"Sorry about what?"

"I don't know. Imperialist wars, torture, poverty, disease. How we've gotten past slavery except that we will never get past slavery, no matter who's the CEO. How the immigrants are good hardworking people, except for the lazy border-violating ones, except that it was their land to begin with and they work even harder than the hardworking ones. That kind of stuff. And also how we are such third-raters at this point, but what does that really mean? And what happened to being Rome? Seems like we didn't get much of a chance to be Rome. Seems pretty fucking unfair."

"Bitches of the First World," I said.

"Nicely put."

"That's Horace."

"Is it? I don't quite remember that. But I think you know what I'm saying."

"I know that you're saying something," I said.

"And by the way, FYI, I share all of these thoughts with you as somebody descended from both slave-owners and struggling immigrants. In some cases, they were the same people. It might sound cynical but I'm not cynical at all. I believe in the sensitive jerk-off stuff. I get off on the jerk-off stuff. But am I right? About your school? About wanting to ratchet things up, bring on the brand consciousness? Piss with the big art fairies? That's what that slick Southern kid intimated. What's his name?"

"Llewellyn."

"That's the one. He's impressive. What my dad used to call a comer. You must hate his guts."

"He's okay."

"Sure he is. Anyway, that's what he gave me to believe, when I met him at this sort of art happening. An historical re-enactment of the dotcom bubble. Some guy rented a loft and hired actors to pretend to be designing websites. Have to say he nailed the details, the clothes, the snacks, the drugs, the toys. Thought I was in a time machine. But the point is he said you guys wanted to go big. Stop pussyfooting, as he put it. Here's your mojito."

The waiter laid a tumbler at my elbow. I stared into the crushed ice, the muddled mint, and thought, oddly, of Scandinavia, of hissing, mist-sheathed fjords. It must have been the crushed ice.

"Judging by your face, the what-the-fuck nodes in your cerebral cortex must be a real light show."

"You texted the drink order?"

"What do you think?"

"I think I should have ordered an aquavit. You texted the drink order. Just before."

"Maybe."

"But to whom was the text addressed? The waiter? The bartender?"

"We'll cover that next time. This is a process. What I want to make clear tonight is that despite the hits my portfolio has taken, I am committed to exploring the possibility of a serious give. Now might be an appropriate time for one last question."

I was halfway to the morning's hangover. Boozewise, fatherhood had bounced me to the bantam ranks. But I wanted to keep going. I wanted to know things, like what Purdy really thought of our former friendship, whether he sensed how much he'd changed, or if he believed this was what he'd always been. Also, did he happen to know the whereabouts of the vintage Spanish dueling knife I lost in college?

"Why did you insist on me?" I said.

"Sure," said Purdy. "That's a suitable closing question. And here's the answer: because you're my pal. Because, like I said, I held you over the toilet a few times. Was it liquor or smack? I can't remember. Did you call it smack?"

"But you don't need me for this."

"Yes, I do."

"Why?"

"Because I trust you. Because you're not the only one with an ask. I'm going to ask you to do a few things for me. And you won't betray me."

"I won't?"

"You're the opposite of Judas."

"You're the opposite of Jesus."

"So, we'll be fine. You okay?"

I've never been much for drunken wakefulness, always admired those blackout artists who seemed perfectly alert while entirely unconscious, who rode trains and conducted real estate deals and pleasured lovers in a technical sleep state, who woke up in the Cleveland Hilton with inexplicable amounts of river silt in their pants cuffs. My overhooched evenings tended to expire with a lone ax stroke to the motherboard. Lucky nights I'd get one last surge of consciousness, like those precious seconds of life savored, if certain movies are to be believed, by severed heads.

"Anybody there?" said Purdy. "Let's get your ass home."

"Hell, no," I said. "Let's drink! Let's get some coke! Text it to me! Text me some fucking coke!"

I remember saying this, anyway, and I remember Purdy's laugh, his trademark trace chuckle. I remember digging in my pockets to see if I'd be able to cover the dinner, the imaginary blow, expense it later. Of course, I didn't even have carfare, which was rather unprofessional. This was my party, my check, my ask. Purdy pushed some buttons on his handheld again and I wondered if he might be ordering an eight ball, or dumping shares in Singapore, or calling Melinda, or calling a call girl, or calling a car, or checking a West Coast baseball score.

Next thing, I awoke alone in a cab rocketing over the Queensboro Bridge with fifty bucks in my fist like it had been wedged there with great fuss, which I figure it must have been, because even a piker like me knows you don't cadge cab money from the ask. It's a central tenet of development.

You don't even have to research that one. You just feel it in your asking bones.

Of course, there was a credit swipe in the back of the cab, but we both must have known my card would be denied.

Six

Once I could drink all night and, if not spend the next morning charming a potential donor over low-fat scones, or better, reinventing the color field with my best sable brush, still manage to pass the morning vaguely upright in my Aeron. Now, as I slumped across the sofa and watched my child play and my wife dress for work while I sipped my Vitamin Drink from a Bernie-deceiving coffee mug, the best I could do was suppress a decent percentage of the moister retches and wonder how long this hangover would last.

Maybe the hangover would never leave, just fade from immediate detection, hide like a deep-cover hitman, some human killbot who works the graveyard shift at American Smelter, takes his family to mass every Sunday, until the moment the baddies flip his switch. Then my hangover, "activated" by further alcohol consumption, would return, step out of the shadows in surgical galoshes, press the muzzle of its silencer-engorged Ruger to my skull.

The Milo Sanction would be complete.

I made like I was picking my teeth, dropped another of Maura's pills onto my tongue.

Bernie flew by on his wooden scooter, one of those beautiful Danish objects the Danes must foist on the world out of spite.

"Watch it," I said.

My son flung a wet wedge of fruit at the wall.

"Mango attack!"

"Bernie!"

"Togsocker! Macklegleen! Ficklesnatch!"

Nonsense words had become impromptu mantras for the boy, just pleasing bursts of Anglo-Saxon sound, though occasionally he'd hit on one with inadvertent resonance. The last word just uttered, for instance, did describe his mother at certain regrettable points in her history.

"Ficklesnatch!" he said again.

I went to fetch a rag for the wall.

"Bernie, no throwing!" said Maura.

Today was an emergency vacation at Bernie's school, another of those hasty cancellations of service we had come to expect from the dingy neighborhood basement where some young people with fancy education degrees and a tin of Tinker Toys had founded Happy Salamander. We did not understand their dense pedagogical manifesto, emailed to us upon acceptance, but had enrolled our son anyway.

"It's like a student haircut," I had said, and Maura laughed, a new, slightly apocalyptic tinge to her snicker.

So far, Bernie seemed no more miserable than he did anywhere else, and the school was close by. But the Salamander people canceled class quite often. They gathered, rumor had it, for retreats on somebody's father's farm, to debate amendments to their manifesto, snowshoe.