The Ask (13 page)

How sick and marvelous an age this was, wherein I could boot up my desktop with a couple of names or notions in mind—Todd Wilkes, William Moraley, indentured servitude, technological advances in prosthetics, toosh dev—and plug them all into various amateur encyclopedic databases. How fucked and wondrous to siphon off such huge reservoirs of community-policed knowledge, funnel it directly into my head. Every man a Newton, a Diderot. Even now I skimmed an article about Diderot for no reason. Bernie was asleep, Maura just a few feet away on the sofa with her laptop and headphones. She might as well have been in French Guiana.

All was peachy and near utopic until I rose for a beer. At that moment the knowledge just disappeared, tilted out my earhole. I'd have to start again, or else concede my memory palace was a panic room. It would be good to exile some items and sensations, some people, even, but how to cull? I could not spare one hamburger or handjob. I wanted to recall all the cigarettes I once smoked, those afternoons I did nothing but sit on a bench and smoke cigarettes, interview myself for major art magazines. I did not want to lose the acoustics of past lovers, the grunts of Constance, Lena's clipped whinnies, or even the tremolo moans the touched-out woman on the sofa used to make. What else? Which stray events did merit deletion? What about the time I demonstrated my karate kicks to the girls in Mrs. Ardley's
Chem I, felt a hot, fierce squirt in my underwear, knew I'd soon begin to stink?

What about Jolly Roger, my progenitor, the cad denied heroic measures? Could I Augean the whole heap of him away?

I'm not certain who called him Jolly Roger first, maybe one of my mother's brothers, maybe Gabe, the office machine salesman who thought there was something morose about my father, that quality I usually took for the quiet of the sneak, but the name fit for more than one reason. Jolly Roger was perhaps an emotional pirate. The treasure was your trust. Also, maybe the sneakiness did stem from sadness. There were times we'd watch television, my father and I, Roger back from his office in the city, or just returned from one of his trips, sitting in his armchair with a drink, and I'd hunch on the rug to watch his handsome moods, the flicker and drift of his face. The play of his eyes and his lips beat out any cop show or even the old Abbott and Costello movies he favored, each twitch and grimace another secret I would never know, a rye neat in a hotel bar, a cutting glance at a meeting, a winter beach somewhere far from his family, the surf 's cold froth lapping the feet of a lover. You couldn't say he lived parallel lives, because that would imply he had a home life. Our house was more a transit lounge.

Sometimes, though, he'd drift out of his dream, realize where he was, get pissy, pick fights with my mother, hint at other intimacies, more than hint. He'd boast about a party in Philly, or Dallas, or Spokane, where the women were foxy (I pictured them red-furred, with quivering noses), the lady primo. Claudia might whip a skillet at the wall and the Jolly One would shrug, slouch off to the den. There were a few weeks he took to wearing sunglasses in the house. I don't believe this was a pose. I think the light hurt his eyes.

Most of the time he avoided me, or humored me, or peppered me with blandly supportive exhortations. “Keep it up,” he might say, or “way to go,” apropos of nothing I could discern.
Sometimes if I walked into the room he'd just say, “Here comes the kid!” Invariably I'd wheel to catch a glimpse of this mysterious presence. Maybe it was clear to both of us we were never going to understand each other, not because we were complicated people, or even at loggerheads, but because of the minor obligation involved. I really couldn't blame him. I knew what churned inside me. It was foul, viscous stuff. It wasn't meant to be understood, but maybe collected in barrels and drained in a dead corner of our lawn.

Still, if I was a study in teen toxicity, this man, as Maura would say, was a total disaster. He was my daddy, though, the man version of me, or so I thought. The few times we went bowling or burned tuna melts together or the day he taught me how to change the tire on the Dodge Charger he said could one day be mine, these were, to borrow a metaphor from Purdy's world, the great emotional-liquidity events of my youth. That they always seemed somehow artificial, cooked up to stand in for something more textured and sustainable, did not sway me from my adoration. The fakeness was fragile and exquisite. It had to be protected from people like my mother, who would judge our bond faulty, a ruse.

