The Ask

Two

You could say I had experienced some technical difficulties. There had been bad times, years trickled off at jobs that purported to yield what superiors called, with true sadism, opportunities. These yielded nothing, unless you considered bong slavery, a few bogus spiritual awakenings, and the unswerving belief I could run a small business from my home, opportune. Still, before my outburst at the bastion, I had made great strides. No more did I pine aloud for that time in the past when I had a future. Yes, I still painted on occasion, or at least stood at the easel and watched my brush hand twitch. It made for an odd, jerky style I hoped would get noticed someday.

I never confessed this last part to Maura. Our intimacy was largely civic. We spoke at length about our shared revulsion for the almost briny-scented, poop-flecked plunger under the bathroom sink, and also of a mutual desire to cut down on paper towels, but we never broached topics like hopes, or dreams. Hopes were stupid. Dreams required quarantine.

Still, Maura was a devoted mother, which, even if that often amounted to being helplessly present for the ongoing thwarting of a child's heart, meant something. Bernie was a beautiful boy. Good thing, too, as he'd become an expensive hobby. Preschool, preclothing for the preschool. Then there were the hidden costs, like food. Funny, isn't it, how much you can detest the very being you'd die for in an instant? I guess that's just families. Or human nature. Or capitalism, or something.

But the price of Bernie wasn't Bernie's fault. It wasn't Maura's, either. I was the fool who let the starveling have it, who couldn't find another job, though I came close at a few places. The interviewers could maybe tell I had the old brain. Jobs weren't about experience anymore, just wiring. Also, my salary demands might have been high. I lost out to kids who lived on hummus and a misapprehension of history, the bright newbies bosses exploit without compunction because these youngsters are, in fact, undercover aristocrats mingling with the peasantry, each stint entered on their resumes another line in the long poem of their riskless youth.

Not that I resented them.

Besides, there really wasn't work for anyone. The whole work thing was over. I'd even called up my last employers, but there were no further plans for powdered wigs and brass-buckle shoes in the Bronx. I'd grown morose, detached, faintly palsied. I stopped reading the job listings, just rode the trains each day, simmering, until dinnertime.

Back in high school, I remembered, a soothing way to fall asleep after picturing tremendous breasts in burgundy bras (yes, the image pre-dated Vargina) had been to conjure the crimson blossom of bullet-ripped concert tees, the hot suck and pour of flamethrower flame over pep rally bleachers. Typical teen shooter fluff, though I worried I'd inherited my grandmother's nutcake gene. I was fairly popular. Why did I slaver for slaughter?

The visions had stopped in college. Some huge and dainty hand peeled them off my skull walls.

I became a painter, at least at parties. I was happy for a time.

But now, riding the trains, or else home sitting with the bills, the old terrible feeling returned. Whenever I checked my bank balance the terrible feeling welled up in me. The goddamn asks, I'd sweep them with a Maxim gun or some other wipeout device whose history I learned of late at night on the war channels, a glass of Old Overholt rye on my knee. I was not bad off compared to most of the world. Why didn't anybody do anything? We could get a few billion of us together, rush the bastards. Sure, a good many of us would die, but unless the asks popped off some nukes, eventually they'd get overrun.

What was the holdup?

The terrible feeling tended to hover for a day or so, fade. Then I'd fantasize about winning the lottery, or inheriting vast fortunes. Sometimes I was a flamboyant libertine with plush orgy rooms, personal zoos. Sometimes I jetted around the world building hospitals, or making documentaries about the poor.

It all depended on my mood.

Days I didn't ride the trains, I'd take long walks in the neighborhood. We lived in Astoria, Queens, as close to our jobs in Manhattan as we could afford. One afternoon I made a mission for myself: stamps for the latest bills (I'd ask for American flags, stick them on upside down in protest against our nation's foreign and domestic policies), paper towels, and-as a special treat to celebrate the acceleration of my fatal spiral-a small sack of overpriced cashews from the Greek market.

I'd cure my solipsistic hysteria with a noonday jaunt. Sights and smells. Schoolkids in parochial plaids. Grizzled men grilling meat. The deaf woman handing out flyers for the nail salon, or the other deaf woman with swollen hands and a headscarf who hawked medical thrillers in front of the drugstore.

This was a kind and bountiful neighborhood: the Korean grocery, the Mexican taqueria, the Italian butcher shop, the Albanian cafe, the Arab newsstand, the Czech beer garden, everybody living in provisional harmony, keeping their hateful thoughts to themselves, except maybe a few of the Czechs.

A man who looked a bit like me, same eyeware, same order of sneaker, charged past. They were infiltrating, the freaking me's. The me's were going to wreck everything, hike rents, demand better salads. The me's were going to drive me away.

