The Ask (16 page)

The place resembled a new model prison, or one that had achieved a provisional utopia after principled revolt, or maybe a homeless shelter for people with liberal arts degrees. The cages brought to mind those labs with their death-fuming vents near my college studio. These kids were part of some great experiment. It was maybe the same one in which I’d once been a subject. Unlike me, though, or the guinea pigs and hares, they
were happy, or seemed happy, or were blogging about how they seemed happy.

Horace had a sleeping bag in his cage, a desktop computer on an upturned box. The floor was cold concrete. A net sack of VHS cassettes dangled from the ceiling, maybe to honor the ancients, their antediluvian delivery systems. Underneath stood a stack of office files, the familiar hunter green tabs. He was taking work home, to his cage. He was a stronger, more adaptable kind of human.

“Miss Armonk?” I said.

“Thanks,” said Horace, “but I’m not
that
pretty.”

“No, I mean—”

“I know what you mean. Yeah, sometimes. I mean I miss my mom. The home-nuked meals. We had a lot of laughs. And she has a good hash connection. But my dad thought it was time for me to venture out into the world. Here’s the world. You can crash out on the sleeping bag. Not in it. That would be a little gross. Just on it. I’ve got band practice.”

Horace stood, stepped out of the cage. He fastened a padlock to the door.

“Locking me in?” I said.

“Trust me,” he said. “It’s better this way. They don’t do the most rigorous vetting of tenants around here. Most of the kids are cool. But this place can be a creep con, too.”

“What if I have to take a leak?”

“There’s a jug over there in the corner. Okay?”

“Okay. And thanks.”

“Hey, we’re on the same team, right?”

“What team is that?”

Horace walked off, joined a few others near the rehearsal platform. He hoisted himself up behind the drums, laid down some lazy paradiddles. A gaunt woman with a constellation of face studs and a coonskin cap fingered a fuzz-toned bass. A bald guy
with a microphone duct-taped to his throat dropped for some push-ups. His grunts and a few hard burps roared through the PA. The bass player looked over at the blinking soundboard near the drums.

“Wait!” she called. “We should be recording this!”

They got loud and I got weary. I had worried they would keep me awake but they functioned like the noise machine Maura brought home a few years ago, the one that blasted the crush of waterfalls while we slept, or did until we produced our own noise machine, one with the opposite function, shoved the store-bought model in a closet with our racquetball gear and my home gravlax kit. I fell asleep as the throat-miked youngster gargled schnapps and Horace bashed away on his snare and the girl plucked a two-note bass line much like the two-note bass line I used to pluck back when I also believed it was more authentic if you could not play your instrument whatsoever.

That night I dreamed I was an indentured servant in colonial Philadelphia. Somehow, even in the dream, I sensed that I had once been a development officer in post-colonial New York City, but couldn’t be certain. I wore a leather apron with pouches filled with tools, pliers and awls, heavy iron files. My workbench was heaped with broken video games. I had no idea how to fix them, but I knew my master would not let me sleep or eat until I had. Jaw clenched to stanch my sobs, I jabbed a bellows up against the exposed logic board of a console, pumped.

A summer storm whipped the elms outside the workshop window. I heard a knock on the door and a round-shouldered young man with bright gray eyes leaned into the room.

“Ben,” I said.

“I came to see if you needed any help, Milo. I know these contraptions tend to bedevil you.”

“I’m fine, Ben.”

“Truly, Milo, I am here to offer any advice you require. I have
been thinking much on the subject of induction. And I feel I owe you after the incident last week in the tavern. I never knew you possessed any Hebraic blood.”

“I never knew you were an anti-Semite,” I said.

“Well, we do not have that term yet, but I am chancing that you refer to the prophecy I allegedly deliver at the Constitutional Convention sixty years from now? About how the Jews are insidious Asiatics we must protect against? That was a forgery. Everybody knows that.”

“But what about the stuff you said at the tavern last week?”

“I just apologized for that.”

“Ben,” I said, “get the fuck out of here.”

“Please, Milo, forgive me. Not for my sake, but for yours. You must relieve yourself of the burdens of resentment. Such an amelioration of the soul will enliven you. I am loath to see you toil with such futility.”

“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:

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.”

“He mentioned that.”

“It's funny. I can tell you're a no-account putz, but you and I, we're on the same side of the fence. We serve the same liege lord.”

“I didn't realize we lived in a feudal system.”

“You must be kidding. If you didn't learn that going to school with the likes of Purdy, what did you learn?”

“I learned about late capitalism. And how to snort heroin.”

“That's cute.”

“I used to think so.”

“You're growing up. All you need to remember is that nothing changes. New technology, new markets, global intercon-nectivity, doesn't matter. It's still the rulers and the ruled. The fleecers and the fleeced.”

