The Ask

by Sam Lipsyte

  "I didn't know it then but she was planning to drop out," said Purdy. "Her sister was sick. Nathalie was going to have to take care of her, work. Her philosophical investigations would have to wait."

  "Sad."

  "You say that with such haunting conviction. So she sends me back to my galaxy. None of you ever know about any of this, but it eats me up for long time. I feel as though I've failed at something crucial. And I miss the hell out of her, at least for a while. But that fades, of course."

  "It does, doesn't it," I said. I was ready to nudge this conversation back to vague and more comforting terrain, the creeks and dales and low rolling slopes of universal disappointment. Something about this story, its specificity, bothered me, more so now that I seemed part of it, part of the future of it, or why else would I be hearing this?

  "Time goes by," said Purdy.

  "Having no alternative."

  "Don't be cute. Time goes by. Nathalie recedes in my mind."

  "What about you in Nathalie's mind?"

  "How the fuck would I know? Just listen, Milo."

  "Okay."

  " 'Recede' is a weird word. This isn't so easy. So linear. But I do, on some level, just ball up the memory of my time with her, throw it on the sentimental-education heap. Then, a few years ago, I got a letter. It was sent to the company, before I sold it. She'd read something about me in one of those new-media magazines. Of course, the article she mentioned was already years old. I was a business hero in that issue. If she'd read the takedown they wrote later, maybe she wouldn't have contacted me."

  "That piece was bullshit."

  "No, it wasn't, Milo. But thank you. Still, it doesn't matter. Anyway, the letter wasn't very long. Chatty, even nostalgic for a while. Then she caught me up. She was living somewhere upstate. Working in what sounded like a sweatshop. Taking classes somewhere inane. Still reading Schopenhauer. I remember she used to say she read Schopenhauer because he hated women so much. She said it was instructive. But the letter. There's a kicker at the end of the letter. She has a sixteen-year-old son. Do I need to elaborate?"

  It took me a few seconds but he did not need to elaborate.

  "But how could you be-"

  "Trust me, I submitted the kid to tests."

  "What was it like when you met him?"

  "Who?"

  "Your son."

  "I never met him. Nathalie wouldn't let me. Didn't tell the kid anything, either."

  "That's ridiculous."

  "It's fair enough."

  "No, it's not. Nathalie should have told you."

  "It was her call. A dumb call, given my resources, but hers to make. Anyway, I started sending them money. Set them up. Lee handled it all for me. Lee Moss. Lee's the only one who knew about this. Except for Michael here, of course. Lee was my father's lawyer, a mensch. But he's been very sick. Cancer. Pancreatic."

  "That's one of the worst. A killer."

  "Yes, the ones that kill you are definitely the worst. Anyway, Lee's still doing a bit of work around the office. Putting things in order. He noticed that the last few checks were never cashed. He tried to contact Nathalie. When he couldn't find her, he called around up there, found out… well… found out about Nathalie."

  "Found out what?"

  "That she was… it's hard. It's really weird how hard it is."

  Purdy pinkied away a tear. There was something actorly in the gesture, but at least it seemed improvised.

  "She died, Milo."

  "Died?"

  "Car crash."

  "Oh… I'm sorry."

  "Yes. Well. Thanks. Or…"

  "Melinda doesn't know?"

  "No."

  "About any of it?"

  "I just never saw a reason to tell her. Maybe I could have told her before. But I didn't. Now it's too late. She's kind of into the whole trust thing."

  "So, you want to keep a lid on your history."

  "Isn't that what we all want?"

  "What about the boy?"

  "Don?"

  "Don?"

  "I didn't name him. It's Don. Don Charboneau. Well, this is the really fucked-up part."

  "Oh, there's a fucked-up part?"

  "Don's been in touch. Don is just back from Iraq. Can you believe that? He's only twenty-one. And now he's got titanium legs."

  "What?"

  "You heard me."

  "Jesus."

  "Usual roadside shit. And both of them."

  "Man, that's bad. But there's that guy, that runner-"

  "This kid's not there yet. Moves around like a drunk cross-country skier, according to Lee. It's pretty sad. I mean, I feel for him, I really do."

