Sam Lipsyte - The Ask

"No, I'm fine. Why?"

"You look funny."

"I'm just tired."

We passed a souvlaki cart and just beyond it a man with a chapped face slept sitting up on a bus bench. A pint of gin stuck out of his sweatpants.

"That's Larry!" said Bernie. "He must be back from Elmira. I wonder if Aiden knows."

I pushed Bernie past the bench.

"Bernie," I said. "I want you to be a good boy."

"Why?"

"Why what?"

"Why do you want me to be a good boy?"

"Because that's the best thing to be."

"That's stupid."

I took a knee on the sidewalk, clasped Bernie by the shoulders. I'd seen fathers kneel like this in movies, standard posture for the rushed essentials, the Polonius rundown. A little too in love with itself, Don might judge this moment, but that didn't diminish its necessity. Bernie might not understand what I told him today, but he would carry the words with him forever, and with them, me.

"Listen," I said.

"Yes, Daddy?"

"Squander it. Always squander it. Give it all away."

"Give what away? My toys?"

"No, yes, sure, your toys, too. Whatever it is. Squander it. Do you understand?"

"Not really."

"Don't save a little part of you inside yourself. Not even a scrap. It gets tainted in there. It rots."

"What does?"

"I can't explain right now. Someday you'll know. But promise me you'll squander it."

"I promise. What's squander?"

"You don't need to know that yet. Here's what you need to know: The boy can walk away from the ogre's castle. He doesn't have to knock. Some people will tell you that it's better the boy get hurt or even die than never know whether he could have defeated the ogre and won the ogre's treasure. But those are the people who tell us stories to keep us slaves."

"Daddy?" said Bernie.

"Yes?"

"Can I have a stegosaurus cake for my birthday like Jeremy got?"

"Yes, of course. For your birthday."

I yanked him to me, buried my face against his strong, tiny neck.

"I love you, Bernie."

"Will I ever see you again?"

"Yes," I said. "Later today."

"Will you be dead?"

"No."

"Will I?"

"No."

"Can it be a brontosaurus cake instead?"

"Yes."

"With an asteroid flying into his face?"

"Sounds wonderful."

"Let's go to school."

"Good idea," I said, stood.

After I'd dropped off Bernie I walked down to the park under the Hell Gate Bridge. It was one of those beautiful Fridays when everybody decides to ditch work, trust sheer numbers will protect them from retribution. Hondurans roasted chickens near the river, kicked soccer balls at their toddlers' knees. Indian families spread out curry feasts on blankets. A magician did card tricks for a field trip of drooling tweens. Mothers puttered around the quarter-mile track in velour running slacks.

Beside a stone tower some youngish men played touch football with a battered Nerf. They were young me's by the look of them, their watch caps and lazy passing routes, their Clinton-era trash talk. They had marked the end zones with packs of organic cigarettes and film theory pamphlets.

I skirted their game, found a quiet spot in the grass under an elm, read Schopenhauer, or read a scholar's long introduction in the paperback I'd dug out of my closet. Some of the stuff I remembered from college. It was foolish to want. You would never get what you wanted. Even if you got what you wanted you would never get what you wanted. It was better to strip yourself of the wanting. But this was impossible. So you suffered. Your raw eyeballs suffered.

I fell asleep before I got to Professor Schopenhauer's tips on dating. The introduction noted that he once beat a woman senseless on his doorstep. She sued for assault and he paid her off for twenty years. When she died, he wrote, "Obit anus, abit onus."

"The old woman is dead, the burden is lifted."

As I slept in Astoria Park, I dreamed of a park in 1820s Berlin. I squatted at the lip of a pond, tossed hunks of black bread to geese. A man with fierce side-whiskers and a greasy coat pushed an immaculate Maclaren stroller along the walkway. A cigarette bobbed in his lips. Two children hunched in the stroller, a boy and a girl. The boy sat on the girl's lap. They were laughing, but suddenly the boy punched the girl in the mouth.

"Anus," said the man, "don't hit your sister."

I tried to say something, couldn't get my tongue right.

The man smiled, spoke, his voice muddy and loud.

"Hey, you," he said.

Something pressed into my side and I opened my eyes.

Predrag stood over me. He tapped my ribs with his boot.

"You," he said.

"Predrag," I said.

"Hungry?" He dropped a doughnut on my chest.

"Thanks," I said, sat up, bit into a honey-glazed. "Thank you. Wow, I was having the weirdest dream."

Predrag held up his doughnut sack.

"I like to take some around, spread the wealth, you know? I usually give them out to homeless guys. But then I saw you."

"I might be homeless one of these days."

"Yeah?"

"It's tough to call."

"You come to the store, you need help."

"That's nice of you."

"We've got to stick together," said Predrag, lifted his face to the sun.

"Who exactly are we?" I asked.

"The American Dreamers. There aren't too many of us left."

"I don't know if I qualify."

"You an American? Or want to be an American?"

"I am an American."

"You said you were having a dream."

"It's true, I did."

"Was it the one where you're inside the girl and you are pumping her and pumping her and you are so happy but then it turns out it's not a girl, it's really one of those super poisonous box jellyfish, and it stings you and you are screaming and screaming and the sky rains the diarrhea of babies?"

"The. . no, I don't think so."

"I get that sometimes. Anyway, see you around."

I went home to the home that Maura said was still my home and made myself some breakfast. It had been a while since I'd been alone in the apartment. I pulled books off shelves, dug into boxes of old junk, snooped through Maura's drawers. The pills were gone. I sat on the sofa and did nothing for a good hour but sit on the sofa. I could not remember the last time I had managed such a thing.

I tried to recall the words I'd hurled at McKenzie Rayfield, the outburst that started it all. I couldn't really summon them, or at least the proper sequence. A few individual utterances returned, like "shut," and "mouth," and "spoiled" and "dreck" and "sopressatta" and "daddysauce." But most of it was gone. I was glad of it. Those words had never made me proud.

Out the window I watched a deliveryman ride up on a bicycle, buzz the house across the street. He wore a sweatshirt that read "New York Yankees 2001 World Champions." The Yankees, however, had lost the series that year. Arizona, with no regard for the national narrative, or even story, beat them in game seven. The deliveryman must have gotten the shirt in a poor country in Asia or Africa or South America, wherever they sell the runner-up crap, the memorabilia of a parallel universe, maybe the one with the gesso-smeared assistant and my name on public radio. I wondered if Sasha had learned to tip these guys yet.

I still had her cell phone number and I called her now. When she answered, it took her a moment to place me.

"Right," she said. "That guy. The envelope man. Why are you calling?"

"Just. . I don't know. . checking in."

"You still on some kind of mission? For Purdy?"

"I don't work for Purdy. I don't work for anybody right now."

"Got downsized?"

"Right," I said. "Cut down to size."