Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit Read online

  The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 2021 by Mark Leyner

  Cover design by Gregg Kulick

  Cover art: Getty Images

  Cover © 2021 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First ebook edition: January 2021

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  ISBN 978-0-316-56048-1

  E3-20201215-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Epilogue

  Discover More

  About the Author

  Also by Mark Leyner

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  Tap here to learn more.

  Introduction

  PATIENT

  (looking through the phoropter lenses and reading from the eye chart)

  “The first orgasm I ever had was so intense I separated both my shoulders and shit in my pants.”

  So begins Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit…

  The OPTOMETRIST switches lenses on the phoropter.

  OPTOMETRIST

  Is this any better? Sharper?

  PATIENT

  Oh my god! I wasn’t even close!

  OPTOMETRIST

  That’s OK. Can you read it for me now?

  The PATIENT absently twirls a lock of hair around her finger as she reads through the device, which completely masks her face—

  PATIENT

  “On June 26, 2035, Kermunkachunk, the capital of Chalazia, was engulfed in chaos. The Chalazian Mafia Faction, a fanatical offshoot of the Chalazian Children’s Theater, had assumed control of the city center and was carrying out mass executions. Enemies, real and especially imagined, were dragged out of their office buildings and gutted in the street.”

  So begins Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit…

  OPTOMETRIST

  Excellent. Now, this makes it blurry, yes?

  PATIENT

  Yes.

  OPTOMETRIST

  Is it better like this… or like this? One… or two?

  PATIENT

  About the same.

  OPTOMETRIST

  OK. Now, can you read this?

  PATIENT

  So begins Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit, in which a father and his daughter, in Chalazia researching an ethnography of the unique criminal subculture of the Chalazian Mafia Faction, spend a night at the Bar Pulpo, Kermunkachunk’s #1 spoken-word karaoke bar, where seemingly extemporaneous conversations are, in actuality, being read from multiple karaoke screens arrayed around the barroom. Moreover, it’s Thursday—Father/Daughter Nite—when the bar is frequented by actual fathers and daughters, as well as couples role-playing fathers and daughters.

  OPTOMETRIST

  Good. Now… can you make out any of this line? I know it’s small.

  PATIENT

  Not really. I’m guessing here… Uh…

  fneixa alsdfy hoypm ewrse dnfbmoldfh vusyvjfg nktoinb xzinkhg

  … I’m not really sure.

  OPTOMETRIST

  Alright, give me just a moment here…

  He makes a quick note on the PATIENT’s chart and again switches lenses on the phoropter—

  OPTOMETRIST

  How about now? Can you make out anything?

  PATIENT

  … now.

  OPTOMETRIST

  Good. Now, can you read that for me or is it too blurry?

  PATIENT

  No, I can read it:

  Meanwhile, outside on the piazza, sub-factions of the Chalazian Mafia Faction vie for supremacy in a never-ending frenzy of stomach-churning savagery. Chalazian Mafia Faction street soldiers commit acts of unimaginable sadism, reveling in carnage and the grotesque mutilation of their victims’ corpses. But it’s worth keeping in mind that these are kids who, several years ago, frequently only several weeks ago (several days ago, in some cases), were prancing around onstage in a Chalazian Children’s Theater production of Clever Jack and the Magic Beanstalk. These are young people who’ve traded their exuberant devotion to musical theater for an irrepressible desire to kill and be killed out on the piazza. Histrionic narcissists to the core, Chalazian Mafia Faction street soldiers pirouette as they die, like defecating dogs aligning themselves to the earth’s electromagnetic field. These ex-musical-theater kids are always “on,” always performing for the CCTV cameras that ring the perimeter of the piazza. The Chalazian Mafia Faction, we’re told, is like a combination of the Gambino crime family and the Khmer Rouge. Proclaiming itself to be “against everything and everyone,” it is necessarily, per its own ethos, riven by internecine conflict, hence this chaotic, blood-drenched phantasmagoria—this unspeakable orgy of violence—that ensues without respite, day in and day out, on the piazza outside the Bar Pulpo, Kermunkachunk’s #1 spoken-word karaoke bar…

  The PATIENT stops reading…

  PATIENT

  Keep going?

  OPTOMETRIST

  Please.

  PATIENT

  Chalazia is a tiny country wedged between Moldova and Romania, though recognized by neither. Almost every surface in Chalazia (actually, every surface) tests positive for traces of cocaine. The entirety of the country is cordoned off with yellow crime scene tape, all 148 kilometers of border, a phenomenon visible from outer space. (In actuality a Neolithic geoglyph akin to the Kazakh Steppe earthworks or the more recent Nazca Lines, this cordon was made by removing the top layer of the bluish-white reflecting salt flats [that once covered all of Chalazia] to reveal a bright yellow subsoil.) An elaborate system of sewers (now in complete disuse) descends some 1,800 kilometers beneath the ground, ramifying across the subterranean latitudes of the entire planet—a feat of engineering that many believe could only have been achieved by corrupt ancient aliens. (Even in 800 B.C., the Chalazian construction and waste-carting industries were rife with racketeering.) These ancient sewers make Chalazia both the farthest and the nearest destination from any point of origin on earth. In other words, at any given moment, Chalazia may be wedged between any two other nations. Fossilized ancient Chalazian shit—coprolites—can today be found almost anywhere. Anywhere, actually. And everywhere. Apropos of which, a previous incarnation of the Bar Pulpo was called the “Coprocabana” (which was obviously not a spoken-word karaoke bar).