  "He's your son."

  "Right. He's my son. We think so."

  "I thought you did tests."

  "Science isn't everything."

  "How did he find out about you?"

  "We wondered what had happened to him, but he'd sort of dropped out of Nathalie's life for a time. I think she was mad at him for enlisting. Then she dies and he comes back. I guess he went through Nathalie's stuff, figured some things out. He started sending itemized bills for his expenses to Lee. Even showed up at his office once."

  "Really?"

  "Yeah, pretty aggro, right? Then he sends me a letter with a return address in Jackson Heights. Says he looks forward to the healing."

  "Jackson Heights. That's near me."

  "I know."

  The car was turning onto my block.

  "How did you know where I lived?" I said to Michael, the driver.

  "What," said Michael, nodded at the navigation screen on his dashboard. "You think you're living off the grid? You have a listed phone number."

  There was something in the tweaked amusement of his voice I recognized. It made me think of late nights over a CD jewel case, razor blades, long-winded denunciations of world banking cabals.

  "Michael Florida," I said. We had always referred to him by his full name. I never knew how it started but the nature of the name and the nature of the man made it seem correct.

  "Long time, brother."

  Michael Florida's eyes shone in the rearview mirror. Even in the dark of the car I could make out his face now, the pocked cheeks, the pointy chin.

  "How have you…" I said. "How did you-"

  "Figured I was dead by now?"

  "Or working in a halfway house in Arizona."

  "Nice." Michael Florida laughed. "But it was Missouri."

  The car slid up to my building. I looked up and saw the front room lit. The lamp near the sofa threw light on the ceiling cracks.

  "We'll have to postpone the reunion," said Purdy.

  "Seems like my life is one big reunion these days."

  "I'm sure it seems that way," said Purdy. "Me, when I make a friend, I try to keep him."

  "Point taken."

  "Don't take it too hard, Milo. You're a good man."

  "You think so?"

  "I'm betting on it. Michael?"

  Michael Florida twisted around and slid a large envelope between the bucket seats. Purdy handed it to me.

  "I could have sent you an email and wired some money, but this is more fun, no? Fun's hard to find. You have to make your own. Look this material over."

  "I will," I said.

  "Goodnight, Milo."

  "Goodnight, Purdy. Michael."

  I ducked out of the car. The sofa lamp went dark.

  Thirteen

  The next morning I found a note from Maura in the kitchen. She'd written it in the margins of an unpaid cable bill, slipped it beneath a kiwi. I'd always loved Maura's handwriting, its swoops and swells, its queer collapses. She wrote like somebody half trapped by her bubbly grade school script, still trying to ungirl it:

  Milo-Working late tonight. Please pick up Bernie at H. Salamander. He can have the other cupcake in the fridge, but only after he eats his dinner. He can have one show before his bath and two books after. Call if there's a problem. Please don't have a problem.

  The absenc
e of a sign-off did not seem strange. Once she might have written one of our pet names, along with a coded reference to some salacious act. But those names, like most of the acts, had vanished. Bernie had begun to suss them out anyway, and it could be rather unnerving to be addressed by your son as "Smoof" or "Turbs" or "Provost Cavelick," to hear the words wedged so unevenly in his mouth, the way they must have been in ours. That the pet names harkened back to lost years of sustained laughter and lovemaking made me somewhat grateful for Bernie's interventions. Besides, I knew who wrote the note.

  I made some coffee and took the envelope Purdy had given me to the stoop. The envelope was thick, and the first thing that slid out was a packet of cash. I shoved it back in and tugged out some stapled papers, printouts of email exchanges between Purdy and Don Charboneau. Most were terse and cautious hellos, information about whereabouts, fund transfers, but a few let loose, went "aggro," to use Purdy's word, achieved a register that Purdy maybe even secretly admired. The longest, and latest:

