The Ask

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.

"Got it."

"So anyway, this guy, Moraley is his name. He's a real joker. Does no work, gets kicked out of school. Finally gets cut off by his mother after his father dies, and he gambles and whores himself into serious debt. As only a true vaporing dude could."

"Wow."

"That's just the setup. He basically ends up with a choice: go to debtor's prison or become an indentured servant in the New World. Ends up working for a watchmaker in Philly. Young Ben Franklin is hanging around there, too. But Moraley isn't the same kind of self-starter, I guess. Plus he's like a slave."

"So what happens?" I said.

"Nothing really. He goes on a little trip in the wilderness and describes what he sees, though my sister said he made most of it up. Total drunk liar."

"Awesome."

"Actually it kind of sucks. It's pretty boring."

"You seemed so excited about it."

"I was excited by the idea of it. But now that I'm talking to you, it's boring the shit out of me."

"I have that effect."

"I know you do. Or, well, it seems that way, anyway. Or well. George Orwell. That's funny. I never thought of that before."

"His real name was Eric Blair."

"Nobody likes a pedant, Milo. How's your ask going?"

I told him some of Purdy's give ideas.

"Digital art shop sounds smoking," said Horace. "And the brilliant thing about that is the whole point of digital art is you don't really need a ton of real estate to do it. So, of course we should build a huge digital art studio. Cooley's really into counterintuitive moves. Like, for example, people will always need to go to the toilet, so let's not have public toilets. It's different, exciting. The global stuff could be golden. We definitely need to get something hotshit live in the Emirates. I've heard Varge and War Crimes talking. We may have some prince's kid in the film program next year. But you'll have to rip this one. Parking lot jack. For real. Varge and Crimes have both said so, in their ways."

"What do you mean? And since when is she Varge? And how do you know all of this stuff?"

"May I answer your queries in reverse order?"

Horace's swerves in diction always amazed. He once explained that like many in this country, he spoke several dialects: Standard American English, Black American English, American Television English, East Coast Faux Skater English, Foodie French, and Drug Russian.

"Sure," I said.

"Okay, let's see," said Horace. "I know all of this stuff because unlike you, I've been taking this career seriously. I don't sit around dreaming of a parallel universe where everybody's speaking about my artistic vision in hushed voices on public radio and I'm home in my Brooklyn brownstone half listening while my young assistant with the bee-stung lips and gesso-smeared wifebeater gives me a world-class perineum-polishing with her chrome-studded tongue. No, I concentrate on the mission of this office and the mission of the arts at this university. Actually, I try to make your public radio rimjob fantasy come true for young people with the talent and drive and, yes, the moral character to realize it, to walk through the door of life's opportunities and seize the future by the ponytail and yank the future's head down to their crotches and just fucking demand satisfaction, not dream about it while sitting in a cubicle. I listen. I learn. I sit at the feet of the masters, soak up their toosh dev wisdom."

"Toosh dev?"

"Institutional development."

"Right," I said. "I guess I should never have shared that stupid little dream with you when we went to that taco joint. I thought we were buddies."

"It's not Shoah friends. It's Shoah business."

"Huh?"

"Work it out. Break it down."

"I thought it was toosh dev."

"It's what you make of it, pal."

"Anyway, I definitely regret not being clearer: I was talking about how I'd outgrown such silly notions. The loft thing was meant to be an example of my long-shed naivete."

"Is it a shed or a loft, chief?"

"Horace," I said.

"It's too fun with you sometimes. I like you, Milo. You're like the dim older brother I actually have somewhere. Listen, it's Varge because I like saying Varge. And Vargerine. And Bel Biv DeVarge. But I'd never utter these names to her face. So, now you've got something on me. Although she already knows what a little a-hole I am. As to your last question, I've quite fucking forgotten it, dude."

"You said something about Vargina and Cooley. A parking lot jack on the give. Does that mean hitting a home run?"

Horace flicked his eyes past my shoulder.

