The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) (4 page)

I make a face.

“What’s the problem?” asks the executioner. “Are you two uncomfortable touching each other? Is that an issue?”

“No,” we both say, simultaneously defensive.

“Well, then, c’mon. Mark, slide your chair up next to the gurney and hold your dad’s hand. Now, Dad, you look at Mark and talk to
him.”

I pull my chair up alongside the gurney next to the IV drip stand and grasp Dad’s left hand, which is secured at the wrist with a supplementary nylon-webbed restraint with Velcro fastenings. Dad looks at me and begins again.

“When your mother was pregnant with you—”

“Much better!” the executioner says in a stage whisper.

“—I fell for this bank teller who used to keep her deposit slips in her cleavage. And I’d go down to the bank every day to watch
her and it would just drive me fuckin’ nuts. Unbeknownst to me at the time, she had this whole incredibly elaborate, idiosyncratic filing system—regular savings account withdrawal and deposit slips in her cleavage, money market deposit slips under her right bra strap, IRA and Keogh deposit slips under the left bra strap, payroll checks went in the front waistband of her panties, mortgage payments back panty waistband, Christmas club deposits gartered at the thighs, etc. All I knew is that I was completely sexually obsessed with this woman. All day, all night, it’s all I’m thinking about. So I learn from a friend of a friend of a friend that this bank teller loves steak. And you know those ads in the back of
The New Yorker
for Omaha Steaks? Well, I start having four filet mignons packed in dry ice sent to her house every week accompanied by little romantic poems. Call me old-fashioned—but I still think there’s no better way to say ‘I want you’ to a woman than sending her meat in the mail. So one day some idiot from Omaha Steaks calls and leaves a message on the answering machine about whether I’d like to include eight free 4-ounce burgers in my next delivery and your mother plays the message, finds out about the bank teller, and the next thing you know, I’m getting a call from her psychotherapist forbidding me to send any more meat to this woman because it’s jeopardizing your mother’s mental health, and I say, ‘I’m
forbidden?
What is this, some kind of edict, are you issuing a fatwa?’ and he says, ‘Call it a fatwa if you wish,’ and I say, ‘Well, fuck you and fuck your fatwa.’ Meanwhile these filet mignons are starting to set me back like sixty, seventy bucks a week. So I start moonlighting at this very exclusive, very posh beauty salon uptown. Very high-profile clientele—Lainie Kazan, Kaye Ballard, Eydie Gormé, Eddie
Arnold—y’know, you reach a point where you don’t even notice anymore, it’s like, ‘There’s Piper Laurie, pass the rugelach.’ Anyway, one day this woman comes in, she’s got a 4:45
P.M
. appointment, her name is Meredith, and she’s missing the top half of her cranium, and her entire brain is exposed. Y’know the line from that Eurythmics song that goes
I’m speaking de profundis. / This ain’t no joke. / A medium-boiled egg with the upper portion of its shell and albumen removed reveals a glaucous convexity of coagulated yolk. / Oh yeah … It hurts … Oooo, c’mon
 … 
A glaucous convexity of coagulated yolk!
Well, that’s the image. It’s as if someone had taken this woman’s cranium and meticulously—”

“That’s Duran Duran,” the operations officer interjects.

“What?” says Dad, turning to the voice that comes from behind a one-way mirror separating the control module room from the execution chamber.

“I’m pretty sure that line’s from a Duran Duran song, because I remember that in the video, the guy who sucks out the yolk is Simon Le Bon.”

My father furrows his brow for a moment and then nods.

“You’re right,” he says, “you’re absolutely right. Simon Le Bon sucks out the yolk, starts choking, and then Nick Rhodes Heimlich-manuevers Le Bon, who expels the yolk which arcs through the air and settles in a corner of the sky where it begins to throb and radiate, and the video which had heretofore been sepia-toned takes on this incredibly garish, heavily impastoed Van Gogh-at-Aries coloration as they sing the refrain,
Spit the sun into the sky / I’m so hard, I think I’ll die!
over and over again. It’s Duran Duran. You’re absolutely right.”

He turns back toward me.

