Mark Leyner - The Tetherballs of Bougainville

MARK (voice-over)

As I browse through this astonishing array of contraband, I can’t help but marvel at the ingenuity of the inmates. In the Body Cavity/Rectal section, for instance — I can imagine someone smuggling in a wrapped shank, a box-cutter, or a honed nail swathed in plastic wrap, lubricated with Vaseline, and inserted in the rectum. But four 5-piece place settings of Bastille stainless-steel flatware? And a 7-piece Henckels Cutlery set (boning knife, paring knife, chef’s knife, serrated bread knife, utility knife, and shears) in an 11-inch high, slotted beechwood block? Unbelievable! And in the Body Cavity/Oral section — I can see how, during a visit, a girlfriend could convey, through a kiss, a condom partially filled with heroin. But a 959-piece 3D Alsatian Village Puzzle? How? Piece by piece, one kiss per visit per week? Imagine the incarcerated hobbyist’s Zen-like equanimity required to abide such glacial progress! And what if, on the other hand, the puzzle had been conveyed all at once? All 959 pieces. In one single passionate and protracted kiss! Wouldn’t a supervising guard have found it even slightly suspicious that as the grotesquely distended cheeks of the girlfriend subsided, the inmate’s grotesquely swelled?

CLOSE SHOT OF ASSEMBLED 3-D ALSATIAN VILLAGE PUZZLE, GLAZED IN SALIVA.

We hear ADAGIO INTRODUCTION TO FINALE OF MOZART’S STRING QUARTET IN G MINOR and see VARIOUS ANGLES of the scale-model village, its gables and chimneys gleaming, as if sheathed in the ice and rime frost of an Alsatian winter.

DISSOLVE TO:

INT. WARDEN’S OFFICE

MEDIUM SHOT OF WARDEN AND MARK DRINKING “GRAVY” FROM PLASTIC SUNNY-D BOTTLE

(Gravy — also known as Red Sauce, Grave Juice, G, General G, Gravity, Gravitas, Gravlax, Sh’ma, Sh’ma Yisroel, Rupture, Hernia, Enema, Portnoy, Mom, No Mom, I Can’t Talk Now Mom, Lodi, Wanamassa, Bogota, Leonia, Leona, Ivana, Kato, Seneca, Pirandello, Brecht, Borscht, Won-Ton, Duck Sauce, Bug Juice, Booger Juice, Oyster Stew, White Clam, Pus, Pee, Elle, Allure, Glamour, Harper’s Bazaar, Harper’s, Atlantic, Pacific, Cortez, Stout Cortez, John, Jackie, Lady Bird, Pat, Checkers, Chess, Go, Come, Cream, Milk, Half & Half, Comme Ci Comme Ça, Après Moi Le Déluge, Louis Louis, and Knob — is a psychedelic beverage pharmacologically analogous to ayahuasca, the pan-Amazonian hallucinogenic potion made from the alkaloid-rich bark of the Banisteriopsis caapi vine and various admixture plants including Psychotria carthaginensis, P. viridis, Tetrapterys methystica , and Banisteriopsis rusbyana , the leaves and stems of which contain large amounts of DMT.

A black, viscous liquid with the surface iridescence of motor oil, Gravy is made from scrapings of the outer bark of the Banisteriopsis lutum vine, which is indigenous to the northeastern United States and thrives especially in areas downstream of pulp and paper mills that are contaminated with effluent containing high concentrations of polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs). Gravy also consists of a crucial admixture plant, Phalaris dromos , a reed grass species that grows near stadiums and indoor sports arenas, particularly in the dioxin-saturated marshy areas of Queens, Long Island, and New Jersey. The leaves and stalks of this lavender marsh grass contain several psychoactive tryptamines including the very short-acting 5-methoxy-DMT)

CLOSE SHOT OF MARK, seated, motionless, silently experiencing the hallucinogenic effects of the Gravy.

Aside from an initial 90-second sequence at the onset of the drugs’ effect, during which his eyeballs twitch rapidly beneath closed lids, and he’s then stricken with transient Bell’s palsy with paralysis of the facial nerve causing weakness of the muscles in the left side of his face and an inability to close the left eye, superseded by a paroxysm of facial tics — involuntary grimaces, pouts, cracking of the temporomandibular joints, gaping rictus, etc. — accompanied by a spasm of the sternomastoid muscle that forcibly wrenches his head up over the right shoulder, followed by a simultaneous episode of exophthalmos — a protrusion of the eyeballs from their sockets — and heterotropic nystagmus — rapid involuntary movements of the eyes first from side to side, then up and down, and then one eye moving from side to side as the other moves up and down, and then one eye spinning clockwise as the other spins counterclockwise, and culminating in violent undulations of the cheeks akin to those experienced by subjects in G-force experiments, MARK’s face is impassive throughout.

(CASTING NOTE: If the actor playing the role of MARK is incapable of achieving some of the foregoing ophthalmic effects, a Stuntman may be required for this particular shot.)

Although, in the middle of the following voice-over, the camera pans to a brief close shot of the warden, who is similarly sedentary, mute, eyes either shut or gazing into the middle distance as she experiences her own hallucinations, we are otherwise locked into a head-shot of Mark for the five-minute duration of the Gravy’s peak effect.

MARK (voice-over)

I know, from having seen Claude Lévi-Strauss and Alicia Silverstone on The Charlie Rose Show , that certain drugs, particularly the botanically derived hallucinogens used by shamanistic tribal societies in South America, induce a remarkably wide incidence of consistent and specific images — geometrical patterns, jaguars, tigers, anacondas, naked sorceresses, the color blue, phantasmagorical cities, etc. In that regard, I’d be curious to know if my Gravy experience is similar to those that other people might have had; i.e., I wonder if these are the archetypal Gravy motifs encountered by everyone who does the drug:

First, I become fixated on the word mohair .

Then, every surface in the room is overlaid with checkerboards of neon orange, lime green, and hot pink, and patterns like shattered stained-glass windows of plum and magenta.

I begin to hear a high-pitched carrier tone, I’d say about 600 Hz. And soon I hear a clicking sound, like call-waiting. I realize that someone or something is trying to contact me and that I must “free the line,” in other words, sever and jettison my habituated consciousness in order to make myself available to more advanced modes of knowledge.

Stucco patterns detach themselves from the ceiling, hover in the air, and reconfigure themselves into a vaulting dome of dazzling microelectronic circuitry. The floor melts into a percolating ooze of filamentous blue-green algae. The walls are animated Paleolithic cave murals, alive with yellow ochre and hematite bison and ibexes. I discern a faint melismatic voice, like a call to prayer from a distant minaret, but originating seemingly from within the huge Meridian DSP-6000 speaker suspended from ceiling brackets at the far end of the room.

Suddenly I sense that I am in the presence of a host. A palpable, yet transcendent entity — ubiquitous, omniscient, and eternal.

The entity smiles at me and says: “Yes, don’t you see now how we are absolutely not all part of the same whole. Your ultimate spiritual value is based on your body-fat percentage, how much money you make, and how well you do on tests.”

I smile to myself. I suppose this realization may be startling to some people, but it happens to be the basis of my own personal cosmology, so I am pleased. I’m perfectly at peace. Somewhere inside, intuitively, I knew the world was always like this — that the soul of every sentient life-form is locked into a rigid and immutable hierarchy based primarily on physical appearance, scholastic aptitude, and salary — but I lacked the divine insight to actually prove it. Blissfully, the Gravy has provided me with the incontrovertible corroboration I’ve been seeking for so long.