The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Leyner, Mark

  Students Must Remove Shoes

  Before Entering Dojo

  So here we are—you, my father, and I—having arrived simultaneously at the word Dojo.

  Now you can perhaps feel the kinetic sensation of reading apace with us. Share the sensation of neurolinguistic motion with me and my dad. The hair in the breeze! I don’t know what you’d call it exactly … Is there a strictly cerebral kinesthesia … a lexical kinesthesia? A proprioception associated with reading-speed?

  Every male Leyner from the very beginning (I’m talking about the original botched eugenics experiments in Galicia and Estonia in the mid-nineteenth century) reads at exactly the same speed—620 words per minute. A moderate clip. (Female Leyners read at about 750 words a minute.) I don’t care what you give my father and me to read—a three-syllable Leonard Gutman sign or the 2,815-page Fermilab Fixed-Target Proton Accelerator service manual—we’ll reach the final word with perfect coterminous symmetry.

  Dojo.

  And then we look up with what appears to be this impassive bored expectancy but is really a moment of cognitive processing during which our facial muscles go slack.

  “Any questions?” asks the warden.

  “Nuh-uh,” Dad and I say in unison.

  “Very comprehensive,” says my father, slipping the brochure into the inside breast pocket of an orange blazer with a three-guillotined-heads-chatting-amiably-in-a-basket NJSDE escutcheon sewn onto the breast pocket.

  The superintendent then asks if we’d like to purchase a video of the execution. (Videos of all executions, successful or abortive, are made available—at a fee, of course—to the families of the condemned inmate and his or her victims.)

  This occasions a lightning-fast colloquy between my father and I that, in its susurrant urgency, will remind you of—depending on your taste in nonfiction TV—either the ad hoc huddles convened by teammates on game shows or the microphone-muffled, privileged powwows between witnesses and their lawyers at Congressional hearings:

  “I don’t really want it,” I say, cupping a hand to my mouth and whispering into his ear.

  “Get one, for Christ’s sake,” says my father, eyeing the superintendent, but addressing me under his breath, through a clench-toothed ventriloquist’s grin. “I wish I had a goddamn video of my father’s execution.”

  “I don’t have any money on me.”

  “I’ll pay for it.”

  “But it’s so stupid,” I complain, spitting on his ear-lobe.

  “I WILL PAY FOR IT!” he insists, grin frozen, lips motionless.

  “But, Daaaaaady …” I whine, regressing in the face of his peremptory largesse.

  “Superintendent, we’ll take a video,” Dad announces.

  Now the superintendent wants to know whether we’d like a soundtrack. (The video is $24.95 without the soundtrack—for an extra $10 they’ll dub in any song you want.)

  “What exactly is in the video?” my father asks.

  “It’s the entire lethal-injection sequence up to and including when you say ‘I feel shitty.’ You can choose any song you’d like—we have a CD library with over 10,000 titles.”

  Now my father’s pondering this. He’s taken a seat and he’s poring over this catalog of CD titles. And I’m beginning to feel really pressed time-wise. In order to collect the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo / Oshimitsu Polymers America Award, I need a screenplay written by tomorrow. I know, I know—I shouldn’t have waited until the last minute … Anyway, I need to get to the library today before it closes. I never expected this thing to take so long. I thought I’d be in and out of here.

  And also I’m getting in a bad mood because … well, for two reasons: First of all, I have a feeling that my father is going to ask me to share a cab with him—which I absolutely won’t do. I mean, you’re aware of the highly complex social structure of 13-year-old boys with its intricate, hierarchical, and unyielding code of decorum in which various forms of behavior and activities are proscribed by taboos, so you know how mortifying it is for someone my age to be seen with a parent in public by his peers, the ignominy of which is made even more unbearable by anything that calls attention to the fact, and nothing calls attention to itself more conspicuously than a fiery execution attempt—so you can understand my feelings of dread about the possibility of sharing a taxi with a father who might be brutally assassinated by NJSDE operatives while we’re stopped at a traffic light. God, I’d absolutely die with embarrassment! And, second, I’m starting to feel really weird about the warden not having responded to or acknowledged in any way the two clandestine notes I slipped her: “You wanna get high?” and “Be my sweaty bosomy lover?” Maybe—I’m thinking—if you do something so fulsomely inappropriate—like slipping her these billets-doux—maybe the reproach is this massive silence, this nullifying indifference that expunges the act right out of existence, making you question whether you’d ever committed it in the first place. So I start to wonder if I’d ever given her the notes—I rummage around for them in the mealy pockets of my leather trousers, but find only a phenobarbital, an ossified yellow Starburst, and my folded-up fake movie review (more about which later)—or if I’d ever really written them at all.

