The Tetherballs of Bougainville

PART ONE THE VIVISECTION OF MIGHTY MOUSE

My father is strapped to a gurney, about to die by lethal injection, when the phone rings. Everyone — warden, lawyers, rabbi, Dad — looks at the red wall phone. That’s the one that rings when the governor calls to pardon a condemned convict. But when it rings a second time, they realize that it’s not the old-fashioned tintinnabulation of a wall phone, but the high-pitched electronic chirp of a cellular. I reach into my jacket pocket and answer: “Hello? [It’s my agent.] What’s up?” Everyone’s giving me this indignant glare like, “Hey, we got an execution here,” which I deflect with the international sign for “Bear with me, please”—the upraised frontal palm (gesturally closer to the Hollywood Indian’s gesticulated salutation than to the traffic cop’s “Stop,” which is more peremptory and thrust farther from the body). I’m nodding: “Uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh … That’s great! OK, I’ll talk to you later.” I slip the phone back inside my jacket.

“Good news?” my father asks.

“Yeah, kind of,” I reply. “It looks like I’m going to win the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo / Oshimitsu Polymers America Award.”

“What’s that?” the doctor says, retaping the cannula in my father’s arm and sliding the IV drip stand closer to the gurney.

“It’s a very prestigious, very generous award given every year for the best screenplay written by a student at Maplewood Junior High School — it’s $250,000 a year for the rest of your life.”

“Jesus fucking Christ!” Dad exclaims.

“Mazel tov,” says the rabbi.

“Whoa … hold on, folks,” I say. “There’s one big problem here — there’s no screenplay. I haven’t written word one. I don’t even have a title yet.”

The warden — an absolutely stunning woman in a décolleté evening gown — eyes me dubiously. “How’d you win the award if there’s no screenplay?”

“That’s the advantage of having a powerful agent,” I say.

Everyone nods in agreement.

“Trouble is — I gotta get this movie written soon.… Shit, I could really use a title. I can’t write without a title, y’know, I gotta be able to say to myself, I’m working on Such and Such.

“How does Like Lemon-Lime Sports Drink for Carob Protein Bar strike you?” the executioner asks.

“I thought of that myself,” I say, “but it’s a little too close to Like Water for Chocolate.”

“Mark, what about Double Life: The Shattering Affair Between Chief Judge Sol Wachtler and Socialite Joy Silverman?” the warden suggests.

“Too long.”

Dad pipes up. “I’ve got the title,” he says decisively.

“What?”

“Eventually, Even Mighty Mouse Is Vivisected by the Dour Bitch in a White Lab Coat.”

There’s a long silence.

“I love it,” the rabbi finally says. “It’s haunting. It’s archetypal. It speaks to the collective unconscious. Every culture has, if not a full-fledged myth, than a mythological motif involving the man/rodent — strong, honest, resolute in his convictions, striving diligently to excel in life — who, in the end, is confronted by the merciless, omnipotent giantess — a sort of postpartum, premenstrual proto-Streisand — with opulently manicured and fiendishly honed fingernails, who plucks him up and slices him open from his Adam’s apple to his pubic bone. Eventually, Even Mighty Mouse Is Vivisected by the Dour Bitch in a White Lab Coat,” he reprises, gesturing as if at a marquee.

“C’mon, that’s much too long,” I say.

“Bullshit,” rebuts my father. “The length is irrelevant. Moviegoers condense titles regardless. They called One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest ‘Cuckoo’s Nest.’ Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory became ‘Willy Wonka.’ Steroids Made My Friend Jorge Kill His Speech Therapist: An ABC Afterschool Special was simply ‘Steroids.’ So they’ll call this ‘Vivisected’ or ‘Dour Bitch.’ But you want succinct? How about No Exit Wound. Sort of Jean-Paul Sartre meets Jean-Claude Van Damme. Or you want a real contemporary, John Singleton sort of feel? What about something like Yo! You’re My Dope Dealer Not My Thesis Adviser. If I Wanted Your Opinion About My Dissertation, I’d Have Asked for It, Motherfucker!”

I’m starting to get a little impatient. I glance at my watch, a Tag Heuer chronograph. “Listen, I gotta get over to the library and try to come up with some ideas. Can we, uh …” I make the international sign for lethal injection: thumb, index, and middle fingers mime squeezing hypodermic and then head lolls to the side with tongue sticking out of mouth.

The executioner and operations officer check and recheck the IV line and make a final inspection of the delivery module, which is mounted on the wall and holds the three lethal doses in syringes, each of which is fitted beneath a weighted piston.

Everyone’s being especially punctilious here because of an accident that occurred recently at an execution over in Missouri, where leaks in the octagonal gas chamber’s supposedly airtight seals allowed cyanide gas to seep into the witness room, killing ten people, including members of the condemned criminal’s victims’ families. Only writer William T. Vollmann, who was covering the execution for Spin magazine, walked away unscathed.

Dad beckons me to come closer. “Here, son, I want you to have this,” he says, handing me his ring, a flawless oval Burmese sapphire flanked by heart-shaped diamonds.

Something about the way he contorts his body against the leather restraints in order to remove the ring reminds me of my first memory of my parents naked. I must have been three or four — they’d just gotten out of the shower and were toweling each other off. My father’s entire body was emblazoned with tattoos of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings.

“What’s that, Daddy?” I remember asking.

“That’s the Kaufmann house at Bear Run, Pennsylvania, that’s Taliesin West in Phoenix, that’s the Johnson Wax building in Racine, Wisconsin, and that’s the Guggenheim,” he explained, pointing, his head twisted backward over his shoulder.

“Why’d you get those?” I asked.

“I was drunk, I guess …” he shrugged.

My mom’s buttocks were tattooed with an illustration of an 1,800-pound horned Red Brindle bull crashing through the front window of a Starbucks coffee bar and charging a guy who’s sitting there sipping a cappuccino and reading M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled. The caption reads: “Life’s a Bitch and Then You’re Gored to Death.”

Lately I’ve been trying to fix Mom up with the lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who helped prepare an amicus-curiae brief in support of my father’s last appeal. Mom spends most of her time these days dressed in black, fingering her rosary beads, sighing, daubing away tears with a black, lace-trimmed handkerchief, and doing Goldschläger shots — so I thought it might be a good idea for her to start getting out more. My dad’s family is really pissed at me because they think Mom shouldn’t start dating until after the execution, and they’re also mad because I sold some nude photos of Dad to this bondage magazine and they claim to have a right to some of the proceeds, and my position is basically: I tied him up, I took the photographs, they’re my property, profits from their sale belong to me, end of discussion.

It’s time. The superintendent reads the death warrant.

Everyone turns to the wall phone, giving it one last opportunity to ring.

“If you think the governor’s gonna call with a stay of execution, you’re nuts,” I say. “She’s probably not even awake yet. It’s only noon.”

(They’d lowered the voting age to 15 in order to bring the highest-spending demographic sector into the electorate. This resulted in the election of a 17-year-old as governor. It’s been a real joke. At her inauguration, the chief justice had to make her remove her Walkman and spit out a huge multicolored bolus of Skittles so she could hear and repeat the oath of office. And you know how barristers and judges in England wear those white powdered perukes? Our new governor signed an order requiring the lawyers and judges in New Jersey to wear these big-hair wigs — y’know like mall hair. You should have seen my father’s trial — I’m telling you, it was a joke.)

My father is not an evil person. He just can’t do PCP socially. At the risk of oversimplification, I think that’s always been his basic problem. Some people are capable of being social phencyclidine users and some people are not, and my father unfortunately falls into the latter category. Normally Dad’s a very sweet, patient, benevolent guy, but when he’s dusted, he’s a completely different person — belligerent, volatile, extremely violent.

I remember once he was helping me with some homework — I was in the third grade, writing a report comparing the ritualistic sacrifice of prisoners of war during the Aztec festival Tlacaxipeualiztli (the Feast of the Flaying of Men) with recent fraternity hazing deaths at the Fashion Institute of Technology — and Dad was being just extraordinarily helpful in terms of conceptualizing the theme of the report and then with the research and editing (he was a fastidious grammarian), and at some point the doorbell rang and Dad went downstairs. Apparently it was some of his “dust buddies,” because he disappeared for about a half hour and when he returned to my room, he was transformed. Sweating, drooling, constricted pupils, slurred speech — the whole profile.

We started working again, and all of a sudden Dad grabbed the mouse and highlighted a line on the computer screen, and he said, “That’s a nonrestrictive modifier. It needs to be set off by commas.”

I probably said something to the effect of, “It’s not a big deal, Dad, let’s just leave it.”

At which point he went completely berserk. “It’s a nonrestrictive adjectival phrase. It’s not essential to the meaning of the Sentence’s main clause. It should be set off by commas. It is a big deal!”

And he grabbed a souvenir scrimshaw engraving tool, which I’d gotten at the New Bedford Whaling Museum gift shop several summers ago, and he plunged it into his left thigh, I’d say at least two to three inches deep.

“All right, I’ll put the commas in,” I said.

Dad evinced absolutely no sensation of pain, impervious as he was, thanks to the PCP. If anything, impaling his thigh with the scrimshaw graver seemed to mollify him. He certainly made no attempt nor manifested the slightest desire to remove it, and later, while we were trying to come up with a more colloquial way of saying “bound to the wheel of endless propitiation of an unloving and blood-hungry divinity,” Dad absently twanged the embedded tool as he mused.

Another fascinating and potentially mitigating factor emerged during my father’s trial for killing a security guard who’d apprehended him shoplifting a Cuisinart variable-speed hand blender and a Teflon-coated ice-cream scooper from a vendor’s kiosk at an outlet in Secaucus. (The imposition of the death sentence in New Jersey requires “first-degree murder with heinous circumstances.” In this case, it was determined that the weapons used in the commission of the homicide were the purloined implements themselves — the hand blender and the ice-cream scooper. The lower torso of the security guard, who’d pursued my father down into a subterranean parking garage, had been almost totally puréed, the upper torso rendered into almost a hundred neat balls.) Unbeknownst to me, Dad had an extremely rare hypersensitivity to minute levels of gamma radiation. An eminent astrohygienist from Bergen County Community College testified that once a day there’s a 90-minute gamma-ray burst originating from colliding comets within the Milky Way. She was able to link each of my father’s most violent episodes (including the grisly murder of the security guard) to a corresponding gamma-ray burst. My father’s intolerance was so acute, she contended, that exposure to as little as 15 picorads of gamma radiation resulted in extreme neurological disturbances.

Unfortunately, the jury in its verdict and the judge in his sentence proved unsympathetic to this theory. In retrospect, I think that the spectacle of my father’s attorneys in their big-hair mall wigs leading witnesses through hours of arcane testimony about Gamma-Ray Sensitivity Syndrome tended to damage his cause.

My father has always been a good provider. And in terms of a work ethic, he’s been a wonderful role model. He taught me that every morning — no matter how you feel physically and no matter what mood you’re in — you have to get yourself out of bed, shower, shave, put on a dark suit, hood your face in a black ski mask, and go out into the world and make some money.

Back when I was in the fifth grade, Dad had just come off one of his best years — he’d been swindling insurance companies by faking auto accidents and claiming nonexistent “soft-tissue” injuries, and also traveling around the country, using a high-voltage taser stun gun to rob Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes winners — and we all moved to St.-Leonard-de-Noblat in the Limousin region of France. This was supposed to be a very chic place. In the late nineteenth century they’d flooded 50 acres of pasture to create a beautiful lake with three islands. So when Mom and Dad gave me some brochures and I read about the man-made lake, I thought whoa! excellent! swimming, water-skiing, fishing. But the neighborhood had really gone downhill lately. Several large ancien-régime families, all suffering from lead poisoning, had moved in recently. There were two contending explanations for their condition: one, that they’d been eating foie gras from pottery finished with lead glaze (goose liver soaks up lead like the proverbial sponge), and two (this is the one that I believed), that they suffered from congenital pica and had been nibbling away for generations at the peeling lead-based paint and plaster from their dilapidated chateaus. Whatever the cause, they exhibited all the classic symptoms: reduced IQ, impaired hearing, and trouble maintaining motor control and balance. But, worst of all, these lead-poisoned erstwhile aristocrats had developed the unfortunate custom of washing livestock, defecating, and dumping corpses in the lake. By the time we moved back to the States, the coliform bacteria count in the lake was nearly 700 times the permissible limit. (And bear in mind that the French, being far less squeamish than Americans, have much higher acceptable coliform bacteria levels than we do.)

