The Ask

by Sam Lipsyte

  "I'd offer you some food," said Sasha, shut the pitted door behind us, "but I don't have any. I thought you were the food."

  "Right."

  "Oh, I said that already."

  "I'm sorry I wasn't the food," I said.

  "Have a seat."

  I sat down at the table, rested my arm on a stack of papers.

  "Hey, watch those," said Sasha, slipped the stack from under my arm. "The Todd Wilkes files. Can't mess those puppies up."

  "Oh, some important paperwork?" I said.

  Sasha did not seem to notice the sneer in my voice. Maybe she was further along the autism spectrum than she realized. She still stared at the papers.

  "That Todd Wilkes," she said.

  "I don't know him."

  "You don't? I thought everybody did. Don thinks everybody does. Don collects everything he can on Todd Wilkes. He went to high school with Todd. They both went to Iraq but Don just hates him. Hated this whole act he put on when he got back. Writing articles in the newspapers about how proud he was to be an American. Shaking everybody's hand. Going on TV. Saying the soldiers shouldn't whine. It was five years ago, but Don's still got a big bug in his butt about it, says Todd Wilkes will be president someday. And that when that happens, Don will have to shoot him."

  "Well," I said, "I don't really know about any of that."

  "What do you know about, Mr. Not-the-Food?"

  I couldn't tell if she was flirting or not. It could have been the heat, or the spectrum. She misted her neck, her knees.

  "Do you think Don will be back soon? I have something for him."

  "Yeah," said Sasha. "He should be back. He's out pounding the pavement. The pave-o-mento. He said he was going to go out and pound it. He says it every morning. He made me lick his legs the other day. They tasted like a Barbie doll I had when I was a girl. Do you think that's weird? Maybe Todd Wilkes is right. Maybe the vets all whine too much. I don't know where Don goes, but he's usually home around now. It's hot out there, right? But hotter in here. Nabeel, the super, he says the boiler is possessed. He's pretty funny, Nabeel. Mind if I smoke? Even though it's my own motherfucking apartment?"

  "Go ahead."

  "Thanks. For the permission."

  "Maybe I should come back another time."

  "How much is in the envelope?"

  "Which envelope?"

  "The one you must have brought."

  I slid it out of my pocket.

  "I should really give it to Don."

  "I just want to know how much is in it."

  I told her how much was in it.

  "Good. That's a nice number. Tell me, for real, how long do you think Don can keep this up? Because he's starting to freak me out a little."

  "Keep what up?" I said.

  "Come on," she said.

  The door buzzed and Sasha went to the intercom. She did not speak, pressed a button.

  "You know," I said, "it's probably a good idea to ask who it is first."

  "I know who it is. It's the food."

  "You thought I was the food."

  "How many times can I be wrong?"

  A moment later a delivery kid was at the door with a plastic bag. Sasha asked him the price a couple of times. The kid shrugged, pointed to the receipt. Sasha handed him some bills and he stood there and stared as she closed the door.

  "It's like they want a tip," she said.

  "They do want a tip."

  "Fuck that. What did that guy do to deserve a tip?"

  "He bicycled across the neighborhood to bring you your food."

  "That's his job. Don drove a Humvee across fucking Iraq to bring you your freedom."

  "They don't really pay them that well around here."

  "Like they did Don? You got some kind of bleeding heart? My heart bled out a long time ago."

  "I'm sorry to hear it."

  "Do you want to squeeze my tits?"

  "Excuse me?"

  "It's from that show."

  "Which one?"

  "I don't know. Everybody's in a room or something. And it's real."

  "Oh."

  "They look fat but they are very firm."

  "I…"

  "He's speechless."

  I looked down at the stained carpet.

  "He doesn't know what to say. Well, I'm hungry."

  I listened to the rustle of the food bags. Paper and plastic. You could recycle the paper, slip the plastic over your head. Recycle yourself.

  Now the door rattled and a man leaned into the room. He wore a sleeveless black shirt with green letters that read "Thank You for Not Sharing." His greasy hair flopped out of a blue bandana. A pair of artificial legs curved out of his cargo shorts. He just sort of bounced there on the linoleum, scowling, loutish, kangarooey.

