolate planet, furnished with couch, telescope, minibar, and self-replenishing hoagie—laughing, crying, and belching as they watch their lives loop endlessly in universal syndication.

M
y father is strapped to a gurney, about to die by lethal injection, when the phone rings. Everyone—warden, lawyers, rabbi, Dad—looks at the red wall phone. That’s the one that rings when the governor calls to pardon a condemned convict. But when it rings a second time, they realize that it’s not the old-fashioned tintinnabulation of a wall phone, but the high-pitched electronic chirp of a cellular. I reach into my jacket pocket and answer: “Hello? [It’s my agent.] What’s up?” Everyone’s giving me this indignant glare like, “Hey, we got an execution here,” which I deflect with the international sign for “Bear with me, please”—the upraised frontal palm (gesturally closer to the Hollywood Indian’s gesticulated salutation than to the traffic cop’s “Stop,” which is more peremptory and thrust farther from the body). I’m nodding: “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh … That’s great! OK, I’ll talk to you later.” I slip the phone back inside my jacket.

“Good news?” my father asks.

“Yeah, kind of,” I reply. “It looks like I’m going to win the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo / Oshimitsu Polymers America Award.”

“What’s that?” the doctor says, retaping the cannula in my father’s arm and sliding the IV drip stand closer to the gurney.

“It’s a very prestigious, very generous award given every year for the best screenplay written by a student at Maplewood Junior High School—it’s $250,000 a year for the rest of your life.”

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Dad exclaims.

“Mazel tov,” says the rabbi.

“Whoa … hold on, folks,” I say. “There’s one big problem here—there’s no screenplay. I haven’t written word one. I don’t even have a title yet.”

The warden—an absolutely stunning woman in a décolleté evening gown—eyes me dubiously. “How’d you win the award if there’s no screenplay?”

“That’s the advantage of having a powerful agent,” I say.

Everyone nods in agreement.

“Trouble is—I gotta get this movie written soon.… Shit, I could really use a title. I can’t write without a title, y’know, I gotta be able to say to myself, I’m working on
Such and Such
.

“How does
Like Lemon-Lime Sports Drink for Carob Protein Bar
strike you?” the executioner asks.

“I thought of that myself,” I say, “but it’s a little too close to
Like Water for Chocolate.”

“Mark, what about
Double Life: The Shattering Affair Between Chief Judge Sol Wachtler and Socialite Joy Silverman?”
the warden suggests.

“Too long.”

Dad pipes up. “I’ve got the title,” he says decisively.

“What?”

“Eventually, Even Mighty Mouse Is Vivisected by the Dour Bitch in a White Lab Coat.”

There’s a long silence.

“I love it,” the rabbi finally says. “It’s haunting. It’s archetypal. It speaks to the collective unconscious. Every culture has, if not a full-fledged myth, than a mythological motif involving the man/rodent—strong, honest, resolute in his convictions, striving diligently to excel in life—who, in the end, is confronted by the
merciless, omnipotent giantess—a sort of postpartum, premenstrual proto-Streisand—with opulently manicured and fiendishly honed fingernails, who plucks him up and slices him open from his Adam’s apple to his pubic bone.
Eventually, Even Mighty Mouse Is Vivisected by the Dour Bitch in a White Lab Coat,”
he reprises, gesturing as if at a marquee.

“C’mon, that’s much too long,” I say.

“Bullshit,” rebuts my father. “The length is irrelevant. Moviegoers condense titles regardless. They called
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ‘Cuckoo’s Nest.’ Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
became
‘Willy Wonka.’ Steroids Made My Friend Jorge Kill His Speech Therapist: An ABC Afterschool Special
was simply
‘Steroids.’
So they’ll call this
‘Vivisected’
or
‘Dour Bitch.’
But you want succinct? How about
No Exit Wound
. Sort of Jean-Paul Sartre meets Jean-Claude Van Damme. Or you want a real contemporary, John Singleton sort of feel? What about something like
Yo! You’re My Dope Dealer Not My Thesis Adviser. If I Wanted Your Opinion About My Dissertation, I’d Have Asked for It, Motherfucker!”

I’m starting to get a little impatient. I glance at my watch, a Tag Heuer chronograph. “Listen, I gotta get over to the library and try to come up with some ideas. Can we, uh …” I make the international sign for lethal injection: thumb, index, and middle fingers mime squeezing hypodermic and then head lolls to the side with tongue sticking out of mouth.

The executioner and operations officer check and recheck the IV line and make a final inspection of the delivery module, which is mounted on the wall and holds the three lethal doses in syringes, each of which is fitted beneath a weighted piston.

Everyone’s being especially punctilious here because of an
accident that occurred recently at an execution over in Missouri, where leaks in the octagonal gas chamber’s supposedly airtight seals allowed cyanide gas to seep into the witness room, killing ten people, including members of the condemned criminal’s victims’ families. Only writer William T. Vollmann, who was covering the execution for
Spin
magazine, walked away unscathed.

Dad beckons me to come closer. “Here, son, I want you to have this,” he says, handing me his ring, a flawless oval Burmese sapphire flanked by heart-shaped diamonds.

Something about the way he contorts his body against the leather restraints in order to remove the ring reminds me of my first memory of my parents naked. I must have been three or four—they’d just gotten out of the shower and were toweling each other off. My father’s entire body was emblazoned with tattoos of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings.

“What’s that, Daddy?” I remember asking.

“That’s the Kaufmann house at Bear Run, Pennsylvania, that’s Taliesin West in Phoenix, that’s the Johnson Wax building in Racine, Wisconsin, and that’s the Guggenheim,” he explained, pointing, his head twisted backward over his shoulder.

