Mark Leyner - The Tetherballs of Bougainville

But then I have another powerful revelation — one that perhaps every male in every species has in his life, and one that might very well mark the passage from boy- to manhood. I realize that at this moment, ejaculating takes precedence over absolutely everything else in the world, including the death of innocent people. I realize that this overwhelming, heedless desire to ejaculate right now so dwarfs any other consideration, including my own death and the death or grievous injury of others, that I’m incapable of resisting it and unwilling to even try. And I succumb. It’s literally a letting go. A release. A surrender. A fall. A fall from grace.

And I begin to plunge again.

This descent is the stuff of nightmares — the terror excruciating, maddening. The acceleration of the free-fall seems to produce an internal decompression; I have the sensation of a vacuum in my hollow organs, cavities, and sinuses. Adrenaline spews across my nervous system, a gelid effervescence of animal panic.

I shut my eyes and cover them with both my hands.

And then, after what seems like hours and hours of falling, I finally open them …

I’m in the warden’s office.

I’m seated on the couch.

And now I experience a steady return to baseline consciousness. The neon checkerboard patterns and microelectronic overlays, the Paleolithic imagery and blue-green ooze all revert back into familiar aspects of the room. And the keening carrier tone fades to silence.

WARDEN

Pretty intense, huh?

MARK (voice-over)

I checked my watch. From the time we returned from the Contraband Control Room and drank the Gravy to now, only thirty seconds had passed!

Part of me wanted so much to profusely expatiate upon this bewildering, implosive contraction of time; to concoct some erudite correspondence — to propose, for instance, that it was like not only seeing your entire life flash before your eyes in an instant, but like experiencing the entirety of Homo sapiens phylogeny, as narrated by some jabbering Dominican A.M. drive-time merengue DJ, in the time it takes for an air bag to inflate in a 90-mile-an-hour head-on collision (and you’re in, like, one of those little Suzuki Sidekicks and the other vehicle is, like, a fucking Amtrak locomotive); part of me desperately wanted to somehow articulate to her my sense of awe and wonder that, from a warm broth of prebiotic molecules splashed up on Precambrian rocks and baked in the sun some 4 billion years ago, three pounds of deeply fissured neural tissue could evolve — the human brain — capable of apprehending — as evidenced by my own dumbfounding epiphanies (e.g., the karmic and eschatological merits of body-fat composition and LSAT scores, etc.) — not only the most recondite principles of the physical universe, but the origins, structure, procedures and modalities of consciousness itself.

But all I said was …

CLOSE-SHOT of MARK

MARK

It was weird … like a video.

WARDEN

Are you OK?

MARK

I feel kinda … kinda like I’m still … falling.

WARDEN

Post-lapsarian Stress Disorder, n’est-ce pas?

SUBTITLE: Post-lapsarian Stress Disorder, isn’t it?

MARK

Uh … peut-être.

SUBTITLE: Uh … maybe .

WARDEN

Venge-toi, punis-moi d’un odieux amour.

Digne fils du héros qui t’a donné le jour, délivre l’univers d’un monstre qui t’irrite.

SUBTITLE: You were blown into the sky by an exploding cow pie, a mythological gym siren gave you a hand job, and then you experienced a terrifying plunge to earth, yes?

MARK

Madame, pardonnez. J’avoue, en rougissant,

Que j’accusais à tort un discours innocent.

Ma honte ne peut plus soutenir vontre vue.

SUBTITLE: Yeah … pretty much. Whatever .

WARDEN gets corkscrew and two wineglasses from cabinet, and sits back down on couch. She arranges an assortment of pills — Fentanyls, Roxanols, and Demerols — on an antique Persian brass tea-glass coaster, opens a bottle of wine, and lights a hollowed-out Phillies blunt filled with marijuana.

She takes a long hit and passes the blunt to MARK .

WARDEN

Glass of wine? It’ll help cushion the fall.

MARK

(Exhaling thick plume of smoke)

Uh … sure. What is it?

WARDEN

It’s a white Burgundy — a ’73 Meursault-Charmes from the Domaine Roulot.

She pours, and then raises her glass in the air.

WARDEN

To Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo.

MARK

To Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo — without whose wise, generous, and indefatigable support, the screenwriting aspirations of seventh, eighth, and ninth graders at Maplewood Junior High School might well go unfulfilled. We thank you from the bottoms of our hearts and will never forget your unswerving commitment to this venerable art form.

They click glasses and sip.

MARK grimaces and spews wine back into his glass.

MARK

(indignant)

It’s hot! Shouldn’t a white Burgundy be served chilled?

WARDEN

Oh, it’s still warm? I’m sorry about that. We just pulled it from a convict less than an hour ago, and I never had a chance to get it in the fridge.

MARK takes bottle and reads affixed Contraband Control label.

INSERT SHOT of label:

Contraband Control Number: 56113

Confiscation: 5/21/96, 1630 hours

Inmate 77-64-0835

Body Cavity/Rectal

WARDEN

You want to send it back?

He tries another sip, rolls it in his mouth, and shrugs.

MARK

Nuh-uh. I guess its good. (pointing to the two huge Meridian DSP-8000 speakers — each 52″ by 21″ by 27″—suspended in opposite corners across the room)

How much does each of those weigh?

WARDEN

About 300 pounds.

MARK

No fuckin’ way!! What’s keeping them up? It looks like they’re just floating there.

WARDEN gets up from couch, rummages through desk drawer, and returns to couch, having retrieved Oshimitsu Polymers America Corp. product brochure.

WARDEN

(reading from brochure)

“Materials engineers have hypothesized that a single strand of orb-weaving spider silk, as thick as clothesline, could actually stop the Concord supersonic transport in flight!

“Oshimitsu Polymers America Corporation — a subsidiary of Shimazaki Chemical Company — has created a synthetic spider silk that has greater tensile strength than steel and is capable of supporting audio speakers of any weight.

“Using sophisticated computer simulation techniques and recombinant DNA technology, Oshimitsu scientists have been able to utilize the unparalleled ingenuity of the biosynthetic process by controlling polymer sequence and chain length to produce analogs of the natural silk proteins.

“Synthetic Spider-Silk Speaker-Suspension Line(r) is one of the many innovative synthetic fiber products that have made Oshimitsu Polymers America internationally recognized as the preeminent pioneer in advanced materials development.

“Because of their light weight, strength, and ductility, Oshimitsu synthetic biopolymer fibers may also have applications in military and commercial satellites and aircraft, earthquake-resistant suspension-bridge cables, and huge synthetic fiber-mesh space-nets designed to snare and divert errant asteroids and protect the earth from catastrophic and potentially species-threatening collisions.

“Oshimitsu Polymers America — committed to facilitating our increasingly complex synthetic fiber needs into the 21st century.”

MARK

That is so cool! How can I get more information about Oshimitsu Synthetic Spider-Silk Speaker-Suspension Line(r) and learn how other Oshimitsu synthetic biopolymer products can help enhance my home theater?