Once, when I was thirteen, fourteen, I passed by his alcove study off the kitchen. Jolly Roger called me in to chat. Later, I could almost see the famous knife in its tooled scabbard on his desk, but this was years before I knew it existed. He was doing the bills under his green lampshade, an elaborate ritual in which a pewter letter opener and a fancy red fountain pen vied for the role of lead fetish.

That desk, those bills, there was still something glamorous about credit cards, the perks of average citizenship. American Express paid for your postage. Airlines served salad and steak in coach. America was dingier, more bountiful. My father traveled to factories around the country to consult in the manufacture of
movie projectors. This made him, to his mind, and the minds of others, part of the movie business. The edge of a pocket mirror poked out from under a gas company envelope. I saw the white smears.

“Milo, come on in.”

“Hey, Dad.”

“Come in, have a seat. I won't bite, you know.”

It was the only time I thought he might bite.

“Sure, Dad.”

I lowered myself into his captain's chair, a graduation gift from his father, with a slash of black paint where his alma mater's logo once gleamed. There had been some last-minute trouble with Jolly Roger's grades. He still held a grudge.

“It's a funny time,” he said now.

I thought he meant 1982. Then I realized he meant this time in his life, our lives, his marriage.

“She gets so mad, Milo. I thought she was going to break all the dishes the other week. Remember that? That was something.”

Claudia had smashed a good deal of crockery. It was after Roger had left for a week, only to come home and sneer at the state of the house, make some passing reference to the “dynamite” hair of a woman in San Diego, wonder if Claudia might like to try a shampoo that could deliver similar sheen.

Now he shook his head as though he were in a TV movie about a good-hearted guy overwhelmed by his wife's mental illness.

“I don't know,” he said. “I just don't know.”

“What don't you know?”

“It's strange,” he said. “Maybe sometimes the best thing a family can do is dissolve.”

“Dissolve?”

“There's no dishonor. Obviously we're all adults.”

“I'm not,” I said.

“Well, I consider you one,” said my father. “That's what's important.”

“You don't have to,” I said. “I can be a kid for a while longer.”

“Don't shortchange yourself,” he said, his eyes a bit watery, with feeling, or pollen, or primo lady, I had no idea.

“I won't shortchange myself.”

“No, really. I don't judge you. I don't have those hang-ups. You can fuck anybody you want. You can love anybody you want.”

Later I realized he believed I was gay, had taken a rather impressive, if premature, position on my sexuality. At the time I thought he was just veering off topic, which I guess he was doing as well.

“Seriously, you can love anybody, and I will love you.”

“Thanks, Dad.”

“No, really, I mean it.”

“I know, Dad.”

“Oysters
and
snails. Ever see that movie?”

“Saw it with you. On TV. But they didn't have that part. You told me about it.”

“Spahtakus,” he said, “I love you, Spahtakus. Remember? That's what's-his-face.”

“Right,” I said.

“There's no shame in men loving men,” he said. “There's only shame if there's shame. You get me?”

“Sure, Dad.”

“I don't go in for all that macho crap,” he said. “In fact, even though your mother goes to all those meetings, I'm a better feminist than she is. You want to know why?”

“Why?”

“Because I'm objective. I'm not a woman, so I can see it all
very clearly. And they are absolutely right. We are pieces of shit.”

“We are?”

“Not you. You're a good boy. I can tell you want to be a bad boy but you don't have it in you. Or maybe Claudia drained it out of you. I shouldn't say that. She's going through a lot of changes. So am I. Change or die, they say. And who, you may ask, are they?”

“Huh?”

“I said, ‘Who, you may ask, are they?'”

“Who?” I said.

“Who is who?”

“Who are they?” I said.

