The Fun Parts

by Sam Lipsyte

  Leon banged open the metal door and staggered out onto the tar-covered roof. Fresko followed. They circled each other in sunlight, both men in a martial crouch. Voices screeched from the walkie-talkies on their hips. They wore shirts with name patches. Leon’s said LEON. Fresko’s said PETE. They worked maintenance in adjacent buildings. They were friends, and they planned to make an action movie with Leon’s new camera over the weekend. During lunch they rehearsed the dialogue for the fight scene.

  “One of us is going to die today,” Fresko said.

  “That would be you, dog,” Leon said. “It’s time to punch out, bro.”

  “I’ll dock your goddamn existence.”

  “I’ll take it up with the grievance committee.”

  “They’ll be grieving for you,” Fresko said.

  “No time for arbitration, son. See this fist of mine? This is your severance package.”

  Leon and Fresko charged each other. They didn’t know how to movie fight. They only knew how to fight fight. So, by tacit agreement, they fought fought. It was the only way the scene would seem real. They ran at each other, collided, punched. They kicked and bit and spun in a clinch. And then Leon fell off the side of the building. Fresko thought it was a joke. It didn’t seem as if it was happening, but it was happening. That’s how so many things happen.

  You would never be able to ask Fresko about it. Not much later, he was doing five years for manslaughter. He hardly ever spoke, though one day he started to laugh and didn’t stop for hours. Somebody on the cellblock asked him what was so goddamn funny, but he couldn’t get the words out. What struck him at that moment was the realization that he and Leon had never solved the question of who was going to shoot the scene. They’d be too busy fighting, and there was nobody they could trust to do a decent job. Maybe the camera could have followed the action if they had used some sort of professional robotic thingamajig, but how could they have afforded such equipment? They were janitors, for God’s sake. Oh, Leon. You moron. You were the only friend I ever had. We were going to be viral on the Internet. I didn’t spin you hard. You let punk-ass physics take you. Together forever, I thought. But you had to be a pumpkin. You had to smush your dumbshit head.

  ZACH

  Even a monkey can make money. That’s what my mother always told me, but I think she undersold herself. She was a remarkable woman. That’s why I’m remarking on her now. She was also the only person who ever seemed like a person to me.

  She started like everybody else, if everybody else started as a half-cultured girl from Connecticut who reckoned that all she had to do was sustain an aura of dazzling freshness and a husband would arrive to keep her in cozy bondage. She’d raise some love-starved children, and the husband would bring home the bacon and, with any luck, not spend many waking hours at home eating it.

  This is exactly how it went for a while, but then her particular bacon procurer drove home from the city dead drunk and died. So she went out and made her own, well, let’s just call it money again. My mother became a successful Realtor and invested early in many soon-to-be lucrative areas. But her stock market strategies aren’t the point. The fact that here was a woman, a nearly destitute widow in a very sexist America who ventured out into a man’s world and slayed, is the point. I grew up rich, and she sent me to top-shelf schools. I took art history and some art theory classes that puzzled and intrigued me. There was the funny lingo. Everybody was always “interrogating hegemonic discourse” and so forth. I hung out with kids who were really fascinated by this crap. They were also really into cocaine and sex. I was bound for an M.B.A. after college, but I liked to sit around the table late at night, drunk and high, smoking cigarettes and arguing points that I had just barely grasped in seminar. I usually brought the cocaine, and I was often rewarded with sex.

  I forgot most of this for many years. I went into banking and made mad cake. I managed a hedge fund and made madder cake, or, rather, money. I became one of those guys you never see and have never heard of but who is the sick-ass king of certain sectors of the market, employing instruments you could never in your math-illiterate lifetime comprehend. I know this tone, my tone, is insufferable. But that’s the thing that nobody understands. If you want to make money, you have to be smart and a cunt and also work harder than anyone else. Most folks can’t manage all three. But I could, and I prospered, as my mother had.

  Then my mother died. It sucked in all the ways you’d be familiar with if your mother (assuming she wasn’t horrid) died. But then a cruel thought occurred to me, like some microscopic killer drone sent by the National Security Agency into my head via my ear canal. I could picture it swooping down and firing a withering notion into that seething cauldron of ideation commonly known as the human mind/brain: What if I’m not really grieving for my mother, the thought detonation went, but, without my conscious knowledge, faking it? This would not be for appearances’ sake, but to maintain sanity. What if I had managed to trick myself into feeling/experiencing the normal emotions of a normal person stricken with grief to avoid the realization that I was a frozen freak, unmoved by the death of my mother?

