Et Tu, Babe

Chapter Four

The psychoactive effect of Lincoln’s morning breath was quite as astonishing as its aroma.

I could easily devote the balance of this memoir in its entirety to detailing the 12-hour psychedelic joyride/Götterdämmerung that Arleen and I experienced under the influence of the rancid vapor. But highlights shall suffice.

Sex was intense. Creamy lime cum. Then creamy apricot cum. Then a mint gel. And finally a cyan-yellow-magenta swirl that actually burst into flame. Now, I’m no stranger to chemically enhanced lovemaking. For instance, I’ve explored the romantic possibilities of the anabolic steroid Oral-Turinabol (OT), used in conjunction with Piracetam, a drug which increases endurance and enhances concentration. I’ve been known to revive a humdrum evening with a discreet injection of recombinant erythropoietin (rEPO), which raises the red blood-cell count so that more oxygen is carried through the circulatory system, for big performance gains. And every so often, I like to turn the lights down low, put something lush and dreamy on the stereo, and inject myself with blood plasma from hibernating woodchucks, which imparts to the lovemaking an extraordinarily serene and sylvan quality. But these paled in comparison to Lincoln’s morning breath.

Using a piece of charcoal and a sheet of hotel stationery, Arleen did a rubbing of the welter of protuberant veins on my biceps. Had the neuronal networks linking the left and right sides of our brains not undergone an amazing spurt of spontaneous hyperplasia as a result of our inhaling the gaseous relic of the Great Emancipator, surely the rubbing would not have achieved the mystical profundity that it held for us that afternoon. With Arleen’s permission (of course), I quote verbatim from her journal entry dated April 12, 1991: “We gazed at the rubbing for over an hour in awed silence. Like the intricate tesselations that decorate the walls and floors of the Alhambra, the veins on Mark’s biceps bespeak a cosmic meta-mind, a universal and primordial mentality of form, the interplay of energy and entropy that preceded life and will follow it. I will never be able to look at his biceps again without a sense of epiphany.”

Do you know the commercial where the heavily mustached old woman in a black shroud drinks strawberry Nestlé’s Quik and turns into this buxom bombshell in pasties and G-string, and she squats down for a second in a mud puddle, and when she gets up, her buttocks are covered with leeches, and Jesus appears holding a Barbie, and two beams of sparkling particles shoot from the eyes of the Barbie and vaporize the leeches, and the bombshell gets on her motorcycle, and pink florets of exhaust spurt from its tailpipe spelling out the words Be All That You Can Be? Try watching that on Lincoln’s morning breath. It’s un-fucking-believable.

How about the scene from On Golden Pond where Jane Fonda arrives from Omega Centauri to “visit” her father in the nursing home? You remember what it was like to watch her tenderly remove his toupee and then his hearing aid and his bifocals and his dentures and his truss, and then suddenly drain his cerebrospinal fluid through that horrible sucking proboscis? Well, imagine what it’s like watching that scene on Lincoln’s morning breath. It’s almost unbearable. But would you believe that the two of us were actually jumping up and down on the bed, cheering?

It was midnight. Arleen danced on the balcony clad only in white stretch-vinyl jeans and Walkman, bathed in moonlight. I’d been cooling out in the tub — the small fondue forks from my Swiss Army knife vibrating slightly in various acupuncture points on my physique. I focused my video camera beyond Arleen, and scanned the revamped cityscape. Every federal building — White House, Capitol, Executive and Congressional offices, Departments of State, Justice, Commerce, etc. — had been razed and rebuilt in an astonishing new style, each designed and constructed to simulate building blocks toppled in a toddler’s tantrum. And looming over the city, dramatically illuminated by floodlights, was a huge 1,000-foot white marble baby in diapers, arms akimbo, smugly admiring his own vandalism. The Überkind.

I twanged each impaled fondue fork and zoomed in on the monolithic tot’s chubby smirk.

“Überkind, Überkind, a thousand feet tall, what’s the best diet cola of them all?”

“Diet Pepsi. Diet Pepsi #1.”

(I was reading the Überkind’s marble lips through the zoom lens of my camcorder.)

“Thanks, babe,” I said, passing out.

