The Ask

by Sam Lipsyte

  A man who looked a bit like me, same eyeware, same order of sneaker, charged past. They were infiltrating, the freaking me's. The me's were going to wreck everything, hike rents, demand better salads. The me's were going to drive me away.

  The Greeks were out of cashews. I bought pistachios, ate them in line at the post office. Or on line at the post office. I could no longer recall which phrase came naturally. Either way, there was always a line at the post office, people with enormous packages bound, I assumed, for family in distant, historically fucked lands. What were they sending? TVs? TiVos? Hamburgers? Hamburger Helper? The exporting of American culture, did it continue at this level, too? It couldn't for much longer. Not according to Horace's calculations. The line hardly moved. People couldn't fill out the forms. Others did not comprehend the notion of money orders. Come on, people, I thought-beamed. I'm on your side and I'm annoyed. Doesn't that concern you? Don't you worry your behavior will reduce me to generalizations about why your lands are historically fucked? Or does my nation's decline make my myopia moot? They should produce a reality show about how much this line sucks, I thought. Call it On the Line. Or In the Line. A half hour later I reached the teller. I was about to ask for stamps when I realized I already had a book of them in my wallet. I did not need stamps. I needed a job. I needed to cool it with those pills from Maura's root canal.

  Home beckoned, but so did a coconut flake. I was due back an hour ago, felt the admonishing telephonic pulses in my jeans, but instead crossed the avenue to the doughnut shop. There was a high school boy behind the counter, maybe saving up for the video game where you gut and flay everybody in the doughnut shop and gain doughnut life points. He wielded his tongs with affecting delicacy.

  I thought again of my brutal visions of yore. My mother had always said I reminded her of her mother, Hilda. Since therapy, my mother had maintained that her issues, which prior to treatment had been known as her demons, stemmed from the fact that Hilda "withheld." I never knew my grandmother well. She had badly dyed hair and a persecution complex exacerbated toward the end of her life when she was fired from the culture beat at her synagogue's newsletter.

  "That pig rabbi should have died in the camps," she said.

  Most of Hilda's utterances weren't so venomous. Most of her evil she must have withheld.

  Now I took a booth near the window, watched the afternoon bridge traffic. Trucks piled up at the off-ramp, trailer sides browned with exhaust.

  Not long ago Bernie said "beep-beep" every time he heard a car horn. Later his favorite word was "mine." Now he was fluent in the cant of his tiny world. His leaps in speech had seemed otherworldly. What else was he mastering behind our backs? Little Judas. Maura and I had worked so hard to dig the family ditch for the three of us to rot in and now here came the rope of language to haul the boy out. "Beep-beep" begets "Mine," which begets "I hate you, Dad." Then, if you're lucky, there's a quick "I love you, Dad," followed by "Let go, Dad," these last words whispered under the thrum of ventilators, EKG machines.

  My father had been that lucky.

  Some natty loon sat alone at the next table. He wore a pilled herringbone blazer, crusty at the cuffs, guarded a shopping bag packed with neatly folded shopping bags. A notebook lay open on his table. It looked full of sketches, apothegms. His pen still had the wire on it from where he'd maybe snipped it at the bank. The loon muttered, picked white scabs on his head.

  I could picture my colleagues back at the Mediocre development suite, Horace at his desk, unwrapping the outer, non-edible wrapping of his turkey wrap, Vargina holed up in her command nook, poring over ask dossiers and budget spreads, Llewellyn patched in from Zanzibar with the skinny on a give.

  But I was at my new office now, my Formica workstation smeared with jelly and Bavarian cream. This scab-picker was my potential partner. We could make an ace development combo. And the ask? Maybe the ask was that boy over there at the far booth, the one with fluorescent earbuds, a forehead full of leaky cysts. There was a horrible glitter in his eyes that looked like murder, or maybe just higher math.

  The loon caught me staring at the boy, winked.

  "What was that for?" I said.

  The loon winked again. Teen brooder stood. I felt the glare of the leaky child, decided to meet the boy's gaze, try my best to transmit this thought: I'm not the enemy, just an earlier iteration of our kind.