  "What the fuck is going on here?"

  I wondered if the torn boat shoes came with the prostheses.

  "No, okay," he said. "Let's rephrase: What the fuck is going on here?"

  "This is your dad's buddy," said Sasha. "He has some kind of name."

  "Milo Burke," I said.

  "My dad's buddy? My dad doesn't have buddies. He has associates. Employees. Clients. Counsel. Which one are you?"

  "I'm just helping Purdy out a little," I said, put the envelope on the table.

  "Flunky," said Don.

  "Same as last time," said Sasha, nodded at the envelope.

  "I don't mean to be vague," I said.

  "What, you're like some fixer?"

  "No, I'm a development officer."

  "You don't look like any officer to me. What do you develop?"

  "It's been a bad year."

  Don shuffled to the table. I'd seen the amputees on TV, the ones who parasailed and played extreme badminton and were paragons of positive thinking, who never let their calamity stymie them. I presumed this Todd Wilkes was one of those sorts. Watching Don move now I was struck by how utterly impossible and aggravating it must have been to walk on these things, let alone do Tae Bo, no matter how advanced the technology. How easy it would be to say to hell with it all, to lie on a cot with your titanium legs and curse your fate and soil the cot you curse your fate upon and not want to learn how to do anything all over again. I was on the verge of such behavior with my original legs. Don picked up the envelope, thumbed through the bills.

  "Ulysses S. Grant is always welcome in my house," he said. "You, I'm not so sure about. What are you eating, honey?"

  "Rice and beans, baby. I ordered from the place. Our friend here says I should have tipped the guy."

  "Tipped him for what?"

  "Riding a bike."

  "Riding a bike? Try delivering the fucking beans in a chemical suit. Then I'll tip you. Nobody tipped Vasquez."

  "Who's Vasquez?" said Sasha.

  She's the one who got an RPG in the teeth, I wanted to say, figured it for lousy spycraft if I did.

  "She was my friend," said Don, stumbled over to the futon, flung himself down. "I've told you about Vasquez a million times."

  "Oh, yeah."

  "Shit, honey, can you take my girls off? I'm whipped. Been pounding the fucking pave-o-mento. It's goddamn hot in here. We've got to get Nabeel to turn the boiler off. Sahsh, my girls."

  Sasha pushed her plate away, crouched over the futon, and unstrapped Don's prostheses.

  "Feel free to gawk at a total stranger during a private and painful moment," he said.

  "Sorry."

  "Just fucking with you. You can look. So, you here to give me the money?"

  "And say hello from your dad. He'd love to see you sometime."

  "Oh, so now I'm his son again. Good. He was hinting he wanted more tests. I'm sure he wouldn't love to see me. But I suppose we'll have to bro down one of these days. Wait, can a dude bro down with his dad? I guess he can. Where's Lee Moss?"

  "Lee Moss is very sick."

  "Sick like he's going to kick it?"

  "I don't know, Don. I'm new to all of this."

  "New to what?"

&
nbsp; "To working with your father."

  "I thought you were old friends."

  "We are. But we haven't worked together before."

  "Worked together," said Don. "That's funny. My fucking humps are killing me."

  "Don calls them his humps," said Sasha.

  "Excuse me?"

  "His stumps. He calls them his humps. Everything is girls and humps around here."

  Don rubbed the rough knobs just below his knees.

  "Tikrit," he said.

  "Saddam's hometown."

  "We've got a CNN watcher," said Don. "How inspiring."

  "I tried to keep up," I said.

  "Yeah, must have been a real sacrifice."

  "I must sound lame," I said.

  "No, I think I'm the lame one," said Don.