In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Ed Gibbon’s gossipy tell-all chronicle of the West’s first millennium, Attila returns to his wooden palace beyond the Danube after sacking Aquileia, an Italian maritime city on the Adriatic coast, and declaims: “Sure we enriched ourselves with the spoils of a wealthy and effeminate people. Sure we stole their gold and jewels. Sure we stripped their palaces of splendid and costly furniture. We wantonly destroyed exquisite works of art. We defiled consecrated objects. We tortured and slaughtered their clergy. And let no man say that we did not imbibe tremendous quantities of Falernian wine and slake our sensual appetites on helpless, trembling captives — male and female. And yet, notwithstanding the amazing amount of fun I had in Aquileia, it’s so great to be home. My home … Here I don’t worry every minute about having to be the epitome of rapacious avarice and unrelenting cruelty. I can relax and be myself. How sweet to be in my large wooden palace again. How sweet to lie again in the warm beds of my innumerable wives.”

Could it be pure coincidence that the sentiments of one of history’s luminary strongmen and belletrists so perfectly mirror those of another who lives almost sixteen centuries later? I felt exactly the same way about returning home. Sure D.C. had been a blast. Sure the Lincoln’s morning breath had been primo shit. But it just felt so damn good to be back at headquarters.

And, as usual, the staff made quite a to-do over my homecoming. For the occasion, Desiree had outfitted the full detachment of bionic elderly bodyguards in the resplendent regalia of Hungarian hussars. Imagine: rimming the promenade that leads to the front entrance of Team Leyner HQ, a double column of testosterone-enhanced 90-year-old women with electrically activated polymer musculature in fur busbies with plumes and vivid yellow busby bags, sky blue dolman jackets, fur-lined pelisses slung over the shoulder, tight braided red trousers, and concertina-crinkled boots. Was I absolutely, 100 percent on-the-money when I hired Desiree Buttcake or what? I mean the woman just has this flair, this terrific panache about everything she does.

Frequently when I return from a tour or an extended holiday, the media is invited on the grounds to cover the festivities. But Baby Lago, my doe-eyed press attaché, had decided to keep this homecoming private. Ergo the huge banner depicting a just-awakened Honest Abe sitting up in bed and yawning, as his hapless valet succumbs and crumples to the floor.

* * *

With Shalimar snapping at our heels (Baby Lago’s three Lhasa apsos are each named after a classic fragrance by Guerlain: Shalimar, Samsara, and Mitsouko), we strode through the ebullient corridors of the new office annex, acknowledging the fervent salutations of word processors, proofreaders, and mailroom clerks as we headed toward the executive conference gallery, an elegantly appointed suite of terrazzo and aquamarine bulletproof glass.

Immediately upon returning from a trip, I convene a meeting of my inner circle to assess the current status of Team Leyner projects and to discuss opportunities or problems that may have arisen in my absence. Either Joe Casale or Desiree Buttcake will have prepared an agenda of matters they consider urgent and I’ll have usually punched a dozen or so items into my laptop while on the plane or in the limo. Do I always conduct my business with this kind of nonstop indefatigable intensity and zeal? You bet I do. Do I make any distinction whatsoever between my personal life and my career? No, sir, I do not. I work and I play at one speed: hyperdrive — Mach 9, adrenaline OD, total warp. It’s the only way I know how to live.

We get letters from kids all over the world asking everything from “What’s your favorite font?” to “How many egg whites do you eat a day?” But you’d be surprised at how many young people write in with the same basic question: “How do I know if I’m great or if I’m the victim of megalomaniacal delusions?” My standard reply is: “Sorry, kid, you’re probably the victim of megalomaniacal delusions because only an infinitesimal percentage of the species is truly destined for greatness.” Since I was a small child, I’ve had the feeling that simply by clenching my jaw and visualizing an explosion, I could blow up planets or stars in galaxies thousands of light-years from earth. Megalomaniacal delusion or fact? I’ve been lucky enough over the past few years to have developed a very close friendship with the acclaimed theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking. I first became personally acquainted with Stephen when his secretary wrote a letter to my editor at Vintage Books, to say that Hawking didn’t feel completely comfortable publishing A Brief History of Time until I’d reviewed the book’s fundamental theorem and given my critical imprimatur. Luckily I was between projects and happy to oblige Stephen and his publisher, Bantam Books. Recently, I was seated ringside next to Stephen at the Evander Holyfield/George Foreman bout in Atlantic City, and I mentioned my suspicion that I had the ability to destroy celestial bodies simply by willing it, and not only did Stephen find this plausible in the abstract, but actually correlated it with several heretofore unexplained Supernovae.

