The Ask Read Free

rush the bastards. Sure, a good many of us would die, but unless the asks popped off some nukes, eventually they’d get overrun.
    What was the holdup?
    The terrible feeling tended to hover for a day or so, fade. Then I’d fantasize about winning the lottery, or inheriting vast fortunes. Sometimes I was a flamboyant libertine with plush orgy rooms, personal zoos. Sometimes I jetted around the world building hospitals, or making documentaries about the poor.
    It all depended on my mood.
    Days I didn’t ride the trains, I’d take long walks in the neighborhood. We lived in Astoria, Queens, as close to our jobs in Manhattan as we could afford. One afternoon I made a mission for myself: stamps for the latest bills (I’d ask for American flags, stick them on upside down in protest against our nation’s foreign and domestic policies), paper towels, and—as a special treat to celebrate the acceleration of my fatal spiral—a small sack of overpriced cashews from the Greek market.
    I’d cure my solipsistic hysteria with a noonday jaunt. Sights and smells. Schoolkids in parochial plaids. Grizzled men grilling meat. The deaf woman handing out flyers for the nail salon, or the other deaf woman with swollen hands and a headscarf who hawked medical thrillers in front of the drugstore.
    This was a kind and bountiful neighborhood: the Korean grocery, the Mexican taqueria, the Italian butcher shop, the Albanian café, the Arab newsstand, the Czech beer garden, everybody living in provisional harmony, keeping their hateful thoughts to themselves, except maybe a few of the Czechs.
    A man who looked a bit like me, same eyeware, same order of sneaker, charged past. They were infiltrating, the freaking me’s.The me’s were going to wreck everything, hike rents, demand better salads. The me’s were going to drive me away.
    The Greeks were out of cashews. I bought pistachios, ate them in line at the post office. Or on line at the post office. I could no longer recall which phrase came naturally. Either way, there was always a line at the post office, people with enormous packages bound, I assumed, for family in distant, historically fucked lands. What were they sending? TVs? TiVos? Hamburgers? Hamburger Helper? The exporting of American culture, did it continue at this level, too? It couldn’t for much longer. Not according to Horace’s calculations. The line hardly moved. People couldn’t fill out the forms. Others did not comprehend the notion of money orders. Come on, people, I thought-beamed. I’m on your side and I’m annoyed. Doesn’t that concern you? Don’t you worry your behavior will reduce me to generalizations about why your lands are historically fucked? Or does my nation’s decline make my myopia moot? They should produce a reality show about how much this line sucks, I thought. Call it On the Line . Or In the Line . A half hour later I reached the teller. I was about to ask for stamps when I realized I already had a book of them in my wallet. I did not need stamps. I needed a job. I needed to cool it with those pills from Maura’s root canal.
    Home beckoned, but so did a coconut flake. I was due back an hour ago, felt the admonishing telephonic pulses in my jeans, but instead crossed the avenue to the doughnut shop. There was a high school boy behind the counter, maybe saving up for the video game where you gut and flay everybody in the doughnut shop and gain doughnut life points. He wielded his tongs with affecting delicacy.
    I thought again of my brutal visions of yore. My mother had always said I reminded her of her mother, Hilda. Since therapy, my mother had maintained that her issues, which prior to treatmenthad been known as her demons, stemmed from the fact that Hilda “withheld.” I never knew my grandmother well. She hadbadly dyed hair and a persecution complex exacerbated toward the end of her life when she was fired from the culture beat at her synagogue’s newsletter.
    “That pig rabbi should have