The Ask

Seven

The deli near Mediocre had a new wrap man. He rolled my order too tight. Turkey poked through the tan skin. I studied the damage through the translucent lid of the container. It was a bad way to begin my first day at my old job.

I rode the elevator up with Dean Cooley.

"A new start," I beamed.

He nodded, appeared unable to place me.

"Milo Burke," I said. "Back in action."

Cooley stroked his mustache. The door slid open and he stepped off, glanced once over his shoulder as he went.

The development office looked about the same, with certain modifications. My desk, for example, had disappeared, or else been annexed in some office furniture Anschluss orchestrated by Horace. There he lounged now near the window, spread out in an L-shaped command nook of his own, eating ribs from a foil bag.

"Dude," he said into his phone, "I just know I'm going to bag this old biddy. She's got to be good for some serious paper heroin… Yes, I mean money… Dude, I don't know if that's the latest slang, it's my slang. We all have our own nowadays… Anyway, I'm deep in her geriatric ass. I've sort of become her protege. Her son died cliffsurfing a few years ago and I'm like her new son. No offense… Well, it's sort of like base jumping. But more radical."

I could tell Horace was talking to his mother. He spoke to her daily. I had always been a little envious. My mother and I hardly conversed. Since Bernie had been born, we had not gone often to the house in New Jersey where I grew up and where Claudia now lived with her partner, Francine, but things had decayed before that. I traced it to the year my father got sick and we argued about his treatment. Though I was the first to admit I resented the man, preoccupied as he was with his pleasures, adrift in some dream of sleaze, he was still my father, and after the diagnosis I championed all the heroic measures, the experimental chemos, the scalpels and rally caps, any long shot on tap. Maybe I demanded those things precisely because I resented him. But my mother had his ear, convinced him to go gentle into that shitty night. They had caught the cancer late and it had spread quickly, but I wondered if he agreed to slip away out of weariness or a sense of penance.

Meanwhile, the liberation Claudia had felt since the death of her mother and her husband, the nearly Bataan march terms with which she described the slog and heartbreak of her pre-Francine existence, grated. My father had been a scumbag. There was no counter-argument. He cheated on my mother, bragged about his "nooners," seduced my babysitter, sold her quaaludes. Between work and infidelity, he hadn't even been around that much. Mostly it was my mother and I in that house on Eisenhower Road. We'd had hard times, but also some beautiful ones, full of oatmeal cookies and scary stories, the floor covered with butcher paper and us painting murals of pirates and dragons and roller-skating wraiths. We spent hours curled up together with books on her husbandless bed. Did she remember those occasions at all? Were they no consolation? Was I an ass to think they could be?

Yes, I'm sure I was an ass. Maybe I was jealous of her bliss. She took terms like "self-actualize" seriously, or even actually, had a toned senior body, a monumental sense of certainty. She trained for ultra-marathons. I got winded on the Mediocre stairs.

She was not much of a grandmother, refused even the name. Claudia and Francine, that is how Bernie was to address his grandmothers those rare occasions he saw them. I didn't mind this. I liked Francine, appreciated any instant granting of progressive status. Less work for me. But I guess I just craved, in my twitching little-boy heart, for my mother to want us around, to maybe even nudge and nag the way grandmothers did in advertisements for stewy soups.

Now she came off more the charismatic aunt. Maybe she had actualized into my father. Perhaps a magic portal existed that I needed to step through, too, so I could leave the planet of the weak and whiny, which I imagined at this moment as a humid orb stuffed with pinkish meat and warmed-over chipotle dijonnaise, though that could have been my lunch talking, or imagining, for me.

I pulled a chair up to the far edge of Horace's elongated workstation, popped my wrap lid.

"What's the matter," said Horace. "Your pussy hurt?"

"What?"

"You look like you just got kicked in your pussy. Or like some commandos kicked down the door of your pussy and just rushed in there with machine guns and concussion grenades. Or like your pussy is being used against its will as a staging area for a large-scale invasion by a nation with which your pussy has long had strained relations, even if certain markets have opened up in recent years."

