The Ask

by Sam Lipsyte

"Fuck your morphine," said the bat guy. "Yeah, give it to me."

  "It's in my room."

  "Where's your room?"

  "End of the hall."

  "Go get it. Just fucking stay where you are."

  "I am," said Maurice.

  "Get back on the couch."

  The bat guy turned just as Constance put out her hand for me.

  "Don't touch him!" he said. "Shit, you're a chick. Let me see you. You fuck him?"

  It's complicated, I wanted to say.

  "He's my friend," she said.

  "You fuck him. I can tell. You blow him and tell him how smart he is. But he's a dumbshit. Take it from me."

  "I can vouch for that," said Billy Raskov.

  I didn't take it personally, knew it for some kind of play, a ridiculous one.

  "You can vouch for what, potato head?"

  "Jesus, Billy," Goldfarb whispered.

  The bat guy stuck his bat in the cushions of an armchair behind him, far from our reach, though I noticed Gunderson eye it. Now he snatched a handful of Billy's lank hair, cranked his head back.

  "What do you vouch for?"

  "Nothing," said Raskov.

  "Nothing?"

  Raskov snarled as the bat guy bent his head. Constance leaned in and stroked Raskov's knuckles, as though what he needed most now was moral support, the structural integrity of his spinal column a minor matter.

  "No," said Raskov. "Just that I can vouch for what you said about the guy over here. Milo. He is a dumbshit."

  "Oh, is he?"

  "Yeah."

  The bat guy slammed Raskov's head down on a spindly wooden end table. A leg splintered.

  Billy slumped, clutched his skull.

  The bat guy turned to me, waved his gun.

  "Nice friend you got there. Calls you a dumbshit. He's fucking the chick, isn't he? Or maybe you all are. Maybe I will. What do you think of that?"

  I could see Constance out of the corner of my eye. Her lips twittered, as though moving briskly through a sequence of calculations.

  "Been a while since I got my wick dipped."

  I could tell the bat guy was about to do something ugly with his penis. His pistol would authorize the ugliness. His pistol would have his penis's back. He started to rub himself. We froze, Billy and Maurice and Charles and I, or else we watched the scene as though it were precisely that, a scene, unfurling in the present but with a structure, a destination, already in place. Like a TV show, if TV made you too scared to move. I guess in a sense it does, but this was also something else. I was waiting for some instinct to take over. Fight or flight, I remember thinking. I suppose just sitting there on the sofa was, technically, flight.

  The bat guy made an experiment of bobbing his crotch near Constance's face.

  Something scraped on the hardwood behind us.

  Purdy and Michael Florida squatted behind the armchair. Had they been here all along? Wandered in from the kitchen? Purdy put his finger to his lips. Michael Florida's eyes blazed, flicked around the room. They each crept around a side of the chair. Purdy slipped the Easton from the cushions.

  The bat guy cocked his head but did not look back.

  "What the fuck took you so long?" he said. "Did you find the morphine? This kid says he got morphine."

  "Hey," he said again, "I want to get out of here. You see this chick here? Let's take her with us. She'll have a better time than with these queers."

  Then we all heard footfalls from the hallway, the boots of his fellow invaders. I saw fear in the bat guy's eyes and he had every right to feel it, because as he wheeled to see what forms he had mistaken for his friends, Purdy and Michael Florida vaulted over the wrecked coffee table. Purdy smashed the pistol from the bat guy's hand. Michael Florida dove, speared the bat guy in the chest. Together they crashed to the floor. The bat guy rolled on top of Michael Florida, choked him, both men dusted with glass. Michael Florida clawed back and the bat guy's mask peeled off and we saw his face, his brown hair and rosy cheeks. He looked like a thousand young men in this city. But this one was throttling brave, meth-carved Michael Florida.

  Purdy picked up the pistol, pointed it at the other two men.

  "He's a fucking nut," said one of them. "We didn't even want him with us."

  "He's my cousin," said the other. "But I don't care. We just came for the cash."

  It was an odd moment, as though the narrative had somehow forked and we were witnessing two possible outcomes, the intruders subdued at one end of the room, our friend strangled at the other. The story had to decide. Or Purdy had to decide, because the rest of us just sat there, and he did, tossed the Easton, shouted, "Constance!"

