"What's the matter," said Horace. "Your pussy hurt?"

"What?"

"You look like you just got kicked in your pussy. Or like some commandos kicked down the door of your pussy and just rushed in there with machine guns and concussion grenades. Or like your pussy is being used against its will as a staging area for a large-scale invasion by a nation with which your pussy has long had strained relations, even if certain markets have opened up in recent years."

"What the hell are you talking about?" I said.

Horace had his desk phone pressed to his chest. He put it to his ear again.

"I've got to go, Mom. Burke's here. You should see him. Such a sad case with his little wrap and a few gherkins in a ketchup cup. I know. Cornichons. I was going to say cornichons but I bailed. I got nervous. Yeah, I'll tell him. I just asked him if his pussy hurts. He's mulling it over. Okay, love you, Mom. See you later. Around seven. Okay, bye."

Horace hung up the phone, tipped the rib bag into his mouth. A rivulet of greasy sauce ran down his chin.

"Hello, lover," he said. "Come for your desk?"

"Horace, look, since I'm working here again-"

"I heard it was just provisional."

"Since I'll be around the office some, I think we should try to communicate better in the future."

"I think flashing your fuzzy nip at me was communication enough, Wolf Man."

"Horace, I'm sorry. I think I misread some cues or something."

"That's one way of putting it."

"No, really, I never meant anything untoward. I just thought we were goofing around, being jackasses together. I never meant anything sexual, or imagined you felt harassed."

"Who said I did?"

"Vargina."

"Crafty. Divide and conquer. All Gaul, baby."

"Didn't you complain about me?"

"Yeah, I guess I did. But more like as a joke."

"Did you make an official written complaint?"

"Yeah, but in a jokey way."

"Those go on record, Horace. Those are in our file. As soon as a company hires you they begin plotting the paper trail with which to fire you. Didn't you know that?"

"Sort of."

"Okay, let's just shake and start again. Congrats on the new position. I hear you are really doing well on a big ask."

"Thanks, Milo. But you'll have to find yourself another desk. I'm wedded to this configuration."

I found a Plant Ops guy and an IT guy and by the end of the day I had a desk, a chair, a computer, an internet connection. I had a password to the server, though my only access was to an empty folder marked "MiloStuff."

Now that I had the desk I wasn't sure what to do. I only had the one ask. Also, I was on probation. I sent Purdy an email, thanked him for dinner, told him how thrilled I was to be working with him on this tremendously exciting project. I used all the dead language. Dead language would keep me alive. Besides, tone was tricky. I had to sound like a man who unexpectedly discovered himself in a professional relationship with an old friend. Just because it was true didn't mean it wasn't tricky. That was usually when I started to crack-when I told the truth, especially to social betters.

The night before I left for college, my father gave me his Spanish dueling knife. This was huge, the kind of intimate bestowal for which I'd always yearned.

"Take this," said my father, from where he stood at the edge of my basement room. I had moved down there, near the gas meter, to become a man. Soon I would depart the cold cinder walls lined with Scotch-taped postcards of my icons, Renaissance thugs and alcoholic crybabies from the Cedar Tavern. My own boozy, plaintive triumphs awaited, surely.

"Wow, thanks," I said.

The blade bordered on sword. We studied its Castilian chasings.

"A beaut, right?"

"I never knew you had this."

"Didn't want you to know about it. Thought you and the neighbor boys would sneak it out, behead each other. Then I'd really be screwed."

"Probably a good call. Where did you get this? It really is something."

"If I told you I won it in a card game in a cathouse in El Paso, would you tell your mother?"

"Do you think she'd want to know?"

"She always seems to want to know. Maybe it's better if you picture me in a gift shop near a hotel."

"Okay, that's how I'll always remember you, Dad."

"You must be nervous about driving up to school tomorrow. Sorry I can't make it. Got a lot 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 girlfriend sifting 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 sounded pretty 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 Lena.