“Third base,” said my father, laughed.

He loved the old routines, even if he never quite got how they worked. Maybe he liked those movies, the spit takes and predictable trickery, because they gave him occasion to dream, to watch the better movie in his head, or even just browse for an interior state. When you did that without a television, people worried, asked if you'd like to see a professional.

“But who's on first?” I said now, tried to get him going.

“You're a good kid,” he said. “It's not your fault.”

I thought he meant it wasn't my fault that he didn't love me enough. But he probably meant something else. The phrase “good kid” made me shudder now, especially when I looked at Bernie. I'd spoken those words myself on occasion, knew them for the flail scared fathers wielded to fend off the love of their sons.

I think I understood Roger a little more the night before he died. He looked disappointed on his deathbed, a weak, sweet boy, like Bernie with a fever. Hell, maybe Gabe was right, maybe Roger was morose. Heroic measures had been forsaken. He wouldn't sneak out on this one.

So maybe I wanted all these memories, the sorrows and the hollows. Or maybe I was just programmed to want them, to believe I was composed of them, a failsafe wired into me, to keep me eating and shitting and dwelling on what exactly I wanted in a winter lager and not seeing things very clearly. Some argued that the creation of artificial intelligence amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. Consciousness was suffering. Why inflict it on a poor machine? I wasn't one of those people, but only because I believed that AI would someday make good on its promise of astonishing robot sex, if not for us, then for our children.

I was also one of those people who hadn't caught up with the latest social networking site. Maura belonged to most of them. She passed most evenings befriending men who had tried to date-rape her in high school, but I was still stuck in the last virtual community, a sad place to be, like Europe, say, during the Black Death. Whenever I cruised this site, with its favorites lists and its paeans to somebody's cousin's gas station art gallery, I could not help but think of medieval corpses in the spring-thaw mud, buboes sprouted in every armpit and anus, black bile curling out of frozen mouths. Those of us still cursed with life wandered the blasted dales of this stricken network, wept and moaned and flogged ourselves with frayed AC adaptors, called out for God to strike us dead, or else let us find somebody who liked similar bands.

When it came to locating people, I was still an old-timey search engine man, and now I plugged in the name Todd Wilkes. I wanted to know what he'd done to earn Don Charboneau's everlasting ire. There were more than a dozen articles about this Wilkes. They began a few years back when he'd charmed some politicians at a military hospital in Germany while recovering from bomb burns.

The language of these pieces seemed lifted from the
Daily
Planet
archive. Todd Wilkes was “plucky,” the reporters wrote, a “throwback, a happy warrior.” Todd Wilkes was a “sharp cookie”
from a “hardscrabble town.” “He has no time for excuses,” went one profile. “He takes the bull of life by the horns,” proclaimed another. Todd Wilkes was going places. He was not to be denied. Also, he was sick of the whining from some of his cohort. “Nobody put a gun to our heads and told us to put guns to people's heads,” he told a New York daily. “I don't care if you left your legs in Fallujah or Baghdad, you better suck it up. Nobody is going to help you if you don't help yourself. We are warriors. I follow the warrior code.”

Most of the reporters had gorged on the bluster. Todd Wilkes was off to college to study government. He was going to be a senator someday. “The sky is the limit!” wrote one columnist.

“Forget the sky,” wrote another.

I could see why Don wanted to shoot him, but these pieces had run some time ago. We had no use for Todd Wilkes now. But maybe Don still did. Once you've tasted the hate, it's hard to forsake that unique and heavenly flavor. It was maybe what got Don up in the morning. Surely it wasn't Sasha, or the promise of another day out on the pave-o-mento, the sun stabbing his scrawny neck, the humps swelling up, the girls on all fucking wrong.