  "Goddamn fucking faggots!" the boy shouted, careened out the door.

  Poor kid was a wild child, a homophobe. He might as well have been illiterate, guessing at supermarket signage. For all my adolescent rage, I had never included the marginalized or oppressed in my dream carnage. I never said gypped, or Indian giver, or paddy wagon, or accused anyone of welshing on a bet. If there ever evolved a tradition of locutions such as "She tried to tranny me on that real estate deal," you would not hear them out of my mouth. I never even called myself a yid with that tribal swagger I envied in others, though I had a right, or half a right, from my mother's side. I nearly spoke this truth aloud when the loon cackled.

  "Don't mind the boy," he said. "I've known him since he was a child. A marvelous little specimen."

  The man's voice had odd nasal authority. He sounded like some mandarin of vintage radio, and hearing him I suddenly recalled certain items from my childhood, a particular carton of laundry detergent, the mouthfeel of a discontinued cola.

  The man dove back into his notebooks, his boy doodles and prurient runes. Even from here his sketches looked quite accomplished and insane.

  Maybe someday he'd be heralded, a folk museum folk hero.

  Maybe someday Bernie, still getting over his father's untimely but somehow not surprising death, would take his new girlfriend to see the disturbed but brilliant drawings by the kiddie-diddler who spent most of his adult life guarding a shopping bag full of shopping bags in a doughnut shop not far from where he, Bernie, grew up, but who also, unbeknownst to the world, inhabited a fabulous and secret universe of the mind.

  My phone pulsed again. There were two messages, one from a number I recognized: the Mediocre development suite. The other was a text from Maura: How's the donut, Fat Heart? Find a job yet? Buy milk for Bern. Also p. towels.

  The bile was a good sign.

  It's when they stop trying to destroy you, my mother once said, that you should really start to worry.

  Three

  Home, hidden by the refrigerator, I hovered over the garbage bin, gulped down a bottle of Vitamin Drink. We still dreaded the day that little Bernie, asquat now on the kitchen floor spooning oatmeal into the body cavity of a decapitated superhero, might spot this iridescent liquid, demand a sip. Vitamin Drink may or may not have contained vitamins, but it was too polluted for the tykes. They needed wholesome nectars humped back from the wholesome food empires in Manhattan. This sugary shit was for the dying. I was dying, surely, sugary-ly.

  I made to speak before I did.

  "A call. A message. From work."

  "What?" said Maura. "Work? What work?"

  Maura sat on a stool, fresh from the shower and still unclothed, pecked at her laptop.

  She had been raised in one of those happy, naked families from Vermont. I looked at her body now, remembered Bernie's weaning, that era of inconsolable sobs and farewell fondles. Maura's breasts, large and milk white when they'd been full of milk, had darkened, pancaked a bit, but they were still beautiful, and I was not just saying that, or thinking of saying that, to be kind.

  "Wait," said Maura, "what?"

  It was her I'm-downloading-a-crucial-file-from-the-office tone.

  "A call from work on my voice mail," I said. "From old work. Vargina and Llewellyn. They want me to come in."

  "Why would they want that?"

  "I don't know."

  "Wasn't firing you enough? Is this a legal thing? Do you need a lawyer?"

  "I said I don't know."

  I leaned out from my trash niche. Bernie pointed at the bottle in my hand.

  "Daddy, what are you
drinking?"

  "Coffee, Bern. Why, do you think I need a lawyer?"

  "Do lawyers have foreskins?" said Bernie.

  "I'm talking to Mommy," I said.

  "I have a foreskin."

  "I know, Bernie."

  "You don't."

  "True," I said, opened the refrigerator door, sneaked the bottle back into the door rack.

  "How come I have a foreskin, Daddy?"

  "We've talked about this, don't you remember? Your mother and I decided that-"

  "Hey, that's juice. I want some, Daddy! I want some juice!"

  "Shit," I said. "Sorry. Bernie, it's not juice. It's for grown-ups. It's like coffee."

  "You said it was coffee."

  "That's right."

  "But it's pink!"