“Anyway … it’s as if someone had meticulously sawed around the circumference of this woman’s cranium at about eyebrow-and-ear level and just lifted the top right off. But the
really
amazing thing is that she has a full head of long brown hair growing directly out of her brain. So apparently her condition was not the result of a freak workplace accident or a sadistic experiment—which is what I’d initially assumed—but the result of a congenital defect. She was either born without enclosing cranial bones or had suffered some sort of massive fontanel drift. And, remarkably, her hair follicles are distributed in a perfectly normal pattern directly on the pia mater of her cerebral cortex. The other beauticians are too squeamish to work on her and, in fact, fled to the pedicure and waxing rooms the minute she walked through the door, so I volunteer. As soon as she’s in the chair, it’s obvious to me that she’s feeling a bit uncomfortable, so the first thing I say is, ‘Meredith, take your eyeglasses off.’

“She’s like, ‘Excuse me?’

“ ‘Take off your glasses.’

“She doffs the thick-lensed violet frames.

“ ‘Did anyone ever tell you how much you resemble Reba McEntire? It’s uncanny.’

“She giggles, blushing. The ice is broken. I intuit immediately that Meredith is a warm, friendly person with a wonderful, understated sexiness. We start talking about what kind of a cut she wants.

“ ‘First of all,’ she says, ‘I’m sick of always having to brush these bangs off my prefrontal lobes.’

“ ‘The bangs have to go,’ I say.

“Meredith explains that she’d like a hairstyle that doesn’t look
‘done.’ She wants to be able to just wash her hair and finger-style it, without needing a brush, because the bristles can apparently nick cerebral arteries and cause slight hemorrhaging and mild dementia. She also wants to be able to let it dry naturally—hair dryers can overheat and sometimes even boil her cerebrospinal fluid. And electric rollers and curling irons are absolutely contraindicated—they tend to induce convulsions.

“I start by trimming off all the extra hair that had been hanging down over Meredith’s shoulders and bring the length up to a point where the hair can curve gently against the sides of her neck. I want a fuller, more luxurious look to her hair, and since she’s got plenty of it, I control the volume with a graduated cut. Meredith’s hair had parted naturally between the cerebral hemispheres, along the superior sagittal sinus. I think a slight asymmetry will create a more sophisticated shape and line, so I sweep her hair over from a side part at the left temporal lobe. This is a very versatile style. It can be tied back for aerobics, worn full and smooth at the office—Meredith is a commercial real estate broker—and then swept up for evening. In other words, there are no limitations to what Meredith can do with this cut, which is exactly right considering her sports activities, her business, her charity benefits—she’s co-chairperson of the Rockland County chapter of the American Acrania and Craniectomy Society—and her busy social life. Meredith’s hair is a very dark, nondescript brown, so I suggest to her that we lighten it. She enthusiastically agrees. I start by coloring in a soft, cool blond to maximize the impact of the wet, pinkish gray tissue of her brain. Then I add a few extra highlights to play off the deep ridges and fissures that corrugate her cortex.

“Meredith is ecstatic about the make-over, but she has one lingering concern.

“ ‘I won’t need barrettes, will I? When I wear them, they put too much pressure here,’ she says, indicating the posterior perisylvian sector of her left hemisphere, ‘and it disrupts my ability to assemble phonemes into words. That can really be a problem when I’m showing property.’

“ ‘No barrettes, clips, combs, hairpins, headbands—that’s the beauty of this style. You wash it, let it dry, run your fingers through it—done. No fuss, no aphasia, no memory loss, no motor impairment. You’re ready to rock.’

“ ‘It’s just perfect!’ she says, turning her head this way and that, as she admires herself in the mirror.

“Before she leaves, we discuss which shampoos and conditioners won’t permeate the blood-brain barrier. She gives me a big kiss, a huge tip, and nearly skips out of the shop, at which point the other beauticians filter back to their stations.

“About two weeks later, I receive a note at the salon from Meredith. It says: ‘The office manager was very,
very
impressed—if you know what I mean! Some people took a while to notice how different I looked, but all of them
love
it! You’re
THE BEST!’

“And so, son, the point is—any asshole with a Master of Social Work degree can put on a turban and start issuing fatwas about whom you can and whom you can’t mail meat to, but it takes real balls to turn a brunette without a cranium into a blonde.”