  “What about ‘Night of the Living Baseheads’—Public Enemy?” Dad asks, running a finger down a page from the CD catalog.

  “Too old,” says the superintendent. “What about something from … like Snoop or Wu Tang Clan?”

  Dad moistens his finger and flips a couple of pages ahead.

  “They got Raekwon … Only Built 4 Cuban Linx. What about something off that?”

  “That shit’s too aggressive, man. Too strident,” says the executioner. “Think about it, Joel—you’re just stretched out there on the gurney. It’s very … supine.”

  Dad nods.

  “Y’know what might be really good?” he asks. “But you gotta think about it for a minute. ‘My Jamaican Guy.’ Grace Jones.”

  Grimaces of disapproval.

  “You’re strapped to a gurney with lethal drugs dripping into your vein and we hear ‘My Jamaican Guy’ … I don’t get it,” says the doctor.

  “Yeah, you’re right … maybe if I was Jamaican …” Dad says, perusing along.

  Then the rabbi pipes up.

  “See if they have the Smiths’ CD, The Queen Is Dead,” he says. “The song ‘I Know It’s Over.’ ‘Oh Mother / I can feel / the soil falling over my head …’ That presentiment of being buried could be really intense.”

  “Please, not Morrissey,” grumbles the doctor, rolling his eyes. “You have this great abortive-execution video and you’re gonna ruin it with Morrissey?”

  “I think Morrissey’s perfect for an abortive execution,” the rabbi replies defensively.

  “You know what would be really intense?” says the operations officer. “The White Zombie song ‘Soul-Crusher.’ ‘Burning like fat in the fire / The smell of red, red groovie screamed mega-flow / A stalking ground without prey / A flash of superstition whimpering like a crippled animal / Dogs of the soul-crusher / Pulling closer like the blue steel jaws of hell.’ ”

  “That’s a cool song,” the superintendent agrees.

  “You like Fugazi?” the operations officer asks my father.

  “I don’t really know any specific songs,” says my Dad.

  “Fugazi! Yes!” raves the superintendent, pumping his fist in the air.

  “You ever see them live?” asks the operations officer.

  “No, man, I wish I had.”

  “You gotta see them in Bethesda. That’s like the ultimate place to see Fugazi.”

  “Fugazi … Fugazi … Fugazi … OK, here we go,” says Dad, sliding his finger across the page from Performer to CD Title. “They have Red Medicine.”

  “Perfect!” the operations officer says. “That’s got ‘By You’—‘Generation fuck you / to define and redefine / you’d make them all the same / but molds they break away / safely inside / looking outside / go keep on picking at it / it’s just goin
g to get bigger …’ It’s got ‘Target’—’It’s cold outside and my hands are dry / skin is cracked / and I realize that I hate the sound of guitars / a thousand grudging young millionaires / forcing silence / sucking sound …’ ”

  My father shakes his head.

  “It’s too bleak … Too apocalyptic. I survived the execution attempt, right?”

  The warden’s male secretary floats a concept.

  “Echo and the Bunnymen. ‘Over You.’ ‘Feeling good again / always hoped I would / never believed that I ever could.’ ”

  “You know what song might really work?” Dad says. “ ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.’ Elton John and Kiki Dee.”

  The rabbi shuts his eyes, his head bobbing to the imagined music.

  “That might work,” he says.

  “Or maybe a standard …” says Dad. “ ‘The Best Is Yet to Come.’ Sinatra. Y’know, real brassy optimism …”

  “What about something from Phantom? Like Michael Crawford singing ‘Music of the Night,’“ suggests the warden’s secretary. “That could be very dramatic. Because, frankly, I think you could use something with a little schmaltz, ‘cause seven minutes of a motionless body on a steel cot is not particularly compelling.”

