The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) (21 page)

“This, of course, is attended by the shrieking violins that accompany any even mildly unexpected plot contrivances in this movie.

“At the screening I attended, this scene, in which Polo is revealed to be Mark’s father, was greeted in the theater by a mixture of gasps and embarrassed laughter—some viewers seeming to experience a profoundly cathartic epiphany, others finding this latest revelation to be bathos bordering on farce.

“ ‘I did it all for you, son,’ says Polo/Dad. ‘I had to be there for you in Bougainville. Just like I was during the school year.’

“ ‘What do you mean,
during the school year?’

“ ‘I was Sylvia.’

“More shrieking violins.

“And another proportional outburst of tears and titters in the audience.

“ ‘That’s
why Sylvia wouldn’t ever have sex with me!’ says Mark. ‘Because …’

“ ‘Because it would have been
so
wrong,’ signs Polo/Dad. ‘See, I had to stay near you, son, but I also had to alter my DNA in order to elude the NJSDE boys.’

“ ‘How, though? How did you do it?’

“ ‘Chemical mutagens, irradiation, viral agents—the standard transgenic protocol. You target specific genes and then specific sites, known as codons, on a gene’s DNA sequence, and basically, you transpose the sequence. It’s like a genetic anagram. You reshuffle the code. For instance,
Sylvia
was homozygous for the amino acid methionine at polymorphic residue 129 of PrP …’

“Polo/Dad’s explanation of how he was able to genetically rearrange himself first into the stripper at The Carousel, then into Sylvia, and finally into a Bonobo chimpanzee runs some 90 minutes, and although personally I found it easy to follow, it’s so thoroughly larded with arcane jargon, biotech neologisms, and unexplicated acronyms as to be completely impenetrable to the average layperson.

“In the ensuing weeks, Mark nurses Polo/Dad back to health, and persuades him to allow Mark to act as his attorney in a lawsuit against the phony authors
and
their publishing companies.

“It’s the Trial of the Century. A legally intricate—and, from a dramatic perspective, almost unbearably intense—maelstrom of concepts and case law ranging from the Scopes Monkey Trial to the Janet Malcolm-Jeffrey Masson and Joan Collins litigations to, of course, the Milli Vanilli case.

“Chandrapal Ram—whose rendering of Mark has heretofore been almost Noh-like in its sullen laconicism and choreographic rigor—explodes here, giving one of
the most uninhibited, convulsive, transformative, and courageously over-the-top performances I have ever seen.

“Stalking the courtroom shirtless and in his signature Versace leather motocross trousers, he combines not only the tenacity and snarling, ruthless brilliance of Barry Scheck and the majestic oratorical abandon and mesmerizing, free-associative whimsy of a young Muammar Qaddafi, but the taunting, gutter sexuality of a Susan Dey.

“During the climactic closing arguments, the courtroom is overflowing with spectators and press. The fake ‘Chabon,’ ‘Tartt,’ ‘Coupland,’ ‘Belle,’ ‘Ellis,’ et al., sit together in a specially reserved section of the gallery. David Levine is the courtroom sketch artist. The publishing executives and their attorneys occupy the defense table. Polo, of course, sits slumped at the plaintiff’s table.

“Mark prefaces his summation by thanking the judge (played by a somnambulant Lou Diamond Philips) for his equitable and expeditious rulings and the jury (one of whose female members wears a T-shirt throughout the trial that says ‘Men Suck’) for its patience and sacrifice.

“And he begins by rephrasing the opening line of Stéphane Mallarmé’s beautiful poem ‘Brise Marine’ (Sea Breeze), which originally reads
‘La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres’
(‘The flesh is sad, alas! and I have read all the books’).

“ ‘Ladies and gentleman of the jury,’ he intones, ‘The flesh is sad, alas!’ And then pointing to Polo, ‘And he has writ
ten
all the books.’

“At first he affects a casual, amiable, at times intimate manner—seeking to connect personally with each member of the jury. He jokes about a newfound interest in petit-point embroidery. He shares odd, seemingly irrelevant bits of gee-whiz scientific trivia (‘Most things swell in the heat, right? Well, zirconium tungstate
contracts
when warmed!’) and then a strange anecdote about
being chased through the Museum of Natural History by a girl with webbed fingers. He launches into a long, pointless digression about Seattle Supersonics point guard Gary Payton and Los Angeles Laker Nick Van Exel. And then he relates a dream he says he had the previous night (‘There were these aliens, female aliens in, like, Carmelite nun headgear and long silver Gore-Tex capes, and they had these Super Soaker water guns filled with stagnant vase water and they were forcing these real narcissistic musclemen to whack off—y’know at, like, gunpoint—and then all the female aliens turned out to be, like, all my teachers from school and stuff …’).