  Constance stood, snatched the airborne bat. The knob slid toward her fist and I remembered her stint on the freshman softball squad as she rocked her hips and swung into the bat guy's head. He screamed, but did not let go of Michael Florida's throat. Charles Goldfarb shouted. Constance bashed the bat guy on the elbow and his grip popped loose. Michael Florida rose, spun out, a practiced wrestler's escape. Many of us, maybe, were secret jocks. Michael Florida pounced on the bat guy, pressed him into the table shards, tugged his arms behind his back, bound his wrists with a leather belt. Michael Florida, more than anyone, would also be practiced in the swift removal of his belt.

  Now Purdy waved the pistol at the two economically motivated, mostly non-violent invaders.

  "Go," he said. "Get out of here. Run. Nobody's seen your faces. Just run on out of here."

  "What about Jamie?" said one intruder to the other.

  "Fuck Jamie. He's my cousin, and I say fuck him."

  "They'll kill him."

  "Don't be stupid," said Purdy. "We won't kill anybody. We want to graduate on time."

  "There's nothing here," said Jamie's cousin. "We got nothing."

  "You have everything," said Purdy. "The only important thing. Leave with it now."

  "Wait!" called Jamie, started to thrash.

  Michael Florida cinched his improvised truss. Billy Raskov stood, kicked Jamie in the kidney.

  "Shit!"

  It was craven, but at least Raskov had bare feet, and anyway I hadn't been cracked with a used end table.

  "Billy," said Constance, pulled Raskov off.

  "Leave him here," said Purdy to the other two. "You guys deserve better."

  The deserved invaders nodded, bolted for the door. I watched them through the window fly down the street, weave off under streetlamps.

  Michael Florida sat on the bat guy until the police arrived.

  Charles Goldfarb, who had been sitting in stunned lotus on the sofa, rose, paced, cursed, smoked.

  A lot happened after that, testimonies and court appearances and a hung jury and vague threats, never made good, from townier parts of town. That summer the newspaper reported the bat guy had been shot dead outside Star Market. He was a local boy named Jamie Darling. He'd drawn down on some cops with an unloaded revolver. I think the term "suicide by cop," like "home invasion," came later, but that's what it was.

  A lot happened even after all the stuff that happened after, but years later I couldn't remember most of it, at least not the legal and ethical intricacies that entertained us for many stoned hours back then.

  What lingered was that frozen feeling, the paralysis, the unnerving awareness that came with it, my real-time curiosity about the nature of my cowardice, as though I were already beyond any possibility of action, just wanted to ascertain, in the moment of my acquiescence, whether I was going to ascribe it all to moral failure or grant a kinder, chemical explanation. Of course, the bat guy had a gun. Nobody ever blames you for freezing in front of a gun.

  But it was still the bat that scared me.

  The biochemical states of Maurice and Billy and Constance also intrigued, and then, of course, loomed the indelible fact of Purdy and Michael Florida, the aristocrat and the outcast, hurling themselves over the coffee table like some heroic tandem from the mendacious mythopoetry of another age, one of whistles a
nd human waves and the Maxim guns ripping away. You had to either have everything or have nothing to act in this world, I mused then, to make the move that will deliver you, or cut you to pieces. The rest of us just cling to the trench's corroded ladder, shut our eyes the way I remember Bernie used to shut them, squeeze them hard, call it hiding.

  Of course, this feeling, this hysterical read on agency's dispensations, was a lot of what Maura used to term, with the full-bore Midwestern irony she'd somehow absorbed near Brattleboro, Vermont, "hooey," or what Claudia might have deemed a crock of absolute shit.

  Still, a final tally, a statistical breakdown of this moment, did exist.

  Future Apocalypse Guru: Smidgen of composure, ineffective diplomacy, intractable whininess.

  Artistic Provocateur: Ineffectual response to threat, admirable behavior under physical duress, unseemly and gratuitous assault on downed invader.

  Larkish Frankfurtian: Frightened retreat into walls of self.

  Marxist Feminist Who Fucked: Initial paralysis, subsequent display of courage.

  Semi-Brain-Damaged Crystal Tweaker: Valiant and focused response to threat.

