The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) Read online

  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.

  My father has always been a good provider. And in terms of a work ethic, he’s been a wonderful role model. He taught me that every morning—no matter how you feel physically and no matter what mood you’re in—you have to get yourself out of bed, shower, shave, put on a dark suit, hood your face in a black ski mask, and go out into the world and make some money.

  Back when I was in the fifth grade, Dad had just come off one of his best years—he’d been swindling insurance companies by faking auto accidents and claiming nonexistent “soft-tissue” injuries, and also traveling around the country, using a high-voltage taser stun gun to rob Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes winners—and we all moved to St.-Leonard-de-Noblat in the Limousin region of France. This was supposed to be a very chic place. In the late nineteenth century they’d flooded 50 acres of pa
sture to create a beautiful lake with three islands. So when Mom and Dad gave me some brochures and I read about the man-made lake, I thought whoa! excellent! swimming, water-skiing, fishing. But the neighborhood had really gone downhill lately. Several large ancien-régime families, all suffering from lead poisoning, had moved in recently. There were two contending explanations for their condition: one, that they’d been eating foie gras from pottery finished with lead glaze (goose liver soaks up lead like the proverbial sponge), and two (this is the one that I believed), that they suffered from congenital pica and had been nibbling away for generations at the peeling lead-based paint and plaster from their dilapidated chateaus. Whatever the cause, they exhibited all the classic symptoms: reduced IQ, impaired hearing, and trouble maintaining motor control and balance. But, worst of all, these lead-poisoned erstwhile aristocrats had developed the unfortunate custom of washing livestock, defecating, and dumping corpses in the lake. By the time we moved back to the States, the coliform bacteria count in the lake was nearly 700 times the permissible limit. (And bear in mind that the French, being far less squeamish than Americans, have much higher acceptable coliform bacteria levels than we do.)

  I think that we tend to select certain emblematic images to store in our memories as visual icons representing each of the journeys and sojourns in our lives. And when I remember our year in St.-Leonard-de-Noblat, I think of the topless contessa and her boom box.

  Every sunny afternoon I’d go down to the lake and watch the contessa, a voluptuous woman from one of the most severely lead-poisoned families, struggle for 45 minutes to mount her chaise longue and then endeavor spastically for another half hour to remove her bikini top. This finally accomplished, she’d pillow an ear against her huge radio, which was turned up so loud that it literally drowned out the dredging equipment that the sanitation department used to remove bodies from the turbid water.

  There I’d loiter, leering, until I’d hear my mother’s calls—her voice so shrill that it easily pierced the roar of the dredging equipment and the blare of the bare-breasted contessa’s ghetto blaster. I’d reluctantly trudge home to find Mom on the veranda, draining her second pitcher of kamikazes.

  “Get your steno pad,” she’d bark, lighting a cigarette and singeing the ends of a platinum tress that had swung into the flame of her Zippo.

  And so each afternoon my mother would dictate yet another revision of her “living will.” And although all sorts of frivolous codicils were continuously appended—often to be nullified the following day—the gist of the will remained constant: “In the event that I ever become seriously ill and my ability to communicate is impaired, please honor the following requests. No matter how onerous a financial and emotional burden I become to my family and no matter what extraordinary means are necessary, I want to be kept going. I don’t care about mental lucidity, dignity, or quality of life, I don’t care how flat my EEG is or for how long, I don’t care if I’m just half a lung and a few feet of bowel—I want to be kept alive.”

  “Do you understand?” she’d snarl.

  “Yes, Mom,” I’d nod.

  I’d file the latest version in a strongbox in her lingerie drawer, and then scamper back to the lake, hoping that I’d hadn’t missed the departure of the contessa, a sad and beautiful spectacle. Her lead-suffused flesh luridly burnished in the gloaming, she’d attempt to free herself from her folding chaise, which would have collapsed around her like a Venus’ flytrap enclasping some engorged and lustrous bug.

  The warden reads the death warrant. The doctor daubs my father’s limbs and chest with conductive jelly and attaches five EKG electrodes. He then gives him a pre-injection of 10 cc of antihistamine to minimize spasming.

  “Do you have a final statement you wish to make?” the warden asks.

  “Yes. I’d like to direct my last words to my son.

  “Mark … Mark?”

  “Just a sec, Dad,” I say, my head bowed, eyes glued to the Game Boy that glows in my hands. “I’m on the brink of achieving a new personal best here.”

  I’m playing a game called Gianni Isotope. It’s pretty awesome. The ultimate object is to enable the hero, Gianni Isotope, to save as many rock stars as possible from being turned into edible breaded nuggets at a space-based processing plant in the Lwor Cluster. You earn the opportunity to attempt the Lwor rescue mission by scoring a requisite number of points on the two preceding levels.

  First, before beginning play, you have to choose the outfit that Gianni Isotope wears throughout the game. I usually just put him in what I wear to junior high every day—no shirt, Versace leather pants, and Di Fabrizio boots.