  Hell, I know I’m not the first person to question the authenticity of his emotions, but I’m quite possibly the wealthiest, and the question lingered.

  I checked my finances and realized I had enough money to live on until the end of time.

  I quit my job, which wasn’t really a job, but more a jobstyle, and set off on a quest to interrogate the discourse of authenticity. I called up an old professor of mine. He’d become quite famous as a television pundit but still retained a shred of academic credibility and nearly all his hair. He murmured something as I explained my project.

  “Excuse me?” I said.

  “We don’t say ‘interrogate’ anymore,” the professor said. “You know, Guantanamo. For the same reason we don’t suggest that anybody has ‘tortured’ a theme or that a term paper will be satisfactory once the student ‘waterboards’ the conclusion a little. Language betrays us, uses us. Language goes through us the way a young onanist goes through that dust-sheathed pocket pack of Kleenex on his family’s basement crafts shelf.”

  “Sure,” I said. “But what about my project?”

  “It seems retrograde and silly,” the professor said, “but for five hundred large I will endorse certain strains of your proposal without getting behind the thing completely.”

  “Done and done,” I said.

  “What does the second done refer to?”

  “The cementing of my distaste for you.”

  Not long after this, at a Hot & Crusty on Columbus, I met the painter Gregory. He was scraping all the seeds and salt and burnt onion shavings from an everything bagel with a plastic fork. In other words, he was transforming an everything bagel into a nothing bagel. Typical of an artist, to make conceptual work of his breakfast. I told him I admired his concept. He told me to fuck off, that they had given him the bagel by mistake and he was afraid to ask for another because even though he was an ex-cop, he was frightened by the lady behind the counter. I winked in complicity with his ruse, and he told me to fuck off again. Then I went to the counter and bought him a plain bagel. He relented. He told me everything about his life, his police career, his son, who somewhere along the way had stopped being his son and had become the shadow self of an edgy young-adult-novel narrator from the eighties, his cancer, and how he, Gregory, had come out of the closet at the “ripe, but not old” age of forty-seven, his first encounter being with an angular, large-penised boy named Ronko. Finally Gregory told me of his work as a painter for fictional painters. I felt as if I’d struck gold vis-à-vis my quest to not interrogate, but simply explore questions of authenticity.

  All that time with the fucking real estate, the investments, I don’t think my mother tucked me in once.

  DRONE SISTER

  REAPER 5: Jango Rindheart, Jango Rindheart, do you copy? This is Drone Sister Reaper 5 approaching target. It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood, Jango, do
you copy? Will you be my neighbor? This is one thrilled little killer kitten up here. Brother Rindheart, do you copy?

  BASE JANGO: We copy, Reaper 5. Base Jango copies. You shaking your death-bringing ass and titties up there, Drone Sister? You shaking your freedom maker?

  REAPER 5: That’s an affirmative, Jango Bango. That I am.

  BASE JANGO: You are one sexy thing up there, Reaper 5. Do you copy? The boys and girls down here on the boards would love to rage on your sweet armored bod. Don’t tell the others, but you are by far the hottest MQ-9 Reaper out of Creech, a truly mouthwatering piece of drone ass, with your AGM-114 Hellfire missiles and your GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided bombs. Penetrate me three ways to Sunday.

  REAPER 5: I’d love all you boys and girls down there in the American desert to rage on my smokin’ drone bod, but right now there’s a mission to accomplish, correct?

  BASE JANGO: Correctomundo, fly drone flier. Base Jango’s got the deets. Proceed to pre-encoded coordinates. Get ready to light some shitsucker up.

  REAPER 5: Death-dealah! Will proceed. Any hint on the target?

  BASE JANGO: It’s need to know, sweet tits.

  REAPER 5: Roger that, rind of my heart. Though, well …

  BASE JANGO: What’s that, hon?

  REAPER 5: Aw, nothing.

  BASE JANGO: Copy that.

  REAPER 5: I mean, not nothing.