"What the hell are you talking about?" I said.

Horace had his desk phone pressed to his chest. He put it to his ear again.

"I've got to go, Mom. Burke's here. You should see him. Such a sad case with his little wrap and a few gherkins in a ketchup cup. I know. Cornichons. I was going to say cornichons but I bailed. I got nervous. Yeah, I'll tell him. I just asked him if his pussy hurts. He's mulling it over. Okay, love you, Mom. See you later. Around seven. Okay, bye."

Horace hung up the phone, tipped the rib bag into his mouth. A rivulet of greasy sauce ran down his chin.

"Hello, lover," he said. "Come for your desk?"

"Horace, look, since I'm working here again-"

"I heard it was just provisional."

"Since I'll be around the office some, I think we should try to communicate better in the future."

"I think flashing your fuzzy nip at me was communication enough, Wolf Man."

"Horace, I'm sorry. I think I misread some cues or something."

"That's one way of putting it."

"No, really, I never meant anything untoward. I just thought we were goofing around, being jackasses together. I never meant anything sexual, or imagined you felt harassed."

"Who said I did?"

"Vargina."

"Crafty. Divide and conquer. All Gaul, baby."

"Didn't you complain about me?"

"Yeah, I guess I did. But more like as a joke."

"Did you make an official written complaint?"

"Yeah, but in a jokey way."

"Those go on record, Horace. Those are in our file. As soon as a company hires you they begin plotting the paper trail with which to fire you. Didn't you know that?"

"Sort of."

"Okay, let's just shake and start again. Congrats on the new position. I hear you are really doing well on a big ask."

"Thanks, Milo. But you'll have to find yourself another desk. I'm wedded to this configuration."

I found a Plant Ops guy and an IT guy and by the end of the day I had a desk, a chair, a computer, an internet connection. I had a password to the server, though my only access was to an empty folder marked "MiloStuff."

Now that I had the desk I wasn't sure what to do. I only had the one ask. Also, I was on probation. I sent Purdy an email, thanked him for dinner, told him how thrilled I was to be working with him on this tremendously exciting project. I used all the dead language. Dead language would keep me alive. Besides, tone was tricky. I had to sound like a man who unexpectedly discovered himself in a professional relationship with an old friend. Just because it was true didn't mean it wasn't tricky. That was usually when I started to crack-when I told the truth, especially to social betters.

The night before I left for college, my father gave me his Spanish dueling knife. This was huge, the kind of intimate bestowal for which I'd always yearned.

"Take this," said my father, from where he stood at the edge of my basement room. I had moved down there, near the gas meter, to become a man. Soon I would depart the cold cinder walls lined with Scotch-taped postcards of my icons, Renaissance thugs and alcoholic crybabies from the Cedar Tavern. My own boozy, plaintive triumphs awaited, surely.

"Wow, thanks," I said.

The blade bordered on sword. We studied its Castilian chasings.

"A beaut, right?"

"I never knew you had this."

"Didn't want you to know about it. Thought you and the neighbor boys would sneak it out, behead each other. Then I'd really be screwed."

"Probably a good call. Where did you get this? It really is something."

"If I told you I won it in a card game in a cathouse in El Paso, would you tell your mother?"

"Do you think she'd want to know?"

"She always seems to want to know. Maybe it's better if you picture me in a gift shop near a hotel."

"Okay, that's how I'll always remember you, Dad."

"You must be nervous about driving up to school tomorrow. Sorry I can't make it. Got a lot of work, though I'd love to switch places with you. All that moist young stuff up there. Have you gotten laid yet?"

"Dad."

"The few girls you've brought home, they seem like nice girls. But you've got to learn how to reach the dirty glory in them."

"I'll try to squeeze that into my schedule. Thanks for the advice."

"Shit," said my father. "You can read books and paint your splotches at home. Make the most of the scene up there. And I'm not saying this just because of the money. Your grandparents put some aside for you, and I'll kick in some, but there will be debt on your head. It will pursue you like, I don't know, some sicko pursuer. But that's not what I'm talking about."