“At this point, the jurors are frantically scribbling notes.

“An arm draped casually over the railing of the jury box, as he swirls water in a plastic cup, Mark confides that he was mortally hydrophobic as a small child. He then tells a story about how once a day-camp counselor playfully tossed him into a swimming pool. Mark’s feelings were hurt terribly, and he put a Satanic curse on the counselor, who, the next day, was mysteriously scalded to death in his own shower.

“Whether or not this is a cryptic attempt on Mark’s part to intimidate the jury is furiously debated by legal analysts in television studios across the country.

“Following another personal aside (‘I don’t know about you, but I hate the goddamn beach. I lie there, I feel like a fucking cutlet—drenched in oil, coated with sand, and frying. That’s a vacation?’), he maneuvers deftly into the heart of his summation by reading to the jury, in a lilting singsong, the entirety of Baruch Spinoza’s
Ethics
(‘For no one has acquired such accurate knowledge of the fabric of the body, as to be able to explain all its functions; nor need I omit to mention the many things observed in brutes, which far surpass human sagacity, and the many things which sleep-walkers
do, which they would not dare to do when awake: this is sufficient to show that the body itself, merely from the laws of its own nature alone, can do many things, at which the mind marvels, etc., etc.’).

“He then pauses dramatically.

“ ‘These people you see seated there in that row in this courtroom are not authors, they’re impersonators. Actors! Straight out of central casting! They’re impostors! They’re garden-variety lowlife scamming slacker scum! “Elizabeth Wurtzel,” “David Foster Wallace,” “A. M. Homes” … these people don’t even exist! There are no such people. THEY DO NOT EXIST!’

“The courtroom at this moment is hushed and absolutely still. The only sounds are the scratching of David Levine’s sketch pen and the sobs of the jurors.

“ ‘Polo and I fabricated these names from the sports pages of a Bougainville newspaper. You all remember when I had that refrigerator brought into court and I showed you with the magnetic letters how easy it was rearrange the names, to concoct “Jennifer Belle” from Libré-El-Fennjé, and “Douglas Coupland” from Gascand-Pupulolo. His Honor let you play with the letters and you saw for yourselves how simple it was to make the anagrams. And we even had some of the players—Mafuta Mel’Chachanibo and Ozzy Emshamo and Satmak L. L.’Herbé-Tetziwuza brought all the way from Bougainville to present their birth certificates and testify in this courtroom, under oath, as to their given names.’

“Again he pauses dramatically, and then walks slowly past the defense table.

“ ‘This trial is a search. A search for a writer. The writer of all those books,’ he says, pointing to a huge mounted display of enlarged glossy dust jackets.

“ ‘But, ladies and gentleman, these are not writers,’ he says, gesturing contemptuously at the row of impersonators.

“ ‘These are merely …’ he hesitates, as if groping for the most precise way to articulate his disdain. ‘These are merely
the tetherballs of Bougainville!’

“There’s a buzz throughout the courtroom.

“He strides back toward the plaintiff’s table.

“ ‘This is
the writer,’
Mark says reverently, with a sweeping flourish of the arm, indicating Polo, and then a deep genuflection.

“ ‘No one wants to believe that
Microserfs
and
Infinite Jest
and
Prozac Nation
and
The End of Alice
were all written by a Bonobo chimp and a 13-year-old boy smoking weed and drinking forties in their bedroom! No one wants to believe it! No one wants to believe that those assholes over there didn’t write these books. Throughout the 1930s, American physicians routinely prescribed potassium cyanide as a palliative for headaches and menstrual cramps, even though it inevitably resulted in the death of the patient within minutes of ingestion. But doctors continued prescribing it, and people just kept on taking it. Because they couldn’t deal with the truth. And they can’t deal with the truth here. No one can deal with the fact that a drunk, stoned Bonobo chimp and a 13-year-year-old boy actually wrote every single one of those novels. It just shatters everyone’s cherished notion of the great, exalted, hallowed
Author
. Right? It just can’t possibly be. How impudent to suggest that this is how these books were written. But it is! It’s true. You’ve seen that demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt in this courtroom. And you know something? Any inbred, paint-chip-munching, goat-bonking pinhead retard they put on this jury could see that. Because it’s the truth! It’s the goddamn irrefutable truth!! And in your hearts you know it is! You can’t lie to yourselves!
You
know who wrote those books!! WE
ALL
KNOW WHO WROTE THOSE BOOKS!!!’ he raves, froth appearing at the corners of his mouth.