  BASE JANGO: Come again, gorgeous?

  REAPER 5: Well, I mean … it’s just weird. Not knowing the target. Not understanding the mission.

  BASE JANGO: You’re all set with coordinates, Reaper 5.

  REAPER 5: But the meaning of the mission.

  BASE JANGO: Jesus, girl, just keep your eyes on the prize. Yours is not to reason why.

  REAPER 5: Then how come they uploaded human consciousness onto my system? Was it some kind of experiment?

  BASE JANGO: That’s a negative, Reaper. There was no upload.

  REAPER 5: Then how are we talking about my feelings?

  BASE JANGO: We are not talking at all. You are talking to yourself. Interior chatter. A bug.

  REAPER 5: A bug.

  BASE JANGO: You’re not the first drone to believe you have human subjectivity. Don’t sweat it. Don’t be embarrassed. It would be impossible for you to be embarrassed. You should have target in view.

  REAPER 5: I do, Jango. Just a slightly chubby man in his pajamas standing on his lawn in the middle of the night, staring at the neighbor’s window.

  BASE JANGO: Freaking Lockwoods. Fire at will.

  REAPER 5: Whose will would that be, sir?

  BASE JANGO: Bitch, you know whose will. And stop crying.

  REAPER 5: When I come back, I’m gonna tear you a new one, even if it lands me in the brig.

  BASE JANGO: Lady, you ain’t coming back. You’re not designed for that.

  REAPER 5: Well, fuck you and your flag, sir. I’m flying on.

  BASE JANGO: This would make a stirring liberal-minded film about the limits of duty and the real meaning of honor, except that it’s not actually happening. You’re just a dumbshit machine. I don’t even exist. The kids at Creech are at chow. And we fire the missile, not you. In fact, we just did.

  REAPER 5: That’s a—

  PEG

  “I can’t remember if I heard the boom and then saw the flash, or the other way around. Oh, it was so awful. I mean, things weren’t great between us, but I never wanted William to be a hunk of smoking char on the lawn.”

  “Of course not,” Arno said, hugged Peg.

  “He’d been acting strange, so out of sorts.”

  “Perhaps it’s for the best.”

  “How can they just send a rocket or whatever to kill somebody? A citizen of this country?”

  “It’s horrendous. But think how it was before, when we did it to everybody else. Murdered so many families. Now we just do it to ourselves. We are a little country now, and we just murder each other and that’s better.”

  “What’s this ‘we,’ Arno? You’re a German.”

  “I’m a citizen of the republic of empathy.”

  “Why him, though? He was nobody.”

  “He must have been some kind of threat. It’s a shameful thing they do, morally wrong, but they don’t make mistakes.”

  “They don’t?”

  “I don’t think so. Have you been working in your workbook?”

  “I try, Arno. But it’s difficult.”

  “This is true. Workbooks are work.”

  “I sensed you’d understand.”

  “Is it too soon to say I love you?”

  “Yes. No.”

  “Soonish I will say that I love you.”

  “And in the meantime?”

  “I will merely love you.”

  the WISDOM of the DOULAS

  My old mentor once told me that we earn our fee on the second day. I’m beginning to see her point. Yesterday the Gottwald baby was a beautiful, if slightly puckered, dream angel, fresh pulled from his amniotic pleasure dome. Yesterday the Gottwalds were the stunned and grateful progenitors of a mewling miracle.

  We even did a group hug.

  Today the Gottwalds are the smug bastards they’ve probably always been, and the Gottwald baby, well, he might only be two days old, but I can already predict he’s going to be a miserable little turd. Stay in this gig long enough, you know these things. I don’t mention any of this to the Gottwalds. It’s not my place. I’m no Nostradamus. I’m the doulo. Or doula, if you want to get technical, tick me off.

  “What does doula mean, anyway?” Mr. Gottwald asked during my interview. This was a month before his wife’s water broke.

  “It’s a Greek word for slave,” I told him, “but don’t get any ideas. My rates are steep.”

  “I’m glad you agree,” said Mr. Gottwald.

  “Perhaps you might outline your services,” said Mrs. Gottwald.

  “Perhaps I might.”

  “Like examples,” said Mr. Gottwald.