  In Level One, you manipulate Gianni Isotope as he flies a helicopter into a city whose skyline comprises cylindrical and rectilinear towers of deli meats and cheeses. You/Gianni have to fly upside down and, using the whirring rotor blades of the helicopter, slice these skyscrapers of bologna, salami, ham, liverwurst, American cheese, muenster, etc., as thinly as possible. The object is to slice the city’s entire skyline down to ground level. Points are awarded based on speed and portion control. You need 5,000 points to advance.

  In Level Two, Gianni Isotope works for a private investigator in Washington, D.C., who’s compiling scurrilous information about Supreme Court justices. You/Gianni can pick any of the eight optional sitting justices, or you can play the default setting—Clarence Thomas. If you choose Justice Thomas, for instance, you’re given the following five stories:

  Thomas’s fascination with breast size is well established. But he is also intrigued by more-arcane aspects of the female anatomy. His standard interview queries—proffered to job applicants when he chaired the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—were gynecological in their scope and specificity: 1. Objectively describe your urethral meatus. 2. Is your perineum very hairy? 3. How violent are the contractions of your bulbocavernosus and ischiocavernosus muscles when you experience sexual orgasm, and how might that affect your performance at the EEOC?

  Thomas delights in sharing his frisky frat-house humor with fellow Supreme Court Justices. Recently, while the high court was hearing arguments about the constitutionality of a statute regulating interstate commerce, Thomas was seen scribbling a note and passing it to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who read it, became slightly red in the face, and then shrugged back at a grinning Thomas. Sources with access to several of Ginsburg’s clerks contend that the note read: “How big was Felix’s frankfurter?”—a reference, of course, to Felix Frankfurter, the distinguished Austrian-born jurist who was appointed to the Supreme Court by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and who served as an associate justice from 1939 to 1962.

  Thomas’s self-titillating fear of pubic hair has been immortalized in his legendary entreaty “Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?” Ever attentive to the requirements of politesse and protocol, Thomas can couch his scatological solecisms in more delicate terms when he deems it appropriate. At a recent Embassy Row cocktail party, Thomas was overheard asking his hostess, the patrician wife of an ambassador, “Who has put a tuft of epithelial cilia on my Chivas?”

  Seated in the first-class section of American Airlines Flight #3916 en route from O’Hare to Dulles, Thomas, thoroughly engrossed in Willa Cather’s My Antonia, suddenly looks up and exclaims, “Antonia’s gotta be at least a 34C”—speculating upon the bra size of the novel’s plucky protagonist.

  As a college undergraduate, Thomas submitted a final term paper for his American Literature of the Nineteenth Century class which was titled, “Hester Prynne, Spitter or Swallower?”

  You/Gianni Isotope have to track down leads, interview witnesses, and unearth documents that will corroborate these anecdotes before rival investigators from the tabloids and liberal media elite do it first.

  Then an indignant Justice Thomas, black judicial robes billowing in his wake, pursues Gianni Isotope through an aquatic labyrinth on jet skis.

  During the labyrinth chase, Thomas’s and Gianni’s energy supply can become low. To replenish, Gianni ca
n buy Citicorp stock from surfing Saudi princes in matching madras trunks and kaffiyehs. Justice Thomas can refuel by snaring Big Gulp Cokes from vending machines on buoys. If either character’s energy supply becomes too depleted, he is engulfed in a large cloud of greenish incandescent gas and can only jet-ski very, very slowly.

  If you/Gianni Isotope are able to scoop the Fourth Estate with Supreme Court scandal, elude the avenging Justice through the aquatic labyrinth, and then, finally, negotiate a creature with the upper torso of a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader and the lower torso of a coatimundi without being shredded by its claws, you advance to the ultimate level.

  Welcome to the Lwor Cluster in the Goran H47 Helix.

  Rock musician is the protein of choice for the typical Lwor creature. Certain parts of the musicians are considered delicacies. Their burst eardrums are eaten by Lwors like popcorn while they watch movies. Their alcohol-ravaged cirrhotic livers are especially delectable to the Lwor palate and are mashed into a paste and served on flat bread and Wheat Thins.

  At a processing plant, the live musicians are emptied onto a conveyor belt that leads to a darkened room, where Lwor workers hang them upside down from U-shaped shackles on an assembly line. The rock stars are stunned with an electric shock, their throats slit by machine, and they move through boiling water to loosen their scalps and tight pants. Machines massage off the hair and trousers, eviscerate and wash the musicians inside and out, and slice them into pieces. Seventy rock stars a minute move down the line. Nothing is wasted. Studded jewelry, latex underwear, blood, internal organs, even the decocted tattoo ink is collected and sent to a Lwor rendering plant to become ingredients in cattle feed and pet food for export to other planets. Processed rock musician is Lwor’s most lucrative commodity. They debone it, marinate it, cut it into pieces, press it into patties, roll it into nuggets, bread it, batter it, cook it, and freeze it.