Sam Lipsyte - The Ask

"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.