Sam Lipsyte - The Ask

"Present."

"I need you to pick up a pair of relief chaps for Melinda. Open-toed."

"Relief chaps," said Michael Florida.

"They're compression stockings. They reduce the chance of varicose veins. I'm all for varicose veins. Melinda could use some flaws. But she wants them."

"Relief chaps," said Michael Florida.

"I know," said Purdy. "If I only had a band to name."

Purdy rubbed my head.

"Was there anything else? About Don? Just a little thing. Some kind of detail? I'm curious."

"Well," I said. "He mentioned something about the fake internet."

"The what?"

"He thinks the internet is fake. Or else he thinks there's something called the fake internet."

"So, he's not that dumb."

Purdy wheeled and jogged across the atrium, tugged his phone from his pocket.

Michael Florida and I stood wordless at the bar. I sipped my Hind Kindness. Michael Florida reached over and tasted Purdy's.

"Last time they were creamier," he said. "More hind-y."

The hand-scrawled sign over the door to Happy Salamander read: "Closed indefinitely due to pedagogical conflicts. Sincerely, The Blue Newt Faction."

"Fuck," I said, a word I had made sincere efforts to purge from my repertoire of professed displeasure, at least in the presence of my son. It was 8:50 in the morning and Bernie and I were alone on an Astoria side street, not far from a sandwich shop that sold a sopressatta sub called "The Bypass." I used to eat that sandwich weekly, wash it down with espresso soda, smoke a cigarette, go for a jog. Now I was too near the joke to order the sandwich, and my son's preschool was in the throes of doctrinal schism.

"Fuck," said Bernie. "Fuckwinky eyeballhead."

"No, Bernie. We don't use those words."

"Which words?"

"You know which words."

"You used them, Daddy."

"I made a mistake. I am sorry I said that word. It isn't helping with our problem."

"What's our problem?"

"There may be no school today."

"That's okay," said Bernie. "It'll be okay."

We weren't sure where he had picked up that becalming phrase, probably from us, as we tried to talk ourselves out of the awful lucidity certain days afforded. The whole mirthless dwindle of things would suddenly pull into focus, the crabbed, moneyless exhaustion that stood in for our lives, and Maura and I would both start the chatter, the cheap pep: It's okay, it's going to be okay, we'll get through this . When Bernie repeated these bromides, he sounded seventy years old. It broke your heart, as did about forty-three percent of the things Bernie said and did. About twenty-seven percent of the things he said and did made you want to scream and banish him to his childproofed room, or do much more heinous and ingenious things, just so he'd get the point, whatever the point could be with an almost-four-year-old, but still, to bury him alive and then save him at the last minute, or tell him that the state had passed a law against ice cream and he would go to prison if he even thought about it, because they now had the technology to detect illegal mint-chocolate-chip cogitation, had, in fact, the chips for it, seemed, if not conducive to his development, at least on some level deserved. Thirty percent of what Bernie said and did was either on the bubble or else utterly inscrutable, just the jolts and stutters of a factory-fresh brain working out the kinks.

"Pedagogical conflicts?" said a voice behind me. Aiden's mother stood with her boy, her red bun blazing in sunlight.

She was sky-charged and goddessy in her pantsuit.

"I know," I said, "like, what the hey?"

I was glad I'd remembered to shucksify my vocabulary in the company of children. I hoped it imparted the care with which I could also create a fluttery motion with my tongue around Aiden's mother's bunghole. I was falling in love with her on the spot, on the sidewalk. I wasn't even an ass man, or ass person. I liked breasts, and the word "burgundy."

It must have been the way she'd said "pedagogical."

"It's a bunch of baloney," said Aiden's mother.

You could tell she was sassy, the skeptical sort. She had opinions. She'd be the first to tell you she had opinions.

"I agree," I said.

"They've got no right. We trusted those little brats with our brats."

"Who are the brats, Daddy?" said Bernie. "I'm not a brat."

"It's just irresponsible," I said. "This isn't the end of it."

"If you're talking about messing those yuppies up, I'm in. Pedagogical, my behind."

Bernie and Aiden slipped from their respective parental grips and commenced conversation about an action hero, something not quite human that maybe transformed or transmogrified but in any event could easily exsanguinate any mother or father or adult guardian, which was the crucial part, the takeaway, as TV commentators put it. It would have been hard to tell, witnessing the boys together now, that one had recently tried to bite off the other's penis. The flipside to the fickleness of children was their ability to transcend grudge, adjust to new conditions. Innocence, cruelty, rubbery limbs, amnesia, successful nations were erected on these qualities.

"Say 'pedagogical' again," I said, a little dreamily.

"Excuse me?" Aiden's mother took a step back.

"I mean, say it ten times fast," I said. "I can't. Why is the school closed? Those crazy kids. I was really looking forward to school today. I had my activity nodes all planned out. I was going to play office."

"Were you now?"

I'd won her back. It had been years since I'd flirted. I felt as though I were snorting cocaine, or rappelling down a cliffside, or cliffsurfing off a cliff of pure cocaine.

"I had a memo all planned out."

"Well," said Aiden's mother, "there's no way I was going to play office. Not when I have to go to one. I was really counting on making a house out of pipe cleaner. Maybe a four-bedroom, three-bath, Italian-style villa."

"That could be tough, with pipe cleaner," I said. "Milo."

I stuck out my hand.

"Denise."

"His legs are the motorcycle, they become the motorcycle or the airplane, but he can't fly like Superman," said Bernie.

Sometimes with peers, and with us, Bernie acquired an authoritative tone that charmed. Autodidactic vigor is darling in a little boy. Give him forty years, though, a beer gut, leather vest, bandanna, granny glasses, and picture him the sad knob known as the Professor in a biker bar off the thruway, the arrogant but harmless turd humored for his historical factoids about extinct warrior societies and mots justes about the bankruptcy of liberal democracy, humored, that is, until a severe, silence-craving patron, maybe some psychotic who made his living garroting people's wives and business partners for high three-figure fees, suddenly didn't find the Professor's disquisitions edifying, kicked his neck in, then it wasn't so charming. Which is why I tended not to picture it.

"I saw him fly on TV," said Aiden.

"He's not real," said Bernie.

"Who? Iron Hawk?"

"No," said Bernie, and I started to cringe. "Superman. He's not real."

"Yes, he is," said Aiden.

"No," said Bernie. "He's just a story people tell to make themselves feel better. That's what my daddy says."

Denise shot me a look.

"It's true," I said.

"I guess it is." She laughed.

Now the Happy Salamander door opened and a bearded young man peered out. This was Carl, a Salamander founder, the heavy theorist with the barn. I'd met him once at a school picnic. Was he Blue Newt Faction? We'd have to tread carefully.

"Hey, guys," he said. "Probably be better if you didn't loiter here."

"Loiter?" I said.

"Right."

"We came to drop our kids off at school."

"I'm sure you read the sign on the door," said Carl.