  "You move incredibly well," I said, "considering, you know…"

  "Considering I'm a double transtibial amputee," said Don. "I'll tell you, man, some things I do better now. Right, Sahsh? Sahsh loves my humps. They're all-American humps. Can-do mission-accomplishing humps. Is my bitterness too obvious? I grew up watching those Vietnam movies on TV. There was always that bitter vet in the ball cap. I think I identified with that guy long before I went into the fucking army. Maybe being a pissed-off, paranoid, maimed war vet was my goal. I bet Nathalie thought so. How could such a smart lady have such a stupid-ass son?"

  "Don," said Sasha.

  "Mr. Burke," said Don. "Do you know where I can score hard drugs in this neighborhood? I see a lot of curry and lot of beans out there, but no dope."

  "No, I really don't."

  "You must think we're the lowest scum on earth, right? Regular old dude like you."

  "We all have our pasts."

  "I'm sure."

  The near-knowing, not-knowing snarl in his voice, it reminded me of so many kids from college. Myself then, too. I wondered if that's what Nathalie sounded like. Probably not. Purdy would never have been so smitten.

  "I'm sorry about your mother," I said. "I know Purdy is. It really shook him up."

  "So much he had to finish her off, right? Wasn't going to keep meeting her in that motel, so he wasn't going to pay those fucking hospital bills. His little upstate authenticity piece just a slab of sleeping meat."

  "Listen," I said. "I really don't know what you're talking about."

  "Are you sure about that?"

  Don rocked forward on his knobs.

  "Extremely."

  "Did you know Don was an interrogator?" said Sasha. "Just for a little while."

  "I took a couple of classes. Online. But my instructor called me Don Juan because in all the simulations I used my masculine wiles instead of, like, a waterboard. When the situation allowed for it. Arab men are attracted to me. They have a whole different take on buttly rapaciousness over there."

  "Don."

  "Sorry, baby. And what I mean is virtual Arab men, anyway. I'm not a racialist."

  "Racist," said Sasha.

  "Racialist," said Don. "They're different words."

  "Not for the people who use them both," said Sasha.

  "Touche, douche," said Don.

  "These simulations," I said now, "this class, was this through the army?"

  "Not really."

  "No?"

  "It was on the fake internet."

  "The fake internet?"

  "Ask the fellow you supposedly work with."

  "I'm not sure I follow."

  "That's the kind of thing a guy who knows all about the fake internet would say."

  "Really, I don't."

  "Your ignorance is duly noted. Got that, satellite?"

  "Got it," I said.

  "Wasn't talking to you. But now that I am, do you have any questions you want to ask me?"

  "I didn't come to ask you questions," I said. "I'm not exactly sure why I'm here. I think I'm supposed to make sure that you're okay. To find out how your father can help. He really does want to see you. Do you have a message for him?"

  "Yes, I do, Mr. Burke."

  "Milo, please."

  "Okay, Milo. I certainly do have a message for my father. Please tell him that my mother, his precious Nathalie, the woman he loved so much he let her fester for twenty years in nowhere towns, was better off without him. And that the son he cares for so deeply that he tried to make sure he never found out about him really just hopes that someday soon he, Purdy, goes for a checkup, and the doctor tells him he's dying of cock cancer, and then he, my wonderful father, goes out into the street, stunned by the news, and gets hit by a bus, and lives, only to spend the entire following year rotting from cock cancer and in horrible pain from getting just crushed by that bus, one of those huge kinds with the accordion middle, and him just begging for somebody to feed his mouth a gun. Tell my father that."

  "Okay," I said. "I'll try to remember it all."

  "And also tell him that the envelopes will need to get much thicker. And that I look forward to joining him for some wonderful father-son time very soon. It may sound corny, but I'd like him to take me to the Bronx Zoo."

  "That's the fun one," I said.

  "Tell me," said Don. "Was there anything you wanted to be before you became some rich dude's bitch?"

  "An artist," I said.

  "So you wanted to be some rich dude's bitch all along."

  "I guess," I said.

  "He guesses."

  "By the way," I said. "And don't take this the wrong way."

  "What's that?"

  "You sound a little like your father."

  "I never had a father."