I think that we tend to select certain emblematic images to store in our memories as visual icons representing each of the journeys and sojourns in our lives. And when I remember our year in St.-Leonard-de-Noblat, I think of the topless contessa and her boom box.

Every sunny afternoon I’d go down to the lake and watch the contessa, a voluptuous woman from one of the most severely lead-poisoned families, struggle for 45 minutes to mount her chaise longue and then endeavor spastically for another half hour to remove her bikini top. This finally accomplished, she’d pillow an ear against her huge radio, which was turned up so loud that it literally drowned out the dredging equipment that the sanitation department used to remove bodies from the turbid water.

There I’d loiter, leering, until I’d hear my mother’s calls — her voice so shrill that it easily pierced the roar of the dredging equipment and the blare of the bare-breasted contessa’s ghetto blaster. I’d reluctantly trudge home to find Mom on the veranda, draining her second pitcher of kamikazes.

“Get your steno pad,” she’d bark, lighting a cigarette and singeing the ends of a platinum tress that had swung into the flame of her Zippo.

And so each afternoon my mother would dictate yet another revision of her “living will.” And although all sorts of frivolous codicils were continuously appended — often to be nullified the following day — the gist of the will remained constant: “In the event that I ever become seriously ill and my ability to communicate is impaired, please honor the following requests. No matter how onerous a financial and emotional burden I become to my family and no matter what extraordinary means are necessary, I want to be kept going. I don’t care about mental lucidity, dignity, or quality of life, I don’t care how flat my EEG is or for how long, I don’t care if I’m just half a lung and a few feet of bowel — I want to be kept alive.”

“Do you understand?” she’d snarl.

“Yes, Mom,” I’d nod.

I’d file the latest version in a strongbox in her lingerie drawer, and then scamper back to the lake, hoping that I’d hadn’t missed the departure of the contessa, a sad and beautiful spectacle. Her lead-suffused flesh luridly burnished in the gloaming, she’d attempt to free herself from her folding chaise, which would have collapsed around her like a Venus’ flytrap enclasping some engorged and lustrous bug.

The warden reads the death warrant. The doctor daubs my father’s limbs and chest with conductive jelly and attaches five EKG electrodes. He then gives him a pre-injection of 10 cc of antihistamine to minimize spasming.

“Do you have a final statement you wish to make?” the warden asks.

“Yes. I’d like to direct my last words to my son.

“Mark … Mark?”

“Just a sec, Dad,” I say, my head bowed, eyes glued to the Game Boy that glows in my hands. “I’m on the brink of achieving a new personal best here.”

I’m playing a game called Gianni Isotope. It’s pretty awesome. The ultimate object is to enable the hero, Gianni Isotope, to save as many rock stars as possible from being turned into edible breaded nuggets at a space-based processing plant in the Lwor Cluster. You earn the opportunity to attempt the Lwor rescue mission by scoring a requisite number of points on the two preceding levels.

First, before beginning play, you have to choose the outfit that Gianni Isotope wears throughout the game. I usually just put him in what I wear to junior high every day — no shirt, Versace leather pants, and Di Fabrizio boots.

In Level One, you manipulate Gianni Isotope as he flies a helicopter into a city whose skyline comprises cylindrical and rectilinear towers of deli meats and cheeses. You/Gianni have to fly upside down and, using the whirring rotor blades of the helicopter, slice these skyscrapers of bologna, salami, ham, liverwurst, American cheese, muenster, etc., as thinly as possible. The object is to slice the city’s entire skyline down to ground level. Points are awarded based on speed and portion control. You need 5,000 points to advance.

In Level Two, Gianni Isotope works for a private investigator in Washington, D.C., who’s compiling scurrilous information about Supreme Court justices. You/Gianni can pick any of the eight optional sitting justices, or you can play the default setting — Clarence Thomas. If you choose Justice Thomas, for instance, you’re given the following five stories:

Thomas’s fascination with breast size is well established. But he is also intrigued by more-arcane aspects of the female anatomy. His standard interview queries — proffered to job applicants when he chaired the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission — were gynecological in their scope and specificity: 1. Objectively describe your urethral meatus. 2. Is your perineum very hairy? 3. How violent are the contractions of your bulbocavernosus and ischiocavernosus muscles when you experience sexual orgasm, and how might that affect your performance at the EEOC?

Thomas delights in sharing his frisky frat-house humor with fellow Supreme Court Justices. Recently, while the high court was hearing arguments about the constitutionality of a statute regulating interstate commerce, Thomas was seen scribbling a note and passing it to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who read it, became slightly red in the face, and then shrugged back at a grinning Thomas. Sources with access to several of Ginsburg’s clerks contend that the note read: “How big was Felix’s frankfurter?”—a reference, of course, to Felix Frankfurter, the distinguished Austrian-born jurist who was appointed to the Supreme Court by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and who served as an associate justice from 1939 to 1962.

Thomas’s self-titillating fear of pubic hair has been immortalized in his legendary entreaty “Who has put pubic hair on my Coke?” Ever attentive to the requirements of politesse and protocol, Thomas can couch his scatological solecisms in more delicate terms when he deems it appropriate. At a recent Embassy Row cocktail party, Thomas was overheard asking his hostess, the patrician wife of an ambassador, “Who has put a tuft of epithelial cilia on my Chivas?”

Seated in the first-class section of American Airlines Flight #3916 en route from O’Hare to Dulles, Thomas, thoroughly engrossed in Willa Cather’s My Antonia, suddenly looks up and exclaims, “Antonia’s gotta be at least a 34C”—speculating upon the bra size of the novel’s plucky protagonist.

As a college undergraduate, Thomas submitted a final term paper for his American Literature of the Nineteenth Century class which was titled, “Hester Prynne, Spitter or Swallower?”

You/Gianni Isotope have to track down leads, interview witnesses, and unearth documents that will corroborate these anecdotes before rival investigators from the tabloids and liberal media elite do it first.

Then an indignant Justice Thomas, black judicial robes billowing in his wake, pursues Gianni Isotope through an aquatic labyrinth on jet skis.

During the labyrinth chase, Thomas’s and Gianni’s energy supply can become low. To replenish, Gianni can buy Citicorp stock from surfing Saudi princes in matching madras trunks and kaffiyehs. Justice Thomas can refuel by snaring Big Gulp Cokes from vending machines on buoys. If either character’s energy supply becomes too depleted, he is engulfed in a large cloud of greenish incandescent gas and can only jet-ski very, very slowly.

If you/Gianni Isotope are able to scoop the Fourth Estate with Supreme Court scandal, elude the avenging Justice through the aquatic labyrinth, and then, finally, negotiate a creature with the upper torso of a Dallas Cowboy cheerleader and the lower torso of a coatimundi without being shredded by its claws, you advance to the ultimate level.

Welcome to the Lwor Cluster in the Goran H47 Helix.

Rock musician is the protein of choice for the typical Lwor creature. Certain parts of the musicians are considered delicacies. Their burst eardrums are eaten by Lwors like popcorn while they watch movies. Their alcohol-ravaged cirrhotic livers are especially delectable to the Lwor palate and are mashed into a paste and served on flat bread and Wheat Thins.

At a processing plant, the live musicians are emptied onto a conveyor belt that leads to a darkened room, where Lwor workers hang them upside down from U-shaped shackles on an assembly line. The rock stars are stunned with an electric shock, their throats slit by machine, and they move through boiling water to loosen their scalps and tight pants. Machines massage off the hair and trousers, eviscerate and wash the musicians inside and out, and slice them into pieces. Seventy rock stars a minute move down the line. Nothing is wasted. Studded jewelry, latex underwear, blood, internal organs, even the decocted tattoo ink is collected and sent to a Lwor rendering plant to become ingredients in cattle feed and pet food for export to other planets. Processed rock musician is Lwor’s most lucrative commodity. They debone it, marinate it, cut it into pieces, press it into patties, roll it into nuggets, bread it, batter it, cook it, and freeze it.

You/Gianni Isotope attempt to save the likes of Dave Mustaine of Megadeth; AC/DC guitarist Angus Young; Def Leppard drummer Rick Allen; Tony Araya, the bassist from Slayer; Joe Perry of Aerosmith; Eddie Van Halen; Terence Trent D’Arby; Jon Bon Jovi; and, inexplicably, Val Kilmer. (The updated version, Gianni Isotope II: The Final Dimension, includes Pantera, Rivers Cuomo of Weezer, and David Roback of Mazzy Star.)

For each rock star you rescue from the processing plant, you’re awarded 1,000 points.

The highest score I’d ever gotten was 30,000. I’m about to pluck Metallica frontman James Hetfield from the deboning machine — which would give me a record-shattering 40,000 points — when my father breaks my concentration. Hetfield’s filleted and flipped into the fry-cooker and time runs out. Game over.

“Fuck!” I mutter, flicking off the Game Boy.

I take a deep breath.

“What is it, Dad?”

“Did you bring your camera?”

“Yeah, but they won’t let me take any pictures in here.”

“That’s too bad. I thought you could get a shot of me dead on the gurney and sell it to Benetton and maybe they’d use it in an ad.”

There’s a pause.

“Are those your last words?” the warden asks.

“No, that was just an aside.”

“OK. We don’t want to start administering the drugs if you’re not finished. Unfortunately, that’s happened before.”

“You’ve killed people in the middle of their last words?”

“Well, if a person pauses for an extended period of time, we might just assume that he’s finished, and execute him. We had a guy recently who ranted for a while and then he sighed and said nothing for about a minute, so we administered the drugs. But then the next day, when we went back and read the transcript and parsed the sentence, we realized that, having finished this long string of subordinate clauses and prepositional phrases and appositives, he’d apparently just paused in anticipation of introducing the main clause. So, as it turns out, unfortunately, we did execute him in mid-sentence. In mid-ellipsis, actually. So if you could give us a general idea of what you’re going to say and about how long you think it might take …”

“You mean like an outline?”

“No, just a rough idea of where you’re going. And that’ll make it much less likely that we kill you in medias res.”

“Well, I don’t know … I was thinking of maybe starting off with some maudlin and desultory reminiscing — that should only take a couple of minutes — and then I thought I’d tell a brief impressionistic anecdote about hair, and then I figured I’d finish off with some sort of spiritual or motivational aphorism for my son. I think we’re looking at about four or five minutes, tops.”

“Excellent,” says the warden.

“It’s very nice,” says the rabbi.

“All right, let’s take it from the top,” says the executioner, gamely.

“When your mother was pregnant with you—”

“Hold it,” interrupts the executioner. “Are you referring to my mother?”

“No, I’m talking to my son.”

“Well then don’t look at me, look at him. And, Mark, while your father’s addressing his last words to you, why don’t you hold his hand?”

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.

So what I’m trying to say here is that, given the fact that I’m the kind of person who starts each day exulting in the aroma of his own sweaty pants, coming up with an unpleasant memory to preempt an erection is not easy. But finally, after racking my brain for almost a minute, I manage to dredge something up from last Thursday.

Something from television, actually.

What turns a person off is as inscrutably subjective as what turns a person on. There are four major turn-offs in the following synopsis of a story that aired last Thursday night on ABC’s 20/20. See if you can deduce what they are. Put yourself in my Di Fabrizio boots as you read. Give yourself a time constraint — say fifteen seconds — and as you analyze the text for anaphrodisiacal elements, imagine the pressure I’m under as I frantically scan my own memory bank, scrotum tingling, the execution of my father only moments away.

To further enhance the interactive realism of the text, begin to masturbate as you read the following passage. For each turn-off you’re able to find before coming, award yourself 1,000 points. If your point total equals or exceeds 3,000, proceed to the section beginning All of this — the warden escorting me into the witness room, the momentary glimpse of the slope of her breast, possibly her areola … If your total is under 3,000, return to the words Felipe, his older sister Gretel, and I are watching TV Thursday night, and begin masturbating again.

Felipe, his older sister Gretel, and I are watching TV Thursday night. 20/20 is running a profile of Silvio Barnes, the painter who was blinded after being hit on the head with a frying pan while surfing the 35-foot breakers at Waimea Bay in Hawaii and then, less than a week later, suffered a massive stroke during a full-body wax at an after-hours depilation bar in Manhattan. Thanks to the Dove unauthorized biography, we all know the story by now of how, when Silvio was only fourteen, his father — the inventor of the Miracle Collar, the push-up collar for men’s dress shirts that gives the appearance of a larger, more protuberant Adam’s apple — offered Silvio a yearly stipend and a studio of his own. But Silvio, perceiving his father’s patronage as an instrument of control, refused, and catching the next plane and hydrofoil to Chiang Mai, a resort city in northern Thailand, took a job as a busboy at the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (Society for Heavy Ion Research), a gay dance club. Snatching a minute here and a minute there during breaks, he’d sneak off to the club’s sulfurous boiler room cum atelier, where he’d eventually complete his two astonishing masterpieces:

Teenage Neofascist Skinheads Suffering From Progeria (That Rare Premature Aging Disease) Play Mah-Jongg at a Swim Club in Lake Hayden, Idaho is a 94-by-66-inch, acrylic-on-canvas work that, notwithstanding a title that leads one to expect several freakishly wizened nazi youths wanly shuffling mah-jongg tiles outside a lakefront cabana, actually depicts, in delicate flecks of color, several peonies in a vase.

