Mark Leyner - The Sugar Frosted Nutsack

Hmm Uh, who used to spend Spring Breaks at Novaya Zemlya, an Arctic testing site for nuclear weapons during the Cold War, says, “Radiation isn’t so bad. I think it makes men better at sex.”

Wednesday: 10:00 PM Eastern

“ Meir Poznak: Behind the Music”

Meir Poznakbegins to seriously, almost obsessively, ponder the idea of “fucking with the mind of the mind-fucking God.” He begins to think about whether it’s somehow possible to subvert XOXO, the God who subverts almost everything we think. He wonders whether it might be possible to inoculate the epic against XOXOwith denatured infusions of XOXO, or whether a form of mithridatism might actually be feasible (i.e., protecting the epic against the poison of XOXOby gradually administering nonlethal amounts of XOXO). Of course, he has to concede, there are myriad enemies, real and perceived. The world of The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack is a world of paranoia. There are endless provocateurs. Endless spies and traitors. Double, triple, and quadruple agents. But behind it all, pulling the strings and tying it all into knots, is XOXO. Vanceand Ruthieand the Daughter(whose name is withheld because she’s a minor) and her unborn son, Colter Dale, have all been suddenly and unceremoniously “deported” from the epic and turned into football hooligans. ( Vancebecause Mogul Magoobristled at the notion that a street-level Gravy dealer was thought to be a God by the Chineans. Ruthieand the Daughterfor their own protection? Or because they became superfluous? There’s no consensus among the experts.) Vanceends up in Serbia, where he joins the Grobari (“Gravediggers”), a gang of violent thugs associated with the Belgrade club FK Partizan. Colter Dale, a Liverpool Football Club fanatic, actually strangles his unborn twin brother (a Manchester United fan) to death in utero, using their mother’s umbilical cord. Put a stethoscope to the Daughter’s pregnant belly and you can hear a drunken Colter Dalesinging the Liverpool FC anthem, “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” over and over and over again (“When you walk through a storm / Keep your chin up high / Etc., etc.”). XOXO’s “disappearing” of Vance, Ruthie, the Daughter, and Colter Daleguts the band The Kartons, leaving Ikea solo act, which, at the end of the day, is what he so quintessentially is anyway. Meir Poznak, as anyone with even the faintest familiarity with The Sugar Frosted Nutsack 2: Crème de la Sack knows, is seriously, almost obsessively, pondering all this…pondering exactly how he might fuck with the mind of the mind-fucking God.

He’s skinny and fidgety and humming constantly, he’s only eating fish food (the red and gold flakes). In a conversation with his brother on the morning of Super Bowl LVI , he says he’s lost his interest in listening to music and talking to people. He says he might castrate himself (i.e., explore “nongenital sexuality”). He complains bitterly about “the whole balaclava/baklava thing” and says that XOXOis making everyone connected with the epic “look bad.” When his brother asks what he’s been doing with himself lately, he says “checking my ant traps” and “analyzing adjourned positions” (i.e., grappling with the ramifications of fucking with the mind of XOXO). He says that he wants to tear himself in half like Rumpelstiltskin. Aaron Poznakdescribes his brother as being “extremely, extremely disturbed by the proximity of the words ‘balaclava’ and ‘baklava.’”

Later that day, an expert cadges a lone cigarette from a vacant-eyed dockworker and tentatively approaches. “ Meir Poznakwas especially upset and angry about the proximity of those words, which he said were part of a smear campaign against the epic, and he wanted to do something about it, by which I assumed he meant do something about XOXO,” says the expert, who speaks on the condition of anonymity because of the delicacy in discussing a major mind-fucking God’s mind possibly getting fucked.

During a hiatus of Hmm Uh’s reality show, Meir Poznakclandestinely rendezvouses with the Goddess of inarticulation and nonlexical vocables at her dacha in Paramus, New Jersey, and, for hours, pleasures her with his fingers and his mouth and the veiny two-headed latex toys he brings her.

The Gods (except for Hmm Uhand La Felina, who are out partying) have temporarily relocated from the top floors of the 2,717-foot, 160-story Burj Khalifa in Dubai to the bowels of the Compact Muon Solenoid, a particle detector buried in an underground cavern beneath the Large Hadron Collider in Cessy, France, just across the border from Geneva, as they await the construction of the next world’s tallest building, either the 3,284-foot, 250-story Burj Mubarak al Kabir at Madinat al-​Hareer (Silk City) in Subiya, Kuwait, or the 3,200-foot, 166-story Miapolis on Watson Island in Biscayne Bay, just west of Miami Beach — whichever goes up first. The Gods and Goddesses ride the particle accelerator, like kids on the Bizarro megacoaster at Six Flags New England — over and over and over again — and each becomes a subatomic, one-dimensional oscillating string.

Thursday: 8:00 PM Eastern

“Fucking the Mind of the Mind-Fucking God”

Ikeis standing on his stoop, staring off into space, thinking about which heavyset, hairy Goddesses he’d like to fuck.… Ike—who never curdles into the comprehensible, whose willful anonymity and implacable hostility toward celebrities and desire for the bodies of women who dislike their bodies make him the favorite of La Felina, the patron Goddess of street scum and sans-culottes — is now exquisitely aware of the imminence of his fate. And there he stands on his stoop — alone, somber, dignified.

A distant cackling Popeye(“ Ike Ike Ike Ike Ike”), the Mister Softee jingle, the sound of the fetus Colter Dalesinging “You’ll Never Walk Alone” from within the womb of his teenage mom…it’s all speeding up now, this fucked-up caffeinated cacophony, in reverse, as XOXOtries to expunge the epic — with all its excruciating redundancies, heavy-handed, stilted tropes, and wearying clichés, its overwrought angst, all its gnomic non sequiturs, all its off-putting adolescent scatology and cringe-inducing smuttiness, all the depraved tableaus and orgies of masturbation with all their bulging, spurting shapes, and all the compulsive repetitions about Freud’s repetition compulsion — faster than the last surviving bard can recite it.

The spokes of the spinning BMX wheel hitting the empty can, that accelerating beat, the high-pitched gibberish of the horseflies (those buxom nymphs) and the transported babel of all those gasping, orgasming Goddesses…

Meir Poznakwalks past the Miss America Diner, east on Culver Avenue, turns right on Towers, strides up the stairs to the stoop of the two-story brick hermitage, pulls out a semiautomatic pistol, and shoots Ike Kartonin the face.

At that moment, war conches are sounded. Ikesearches for his Goddesses, readjusting his gaze with three sharp, reptilian ratchets of his head, first toward the Large Hadron Collider in Cessy, France (just across the border from Geneva), then toward south-central Quebec, then a Chevron station in Nogales, Arizona. At that moment, Meir Poznak, first-​person shooter, pupils dilated, trained by Russian Spetsnaz forces, a guy who is determined to fuck with the mind of the mind-fucking God, a guy who, after a clandestine tête-à-tête with Hmm Uh—the Goddess of Inarticulation and Nonlexical Vocables — fully commits himself to consummating his love for Ike Karton, strides up the stairs to that stoop, and shoots and kills Ike Karton. At that moment, the war conches are sounded, and the high-pitched gibberish of tiny iridescent-winged nymphs and nano-drones and swarms of bold-faced notables (with their rising chorus of nonlexical vocables) is like a hissing crescendo of white noise.