  "It's pink coffee, Bernie. It's what I drink. It's what grownups drink."

  "Do superheroes have foreskins? Like my guy?"

  He held up his headless hero.

  "Yes. No. I don't know. Probably. So, who would I call, Maura? They want me tomorrow."

  "Do they, Daddy?"

  "I don't know, Bernie. It's possible."

  "Do foreskins help you fly?"

  "Maybe," I said.

  "All I'm saying," said Maura, "is you don't have to play it their way. That's all you've ever done."

  "Excuse me?" I said.

  "Give me some juice!" Bernie called again. "I want it!"

  "Ask nicely."

  "Please."

  "But it's not for kids, Bernie."

  "Don't confuse him like that," said Maura. "Daddy's going to give Bernie some pink coffee juice that's not really coffee. Would Bernie like Daddy to give Bernie some pink coffee juice that's not really coffee? Daddy, would you please give Bernie some pink coffee juice that's not really coffee?"

  "Fine!" I said.

  "Fine!" said Bernie.

  He flicked his guy and a cold gob of oatmeal slapped my cheek. I could see this was the beginning of something. Like sudden sympathy for Goliath. What was the phrase? Tell it not in Gath? How about we start telling it?

  "What?" said Maura.

  "Was I mumbling again?"

  "Who's Goliath?" said Bernie. "A superhero? Is he a bad guy? A masher?"

  "He's a masher, for sure," I said. "Whether he's a bad guy depends on your politics."

  "What's politics?"

  "Well, let me see. It's-"

  "Does Goliath have a foreskin?"

  "Not for long. Not when David's done with him."

  "Who's David?"

  "A foreskin collector."

  "What are you telling him!" said Maura.

  "Nothing," I said. "He should know about the Bible. He lives in a fucking theocracy."

  "Jesus, language, Milo."

  "Daddy! Juice!"

  "Okay, Bern, but first, how about some water?"

  I filled a cup from the tap. Bernie batted it away, lunged toward the refrigerator.

  "Give me pink coffee juice, Daddy!"

  "Okay," I said. "Okay."

  I dumped out the tap water, took the Vitamin Drink from the refrigerator. Back turned, I mimed a long pour, added a drop for color, refilled the cup from the tap.

  Bernie stared up at me.

  "Let go, Dad," the boy seemed to be saying, but his beautiful mouth wasn't moving.

  Later, in bed, Maura and I cuddled in the way of a couple about to not have sex. It never appeared to bother us much, unless we watched one of those cable dramas about a sexless marriage. Then we'd curse the inanity of the show, its implausibility, switch over to something where the human wreckage was too crass and tan to touch us.

  "I still don't understand why they want to meet with you," said Maura.

  "I don't, either. Maybe they realized they forgot to take the shirt off my back."

  "It's not funny. That girl's father. I don't know."

  "What more can they do to me?"

  "Oh, I'm sure there are all sorts of things we'd never even think of."

  "That's very calming. Thank you."

  "I'm just saying. You never learned to protect yourself. You always rail against the evil and exploitation in the world but you still act as though everybody has your best interests at heart. I never got it. You're like an idiot savant without the savant part."

  "I still have faith in the basic goodness of humanity. Shoot me."

  "Don't be so sure that's not the plan."

  Vargina had reserved the conference room. A tray of turkey wraps sat near the edge of the table. They looked like university wraps, from the cafeteria downstairs, not the deli across the street. They had no avocado.

  Llewellyn and Vargina sat across the table. We took turns popping the tops of our sodas, listened to the sounds reverberate in the wood-paneled room. The word "reverberate" reverberated in my mind, which I could now picture as a wood-paneled room.

  "It's nice to see you again," said Vargina.

  "Hear, hear," said Llewellyn. "So, hoss, what have you been doing to yourself?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "Just shitting you," said Llewellyn. "Seriously, how's it going?"

  "I didn't see Horace when I walked in," I said to Vargina.

  "He's at a lunch."

  "A lunch?"

  "He's working on an ask."

  "Horace? He's a temp."