Anna Nicole Smith Before and After Fire-Ant Attack is a 90-by-120-inch acrylic-on-canvas diptych. In this case, the title does literally describe the painting’s content. In the left-hand panel, the former Texas checkout girl turned Guess? Jeans model is splayed lasciviously on a dirt road. The right-hand panel features the identical pose except that the lasciviously splayed Smith is stippled with hundreds of Seurat-like inflamed pustules.

Barbara Walters conducts a brief interview with Silvio, whose garbled responses are subtitled. In the closing minutes, wiping drool from his chin, she says, “Silvio, you completed only two paintings in your entire career, both of which you sold for a fraction of their current value [the paintings now hang in opium warlord Khun Sa’s splendid new museum in northern Myanmar] and then squandered the money on an endless succession of skanky male prostitutes. As a result of a frying pan and a body wax, you’ll never paint again. And your desperate attempt to reinvent your career as a movie director was an unmitigated critical and financial disaster.”

Barnes wrote and directed a film entitled ¡Hola Mami! about an eccentric middle-aged optometrist who marries a sullen, zit-spangled 16-year-old who loiters around his office every day after school, chain-smoking in a fuchsia PVC bustier, a huge gaudy crucifix bobbing on her bosom. The “plot” revolves around the optometrist’s use of a varietal rice chart instead of the traditional lettered eye chart. Long, uninterrupted stretches of the movie consist of the following sort of dialogue:

OPTOMETRIST: Let’s start with the top row, moving from left to right.

PATIENT: All right. Arborio. Valencia. Lundberg’s Christmas Rice. Black Japonica. And Wehani.

OPTOMETRIST: Perfect. Second row.

PATIENT: Red. Sri Lankan Red. Wild Pecan. Jasmine. White Basmati.

OPTOMETRIST: Perfect. Let’s skip down a few rows. How about row five?

PATIENT: American White Basmati. American … Umm … American Brown Basmati, I think. Maratello. And that next one’s either Black Sticky or Thai Sticky. And I’m not sure about the last one.

OPTOMETRIST: OK. How about the next row down, row six?

PATIENT: That’s really tough. Converted? Sambal? Gobind Bhog? They’re really fuzzy.

OPTOMETRIST: OK. Back up to the fourth row—

PATIENT: Japanese Sticky. Sticky Brown. Short-Grain Brown. Long-Grain White. And Wild Rice.

OPTOMETRIST: Is row six sharper now or … now?

PATIENT: The first way.

Following the clip from ¡Hola Mami! they cut to Hugh Downs and Barbara Walters back in the studio.

And Walters says with her patented withering aplomb, “Hugh, in all our years together on the show, we’ve profiled so many wonderful people whose lives have been shattered by tragedy, but I’ve never before come away with the feeling that — hey, this guy is such an overweening, self-absorbed asshole, he deserves his misfortune, and, in fact, there’s something so divinely just about it, that it’s actually funny. It’s so rare that we can derive some cathartic enjoyment from another person’s suffering. But every so often our fervent prayers are answered and an obnoxious enfant terrible’s meteoric success is abruptly and irrevocably snuffed. Silvio Barnes — now blind, incapacitated, and anathema in New York and Hollywood — is an individual whose precipitous ruin all Americans can celebrate with big, hearty, guilt-free gales of laughter.”

And Hugh looks at Barbara and says, “Fascinating.”

As they break for a commercial, Felipe, Gretel, and I do an instant postmortem.

“I’m into Barbara’s rancid schadenfreude,” says Felipe.

“I hear you, dude,” I say. “It had wings. But Downs killed it with that perfunctory ‘Fascinating.’ ”

“Hugh’s hot!” objects Gretel.

“Yuuuk!” Felipe and I make the international sign for hemorrhagic vomiting.

“You’ll appreciate Hugh Downs when you’re more mature,” she says, haughtily readjusting her brassiere.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be that mature,” I say, huffing glue from a brown paper bag and passing it back to Felipe.

All of this — the warden escorting me into the witness room, the momentary glimpse of the slope of her breast, possibly her areola, and the flesh of her armpit as she sits down, and then the frenzied search through my memory for just the right 20/20 segment to temporarily neuter myself so that a healthy, perfectly normal, and involuntary heterosexual reflex won’t be misinterpreted in such a way that I’m seen as an execrable son — all of this takes place in a span of no more than ten seconds. I wonder if, like, Bill Gates when he was 13, had the ability that I have at the age of 13 to anatomize minute fluctuations of consciousness that are occurring literally in femtoseconds. Anyway …

It’s 5:25 P.M. Appeals exhausted, reprieves forsaken, last words ardently orated, the execution of Joel Leyner C.P. #39 6E-18 commences.

Inside the control module room, the executioner activates the delivery sequence by pushing a button on the control panel. A series of lights on the panel indicates the three stages of each injection: Armed (red), Start (yellow), and Complete (green).

As the lights for the initial injection sequence switch on and a piston is loosed from its cradle and falls onto the plunger of the first syringe, the delivery module introduces 15 cc of 2-percent sodium thiopental over ten seconds, which should cause unconsciousness.

I nudge the superintendent with my elbow.

“Thanks,” I whisper, returning his pen.

“Keep it,” he says.

“Are you kidding?”

“No. It’s yours.”

“Cool!” I gush.

After a minute, the red light pulses again, then the yellow, and the machine injects 15 cc of pancuronium bromide, a synthetic curare that should produce muscle paralysis and stop his breathing.

Following another one-minute interval, the lights flash and the final syringe, containing 15 cc of potassium chloride, is injected, which should induce cardiac arrest, with death following within two minutes.

Thirty seconds pass.

A minute.

In the dark witness room, we are mute and absolutely still. And in this riveted silence, the physiologic obbligato of human bodies — the sibilant nostrils, the tense clicking of temporomandibular joints, the bruits of carotid arteries, and the peristaltic rumblings of nervous bowels — becomes almost a din.

Ninety seconds elapse.

Two minutes.

The muscles in my father’s neck appear to become rigid, actually lifting his head slightly off the gurney.

His eyes open wide.

“I feel shitty,” he says.

The doctor, who’s been monitoring the EKG, frowns at the operations officer, who turns to the warden and shakes his head grimly. Scrutinizing an EKG printout incredulously, he emerges from behind the screen and approaches my dad. He checks his pupillary reflexes with a penlight and then listens to his respiration and heart with a stethoscope.

“Physically, he appears to be absolutely fine,” he says, grimacing with bewilderment.

The operations officer in turn gives a thumbs-down to the warden, who’s now risen from her seat in the witness room.

“Mr. Leyner,” says the doctor to my father, “I’m going to give you several statements and I want you to respond as best you can, all right?”

My father nods.

“Bacillus subtilis grown on dry, nutrient-poor agar plates tends to fan out into patterns that strongly resemble this fractal pattern seen in nonliving systems.”

“What is a diffusion-limited aggregation?” responds my father.

“Music played by this Vietnamese ensemble consisting of flute, moon-lute, zither, cylindrical and coconut-shell fiddles, and wooden clackers is the most romantic and, to Western ears, melodic of all Southeast Asian theater music.”

“What is cai luong?”

“This Hollywood legend kept a secret cache of Dynel-haired toy trolls.”

“Who was Greta Garbo?”

“According to the American Mortuary Society, these are currently the two most widely requested gravestone epitaphs.”

“Wake Me Up When We Get There and If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now.”

The doctor brightens momentarily.

“I’m sorry,” amends my father. “What are Wake Me Up When We Get There and If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now?”

The doctor sags.

“Neurologically, he’s perfectly normal,” he announces, punctuating his diagnosis with a dejected, frustrated fling of his NJ State Capital Punishment Division of Medicine loose-leaf binder, which skitters across the floor.

“Cool binder!” I marvel sotto voce, helplessly susceptible to logo merchandising.

My father is returned to his cell. The operations officer confers with the warden, who informs me that the doctor would like to see me in his office.

I slip two hastily scrawled notes into her left hand.

The lights have come back on in the witness room and programmed music resumes over the ambient audio system — Kathleen Battle and Courtney Love’s haunting performance of Mozart’s aria “Mia speranza adorata” from the Ebola Benefit — Live from Branson, Missouri CD (Deutsche Grammophon), which segues into “Sarin Sayonara” from the Aum Supreme Truth Monks’ Les Chants d’Apocalypse CD (Interscope), which is followed — as I enter the elevator — by the Montana Militia Choir (accompanied by Yanni and the Ray Coniff singers) singing — I swear to god! — “The Beasts of Yeast.”

Read along with me, as I peruse this People magazine article in the waiting room of the prison doctor:

When Viktor N. Mikhailov, Russia’s Minister of Atomic Energy, invited Hazel R. O’Leary, the U.S. Secretary of Energy, to a dinner party arranged to facilitate a discussion of Russia’s plutonium stocks, he probably expected Mrs. O’Leary and her retinue to arrive with the first editions and bottles of rare vintage champagne that are the traditional accoutrements of diplomatic courtesy.

What he certainly didn’t expect was for Mrs. O’Leary to arrive, Fender Stratocaster slung across her back, along with bassist Ivan Selin, Chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, guitarist John Holum, Director of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and drummer J. Brian Atwood, Administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development. Instead of propounding her views over cocktails or across the dinner table — as would be the norm at such a gathering — Mrs. O’Leary and her bandmates delivered a blistering set of original songs, thematically linked, each exploring a different facet of her overarching position that Russia must render its surplus weapons plutonium unusable.

Mrs. O’Leary, soignée and austere in a black Jil Sander dress, opened with a smoldering rocker about the global security risks of stolen fissile material that seemed to gradually implode with intensity as it slowed to the tempo of a New Orleans funeral march, achieving the exaggerated slow-motion sexual swagger of the Grim Reaper bumping and grinding down Bourbon Street. Next, Mrs. O’Leary almost shattered the huge Czarist-era crystal chandelier with an opening riff that tore from her amp like shrapnel from an anti-personnel bomb. She repeated the riff — an irresistible and diabolically intricate seven-note figure — over and over again, plying each shard with the obsessive scrutiny of a monkey grooming its mate, it becoming more squalid, more lewd, more intoxicating with each iteration, until finally the band launched into the song, a hammering sermon about how Russia must mix its plutonium in molten glass and bury it deep underground.

In the midst of the song, which, like an asylum inmate gouging at his own scabs, exacerbated itself into a raging cacophony, Mikhailov; Viktor M. Murogov, director of the Institute of Physics and Power Engineering at Obninsk; Yuri Vishevsky, the head of Gosatomnadzor or GAN, the Russian equivalent of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission; and Aleksei V. Yablokov, an adviser to President Boris Yeltsin, and their spouses formed a throbbing mosh pit in the center of the living room.

Following the set, when asked what had made her appear with the band, Mrs. O’Leary, drenched in sweat, paused to catch her breath and then replied, “I’d asked Viktor [Mikhailov] if I could bring my guitar … and he said sure. And one thing led to another … and, well …” She gestured toward the throng of guests still pumping their fists in the air.

After dinner, a bizarre incident occurred that has had the diplomatic community and entertainment industry abuzz with wild rumor and rampant speculation.

Sergei Smernyakov, a well-known nightclub hypnotist invited to the soirée by Mikhailov to provide postprandial entertainment, hypnotized guests Dorothy Bodin, Deputy Secretary of the Department of Energy; Cynthia Bowers-Lipken, a weapons expert at the Natural Resources Defense Council; and LaShaquilla Nuland, wife of Adm. C. F. Bud Nuland, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Each woman was given the posthypnotic suggestion that at the tone of a spoon striking a wineglass she would become a frenzied Dionysian orgiast with an uncontrollable compulsion to instantly gratify her every carnal desire.

Brought out of their trances, the women, each one a paragon of professional accomplishment, dignity, and decorum, blushed at the suggestion, and laughingly assured their companions that — with all due respect to Mr. Kavochilov’s mesmeric prowess — they could certainly never be induced to behave in such an outrageously uncharacteristic manner.