I brought my fist down on the conference room table with peremptory authority.

“Let’s get busy, folks. Joe, what do you have for me, babe?”

“Well, first of all, Mr. Leyner, Ken Dietrich — he’s VP Marketing for Pepsico Inc. — called about the agreement wherein you mention Diet Pepsi in a new book and Pepsico remunerates Team Leyner with $750,000 in cash, plus $250,000 in stock. He basically wants to know if we’ve made any progress on the product insert.”

“Tell Dietrich it’s done, not to worry about it anymore, and to get the check in the mail. What else?”

“Mr. Leyner, we have a minor personnel problem. Y’know our regulation prohibiting any Team Leyner employee from earning income outside the organization? Well, one of the mailroom clerks is selling marijuana grown on pieces of sod he’s removed from various major league baseball stadiums. He’s got Wrigley Wiggly, Fenway Dream Bean, Comiskey Park and Ride … he’s even selling marijuana grown on stadium sod from vintage years, like 1969 Shea Stadium Sinsemilla. I didn’t want to make a decision about the guy until you got back.”

“Eighty-six him, babe. No freelancing means no freelancing, no exceptions. And impound the sod.”

“OK, Mr. Leyner.”

“Joe, any paternity suits this week?”

“Only two, Mr. Leyner. Both women are members of the Ecuadorian Olympic Equestrian Team, and their attorney’s hired a forensic DNA-fingerprinting laboratory to provide incontestable evidence that you’re the father.”

“As soon as the meeting’s over, Joe, I want you to Fed Ex the director of the lab a Team Leyner belt buckle and insignia magnet, and an official Team Leyner trivet. OK, babe?”

“Consider it done, Mr. Leyner.”

“Anything else, Joe?”

“Two more things. While you were away, a Japanese industrialist named Takeshi Oshiro, who owns the Uchiyama Paper Manufacturing Company, paid $19,250 in a public auction at Sotheby’s for one of your discarded deodorant sticks with a stray armpit hair and — this is such a weird coincidence — he’s hired the same DNA-fingerprinting lab to confirm that it’s your armpit hair, and if it’s not, Sotheby’s has agreed to refund the 19K and change. And lastly, I just wanted to remind you that this coming Friday they’re shooting the commercial for Becker Surgical Devices and they need you on the set at about ten A.M.”

“Thanks, Joe, good job. Desiree, you’re up.”

“Well, first of all, I’m happy to report that we’re close to completing a comprehensive demographic analysis of your readership, which means that now we’ll be able to develop software that can alter your texts depending on which regional or even local audiences we’re targeting. For instance, in a forthcoming novel, you have a giant who eats postmenopausal crossing guards. OK — we now know that you have a rabidly enthusiastic following in the rural northwest, but in the rural northwest they don’t have crossing guards because generally kids out there don’t walk to school. So with the new demographically based software, the computer can flag something like that and change the postmenopausal crossing guards to postmenopausal school-bus drivers or whatever is appropriate for the rural northwest edition. It’s yet another way of making readers feel as if you’re writing just for them.”

“That’s really cool.”

“It’s also a pleasure to report that the initial response to the 1-800-T-LEYNER number has been just fabulous.”

“What’s the deal on that, Dez? You get a choice of different messages when you call or what?”

“A fan calls 1-800-T-LEYNER and — using a touch-tone phone, of course — dials 1 to hear an excerpt from your upcoming book, 2 for your most intimate thoughts about weight-lifting, 3 for dating advice, 4 for an up-close-and-personal tidbit from Arleen, and 5 for a cute anecdote about Carmella. And the messages change every week. It’s $2 for the first minute, $1 for every additional minute. Fans under 18, please don’t call without your parents’ permission.”

