Ansel pressed the power button on the Pantry. Nothing happened. He pressed it again, harder, which never works on anything and which everybody does anyway.
The screen stayed black. A fan inside the case spun down with a small, sad whine.
"How long to reboot?" I asked.
"Twenty minutes. If it reboots." He looked at the clock on the wall. "We're live in eight."
Mortimer came up the booth stairs faster than I had ever seen him move. He stood in the doorway, looked at the black screen, and opened his mouth.
"Note," he said.
We waited.
Mortimer closed his mouth. He opened it again. For the first time in four seasons, there was no note. He went back down the stairs.
At nine o'clock exactly, the red light over the stage door came on, and Gravy Boat went out live to the East Coast.
I was on the floor with my boom. The audience in the bleachers looked like they had been rained on, which they had. A man in the second row was asleep sitting up. Renata Abbott sat in the third row with her legs crossed and her watch hand ready.
The first act was good. I want to say that clearly. The cast was sharp, and the jokes were the best of the season. And the room gave them almost nothing back.
Benedetta delivered her coffee machine line, the one that had shaken the floor every Wednesday for a month. It got a single, polite cough.
Yasmin did a bit with a tray of pies that had killed in rehearsal. Someone in the back row said, "Heh."
Mitch came through the back door of the diner. He fell over a chair in a way that had once made a grip snort coffee through his nose. The audience watched him lie there with the patient interest of people at an aquarium.
I could see the cast feeling it. When a room is dead, actors start pushing, louder and faster, and the jokes get thinner. At weddings it happens to the DJ around eleven p.m., when he starts playing songs about doing the hokey pokey with feeling.
In the third row, Renata checked her watch.
At nine-eleven, Paulette said, "Commercial. Three minutes. Two fifty-nine."
The cast came off the set like people climbing out of a cold lake.
"They hate us," said Yasmin.
"They're not cruel," said Benedetta. "They're damp. On my second show, we taped through a heat wave and the audience fainted in shifts. You can't play to people who are drying out."
Mitch was already looking at the bleachers. "I could warm them up. I could do Buzz. I could fall off something."
"You fell off something," I said. "They watched you."
"Two thirty," said Paulette.
That was when the booth door opened at the top of the stairs.
Ansel came down. He came down slowly, the way he had come down after the feathers, one hand on the rail. He was still in the Fortress. He was holding Vince's handheld microphone.
He stopped at the bottom of the stairs, by the diner counter, where the whole cast was standing. He looked at Mitch.
"Don't do Buzz," he said. "They don't need a bit. They need a reason."
"What reason?"
Ansel didn't answer. He turned toward the bleachers, switched on the microphone, and walked out into the light.
I had never seen him in front of an audience. I don't think anybody had. He stood on the edge of the diner set in a charcoal turtleneck at ninety-four degrees, holding the mic like it might go off.
"Hi," he said. "Where are my birthday people?"
It came out quiet. It came out in the voice of a man who had never once said it before, and had listened to it said five hundred times.
There was a pause. Then, in the sixth row, a woman in a wet raincoat slowly raised her hand.
"Happy birthday," Ansel said, very seriously. "That's eighty decibels of happy birthday. From me."
The woman laughed. It was small, but it was real, and a few people around her laughed at her laughing.
"I'm the sound engineer," said Ansel. "I sit in that box."
He pointed up at the glass. "For four seasons, when you've watched this show at home, a lot of the laughs you heard came out of a computer in there. Tonight the computer died. So you're going to have to be the laugh track."
Some people shifted. The man in the second row woke up.
"I know you're tired. So I'm going to help."
He took a breath. "I'm very ticklish. The cast found out a month ago, and they've spent four weeks trying to make me laugh without touching me. Feathers, crickets, a leaf blower."
He tugged at the collar. "That's why I wear the sweater."
He pointed at it. A few more people laughed. One of them was a grip.
"There's a rule," Ansel went on. "Nobody touches me unless they ask and I say yes. There's also a word, and the word is strike. Somebody says it, everything stops."
He turned around. "Yasmin."
Yasmin froze with a cracker halfway to her mouth.
"Would you come here, please?"
She put the cracker down. She walked out onto the set. She looked at him, and then up at the booth, and then back at him.
"Are you sure?" she asked. She said it into the mic, so the room could hear. I will always love her for that.
"I'm sure," said Ansel. "One finger, left elbow, three seconds tops. When I say strike, you stop."
"When you say strike, I stop."
"Jo." He found me at the end of the counter. "Boom, please, over me."
Then, to the wings: "Paulette, put my channel in the house speakers."
Paulette touched her headset. "Done. One forty."
I swung the boom out and held it over him. It was a lot steadier than the first time.
Then Ansel took hold of the bottom of the Fortress and pulled it over his head.
Underneath, he was wearing a plain white T-shirt. It was cotton, short-sleeved, and brand new. It still had a store tag hanging from the collar.
From the side of the stage, Mitch said, "You bought one?"
"I'm an engineer," said Ansel. "I plan for failure."
The bleachers laughed at that. A real one, across three rows. He'd gotten them on his own, before anyone had done anything at all.
Yasmin raised one finger. She held it up so everyone could see, like a magician showing there's nothing up her sleeve. Then she moved it, very slowly, toward his elbow.
She never got there, or at least not at first. Ansel was already folding at the waist. The noise was starting somewhere deep in his chest.
Two hundred people leaned forward.
Yasmin's finger touched his elbow, very lightly. It was there for about one second.
And the Goose came out.
It came out of Ansel, into my boom, through the board, and out of every speaker on Stage 11. It was a high, honking, helpless, joyful sound. It was a goose falling down a staircase, and landing, and getting up, and falling down a second, longer staircase. It rattled the fake pies in the diner case.
For one second, the room was completely silent.
Then a man in the ninth row stood up, pointed at Ansel, and shouted, "THE HONKER!"
And the room went.
It started in the ninth row and rolled forward like weather. People were bent over.
The woman with the birthday was wiping her eyes. The man in the second row, fully awake, was slapping his knee. In the third row, Renata Abbott had both hands over her mouth, and her watch was nowhere in sight.
"Strike," Ansel gasped. "Strike."
Yasmin's hands were in the air before he finished the word. She stepped back two full paces and held them there, like someone in a movie surrendering to the police. Ansel straightened up. He was red to the ears and still hiccuping.
The audience gave him a standing ovation. It wasn't for the cast. It was for the sound guy in a T-shirt with the tag still on.
"Ten seconds," said Paulette, who had tears on her face and was still counting perfectly. "Places. Nine."
The second act was the best twenty minutes of Gravy Boat ever broadcast. Everyone agrees on this, including people who were not there.
Every joke landed. Every look landed. When Benedetta delivered the last line of the season, the floor shook again. Mitch fell through the back door so hard he took the door with him, and the audience cheered as if he'd scored a touchdown.
Ansel was back in the booth by then, in the T-shirt, riding the levels. He wasn't sweetening anything. There was nothing to sweeten.
At nine thirty-one, the red light went off. We were clear.
I climbed the stairs to the booth to tell him. He wasn't there. He was down on the floor, surrounded by the whole cast. All of them were keeping a respectful eighteen inches away.
Behind me, the Pantry chimed.
It had finished rebooting. On the screen was the last window Ansel had open before it died. It was a folder with no name and a single red-labeled file inside.
Laugh 47. DO NOT TOUCH.
I put on his headphones. I knew it was none of my business. I pressed play anyway.
And I heard, for the second time that night, a goose falling down a staircase.
Up next: Ask First
Continue to Part 6 →