Mark Leyner - Et Tu, Babe

“Arleen, Joe, Dez … what do you think?” I asked.

“I agree, Mr. Leyner,” Joe said. “One big nostril wouldn’t look that great on a book cover … but I guess I’m not really one to talk.”

“Thanks, babe, but I meant what do you think about copping a guilty plea?”

“I agree with Gary,” Desiree said. “I think you guys should play it safe. And you have so much stuff — maybe losing something once a week would be a blessing in disguise, sort of like spring cleaning.”

“Arleen?”

“Yeah, I guess so … but I don’t know why I’m even being charged. It wasn’t my idea to steal that shit.”

“Oh, like you said, ‘Mark, it’s so wrong, take the Lincoln’s morning breath back to the National Museum of Health and Medicine this minute.’ ”

“I didn’t say I said that.”

“And like you didn’t get off on it as much as I did.”

“I never said I didn’t get off on it, you creep.”

“Hey, you two, c’mon. So we plead guilty to First-Offense Theft of a Federally Protected Bio-Historical Specimen and accept weekly punitive confiscation — yes?”

“Yes, Gary.”

The punishment consisted of having one item confiscated each week. At 10 A.M. every Monday morning, the authorities would arrive in a large truck. They’d read the statement that the courts required them to read prior to each punitive confiscation, they’d handcuff us, and they’d put us in the truck in a special enclosed compartment, where we were strapped to chairs in front of a 27-inch television screen. The identical 30-minute video was shown to us each week. And while we were watching the video — a porno film with all the sex edited out, leaving only the wooden narrative segues — the one item was confiscated and placed in the truck’s main compartment. (The Supreme Court has since ruled that forcing someone to view only the narrative segues from a pornographic film is in violation of the Eighth Amendment.) We were then allowed to return to our home. We were never told which item was confiscated. Sometimes it was obvious: the piano, the living room sofa, the wall phone in the kitchen, etc. But often we wouldn’t know what was taken until we needed it and it wasn’t there. For instance, one morning I badly needed my styptic pencil. (I groom myself with the same manic intensity with which I do everything else, and often after I shave, it looks as if I’ve gone face-first through an automobile windshield.) I looked in the drawer and the styptic pencil was gone — confiscated. Then one evening I was making pesto sauce, and I opened the cabinet to get the pignoli nuts and they were gone — confiscated. And one night we were making love, and Arleen went into the bathroom to get her tube of prescription maximum-strength spermicide (my spermatozoa are exceptionally robust and have developed a total resistance to over-the-counter spermicides) and the tube was gone — confiscated. We were prohibited from replacing confiscated items. If we were discovered to have replaced a confiscated item, our punitive status would be upgraded to second offense — nasal septumectomy.

“Sir, is there anywhere in particular you want to go?”

“No, just keep flying.”

I’m in the XXT7, a top-secret, experimental hyperspeed jet fighter that does about Mach 8. I just had to get away from it all, get up in the azure void of high-altitude airspace for a while, try to get some perspective.

“Well, sir, how about this: I’ll swing west across the Indonesian archipelago, cut northwest across the Bay of Bengal, take her due west over India, Pakistan, Iran, the Persian Gulf, Saudi Arabia, north over Syria and Turkey, the Black Sea, we’ll follow the Dnieper River from Kiev to Moscow, cut over toward St. Petersburg, cross the Baltic, Sweden, Norway, then swing sharply to the east, transverse the Arctic Ocean, follow the Bering Straits east, cross the Bering Sea, and head south over the Pacific past the eastern coast of Japan toward the Philippines and I can have you back in Malaysia by suppertime.”

I don’t even really hear what the pilot’s saying, so I just nod. “Yeah, yeah, that’s fine, that’s great.”

Y’know, when I was a teenager, I was told that I’d spend my entire life in and out of institutions, pathologically maladapted, living on society’s fringes … well, it didn’t turn out quite that way, folks. I’m only 36 years old; I’ve achieved international notoriety as a best-selling author, body builder, martial artist; I make more in a year from product endorsements than most people make in a lifetime; I’ve got a multimillion-dollar headquarters with a guard tower, gatehouses, patrol dogs, armed sentries, a vast warren of underground tunnels; I’ve got a gorgeous wife and an entourage of gofers and sycophants … So what’s the problem, right? The problem is that when you reach a level of achievement that few people have ever reached, when you routinely do things that no one else is even capable of imagining never mind attempting, when you are destined for greatness and possess the fortitude and inner focus to fulfill that destiny … you have no real friends, no real family. People look at you with awe, with fear, with lust, with suspicion, with envy … but not with affection. This is just a fact of life for me. It’s just the way it is. So is it paranoia or my fierce instinct for survival that makes me suspect an agent provocateur in our midst? How did Iron Man Wang’s hit squad of horny robo-trash find me so easily that day on the interstate outside of Wenton’s Mill? Why did Rocco Trezza suddenly disappear? Is it pure coincidence that the same DNA-fingerprinting laboratory retained by the attorney for both members of the Ecuadorian Olympic Equestrian Team is also analyzing my armpit hair for Sotheby’s? How did the FBI connect me to the Lincoln’s morning breath heist? Here’s an even better question: Why does the possibility that there’s a traitor in my inner circle excite me so much?

There was a full moon. We took our clothes off and carefully folded them over the branches of a tree that jutted obliquely from the sand dune. We waded out into the sea and started to swim toward Kana Island, where the abandoned insane asylum rose in the white moonlight. She swam effortlessly, smiling, humming jingles.

“I didn’t catch your name,” I said, adjusting the speedometer on my diving watch to see how many knots I could do on my back.

“My name is Patty Amato,” she replied.

“What hotel are you staying at?”

“The Hilton at Sugar Plantation. How about you?”

“I’m at the Green Isle … it’s sort of out-of-town. It’s full of rats, but it’s cheap.”

“The Hilton’s beautiful — really service oriented.”

With that, she arched her back and submerged, curving 180 degrees to the sea floor and then 180 degrees back to the surface at my side.

“Do you know what this is?” she asked, handing me a small cylindrical object that she’d plucked from the bottom.

I studied it for a moment. “It’s called ‘awakura.’ It’s the felt-tipped reproductive organ of a certain bioluminescent crustacean. Do you like sushi?”

“Yeah … why?”

“Well, you can eat that. It’s considered quite a delicacy in Japan. And it’s very expensive. In fact, in Tokyo, the difference between sushi regular and sushi deluxe is usually that the sushi deluxe includes awakura and the sushi regular doesn’t.”

“What about this thing at the end here? Do they eat that?”

“That’s felt. You just spit that out.”

She ate it and spit the end back into the sea.

“Oh, I forgot to tell you,” I said, winking, “it’s a powerful aphrodisiac.”

She looked at me with raised eyebrows and I started to laugh.