"Toosh dev?"

"Institutional development."

"Right," I said. "I guess I should never have shared that stupid little dream with you when we went to that taco joint. I thought we were buddies."

"It's not Shoah friends. It's Shoah business."

"Huh?"

"Work it out. Break it down."

"I thought it was toosh dev."

"It's what you make of it, pal."

"Anyway, I definitely regret not being clearer: I was talking about how I'd outgrown such silly notions. The loft thing was meant to be an example of my long-shed naivete."

"Is it a shed or a loft, chief?"

"Horace," I said.

"It's too fun with you sometimes. I like you, Milo. You're like the dim older brother I actually have somewhere. Listen, it's Varge because I like saying Varge. And Vargerine. And Bel Biv DeVarge. But I'd never utter these names to her face. So, now you've got something on me. Although she already knows what a little a-hole I am. As to your last question, I've quite fucking forgotten it, dude."

"You said something about Vargina and Cooley. A parking lot jack on the give. Does that mean hitting a home run?"

Horace flicked his eyes past my shoulder.

"Look, Milo, I don't have to tell you things are bad. It's a very fucked time. There is epic, epochal fuckedness. A bunch of our asks have skedaddled. Even with the markets collapsing, they were waving their cash rolls around for a while, wanting to help the arts, but now a lot of them are just gone. If Purdy is truly still on the hook, it's a big deal. And everybody here has total confidence you'll screw it up. If he walks without writing a check, that's one thing. You're back where you started, out on the street, obviously. But to them it would be almost worse if you did a Milo and shepherded Purdy to some dinky give. Remember your big plasma score? Like that. Then Purdy wouldn't even be tappable again for a long time. I'm not trying to insult you, just tell you the truth. They are hurting and need a big one. If you do this small-time, they will dump you hard."

"So, what should I do?"

"Bleed him."

"I'm… I'm not good at it, Horace."

I'd never just blurted it out like that before. Horace looked at me as though I'd bitten off my pinky.

"This is a known known, son. But you've got to fake it till you make it, as the alkies say."

"They promised that if I reeled him in I'd get my job back. Period. They never mentioned numbers."

"We're all good on used floor fans from Northern Boulevard. That's all I'm saying. Capice, Cochise?"

"Jonathan Livingston Seagull, I presume?"

Horace stood, slapped me on the back.

"Hopeless," he said.

I needed to talk to Vargina, straighten this out, but felt suddenly faint, headed for the deli across the street. Just standing in the vicinity of comfort food was comfort. The schizophrenic glee with which you could load your plastic shell with spinach salad, pork fried rice, turkey with cranberry, chicken with pesto, curried yams, clams casino, bread sticks, and yogurt, pay for it by the pound, this farm feed for human animals in black pantsuits and pleated chinos, animals whose enclosure included the entire island of Manhattan, this sensation I treasured deeply, greasily. Executive officers, up since dawn for their Ashtanga sessions, might pay for pricier, socially conscious salads at the vegan buffets, but this was where the action was, and I, who should have been Tupperwaring couscous from Queens, who could just barely afford this go-goo for the regular folk, these lumpy lumpen lunches, reveled in them, or at least the idea of them. Because the sad fact was I always balked at the last minute, a dumpling, some knurled pouch of gristle, spooned above my tray. This pre-digestive switch would flip and I'd abandon the wonton or rib tips or the shrimp salad with its great prawns like fetal hamsters drowned in cream, scurry back to the clean wisdom of the wraps. I was the food bar orgy's anxious lurker, the smorgasbord's voyeur.

They promised no excitement, my beloved turkey wraps, but no exotic gastrointestinal catastrophes, either. Wraps were elemental. You had your turkey, your cheese, your avocado and leaf of lettuce, and you rolled that shit up tight. What could go wrong? A child could do it. I preferred children do it. But today, the day I needed my old standby in a nearly pre-civilizational way, they had no fresh turkeys left.

"How about panini?" the counterman said.

"What?" I said.

"Panini."

I laid my hands, my forehead, on the deli case. This one held the myriad schmears, the bagel cheeses, like a small city of cups and tubs, all of it under Saran wrap since the morning rush, submerged like a breakfast Atlantis, peaceful and ordered, decorous. What pleasure to push the tubs aside, curl up in there for cool sleep. I envied the food. That lo-cal scallion cream spread had no worries. There were no little ramekins of lo-cal scallion cream spread depending upon it. It just offered itself up to the schmearer's spade, oblivious.

"No," I said. "No panini."

"What's that?"

"I said, 'No panini,' " I said.

I bought an energy bar, and as I ate it a great weariness fell over me. I forced myself across the street and back up to the office. Reception was still empty. So was Horace's desk. I walked down to Vargina's command nook, knocked.

"Yes?"

"It's Milo," I said. "May I have a word?"

"Of course. Pull up a chair."

Vargina swiveled to face me, scooped egg salad from a plastic dish. The egg salad had a slightly redder tinge than the batch in the deli case across the street.

"Want some?"

"What? No, I'm fine."

"You were staring at it."

"Is that paprika?"

"Have a bite."

Vargina held out a spoonful and I leaned forward, let the egg salad slide into my mouth, sucked down the creamy aftercoat of mayonnaise, with its spiced, nearly deviled, kick.

"Wow," I said.

"Pretty good, right?"

"Delicious," I said. "I… I hope this wasn't inappropriate."

"It wasn't," said Vargina. "Until you said the word 'inappropriate.' "

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay, Milo."

"This is delicious egg salad."

"My husband made it."

"He's got a gift."

"I'll tell him you said so."

"Please do."

"So, Milo, how may I help you?"

I told her about my talk with Horace. I tried not to betray too much, kept things general. I just wanted to understand the terms of this arrangement.

"I see," said Vargina. "It sounds like you had a very nice chat."

"Come on," I said, "be straight with me."

"About what?"

"Are you guys going to screw me?"

"As far as I know, the terms stand."

"But what are the terms? What's the number?"

"What number?"

"How big does the give have to be for it to be considered a success, or enough of one to earn my job back? Is there a target on this give?"

"It's hard to say, Milo."

"Hard to say?"

"I mean it would have to be big."

"Big."

"Hate speech, sexual harassment, these are horrible allegations."

"I prefer to think of them as challenges for me to meet and overcome."

"That's good, Milo. You're coming around, I can tell. I'm on your side. Among other sides. But I am on your side. Think I like Llewellyn? The pastiness? The arrogance? Please. But he's our rainmaker. Of course we can't count out Horace. But you, this Purdy give, it sounds like it can be something. We need it to be something. I'm sure Horace told you that. This is larger than you. This whole game is poised for a gargantuan fall."

"What game?" I said.

"Higher education. Of the liberal arts variety. The fine arts in particular. Times get tough, people want the practical. Even the rich start finding us superfluous. Well, they always think we're superfluous, but when they're feeling flush it doesn't matter. You pay a whore to make you feel like a man, you fund a philharmonic to make yourself feel like a refined man. But it's a pleasure many don't feel like splurging on these days. Worse is the pain of the tuition payers. They are just small-time enough to really resent the price we charge to fool their children into thinking they have a lucrative future in, say, kinetic sculpture. Fat times it was maybe okay to send your slightly slow middle son to an expensive film program. He'd learn to charge around in his baseball cap, write his violent, derivative screenplay in the coffee shop. Idiotic, right? But ultimately affordable."