    I’ve whipped out a pad and pen, and I’m trying to scribble this down as quickly as I can:
Any asshole with a Master of Social
Work degree … can put on a turban and start issuing fatwas … about whom you can and whom you can’t mail meat to—

And my pen runs out of ink.

“Fuck!” I squawk. “Excuse me, anybody have a pen or a pencil?”

“Here,” says the prison superintendent, reaching into his jacket pocket and handing me a syringe-shaped pen, the bottom half of which is emblazoned with the words
New Jersey State Penitentiary at Princeton—Capital Punishment Administrative Segregation Unit
, its upper half a transparent, calibrated barrel filled with a viscous glittery blue liquid that undulates back and forth as you tilt it.

“Cool pen!” I exclaim.

“Thanks,” he says. “I get them from the potassium chloride sales rep. It’s one of those ‘put your logo here’ freebies.”

I finish transcribing the maxim:—
but it takes real balls to turn a brunette without a cranium into a blonde
.

And as the superintendent and warden usher me into the witness room, I experience two serendipitous visual thrills.

First, as the warden extends a guiding hand, there’s a slight billowing of fabric at the top of her dress that gives me a sudden glimpse of the etiolated curvature of a breast and then (I catch my breath!) a sliver of a crescent whose slight variance in coloration might indicate—I suspect, I hope!—just maybe (gulp!) the very top of an areola!

(Or perhaps not. My seventh-grader brain could be creating an areola where there is none, my adolescent libido “filling in the blanks,” investing ambiguous retinal input with its own meaning. I may be processing visual stimuli with the little head
instead of the big one. In fact, this could be a perfect example of an idiomatic expression that Ms. Frey, my Spanish teacher, taught us:
Mirando con el bastón en ves de los bastoncillos y los conos
. Seeing with the rod instead of the rods and cones. In other words, this phantom areola might simply be a cathected version of the Kanizsa triangle—a famous optical illusion in which the observer perceives a triangle even though the interconnecting lines forming a triangle are missing—that we just learned about in Mr. Edelman’s biology class. Weird … )

And then, moments later, as the warden lowers herself into one of the witness room’s orange extruded-plastic chairs: Visual Thrill #2. A taut, faintly stubbly swath (yum!) of pale and dewy armpit flesh!

I desperately need to preempt an erection. First of all, a hard-on here would be terribly inappropriate (just because I’m only in the seventh grade doesn’t mean I lack a modicum of decency), and second, it would be impossible to conceal—remember, I’m shirtless and these Versace leather pants are tight and ride really low on the hips. It might also suggest the perverse possibility that I find the imminent execution of my father sexually arousing, which would be a gross misreading. And at the very least, it might imply that I’m callous and self-absorbed. (Totally wrong. I’m empathetic and I’m sensitive, but I belong to a peer group that’s temperamentally and philosophically averse to verbalizing real feelings. [For a comprehensive discussion of this psychological paradigm, see Renata Mazur’s
Fetuses with Body Hair: The Loathsome World of Pubescent Boys.
] We choose to speak a language that conveys as little information as possible. Like mites signaling each other across great distances with minuscule puffs of
pheromone, we identify ourselves to each other with monosyllabic, opaque shibboleths of diffidence—“huh,” “cool,” “fucked,” “weird,” etc. This is our special language and we’re proud of it—in this way, we’re no different from the Basques or the Kurds or any other linguacentric separatist group. But don’t think that simply because we’re affectless and inarticulate, and harbor a deep distrust of romantic bromides, that we don’t have intensely passionate and turbulent inner lives.)

