“ ‘Ladies and gentleman of the jury,’ he intones, ‘The flesh is sad, alas!’ And then pointing to Polo, ‘And he has written all the books.’
“At first he affects a casual, amiable, at times intimate manner — seeking to connect personally with each member of the jury. He jokes about a newfound interest in petit-point embroidery. He shares odd, seemingly irrelevant bits of gee-whiz scientific trivia (‘Most things swell in the heat, right? Well, zirconium tungstate contracts when warmed!’) and then a strange anecdote about being chased through the Museum of Natural History by a girl with webbed fingers. He launches into a long, pointless digression about Seattle Supersonics point guard Gary Payton and Los Angeles Laker Nick Van Exel. And then he relates a dream he says he had the previous night (‘There were these aliens, female aliens in, like, Carmelite nun headgear and long silver Gore-Tex capes, and they had these Super Soaker water guns filled with stagnant vase water and they were forcing these real narcissistic musclemen to whack off — y’know at, like, gunpoint — and then all the female aliens turned out to be, like, all my teachers from school and stuff …’).
“At this point, the jurors are frantically scribbling notes.
“An arm draped casually over the railing of the jury box, as he swirls water in a plastic cup, Mark confides that he was mortally hydrophobic as a small child. He then tells a story about how once a day-camp counselor playfully tossed him into a swimming pool. Mark’s feelings were hurt terribly, and he put a Satanic curse on the counselor, who, the next day, was mysteriously scalded to death in his own shower.
“Whether or not this is a cryptic attempt on Mark’s part to intimidate the jury is furiously debated by legal analysts in television studios across the country.
“Following another personal aside (‘I don’t know about you, but I hate the goddamn beach. I lie there, I feel like a fucking cutlet — drenched in oil, coated with sand, and frying. That’s a vacation?’), he maneuvers deftly into the heart of his summation by reading to the jury, in a lilting singsong, the entirety of Baruch Spinoza’s Ethics (‘For no one has acquired such accurate knowledge of the fabric of the body, as to be able to explain all its functions; nor need I omit to mention the many things observed in brutes, which far surpass human sagacity, and the many things which sleep-walkers do, which they would not dare to do when awake: this is sufficient to show that the body itself, merely from the laws of its own nature alone, can do many things, at which the mind marvels, etc., etc.’).
“He then pauses dramatically.
“ ‘These people you see seated there in that row in this courtroom are not authors, they’re impersonators. Actors! Straight out of central casting! They’re impostors! They’re garden-variety lowlife scamming slacker scum! “Elizabeth Wurtzel,” “David Foster Wallace,” “A. M. Homes” … these people don’t even exist! There are no such people. THEY DO NOT EXIST!’
“The courtroom at this moment is hushed and absolutely still. The only sounds are the scratching of David Levine’s sketch pen and the sobs of the jurors.
“ ‘Polo and I fabricated these names from the sports pages of a Bougainville newspaper. You all remember when I had that refrigerator brought into court and I showed you with the magnetic letters how easy it was rearrange the names, to concoct “Jennifer Belle” from Libré-El-Fennjé, and “Douglas Coupland” from Gascand-Pupulolo. His Honor let you play with the letters and you saw for yourselves how simple it was to make the anagrams. And we even had some of the players — Mafuta Mel’Chachanibo and Ozzy Emshamo and Satmak L. L.’Herbé-Tetziwuza brought all the way from Bougainville to present their birth certificates and testify in this courtroom, under oath, as to their given names.’
“Again he pauses dramatically, and then walks slowly past the defense table.
“ ‘This trial is a search. A search for a writer. The writer of all those books,’ he says, pointing to a huge mounted display of enlarged glossy dust jackets.
“ ‘But, ladies and gentleman, these are not writers,’ he says, gesturing contemptuously at the row of impersonators.
“ ‘These are merely …’ he hesitates, as if groping for the most precise way to articulate his disdain. ‘These are merely the tetherballs of Bougainville!’
“There’s a buzz throughout the courtroom.
“He strides back toward the plaintiff’s table.
“ ‘This is the writer,’ Mark says reverently, with a sweeping flourish of the arm, indicating Polo, and then a deep genuflection.
“ ‘No one wants to believe that Microserfs and Infinite Jest and Prozac Nation and The End of Alice were all written by a Bonobo chimp and a 13-year-old boy smoking weed and drinking forties in their bedroom! No one wants to believe it! No one wants to believe that those assholes over there didn’t write these books. Throughout the 1930s, American physicians routinely prescribed potassium cyanide as a palliative for headaches and menstrual cramps, even though it inevitably resulted in the death of the patient within minutes of ingestion. But doctors continued prescribing it, and people just kept on taking it. Because they couldn’t deal with the truth. And they can’t deal with the truth here. No one can deal with the fact that a drunk, stoned Bonobo chimp and a 13-year-year-old boy actually wrote every single one of those novels. It just shatters everyone’s cherished notion of the great, exalted, hallowed Author. Right? It just can’t possibly be. How impudent to suggest that this is how these books were written. But it is! It’s true. You’ve seen that demonstrated beyond a reasonable doubt in this courtroom. And you know something? Any inbred, paint-chip-munching, goat-bonking pinhead retard they put on this jury could see that. Because it’s the truth! It’s the goddamn irrefutable truth!! And in your hearts you know it is! You can’t lie to yourselves! You know who wrote those books!! WE ALL KNOW WHO WROTE THOSE BOOKS!!!’ he raves, froth appearing at the corners of his mouth.
“ ‘And now you have an extraordinary opportunity to redress this foul, unconscionable injustice. You can make it right! Do it, my fellow Americans! Do it for every adolescent anomic skank genius cloistered in his room, getting cranked, rabidly humping his sampler as he confects some heretical, monstrous persona for himself and dreams of an orgiastic, blood-soaked apocalypse. Yes, the impudence! We have nothing in this life of suffocating obligation but our motherfucking impudence! For God’s sake, give us this day our motherfucking big-dick impudence!!’
“In a volcanic recitative, with venomous, profanity-laced fury, he continues to exhort the jury to render the correct verdict. It’s a febrile, histrionic, spellbinding masterpiece of demagogic virtuosity: the carefully practiced threatening and imploring gestures, the calculated hysterical climaxes, the modulations of the voice — one moment, shrieking and gesticulating, and in the very next, whispering urgently and with hypnotic persuasion.
“He concludes with the final stanza from Mallarmé’s ‘Sea Breeze’: ‘An ennui, bereft of cruel hopes, / Yet believes in the ultimate farewell of handkerchiefs! / And, perhaps, the masts, inviting storms, / May be those a wind bends over shipwrecks / Lost, without masts, nor masts nor fertile shores … / Still, O my heart, hear the seafarers’ song!’
“ ‘Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I am confident that, having considered the evidence we have presented to you in this trial, you will sing that seafarers’ song, and you will find in favor of my client.