The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) (6 page)

“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.

“Fuck,” I mutter, and toss the magazine atop a pile.

Have you ever read an article in
People
that was so perfectly suited to your interests that it seemed as if the writer had intended it exclusively for you, so that you could—in the way that mentally disturbed individuals glean divine messages from advertising jingles or laundering instruction labels—perhaps derive some subliminal or encrypted communication or some secret gnostic insight? That’s how I feel about this particular article.

I can’t tell you how many afternoons I’ve frittered away contemplating what it would be like to be held captive and abused by various groups of fanatical and/or unbalanced and/or unwashed women. For a while, it’s
all
I talked about, which I realize became rather tedious for my parents. I remember one night at the dinner table, I was going on and on about what it might be like to get kidnapped and tormented by a group of rogue policewomen, when my dad interrupted me and said, “I didn’t think I’d ever hear myself saying this, but—could we talk about Napoleonic War muskets [my previous fixation] for a while?”

Actually my parents were pretty cool about it, though. In fact, they got me a subscription to one of these young-adult book series called
Around the World With Rusty Hoover
. In each book, this kid Rusty Hoover—who’s about my age—invariably finds himself mistaken for someone else and then gets abducted by gorgeous women who torture him. Like in
Rusty Hoover Goes to Peru
, Rusty’s on vacation with his parents, and he’s misidentified as a Peruvian Treasury officer, captured and brutally interrogated for weeks in a sweltering Lima apartment by giggling cadres at a Shining Path pajama party. In
Rusty Hoover Goes to Portugal
, Rusty’s on vacation in the Algarve with his parents, where he’s erroneously targeted as an unethical shipbuilding magnate by an
underground cell of shrouded fishermen’s widows who turn out to be particularly sadistic and horny. There’s
Rusty Hoover Goes to Law School
, where Rusty accompanies his parents to visit his older sister Tara at law school, and he’s confused for some pervert who’s been sending pornographic E-mail to fellow students in his Patents class, and he’s forced to sign a confession in his own prostatic fluid, subjected to pseudoscientific experimentation, and flogged by Professor De Brunhoff—a loose composite of Catharine MacKinnon and Lisa Sliwa—and her frothing acolytes. And then—one of my favorites—
Rusty Hoover Goes to Indiana
, in which, en route to Yellowstone Park, the family car’s cruise control malfunctions on Route 70 near Terre Haute, where Rusty’s mistaken for a locker-room Peeping Tom by a women’s fast-pitch softball team that has just completed a double-header in 100-degree heat and that—in the words of the jacket copy—“teaches Rusty a lesson in pine tar and voyeurism he’ll never forget.”

But until I read the article in
People
magazine, this sort of thing had only existed for me in fiction and in my own febrile fantasies. And now I see that it’s actually happened to some guy who was lucky enough to be in Moscow at just the right dinner party. But who is he?

Isn’t it one of life’s—well, maybe
tragedies
is too strong a word—one of life’s most vexing conundrums, that just at the exact moment that you really get into a magazine article in a doctor’s waiting room, the nurse calls your name?

    The doctor’s office features standard-issue M.D. furnishings and bric-a-brac with three notable exceptions: on his desk, a photograph of a dismayed woman (whom I presume is his wife) in a
gauzy lavender negligee drowning a four-inch Madagascar “hissing” cockroach with spray from a White Diamonds cologne atomizer; on the wall alongside an array of diplomas and certificates, a huge LeRoy Neiman painting of Socrates drinking his cup of hemlock; and above the credenza, a framed needlepoint of Cleopatra’s valediction from Shakespeare’s
Antony and Cleopatra:
“The stroke of death is as a lover’s pinch, / Which hurts, and is desired”—the cursive embroidery bordered by intertwined asps.

“I’m very sorry about your father, Mark.”

The doctor, downcast and shaken, rises from his chair and walks out from behind his desk. “I’m terribly, terribly sorry,” he says, embracing me.

Perhaps I have deferred or suppressed my emotions—numbed myself. Also—and I realize that I may have been naive or unrealistically optimistic—it simply hadn’t ever occurred to me that my dad wouldn’t respond to the lethal drugs. But now the emotions come surging forth. My eyes begin to fill. I sob, I heave, I weep unrestrainedly.