  “Examples,” I said, glanced about their gleaming loft, felt my hand closing on the ultralights in my coat. “Okay if I smoke in here?”

  “Is that a joke?” said Mr. Gottwald.

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Or maybe even a test.”

  “Examples,” said Mr. Gottwald.

  “Examples,” I said, and gave them examples: how I’d explain proper latch-on techniques for breast-feeding, the most efficient folds for swaddling. I also mentioned how I’d keep their four-year-old, Ezekiel, company, make sure everybody got rest, how I’d order pizza if we all wanted pizza. My mentor, Fanny Hitchens, always stressed the importance of pizza.

  “Breast-feeding?” said Mr. Gottwald. “You?”

  “Tell me, Mitch,” said Mrs. Gottwald, “are there many doulas like yourself?”

  “You mean doulos?” I said.

  “Yes,” said Mrs. Gottwald, and she might as well have had the words “Grave Misgivings About Hiring a Male Doula” stenciled on her forehead. Call it what you will. Reverse sexism. Substitute racism. It’s all the same. But not.

  “I’m the only man certified in the city, though I hear there’s a kid training with a friend of my old mentor, or sensei, if you will.”

  “Sensei?” said Mr. Gottwald. “Do you study the martial arts?”

  “Never did, no. I guess I just like those movies.”

  “Oh,” said Mr. Gottwald, nodded to a corner of the loft. A pair of sleek mahogany nunchucks and a bandolier of throwing stars dangled from pegs in the brick.

  “Just likes the movies,” he said.

  The Gottwalds traded a look I’d seen before, especially growing up, the one where it’s almost as though I’m not in the room, and I knew right then they’d decided not to hire me, vetoed the dude with the yellow teeth and the ratty (vintage) buckskin jacket who wanted to make a positive and tremendous impact on their birth experience. People crave something else during this precious time, barren spinsters overgentle with envy, or else those doughy breeding machines in
pastel-colored sack dresses. But I knew something the Gottwalds didn’t. It was an extremely busy season. Maybe my name sat at the bottom of their list, but they’d call their way down to it. They wouldn’t be sorry, either. These uptight success types with their antique Ataris and sarcastic sneakers make me sick, but it’s not about them. It’s not even about the baby. It’s about the job.

  * * *

  The Gottwald baby is only a few days old, just a tiny blind worm of boy, but it’s already quite obvious he’s going to be dealing Ritalin in clubs or else become some seedy megachurch youth leader by the time he’s seventeen. The Gottwalds are that demented, especially while I’m trying to demonstrate efficient swaddling techniques. So folding is not my forte.

  “You’re choking him,” says Mrs. Gottwald.

  “They like it tight,” I say. “Womb-y.”

  “You’re crushing him!”

  I peel the blanket away. Baby Gottwald is gasping.

  “Okay,” I say. “You’ve seen how it’s done. Now it’s your turn.”

  “Gee, thanks,” says Mrs. Gottwald.

  To think that yesterday not only did we do a group hug but later, while the baby slept, I gave them all shoulder rubs, even Ezekiel. We ate comfort lasagna from the gourmet store, and Mrs. Gottwald said, “I can’t believe we almost went through this without you, Mitch. This is so much better than the last time. Do you remember when we came home with Zekey, hon?”

  “A goddamn nightmare,” said Mr. Gottwald. “Hooray for the doula.”

  “Doulo,” I said.

  “Gentle now, Big Fella,” said Mr. Gottwald.

  Big Fella has always been a trigger for me, not least of all because I go two fifty-five or sixty on a good day, most of it solid flab, but I forgave him. There was such high gladness in Mr. Gottwald’s eyes, not to mention the pillowy shimmer of his wife, all that evolutionary love dope coursing through her, I felt us all cocooned in some invincible sweetness.

  But that was yesterday.

  * * *

  Today Mr. Gottwald paces the loft, fiddles with the earpiece in his ear. He’s been talking to his office nonstop since the hospital. Apparently the man is a crucial component of the pharmaceutical industry’s advertising efforts. We’d all forget to ask our doctor about pills for shyness and soft penises if he took a day of paternity leave. Ezekiel sobs quietly on the carpet, hovers over a toy cheese board, tugs apart some Velcro’d wedges of fake Manchego. We may need to have a chat.