  Ruling-Class Brat: Remarkable bravery and tactical leadership in face of threat.

  Home Invaders: Bold initiative, bad intel, poor battle management.

  Painting's New Savior: Utter cowardice, experienced as bodily paralysis in conjunction with what he would later describe, in an effort to steer the conversation away from actual events, a "bizarre floating sensation."

  But no matter my conversational machinations, I knew the truth. Nobody ever mentioned it, of course. It meant not much. Physical bravery probably held the same value in our milieu as skill at parallel parking: a useful quirk. But the box score stayed in my wallet, or the wallet of my heart, so to speak, a smeared and origamied scrap to remind me how little I resembled the man I figured for the secret chief of my several selves.

  Eighteen

  How sick and marvelous an age this was, wherein I could boot up my desktop with a couple of names or notions in mind-Todd Wilkes, William Moraley, indentured servitude, technological advances in prosthetics, toosh dev-and plug them all into various amateur encyclopedic databases. How fucked and wondrous to siphon off such huge reservoirs of community-policed knowledge, funnel it directly into my head. Every man a Newton, a Diderot. Even now I skimmed an article about Diderot for no reason. Bernie was asleep, Maura just a few feet away on the sofa with her laptop and headphones. She might as well have been in French Guiana.

  All was peachy and near utopic until I rose for a beer. At that moment the knowledge just disappeared, tilted out my earhole. I'd have to start again, or else concede my memory palace was a panic room. It would be good to exile some items and sensations, some people, even, but how to cull? I could not spare one hamburger or handjob. I wanted to recall all the cigarettes I once smoked, those afternoons I did nothing but sit on a bench and smoke cigarettes, interview myself for major art magazines. I did not want to lose the acoustics of past lovers, the grunts of Constance, Lena's clipped whinnies, or even the tremolo moans the touched-out woman on the sofa used to make. What else? Which stray events did merit deletion? What about the time I demonstrated my karate kicks to the girls in Mrs. Ardley's Chem I, felt a hot, fierce squirt in my underwear, knew I'd soon begin to stink?

  What about Jolly Roger, my progenitor, the cad denied heroic measures? Could I Augean the whole heap of him away?

  I'm not certain who called him Jolly Roger first, maybe one of my mother's brothers, maybe Gabe, the office machine salesman who thought there was something morose about my father, that quality I usually took for the quiet of the sneak, but the name fit for more than one reason. Jolly Roger was perhaps an emotional pirate. The treasure was your trust. Also, maybe the sneakiness did stem from sadness. There were times we'd watch television, my father and I, Roger back from his office in the city, or just returned from one of his trips, sitting in his armchair with a drink, and I'd hunch on the rug to watch his handsome moods, the flicker and drift of his face. The play of his eyes and his lips beat out any cop show or even the old Abbott and Costello movies he favored, each twitch and grimace another secret I would never know, a rye neat in a hotel bar, a cutting glance at a meeting, a winter beach somewhere far from his family, the surf's cold froth lapping the feet of a lover. You couldn't say he lived parallel lives, because that would imply he had a home life. Our house was more a transit lounge.

  Sometimes, though, he'd drift out of his dream, realize where he was, get pissy, pick fights with my mother, hint at other intimacies, more than hint. He'd boast about a party in Philly, or Dallas, or Spokane, where the women were foxy (I pictured them red-furred, with quivering noses), the lady primo. Claudia might whip a skillet at the wall and the Jolly One would shrug, slouch off to the den. There were a few weeks he took to wearing sunglasses in the house. I don't believe this was a pose. I think the light hurt his eyes.

  Most of the time he avoided me, or humored me, or peppered me with blandly supportive exhortations. "Keep it up," he might say, or "way to go," apropos of nothing I could discern. Sometimes if I walked into the room he'd just say, "Here comes the kid!" Invariably I'd wheel to catch a glimpse of this mysterious presence. Maybe it was clear to both of us we were never going to understand each other, not because we were complicated people, or even at loggerheads, but because of the minor obligation involved. I really couldn't blame him. I knew what churned inside me. It was foul, viscous stuff. It wasn't meant to be understood, but maybe collected in barrels and drained in a dead corner of our lawn.

