The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) by Mark Leyner Read Free Book Online Page A

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 byYanni 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 globalsecurity 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