The Best Place was one of those establishments that signaled the end of empire, or perhaps the advent of something much better than empire, at least to those who could afford it: spa facility, birthing center, archery gallery, breast milk bank, coffee shop. Who wouldn't want to quaff a latte, or shoot a few quivers, during prodromal labor? If the mother-to-be wasn't up to it, she could email JPEGs of her dilated cervix to her birthing community while her partner got a peel, or whiled away the downtime role-playing Agincourt in the gallery.

We few, we happy few.

There was no sign on the street but Purdy had texted me the building number and the password: “Ashtoreth.” Somebody buzzed me into a chrome-sided elevator, and I slid stealth-phallically several floors up, stepped into a light-soaked atrium. The room resembled a rain forest tricked out with designer furniture, or a furniture showroom tricked out like a rain forest. Women, some pregnant, and a few men, milled about in plush robes. Michael Florida stood at a Lucite bar, sipped something beige and foamy.

“There's our guy,” he said, waved.

Here comes the kid, I thought, took a stool a few stools over.

Michael Florida winked, flipped a notepad shut.

“Care for a drink?”

“What are you having?” I said, peeked into his frothy highball glass.

“I'm digging on this hind milk smoothie.”

“Hind milk?”

Now Michael Florida let me in on the details of this place, the Best Place, the luxurious labor chambers, the bottled breast milk chilled in vaults, the mud baths and neo–Swedish massage and compound bows. Purdy was here with Melinda to screen potential midwives, but he wouldn't be long. There was a meeting with some Chinese bridge loan specialists. It concerned Purdy's new project, something to do with Bible stories and mobile phones. But first Purdy wanted a few minutes with me.

“Bible stories?” I said.

“Better than those midget psalms books, right?” said Michael Florida. “But what do I know? I pick this stuff up in dribs and drabs. I'm just a glorified driver, really. This milk is awesome. And great for the immune system. Mine's pretty compromised. So's yours, I'll bet.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Your eyes.”

“What's wrong with my eyes?”

“They're fucked up.”

“Fucked up how?”

“Kind of sludgy.”

“My eyes are sludgy?”

“Sorry, dude, don't mean to alarm you. An expert could tell you what it all means. Liver cancer, diabetes, who knows?”

“Maybe they're naturally sludgy.”

“That could be. I'm just—”

“I know,” I said. “You're just the driver. Michael, can I ask you something? Do you remember me from college?”

“Yeah, sure. You were around. Though to be honest, between the time we all split from there and the other night when I picked
you and Purdy up, I hadn't thought of you once. No offense. I mean I'm sure I was that guy for you. That speed freak always lurking around. Did we ever even talk, just the two of us? I don't think so. We only knew each other in a group setting.”

“I guess it goes that way sometimes.”

“I was always pretty sure you didn't like me. But then again, why would you? I was kind of an animal. Still am. I mean, look at this.”

Michael Florida flipped his notepad open. It looked like a list of names, women's names.

“I'm doing some inventory,” he said. “But I'm still out there, man. It's a nightmare.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

“I've been clean and sober for years. But I have not been able to put together any real recovery around my sex addiction. I had a great thing going with this one girl, she was fantastic, a recovering garbage head, used to sell her ass a little, but she was really grounded and cool. Had her own business making vegan snake treats.”

“Snake treats?”

“Snake treats. For boas. Save the mice. She was a sweetheart. But of course I had to go to my Everglades on her a few too many times, and she called me out. Sent me packing.”

“Everglades?”

“Yeah, you know, because my name is Florida. When I do something shitty, something swampy and wrong, I call that going to my Everglades. Stupid, I guess.”

Michael Florida took a tight sip of his drink.

“So, what's with the list?” I said.

“These are all the women I've fucked in the last month.

Twenty-seven of them. I'm not bragging about it, believe me. I'm just trying to get a handle on my disease. Because it is a disease. Do you know about this stuff?”

“I think I have a very different disease.”

“Which one is that?”

“The one where you don't sleep with twenty-seven women in a month. The one where you don't get laid at all. Ever. Even by your wife. Especially by your wife. You wouldn't understand.”