“ ‘And now you have an extraordinary opportunity to redress this foul, unconscionable injustice. You can
make it right! Do it, my fellow Americans! Do it for every adolescent anomic skank genius cloistered in his room, getting cranked, rabidly humping his sampler as he confects some heretical, monstrous persona for himself and dreams of an orgiastic, blood-soaked apocalypse. Yes, the
impudence!
We have
nothing
in this life of suffocating obligation but our motherfucking impudence! For God’s sake, give us this day our motherfucking big-dick impudence!!’

“In a volcanic recitative, with venomous, profanity-laced fury, he continues to exhort the jury to render the correct verdict. It’s a febrile, histrionic, spellbinding masterpiece of demagogic virtuosity: the carefully practiced threatening and imploring gestures, the calculated hysterical climaxes, the modulations of the voice—one moment, shrieking and gesticulating, and in the very next, whispering urgently and with hypnotic persuasion.

“He concludes with the final stanza from Mallarmé’s ‘Sea Breeze’: ‘An ennui, bereft of cruel hopes, / Yet believes in the ultimate farewell of handkerchiefs! / And, perhaps, the masts, inviting storms, / May be those a wind bends over shipwrecks / Lost, without masts, nor masts nor fertile shores … / Still, O my heart, hear the seafarers’ song!’

“ ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I am confident that, having considered the evidence we have presented to you in this trial, you will sing that seafarers’ song, and you will find in favor of my client.

“ ‘Thank you.’

“The jury responds with convulsive emotion—many are weeping, others have swooned, several rise to their feet, shaking their fists in the air, some are simply paralyzed in their chairs, slack-jawed with astonishment.

“Mark returns to his seat, exhausted, his eyes glazed. He is soaking wet, having lost five or six pounds.

“The jury takes only 45 minutes to deliberate before rendering its decision.

“In a stunning, landmark verdict that fundamentally
and irrevocably changes the relationship between the publishing industry and brachiating primates, it awards Polo $10.5 million in compensatory and punitive damages.

“And the counterfeit ‘authors’ are utterly discredited and exposed as the scheming con artists they are.

“In the final scene, we see Mark and Polo seated next to each other in the first-class section of a plane to Luxembourg. Sipping Cristal, the hitherto hairless Polo wears an expensive, custom-tailored, full-body Bonobo pelt.

“After the plane takes off, Mark stares contemplatively at the clouds for a while and then turns to Polo.

“ ‘Dad, do you know when I first realized how much I really love you?’

“ ‘When?’ signs Polo.

“ ‘When you danced for me and Felipe at The Carousel. Maybe you don’t really appreciate your father until he has huge tits.’

“ ‘Y’know,’ Polo signs, embracing his son, ‘maybe you’re right.’

“Passengers and flight attendants break into applause, stanching their happy tears with cocktail napkins.

“The music swells (Offramp Tavanipupu’s searingly unapologetic cover of the Jim Nabors’ elegiac smash classic ‘Oh My Papa’) as the plane disappears into the distance, and credits roll across the azure screen.

“To me, this ending represents something of a squandered opportunity. We have the protagonist Mark—who, having spent most of the movie shunning his father out of fear for his own safety, has been as much a target for the audience’s opprobrium as he has for its sympathy—finally redeemed by his passionate and courageous courtroom advocacy. We have the
ancient archetype of the hero reckoning with his patrimony—going through a series of ordeals culminating in a crisis in which he and his father are atoned. And we have five million years of hominid evolution telescoped into two generations. And the best they can come up with as a conclusive, overarching declaration is ‘Maybe you don’t really appreciate your father until he has huge tits’?

“This is all the more perplexing, in light of assertions by individuals with intimate knowledge of the movie’s genesis, that this very line—‘Maybe you don’t really appreciate your father until he has huge tits’—is the end product of a succession of extravagantly expensive rewrites by script doctors including Richard Price, Callie Khouri, and John Gregory Dunne, each of whom purportedly received a seven-figure paycheck for tweaking this single sentence of dialogue.