“Which are you?”

“I'm a piece of expensive equipment. You, too. Maybe not so expensive. Do you have any other questions?”

“What is Purdy trying to do? What does he want me to do?”

“Containment, I think, would be one word.”

“But to what end?”

“I don't think I'll live long enough to make an informed conjecture.”

“How about uninformed?”

“You feel caught somehow. You want to honor the terms of your employment. But it's difficult because you've been shut out of the whole story.”

“So, what's the whole story?”

“None of your beeswax.”

“That's helpful.”

“I do what I can.”

“Well, if you won't tell me,” I said, “I'll just have to go with what I think would be Don's version. It's pretty grisly.”

“Are you threatening your employer? Our employer? Why don't you do it like a man? Did they teach you anything about being a man while you were learning about late capitalism, whatever the fuck that is?”

Lee Moss plucked a phone from his suit pocket, angled it to his ear.

“Hello, young Stuart!” he said. “Yes. Yes. Okay, I'll take care of that. He's here, though. Here he is. He has something to tell you. For you.”

“Hello?” I said.

“You dog.”

“Excuse me?”

“Billy Raskov here just told me that you used to bone that hot art professor, what was her name?”

“I don't know,” I said.

“He doesn't remember her name!” Purdy called to somebody.

“No, I remember, it's just—”

“I'm playing with you, Milo. You're always so sensitive. So nervous. Don't be so nervous.”

“I'm not nervous.”

“You are, you're nervous. Come to my thing next week.”

“What thing?”

“Don't eat. I hired this incredible chef. He dehydrates everything into these little figurines. He does a menagerie. The best part is it's not nearly as expensive as it looks.”

“What time?” I said, but Purdy was already gone. I handed the phone back to Lee Moss.

“His father used to beat the living shit out of him. Can you believe it? Embarrassing.”

“Purdy never mentioned that,” I said.

“Of course not. Walter Stuart was a monster. You don't beat your son. You alienate him, distance him from any sense of self-worth, force him toward the womanish and then berate him for latent faggotry, but you do not beat him. That's for people just off the boat. Purdy was a tough kid though. Learned how to be a monster, too. Which is the point of the exercise.”

“I see,” I said.

“I really doubt you do. Here's a cashier's check. Look at the figure. Ask the Charboneau boy if he accepts. If so, he can come here to pick it up. He will be required to sign a number of documents. Waivers. This isn't to cover up any crime. That's why it pains me to pay out so much. I don't mind paying to cover up a crime. What else is money for? But this is just to protect Melinda's feelings. And she's a goddamn gold-digging twat. But her feelings must be protected. That's at the top of my to-do list. And as long as Purdy pays you, it's at the top of yours. Here's your check. The check for you. Read the amount written on it. You can see it's quite a bit more than you probably expected. When the boy has signed the documents, you will receive this check. And one final thing. Here's a coroner's report stating that Nathalie Charboneau died of complications arising from injuries sustained in a car crash. No foul play. So you can put your mind at ease. No crime. Just feelings. Pretty despicable, really.”

Lee Moss closed the folder in his lap.

“I don't need a check,” I said.

“Everybody needs a check.”

“No,” I said. “I need Purdy to reach deeper than this. I need him to make a big give to the university. Then I will get many checks. Paychecks. From my job.”

“A sizable give might not be prudent for us.”

“But that's what this is all about for me. That's what I've been eating the shit for.”

“If you don't like what I'm telling you, you can walk away. This isn't the mob.”

“Purdy promised.”

Lee Moss dipped his head, reached for his lapel, spoke into it.

“Shatz, some of the Brazil nut carob chip, please.” Lee Moss's eyes seemed lit with a new kind of joy. “It's a wonderful ice cream made by some young farming people upstate. It's keeping me alive.”

“Of the pancreas, Purdy said.”

“In my pancreas, yes,” said Lee Moss.

The door opened and a stern young man in a suit carried in a tray with two bowls and two spoons and a periwinkle pint carton that read: “Blue Newt Creamery.”

“I hope you'll join me.”

“I ate before I came.”

“Don't pass up life's treats, son.”

“Okay.”

“Wonderful.”

The sounds of our spoons on bone china mingled with Lee Moss's hard breathing.

“My advice is to follow this through. Follow-through is the most important thing in life. Go see Charboneau. Tell him the number. Report back. We will see where we are. And perhaps, despite the volatility in the market, Purdy will be in a good enough position to make you a beloved man at your third-tier college. My grandson's at Harvard right now. He's a dummy.
But then again most of them are. I went to City College on the GI Bill. This was back when there was America. How is your delicious treat?”

“Delicious.”

“We are going to eat ice cream and we are going to eat shit. The trick is to use different spoons.”