“Excellent stuff, Desiree.”

“Mark, based on the notes that you made before you left for D.C., we’ve worked up a draft of the press release you want put out, and I just want to make sure that we’re all in synch here. You basically want to inform book critics that, in the event of a bad review, Team Leyner will not be held responsible for the wrath of fans who see you as the articulator of their vision and who see your detractors as a threat to their way of life. Consequently, Team Leyner cannot be held responsible for the physical safety of the reviewer and his or her family, in the event of an unfavorable notice. Is that about the gist of it?”

“That’s it exactly.”

“And you want this put out in general release?”

“I want this sent directly to our friends themselves — to the Lehmann-Haupts and the Kakutanis, to the Yardleys, to the Wolcotts and the Atlases and the Raffertys … understood?”

“Understood.”

“I wane everyone here to remember something. Team Leyner plays hardball. If anyone — and I don’t care who it is, I don’t care if it’s my own grandmother — if anyone attempts to impede the fulfillment of our destiny, we fuck with them big time.”

“We fuck with them big time,” everyone chorused.

“Anything else, Dez?”

“This is somewhat of a corollary to what we’ve just been discussing. Joe and I have been analyzing a trend we see developing in media coverage of Team Leyner, and we’ve come up with a means of countering what we perceive as an incipient problem that could become dangerous unless we act decisively now. There are, increasingly, those in the media who would twist the work we’re doing in our writers’ vocational counseling intensives into something sinister. Scurrilous rumors abound about your supposed steroid use, your messianic fantasies, your weakness for Hispanic women … Joe and I propose a public relations program designed to resuscitate your image in the media. We propose that you engage in a well-publicized personal campaign to help agoraphobic housewives with their poetry. We see two options here: video teleconferencing, which enables you to counsel agoraphobic poetesses wherever they live without having to leave headquarters — signals are relayed through a satellite over the Yukon to a ground station in northern Michigan, to a satellite over the West Indies and finally to a fiber-optic link in Atlanta. Or you can simply visit the women at their homes. What do you think?”

“I think I’ll make housecalls.”

“You like the proposal?”

“Desiree, Joe — it’s top-notch work. I’m proud of you both.”

“Thanks, Mark.”

“Thanks, Mr. Leyner.”

“Baby Lago, why don’t we finish up with your concert report.”

“OK. Well, we have Libidinal Hegemony at Maxwell’s tonight. And tomorrow night at CBGB’s, there’s Fried Wind and Dick Cheez. And all three bands are comping you and anyone from Team Leyner who wants to go.”

“Thanks, sweetie. Folks, it’s getting late. I’m sure you’re all tired. So I’d like to just say good night, thanks again for all the hard work you’re doing, and … it’s great to be back.”

“Mr. Leyner …”

“Yes, Joe?”

“Mr. Leyner, do you have a few minutes? There’s something kinda private I’d like to talk to you about.”

“Sure, babe. Why don’t you meet me at The Triggerman in about ten minutes. We’ll have a few drinks and talk.”

The Triggerman is a bar/pistol range that we opened for Team Leyner staffers so that, at the end of a long day, there’d be a place “on-campus” where they could have a few drinks and shoot firearms — a place for them to blow off steam. I like to come down to The Triggerman after a late night meeting to unwind and maybe chat with some of the lower-echelon employees with whom I don’t normally interact.

I’d just emptied a magazine of 125-grain jacketed hollow-points from my six-and-a-half-inch.44 Auto Mag, when I noticed Joe on the bar stool next to mine.

“Mr. Leyner, I’m in love.”

“Hold on a second, Joe,” I said, removing my ear protectors. “You’re what?”

“I’m in love.”

I ordered two triple Chivases and another fifteen rounds of hollowpoints.

“In love with whom, babe?”

“Mr. Leyner, I’m in love with Desiree. Y’know, we’ve been working really closely together on that press release for the book critics and on the PR program and … I just fell totally in love with her. And the trouble is that I know she doesn’t feel the same way about me. I mean she’s such an incredibly beautiful woman, and I … well, I’m not trying to be self-deprecating, but I’m not like traditionally handsome. And this unrequited stuff makes me feel like a bit of an A-hole.”

