Free The Tetherballs of Bougainville: A Novel (Vintage Contemporaries) by Mark Leyner

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 Stetsonsand 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