  From: buckcharb@earthweb.net

  To: Purdy.Stuart@GroupusculeMedia.com

  Hi Dad. Just moved down to the city to be closer to you, my dad. I'm in Jackson Heights. Ever heard of it? Some good curry around here. Lots of dotheads, too, though Mom would have killed me if she heard me say that. Weren't so many dotheads in the service, but there were a few. Cool guys. For dotheads. Most of my unit was just niggers, black niggers and brown niggers and white niggers and Christ niggers. So, now that my mom is dead and my aunt is dead and even the only close friend I had in the Army is dead, and I have nobody in the world but you (and my girl, Sasha), I am really looking forward to us hooking up and doing father/son things, like going to baseball games, and movies, and you can teach me about sex and how to tie my shoelaces and wipe myself or maybe you can just send me more of that money. Yeah, do that. Don't they call it hush money? That's a funny phrase. Where's Lee, your Hebrew friend? Can you get him to send more hush money? Or maybe you can do it yourself. I know how much you want to see me. Come out and we'll eat some dothead food or there's also really good Salvadoran. I knew somebody from San Salvador in my unit. Another light-wheel mechanic. The close friend I mentioned before. Her name was Vasquez. Fucking Vasquez. Got an RPG right in the teeth. Can you picture that? Probably not. Yeah, so, that was what happened to Vasquez. She was right ahead of us and I saw her head explode off her neck, about three seconds before our Humvee blew. I bet you really care. There was a lot of brain and bone in the road, and pieces of a paperback book by Roque Dalton. Ever read Roque Dalton? I actually have. I'm the one who told Vasquez about him. See, I'm not quite the guy you'd think would be the guy who wrote most of this email. I'm kind of a mystery. That's what Sasha says. But then again, she's not always the sharpest card in the deck, if that's the saying for it. I'll take that money now. Love, your loving son, Don

  Along with the money and the emails were directions to Don's apartment. My mission, so to speak, was described in a brief note from Purdy. He wanted me to deliver the money to Don, but more important, get some kind of read on him, figure out whether he seemed to have a master plan or was just, as Purdy put it, a "hurt, confused kid with no legs (probably the case)." The "deal," Purdy wrote, was this: Purdy would be ready at a certain point to get involved in the boy's life, be a better secret father, if Don wanted that, to help in ways beyond these relatively paltry payouts, but he needed a more reliable sense of the kid, if he could be trusted to not divulge Purdy's broken trust to trust freak Melinda. This was Purdy's ask. I was going to be his bastard son's minder, his mind reader. It couldn't be as bad as building decks, and given what Purdy had intimated at the candy store, the payout would be better than paltry. Already in my mind I was curating the opening show in the Milo Burke Gallery at the Mediocre University at New York City, where, in a maneuver without precedent, I had been promoted from part-time development officer to full-time chair of the painting department. It seemed right, if only a tad egotistical, that the first exhibit include a few of my more representative works.

  The morning glided by on daydreams and coffee and decadent sessions at stool. I read poetry for the first time in years, put on loud sludgy music, did a few sit-ups, rolled over with a heavy cramp. I crawled to the computer and hoisted myself into the chair. It was time to catch up on the state of the world. I'd start with the Middle East. I found the report of a recent debate between two professors at the Ivy League college uptown. One of the experts said the Palestinians were irrational and needed a real leader, like maybe a smart Jewish guy. The other professor said that the central paradox to all of this was that Jews both were Nazis and didn't really exist. But how could they be both? He was still working on it.

  I clicked onward to Home Aid Ho's. This was actually part of a larger constellation of niche sites, and I searched some other scenarios until I found one that catered to my particular deformity. Spreadsheet Spreaders featured men who pleasured their female employers for raises of up to twenty percent. I started to rub myself and, remembering I would have to retrieve Bernie soon, recalled that I'd once done what I was doing with Bernie in the room. He'd been a few months old, and though sex in his vicinity was deemed okay, or, more than okay, beautiful and natural, Maura and I had never covered the masturbation question. Was jerking off in view of your mewler any different than making sweet slow love? I'd always meant to start an anonymous thread about this on one of those parenting resource sites. Things got away from me. Now it was no longer a concern. Bernie was too old. I was too old. It took me a good while to banish this memory, return to the hermetic joys of Spreadsheet Spreaders. I rubbed on valiantly, shot what was doubtless, at my advanced age, some sullen autist into a superannuated tube sock.