But sure enough, when Yeltsin aide Yablokov tapped a tiny silver jam spoon against his wine goblet, Ms. Bodin, Ms. Bowers-Lipken, and Mrs. Nuland immediately disrobed, rending the garments from their bodies as if they were aflame, and then, like deranged children, spreading caviar and blintz filling over each other’s naked flesh. Then, after a brief huddle, they overpowered a chosen male guest, shackled his legs, cuffed his hands behind his back, and took turns sitting on his face as they swigged caraway and jimsonweed-infused vodka from cut-crystal decanters.

Having finally sated themselves and tired, the women released the man, who staggered back to his hotel covered in their juices, followed by a howling cavalcade of rutting dogs, cats, raccoons, and possums whose demented caterwauling awakened sleeping Muscovites throughout the city.

Although invited guests refuse to comment on the identity of the male victim, People has learned that it was none other than celebrated television personality and Tony Award-winning actor

continued on p. 115

“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.

Perhaps also contributing to my feelings of affinity for the doctor is the fact that a V-shaped area from the waist to the crotch of my leather pants had become sodden with tears, causing a distinctive odor to waft upward. And whereas the pungent aroma of sweaty leather makes me feel omniscient, the bittersweet fragrance of tear-soaked leather engenders in me a sense of interconnectedness with all sentient beings.

“Has lethal medicine always been your specialty?” I ask, infused with agape.

“I was a third-year medical student when I made up my mind,” he replies. “I was assigned to the pediatric-execution wing of a large state prison up in Connecticut — it was the first of my clinical rotations in what was then called Malevolent Medicine. From that point on, I was hooked. For me, the field of pediatric executions has always been the most gratifying. There’s absolutely nothing in the world that compares to the look on the faces of a mother and a father after they’ve been told that the execution of their sociopathic, incorrigibly homicidal child has been a success. There’s an instant realization — you can see it in their eyes — that the courtroom vigils, the legal bills, the civil suits, the endless hours of family therapy are all over, that they and the deceased demon seed’s siblings can now go on and live a normal happy life. It’s an expression that never ceases to touch you deeply, no matter how many times you see it.”

The telephone rings.

The doctor reoccupies the high-backed chair behind his desk, picks up the receiver, and swivels around so that his back is to me and his conversation — save for an initial “I think that would be wise under the circumstances”—is inaudible.

I pluck a lollipop from the fishbowl on his desk, wander over to the window, and gaze bemusedly at the gazebo.

Ch-ch-ch. Ch-ch-ch. Ch-ch-ch.

Shortly the doctor swivels back into view and hangs up the phone.

“The warden’s going to make an announcement in her office in a few minutes,” he says.

He stands, circumambulates his desk, and embraces me again.

“If it provides any solace, I want you to know that, medically, I’ve done everything at my disposal to kill your father.”

“I understand,” I quaver, nodding solemnly. “And thank you.”

I pivot and race out of his office, heading straight for the pile of magazines in the waiting room. I retrieve the People I’d been reading and flip frantically to page 115 so I can finally learn the identity of the television personality and Tony Award-winning actor who was ravaged by the three hypnotized wives at a Moscow dinner party. But when I reach 115, I find — to my absolute horror — that someone has cut a rectangular section out of the page including the all-important final paragraphs of the story that had so captured my imagination. And it’s all the more frustrating to discover that the excision of my article was inadvertent. The culprit had cut out a coupon on the reverse page—116—for two Bradford Exchange limited-edition collector’s plates commemorating, respectively, the 1977 professional debut of transsexual tennis player René Richards and the 1993 beating of Reginald Denny during the Los Angeles riots.

“Inmates aren’t allowed to have scissors, are they?” I ask the nurse.

“No,” she says.

“Well, how did someone cut a coupon out of this magazine?” I ask, wiggling my fingers through the hole in the page.

“They use shanks — y’know, homemade knives.”

I shudder.

The image of hardened convicts daintily clipping coupons with their shanks gives me goose bumps.

The warden’s office is a serried, murmuring Who’s Who of penal officialdom: the warden, of course, seated at her desk, signing papers proffered assembly-line-fashion by a feline male secretary with close-cropped orange hair; and milling about and filling the room with gossip and banter are the superintendent; the operations officer; the executioner; the doctor; two of the prosecuting attorneys from the ice-cream scooper murder case; my dad’s lawyer; my dad, who, despite a slightly bilious tinge to his complexion, is chewing his gum mirthfully and talking golf with the rabbi; and a state-appointed stenographer, her fingers a kinetic blur as she endeavors to somehow transcribe the babble of simultaneous small talk.

Given the self-importance and solipsism endemic to seventh graders, I’m assuming that the wardens impending announcement is about me. After the execution attempt and just before I met with the doctor, I’d scribbled and surreptitiously conveyed to the warden two notes that read, respectively, “You wanna get high?” and “Be my sweaty bosomy lover?”

Why she would choose to make such a public response to my homey blandishments, though, I have no idea.

The lithe arm swings over her desk with one final form. The warden signs with a culminating flourish and rises. A dainty throat-clearing and a tentative, collegial “Folks …” goes unheeded. And then a great gurgling hawking up of phlegm and a stentorian imperious “Gentlemen!” effects an instant decrescendo of chitchat, the rabbis punch line “So Moses flings the Pharaoh’s ball into the Sinai and says, ‘Here, use my sand wedge …’” trailing off in the corner of the room, the stenographer’s fingers momentarily still.

“Gentlemen,” the warden says, “I have an announcement to make concerning Joel Leyner C.P. #39 6E-18, and pursuant to Volume 2C, Part Five, Article 11-3 of the New Jersey Department of Corrections Digest of Procedural Regulations and Guidelines, a state-appointed stenographer will herewith transcribe all remarks germane to the disposition of Mr. Leyner’s sentence.

“The State Legislature has vested in the Governor, the Attorney General, and the warden of this institution the following authority, as specified in Section 42J of the Penal Code: ‘In the event of an abortive execution by lethal injection in which the condemned inmate survives, any and all further attempts to execute that inmate by lethal injection within that institution and under the medical supervision of said institution’s physician(s) are prohibited. Subject to unanimous consent of the Governor, the Attorney General, and the institution’s warden, said inmate shall be, with all due speed and by public decree, resentenced to State Discretionary Execution, and thereupon immediately released. Although the State is not hereby required to enforce the death sentence, it may, at its discretion, execute said inmate immediately upon his or her release into the community or at any time thereafter. Said inmate (hereafter referred to as “the releasee”) is subject to discretionary execution immediately upon vacating said institution’s premises and at any time thereafter. In the event of an abortive Discretionary Execution in which the releasee survives, the State may, but is not required to, make an additional attempt or unlimited attempts on the life of the releasee. The Discretionary Execution of the releasee shall be carried out — if at all — whenever, wherever, and however the State of New Jersey deems appropriate, subject only to the inalienable caprices of the State of New Jersey.’

“It is so ordered and adjudged that Joel Leyner be sentenced to State Discretionary Execution and promptly discharged from this institution, this sentence to remain in force until Mr. Leyner’s decease.”

“En inglés, por favor,” I chafe, gnawing my lollipop stick.

“Basically, Mark, your dad’s free to go, but the State reserves the right to kill him the minute he walks out the front gate,” says the warden. “Plus, the State has complete latitude in terms of execution protocols and rules of engagement. In the next ten minutes your dad could be pithed with an English pub dart in the car on the way home from here. On the other hand, he might never be killed — he could live out his life unperturbed and die of natural causes in his slobbering dotage. Or the State could wait until he’s 99 years, 11 months, and 30 days old and then, on his 100th birthday, replace his dentures with molded plastique so that morning, as Willard Scott is telling America what a goodlooking man he is, god bless him — BA-BOOM! Now, if you’ll excuse me for just a moment, there’s some material I’d like you to have before you leave, Mr. Leyner,” she says, exiting her office.

“And this is called what, again?” my father asks the superintendent.

“NJSDE — New Jersey State Discretionary Execution.”

“I think I read about this in Elle,” Dad says. “It’s sort of like an optional fatwa.”

“The feature we like to stress to releasees is the indeterminacy,” continues the superintendent. “You’re living your life, rowing merrily along, and suddenly one morning you wake up and there’s a dwarf ninja crouched on your chest who deftly severs your carotid arteries with two honed throwing stars. Or you’re on a flight to Orlando, Florida, giggling to yourself as you read the Confessions of Saint Augustine, and meanwhile, 35,000 feet below, a New Jersey state trooper steps out of his car, kneels alongside the shoulder of I-95, aims a shoulder-held antiaircraft missile launcher, and blows your 727 into friggin’ curds and whey.”

“They’d do that?” I ask excitedly. “They’d sacrifice all those people just to kill my dad?”

“NJSDE gives us a lot of leeway. We’re no longer encumbered by the federal government, by the FDA, the FAA, the Justice Department … it really unties the hands of the state. I think it’s an extremely innovative piece of statutory legislation. And you have to give the Governor the bulk of the credit. She takes a lot of flak for the narcolepsy and the lathery horse posters, but she was committed to this and very savvy about the politics.”

“How do you feel about it?” my father asks, turning to the rabbi.

“It’s a very postmodern sentencing structure — random and capricious, the free-floating dread, each ensuing day as gaping abyss, the signifier hovering over the signified like the sword of Damocles. To have appropriated a pop-noir aesthetic and recontextualized it within the realm of jurisprudence is breathtakingly audacious. I think you’re going to find it a very disturbing, but a very fascinating and transformative way to live, Joel.”

Personally, I don’t find it all that innovative, audacious, disturbing, fascinating, or transformative. It just seems like normal life to me — not knowing from day to day if you’ll be pithed with a pub dart or sliced into sushi by some hypopituitary freak in black pajamas, or if your false teeth will blow up in your head. That’s just late-second-millennium life. I mean, isn’t everyone basically sentenced to New Jersey State Discretionary Execution from, like, the moment he’s born?

Although, OK — I have to admit — a statutory algorithm designed to amplify the anarchic cruelties of human existence and arbitrarily inflict its violence upon innocent bystanders, exponentially expanding the nexus of fatal contingencies, is pretty intense. And also, I assume that any ninja who works for NJSDE is involved in the state civil service bureaucracy — and there’s something really appealing to me about the image of ninjas waiting in lines for hours at state offices for application forms and photo IDs. And I absolutely adore the notion of elite units of New Jersey State Troopers, magnificently loathsome in their Stetsons and jackboots, sworn by blood oath to enforce the stringent dicta of NJSDE, wending the corniches of the French Riviera or the Spanish Costa del Sol in their emblazoned cruisers, in inexorable pursuit of some targeted releasee, some hapless New Jersey expatriate shambling along the boardwalk, camera and wine sack slung across his belly, oblivious to the cataclysmic, surreal violence in which he’ll be momentarily engulfed.

But do I say any of this when the rabbi, in turn, asks me what I think of NJSDE? No, of course not. Instead I mutter some facile, meaningless catchphrase.

Why do I nullify my own intelligence with this willful, stereotypical inarticulateness? Why do I immure my thoughts in this crypt of sullen diffidence?

Do I perhaps derive some sadomasochistic pleasure in the mortification of my own intellect, akin to those who cut and burn their own bodies? After all, isn’t the act of making oneself mute a mute-ilation?

Am I ultimately knowable?

Is it ludicrous and stilted for a 13-year-old to describe himself, even facetiously, as “an individual of daunting complexity”?

Why is it, then, that when the rabbi, in turn, asks me what I think of NJSDE, I glibly reply: “It’s cool, like a video”?

The warden returns.

“This should help answer any questions you might have, Mr. Leyner,” she says, handing my father a booklet, which I peruse over his shoulder.

The glossy brochure is entitled You and Your Discretionary Execution.

Q. What is New Jersey State Discretionary Execution?

A. NJSDE was developed by Alejandro Roberto Montés Calderón, a cashiered Guatemalan Army colonel who fled Guatemala after his counterinsurgency unit was accused of “crimes against humanity” by Americas Watch and Amnesty International. Mr. Calderón resettled in the United States, where he became a gym teacher at Emerson High School in Union City, New Jersey. The Governor, who had Mr. Calderón for gym in both her junior and senior years, appointed him to chair the Select Committee on Capital Punishment and Tort Reform.

NJSDE is a pioneering sentencing program designed to give the State of New Jersey maximum — one might even say giddy—latitude in dealing with condemned inmates, like yourself, who have survived unsuccessful institutional executions.