Joe will not say the word asshole. He says, instead, “A-hole.” Similarly, he will not utter the epithet douche-bag, preferring the more delicate “D-bag.” “Go develop E of the S, you FS-munching MG-head” is “Go develop elephantiasis of the scrotum, you foreskin-munching Merv Griffin — head”—invective overheard when a careless tailor accidentally pinned one of Joe’s flippers to his inseam while fitting him for a Team Leyner soft ball uniform.

“Look, Joe, there are all kinds of women, and I truly believe that there’s someone out there for everyone. Just take a look at some of these personal ads here.” I reached across the bar for the newspaper. “For example, look at this one: ‘Do you wear peasant blouses and billowy gypsy skirts? I’m a drooling, catheterized, cataract-eyed white supremacist from Baton Rouge who has three to four lucid hours a day. Let’s go underground where Zionist water-fluoridators and Russian space debris can’t find us.’ What do you want to bet that this guy gets a couple of hundred responses?”

“Well, I’m not interested in other women. I’m interested in Desiree.”

“Joe, check this out,” I said, handing him my first target, which had just arrived at the bar. I’d managed to achieve, at a range of 50 yards, a four-inch seven-round group on the black of the target, with most of the shots less than two inches apart. “Not bad, huh?”

“Really great, Mr. Leyner,” Joe said morosely.

“C’mon, Joe, lighten up, would ya? Maybe there’s a way for you to somehow provoke Dez into feeling romantic about you.”

“Provoke her how?”

“Well, I can only tell you what works for me, babe. I take my clothes off. Women go nuts. I know that sounds stupid, but it’s how I do it that’s important — it’s the style, it’s the head trip I get into. Each item of clothing — leather blazer, T-shirt, snake-skin boots, jeans, socks, and finally underpants — is removed as if I were stripping for an audience at a maximum security prison for criminally insane women. With that masturbatory simultaneity of languor and urgency, I whip the floor with my silk bikini briefs that have been stretched grotesquely out of shape after a day of restraining my restless genitals, and I hear — in my head — the horrific cacophony of gasps, moans, ululations, stomping feet, shrieks, sobs, pleas … y’know what I’m saying?”

“I guess so, Mr. Leyner, but I don’t know if I could—”

“Listen, the thing you’ve got to be careful about is the effect something like that can have on a woman. I was with this notary public Felice Ruiz once, and I’m doing the whole bit and I get to the part where I’m whipping the floor with my silk undies, and I guess my body’s just too much for the poor girl — she goes apoplectic on me. She’s hyperventilating, taking in giant gulps of air, foaming at the mouth. Then she’s purple in the face, clutching at her throat, clutching at her chest, like she’s having some kind of seizure. She falls to the ground and, writhing, manages to point to a cabinet in the armoire. I rush to the cabinet, open it, and there are two bottles, gin and vodka. I make a split-second decision — vodka. I bring the bottle to Felice, who’s rolling on the ground, tearing at her hair. I show her the vodka bottle. She shakes her head violently back and forth, kicking her feet. I rush back to the armoire and retrieve the bottle of gin. Felice is trying to say something, and I put my ear to her lips, but her mumbling and grunting are completely unintelligible. I quickly produce a pad and a pen. Can you write? I ask. She nods, and I hand her the writing implements. Her body jerking spasmodically, she manages to scrawl: Singapore Sling. Now, a Singapore Sling is a fairly elaborate cocktail; it involves shaking together gin, cherry brandy, lemon juice, and powdered sugar, pouring it into a tall glass filled with ice and topping it with soda water. But I concoct the drink as rapidly as I can, bring it to the convulsant Felice, tilt the highball glass to her lips, and let her drink. After a few sips, her paroxysms begin to subside, and she’s eventually able to return to the sofa. So what I’m trying to say is that you have to exercise some degree of caution here … are you following me, babe?”

“Yes, Mr. Leyner.”

“Joe, can I get you another drink?”

“No thanks, Mr. Leyner, I think I should get to bed. I’ve got a pretty full schedule in the morning.”

“OK, babe. Sweet dreams. And thanks again for all your effort.”