At any rate, obviously this is neither the time nor the place for what Walter Pater called “burning with the hard, gem-like flame” (my English teacher, Mr. Minter, interprets this as a kind of
aesthetic rapture
, but my friends and I believe that Pater was referring to a
hot bone
). So in an effort to quell arousal, I try conjuring unpleasant thoughts. But I can’t think of anything at the moment. I guess, on balance, I’m a pretty upbeat, sanguine guy. I’m basically a morning person. And I consider this a bona fide psychological category, because when you wake up in the morning, the first thing that really hits you is that you’re not dead, and if you tend to greet that basic fact with any degree of enthusiasm if not outright alacrity, then I think that’s a fairly strong indicator of an optimistic disposition. And man, I’m out of the chute each morning with out-and-out zipadeedoodah alacrity! I set the clock-radio alarm to 95.7 FM, which until recently was a classical station and is now all-Pathoco. Pathoco—which was originally called “Texas 12-Step”—is a musical subgenre that originated in some of the country’s most parochial, inbred, and anomic white suburbs. It features a bouncy sort of Tijuana Brass sound that completely belies its dark and often disturbing lyrics. For instance, the #1 Pathoco single right now is a song called
“The Beasts of Yeast.” Against a very festive, up-tempo mariachi background, a man sings of his wife’s recent confession that every night she dreams of beating him with a baseball bat, covering his bloodied head with a plastic bag, sitting on his chest, punching his face, and screaming, “Die, David, Die!” and then once he dies, relaxing and smoking crack. In the next verse he sings about his five-year-old daughter, who euthanizes all of her stuffed animals and dolls. The father returns home from work each day to find his daughters dolls and teddy bears on the floor of her bedroom with plastic bags over their heads secured with thick rubber bands. When he asks her why she’s assisted her little friends in committing suicide, she says simply that they were “stressed out.” Then in the ensuing verse—in the phlegmatic, acquiescent falsetto of one whose ability to register indignation has corroded from years of living in New Jersey—he reveals that the underlying cause of all his family’s problems is severe food allergies. And in the chorus, husband, wife, and daughter, in shimmering three-part harmony, enumerate the offending substances: “Wheat gluten. Lactose. Yeast. Shellfish. Eggs. Tropical oils. Etc.” The malevolence of the banal—Legionnaire’s disease from a motel hot tub, toxic shock from a tampon, lung cancer from radon, leukemia from the electromagnetic radiation of high-voltage power transmission lines, MSG-induced spontaneous abortions from take-out lo mein—is a central Pathoco motif. But the music’s irrepressibly ebullient beat and the shrill, deliriously mirthful horn arrangements rouse me like reveille each morning. Bathroom ablutions consist of ground azuki-bean scrub for the blackheads, followed by a quick yogic deep-gargle (you swallow about a foot of what’s called “esophageal floss” and then pull it back out—I learned it
from Mr. Vithaldas, he’s my Ayurvedic Health teacher, that’s my 7th-period elective), and then I descend on the kitchen and, if it’s a school-day morning, I have an espresso laced with a shot of calvados and some thinly sliced bichon frisé on a plain bagel, and then I’m out the back door and I’m at the tetherball pole. It’s difficult to adequately describe how important the sport of tetherball is to me. Yes, I love playing tetherball more than doing anything else in the world. Yes, I adore the way that the dew flies off the ball when I hammer that first serve each morning and the cord wraps in a tight spiral around the top of the pole and the ball caroms with such force that the cord uncoils with almost equal torque, and I crouch in a low, ballasted stance and let the ball sail over my back and then, my bodyweight cantilevered like a discus thrower’s, wield a lethal and quasi-legal cupped palm to sling it in an opposite orbit, and back and forth, in clockwise and then counterclockwise centrifugal arcs that whine as they split the air. Yes, the spiritual sludge of late-second-millennium life literally evaporates in the thermal vectors of my frenzied footwork, my bobbing and weaving, my parries and pirouettes, and it becomes like this atavistic dance, and I feel as if I’m dancing in the center of the sky. And yes, I feel as if everything most precious within myself is awakened and I experience an ineffable kinesthetic beatitude. But the
coolest
thing is that after I’ve been hitting for a while, there’s something about the way my pants smell when they get sweaty—I don’t know if it’s the kind of leather Versace uses or it’s just the way any leather smells when it gets wet—but it makes me completely euphoric, and I enter a highly evolved, massively parallel quantum fugue state during which I achieve tachyphrenic processing speeds of ten trillion floating-point operations
per second, and I have cosmological revelations (e.g., instead of subatomic particles being composed of strings—which are tiny vibrating bits of hyperdimensional space—perhaps the
ball-like
leptons and quarks are attached to hyperdimensional
tethers
and they coil and uncoil around
poles
, which are the dimensionless interfaces between matter and antimatter) and then I get this incredible sensation throughout my body as if I’ve been given an ice-cold mint-jelly enema and bubbles of the frigid jelly are percolating up through my spinal column and bursting exquisitely in the back of my head.