"Look, Milo, I don't have to tell you things are bad. It's a very fucked time. There is epic, epochal fuckedness. A bunch of our asks have skedaddled. Even with the markets collapsing, they were waving their cash rolls around for a while, wanting to help the arts, but now a lot of them are just gone. If Purdy is truly still on the hook, it's a big deal. And everybody here has total confidence you'll screw it up. If he walks without writing a check, that's one thing. You're back where you started, out on the street, obviously. But to them it would be almost worse if you did a Milo and shepherded Purdy to some dinky give. Remember your big plasma score? Like that. Then Purdy wouldn't even be tappable again for a long time. I'm not trying to insult you, just tell you the truth. They are hurting and need a big one. If you do this small-time, they will dump you hard."

"So, what should I do?"

"Bleed him."

"I'm… I'm not good at it, Horace."

I'd never just blurted it out like that before. Horace looked at me as though I'd bitten off my pinky.

"This is a known known, son. But you've got to fake it till you make it, as the alkies say."

"They promised that if I reeled him in I'd get my job back. Period. They never mentioned numbers."

"We're all good on used floor fans from Northern Boulevard. That's all I'm saying. Capice, Cochise?"

"Jonathan Livingston Seagull, I presume?"

Horace stood, slapped me on the back.

"Hopeless," he said.

I needed to talk to Vargina, straighten this out, but felt suddenly faint, headed for the deli across the street. Just standing in the vicinity of comfort food was comfort. The schizophrenic glee with which you could load your plastic shell with spinach salad, pork fried rice, turkey with cranberry, chicken with pesto, curried yams, clams casino, bread sticks, and yogurt, pay for it by the pound, this farm feed for human animals in black pantsuits and pleated chinos, animals whose enclosure included the entire island of Manhattan, this sensation I treasured deeply, greasily. Executive officers, up since dawn for their Ashtanga sessions, might pay for pricier, socially conscious salads at the vegan buffets, but this was where the action was, and I, who should have been Tupperwaring couscous from Queens, who could just barely afford this go-goo for the regular folk, these lumpy lumpen lunches, reveled in them, or at least the idea of them. Because the sad fact was I always balked at the last minute, a dumpling, some knurled pouch of gristle, spooned above my tray. This pre-digestive switch would flip and I'd abandon the wonton or rib tips or the shrimp salad with its great prawns like fetal hamsters drowned in cream, scurry back to the clean wisdom of the wraps. I was the food bar orgy's anxious lurker, the smorgasbord's voyeur.

They promised no excitement, my beloved turkey wraps, but no exotic gastrointestinal catastrophes, either. Wraps were elemental. You had your turkey, your cheese, your avocado and leaf of lettuce, and you rolled that shit up tight. What could go wrong? A child could do it. I preferred children do it. But today, the day I needed my old standby in a nearly pre-civilizational way, they had no fresh turkeys left.

"How about panini?" the counterman said.

"What?" I said.

"Panini."

I laid my hands, my forehead, on the deli case. This one held the myriad schmears, the bagel cheeses, like a small city of cups and tubs, all of it under Saran wrap since the morning rush, submerged like a breakfast Atlantis, peaceful and ordered, decorous. What pleasure to push the tubs aside, curl up in there for cool sleep. I envied the food. That lo-cal scallion cream spread had no worries. There were no little ramekins of lo-cal scallion cream spread depending upon it. It just offered itself up to the schmearer's spade, oblivious.

"No," I said. "No panini."

"What's that?"

"I said, 'No panini,' " I said.

I bought an energy bar, and as I ate it a great weariness fell over me. I forced myself across the street and back up to the office. Reception was still empty. So was Horace's desk. I walked down to Vargina's command nook, knocked.

"Yes?"

"It's Milo," I said. "May I have a word?"

"Of course. Pull up a chair."

Vargina swiveled to face me, scooped egg salad from a plastic dish. The egg salad had a slightly redder tinge than the batch in the deli case across the street.