I love that guy.

I ordered an anisette with three spent shells. The shells, still muzzle-hot, warm the anisette for a nice nightcap.

I felt good.

The first applicant whom we accepted for the agoraphobic housewife-poet program was Mary Elizabeth Thuring, whose manuscript Coarse-Cut Marmalade Enema Binge opened with the erotic sonnet “The Wilted Crudités.”

Eyeballs stew in hot sockets

During long sexual dream of bearded

Blacksmith in crotchless high-bib overalls

Hammering hot metal on an anvil.

Funny … isn’t this Belmar?

I lie ungarnished in the sand,

Sweet carrion for beach hyenas.

The plaited strands of his licorice noose

Become sticky in the heat of the sun.

Soon thousands of flies form a buzzing black garland

Around the neck of the condemned candy cowboy.

Yes, Emily Dickinson,

Once I did love a Pakistani badminton champion.

You got a problem with that?

I spent some six-and-a-half hours with Mary at her lovely home, poring over her manuscript, rearranging the order of the poems for maximum effect, suggesting various emendations and deletions (for example, I cut the following two lines: “Whiskey-swilling itinerant beauticians/Wax the bikini line of Isis” from the first stanza of “The Wilted Crudités”).

When I return to Team Leyner HQ from Mary Elizabeth Thuring’s home, it’s approximately 5:20 A.M.

Arleen is being led out the front door, her wrists handcuffed behind her, surrounded by FBI agents. A miscellany of Team Leyner employees is milling around, smoking cigarettes, muttering, glaring, cursing. Joe Casale is screaming at the top of his lungs one of his cryptic algebraic curses: “Go MW your PGs, you pimply D’ed, CL-flapping, U-quaffing YIs!” My immediate chain of thought is: missing fiction workshop participants … federal kidnapping indictments … prison.

I throw one of the agents — a burly guy about 6′ 6″, 275 pounds — up against a column and slap him hard across the face about a dozen times.

His playmates draw their weapons.

“You gonna shoot me, you motherfuckin’ morons? There’d be riots in every major city of this country!”

“Holster your weapons, men,” orders the senior agent. “Holster your weapons!”

“That’s better,” I snarl. “Now, what’s the fucking problem here?”

“Mark Leyner and Arleen Portada, you are both being charged with theft of a federally protected bio-historical specimen.”

Ahhhh, I thought to myself, greatly relieved, this has nothing to do with kidnapping fiction workshop participants, it’s the Lincoln’s morning breath. It’s just a bullshit larceny rap.

“Joe, get Gary Knobloch [chief corporate counsel for Team Leyner] over here right away — OK, babe. The rest of you get back to work. Everything’s going to be all right.”

* * *

Knobloch was leafing through the U.S. Criminal Code.

“Let’s see … Tailgating a Presidential Motorcade … Talking Dirty to a Congressional Page … Terrorizing a U.S. Mail Carrier … Testifying Falsely Against a Fetus … ah, here we go. Theft of a Federally Protected Bio-Historical Specimen. First offense: Weekly punitive confiscation. Second offense: Removal of the nasal septum, leaving offender with one large nostril. Third offense: Underwater spear-gun execution by scuba-diving firing squad. Listen, Mark, I don’t like telling you what to do — you’re my favorite writer, you’re my favorite client, you’re the godfather of my two children — but I strongly advise you to plead guilty on this thing and live with punitive confiscation once a week. If we go to trial and there’s any way they can prove that you did something like this before, you could be walking around with one big hole in the middle of your face. Wouldn’t make a very attractive book jacket photo, kid.”

“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.

“That whole thing was bullshit, wasn’t it … there’s no such thing as awakura. Right?”

I couldn’t stop laughing.

She put me in a hammerlock and held my head underwater.

“Right?” she repeated.

Bubbles of laughter clustered at the surface.

She let me go.

“I’m sorry,” I gasped. “Friends? C’mon … friends for life?”

She was laughing now herself.

“You’re a fucking dickhead, y’know that? What did I just eat anyway?”

“Can’t say, Patricia … hey, look, we’re almost at the island.”

“Yeah, just a little more. Do you have those pay movies in your room?”