I looked down at Michael Florida's hind milk smoothie. I wasn't sure why I was suddenly confessing to him. I knew why he'd related his problem to me. There wasn't exactly a surfeit of humiliation in confiding to another man that you have been copulating ceaselessly. Although maybe for him there was. Still, I remembered how he talked to everybody all those years ago. Everybody but me. His speech had grown less frantic and drool-specked since college. The cosmic itch seemed intact. Still, what was I doing? Don Charboneau's T-shirt snapped on a clothesline strung between mental tenements: “Thank You for Not Sharing.”

“Yeah,” I continued. “So it's hard for her. Hard for us. We did almost have sex recently, but in retrospect I don't think it was any kind of turning point. I think it was an anomaly. It's the kid, caring for the kid. She's just really touched out.”

“Touched out,” said Michael Florida.

“What?”

“No, that phrase. What's her name …” Michael Florida ran a leathery finger down his list. “Nadine. She said that was what she always told her husband. Touched out. Like ‘Sorry, baby, I'm touched out tonight.'”

“What was her name again?” I said.

Michael Florida laughed.

“Oh, man. That's good. Don't worry. It's not your wife.”

“I won't worry, Michael. I don't think you're her type.”

“No? You sure?”

“I think I'm sure. Anyway, I should congratulate you. Your disease is really putting up big numbers.”

“Thanks, man,” said Michael Florida. “But really, just to put you at ease, most of these bitches are sad and fat. A few, though,
I would have paid. There was this seventeen-year-old, yeah, this one, Vanessa. She was something. Thank God for Viagra.”

“You take Viagra?”

“Only with the kids. The kids are so demanding. With somebody my age, I don't take the stuff. They get what they get. Anyway, how'd we start with all this? Crazy. Purdy told me to keep you entertained while you waited. Hope I entertained you.”

“You did your job.”

“Yeah,” said Michael Florida, drank off the rest of his milk. “I do my job.”

“Remember,” I said, “the night those guys broke into our house?”

“Wait, when?”

“Back in college. Those guys came in with ski masks. Tried to rob us. That one guy was getting up in Constance's face—”

“Jamie!”

“Right,” I said. “They called him Jamie.”

“Fucking idiot, that guy. I couldn't believe what a tool he was. His cousin said he was okay.”

“What are you talking about? You knew him?”

“No, I knew his cousin.”

“You mean you were in on it?”

“I needed money, dude. I had a disease. I made amends to everybody that was there. Except you, I guess. Forgot about you. That you were there.”

“I was the guy experiencing a bizarre floating sensation.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Purdy knows?”

“He forgave me a long time ago.”

“But you guys came in together.”

“Well, he'd come in from outside. I was hiding the whole time. I'd told those guys where stuff was. So, I pretended to Purdy I'd just stumbled in there, too.”

“They didn't find anything.”

“No. I was pretty stupid. For some reason I thought Gunderson had a lot of cash in his room. Nobody was supposed to get fucked with. But that guy Jamie was disturbed. You know he died soon after that.”

“Suicide by cop,” I said.

“Sure,” said Michael Florida, grinned.

“What?”

“That phrase. It's funnier than ‘touched out.' Jamie was a fuckup and a pervert, but I don't think he wanted the cops to kill him. That was their hilarious idea.”

“I see. Speaking of the police, how did you keep out of jail when they took Jamie away? Why didn't he rat you out?”

“We were friends.”

“I thought you said you didn't know him.”

“Did I?”

“Yes, you did.”

“Well, I don't know what to say, Detective. I guess you better cuff me.”

“Were you …”

“What?”

“Were you actually a student at the college?”

“Of course not.”

“Oh.”

“What, all these years you thought I was in college with you? Do you remember what I was like? How did you square that?”

“I never could.”

“I mean, did you ever see me even reading a book?”