Q. Am I responsible for the cost of my unsuccessful institutional execution?

A. You are responsible only for the cost of the lethal drugs. Most health insurance plans and HMOs cover lethal prescription drugs, paying for them directly or through reimbursements to the insured individual. Check your policy and consult with your broker or benefits administrator.

Q. How does the State determine whether I will live or die?

A. Your status is reevaluated on a daily basis. At precisely 9:00 P.M. each night, at the New Jersey State Discretionary Execution Control Center in Trenton, data processors insert every NJSDE releasee’s social security number into an intricate equation whose variables include the current pollen count at Newark International Airport and the total daily receipts collected at toll-booths along the Garden State Parkway as of 7:45 P.M. If, factored through this algebraic operation, your SS number yields a prime number, any five-digit sequence from pi, or the Governor’s PIN code for her MAC card, you are subject to Discretionary Execution over that ensuing 24-hour period.

Q. Is NJSDE painful?

A. Yes! The State avails itself of a potpourri of execution methods including bare hands and teeth, sharpened stick, flint ax, bisection by lumberyard circular saw, car bomb, drive-by shooting, rocket-propelled grenade, Tomahawk cruise missile, etc., any of which can cause significant discomfort. The degree of pain you experience may vary in accordance with the efficacy of the execution attempt and with your body’s ability to produce natural opiates, called endorphins, at moments of extreme stress. If you choose to augment your endorphins by prophylactically self-anesthetizing through heavy alcohol consumption and you develop cirrhosis, bear in mind that some hospitals in New Jersey will not perform liver transplants on patients who face possible execution within 48 hours of surgery.

Q. How does the State make certain it’s executing the right person?

A. Prior to any execution attempt, your identity will be surreptitiously confirmed using sophisticated DNA-fingerprinting autoradiograph techniques developed by the LAPD Forensic Crime Laboratory.

Q. What will happen to me after I’m killed?

A. You will experience a sense of well-being. You (i.e., your soul) will separate from your body. You will travel through a dark tunnel. Emerging from this darkness, you will encounter a field of white radiant light. And you will enter this light. You will conduct a review of your life. You may encounter a “presence.” You will probably meet deceased loved ones. At some juncture, you may hear what you think is your body calling out, beseeching you. Do not return to your body! This bark or whooping sound is made by a spasm in the muscles of the voice box caused by increased acidity in the blood of the corpse.

Your body will undergo rigor mortis (rigidity), livor mortis (discoloration due to settling of blood), and algor mortis (cooling). Tissue will break down through enzymatic action, and putrefaction will ensue through the decomposition of proteins by bacteria. Your body will be colonized by necrophage insects, including blowfly larvae and saprophagous beetles, and within three to six months, caseic fermentation should occur.

Q. This is a change of subject, but — Why, after he’d been so successful as a starting pitcher and in fact had recently thrown a no-hitter against the Boston Red Sox, was Dave Righetti pulled from the starting rotation and put in the Yankee bullpen? Was this just the result of one of Steinbrenner’s autocratic tantrums, or was there some sound baseball reasoning behind the decision?

A. The months following Righetti’s July Fourth no-hitter against the Boston Red Sox were among the most tumultuous in Yankee history. Players had the locker room repainted, replacing the traditional Yankee pinstripe motif with gyrating chained dancers and huge flying griffins bearing futuristic bare-breasted Valkyries with laser guns. Each game was preceded by a ritual team circle jerk. Post-game revels raged into the early morning. It was not unusual to find Meg Tilly, Teri Hatcher, Amanda Plummer, Vanessa Williams, Jaye Davidson, Kate Capshaw, Janet Reno, Daphne Zuniga, Helena Bonham Carter, and the like sprawled languidly across the locker-room floor as players sipped sweat from their navels with teeny coke spoons. Sports fans will not soon forget the image of a simpering Don Mattingly injecting Ritalin into his neck for the benefit of press photographers. Steinbrenner’s capricious mean streak was exacerbated by the cheese-free diet he’d been put on by his cardiologist. One minute, he seemed too spaced out to recognize anyone; the next, he was clubbing or pistol-whipping whoever was handy. Predictably, players and coaches oscillated between rhapsody and despair, their heady self-confidence undermined by an involuntary nihilism. Righetti, the crotch of his uniform distended by the heavy cock rings he now insisted on wearing when he pitched, circumambulated the mound between pitches muttering what a New York Post headline described as “Hermetic Incantations and Insane Glossolalia!” Righetti was ultimately placed on the disabled list and committed by Steinbrenner to the psychiatric hospital in Rodez, France, where the visionary dramatic theorist and poet Antonin Artaud had undergone sixty convulsive shock treatments. Pledging that his star pitcher would receive “the finest care money can buy,” Steinbrenner stipulated that Righetti be given sixty-one convulsive shock treatments — one for each of the home runs Roger Maris hit in 1961. Three weeks later, Righetti rejoined the team in Kansas City. That night, in the eleventh inning, Yankee utility infielder Hector Peña hit a mammoth 600-foot shot to dead center field. Following a protest by Royals manager Dick Howser that Peña was using an illegally doctored bat, umpires confiscated his Louisville Slugger, sawed it open, and discovered two pounds of stolen Russian plutonium. The Yankees were forced to forfeit the game and effectively dropped out of pennant contention. That off-season, in an effort to restore morale, Steinbrenner took the team on a tour of Japan, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. Although several Yankees tore anterior cruciate ligaments slipping on the raspberry-colored snail-egg pods that litter ballparks in the Mekong lowlands of southwest Laos, and during a game in the Mujahedeen Dome in Kabul, Afghanistan, rookie prospect Andre Knoblauch lost his legs when he stepped on a land mine chasing a line-drive hit into the gap in left-center, the trip was a great success. Steinbrenner was particularly impressed with the custom practiced by Japanese players of wearing glass vials of potassium cyanide on cords around their necks. And in an exhibition game against the Yomiuri Giants, a Yomiuri player, caught in a run-down between second and third base, did indeed swallow his suicide capsule rather than suffer the ignominy of being tagged out. The Yankees returned to the United States, proceeding directly to Fort Lauderdale, and throughout spring training they evinced a renewed esprit de corps and seriousness of purpose. The new season began with extremely high expectations. But on opening day, several hours before game time, as starting pitcher Dave Righetti napped on a training table, his fingers interlocked behind his head, Knoblauch — in a stupid rookie prank — put a caramel apple in Righetti’s left armpit. When Righetti awoke and discovered the caramel apple stuck fast to the armpit of his pitching arm, he panicked and, seizing the wooden stick, wildly pried the agglutinated candy-coated winesap from his body, taking several layers of torn flesh with it. Righetti was rushed to a nearby hospital where surgeons performed an emergency graft using 53 infant foreskins donated by a Bronx mohel who was a rabid Yankee fan and had heard what happened on his car radio. Righetti returned to the stadium in time to pitch two innings of hitless relief, and remained in the bullpen for the rest of his tenure with the New York Yankees.

Q. Could innocent people who happen to be near me at the time of my New Jersey State Discretionary Execution also be killed or injured?

A. Yes! It’s quite possible that bystanders unfortunate enough to be in your proximity during your execution attempt will be inadvertently killed or maimed. “Collateral damage” is an integral component of the NJSDE program, effectively increasing the degree and rapidity with which NJSDE releasees are stigmatized by, and ostracized from, their communities. The fact that being anywhere near you puts someone at risk of being killed or paralyzed by a stray 9-mm round, gruesomely disfigured by an errant machete, or blinded by a wayward crossbow arrow makes it unlikely that — in the gym, for instance — that person will choose the StairMaster next to yours, never mind join you in tucking away some sea leg fra diavolo and Chianti at the local trattoria, and less likely still that he or she will have sex with you later that evening. As an NJSDE releasee, you’ll be amazed not only at the corrosive anxiety of living with an indeterminate death sentence, but at how quickly you’ll be shunned as a pariah wherever you go. That’s why The American Spectator awarded NJSDE five bastinados — its highest rating — in a recent evaluation of state-funded internal security apparatus, calling it “A breath of fresh air … The most whimsical deterrent program in years!”

Q. Given the potential for “collateral damage,” can I be killed while praying in a crowded church, synagogue, or mosque?

A. Yes, you can!

Q. Can I be killed while visiting a friend’s premature infant in a neonatal intensive care unit?

A. Sure!

Q. Can I be Discretionarily Executed while giving someone CPR?

A. I don’t see why not!

Q. My girlfriend and I have a bet. She insists that it’s illegal for an NJSDE releasee to be executed in a casino on an Indian reservation. I say that’s nonsense — an NJSDE releasee can be executed absolutely anywhere. If she’s right, I take her out for sushi. If I’m right, she treats at the steakhouse of my choice.

A. Try Peter Luger’s, 178 Broadway at Bedford Avenue in Brooklyn. Order the double porterhouse and a bottle of 1975 Lafite Rothschild.

Q. If I’m convicted of another crime and sent back to prison, can I be Discretionarily Executed while serving that sentence?

A. Absolutely, but it probably won’t be necessary. Because you expose fellow convicts and guards to the risk of incidental death or injury, you will be one extremely unpopular inmate. NJSDE releasees who reenter the correctional system are rock-bottom on the institutional totem pole, ranked below informers and pedophiles. So don’t count on your new cellmate greeting you that first day with a lei and ukulele — the chances of your surviving 24 hours are nil.

Q. As an NJSDE releasee, will I find it difficult to secure employment?

A. Unfortunately, you may. Most businesses are reluctant to hire NJSDE releasees, despite the fact that they often make stellar employees. You’ll have better luck with those companies, nonprofit organizations, and public-sector agencies that are less squeamish about workplace violence, such as 7-Elevens, Planned Parenthood clinics, and the U.S. Postal Service.

Q. Will I be issued special license plates?

A. Yes. NJSDE vehicular license plates feature the “NJSDE” prefix, a specially designed logo (three guillotined heads chatting amiably in a basket, superimposed over the State of New Jersey), followed by a random or vanity five-digit sequence. State law requires that all parking areas provide specially designated spaces for NJSDE cars. Given the possibility of car-bomb execution attempts, though, these spaces are not always conveniently situated. For example, the Short Hills Mall in Short Hills, New Jersey, generously allots six NJSDE parking spaces, but they are located in North Battleford, Saskatchewan.

Q. What savings or premiums does my NJSDE card entitle me to with restaurants, hotels, sports and leisure facilities, and airlines?

A. Because there may be an NJSDE attempt on your life at any moment, you put the lives of those around you in constant jeopardy. Consequently, many fine restaurants, hotels, and airlines offer NJSDE releasees substantial cash premiums to take their business elsewhere. Simply present your NJSDE card to the maitre d’, or at the front desk or ticketing counter. Following a spate of Discretionary Executions, airlines typically engage in NJSDE No-Fly Premium “wars,” so consult with your travel agent about which carrier is offering releasees the most money to fly with its competitors.

Q. Are there support groups for people who’ve been sentenced to Discretionary Execution?

A. Yes. Local NJSDE Support Groups meet throughout the state. The day-to-day burden of living with an NJSDE sentence can be psychologically debilitating, and many releasees find the NJSDE Support Group enormously helpful. The fellowship of others who are experiencing the same dread and paranoia, and the guidance of specially trained counselors, can ease your feelings of isolation and significantly enhance the quality of your life.

Q. Can I be Discretionarily Executed while attending a New Jersey State Discretionary Execution Support Group meeting?

A. Absolutely! In fact, the chances of being killed while attending an NJSDE Support Group meeting are extraordinarily high. Not only are you subject to an NJSDE attempt on your own life, but you are at increased risk of being collaterally killed in an attempt on any one of your fellow NJSDE Support Group members!

Q. If I avoid execution and survive into my senescence, but then develop a fatal disease or disorder, will I — at that point — be removed from the NJSDE “active list” and allowed to die a natural death?

A. No. Your status as an NJSDE releasee is irrevocable and remains in effect until you are declared legally brain dead. Unless certification of brain death is received by the NJSDE Control Center, your social security number remains active in the NJSDE system, and if that number yields any of the triggering values, you are subject to Discretionary Execution over that ensuing 24-hour period, regardless of your age or infirmity.

Several years ago, an octogenarian NJSDE releasee who’d suffered a serious thromboembolic stroke was sent to the hospital for an MRI scan in order to determine the degree of neurological damage. As he was rolled into the tunnel-like magnetic machine, an NJSDE commando hidden inside, splayed stealthily against the scanner’s cylindrical walls, garroted the releasee to death, as bewildered physicians squinted at their monitors in the control room.