  Dad looks up from the catalog.

  “This is gonna sound weird,” he says, “but I think it could be really good. ‘I’m Hans Christian Andersen.’ Danny Kaye, from the movie.”

  “You’re lying there with a lethal drug IV in your arm and the soundtrack is ‘I’m Hans Christian Andersen’? That doesn’t make any fucking sense to me,” says the superintendent.

  “That’s the point,” asserts my father. “We see me—Joel Leyner—on a gurney. But we hear ‘I’m Hans Christian Andersen / Andersen—that’s me.’ See, it’s like: How are we identified? And how do we denominate ourselves? What’s me/Leyner? What’s the meaning of that classification? Names are arbitrary designations used by the state apparatus to facilitate surveillance and control. That could be Hans Christian Andersen on that gurney. You know what I’m saying? See, you’ll be watching Joel Leyner and hearing Danny Kaye claim that he’s Hans Christian Andersen. You’d get this dissonant dialectic going between image and sound.…”

  “I think people would just think it’s a goof,” the superintendent says.

  “Well, what about ‘Inchworm’—from the same movie. Y’know, ‘Inchworm / inchworm / measuring the marigolds Like measuring out the last moments of my life.”

  “I just wouldn’t use a Danny Kaye song. That’s my personal feeling, man. I just don’t think he’s right for this.”

  “I have an idea, but it’s in a completely different direction,” says the warden. “We see a man lying on a gurney, strapped to a gurney, right? That, to me, connotes surrender—a kind of erotic surrender. Y’know, you can do whatever you want to me and take however long you want to take doing it. Because I’m ceding control to you. So I thought maybe something like Luther Vandross … y’know the song ‘The Glow of Love.’ There is no better way to be / Hold me, caress me / I’m yours forever and a day / We are a sweet bouquet / Seasons for happiness are here / Can you feel it? / The reason we’re filled with cheer is / We’re in rapture / In the glow of love.’ ”

  “Is he restricted to one song, or can you lay in parts from different songs?” asks the executioner.

  The superintendent shrugs.

  “I don’t see why we couldn’t use sections from several songs, if that’s what Mr. Leyner would like.”

  “OK, maybe we go like this,” the executioner says excitedly. “We key the music to the control-panel lights for the drugs’ delivery sequence. Red light, yellow light, sodium thiopental injection—boom—Elton John and Kiki Dee, ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.’ Green light—fade music. OK. Red light, yellow light, pancuronium bromide injection—boom—Luther Vandross, ‘The Glow of Love.’ Green light—fade music. OK. Red light, yellow light, potassium chloride injection—boom—Michael Crawford, ‘Music of the Night’ from Phantom of the Opera. Green light—fade music. Joel looks up and says, ‘I feel shitty.’ Fade to black.”

  “You like Arnold Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano, opus 25?” the rabbi asks my father.

  “How’s it go?”

  The rabbi hums the entire fourteen-minute composition.

  “Nuh-uh,” Dad says.

  I stick my two pinkies into my mouth and produce an excruciating, hideously high-pitched whistle.

  “Hey! People! C’mon, I gotta get out of here already!”

  “We have a soundtrack to finish, son,” says my father, without looking up from the catalog.

  I turn to the superintendent.

  “Can you remix an existing song? Patch in some samples, add some tracks?”

  “Y’know the remote-fired stationary tear-gas network control console booth above the maximum-security eating hall?” says the superintendent. “Well, I have a little studio in there—Korg DSS-1 Digital Sampling Synthesizer, Kawai R-100 Digital Drum Machine, Roland MC-500 MIDI Sequencer. What are you thinking?”

  “Well … this is like completely off the top of my head, but … After the drugs, my dad looks up and says ‘I feel shitty,’ right? Why don’t we take the Bernstein/Sondheim tune from West Side Story—‘I Feel Pretty’—overdub the word shitty—make ‘I Feel Shitty.’ And I’d slow it down to a dirge. Do a sort of Trent Reznor mix. ‘I feel shitty / oh so shitty / I feel shitty and witty and bright / and I pity / any girl who isn’t me tonight.’ ”

  “That’s it!” hails the rabbi. “It’s lovely.”

