Sam Lipsyte - The Ask

"Sorry it's so painful to watch."

"I just don't understand it, my good friend. I left school at ten but have applied myself assiduously to learning and life. I will refrain from reciting my present and future accomplishments. You can look them up on ye olde webnet."

"I hate that joke. Both of those jokes."

"To each his own," said Ben.

"You made a slave hold the kite."

"Pardon?"

"I read that somewhere. You made a slave hold the kite and then the lightning struck and he got hit."

"Kite? Lightning? I fear I am ignorant of this calumny. But, yet, you may have something there. As I mentioned, I have been cogitating upon certain electrical properties, as found in nature. Kite, you say?"

"Come off it, Ben. You fucking hustler."

"And what, pray tell, are you, Mister Burke?"

"You know what I am, Ben. I'm a piece of shit. A man with many privileges and zero skills. What used to be called an American."

"Not my kind of American. Fare thee well, Mister Burke. Good luck with that GameCube."

Young Ben Franklin slammed the door shut after him. My master's lucky horseshoe fell from its nail, clattered to the stone floor.

I woke with my cheek pressed into the cage wire. The bass player's porous face, scabbed and splotched at the sites of her various impalings, bobbed inches from mine. She knelt on the stone floor in the next cage over. Horace thrust away behind her. I'd once heard him refer to this position, on the phone with his mother, as "the style of the doggie." Of course, he might have been in her ass. I had no way of knowing from my vantage. It was a phenomenological quandary. Either way he pushed into her, and the girl's face drew up to my tiny patch of world. Our eyes locked. Her sour breath jetted through the wires. I stuck my pinky through the cage, uncertain of the nature of my ask. A suck? A nibble? She seemed to know, precisely, shook her head. I shrugged, rolled over, stood. The place had quieted down. Kids huddled in clots. Some swayed on their haunches around laptop screens. The boy with the throat mike snored on the drum riser, his aural emissions now less tropical waterfall and more the creak of a splitting ice cap, or some ur-continent's ancient riving.

No messages from Maura arrived in the night. It seemed she had not crumpled with longing and regret, tried to reach through the dark to find me, beg forgiveness, or at least talk me home. Maybe the animator had cabbed out to comfort her, to animate her. Maybe at this very moment she brewed him coffee as he doodled at the kitchen table for Bernie's amusement. Did his cartoons feature an oafish, middle-aged disappointment who'd watched his young colleague fornicate in a chicken-wire cage and now just wished more than anything his wife could love him again, because that was the gruesome truth about betrayal, it was the cheater who had to be coddled, groveled to, convinced?

I hoped he drew me with some mercy, for Bernie's sake.

I checked my email on Horace's laptop. Two new messages sat in my inbox, the first from Don Charboneau, addressed to me, but with Purdy cc'd:

Hey there, bag boy-where is my bag? Daddy mad I called his lady friend? (Are you mad, Daddy? I just want a new mommy. And also I am so excited to meet my new sibling. Is it a boy or a girl?) Anyway, Mr. Burke, I guess this email is to you. I just wanted to see how it was hanging. Since my Daddy doesn't seem to want to respond to my emails I thought I'd get us all on the same screen this way. I'm thinking of starting some kind of mail order business called

PurdyStuarthadasecretfamily.com

, but I'm not sure what I could sell. I really just want to get drunk and watch television, but my finances are in a delicate state with this depression and shit. I'm not sure what to do. I was hoping for some fatherly advice, if not from my father, then from you. You ever read

Hamlet

? It's too long, and kind of in love with itself, but there are some good parts. I feel like Hamlet sometimes. But I know I'm in a very different situation. Because nobody poured poison in my father's ear. My father just fucked my mother long after he'd left her and married somebody else. Then he killed her, sort of. So it's kind of a separate story line. What should I do? Confused in Denmark, or Maybe Northern Queens

The second email, from Purdy, said, Lee Moss, ASAP , which I read as RIP , oddly, until my eyes focused.

"Want to ride into the office together?" said Horace. He walked into the cage, rubbed his hair dry with a dishtowel. "You're single now, and the morning rush is a great place to meet women. Or at least stare at them until they get pissed and change cars. What do you say? Or should we play hooky and get breakfast? No, wait, I can't, I've got a meeting with an ask."

"Where's your friend?" I said.

"What friend?"

"The bass player."

"Oh, Colleen? She's got the morning shift at her diner job. What was the deal with your finger last night?"

"My finger?"

"You know what I'm talking about, you freaky polysexual maniac. I like it."

"Polysexual? Because of my finger?"

"I don't know, dude. Good thing you didn't try to go glory-hole through the wire. Colleen's not so free-spirited. Though I would have taken care of you. And I don't even mean that in some sort of jokey crypto-homophobic way."

"Thanks, Horace. I seem to remember some harassment allegations you made about me at work."

"That's all part of it. The deep play."

"Shit," I said, looked at my phone, as though there was a clock on it, which there was. "I should just go now. Have a great commute."

The office of Lee Moss reminded me of ads I'd once seen for replicas of some literary titan's study. A faded lion could have paced all that leather and oak with a brandy in one hand and an Italian shotgun in the other, wondered whether his talent had finally fled him, and how long after his death his shiftless heirs would sell his name and likeness to an office design company. The place also boasted a decent view of the park.

Lee Moss himself resembled a faded lemur, frail, fuzz-skulled, curled up in his oxblood club chair, a tartan shawl across his knees. He motioned for me to join him on his throne's twin, poured a glass of water from the pitcher on the deal table between us.

"Thanks," I said. "So, Purdy suggested I stop by. I'm sure you're busy, but he insisted."

"Not so busy," said Lee Moss, his voice a flat rasp. "People cannot believe I'm still coming to work. They think I'm some kind of martyr to my clients. But I like being here. I'm more comfortable here. If I were home, I'd be in my study, which is just a less-comfortable version of this office. So why not be here?"

"As long as you get to see your family."

"My family? I shut my family out years ago. Not that I didn't love them, but I had to rack up the hours, right? That was the understanding. I made the money. I didn't go to the Little League game or the bake sale. You know, when you're a person like I am, you can either sit around and bemoan the fact that you missed all the Little League games, or just accept the fact that you were never really the guy who wanted to be at the Little League games. I think it's better to be honest. I gave my family everything. In return, they left me alone. It was a fair trade. But now I'm supposed to go home and die in the house with them? I'm supposed to lie there and wait for death while they tiptoe around my room a few minutes a day and then go off to shop or watch videos or drink liquor or make babies or price real estate or whatever it is they do? No thanks. I'll finish things out here, in my chair, taking care of business. My due diligence, sir. Now, I'm sure you didn't come here to listen to my speech, but I enjoy giving it, and I don't stint on my pleasures right now, as you can imagine. Thanks for coming to see me. I've been looking forward to meeting you. Purdy Stuart's old school chum. He's a good boy, Purdy. I worked for his father."