  Happy Salamander, the physical space, as opposed to the educational concept, took up the basement of a private home off Ditmars Boulevard. You walked in the side door, dipped your head beneath a sagging heat duct, and descended a short staircase to the low, bright chamber. The fluorescent lights drove Maura mad, but I didn't mind them. It was the filth beneath the tidiness that got to me, every bookcase and table and chair smeared with an odd, thin grease. It must have been some pedagogical lubricant.

  Otherwise, you really couldn't argue with Happy Salamander, or you could, but you would get nowhere with its idealistic and adamantine young educators. They had a smug ideological tinge about them, a minor Red Brigades vibe, which often angered Maura, but which I chalked up to an abiding love for children, or an abiding hate for what children eventually become.

  Splotched toddler art pocked the walls, the usual stick figure families standing in green yards under multi-colored skies, as though to assure the anxious customer that here, despite rumors to the contrary, a healthful focus on heteronormative rainbows obtained. Posters of butterflies and chipmunks curled damp from tacks, along with Polaroids of the kids on their various excursions to the nearby playground, or the local handball court, or the cracked fountain near the subway where bums liked to sun themselves and smoke. I'd seen the kiddie-diddler there, snarling and remonstrative with his duller peers.

  Today the seven or eight kids in Bernie's class were scattered about the room at various stations, or, in Salamanderspeak, activity nodes. Some played office, shuffled telephones and scraps of printer paper across a squat table in approximation of future misery. Others stood smocked at easels, or hovered over wooden puzzles. A few teachers fluttered from cluster to cluster, mother sparrows with their beaked seeds of approbation. I spotted Bernie's pal Aiden sitting alone in a corner. He wore the bitter look of a boy dealt a time-out, a bad baby bird.

  Bernie sat nearby on a pink mat. His shirt was off, his eyes closed. He hummed quietly. Maddie, his slender, slightly elfin teacher, knelt beside him, whispered in his ear. I watched as she lifted a chrome-colored clothespin, seemed about to affix it to my son's nipple.

  "Hey!" I called.

  Soft faces swiveled.

  "Daddy!"

  Maddie smiled.

  "Hi, Bernie's D
ad!" She knew my name, but this form of address was protocol, meant, if I remembered the manifesto correctly, to maintain contextual integrity for the other children.

  "Hi, Maddie!"

  "Bernie asked me about Indians. Or, as I explained, Native Americans."

  "Oh?" I said.

  "Yes, and we started talking about the Plains tribes in particular."

  "They're the fun ones," I said, regretted it at once.

  Maddie seemed to waver between confusion and scorn.

  "Yes, well, Bernie wanted to know about the lives of the Plains tribes, and we touched upon the famous Sun Dance."

  "Sun Dance?"

  "Yes."

  "What's with the clothespin?"

  "Well, Bernie's Dad, it was all I had on hand. I wanted to give Bernie a sense of the ordeal. The piercing of the skin and the looping of rawhide straps through the wounds. They would fasten these straps to the sun pole. The young warrior would have to tear through his own flesh to free himself."

  "Oh," I said, "like that movie."

  "Movie?"

  Maddie seemed unfamiliar with the medium.

  "Before your time," I said. It was a phrase I was trying not to rely on so much these days. "Anyway, I hope you weren't going to make Bernie tear through his flesh."

  I chuckled, caught a trace of Purdy in the sound.

  "Daddy, I don't want to tear my flesh."

  "You don't have to tear your flesh, Bernie, I promise."

  Maddie made a stern face. I grinned, felt somehow chastened, though for what I couldn't be sure.

  "No, obviously we wouldn't tear his flesh."

  "I was just joking around."

  "But I hope you've read our newest Statement of Pedagogical Goals. It was emailed as an attachment over the weekend."

  "I don't think, well, now, not all of it, no."

  "Oh," said Maddie, "because we assumed no response meant tacit agreement with our change in direction."

  "Change in direction?"

  "It's in the attachment, Bernie's Dad."

  "Right."

  "We believe that many of the problems children suffer from-sensory integration issues, boundary instability, lack of impulse control-stem from our collective refusal to expose children to certain dark edges of experience."