“We don’t even have television sets. I’m telling you, the Green Isle is no-frills.”

“Well, last night there was a really cool movie — it was called Miracle Worker 2200. It’s like a remake of The Miracle Worker, but it takes place in the year 2200 and Anne Sullivan implants all these electronic microprosthetic devices into Helen Keller, like this infrared sensor to pick up hot spots — y’know, heat sources — and this voice synthesizer so that she can sound like anything she wants to — y’know, like a flute or an electric piano or an Australian dingo or anything. Y’know, it’s so amazing when you think about what science can do.”

We had reached the shore … Kana Island. Before it was condemned by the government, its medieval insane asylum was considered a true house of horrors. There were persistent reports of torture, cannibalism, human sacrifice, and bizarre medical experimentation. As we emerged from the water, we observed each other’s nakedness in the moonlight and we embraced.

“Do you get collagen injections or are those your real lips?” I asked her.

“Are you serious?”

For the first time that night, I had the feeling that she thought there was something wrong with me.

We walked up the road to the asylum and entered through its huge gates of rusted iron.

As soon as we got into the building, we could hear the rats, thousands of them, their scampering claws reverberating through the empty wards.

“Let’s go right to the warden’s quarters — they’re on the top floor. Can you walk up twenty flights? Can you walk up twenty flights in an insane asylum … naked?” I asked.

She gave me that look again.

“What’s the difference? Twenty flights are twenty flights, naked or clothed. What’s wrong with you?”

We climbed to the top floor of the asylum. There was a utility room across from the stairway. We walked in and I strode directly to the refrigerator and opened it.

“Look, Patricia,” I said, pointing to a harmonica in the freezer.

She took it in her hands. And she put her full lips on the ice-cold harmonica and she blew. A plaintive arpeggio echoed throughout the building and thousands of rats began making their way toward the top floor.

“You knew exactly where that refrigerator was … how did you know that?” Patricia asked me, trembling.

I put my arm around her shoulder and led her to the warden’s quarters.

“Patricia, look.”

I pointed to a crudely lettered sign above the door.

It said, “Green Isle.”

She began screaming.

And so did I.

“Oh wow, Mark, that was great! And it was so spooky the way you read it!”

“I’m really glad you liked it, Baby Lago. It’s called ‘The Warden of Green Isle’ by Imelda Kabakow, one of the premier genre-restricted authors in North America. I hope it doesn’t give you nightmares.”

“Oh, I love nightmares!”

“Listen, it’s late, and I have to be up pretty early in the morning.”

“Oh yeah, they’re filming that commercial tomorrow, right?”

“Yeah. Baby Lago, I wanted to thank you for all the work you did in Tokyo negotiating the lease on that 500-story supersky-scraper headquarters for Team Leyner Nippon. You did a great job.”

“It was fun!”

I bowed.

“Good night, Baby Lago-san.”

“I guess you could say that I like things ‘natural.’ By ‘natural’ I mean ‘naturally selected’ as in Darwin, i.e., organisms with advantageous mutations are likely to outcompete the original forms, gradually outnumbering and replacing them in the population … that sort of thing. Sure I have my tender moments — I like the silent white dawn after a night’s heavy snowfall, sometimes I like to say something sarcastic to the person making my submarine sandwich or to the person slicing meat for my gyro just to see them smile — maybe it’s their first smile of the day — but basically I’m pretty contemptuous of people, because most people are weak and I find weakness pretty sickening. I like my men, my women, my coffee, my cocktails — I guess everything in my life — STRONG. That’s why I can offer my unequivocal endorsement of Armor-Guard High Security Barbed Wire Fences. The choice of maximum security institutions across the country, Armor-Guard fences feature substantially longer barbs with additional barb points for superior intimidation and entanglement capabilities—”

“Cut! Cut! Hold it, Mr. Leyner.”

“What’s the problem?”

“We’re getting a weird glare off that section of barbed wire over there … why don’t we take a break and we’ll adjust the lighting over there.”

“OK, babe.”