  Sixteen

  Here came the international teens with their embossed leathers, their cashmere hoodies and pimpled excitements. They had traveled from China, Japan, Russia, Kuwait, just to squeeze into the lone Mediocre elevator car and delay my arrival at work. The international teens studied English in the language program down the hall from our suite. Who knew why they bothered? Maybe someday Business English would be the only trace of our civilization left. Bored youth across the global globosphere would memorize its verb tenses, concoct filthy rhymes in its honor. Maybe they'd speak Pig English to trick the oldsters. Pig English would be Latin.

  Rumor had it the whole deal was a scam, that the students were gaming us. We sponsored them for visas, and when the paperwork went through, they transferred to one of the online universities, lit out for the territories, Vegas, Miami, Maui. No classes to attend, all their assignments written by starving grad students and emailed for grading to shut-in adjuncts scattered across the North American landmass, the international teens would have a whole semester for the most delightful modes of free fall. Daddy's Shanghai factories or Caspian oil pipes would foot the bills.

  But rumor also had it that Mediocre had to somehow benefit, or the practice would have been stopped long ago.

  The international teens wore jackets and carried handbags worth half my monthly paycheck, back when I received a monthly paycheck. They clutched cell phones and cigarette lighters shaped like postmodern architectural masterpieces. The international teens rode to the roof to smoke. Later they would gather in the lounge area, nap. One boy, a handsome kid in rumpled club wear, could often be glimpsed snoozing on the suede divan outside Dean Cooley's suite. No other disco napper dared claim this inviting nest, and I never discovered who the boy was, or why he merited this dispensation, but sometimes I found myself unconsciously bowing my head in his presence.

  Now the international teens jammed me harder up near the button panel, chatted in their conquering tongues. Their giggles, I concluded, regarded shabby me. It felt good to be colonized, oppressed, a subaltern at last.

  You reactionary scumbag, I upbraided myself. But I'm just being honest, I replied. Your so-called honesty is a weapon against the weak, I said. Fuck off, I retorted, I am the weak. Look at my dollar! It's shriveling in my hand! It's like a vampire caught out by the sun. My dollar is exploding into dust. I'm not the bad guy anymore! Han brothers and sisters have the wheel of this wreck
now!

  "Excuse me, sir," said one of the Chinese students. "I must ask once again, I do not mean to offend. Is this your stop?"

  Another nodded, held the door. How long had they been waiting for me to leave the car?

  "Yes, thanks,xie xie," I said, slinked past them into the lounge area.

  The receptionist had gone to lunch, left Horace curled up in one of the Eames knockoffs with a twist of pemmican and a paperback book.

  "What up, kid?" he said. "How's my home slice?"

  A devout ageist, Horace frequently mocked me with antiquated slang.

  "I'm okay, thanks."

  I took a seat nearby.

  "You passing the dutchie, or what?"

  "I don't know what that means, Horace."

  "Sure you don't."

  "What are you reading?"

  "This book my sister got for one of her college seminars. It's called The Unfortunate."

  Horace held up the book. It was called The Infortunate.

  "You sure?" I said.

  Horace flipped the book around.

  "What the fuck are you talk-Ah, good catch, Meister Po. Anyway, it's an awesome book. It's about this dude back in pre-revolutionary times. Like his memoir. He was in law school and living on the family dime in London, but really just partying and shit. Listen to this sentence here: 'In my Clerkship, I did little else but vapour about the Streets, with my Sword by my Side; as for studying the Law, little of that serv'd me, my Time being taken up with pursuing the Pleasures of the Town…' He's like the first slacker. Just saying you're not the boss of me to his whole world."

  "Like you."

  "Hardly," said Horace. "There are no slackers anymore. Your generation murdered the dream. You guys were lazy pigs. We're more like highly efficient pleasurebots. But this guy, he really sparked something, in his way."

  "Sounds interesting."

  "Don't be a phony, Judge Holden."

  "Your references are all over the place. You know that, right?"

  "That's the point," said Horace.

  "Oh," I said.

  "Got it, Francis Gary Numan Powers? William of Orange Julius and Ethel Rosenberg?"

  Our grandchildren would be steeped in some other nation's trivialized history. It would be their salvation.