  The Chalazian joie de merde is only surpassed by its joie de guerre.

  But could this violence, this atrocious, unabating carnage, be as random and incohere
nt as it appears? Is there someone responsible for orchestrating the perpetual conflagration on the piazza outside the Bar Pulpo—the piazza, with its stench of sweat, lube, and gasoline, littered with shell casings, cigarette butts, and used condoms floating in puddles of blood?

  Perhaps it’s the Divine Hermits themselves, those heretical holy men, who are the real puppet masters, the ones calling the shots on the brazen predation that’s come to define contemporary Kermunkachunk. Like Kabbalistic tzaddiks or Shaiva tantrikas but historically associated with the Chalazian Mafia Faction, these antinomian mystics, moonlighting as Mafia warlords, combine the esoteric pursuit of nondualistic illumination with extortion and loan-sharking. Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit makes a strong case that it’s these eponymous individuals who are masterminding events on the piazza from their perch in the Floating Casino on Lake Little Lake, where these racketeering illuminati who wear their diamond-encrusted hair balls and engraved prostates around their necks as amulets, these shirtless recluses with their white chest hair and neon-orange nylon sweatpants, paradoxically socialize every Thursday night.

  Made members (and frequently godfathers) of the Chalazian Mafia Faction, these adepts remain literally above the fray, levitating a foot or two above their seats as they play a traditional Chalazian game that combines Scrabble and mahjong. They roll their eyes at the suggestion that they have anything to do with the violence on the piazza, let alone direct it, as, seemingly in a trance, they endlessly shuffle their tiles (this is known as “permutation of the letters”). And they send deeply encrypted death threats to anyone with the temerity to suggest that they encrypt their death threats.

  The Chalazian Mafia Faction warlord and the Divine Hermit embody (frequently within the same individual) two complementary modalities: criminality and devequt (cleaving to the divine), encapsulating, within this single chimerical figure, the Chalazian concept of human existence. As for the CMF street soldiers themselves, when it comes to fashioning weapons, they are remarkably resourceful, and have been known to make shanks out of soft-serve ice cream.

  The men’s room in the Bar Pulpo is an insane parody of the ladies’ room. It is haunted by the anthropoid ghosts of the ancient aliens (the Kermunks) who built the vast, labyrinthine sewer system. In this particular men’s room (in any men’s room, actually) we encounter “misshapen forms of the gods in agony.” This men’s room is, in a sense, like an incubator, where the larval Divine Hermits molt and mature, sheltered from predators and fed by the mechanomorphic vermin that scurry behind the toilets. It is this men’s room from which, in a sense, they migrate on deciduous wings to the Floating Casino. And it is where, at the end of his life, the Divine Hermit instinctively returns, where he and his demonic double, the Mafia warlord, are locked in a reciprocal interrogation in a mirror above the sink—“the mirror from which there is no escape.” It is where Ron Howard looks in the mirror and sees Clint Howard. (Sixty years ago, on an episode of Bonanza, Clint Howard, in blackface, played a little African boy who brings the Ebola virus to the Ponderosa, sparking two consecutive three-day weekends of deadly pogroms that eventually became known as the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival.)

  OPTOMETRIST

  Close enough.

  He changes lenses on the phoropter.

  OPTOMETRIST

  Now, can you make out any of this?

  PATIENT

  (squinting through the phoropter)

  Some.

  OPTOMETRIST

  Give it a try.

  PATIENT

  And the Chalazian joie de guerre is only surpassed by its joie de lire.

  Among the most literate people on earth, Chalazians almost never read in solitude or silence, only publicly and out loud (“belting”), either from the spoken-word karaoke screens or, swaying back and forth, from the Big-Character Posters that festoon the perimeter of the piazza, and whereas these collective performances are widely referred to as “orgiastic,” the more cosmopolitan Kermunkachunkians (the “Kermunkachunkian cognoscenti,” the most zealous of whom are, of course, the street soldiers of the CMF) go one step further, stigmatizing solitary reading as “prurient and petit bourgeois,” i.e., a mortal sin akin to eating your own earwax…

  I’m sorry—

  … one’s own earwax.

  OPTOMETRIST

  Excellent!

  PATIENT

  When, at the beginning of Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit, the door to the Bar Pulpo opens on Father/Daughter Nite, the babble (which, to an untutored ear, wouldn’t sound much different from the ambient hubbub of any bar) includes the drunken voices of an anthropologist and his daughter (Gaby, a gorgeous, young neo-structural filmmaker from New York) who are in Kermunkachunk researching an ethnography about the ultraviolent Chalazian Mafia Faction, the two of them seated in a booth across from each other and reading aloud, along with everyone else, from the numerous spoken-word karaoke screens, Chalazia’s most beloved folktale, which is sometimes palindromically called “Nite of the Daughter’s Father.”