“Hi, I’m Mark Leyner. With my reputation as a tough guy and best-selling author, I’m asked to do commercials — well, as you just saw — for all kinds of ‘tough’ products like penal fencing, cattle prods, bulletproof vests, etc. But when it comes to my family and my friends and my fans — those I cherish most dearly — I can be a real ‘softie.’ That’s why when Becker Surgical Devices asked me to tell people about their balloon angioplasty equipment, I said I’d love to. There’s nothing good about ‘tough’ stenosed arteries. When plaque accumulates, inhibiting the flow of blood to vital organs, the life of someone you love, perhaps even your own life, may be threatened. And I don’t know about you, but I love life.

“Some people are preoccupied with the symbolism of their dreams and with who they might have been in past incarnations and with where their souls are going after they die, but I never think about any of that shit. I just love this earth. I love the morning. When the first morning light hits my eye, I feel like a new appliance that’s been unpacked and plugged in for the first time. But my life is beautiful. Perhaps that’s why I love the morning light. I have money. I have a voluptuous wife. And I have fans. People who have ugly lives often hate the morning; it means the beginning of all the pain and the toil and the flashbacks all over again, and they try to bear the unbearable until twilight, which comes on slowly with the physical sensation of a warm barbiturate liquid, and of course the black silent night — phone off the hook, doors bolted — is the full-blown anodyne. That’s the circadian saga of the ugly life, in brief. When I awaken, I go outside naked. The sun — the perpetual hydrogen bomb — is my shower, and it galvanizes me, it freaks me out. A pirouetting monster emitting guttural expressions of ecstasy in the radiance of the sun …

“What’s a typical day like for me?

“It’s the late afternoon, a married woman in her forties pours the heavy syrup from a can of peaches over her breasts and looks at me. I’m sitting on a chair across the room, critiquing her masochistic poetry. When I say good-bye to her later, it’s night. Under her hot halogen lamp, oil oozes from the pores of her ‘T-zone.’

“ ‘Why wouldn’t you fuck me?’ she asks.

“ ‘I’m married. And I don’t fuck the women I counsel. You asked me to take my clothes off so that you could see my body and I did that. Why don’t you fuck your husband when he gets home?’

“ ‘He’s not coming home tonight and if he was I wouldn’t fuck him. I’m too angry to fuck him.’

“ ‘What are you angry at him about?’

“ ‘He’s cheating on me. It’s in the poems. Couldn’t you figure that out?’

“I shrugged and started putting my clothes back on.

“ ‘How’d you get that scar over your right nipple?’

“ ‘I had an Uncle Jack. He was my mentor; he taught me to be a writer and to be a man. He said that when you write you march through the reader’s mind like Sherman marching to the sea and you burn every neuron and synapse as you go. He taught me a secret style of Kung Fu that’s based on ballroom dancing steps — the Foxtrot, Lindy, Waltz, etc. — but that’s lethal and terrifying. He had a girlfriend, a cocktail waitress at a nightclub. Her name was Adele. One night Jack had to go meet some business associates and he left Adele and me at his place. We were drinking heavily. At some point Adele said that she’d recently read something of mine in a magazine and that she really found the style exhilarating and she asked me if I’d take off my clothes so she could see my body. I said OK. Just then Jack came home. He was drunk. He went for me with his knife. I swiveled around and did a modified mambo step and kicked the knife out of his hand and then did a polka backfist and knocked him cold. Adele screamed, pointing to my chest. Jack had slashed me over my right nipple on his first lunge. That’s the scar story.’

“She walked me out to the carport.

“Her glazed breasts shimmered in the moonlight.

“Someone had spray-painted ‘Death to America!’ on my car.

“Not a pretty sight — especially considering the fact that it was a brand-new 1997 Ferrari Testarossa Spider with less than 100 miles on the odometer — not a pretty sight at all … but then, coronary arteries clogged with atherosclerotic plaque aren’t a very pretty sight either. And that’s where Becker Surgical Devices comes in. Becker Surgical Devices, makers of fine percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty catheter tubes and balloons, is the overwhelming choice of cardiologists across the country. And remember, Becker Surgical Devices is the official balloon angioplasty instrument supplier for Team Leyner.”

“Cut! That was perfect, Mr. Leyner! Absolutely perfect!”