“Why did this have to happen?” I wail, clutching him.

“Mark, I wish there was a simple answer,” he says, with a reciprocal squeeze.

I unclasp his arms and step away from him.

“But everyone said it would work,” I contend with aggrieved composure.

“For the overwhelming majority of inmates, sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride is the terminal regimen of choice and proves to be completely efficacious. Unfortunately, it was not as deleterious to your father as we would have hoped.”

“Doctor, isn’t there anything more you can do?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“What about trying other lethal drugs?”

“The
only
drug protocol that the Food and Drug Administration has approved for executions is sodium thiopental, pancuronium bromide, and potassium chloride.” He bristles. “There are literally scores of promising new lethal drugs in development, but each one is hopelessly mired in FDA bureaucracy. Glaxo Wellcome has a compound called Mortilax, which combines the industrial solvent carbon disulfide and a neurotoxic insecticide, pyrethrum, with death-cap fungus, but it’s bogged down in phase-one animal studies. Johnson & Johnson’s Panicidin—whose active ingredients include several nitrated derivatives of phenol, zinc phosphide (a hepatotoxic rat poison), dioxin, and tetrodotoxin (a poison extracted from the livers of Japanese blow-fish)—was sailing through phase-two human efficacy trials when the FDA declared a moratorium on further testing because the drug was apparently causing moderate new hair growth in men with male-pattern baldness. And Pfizer has a very exciting new product in the pipeline called Necrotropin, which is a year into a four-year phase-three clinical trial. Necrotropin is composed of tetraethylpyrophosphate (an insecticide that blocks the enzyme Cholinesterase, resulting in a fatal buildup of acetylcholine), caustic potash (for corrosive destruction of internal organs), santonin (an alkaloid from wormseed that causes cardiovascular collapse), strychnine (for tetanic spasms leading to asphyxia), methyl isocynate (the chemical that killed 3,000 people in Bhopal), and a concentrate of Gaboon viper venom (which is both hemotoxic and
neurotoxic, causing diffused hemorrhages
and
respiratory paralysis). Pfizer is planning to offer it as an injectable, a transdermal patch, and a pleasant-tasting chewable tablet.

“So, potentially—and in spite of the appalling ineptitude of the FDA—the future is very bright. I emphasize the word
potentially
—one of the things that causes me so much anguish about the destruction of the rain forest is the possibility that we’re irrevocably losing indigenous plant toxins and venoms that could be used in the development of new and more powerful lethal drugs. But look, even if the FDA approved one of these experimental agents, there’s no guarantee that it would prove any more effective on your father than the drugs we administered today. I suspect that your father’s habitual abuse of angel dust and his hypersensitivity to gamma radiation have somehow conferred an immunity to toxins. Although I have no idea what the precise biochemical mechanisms are here, my hypothesis is that chronic anaphylactic reactions to gamma rays occurring concomitantly with sustained exposure to phencyclidine has actually altered the genetic matrix in each of your father’s cells, rendering him resistant to the lethal drugs presently available to us.”

“Well, why can’t any of these companies develop a drug that will kill gamma-ray-sensitive angel-dust users?” I ask.

“It’s more an issue of economics than scientific or technological capability. How many people in the United States with severe gamma ray sensitivity who habitually abuse phencyclidine do you think commit capital crimes each year?”

“Probably not that many … I don’t know … maybe 50,000 a year?”

“Try 1,500. Compare that to the 600,000 new cases of congenital generalized hypertrichosis each year. [Individuals with this disorder, thought to be transmitted on the X chromosome, have an upper body and face covered with hair and often end up in sideshows as human werewolves.] Or the 1.2 million annual cases of Lipid-Induced Inuit Hyperthermia. [Sufferers of this malady, which primarily affects the Eskimo people of Arctic Canada, maintain exceptionally high body temperatures—about 107°F or above—as a result of heavy consumption of blubber and tallow. Geologists have long been concerned that an LIH epidemic could raise ambient temperatures sufficiently to weaken and finally destroy the ice underpinnings of the West Arctic Ice Sheet. The entire sheet would then slide rapidly into the sea, causing an abrupt and catastrophic rise in global sea levels, and flooding low-lying countries like the Netherlands and Bangladesh.] But even these are considered third-tier markets. In terms of the bottom-line mindset of the pharmaceutical industry, 1,500 cases is a negligible patient base. It’s just not economically feasible for a company to expend the necessary R&D resources on a drug that’s designed to kill only 1,500 people a year. So we’d be talking about an orphan lethal drug. And who do you think awards orphan-drug status? The FDA.”