"What are you talking about?"

"Take the knife."

"Not exactly sure what I'll do with it in my dorm."

"Get drunk and wave it at some stuck-up assholes. Brandish it. Show it to a girl. Girls who can really fuck will appreciate a work of exquisite craftsmanship like this. Or just put it in a drawer and whenever you open the drawer and see it, think of me. In a cathouse in Brownsville."

"You said El Paso."

"What?" said my father. "El Paso. Sure."

I did keep the knife in a drawer, in a series of them, as I moved from dorm room to dorm room to off-campus apartment. I would put it in my desk or under the clutter of utensils in the kitchen drawer. My father died during my junior year and every time I caught sight of the knife a warm charge of grief shot through me. That knife was my talisman of bereavement. I never spoke of the thing unless somebody spotted it, digging for a garlic press or a slotted spoon. Usually it would be a girlfriend sifting through the drawer while we cooked and I would tell her it was my father's knife, bequeathed to me before his death. Everyone knew about my father. I made a habit of getting blotto and cornering people so I could describe the exact nature of his monstrosity. Now I winced when I recalled the bathos, the drool. I was a raincoat perv with my wound. I guess I was working on some stuff. Some moist young stuff.

Senior year I moved into the House of Drinking and Smoking, took the cheap room, almost a pantry. It had a futon, some books, a desk, a chair, a Fold 'N Play record player. I screwed a blue bulb in the ceiling and slept there, mostly alone. I listened to old records and stared at the blue light. I worried I might go crazy, but I also felt on the verge of something important, the final touches on the permanent exhibition-Father, Fucker, Human: The Dreamtime of Roger Burke-I was mounting in my heart. I stayed many hours in that room.

Otherwise I studied in the library or painted in my studio or drank in the living room with all the people who either lived there or sort of lived there or might as well have lived there, though the core stayed fairly stable, a crew that included Billy Raskov, Maurice Gunderson, Charlie Goldfarb, Purdy, Constance, Sarah Molloy, and a guy named Michael Florida, who may or may not have been a student, though by dint of his meth addiction could have counted as an apprentice chemist. We drank local beer, smoked homegrown and shake. We used words like "systemic," "interpolate," "apparatus," "intervention." It wasn't bullshit, I remember thinking at the time. It just wasn't not bullshit.

But the blue bulb was healing me.

I moved out at the end of spring term. My plan was to stay in town for the summer, perhaps beyond, to work at a restaurant near campus and finish up some paintings. Maybe I wasn't ready for New York City, even if Lena thought so, had made some phone calls on my behalf. But to what end? To be some pompous impostor's assistant? To stretch canvas, fetch sushi? It sounded pretty admirable, in a strange way, as though in lieu of the atelier you might learn something ferrying hunks of rice-couched toro, but I also wanted more time in my little world. Maybe more time with Lena.

I found a cheap studio above a dry cleaner and moved everything out of the house. A new group took over the Drinking and Smoking lease. One of them was the daughter of a reactionary governor, a girl who'd become notorious for denouncing her father's policies at campus demos. We admired her greatly for this.

Sometime early in the semester I found myself at a party at the house, stood in the kitchen with a can of beer and watched everybody shout and flirt. Already I was the older fellow, suspect. Why had I not gone bounding into the surf of destiny? Why did I still lurk on this sorry spit? Somebody brushed past and opened a drawer near my hip, poked around, maybe for a bottle opener. That's when I saw it, my knife, wedged in the wires of a whisk.

I had forgotten to take it when I moved out. I had no idea what this lapse could mean. Or maybe some idea. I hoisted myself up on the counter, unsheathed the knife. The party got louder, crowded. Somebody tapped my shoulder. Somebody tugged my shirt. A few of the new tenants gathered around the counter. Constance stood with them, smiled. We'd ended things, but we still mattered to each other. She had understood about the blue light.

"Hey," I said.

"What are doing with that thing?" one of the others asked.

"Nothing," I said.