In a recent incident, an elderly NJSDE releasee was about to undergo a lithotripsy — a procedure for fragmenting bladder stones, in which the patient is immersed shoulder-deep in a special tub and high-frequency ultrasound shock waves transmitted by a machine called a lithotripter are focused on the stones and shatter them. As he was lowered into the lithotripsy tub, several clandestinely submerged NJSDE frogmen fired a salvo from their spearguns, killing the shriveled releasee instantly.

NJSDE operatives dispatched to execute ailing releasees in New Jersey hospitals frequently disguise themselves as grossly negligent physicians, thereby enabling them to move freely about operating rooms and intensive-care units.

Be advised, though, that if you die as a result of premeditated medical malpractice at the hands of an NJSDE assassin disguised as a grossly negligent physician, your loved ones are not entitled to compensatory and punitive damages. But if they can show that, during a Discretionary Execution attempt by NJSDE assassins disguised as grossly negligent physicians, the primary cause of death was actually the inadvertent result of a bona fide grossly negligent physician’s own gross negligence, then they are entitled to compensatory and punitive damages.

The most celebrated lawsuit resulting from an NJSDE releasee’s death due to concomitant deliberate and inadvertent gross negligence involved the renowned signage copywriter Leonard Gutman.

Although most signage copywriters are unheralded, their work is among the most widely apprehended language-product in the world. The lay public is aware that copywriters are critical in the creation of brochures, direct mail, print ads, radio spots, television commercials, etc. And some advertising copywriters have even achieved celebrity status in this country, commanding salaries commensurate with Hollywood screenwriters and best-selling novelists. Most people, though, tend to disparage — or ignore altogether — the role of highly skilled copywriters in the creation of the text-driven signs that we see everywhere around us.

Len Gutman was not only considered technically virtuosic in his craft, he was deemed a visionary genius. In the course of his career, he garnered every significant award bestowed by his colleagues, and was ultimately designated a “Living National Treasure” by the American Signage and Display Association (ASDA). His work is so ubiquitous and prototypical that it smacks of the primordial, as if it’s somehow existed always, independent of human artifice.

Use Other Door—one of the very first signs that Gutman wrote as a young man — became an immediate classic. Gutman went on to write a stunning series of signs that fundamentally redefined our sense of public language, including: Out of Service, Visitors Must Sign In, and Push to Start. Then — in what is considered Gutman’s annus mirabilis—an astonishing burst of creative activity in which masterpiece followed masterpiece in astonishing succession: Do Not Enclose or Obstruct Access to Meter, Turn Knob to Right Only, Right Lane Must Turn Right, and the sublime Employees Must Wash Hands Before Returning to Work. (That same year, Gutman also co-wrote We Deliver, Totally Nude, and Void Where Prohibited.)

There’s an austere beauty to much of his work, pared down to its irreducible essence. In a famous television interview with Gutman late in his life, a critic is standing with him in front of a restaurant’s lavatories, admiring what is indisputably Gutman’s most popular, and arguably his finest, sign: Men.

They then move over to the distaff door.

“You didn’t write Women?” asks the critic.

“No, I wish I had,” Gutman smiles wistfully.

In contrast, there’s an almost rococo exuberance to some of his work—The Plinth Is Not Edible, for example, a sign Gutman wrote for an exhibition of halvah statuary at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

Gutman was writing what would be his final and unfinished sign, Excuse Our Appearance, We’re—, when he suffered a severe coronary and was rushed by ambulance to a nearby hospital.

Unbeknownst to the EMS paramedics and hospital staff who ministered to him that afternoon, unbeknownst to his wife and children, unbeknownst to his dearest friends and his peers in the signage and display industry, Len Gutman was an NJSDE releasee.

As a result of a youthful indiscretion, Gutman had lived each day of his adult life with the specter of impending Discretionary Execution. Remarkably, though, graced by the vagaries of the NJSDE condemnation process, there was not to be a single attempt on his life until he was 78 years old.

That autumn evening at 9:00 P.M., at the Control Center in Trenton, Gutman’s social security number was factored into the NJSDE computer as it had been every day for the past 60 years, only this particular night — according to unsealed NJSDE records — it yielded the numerical sequence 94375—the four billionth to four billion and fourth decimal digits of pi — exposing Gutman to Discretionary Execution for the ensuing 24 hours. Ironically, on the afternoon of the following day — and as yet unrelated to any NJSDE activity — he suffered the aforementioned heart attack, and was wheeled into the emergency room in a state of cardiac arrest.

Gutman’s heart was in ventricular fibrillation. The cardiologist on call at the time, New Jersey native Dr. Richard Cuozzo, administered a precordial thump in an effort to mechanically stimulate Gutman’s heart and convert it to a normal rhythm. A precordial thump is a firm blow to the lower half of the sternum, delivered with a closed fist, from a distance of about 15 inches above the chest. Cuozzo gave Gutman two additional precordial thumps, all to no apparent effect. He then initiated external cardiac massage, in an effort to drive blood out into the pulmonary artery and aorta. With one hand placed over the other, Cuozzo positioned the heel of the bottom hand on the lower third of Gutman’s sternum and sharply depressed it, holding it down for a moment and then releasing. He performed some 60 massages per minute for approximately two minutes — again, to no apparent effect.

It was at this point that two NJSDE operatives — disguised as grossly negligent physicians assisting Dr. Cuozzo — placed external defibrillator paddles on Gutman’s chest and administered two shocks in rapid succession. The maximum charge for defibrillating a human heart is 300 to 350 joules. The disguised NJSDE agents used approximately 5,000 joules of electricity, delivering to Gutman a charge sufficient to jump-start a Winnebago. Then, leaving nothing to chance, they administered an intravenous injection of lidocaine, an anesthetic used as a ventricular antiarrhythmic, giving Gutman 20 grams, a lethal quantity some ten times the recommended dose.

Gutman, of course, died.

Early that evening, a hospital spokesman announced that Len Gutman had arrived at the emergency room suffering a heart attack and had expired as a result of deliberate and premeditated measures taken by NJSDE agents disguised as grossly negligent physicians, acting without the foreknowledge or complicity of Dr. Cuozzo or anyone else on staff. The media had no reason to question the veracity of the hospital’s account, and the story, along with Leonard Gutman, was seemingly put to rest.

Gutman’s wife and son, though, were not quite so credulous. Retaining the services of prominent medical malpractice attorney Irvin Wachtell, they initiated a private investigation, resulting in a disinterment and a new autopsy, and two months later they filed a $25 million wrongful death suit against the hospital and Dr. Richard Cuozzo, claiming that it was Cuozzo’s genuine gross negligence and not the feigned gross negligence of the NJSDE agents that resulted in Gutman’s death. Specifically, they charged that Cuozzo had used “egregiously excessive force,” causing “CPR-induced thoracic wall trauma and fatal injury to abdominal and thoracic organs.”

At the trial, a nuanced and often sympathetic portrait emerged of Dr. Richard Cuozzo.

“Richie’s a surf-and-turf kind of guy,” testified Cuozzo’s best friend, Victor Polumbo, a hospital maintenance man. “Not your typical cardiologist, y’know what I’m saying. He never talks down to you like the other doctors. He’s a good guy. A Rangers fan.”

A podiatrist, who’d been a fraternity brother of Cuozzo’s at medical school in Guadalajara, testified about his extraordinary ability to drink and parallel-park. “I been out with Richie where we’d be doin’ shots and beers all night, and I got a Lincoln Town Car, and Richie, he could put that car in a space where you get out and look and you go, there’s like no fuckin’ way he just did that.”

“He’s never too tired to spot for somebody,” testified a gym buddy.

“He’s fun, y’know what I mean?” said OR nurse Sheri Hildebrand. “The other doctors, they’re so serious all the time. Richie, he can always make you laugh. Even when he loses a patient, he can immediately say something funny, and, y’know, you just forget about it.”

Called to the stand by the Gutmans’ attorney, Cuozzo was asked to demonstrate — on a CPR dummy laid out on a table in front of the jury — the force of the precordial thumps he administered to Len Gutman that fateful afternoon. Cuozzo made a fist and thumped the dummy, breaking the table in two. The CPR dummy was then laid across several cinder blocks. Cuozzo delivered another precordial thump, this time splitting the cinder block under the dummy’s sternum. At the request of plaintiff’s counsel, Cuozzo then demonstrated how he’d administered external cardiac massage to the deceased. This time the CPR dummy was placed on a four-inch-thick marble tabletop with thick reinforced-steel legs. Cuozzo began his forceful depressions of the dummy’s chest. By the twentieth massage, the steel legs began to buckle, and marble dust was sprinkling from a spreading fissure in the tabletop. In less than a minute, the legs snapped completely.

Indeed, Gutman’s autopsy disclosed extensive hemorrhage investing the pectoralis regions, intercostal musculature, and parasternal muscles. The sternum had two fractures with extensive localized hemorrhage. The left first through seventh ribs were fractured with severe accompanying soft-tissue hemorrhage. The right first through ninth ribs were fractured with similar soft tissue and muscular hemorrhage.

The autopsy further disclosed liver lacerations, splenic and pancreatic injury, cardiac rupture, pneumothorax, aortic laceration, and systemic fat embolism — each of which could be distinctly certified as a cause of death and of all of which were directly attributable to Cuozzo’s ungainly attempts at cardiopulmonary resuscitation.

In the unequivocal opinion of the plaintiff’s expert witnesses, Len Gutman was already dead when the NJSDE agents gave him the 5,000 joules of electricity and 20 grams of lidocaine.

The jury deliberated for less than fifteen minutes and awarded the Gutman family $40 million in damages.

Although Dr. Richard Cuozzo experienced a dramatic surge in his malpractice premiums, he was given an honorary fourth-degree black belt by the Passaic County Tae Kwon Do School in recognition of his accomplishments in the emergency room and during the trial.

And in a final irony, as he accepted his honorary black belt — the first ever bestowed by the Passaic County Tae Kwon Do School on a nonpractitioner — Cuozzo stood under one of Leonard Gutman’s earliest signs, which, though immediately recognizable as fledgling Gutman, betokens the compression and allusiveness that would so distinguish his mature oeuvre:

Students Must Remove Shoes

Before Entering Dojo

So here we are — you, my father, and I — having arrived simultaneously at the word Dojo.

Now you can perhaps feel the kinetic sensation of reading apace with us. Share the sensation of neurolinguistic motion with me and my dad. The hair in the breeze! I don’t know what you’d call it exactly … Is there a strictly cerebral kinesthesia … a lexical kinesthesia? A proprioception associated with reading-speed?

Every male Leyner from the very beginning (I’m talking about the original botched eugenics experiments in Galicia and Estonia in the mid-nineteenth century) reads at exactly the same speed—620 words per minute. A moderate clip. (Female Leyners read at about 750 words a minute.) I don’t care what you give my father and me to read — a three-syllable Leonard Gutman sign or the 2,815-page Fermilab Fixed-Target Proton Accelerator service manual — we’ll reach the final word with perfect coterminous symmetry.

Dojo.

And then we look up with what appears to be this impassive bored expectancy but is really a moment of cognitive processing during which our facial muscles go slack.

“Any questions?” asks the warden.

“Nuh-uh,” Dad and I say in unison.

“Very comprehensive,” says my father, slipping the brochure into the inside breast pocket of an orange blazer with a three-guillotined-heads-chatting-amiably-in-a-basket NJSDE escutcheon sewn onto the breast pocket.

The superintendent then asks if we’d like to purchase a video of the execution. (Videos of all executions, successful or abortive, are made available — at a fee, of course — to the families of the condemned inmate and his or her victims.)

This occasions a lightning-fast colloquy between my father and I that, in its susurrant urgency, will remind you of — depending on your taste in nonfiction TV — either the ad hoc huddles convened by teammates on game shows or the microphone-muffled, privileged powwows between witnesses and their lawyers at Congressional hearings:

“I don’t really want it,” I say, cupping a hand to my mouth and whispering into his ear.

“Get one, for Christ’s sake,” says my father, eyeing the superintendent, but addressing me under his breath, through a clench-toothed ventriloquist’s grin. “I wish I had a goddamn video of my father’s execution.”

“I don’t have any money on me.”

“I’ll pay for it.”

“But it’s so stupid,” I complain, spitting on his ear-lobe.

“I WILL PAY FOR IT!” he insists, grin frozen, lips motionless.

“But, Daaaaaady …” I whine, regressing in the face of his peremptory largesse.

“Superintendent, we’ll take a video,” Dad announces.

Now the superintendent wants to know whether we’d like a soundtrack. (The video is $24.95 without the soundtrack — for an extra $10 they’ll dub in any song you want.)

