Mark Leyner - The Tetherballs of Bougainville

My father nods.

“Bacillus subtilis grown on dry, nutrient-poor agar plates tends to fan out into patterns that strongly resemble this fractal pattern seen in nonliving systems.”

“What is a diffusion-limited aggregation?” responds my father.

“Music played by this Vietnamese ensemble consisting of flute, moon-lute, zither, cylindrical and coconut-shell fiddles, and wooden clackers is the most romantic and, to Western ears, melodic of all Southeast Asian theater music.”

“What is cai luong?”

“This Hollywood legend kept a secret cache of Dynel-haired toy trolls.”

“Who was Greta Garbo?”

“According to the American Mortuary Society, these are currently the two most widely requested gravestone epitaphs.”

“Wake Me Up When We Get There and If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now.”

The doctor brightens momentarily.

“I’m sorry,” amends my father. “What are Wake Me Up When We Get There and If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now?”

The doctor sags.

“Neurologically, he’s perfectly normal,” he announces, punctuating his diagnosis with a dejected, frustrated fling of his NJ State Capital Punishment Division of Medicine loose-leaf binder, which skitters across the floor.

“Cool binder!” I marvel sotto voce, helplessly susceptible to logo merchandising.

My father is returned to his cell. The operations officer confers with the warden, who informs me that the doctor would like to see me in his office.

I slip two hastily scrawled notes into her left hand.

The lights have come back on in the witness room and programmed music resumes over the ambient audio system — Kathleen Battle and Courtney Love’s haunting performance of Mozart’s aria “Mia speranza adorata” from the Ebola Benefit — Live from Branson, Missouri CD (Deutsche Grammophon), which segues into “Sarin Sayonara” from the Aum Supreme Truth Monks’ Les Chants d’Apocalypse CD (Interscope), which is followed — as I enter the elevator — by the Montana Militia Choir (accompanied by Yanni and the Ray Coniff singers) singing — I swear to god! — “The Beasts of Yeast.”

Read along with me, as I peruse this People magazine article in the waiting room of the prison doctor:

When Viktor N. Mikhailov, Russia’s Minister of Atomic Energy, invited Hazel R. O’Leary, the U.S. Secretary of Energy, to a dinner party arranged to facilitate a discussion of Russia’s plutonium stocks, he probably expected Mrs. O’Leary and her retinue to arrive with the first editions and bottles of rare vintage champagne that are the traditional accoutrements of diplomatic courtesy.

What he certainly didn’t expect was for Mrs. O’Leary to arrive, Fender Stratocaster slung across her back, along with bassist Ivan Selin, Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, guitarist John Holum, Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and drummer J. Brian Atwood, Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Instead of propounding her views over cocktails or across the dinner table — as would be the norm at such a gathering — Mrs. O’Leary and her bandmates delivered a blistering set of original songs, thematically linked, each exploring a different facet of her overarching position that Russia must render its surplus weapons plutonium unusable.

Mrs. O’Leary, soignée and austere in a black Jil Sander dress, opened with a smoldering rocker about the global security risks of stolen fissile material that seemed to gradually implode with intensity as it slowed to the tempo of a New Orleans funeral march, achieving the exaggerated slow-motion sexual swagger of the Grim Reaper bumping and grinding down Bourbon Street. Next, Mrs. O’Leary almost shattered the huge Czarist-era crystal chandelier with an opening riff that tore from her amp like shrapnel from an anti-personnel bomb. She repeated the riff — an irresistible and diabolically intricate seven-note figure — over and over again, plying each shard with the obsessive scrutiny of a monkey grooming its mate, it becoming more squalid, more lewd, more intoxicating with each iteration, until finally the band launched into the song, a hammering sermon about how Russia must mix its plutonium in molten glass and bury it deep underground.

In the midst of the song, which, like an asylum inmate gouging at his own scabs, exacerbated itself into a raging cacophony, Mikhailov; Viktor M. Murogov, director of the Institute of Physics and Power Engineering at Obninsk; Yuri Vishevsky, the head of Gosatomnadzor or GAN, the Russian equivalent of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; and Aleksei V. Yablokov, an adviser to President Boris Yeltsin, and their spouses formed a throbbing mosh pit in the center of the living room.

Following the set, when asked what had made her appear with the band, Mrs. O’Leary, drenched in sweat, paused to catch her breath and then replied, “I’d asked Viktor [Mikhailov] if I could bring my guitar … and he said sure. And one thing led to another … and, well …” She gestured toward the throng of guests still pumping their fists in the air.

After dinner, a bizarre incident occurred that has had the diplomatic community and entertainment industry abuzz with wild rumor and rampant speculation.

Sergei Smernyakov, a well-known nightclub hypnotist invited to the soirée by Mikhailov to provide postprandial entertainment, hypnotized guests Dorothy Bodin, Deputy Secretary of the Department of Energy; Cynthia Bowers-Lipken, a weapons expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council; and LaShaquilla Nuland, wife of Adm. C. F. Bud Nuland, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Each woman was given the posthypnotic suggestion that at the tone of a spoon striking a wineglass she would become a frenzied Dionysian orgiast with an uncontrollable compulsion to instantly gratify her every carnal desire.

Brought out of their trances, the women, each one a paragon of professional accomplishment, dignity, and decorum, blushed at the suggestion, and laughingly assured their companions that — with all due respect to Mr. Kavochilov’s mesmeric prowess — they could certainly never be induced to behave in such an outrageously uncharacteristic manner.

But sure enough, when Yeltsin aide Yablokov tapped a tiny silver jam spoon against his wine goblet, Ms. Bodin, Ms. Bowers-Lipken, and Mrs. Nuland immediately disrobed, rending the garments from their bodies as if they were aflame, and then, like deranged children, spreading caviar and blintz filling over each other’s naked flesh. Then, after a brief huddle, they overpowered a chosen male guest, shackled his legs, cuffed his hands behind his back, and took turns sitting on his face as they swigged caraway and jimsonweed-infused vodka from cut-crystal decanters.

Having finally sated themselves and tired, the women released the man, who staggered back to his hotel covered in their juices, followed by a howling cavalcade of rutting dogs, cats, raccoons, and possums whose demented caterwauling awakened sleeping Muscovites throughout the city.

Although invited guests refuse to comment on the identity of the male victim, People has learned that it was none other than celebrated television personality and Tony Award-winning actor

continued on p. 115

“Mark Leyner?”

“Huh?” I say distractedly, my attention monopolized by the foregoing magazine article.

“Mark, the doctor will see you now.”

“Right now?” I whine, my fingers riffling furiously through a multipage Lincoln Town Car insert in a frustrated effort to reach the jump on page 115 and learn the name of the celebrity “victim.”

“Right now,” answers the nurse with a peremptory lilt.