  "No longer," said Llewellyn. "He's looking like a little earner."

  "Very exciting possibility, Horace's ask," said Vargina. "Very worthy. The lady is a major admirer of our dance program."

  "Where's the money from?"

  "Her husband's company. Private security. Military catering."

  "Blood sausage, anyone?" I said.

  "Oh, please," said Llewellyn. "We can't wash the bad off anybody's money, now, can we? But we can make something good out of all the misery. That's what you never understood."

  "I understood it. I'm just not sure I believed it."

  "Oh, some kind of martyr now, are you?"

  "A martyr has to give a shit."

  "Get over yourself, Milo. You're a sad man. A born wanker. You were born into the House of Wanker. You're a berk, and you probably think I'm just saying your last name."

  Llewellyn's Cambridge year was the stuff of office legend, thanks to Llewellyn, but I'd always suspected he lifted most of his lingo from the British editions of American men's magazines.

  "Wanker," I said. "Don't know that word. Is that a Southern thing? What is that, Richmond? Newport News? Is that like peanuts in your Coke?"

  "You have a provincial mind, hucklebuck."

  "Pardon?"

  "It's a global globe now," said Llewellyn. "We sink or swim together."

  "It's a global globe?"

  "That's right."

  "Moron."

  "Gentlemen," said Vargina.

  "Why am I here?" I said. "I thought I was fired."

  "You were," said Vargina.

  "You are," said Llewellyn.

  "Then what's going on?"

  "We have special circumstances," said Vargina.

  "You have special circumstances," I said.

  "Yes."

  "I have not-so-special circumstances," I said.

  "If you help us with our circumstances," said Vargina, "we might be able to assist you with yours."

  The door opened and in walked a large man with a moist pompadour and a tight beige mustache. Dean Cooley was not a dean. He was Mediocre's chief development officer. Several groups worked under him, and he spent most of his energy on the more lucrative ones, like business, law, or medicine. His art appreciation did not reach much past the impressionistic prints from the Montreal Olympics he'd mounted on his office wall. He'd been a marine, and then some kind of salesman, had started with cars and ended up in microchips and early internet hustles. Here in the cozy halls of academe, as he had put it during our first team talk, he meant to reassess his priorities. Meanwhile he would train us maggots how to ask asks and get gives. Cooley was a hard-charger who often began his reply to basic of
fice queries by invoking "the lessons of Borodino." He was the kind of man you could picture barking into a field phone, sending thousands to slaughter, or perhaps ordering the mass dozing of homes. People often called him War Crimes. By people, I mean Horace and I. By often, I mean twice.

  "Dean," said Vargina. "This is the man we were telling you about. Milo Burke."

  "Nice to meet you."

  We'd met a dozen times before, at lunches, cocktail receptions. He had stood beside me while his wife explained a project she'd embarked upon in her student days, something to do with Balinese puppets and social allegory.

  "I assume you are wondering why, after being terminated for cause two months ago, we've asked you to come in," Cooley began.

  "A fair assumption," I said.

  "What you need to understand is that the incident with Mr. Rayfield's daughter was very serious. Mr. Rayfield is still angry. You made his daughter doubt herself, artistically. He had to buy her an apartment in Copenhagen so she could heal."

  "I'm sorry, sir."

  "The whole debacle nearly cost us a new, working telescope for our observatory."

  "I do understand that."

  "But what you also need to understand is that we are not simply some heartless, money-mad, commercial enterprise. We are partly that, of course, but we are also a compassionate and, yes, money-mad place of learning. And while we're on the topic of learning, we think people can learn from their mistakes. We believe in redemption."

  "As long," said Llewellyn, "as it is not tied to a particular ideology or religious tradition and promotes inclusiveness."

  "Is that from the handbook, Lew?" said Dean Cooley. "Anyway, the point is, we are a family."

  "A family dedicated to furthering science and the humanities in an increasingly meaning-starved culture," said Vargina.

  "Well put," said Dean Cooley.

  "But may I remind us all," said Llewellyn, "that here in development our task is to raise money for said furthering. We can't hug all day. We've got to get out there and work."