Strike

I found Mitch in his dressing room, which still had no mirror. He'd never put it back. He said the cricket had changed him.

I put the binder on his makeup table, open to the red tab.

"Jo the boom," I said.

"Ah," said Mitch. "You opened the taxes."

"Mortimer said stop."

"Mortimer said stop during the war. The finale is the parade after the war."

He spun his chair to face me. "Hear me out."

"Everybody keeps saying that to people in this building."

"Because it works." He tapped the diagram. "Before the live show, Vince does warm-up. Warm-up isn't a take, so rule three is safe."

"And then?"

"Feathers come down from the grid onto the roof of the booth. Not on him, on the roof. Vince gets the whole audience doing air tickles at the glass. And you, Jo, swing the dead cat up to the window."

"I'm not touching him."

"Nobody's touching him! That's the whole art form." He looked genuinely hurt.

"The dead cat stays outside the glass. It just waves. It just reminds him that it exists."

I thought about it. I'll admit that I thought about it. I was still a wedding person at heart, and Mitch was describing a first dance.

"I'm Switzerland," I said finally.

"Switzerland has a boom," said Mitch. "Think about it."

---

The second-to-last taping of the season was on Wednesday. Renata Abbott was not there yet. Nothing depended on it. Everyone was relaxed, which, in my experience, is when weddings go wrong.

Vince came out in his sequined vest and did his routine. He found seven birthday people. He found a couple celebrating their fortieth anniversary and made the whole room sing to them. The audience was warm and loose and ready.

Then Mitch walked out from behind the diner set and borrowed Vince's microphone.

That wasn't unusual. Mitch did that sometimes. The crowd loved Buzz. They cheered.

"Folks," he said. "Quick favor. You see that glass box up there?"

Two hundred heads turned toward the booth. Ansel, inside, looked up from the Pantry.

"That's our sound guy, Ansel. He's the best in the business. He's also—"

Mitch leaned into the mic, conspiratorial. "—the most ticklish man in America. He wears wool in July."

The crowd laughed. "So I need everybody to do me a favor. Hands up. Like this."

He raised his hands and wiggled his fingers at the booth.

And two hundred strangers did it too.

I was standing at the end of the counter with my boom, and I saw the whole thing. Two hundred people in summer clothes were laughing and wiggling their fingers at a man they didn't know.

Somebody started a chant. Goose. Goose. Goose. I don't know how they knew that word. Things travel on a lot.

Up in the booth, Ansel didn't laugh.

He didn't make the noise, or any noise. He sat very still, with his hands flat on the desk, and looked down at all those hands.

The air tickles had worked when it was Benedetta at the window. This was something else. In wedding terms, this was the best man reading out the ex-girlfriend list.

Then the talkback light came on.

"Strike," said Ansel.

It came out of every speaker on the stage. It wasn't loud. He didn't shout. It was, I would guess, about forty decibels, and it cut through the chanting like a knife through a cake.

The room went quiet. Two hundred hands came slowly down.

Mitch had already lowered his. He'd done it on the S. He stood there with the microphone for a second, and I watched him understand something.

"And that, folks," he said, into the mic, in his Buzz voice, "is what we call a professional. Let's hear it for Ansel."

The crowd clapped, uncertain. Mitch handed the mic back to Vince and walked off the set without looking at anyone.

The taping went fine, the way a wedding goes fine after a bad toast. The jokes landed. The laughs were real. Nobody looked at the booth.

---

After the audience left, Ansel did not sweeten.

Paulette noticed first. She stood on the stage with her headset in her hand. In four years, she said, the booth lights had never once gone off before ten. It was eight-fifteen.

"Forty minutes to lockup," she said, very quietly. "Thirty-nine."

I found him in the parking lot. He was sitting on the hood of a very old station wagon, in the reindeer sweater, eating a sandwich in small, careful bites.

"Can I sit?" I asked.

He moved over. The hood was still warm from the day.

"I'm fine," he said. "Before you ask."

"How many decibels of fine?"

He almost smiled. "Low. Twenty."

We sat there for a while. A security cart went past. The driver waved, and we waved back.

"It's different," he said eventually. "Benedetta at the glass, Yasmin's envelope, the feathers. That's—"

He searched for the word. "That's the cast, the people I mix for. They're laughing with me, even when I'm the joke. Hearing the difference is my whole job."

"And tonight?"

"Tonight was two hundred people who'll go home and say they saw a weird guy in a box."

He folded the sandwich wrapper into a square. "I've spent my whole life in boxes, Jo. Wool ones and glass ones. I picked them because nobody looks at a box."

"Is that why you mix laughs? So you don't have to—"

"So I can choose them." He pushed up his glasses.

"I know exactly what my laugh sounds like. I heard it played back once, at sound school, when I was twenty-two. It sounds like a goose falling down a staircase. I never wanted anyone to hear it again."

I sat very still on the hood of that car.

A goose falling down a staircase. I'd read that exact phrase three weeks earlier, on Yasmin's phone, in a thread with nine hundred replies.

I didn't say anything. I'm not sure why. Maybe because Switzerland doesn't ask questions in parking lots.

---

The next morning, Mitch climbed the stairs to the booth carrying his binder.

I was there, coiling cable. He didn't ask me to leave, so I didn't.

He set the binder on the desk next to the Pantry. Then he opened it to the red tab, took out the page that said OPERATION GOOSE, and tore it in half. Then in quarters.

"I made it about the crowd," he said. "It was supposed to be about us."

He took a breath. "I'm sorry. That's not a bit. That's just me."

Ansel looked at the torn page for a long time.

"Thirty decibels of sorry," he said.

Mitch winced.

"Fine. Forty."

Ansel picked up one of the quarters and turned it over. It was the part with the feathers drawn on it. "Keep the feathers," he said. "Lose the crowd."

Mitch looked up. "Wait. The war's still on?"

"Rule four." Ansel swiveled back to his desk. "Something is going to chirp in your car until Labor Day. I'd make peace with it."

Mitch went down the stairs grinning. Through the glass, I watched him hug Benedetta, who was not expecting it, and who said something that was probably about her second show.

---

Finale day went wrong in the morning and kept going.

A storm rolled in off the hills at noon. At two, the power on the lot flickered three times. The studio ran on backup generators for an hour, which meant no air conditioning on Stage 11. The temperature under the lights reached ninety-four.

The audience had been told to arrive at five. Because of the outage, the security gate didn't open until seven-thirty. Two hundred people stood in line in the rain for two and a half hours.

By the time they reached the bleachers, they were damp and tired and very quiet. They looked less like a studio audience than a bus station at four a.m.

At seven forty-five, Vince Esposito walked into the booth with a scarf around his neck and handed Ansel a note. It said, in shaky letters: LARYNGITIS. FIFTEEN YEARS OF BIRTHDAYS. I'M SO SORRY.

Renata Abbott took her seat in the third row at eight-thirty. She wore a gray suit and checked her watch every forty seconds.

Ansel was in the Fortress. It was charcoal gray, turtlenecked, and so thick it had seams on its seams. He sat at the Pantry with his headphones on, cueing four thousand laughs he wasn't allowed to use.

"Live is live," he said, to me, to himself. "But if a joke dies, I can at least warm the room between acts."

"With what?"

"Little bed of chuckles in the house speakers. Nothing on air. It's allowed."

At eight fifty-one, nine minutes before we went live to the East Coast, the power flickered one last time.

The Pantry made a soft sound, like a sigh.

Then its screen went black.