"It's a great knife, isn't it?" said the governor's daughter. "We found it when we moved in. Kind of makes us nervous right now, though, with the party and all these people. Could you put it back?"

"Sure, sorry," I said, nodded sagely to signal my concurrence with the notion that huge knives and parties did not mix. I sheathed the blade, slid it into the back of my jeans.

"What are you doing?" said the first girl.

"What do you mean?"

I scooted off the counter, stood before them.

"We asked you to put the knife back. Not steal it."

"It's my knife," I said. "My father gave it to me. I just left it here when I moved out. By accident. But now I found it. I can't believe I left it in the first place. I'm going to need some therapy to figure it all out."

"That's the lamest story I ever heard," said the governor's daughter.

"Totally," said one of the others.

"Why should we believe you? Do you have proof?"

"Proof?"

"I don't think he has proof."

"It's my knife," I said. "My father won it in cathouse in El Paso."

"A cathouse?" said the first girl, though we knew then to say woman, even if none of us were women or men.

"Is that the word he used?" said another. "Cathouse? Not rape factory? What a pig your father must be. Are you proud of him? Paying to rape underage women of color?"

"They have agency," said the governor's daughter to the first girl. "They are sex workers in a marginal economy and there is agency there. Though not much. Especially if they are underage."

"Who said underage?" I said, tried to recruit Constance to my cause with a glance, but she glided behind the others. Somehow I couldn't blame her.

"Okay, maybe they were eighteen," said the governor's daughter. "Who cares? It's a bullshit story. It's not your knife. And anyway, possession is nine-tenths of the law."

I wondered when she had first heard that sacred charm. Had the governor cooed it into her newborn ear? I could not believe I was not believed. I wanted to laugh. I could just walk out with the knife, nobody would stop me, but still I would not be believed. I would be known as a thief.

I shook as I handed over my father's knife. Such shame. The governor's daughter, who cared so little for this object, would get to keep it. She was from the people who kept everything. I was from the people who rented some of everything for brief amounts of time. I knew I deserved no pity, would get none from the people who kept everything. They only pitied the people with nothing at all. I also knew that because I was leaving without the knife, I did not deserve the knife. A part of me did not want to deserve it.

Brownsville or El Paso.

Wave or brandish.

So it was all very tricky, telling the truth. It wasn't really about the truth. It was about being believed. It was about Purdy believing that he'd chosen right when he'd chosen me. It was bad form to hound him by telephone this soon after the email. I surfed art blogs for news of newer art blogs, food blogs for news of food. A new joint downtown seated eleven. The pork belly tart was divine. Reservations were impossible, and if you got one, it didn't guarantee dinner for your party, just you.

I logged off, swung my knapsack to my shoulder. I'd had a hard time deciding whether to carry a knapsack, a messenger bag, a canvas book bag, or a briefcase. Each seemed to embody a particular kind of confusion and loss. But the knapsack did the least spinal damage. I'd also noticed more people on the street with those briefcases on wheels. Nothing depressed me more than these rigs, this luggage for people not going anywhere, having their holiday at work. Sometimes I imagined those squat cases full of bondage gear or hobby trains, some secret glee, but you could almost be certain they bulged with files.

"Tough hour?" said Horace, swiveled from his monitor.

"Just sort of setting up today. Need to pick up Bernie soon."

"Right. Well, nice to have you back. On a probationary basis."

"Thanks, Horace."

Vargina popped her head up out of her command nook.

"Milo?"

"Hey," I said.

"So, everything working here?"

"Think so, yeah."

"You know, given the nature of your situation here, how it's just this one project, please don't feel you have to come in that often. We're more interested in the outcome than the process."

"Right," I said. "But since, if this works out, I'll be back here long-term, isn't it better if I re-integrate now?"

There was a blankness, and within that blankness an odd flicker of what I took to be pity, in Vargina's expression. The pity part, plus the idea that the tips of her nipples might be brushing the synthetic weave of the cube wall, put a thrum in me. Or it might have been my cell phone.