  Still, if I was a study in teen toxicity, this man, as Maura would say, was a total disaster. He was my daddy, though, the man version of me, or so I thought. The few times we went bowling or burned tuna melts together or the day he taught me how to change the tire on the Dodge Charger he said could one day be mine, these were, to borrow a metaphor from Purdy's world, the great emotional-liquidity events of my youth. That they always seemed somehow artificial, cooked up to stand in for something more textured and sustainable, did not sway me from my adoration. The fakeness was fragile and exquisite. It had to be protected from people like my mother, who would judge our bond faulty, a ruse.

  Once, when I was thirteen, fourteen, I passed by his alcove study off the kitchen. Jolly Roger called me in to chat. Later, I could almost see the famous knife in its tooled scabbard on his desk, but this was years before I knew it existed. He was doing the bills under his green lampshade, an elaborate ritual in which a pewter letter opener and a fancy red fountain pen vied for the role of lead fetish.

  That desk, those bills, there was still something glamorous about credit cards, the perks of average citizenship. American Express paid for your postage. Airlines served salad and steak in coach. America was dingier, more bountiful. My father traveled to factories around the country to consult in the manufacture of movie projectors. This made him, to his mind, and the minds of others, part of the movie business. The edge of a pocket mirror poked out from under a gas company envelope. I saw the white smears.

  "Milo, come on in."

  "Hey, Dad."

  "Come in, have a seat. I won't bite, you know."

  It was the only time I thought he might bite.

  "Sure, Dad."

  I lowered myself into his captain's chair, a graduation gift from his father, with a slash of black paint where his alma mater's logo once gleamed. There had been some last-minute trouble with Jolly Roger's grades. He still held a grudge.

  "It's a funny time," he said now.

  I thought he meant 1982. Then I realized he meant this time in his life, our lives, his marriage.

  "She gets so mad, Milo. I thought she was going to break all the dishes the other week. Remember that? That was something."

  Claudia had smashed a good deal of crockery. It was after Roger had left for a week, only to come home and sneer at the state of the house, make some passing reference to the "dynamite" hair of a woman in San Diego, wo
nder if Claudia might like to try a shampoo that could deliver similar sheen.

  Now he shook his head as though he were in a TV movie about a good-hearted guy overwhelmed by his wife's mental illness.

  "I don't know," he said. "I just don't know."

  "What don't you know?"

  "It's strange," he said. "Maybe sometimes the best thing a family can do is dissolve."

  "Dissolve?"

  "There's no dishonor. Obviously we're all adults."

  "I'm not," I said.

  "Well, I consider you one," said my father. "That's what's important."

  "You don't have to," I said. "I can be a kid for a while longer."

  "Don't shortchange yourself," he said, his eyes a bit watery, with feeling, or pollen, or primo lady, I had no idea.

  "I won't shortchange myself."

  "No, really. I don't judge you. I don't have those hang-ups. You can fuck anybody you want. You can love anybody you want."

  Later I realized he believed I was gay, had taken a rather impressive, if premature, position on my sexuality. At the time I thought he was just veering off topic, which I guess he was doing as well.

  "Seriously, you can love anybody, and I will love you."

  "Thanks, Dad."

  "No, really, I mean it."

  "I know, Dad."

  "Oysters and snails. Ever see that movie?"

  "Saw it with you. On TV. But they didn't have that part. You told me about it."

  "Spahtakus," he said, "I love you, Spahtakus. Remember? That's what's-his-face."

  "Right," I said.

  "There's no shame in men loving men," he said. "There's only shame if there's shame. You get me?"

  "Sure, Dad."

  "I don't go in for all that macho crap," he said. "In fact, even though your mother goes to all those meetings, I'm a better feminist than she is. You want to know why?"

  "Why?"

  "Because I'm objective. I'm not a woman, so I can see it all very clearly. And they are absolutely right. We are pieces of shit."

  "We are?"

  "Not you. You're a good boy. I can tell you want to be a bad boy but you don't have it in you. Or maybe Claudia drained it out of you. I shouldn't say that. She's going through a lot of changes. So am I. Change or die, they say. And who, you may ask, are they?"