The Ask by Sam Lipsyte

Author:Sam Lipsyte [Lipsyte, Sam]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Fiction - General, Humorous, Satire, College administrators, General, Literary, College benefactors, American Contemporary Fiction - Individual Authors +, Fiction, Educational fund raising
ISBN: 9780374298913
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2010-03-02T05:00:00+00:00

Eighteen

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,

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