  This story of a mortally ill father and his beloved daughter in an inn or tavern (of the sort traditionally habituated by itinerant tradesmen, grizzled sailors on weeklong benders, crossing guards in heavy mascara and fluorescent-yellow vests, etc.), this story which culminates in the father’s staggering Dance of Death, is the foundational narrative in Chalazian culture. All the ontological and epistemological preoccupations that constitute the Chalazian mentalité are encoded within this one folktale (and its innumerable variants), which is why, one assumes, the author and his daughter have, on this particular “nite,” ensconced themselves at the Bar Pulpo, itself a matryoshka nesting of successfully smaller and more sacred spaces—the barroom, the men’s room, the stall.

  One of the first things you’ll see upon arriving at Kermunkachunk International Airport are the huge murals depicting various scenes from the folktale. Running the entire length of the moving walkway that conveys you from the arrival gates to the baggage carousels, these monumental murals, unlike the Snellen chart, are read from right to left:

  • The father and the daughter toasting their everlasting devotion to each other, clinking tiny tin mugs (rough-hewn shot glasses) of “gravy,” a fiery Chalazian vermifuge, washed down with flagons of lager.

  • The daughter pensively blowing thick white smoke rings which settle around her father’s neck like an Elizabethan ruff, as he regales her with an account of the marionette show he’d chanced upon that afternoon.

  • Their final embrace and heartrending goodbye, the mere allusion to which can reduce the most hardened, remorseless CMF street assassins to sobbing hysterics.

  • The father’s drunken stagger from the men’s room, his Dance of Death. This is the critical inflection point in the folktale when the father gazes into the mirror above the sink, provoking a strobe-like seizure of initiatory transfigurations (in sober moments, simply the palimpsest that is one’s reflection), and emerges to perform his lurching Danse Macabre, his Totentanz (and/or actually dying, depending on the variant). It’s a raw, contorted, convulsive improvisation, and yet, at the same time, highly… uh… highly… caramelized?

  The OPTOMETRIST changes lenses in the phoropter.

  OPTOMETRIST

  Try it now.

  PATIENT

  It’s a raw, contorted, convulsive improvisation, and yet, at the same time, highly ritualized…

  Ah, ritualized!

  OPTOMETRIST

  (laughing)

  Ritualized. Caramelized. Same difference.

  PATIENT

  It’s a raw, contorted, convulsive improvisation, and yet, at the same time, highly ritualized, hieratic… very Butoh.

  OPTOMETRIST

  Excellent.

  PATIENT

  Don’t Let This Robot Suck Your Dick Productions, Kermunkachunk’s most prestigious film and television production company, is responsible for innumerable movies and miniseries based on the folktale, both live-action and animated.

&nb
sp; The company’s ethos, their cri de guerre, really—shouted by a robot at the beginning of each movie like the roar of the MGM lion—was taken from a commercial for International Delight coffee creamers: “I like it international and I expect to be delighted!”

  There are, by now, thousands of variants of “Nite of the Daughter’s Father,” each a cryptographic hash of the previous iteration, many of which, at this point, don’t even include a father or a daughter or take place at “nite,” but the standard version, the ur-folktale, takes place “a long time ago, farther back than anyone can remember…”

  There was once a small inn at the foot of a hollow mountain, a hollow mountain that was said to be inhabited by a race of warlike elves (although these warlike elves have nothing to do with this story!). One evening, as rain poured down from the skies and, driven by the wind, pelted the windows of the inn, in walked a stooped and jaundiced old watchmaker, gripping his coat’s lapels and shaking the wetness onto the wooden plank floor. He hung the coat up on a peg on the wall and sat, exhausted, at a round, rough-hewn table. Several days before, he’d been to see the physician, an elderly man decades older than the old watchmaker himself. “You’re very sick,” the wizened sage had told him after a careful examination. “You have late-stage cirrhosis of the liver”—a glaringly anachronistic, avant la lettre diagnosis, arrived at through an assortment of fuming alembics, strange alchemical assays, and tzeruf, the permutation of letters. “You’re dying,” he averred solemnly, “and another drink will kill you even sooner than that!” Nevertheless, on this very evening, the old watchmaker signaled to the barmaid, wiggling two fingers, and she brought him two tiny tin mugs of “gravy,” which he knocked back in rapid succession. Just then, a young woman, mid-twenties, petite, and soigné in her hooded cloak, entered and surveyed the bar. The watchmaker waved, catching her attention, and beckoned her over to the table. It was his beloved and kindhearted daughter whom he adored more than anything in this world. He’d arranged to meet her here at this inn at the foot of a hollow mountain to tell her the sad news about his illness, to tell her that he was dying. And although she had traveled miles and miles in an ox-drawn cart along rock-strewn, muddy roads in the raging storm and was completely exhausted, she happily threw her arms around him and kissed him over and over again, before removing the hood of her cloak, dappled from the rain, to reveal her lustrous black hair intricately plaited into a chignon that rested at the nape of her neck. He was her beloved and kindhearted father and she adored him more than anything in the world.