“What exactly is in the video?” my father asks.

“It’s the entire lethal-injection sequence up to and including when you say ‘I feel shitty.’ You can choose any song you’d like — we have a CD library with over 10,000 titles.”

Now my father’s pondering this. He’s taken a seat and he’s poring over this catalog of CD titles. And I’m beginning to feel really pressed time-wise. In order to collect the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo / Oshimitsu Polymers America Award, I need a screenplay written by tomorrow. I know, I know — I shouldn’t have waited until the last minute … Anyway, I need to get to the library today before it closes. I never expected this thing to take so long. I thought I’d be in and out of here.

And also I’m getting in a bad mood because … well, for two reasons: First of all, I have a feeling that my father is going to ask me to share a cab with him — which I absolutely won’t do. I mean, you’re aware of the highly complex social structure of 13-year-old boys with its intricate, hierarchical, and unyielding code of decorum in which various forms of behavior and activities are proscribed by taboos, so you know how mortifying it is for someone my age to be seen with a parent in public by his peers, the ignominy of which is made even more unbearable by anything that calls attention to the fact, and nothing calls attention to itself more conspicuously than a fiery execution attempt — so you can understand my feelings of dread about the possibility of sharing a taxi with a father who might be brutally assassinated by NJSDE operatives while we’re stopped at a traffic light. God, I’d absolutely die with embarrassment! And, second, I’m starting to feel really weird about the warden not having responded to or acknowledged in any way the two clandestine notes I slipped her: “You wanna get high?” and “Be my sweaty bosomy lover?” Maybe — I’m thinking — if you do something so fulsomely inappropriate — like slipping her these billets-doux — maybe the reproach is this massive silence, this nullifying indifference that expunges the act right out of existence, making you question whether you’d ever committed it in the first place. So I start to wonder if I’d ever given her the notes — I rummage around for them in the mealy pockets of my leather trousers, but find only a phenobarbital, an ossified yellow Starburst, and my folded-up fake movie review (more about which later) — or if I’d ever really written them at all.

“What about ‘Night of the Living Baseheads’—Public Enemy?” Dad asks, running a finger down a page from the CD catalog.

“Too old,” says the superintendent. “What about something from … like Snoop or Wu Tang Clan?”

Dad moistens his finger and flips a couple of pages ahead.

“They got Raekwon … Only Built 4 Cuban Linx. What about something off that?”

“That shit’s too aggressive, man. Too strident,” says the executioner. “Think about it, Joel — you’re just stretched out there on the gurney. It’s very … supine.”

Dad nods.

“Y’know what might be really good?” he asks. “But you gotta think about it for a minute. ‘My Jamaican Guy.’ Grace Jones.”

Grimaces of disapproval.

“You’re strapped to a gurney with lethal drugs dripping into your vein and we hear ‘My Jamaican Guy’ … I don’t get it,” says the doctor.

“Yeah, you’re right … maybe if I was Jamaican …” Dad says, perusing along.

Then the rabbi pipes up.

“See if they have the Smiths’ CD, The Queen Is Dead,” he says. “The song ‘I Know It’s Over.’ ‘Oh Mother / I can feel / the soil falling over my head …’ That presentiment of being buried could be really intense.”

“Please, not Morrissey,” grumbles the doctor, rolling his eyes. “You have this great abortive-execution video and you’re gonna ruin it with Morrissey?”

“I think Morrissey’s perfect for an abortive execution,” the rabbi replies defensively.

“You know what would be really intense?” says the operations officer. “The White Zombie song ‘Soul-Crusher.’ ‘Burning like fat in the fire / The smell of red, red groovie screamed mega-flow / A stalking ground without prey / A flash of superstition whimpering like a crippled animal / Dogs of the soul-crusher / Pulling closer like the blue steel jaws of hell.’ ”

“That’s a cool song,” the superintendent agrees.

“You like Fugazi?” the operations officer asks my father.

“I don’t really know any specific songs,” says my Dad.

“Fugazi! Yes!” raves the superintendent, pumping his fist in the air.

“You ever see them live?” asks the operations officer.

“No, man, I wish I had.”

“You gotta see them in Bethesda. That’s like the ultimate place to see Fugazi.”

“Fugazi … Fugazi … Fugazi … OK, here we go,” says Dad, sliding his finger across the page from Performer to CD Title. “They have Red Medicine.”

“Perfect!” the operations officer says. “That’s got ‘By You’—‘Generation fuck you / to define and redefine / you’d make them all the same / but molds they break away / safely inside / looking outside / go keep on picking at it / it’s just going to get bigger …’ It’s got ‘Target’—’It’s cold outside and my hands are dry / skin is cracked / and I realize that I hate the sound of guitars / a thousand grudging young millionaires / forcing silence / sucking sound …’ ”

My father shakes his head.

“It’s too bleak … Too apocalyptic. I survived the execution attempt, right?”

The warden’s male secretary floats a concept.

“Echo and the Bunnymen. ‘Over You.’ ‘Feeling good again / always hoped I would / never believed that I ever could.’ ”

“You know what song might really work?” Dad says. “ ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.’ Elton John and Kiki Dee.”

The rabbi shuts his eyes, his head bobbing to the imagined music.

“That might work,” he says.

“Or maybe a standard …” says Dad. “ ‘The Best Is Yet to Come.’ Sinatra. Y’know, real brassy optimism …”

“What about something from Phantom? Like Michael Crawford singing ‘Music of the Night,’“ suggests the warden’s secretary. “That could be very dramatic. Because, frankly, I think you could use something with a little schmaltz, ‘cause seven minutes of a motionless body on a steel cot is not particularly compelling.”

Dad looks up from the catalog.

“This is gonna sound weird,” he says, “but I think it could be really good. ‘I’m Hans Christian Andersen.’ Danny Kaye, from the movie.”

“You’re lying there with a lethal drug IV in your arm and the soundtrack is ‘I’m Hans Christian Andersen’? That doesn’t make any fucking sense to me,” says the superintendent.

“That’s the point,” asserts my father. “We see me — Joel Leyner — on a gurney. But we hear ‘I’m Hans Christian Andersen / Andersen — that’s me.’ See, it’s like: How are we identified? And how do we denominate ourselves? What’s me/Leyner? What’s the meaning of that classification? Names are arbitrary designations used by the state apparatus to facilitate surveillance and control. That could be Hans Christian Andersen on that gurney. You know what I’m saying? See, you’ll be watching Joel Leyner and hearing Danny Kaye claim that he’s Hans Christian Andersen. You’d get this dissonant dialectic going between image and sound.…”

“I think people would just think it’s a goof,” the superintendent says.

“Well, what about ‘Inchworm’—from the same movie. Y’know, ‘Inchworm / inchworm / measuring the marigolds Like measuring out the last moments of my life.”

“I just wouldn’t use a Danny Kaye song. That’s my personal feeling, man. I just don’t think he’s right for this.”

“I have an idea, but it’s in a completely different direction,” says the warden. “We see a man lying on a gurney, strapped to a gurney, right? That, to me, connotes surrender — a kind of erotic surrender. Y’know, you can do whatever you want to me and take however long you want to take doing it. Because I’m ceding control to you. So I thought maybe something like Luther Vandross … y’know the song ‘The Glow of Love.’ There is no better way to be / Hold me, caress me / I’m yours forever and a day / We are a sweet bouquet / Seasons for happiness are here / Can you feel it? / The reason we’re filled with cheer is / We’re in rapture / In the glow of love.’ ”

“Is he restricted to one song, or can you lay in parts from different songs?” asks the executioner.

The superintendent shrugs.

“I don’t see why we couldn’t use sections from several songs, if that’s what Mr. Leyner would like.”

“OK, maybe we go like this,” the executioner says excitedly. “We key the music to the control-panel lights for the drugs’ delivery sequence. Red light, yellow light, sodium thiopental injection — boom — Elton John and Kiki Dee, ‘Don’t Go Breaking My Heart.’ Green light — fade music. OK. Red light, yellow light, pancuronium bromide injection — boom — Luther Vandross, ‘The Glow of Love.’ Green light — fade music. OK. Red light, yellow light, potassium chloride injection — boom — Michael Crawford, ‘Music of the Night’ from Phantom of the Opera. Green light — fade music. Joel looks up and says, ‘I feel shitty.’ Fade to black.”

“You like Arnold Schoenberg’s Suite for Piano, opus 25?” the rabbi asks my father.

“How’s it go?”

The rabbi hums the entire fourteen-minute composition.

“Nuh-uh,” Dad says.

I stick my two pinkies into my mouth and produce an excruciating, hideously high-pitched whistle.

“Hey! People! C’mon, I gotta get out of here already!”

“We have a soundtrack to finish, son,” says my father, without looking up from the catalog.

I turn to the superintendent.

“Can you remix an existing song? Patch in some samples, add some tracks?”

“Y’know the remote-fired stationary tear-gas network control console booth above the maximum-security eating hall?” says the superintendent. “Well, I have a little studio in there — Korg DSS-1 Digital Sampling Synthesizer, Kawai R-100 Digital Drum Machine, Roland MC-500 MIDI Sequencer. What are you thinking?”

“Well … this is like completely off the top of my head, but … After the drugs, my dad looks up and says ‘I feel shitty,’ right? Why don’t we take the Bernstein/Sondheim tune from West Side Story—‘I Feel Pretty’—overdub the word shitty—make ‘I Feel Shitty.’ And I’d slow it down to a dirge. Do a sort of Trent Reznor mix. ‘I feel shitty / oh so shitty / I feel shitty and witty and bright / and I pity / any girl who isn’t me tonight.’ ”

“That’s it!” hails the rabbi. “It’s lovely.”

Dad closes the catalog. “I can live with that.”

“It’s excellent, man,” says the executioner, giving me five.

“And I’d add a wheeze rhythm track,” I say. “Get a slow, really labored wheeze. Do you have any, like, asthmatic or black-lung wheeze samples?”

“I’ll check,” the superintendent says, rising to his feet.

With a ripple of cracking knee joints, everyone stands.

C’est fini. Finally.

It’s bye-bye time.

My father embraces me. He rocks me gently from side to side. And then, enclasped, we begin to revolve in a counterclockwise rotation, a dirty dance of sorts.

The room is hushed. The stenographer cranes her neck to better apprehend our murmured farewell, made even less audible by the Doppler effect of our axial motion.

“I don’t know when I’m going to see you again.”

“I know that, Dad.”

“There’s no going back, now.”

“I know.”

“No more fairy tales, ace. No restoration of the status quo ante. You know what I’m saying? You have to be the man now.”

“I know that, Dad.”

“And you have to start wearing a shirt.”

“Awwwwwww, Dad,” I whine. And then, testily, under my breath: “I wear a shirt when you lose the false eyelashes and titty-torture clamps, you punk-ass dusthead.”

Our faces slip in and out of crepuscular shadow as we slowly spin.

“It’s going to be tough on your mother. And you have to take care of that woman now. I’m an NJSDE releasee, and I can’t do it. You understand? In a few minutes I’m going to call and tell her that I may never see her again. And she’ll probably be wearing her black Thierry Mugler suit. And from that moment on she might sit home like Miss Havisham in that black Thierry Mugler suit — and she might wear that same fucking suit every single day for the rest of her life. And you have to be prepared to deal with that.”

I’m beginning to feel light-headed and slightly nauseated from the continuous counterclockwise gyre.

“Look at me, boy.”

“What’s the matter?”

“I have something I need to ask you,” he says gravely. “And I want you to take your time and think it over seriously before you give me your answer.”

“I will, Dad.”

We stop moving.

“Son … what’s the maxim that more eloquently than any other articulates a Leyner’s self-image, his worldview, his pride and ambition as a man, as a pagan moralist and as an American — the call to arms, the cri de coeur, the phrase-that-pays that can inspire and galvanize him for the rest of his life? I need to hear you say it, son.”

I peer fervently into my fathers eyes and squeeze him hard, as hard as I’ve ever squeezed another human being. And I recite those words, those stirring, unforgettable words, in defense of which — in the ensuing months — so many brave Bougainvillean boys will lose their minds:

“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,” I intone, “but it takes real balls to turn a brunette without a cranium into a blonde.”

The room bursts into applause and I can see several people daubing tears from their eyes.

There’s now — as if conveyed via the sort of subliminal, instantaneously communicated signal that causes an entire herd on the savanna to suddenly change direction — an implicit sense of adjournment, and everyone gathers his or her personal effects and begins to filter out of the warden’s office.

“You’re going to the library from here to work on that screenplay, right?” my father asks.

