"No," I said.
Mitch looked wounded. "You don't even know what I was going to ask."
"You were going to ask me to swing a dead cat at the sound engineer."
"Gently. In the spirit of science."
"No."
Paulette touched her headset. "Rehearsal resumes in ten. Mitch, put the science away. Nine."
We rehearsed the next scene, and nobody could concentrate. Benedetta kept glancing up at the booth, where Ansel sat with his back to the glass. Yasmin ate four crackers in a row without noticing, and nobody said anything about the noise. That was how I knew it was serious.
On Gravy Boat, a secret had the life expectancy of a donut at a table read.
By lunch, the lighting crew had a name for the sound. They called it the Goose. By two o'clock, someone had written GOOSE? on the call sheet whiteboard, then erased it badly, so it still said GOOSE? in ghost letters. By three, Benedetta had a theory.
"On my second show," she said, at craft services, "we had a key grip who couldn't stand to have his ears touched. Wore earmuffs in Burbank. In August."
"What happened to him?" asked Yasmin.
"The director tried to remove the earmuffs on a dare." Benedetta selected a grape.
"The director sells boats now. With the boom operator. They're partners."
I went up to the booth before call time the next morning. I owed Ansel an apology I could deliver standing still.
He was wearing the navy turtleneck. It went all the way up to his chin. His sleeves went all the way to his knuckles. He looked like a very polite tortoise.
"I'm sorry," I said. "About the boom."
"Forty decibels of sorry. You can stop." He didn't turn around.
"It was an accident. You were doing your job badly. That happens."
"Thanks?"
"It was a compliment. Badly is a stage of good." He pushed up his glasses. "Are they talking about it?"
"There's a whiteboard."
He closed his eyes. "What does the whiteboard say?"
"It used to say 'Goose.' Now it says 'Goose' but fainter."
At the lunch break, Ansel called a meeting. According to Paulette, this had never happened before. She had worked on the show for four years and had once timed a booth silence at eleven hours.
He called it on the talkback. That's the microphone that lets the booth speak into the stage speakers. His voice came out of the ceiling like the voice of a polite god.
"Cast and Jo," he said. "Booth, please. Bring food if you want. Yasmin, nothing over sixty decibels."
The booth was built for two people and a mixing desk. We fit five by having Mitch sit on the floor. Yasmin brought a banana as a peace gesture. Benedetta brought her fan.
Ansel swiveled his chair to face us. He had a dry-erase marker in his hand and a small whiteboard propped against the Pantry.
"I'm ticklish," he said.
Nobody said anything. Benedetta's fan whirred.
"Very," he went on. "I've been this way since I was a kid. Seatbelts are a problem. Haircuts are a big problem."
He tugged at a cuff. "Wool is the only fabric thick enough that nothing registers through it, so I wear wool. Aunt Dorit is very happy about this. She thinks I just love her sweaters."
"Do you?" asked Yasmin.
"I love them now. It took about a decade."
He looked at the floor. "I'm telling you because it'll come out anyway. And I'd like to be the one who says it."
It was, I realized, the longest speech any of them had heard him give. Mortimer had once called him "the man who says less than the furniture."
"So," Ansel said. "That's the situation. I'd appreciate it if we could all just—"
"Prank war," said Mitch, from the floor.
"No."
"Hear me out."
"I've heard you out for four seasons, Mitch. You're never in."
Mitch held up both hands. He had his binder in his lap. TAXES.
"No touching," he said. "Obviously. Touching is cheating, and also it's wrong."
"Thank you."
"I'm saying something better. You think you can't laugh unless somebody touches you?"
"I know I can't."
"I think," said Mitch, leaning forward, "that you're so ticklish we could make you laugh from across the room."
Ansel looked at him for a long moment. He looked the way he looked at an audio file that had a hum in it somewhere.
"That's not how it works."
"Bet."
"What are the stakes?"
Mitch had clearly already thought about this, possibly for years. "You laugh on the talkback before the finale wraps, you come to the wrap party in a T-shirt. Short sleeves. A real one, cotton, from a store."
"And if I don't?"
"Then I do Vince's warm-up at the finale." Mitch spread his hands. "In the Fortress."
Benedetta made a delighted noise. Yasmin peeled her banana like it was popcorn.
I stood in the corner and thought about weddings. In wedding terms, this was the moment someone's cousin grabs the microphone during the toasts. You can't stop it. You can only make sure the audio is clean.
Ansel uncapped the marker.
"Rules," he said. He wrote while he talked.
1. Nobody touches the engineer. Not a finger, not a feather, not a dead cat. Unless you ask out loud and he says yes.
2. The word is STRIKE. Anyone says it, everything stops, with no questions and no "one more."
3. Nothing during a take. The show comes first.
4. The engineer controls every speaker in this building.
He capped the marker. He looked at rule four for a moment, then underlined it twice.
"Strike," said Yasmin. "Like when they take down a set?"
"Like when they take down a set," said Ansel. "Everything comes apart, nobody argues, and the next morning it's a different show." He turned to Mitch. "Do you agree to the rules?"
"I agree to the rules."
"All of you?"
Benedetta raised her fan. Yasmin raised her banana. I raised my hand, then remembered I was crew and lowered it, then raised it again because Ansel was looking at me.
"Jo's in," Mitch said. "Jo's the one who found it."
"Jo's neutral," I said. "Jo is Switzerland."
"Switzerland," said Ansel, "swung a boom at me." But he was almost smiling. It was the first time I had seen the corner of his mouth move without a decibel reading attached.
Then he turned back to his desk, put on his headphones, and said, "Meeting over. Yasmin, take the peel with you, it's rustling."
I stayed behind for a minute after the others left.
"Why'd you agree?" I asked. "You could've just said no."
He took one side of his headphones off. For a while he watched the empty stage below, the diner set with its fake pies.
"Four seasons," he said finally. "I've mixed every laugh on this show. I've never been in on one."
"That's kind of sad."
"Forty decibels of sad. Manageable." He put the headphone back on.
"Also, I'm not going to lose. Nobody can tickle a man from across a room. It's physics."
I went down the stairs feeling, for reasons I couldn't name, that I had just witnessed a groom agreeing to the chicken dance.
Wednesday's taping was quiet, and nobody tried anything. Vince found six birthday people in the front two rows. Benedetta got her coffee machine laugh, and Mitch fell through the back door once.
Mortimer's verdict: "Note. Good. Same."
Ansel sweetened until ten that night. I know because I stayed to wrap cables, and the booth lights were on when I left.
On Thursday morning, I got to the stage at six forty-five, before almost everyone. The work lights were on. The bleachers were empty.
Up in the booth, Ansel was standing very still beside his chair, holding his coffee.
I climbed the stairs. He didn't turn around when I came in. He just pointed, with one finger, upward.
From the ceiling tile directly above his chair hung a single length of clear fishing line. On the end of it was a white feather. It had been trimmed with real precision. It hung exactly one inch above the headrest, where the back of his neck would be.
It was not touching anything. It was just there, turning slowly in the draft from the air vent.
Tied to the line was a small paper tag. In block capitals it said:
DAY ONE. —TAXES DEPT.
"It's not touching me," Ansel said. His voice had gone very flat. "It's a feather on a string. It's nothing."
Then the air conditioning kicked on. The feather swung toward him. It stopped an inch short, the way it had been measured to stop.
And from somewhere deep in the turtleneck, very quietly, came the smallest sound I have ever heard a grown man make.
Up next: Air Tickles
Continue to Part 3 →