Et Tu, Babe

Excerpts from ET TU, BABE

The four-foot hermaphroditic organism from a distant solar system twitched in my arms as I soul-kissed it. The laboratory director would have killed me if he’d known that I’d snuck into the Galactic Lifeform Chamber with a bottle of wine, a cassette player, and an eclectic selection of tapes (Felix Mendelssohn, Steppenwolf, Barbara Mandrell) for a clandestine tryst with the cylindrical being whom the lab technicians had christened “Kitty Lafontaine.” I pipetted a few drops of 1982 Napa Valley Zinfandel into its alimentary aperture. Its synesthetic sensory apparatus was distributed evenly across the entirety of its shiny outer sheath so it could see, hear, smell, touch, precognize, etc., from any point on its body. To say that holding Kitty Lafontaine in my arms was like nestling a large holiday beef log from Hickory Farms would certainly not convey the spine-tingling xenophilic libidinous awe I felt, but it would accurately convey the shape, mass, and weight of this fascinating creature who would irrevocably change all our lives that summer.

Dear Science Editor of the Times,

Frequently the counterman at a sandwich shop will ask “Do you want everything on it?” Well, what if you had a sandwich with literally “everything” on it? In other words, how large a sandwich roll would you need to accommodate all matter in the universe? And, as a corollary, imagine an inconceivably immense being capable of eating this almost infinitely capacious submarine Sandwich. If this colossal creature began eating at the instant of the Big Bang, by what century would he be able to consume, digest, metabolize, and excrete the hypothetical hoagie? And would not this meal, by its very nature, exhaust time itself?

Dear Editors at Swank,

Your article on the sensitive areolas of large-breasted women was excellent. Also, thanks for the recipe for paella valenciana that you published in the October Swank. I’m no gourmet chef, but I made the dish for my girlfriend and after dinner she couldn’t keep her prosthetic hands off my veiny nine-inch chorizo.

I had once intended to write an entire novel while having to urinate very badly. I wanted to see how that need affected the style and tempo of my work. I had found, for instance, that when I’m writing about a character who’s in a Ph.D. program and I don’t have to urinate badly, I’ll have him do a regular three- or four-year program. But if I’m writing a novel and I have to urinate very very badly, then I’ll push the character through an accelerated Ph.D. program in perhaps only two years, maybe even a year.

In 1987, I enrolled in a 12-step program for people who pistol-whip their tailors. First I had to admit to myself that pistol-whipping my tailor was, in fact, a problem. Today I take life one day at a time. Each day that passes without my having pistol-whipped my tailor is a victory … a solid step toward recovery.

— Do you believe in God?

— Yes, sir.

— Do you believe in an anthropomorphic, vengeful, capricious God who can look down on one man and give him fabulous riches and look down on another and say “you’re history” and give him a cerebral hemorrhage?

— Yes, sir.

— You may take the stand. What is your full name?

— I am General Ramon Humberto Regaldo Rosa Cordoba Lopez.

— General Lopez, you are descended from a very illustrious family, is that not true?

— Yes, sir. My great-great-great-great-grandfather was a noble-man in Spain in the fifteenth century and it was he who first discovered that the atomized saliva of hunchbacks enhances the growth of flowers. He, in fact, retained a large staff of hunchbacks to sneeze on his tulips.

— General, are those your real nails?

— Sir?

— Are those your real fingernails?

— Yes, sir.

— General, you are a fucking liar!

— Objection, Your Honor!

— Your Honor, I can see, defense counsel can see, and the ladies and gentlemen of the jury can see that the General is wearing Lee Press-On Nails.

— Objection overruled. Continue.

— General, under direct examination you were asked to describe events that took place on the morning of April 26, 1987. You testified, and I quote: “I was a short thickset man with a fleshy, brutal face. I felt bad. I had been drinking heavily the previous night and the heat bothered me. My wife was sleeping. ‘Wake up, stupid,’ I snarled. I shook her and I kissed her savagely. ‘You stink,’ she sneered. ‘Your breath smells like the steam that rises off fresh vomit.’ I jabbed a syringe full of methamphetamine into her ass, which was covered with boils the size of potato pancakes.” Is that still an accurate account to the best of your knowledge?