The Greeks were out of cashews. I bought pistachios, ate them in line at the post office. Or on line at the post office. I could no longer recall which phrase came naturally. Either way, there was always a line at the post office, people with enormous packages bound, I assumed, for family in distant, historically fucked lands. What were they sending? TVs? TiVos? Hamburgers? Hamburger Helper? The exporting of American culture, did it continue at this level, too? It couldn't for much longer. Not according to Horace's calculations. The line hardly moved. People couldn't fill out the forms. Others did not comprehend the notion of money orders. Come on, people, I thought-beamed. I'm on your side and I'm annoyed. Doesn't that concern you? Don't you worry your behavior will reduce me to generalizations about why your lands are historically fucked? Or does my nation's decline make my myopia moot? They should produce a reality show about how much this line sucks, I thought. Call it On the Line. Or In the Line. A half hour later I reached the teller. I was about to ask for stamps when I realized I already had a book of them in my wallet. I did not need stamps. I needed a job. I needed to cool it with those pills from Maura's root canal.

Home beckoned, but so did a coconut flake. I was due back an hour ago, felt the admonishing telephonic pulses in my jeans, but instead crossed the avenue to the doughnut shop. There was a high school boy behind the counter, maybe saving up for the video game where you gut and flay everybody in the doughnut shop and gain doughnut life points. He wielded his tongs with affecting delicacy.

I thought again of my brutal visions of yore. My mother had always said I reminded her of her mother, Hilda. Since therapy, my mother had maintained that her issues, which prior to treatment had been known as her demons, stemmed from the fact that Hilda "withheld." I never knew my grandmother well. She had badly dyed hair and a persecution complex exacerbated toward the end of her life when she was fired from the culture beat at her synagogue's newsletter.

"That pig rabbi should have died in the camps," she said.

Most of Hilda's utterances weren't so venomous. Most of her evil she must have withheld.

Now I took a booth near the window, watched the afternoon bridge traffic. Trucks piled up at the off-ramp, trailer sides browned with exhaust.

Not long ago Bernie said "beep-beep" every time he heard a car horn. Later his favorite word was "mine." Now he was fluent in the cant of his tiny world. His leaps in speech had seemed otherworldly. What else was he mastering behind our backs? Little Judas. Maura and I had worked so hard to dig the family ditch for the three of us to rot in and now here came the rope of language to haul the boy out. "Beep-beep" begets "Mine," which begets "I hate you, Dad." Then, if you're lucky, there's a quick "I love you, Dad," followed by "Let go, Dad," these last words whispered under the thrum of ventilators, EKG machines.

My father had been that lucky.

Some natty loon sat alone at the next table. He wore a pilled herringbone blazer, crusty at the cuffs, guarded a shopping bag packed with neatly folded shopping bags. A notebook lay open on his table. It looked full of sketches, apothegms. His pen still had the wire on it from where he'd maybe snipped it at the bank. The loon muttered, picked white scabs on his head.

I could picture my colleagues back at the Mediocre development suite, Horace at his desk, unwrapping the outer, non-edible wrapping of his turkey wrap, Vargina holed up in her command nook, poring over ask dossiers and budget spreads, Llewellyn patched in from Zanzibar with the skinny on a give.

But I was at my new office now, my Formica workstation smeared with jelly and Bavarian cream. This scab-picker was my potential partner. We could make an ace development combo. And the ask? Maybe the ask was that boy over there at the far booth, the one with fluorescent earbuds, a forehead full of leaky cysts. There was a horrible glitter in his eyes that looked like murder, or maybe just higher math.

The loon caught me staring at the boy, winked.

"What was that for?" I said.

The loon winked again. Teen brooder stood. I felt the glare of the leaky child, decided to meet the boy's gaze, try my best to transmit this thought: I'm not the enemy, just an earlier iteration of our kind.

"Goddamn fucking faggots!" the boy shouted, careened out the door.

Poor kid was a wild child, a homophobe. He might as well have been illiterate, guessing at supermarket signage. For all my adolescent rage, I had never included the marginalized or oppressed in my dream carnage. I never said gypped, or Indian giver, or paddy wagon, or accused anyone of welshing on a bet. If there ever evolved a tradition of locutions such as "She tried to tranny me on that real estate deal," you would not hear them out of my mouth. I never even called myself a yid with that tribal swagger I envied in others, though I had a right, or half a right, from my mother's side. I nearly spoke this truth aloud when the loon cackled.

"Don't mind the boy," he said. "I've known him since he was a child. A marvelous little specimen."

The man's voice had odd nasal authority. He sounded like some mandarin of vintage radio, and hearing him I suddenly recalled certain items from my childhood, a particular carton of laundry detergent, the mouthfeel of a discontinued cola.

The man dove back into his notebooks, his boy doodles and prurient runes. Even from here his sketches looked quite accomplished and insane.

Maybe someday he'd be heralded, a folk museum folk hero.

Maybe someday Bernie, still getting over his father's untimely but somehow not surprising death, would take his new girlfriend to see the disturbed but brilliant drawings by the kiddie-diddler who spent most of his adult life guarding a shopping bag full of shopping bags in a doughnut shop not far from where he, Bernie, grew up, but who also, unbeknownst to the world, inhabited a fabulous and secret universe of the mind.

My phone pulsed again. There were two messages, one from a number I recognized: the Mediocre development suite. The other was a text from Maura: How's the donut, Fat Heart? Find a job yet? Buy milk for Bern. Also p. towels.

The bile was a good sign.

It's when they stop trying to destroy you, my mother once said, that you should really start to worry.