“Why’d you get those?” I asked.

“I was drunk, I guess …” he shrugged.

My mom’s buttocks were tattooed with an illustration of an 1,800-pound horned Red Brindle bull crashing through the front window of a Starbucks coffee bar and charging a guy who’s sitting there sipping a cappuccino and reading M. Scott Peck’s
The Road Less Traveled
. The caption reads: “Life’s a Bitch and Then You’re Gored to Death.”

Lately I’ve been trying to fix Mom up with the lawyer Alan
Dershowitz, who helped prepare an amicus-curiae brief in support of my father’s last appeal. Mom spends most of her time these days dressed in black, fingering her rosary beads, sighing, daubing away tears with a black, lace-trimmed handkerchief, and doing Goldschläger shots—so I thought it might be a good idea for her to start getting out more. My dad’s family is really pissed at me because they think Mom shouldn’t start dating until after the execution, and they’re also mad because I sold some nude photos of Dad to this bondage magazine and they claim to have a right to some of the proceeds, and my position is basically: I tied him up, I took the photographs, they’re my property, profits from their sale belong to me, end of discussion.

It’s time. The superintendent reads the death warrant.

Everyone turns to the wall phone, giving it one last opportunity to ring.

“If you think the governor’s gonna call with a stay of execution, you’re nuts,” I say. “She’s probably not even awake yet. It’s only noon.”

(They’d lowered the voting age to 15 in order to bring the highest-spending demographic sector into the electorate. This resulted in the election of a 17-year-old as governor. It’s been a real joke. At her inauguration, the chief justice had to make her remove her Walkman and spit out a huge multicolored bolus of Skittles so she could hear and repeat the oath of office. And you know how barristers and judges in England wear those white powdered perukes? Our new governor signed an order requiring the lawyers and judges in New Jersey to wear these big-hair wigs—y’know like mall hair. You should have seen my father’s trial—I’m telling you, it was a joke.)

My father is not an evil person. He just can’t do PCP socially. At the risk of oversimplification, I think that’s always been his basic problem. Some people are capable of being social phencyclidine users and some people are not, and my father unfortunately falls into the latter category. Normally Dad’s a very sweet, patient, benevolent guy, but when he’s dusted, he’s a completely different person—belligerent, volatile,
extremely
violent.

I remember once he was helping me with some homework—I was in the third grade, writing a report comparing the ritualistic sacrifice of prisoners of war during the Aztec festival Tlacaxipeualiztli (the Feast of the Flaying of Men) with recent fraternity hazing deaths at the Fashion Institute of Technology—and Dad was being just extraordinarily helpful in terms of conceptualizing the theme of the report and then with the research and editing (he was a fastidious grammarian), and at some point the doorbell rang and Dad went downstairs. Apparently it was some of his “dust buddies,” because he disappeared for about a half hour and when he returned to my room, he was transformed. Sweating, drooling, constricted pupils, slurred speech—the whole profile.

We started working again, and all of a sudden Dad grabbed the mouse and highlighted a line on the computer screen, and he said, “That’s a nonrestrictive modifier. It needs to be set off by commas.”

I probably said something to the effect of, “It’s not a big deal, Dad, let’s just leave it.”

At which point he went completely berserk. “It’s a nonrestrictive adjectival phrase. It’s not essential to the meaning of the
Sentence’s main clause. It should be set off by commas. It
is
a big deal!”

And he grabbed a souvenir scrimshaw engraving tool, which I’d gotten at the New Bedford Whaling Museum gift shop several summers ago, and he plunged it into his left thigh, I’d say at least two to three inches deep.

“All right, I’ll put the commas in,” I said.

Dad evinced absolutely no sensation of pain, impervious as he was, thanks to the PCP. If anything, impaling his thigh with the scrimshaw graver seemed to mollify him. He certainly made no attempt nor manifested the slightest desire to remove it, and later, while we were trying to come up with a more colloquial way of saying “bound to the wheel of endless propitiation of an unloving and blood-hungry divinity,” Dad absently twanged the embedded tool as he mused.

Another fascinating and potentially mitigating factor emerged during my father’s trial for killing a security guard who’d apprehended him shoplifting a Cuisinart variable-speed hand blender and a Teflon-coated ice-cream scooper from a vendor’s kiosk at an outlet in Secaucus. (The imposition of the death sentence in New Jersey requires “first-degree murder with heinous circumstances.” In this case, it was determined that the weapons used in the commission of the homicide were the purloined implements themselves—the hand blender and the ice-cream scooper. The lower torso of the security guard, who’d pursued my father down into a subterranean parking garage, had been almost totally puréed, the upper torso rendered into almost a hundred neat balls.) Unbeknownst to me, Dad had an extremely rare hypersensitivity to minute levels of gamma radiation. An
eminent astrohygienist from Bergen County Community College testified that once a day there’s a 90-minute gamma-ray burst originating from colliding comets within the Milky Way. She was able to link each of my father’s most violent episodes (including the grisly murder of the security guard) to a corresponding gamma-ray burst. My father’s intolerance was so acute, she contended, that exposure to as little as 15 picorads of gamma radiation resulted in extreme neurological disturbances.

Unfortunately, the jury in its verdict and the judge in his sentence proved unsympathetic to this theory. In retrospect, I think that the spectacle of my father’s attorneys in their big-hair mall wigs leading witnesses through hours of arcane testimony about Gamma-Ray Sensitivity Syndrome tended to damage his cause.