— Yes, sir.

— General, it strikes me as exceedingly odd that, asked to describe a particular morning on a particular day, you would say, “I was a short, thickset man with a fleshy, brutal face.” Are we to understand by this that you were a short, thickset man with a fleshy, brutal face only on April 26, 1987?

— Objection, Your Honor. This kind of semantic nitpicking is an obvious form of harassment. The district attorney knows full well that the General was a short, thickset man with a fleshy, brutal face prior to April 26, 1987, that he was a short, thickset man with a fleshy, brutal face during April 26, 1987, and that he continues to be a short, thickset man with a fleshy, brutal face subsequent to April 26, 1987.

— Sustained.

— General, that afternoon, did you receive a call at the office from your wife?

— Yes, sir.

— What did she say?

— She said that she thought she’d been on her liquid formula diet long enough … that she was so light that the static electricity from the television set was pulling her across the floor toward the screen.

— And she called one more time later that afternoon?

— Yes, sir.

— And what did she say?

— She said that she didn’t have much time to talk, that she was tied to the railroad tracks and the Bullet Train was coming.

— And that was the last time you ever spoke to her?

— Yes, sir.

— General, one final question. Do you have any tattoos?

— Yes, sir.

— On what part of your body and of what?

— I have E = nhf (Max Planck’s formula for the energy in radiation) tattooed on my penile glans.

— General, you are a pathological fucking liar!!

— Objection!!

— Overruled.

— General, I’d like you to look at your penile glans and read to the court what’s tattooed on it.

— It says: d = 16t².

— Not E = nhf?

— No, sir.

— And what’s the significance of d = l6t²?

— It’s Galileo’s formula for the distance an object falls from its starting point as time elapses from the instant it’s dropped.

— Your Honor, I have no further questions.

— General Lopez, you may step down.

The giant awoke, got high on drugs, masturbated, and then went into town to forage for a human-flesh breakfast. He stopped at an intersection where his eye was caught by the puffy orange Day-Glo parka of a postmenopausal crossing guard. He knelt down and plucked up the screaming crossing guard in his fingers and dropped her into a gunnysack slung across his back. He surveyed the town until he discerned the bright orange regalia of another prey whom he captured and then on to the next intersection and then on to the next and the next and the next until his gunnysack was filled with squirming crossing guards. He returned home and laid the gunnysack on the counter. He urinated and then he put some music on the stereo; it was a kind of music I’d never heard before — a single high-pitched oscillating tone.

The giant peeled the crossing guards. After his breakfast, the floor was littered with puffy orange Day-Glo parkas.

Why crossing guards? Japanese scientists speculate that their conspicuous puffy orange Day-Glo parkas make them particularly attractive prey. Why postmenopausal women? Japanese scientists point to reduced estrogen levels. They think that estrogen is bitter to the tongue of the giant and that he simply finds the low-estrogen women tastier. But there’s an even more intriguing explanation. Estrogen deficiencies in postmenopausal women cause osteoporosis, which is characterized by brittle bones. In other words, postmenopausal women are crunchier.

Well, Marty, how does that sound to you? I’m ready for it, babe — I’m massaging IQ-enhancing balm into my temples and I’m loading up on Winstrol, the steroid that got sprinter Ben Johnson disqualified from the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul.

It’s a forty-minute hydrofoil ride from Hong Kong to Macao. Look out toward the horizon. There’s big Arleen rising up out of the water. Her white gown is fluttering violently in the wind, her lace veil is congested with sea spume. Isn’t she beautiful? Isn’t she just fucking absolutely beautiful?

Oh, one last question, Marty. My agent has a supernumerary nipple below and slightly medial to her right breast. The nipple produces approximately one watt of heat, about the same as that given off by a miniature Christmas tree bulb. Is this a standard energy output?

Yours very truly,

Mark Leyner