“Yeah …” I answer, anticipating the inevitable corollary.

“So … you want to share a cab?”

I stare down at the floor, shifting my weight uneasily from foot to foot.

“I can’t, Dad … no way.”

I cringe, awaiting his response. And when none is forthcoming, I look back up.

He’s gone!

I scan the room and he’s nowhere to be seen.

“Hey, where’d my dad go?”

“He left,” says the superintendent, who’s just returned from his studio in the tear-gas control console booth. “I just passed him in the hall.”

That’s it. He’s gone, I say to myself, shaking my head. My father has now begun the grim, tormented, and macabre life of an NJSDE releasee, a life that may very well come to a violent and agonizing end within the next five minutes, within the next hour, or in a month, or a year, or — who knows? — flourish without untoward incident for another fifty years and then the blast of shrapnel or the Colombian necktie.

“Oh, by the way, I searched the patch files,” says the superintendent, “and we have a bronchitis wheeze sample.”

“Bronchitis … that sounds cool,” I say. “Just make sure the tempo is right — very, very slow, larghissimo, funereal. Like ‘I feel shitty / wheeze … wheeze / oh so shitty / wheeze … wheeze …’ ”

“Gotcha,” he says, extending his hand. “Mark, take it easy and good luck on the screenplay.”

“Thank you very much.”

We shake and he exits.

Ditto the operations officer.

“All the luck in the world on that screenplay.”

“Thanks, I appreciate it.”

The doctor.

“I’m keeping my fingers crossed for you on that Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo / Oshimitsu Polymers America thing.”

“Thanks so much.”

And the executioner: “How much was that—$200,000 a year? Madonna! Whack that script out of the ballpark, chief.”

“I’m gonna try. Thanks a lot. And thanks for everything today.”

And then the rabbi.

He gestures elaborately at the mythical multiplex marquee in the sky. “Eventually, Even Mighty Mouse Is Vivisected by the Dour Bitch in a White Lab Coat,” he says, flashing a pair of avid thumbs-up.

“Thank you. Vaya con Dios, Rabbi.”

Now only the warden, the warden’s male secretary, the stenographer, and I remain in the office.

“Absolutely no calls and shut the door on your way out, please,” says the warden.

For a second I assume she’s talking to me.

“Absolutely no calls,” parrots the secretary, winking at me as he closes the door behind him.

When I turn and look back at the warden, she’s perched atop her desk, smirking cryptically, one eyebrow arched high, little diamond chips like crushed ice gleaming across the straps of her stilettos. And she’s got my two little notes in her hand: “You wanna get high?” and “Be my sweaty bosomy lover?” And she’s waving them in the air like a pair of theater tickets. Like front-row orchestra, opening night, Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound at the Greater Dionysia in Athens in friggin’ 468 A.D. I mean, like a pair of real hot ducats.

Gulp.

Boing.

Three quick procedural items before we move on to substantive issues — namely, my impending drug- and alcohol-addled liaison with the warden. (What symmetry, right — the exile of my father and my initiation into manhood!)

First, to paraphrase Oxford zoologist Richard Dawkins, during the minute that it takes you to read this sentence, “thousands of animals are being eaten alive, many others are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, others are being slowly devoured from within by rasping parasites … It must be so. In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice.” Now if you take another minute and reread that sentence, even more animals will be eaten alive and devoured by parasites. In fact, it’s almost as if reading that particular sentence actually causes the animals to be eaten alive and devoured by parasites. Is this possible? Well, yes, according to CERN physicist John Stewart Bell’s theorem of nonlocal interaction. Anyway, my point is — doesn’t it all make what we’re doing right now seem pretty ludicrous? I mean, there’s all that predation and whimpering and devouring going on out there, and you and I are just sitting here, writing and reading. It’s not the writing per se that bothers me, it’s the venue, the sedentarinous, the insularity. If only there were a more public, a more athletic, more agonistic way of doing it. What do you think I’d rather be doing right now: sitting in this book-lined atelier, stroking my chin, lost in this solitary reverie or striding into a domed stadium with a bag full of laptops, wearing a shirt emblazoned with logos — Apple, Microsoft Word, Xerox, Roget’s Thesaurus, Chivas Regal, Marlboro, Zoloft — and going head-to-head against the world’s top-ranked professional prose stylists, as 75,000 raucous, beer-swilling fans cheer our sentences as they instantly appear on the huge Diamond Vision screens?

So why do I do it then? Why do I sit here like this?

Because if writing this book — which, according to several people who are knowledgeable about literature, is the first tetherball novel ever—can help just one other kid who’s gone through a similar experience, i.e., having a dad who survived an attempted execution by lethal injection and is resentenced to NJSDE, and losing your virginity to a 36-year-old warden, then it will all have been worth it.

Second, some of you may find the following depiction of my sexual encounter with the warden to be too explicit or even pornographic. Before reading this section, click the Scramble icon if any of the following activities or anatomical areas are objectionable to you: (1) human genitals in a state of sexual stimulation or arousal; (2) actual or simulated acts of human masturbation, sexual intercourse, or sodomy; (3) fondling or other erotic touching of human genitals, pubic region, buttock, anus, or female breast; (4) less than completely and opaquely concealed (a) human genitals, pubic region, (b) human buttock, anus, or (c) female breast below a point immediately above the top of the areola; or (5) human male genitals in a discernibly turgid state, even if completely and opaquely concealed. By clicking the Scramble icon, your mind will supplant any of the above depictions with images of Buddhist monks paginating toilet tissue. This exclusive bowdlerizing feature is available only in The Tetherballs of Bougainville. And remember, at any point you can reread the Dawkins sentence and kill more animals. Whatever you want. It’s way interactive.

And finally, as you’ll soon see, in the midst of the tryst, I peek at my Tag Heuer and realize there’s no way I’m going to get to the Maplewood Public Library before it closes and that I’ll probably not be able to come up with a screenplay in order to win the Vincent and Lenore DiGiacomo / Oshimitsu Polymers America Award. Did I ever really expect to ensconce myself in a library carrel and produce an original screenplay in one afternoon? Actually, no. I’d always anticipated making a cursory attempt at researching “story ideas,” looking for books to “adapt,” like, y’know, Spin’s Alternative Record Guide: The Movie, and then, quickly tiring of that endeavor, simply plagiarizing an existing screenplay — something prestigious like Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert or Jean-Luc Godard’s La Chinoise. Sure, in a halfhearted attempt at “originality,” I’d have tried to make some cosmetic alteration, like changing the young Parisian Maoists in La Chinoise to followers of Vellupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or to fanatical devotees of leveraged-buyout titan Henry Kravis or maybe fanatical devotees of Amy Tan or Rabbi Schneerson or Ukrainian figure skater Oksana Baiul or whatever, and then finding even this an intellectual conundrum beyond my patience and attention span, just copying Godard’s screenplay word for word, and then, after two pages, annoyed by the prospect of having to retype the whole script, finally just photocopying it and then doing a fast cut-and-paste job on the title page so it read La Chinoise by Mark Leyner, because I figured with the clout of an ICM agent, I’d still be able to win the award.

But I realize, given the time, that it’s going to be impossible to do even that — you’ll be reading all this in a couple of pages — and the warden, grabbing a handful of hair and lifting my head from her crotch, says, “I’ve got an idea, why don’t you make a screenplay out of this?”

And I look at her, or try to look at her, try to focus, squinting through this gooey scrim of secretions that covers my eyes. And I’m like: “This?”

And she says, “Yeah, this,” indicating, with a panoramic gesture, the whole drug- and alcohol-addled liaison we’re presently engaged in. And she says, “Do a screenplay that appears to be a faux autobiographical documentary, but that’s actually — here’s the irony — completely factual. Faux irony.”

My head is spinning. I’d gone from never having even seen a real live vagina one minute to being literally immersed in one the next, which is like having gone from wiggling your toes in a little backyard kiddie pool to scuba diving in the Marianas Trench without any intervening training, and on top of it all, now I’m trying to figure out “faux irony,” which apparently is like multiplying negative numbers, which — I think — we did in Mr. Hawes’s math class. But then a little lightbulb goes on.

“It’s like plagiarizing life, sort of. Right?” I ask. “It’s, like, no work.”

“Basically,” she concurs. “As soon as you get home from here, just write down everything that happened and just put it in screenplay form. In fact, it wouldn’t hurt if you started thinking in terms of camera angles from here on,” she says, pushing my head back down.

Not only do I find transposing my experiences into camera angles simultaneous to actually having those experiences to be an extraordinarily soothing exercise in self-consciousness, but I realize that it’s a correlative to that near-death state during which your spirit hovers over your body and observes the frenzied efforts at resuscitation with this sort of dégagé bemusement, all of which further corroborates my theory of the afterlife that I first proposed in Ms. Kazanjian’s Comparative Thanotology and Eschatology class. As a final project, I built this papier-mâché diorama — well, my friend Felipe actually constructed it; it was my idea, but I seem to have this problem with deadlines—we built this papier-mâché diorama basically illustrating that in our mortal, corporeal existence we’re all sort of like actors and actresses — marionettes endowed with rudimentary attributes like sycophancy and sanctimony, but lacking the capacity for generative thought. But then at the moment we die — unless, of course, we’ve been grossly iniquitous, in which case we plummet on this gondola flume-ride, as Billy Idol sings Venetian boat songs, to some infernal grotto where we become infomercial studio audience members, rapturously applauding nose-hair clippers and sonic plaque removers for eternity — but otherwise we become screenwriters, which is why your life flashes before your eyes in the form of a storyboard. At some point thereafter, you begin your ascension of the empyreal hierarchy — you direct, you produce, you head a studio, you achieve moguldom, and ultimately you implode and, depending on how dense you are, you become either a white dwarf or a black hole. And Ms. Kazanjian said — and she said it in front of the whole class — that of all the seventh-grade final projects linking postmortem ontogeny, Entertainment Weekly, and stellar evolution, mine was one of the best she’d ever seen.

So on the way home from the prison, I stop at Nobody Beats The Wiz and buy this screenplay-formatting software program called SkriptMentor. All in all, I’d recommend SkriptMentor to aspiring screenwriters. In addition to formatting features like slug lines, scene numbers, dialogue breaks, etc., SkriptMentor also offers “idea generator and story guidance” options that include over 50,000 plot and subplot possibilities, 20,000 character combinations, and some 5,000 conflict situations. But I do have some serious reservations. I find several of the tutorial features rather intrusive and cumbersome.

For instance, whenever there’s a sex scene in your script, a dialog box is displayed on-screen reading: Penis size? You’re given several standard options: Harvey Keitel, Jeff Stryker, and Porfirio Rubirosa. There’s a 5-inch default setting. You’re also able to customize the penis size of your characters in much the same way as you adjust tabs and margins in word-processing programs, by manually dragging a size box. Some users may appreciate features that enable you to cut and paste penises from one character to another, or the Find and Replace command that allows you to change penis sizes throughout your script with a single keystroke, but I find it annoying that every time I have a male character engage in or even discuss sex, this penis-size dialogue box plops into the middle of my screen and I have to scroll through the entire Tool Palette just to choose the default setting and continue with my scene.

I find the Ass Menu equally aggravating. With the introduction of every new male character, however subsidiary, a dialogue box is displayed reading Ass? and offering a menu with several options: Hirsute, Hairless, Dimpled, Smooth, Blemished, etc. Clicking any of these options opens a submenu. For instance, there are six levels of Hirsute, from Blonde Down to Coarse Simian. Within Blemished, you can choose Birthmarks, Moles, Keloid Scars, Needle Tracks, Pimples, Folliculitis, Boils, and then you can customize buttock-boil placement with a click, drag-and-drop feature, etc. Again, although some of you may find these features creatively stimulating, I think it would behoove the makers of SkriptMentor to allow users to more easily circumvent these options. Having to scroll through an Ass Menu whenever a FedEx deliveryman appears at the door can really bog you down, and that’s the last thing you need, especially when you have this looming deadline.

And perhaps most distracting of all is that every two pages or five minutes, a dialog box appears on-screen reading: Requisite Springsteen Dirge?

You click No.

Five minutes later: Requisite Springsteen Dirge? Again you click No.

Five minutes later: Requisite Springsteen Dirge?

No!

It’s really irritating. Perhaps this is a valuable feature for those aspiring screenwriters who may have written a script and inadvertently omitted the requisite Springsteen dirge, but at least they could provide some sort of bypass option. Wouldn’t it be better, when you initially set the format parameters of your screenplay, if you could just choose No Springsteen Dirge, double-click, and move on?