  Dad closes the catalog. “I can live with that.”

  “It’s excellent, man,” says the executioner, giving me five.

  “And I’d add a wheeze rhythm track,” I say. “Get a slow, really labored wheeze. Do you have any, like, asthmatic or black-lung wheeze samples?”

  “I’ll check,” the superintendent says, rising to his feet.

  With a ripple of cracking knee joints, everyone stands.

  C’est fini. Finally.

  It’s bye-bye time.

  My father embraces me. He rocks me gently from side to side. And then, enclasped, we begin to revolve in a counterclockwise rotation, a dirty dance of sorts.

  The room is hushed. The stenographer cranes her neck to better apprehend our murmured farewell, made even less audible by the Doppler effect of our axial motion.

  “I don’t know when I’m going to see you again.”

  “I know that, Dad.”

  “There’s no going back, now.”

  “I know.”

  “No more fairy tales, ace. No restoration of the status quo ante. You know what I’m saying? You have to be the man now.”

  “I know that, Dad.”

  “And you have to start wearing a shirt.”

  “Awwwwwww, Dad,” I whine. And then, testily, under my breath: “I wear a shirt when you lose the false eyelashes and titty-torture clamps, you punk-ass dusthead.”

  Our faces slip in and out of crepuscular shadow as we slowly spin.

  “It’s going to be tough on your mother. And you have to take care of that woman now. I’m an NJSDE releasee, and I can’t do it. You understand? In a few minutes I’m going to call and tell her that I may never see her again. And she’ll probably be wearing her black Thierry Mugler suit. And from that moment on she might sit home like Miss Havisham in that black Thierry Mugler suit—and she might wear that same fucking suit every single day for the rest of her life. And you have to be prepared to deal with that.”

  I’m beginning to feel light-headed and slightly nauseated from the continuous counterclockwise gyre.

  “Look at me, boy.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I have something I need to ask you,” he says gravely. “And I want you to take your time and think it over seriously before you give me your answer.”

  “I will, Dad.”

  We stop moving.

  “Son … what’s the maxim that more eloquently than any other art
iculates a Leyner’s self-image, his worldview, his pride and ambition as a man, as a pagan moralist and as an American—the call to arms, the cri de coeur, the phrase-that-pays that can inspire and galvanize him for the rest of his life? I need to hear you say it, son.”

  I peer fervently into my fathers eyes and squeeze him hard, as hard as I’ve ever squeezed another human being. And I recite those words, those stirring, unforgettable words, in defense of which—in the ensuing months—so many brave Bougainvillean boys will lose their minds:

  “Any asshole with a Master of Social Work degree can put on a turban and start issuing fatwas about whom you can and whom you can’t mail meat to,” I intone, “but it takes real balls to turn a brunette without a cranium into a blonde.”

  The room bursts into applause and I can see several people daubing tears from their eyes.

  There’s now—as if conveyed via the sort of subliminal, instantaneously communicated signal that causes an entire herd on the savanna to suddenly change direction—an implicit sense of adjournment, and everyone gathers his or her personal effects and begins to filter out of the warden’s office.

  “You’re going to the library from here to work on that screenplay, right?” my father asks.

  “Yeah …” I answer, anticipating the inevitable corollary.

  “So … you want to share a cab?”

  I stare down at the floor, shifting my weight uneasily from foot to foot.

  “I can’t, Dad … no way.”

  I cringe, awaiting his response. And when none is forthcoming, I look back up.

  He’s gone!

  I scan the room and he’s nowhere to be seen.

  “Hey, where’d my dad go?”

  “He left,” says the superintendent, who’s just returned from his studio in the tear-gas control console booth. “I just passed him in the hall.”

  That’s it. He’s gone, I say to myself, shaking my head. My father has now begun the grim, tormented, and macabre life of an NJSDE releasee, a life that may very well come to a violent and agonizing end within the next five minutes, within the next hour, or in a month, or a year, or—who knows?—flourish without untoward incident for another fifty years and then the blast of shrapnel or the Colombian necktie.