“It sounds hopeless,” I say.

“It’s not hopeless if we set a national agenda. If we as a country commit ourselves and our resources to developing a drug that can kill gamma-ray-sensitive angel-dust abusers, we can do it—and we can do it by the year 2000. But it has to be a national priority with the full support of the American people. Do you know much about North Korea?”

“Not really. I’d like to, though. In fact, I was going to take
Pariah States
as my 7th-period elective for next semester, but I decided to take
English Punk 1975–1978
instead.”

“Well, you want to talk about setting agendas and making national commitments, these guys could teach us all a thing or two. Their leader, Kim Jong Il, is apparently always developing these little growths on his face and he’s an extremely vain guy, so the government spends about $1.8 billion constructing this fabulous thermonuclear dermatological facility the likes of which have never been seen anywhere. The device works by firing a dazzling light from 192 lasers down a labyrinth of mirrors, focusing a titanic bolt of energy—a thousand times the output of all the power stations in the United States—onto a single tiny pellet of supercold hydrogen fuel placed on Kim Jong Il’s mole, wart, or wen and creating a miniature thermonuclear blast lasting one-billionth of a second, which completely vaporizes the lesion. That’s what a country can do if it puts its mind to it.…”

Frustration with the failed execution, the inaccessibility of more-potent lethal drugs, and the vagaries of the federal bureaucracy; envy for the ruthless fecundity of totalitarian technocrats; and utter physical and emotional fatigue seem to cumulatively crest, as the doctor’s voice trails off and, with a sort of spent serenity, he gazes out the window.

The window affords a view of an emerald green lawn upon which sits a filigreed wrought-iron gazebo completely swathed in concertina wire. In 1996, singer Michael Jackson presented then-governor Christine Todd Whitman with the original gazebo used in
The Sound of Music
as a gift to the State of New Jersey—the only proviso being that the gazebo be used for the delectation of
the state’s penal population. Rotated every two years among New Jersey’s several maximum security institutions, the gazebo—in which Liselle and Rolf serenaded each other with “I Am Sixteen Going on Seventeen”—is used both for conjugal visits and punitive solitary confinement.

During this lull, I become aware of a softly pulsing obbligato—the
ch-ch-ch
of innumerable inmates engaging in unlubricated sodomy, which, like the
ch-ch-ch
of stridulating male cicadas, can be heard on summer evenings in villages and towns miles from the prison.

Emerging from his reverie, the doctor turns back to me.

“Do you play any sports? You look like you’re in pretty good shape,” he says.

“Tetherball,” I reply, miming an overhead smash.

“Y’know, when I was your age, the jocks wore pearls … that was
the big thing
back then … freshwater pearls. You’d be in the locker room after football practice, and there’d be these big hairy naked guys wearing single strands of pearls, snapping towels at each other …”

“No way!” I snort, not bothering to hide my contempt for the fleeting fads of bygone generations.

“It’s funny when you look back … the things you thought were so cool, so tough … Freshwater pearls …” he trails off, returning his gaze out toward the gazebo.

Our conversation continues desultorily, the doctor intermittently blurting a question or offering some random reminiscence, and then fading off again into mute introspection, the gaps filled with the ubiquitous
ch-ch-ch
.

Despite the fact that, beyond a gustatory preference for brains
and marrow, we have almost nothing in common, I find myself bonding somewhat with the doctor. Having long accepted the stereotype of the physician as the stolid professional who views the fates of his patients with cold, clinical detachment, I was all the more moved by this doctor’s genuine empathy. He responded with such grief, and with such a sense of personal responsibility, that it was almost as if it were his own father he’d failed to kill.