The Ask by Sam Lipsyte

of work, though I’d love to switch places with you. All that moist young stuff up there. Have you gotten laid yet?”
    “Dad.”
    “The few girls you’ve brought home, they seem like nice girls. But you’ve got to learn how to reach the dirty glory in them.”
    “I’ll try to squeeze that into my schedule. Thanks for the advice.”
    “Shit,” said my father. “You can read books and paint your splotches at home. Make the most of the scene up there. And I’m not saying this just because of the money. Your grandparents put some aside for you, and I’ll kick in some, but there will be debt on your head. It will pursue you like, I don’t know, some sicko pursuer. But that’s not what I’m talking about.”
    “What are you talking about?”
    “Take the knife.”
    “Not exactly sure what I’ll do with it in my dorm.”
    “Get drunk and wave it at some stuck-up assholes. Brandish it. Show it to a girl. Girls who can really fuck will appreciate a work of exquisite craftsmanship like this. Or just put it in a drawer and whenever you open the drawer and see it, think of me. In a cathouse in Brownsville.”
    “You said El Paso.”
    “What?” said my father. “El Paso. Sure.”
    I did keep the knife in a drawer, in a series of them, as I moved from dorm room to dorm room to off-campus apartment. I would put it in my desk or under the clutter of utensils in the kitchen drawer. My father died during my junior year and every time I caught sight of the knife a warm charge of grief shot through me. That knife was my talisman of bereavement. I never spoke of the thing unless somebody spotted it, digging for a garlic press or a slotted spoon. Usually it would be a girlfriendsifting through the drawer while we cooked and I would tell her it was my father’s knife, bequeathed to me before his death. Everyone knew about my father. I made a habit of getting blotto and cornering people so I could describe the exact nature of his monstrosity. Now I winced when I recalled the bathos, the drool. I was a raincoat perv with my wound. I guess I was working on some stuff. Some moist young stuff.
    Senior year I moved into the House of Drinking and Smoking, took the cheap room, almost a pantry. It had a futon, some books, a desk, a chair, a Fold ’N Play record player. I screwed a blue bulb in the ceiling and slept there, mostly alone. I listened to old records and stared at the blue light. I worried I might go crazy, but I also felt on the verge of something important, the final touches on the permanent exhibition— Father, Fucker, Human: The Dreamtime of Roger Burke —I was mounting in my heart. I stayed many hours in that room.
    Otherwise I studied in the library or painted in my studio or drank in the living room with all the people who either lived there or sort of lived there or might as well have lived there, though the core stayed fairly stable, a crew that included Billy Raskov, Maurice Gunderson, Charlie Goldfarb, Purdy, Constance, Sarah Molloy, and a guy named Michael Florida, who may or may not have been a student, though by dint of his meth addiction could have counted as an apprentice chemist. We drank local beer, smoked homegrown and shake. We used words like “systemic,” “interpolate,” “apparatus,” “intervention.” It wasn’t bullshit, I remember thinking at the time. It just wasn’t not bullshit.
    But the blue bulb was healing me.
    I moved out at the end of spring term. My plan was to stay in town for the summer, perhaps beyond, to work at a restaurant near campus and finish up some paintings. Maybe I wasn’t ready for New York City, even if Lena thought so, had made some phone calls on my behalf. But to what end? To be some pompous impostor’s assistant? To stretch canvas, fetch sushi? It soundedpretty admirable, in a strange way, as though in lieu of the atelier you might learn something ferrying hunks of rice-couched toro, but I also wanted more time in my little world. Maybe more time with