"Want some?"

"What? No, I'm fine."

"You were staring at it."

"Is that paprika?"

"Have a bite."

Vargina held out a spoonful and I leaned forward, let the egg salad slide into my mouth, sucked down the creamy aftercoat of mayonnaise, with its spiced, nearly deviled, kick.

"Wow," I said.

"Pretty good, right?"

"Delicious," I said. "I… I hope this wasn't inappropriate."

"It wasn't," said Vargina. "Until you said the word 'inappropriate.' "

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay, Milo."

"This is delicious egg salad."

"My husband made it."

"He's got a gift."

"I'll tell him you said so."

"Please do."

"So, Milo, how may I help you?"

I told her about my talk with Horace. I tried not to betray too much, kept things general. I just wanted to understand the terms of this arrangement.

"I see," said Vargina. "It sounds like you had a very nice chat."

"Come on," I said, "be straight with me."

"About what?"

"Are you guys going to screw me?"

"As far as I know, the terms stand."

"But what are the terms? What's the number?"

"What number?"

"How big does the give have to be for it to be considered a success, or enough of one to earn my job back? Is there a target on this give?"

"It's hard to say, Milo."

"Hard to say?"

"I mean it would have to be big."

"Big."

"Hate speech, sexual harassment, these are horrible allegations."

"I prefer to think of them as challenges for me to meet and overcome."

"That's good, Milo. You're coming around, I can tell. I'm on your side. Among other sides. But I am on your side. Think I like Llewellyn? The pastiness? The arrogance? Please. But he's our rainmaker. Of course we can't count out Horace. But you, this Purdy give, it sounds like it can be something. We need it to be something. I'm sure Horace told you that. This is larger than you. This whole game is poised for a gargantuan fall."

"What game?" I said.

"Higher education. Of the liberal arts variety. The fine arts in particular. Times get tough, people want the practical. Even the rich start finding us superfluous. Well, they always think we're superfluous, but when they're feeling flush it doesn't matter. You pay a whore to make you feel like a man, you fund a philharmonic to make yourself feel like a refined man. But it's a pleasure many don't feel like splurging on these days. Worse is the pain of the tuition payers. They are just small-time enough to really resent the price we charge to fool their children into thinking they have a lucrative future in, say, kinetic sculpture. Fat times it was maybe okay to send your slightly slow middle son to an expensive film program. He'd learn to charge around in his baseball cap, write his violent, derivative screenplay in the coffee shop. Idiotic, right? But ultimately affordable."

"Those days are over?" I said.

"Not yet," said Vargina. "Or none of us would be sitting here. But it's not looking good. Donors are getting scarce. Everybody's worried. That's really my point. The whole deal's in danger. And maybe it should be. Look at you."

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"You were an art major, right? What did it get you? Some egg salad from a crack baby?"

"That was good egg salad," I said.

"I know you liked it."

"You're a good friend, Vargina."

"I'm not your friend, Milo."

"Good colleague."

"So are we straight?"

"You still need to tell me the number. So I have an idea about what to shoot for. Unless you want to come in on this, work Purdy with me."

"No, this is your deal."

"So, what's the number?"

"You're thinking small again. It's not a number. It's a feeling. A great, big, wonderful, gleaming feeling."

"Okay," I said. "I think I got it now."

"I know you can do it. I also know you can't do it. But on some level I know you can do it. Good luck."

"Thanks," I said.

"Now I've got a question for you."

"Shoot," I said.

"Do you know anybody who speaks Mandarin?"

"Maybe. Why?"

"I'm just looking into something in Beijing."

"That's exciting."

"Yes, it is."

"Tell me," I said. "Does it have anything to do with that kid who is always sleeping outside Cooley's office?"

"You need to mind your own business. Especially on the subject of business."

"Will do," I said.

"Here," said Vargina, handed me the rest of her egg salad.

"No, I couldn't," I said.

"Yes, you could. Just wash out the dish when you're done."