“All the time,” I said. “You were always reading.”

“I was, wasn't I?” said Michael Florida. “Now I remember. I mean, I remember reading. I can't remember a goddamn thing I read.”

“Wish I could help. Anyway, I always remembered you tack-ling that guy Jamie. I thought it was brave. Now I know the truth.”

“It was brave. Weird you don't see that.”

Purdy emerged from a lacquered door at the edge of the atrium. He waved, walked over, kept his eyes on us while he spoke into something that resembled a long, shiny bullet.

“Then we won't do Susannah and the Elders,” he said. “It's no skin off my back. It's not even a Bible story anyway … What's that? … It's in the Apocrypha … What? … Okay, you're a talented kid, so I'm still going to let you make some of these movies even though you don't know what the Apocrypha is. Your generation is pathetic … Huh? … It's got nothing to do with being religious. It's cultural knowledge. Which is the glue of a society. Which is precisely what has come unglued. Which is part of the reason we are all working for the Chinese to produce biblical content for cell phones. Okay, later.”

Purdy twisted the upper segment of the bullet.

“Sorry, fellas.”

“Nice phone,” I said.

“Thanks, though I am not even sure it's a phone. I don't think they've decided. It's a prototype.”

“But you can talk into it.”

“Yes, that's true. So, what's up? Did you get a load of this joint?”

“Starting to.”

“You try the archery yet? It's kind of random, I know, but one of the founders used to shoot competitively. It's like a Zen thing for her now.”

“Cool. I'll have to go down and check it out.”

“Melinda is back there having deep talks with badass midwives. This morning they finished up a fifty-seven-hour labor. Can you believe that? A breech vee-back with a flat cord, double-looped. I have no idea what that means, but I want to film one and put it on a cell phone. So people can watch it on their cell phones. Did you get a smoothie?”

“I'm fine,” I said.

“You could probably use one.”

“I'll manage.”

“Manage what? Manage to die? Two Hind Kindnesses, please.”

The bartender, a young woman with skuzzed hair and a mahogany disk distending her lower lip, nodded.

“So, thanks for waiting. I guess you had to deal with all of this stuff with Abner.”

“Bernie,” I said.

“Sorry, Bernie. Bold name, by the way. You just definitely want him to be an accountant?”

“We like the name. We named him after my grandfather.”

“I'm all for it. There are definitely too many Elis and Olivers and Broncos around.”

“Bronco?”

“We know a couple that went with Bronco.”

“What are you guys thinking about for a name?” I said.

“Oh, I don't know. How about Don? That's a solid name.” Purdy pinched out a smile.

“I met with Don,” I said.

“That's why we're here.”

“In your email you mentioned something about further exploring the give.”

“Due time.”

“Okay, so.”

“What did the kid say? Did he pass along a message?”

I told Purdy most everything, left out the soliloquy about cock cancer and the accordion bus. I didn't mention Sasha's offer of a fondle, either. I had never considered it genuine. I think she was just afraid of silence. I described the apartment, Don's legs, his humps, his girls.

“I almost want to cry,” said Purdy. “Poor kid. I can't believe what we do to them. Fucking hell.”

“Well, maybe someday we can finally—”

“Oh, screw that,” said Purdy. “It will always be this way. We do war. That's what we do. We can't be babies about it. I'm a liberal hawk.”

“Swoop!” Michael Florida giggled, but I took it for synaptic misfire. He turned back to the girl behind the bar.

“But it's just not right how we treat our guys,” said Purdy. “My guy. What we need is a draft, that's all. Why does Don have to do all the fighting? Why not the sons of privilege?”

“I don't know, Purdy.”

“What else did he say?”

“He's really angry. I guess that's my point. He's really angry with you. And with the world. I think it gets mixed up for him.”

“Did I ask for a diagnosis? Are you licensed?”

“You said you wanted my take.”

“You're right. I'm sorry. I did.”

“He wants more money.”