Ask First

I found Ansel on the top row of the empty bleachers at midnight, still in the T-shirt. The tag was still on. Two hundred people had stamped feathers into the steps, and the cleaning crew had given up and gone home.

I sat down next to him and held out his headphones.

"You played it," he said.

"I'm sorry."

"No, you're not. You filmed strangers crying at weddings for six years. You're nosy for a living."

He took the headphones. "Somebody told me."

"Mitch?"

"Benedetta. She says you'd have lasted on her second show."

He turned the headphones over in his hands. "That's the highest compliment she has. Everyone else sells boats."

We sat for a while. Below us, the diner set glowed under the work lights. One of the fake pies had fallen out of the case during the Goose and was lying face-down on the counter.

"Sound school," Ansel said finally. "I was twenty-two."

"A classmate was building a laugh library for her final project. She needed one big one. A real one. She asked if she could try."

"Try what?"

"One finger, one second. She asked first, and I said yes. She counted to three."

He shrugged. "She got an A."

---

The classmate, it turned out, had sold her whole library a few years later to a company that licensed sounds to television studios. Four thousand laughs. When Gravy Boat started, the network bought the package and loaded it onto the Pantry.

Ansel found Laugh 47 during the first week of season one. He was sorting files and heard himself.

"I almost deleted it," he said. "I had my finger on the key."

"Why didn't you?"

He was quiet long enough that I thought he wasn't going to answer.

"Because it was the only laugh in four thousand that was mine."

He looked down at the booth. "Every other one is somebody I'll never meet, laughing at something I'll never know."

"That one was me," he said. "So once an episode, I let myself in the room. Once. Never more."

"And you labeled it Do Not Touch."

"It seemed appropriate." He almost smiled. "It's the only rule I ever wrote for myself."

"The fans have spent four years looking for you."

"I know." He winced. "I read the thread. Somebody said I was Mortimer."

"Somebody said you were a goose falling down a staircase."

"That one," said Ansel, "was accurate."

---

By eight o'clock the next morning, the thread had forty thousand replies.

Somebody in the ninth row had filmed the whole thing on a phone. The video showed a man in a charcoal sweater asking a crowd for birthday people. It showed him explaining the rules, saying "I plan for failure," and taking the sweater off. Then came one finger, one second, and a sound that half the internet already knew by heart.

The thread had a new title. It said: THE HONKER IS THE SOUND GUY.

Yasmin read the best replies aloud at craft services, between crackers.

"'I have been searching for this man since season one.' 'I cried at a laugh track.'"

She scrolled. "'Is he single, asking for my aunt.'" She looked up. "There are four aunts asking."

"Aunts are his whole demographic," said Mitch.

At ten, Renata Abbott called Mortimer. Mortimer took the call on the diner set, standing very straight, saying "Yes" at intervals. Then he hung up and looked at all of us.

"Season five," he said.

Nobody breathed. Then everybody did.

"Note," Mortimer continued, over the noise. He held up a hand. "From the network. They would like the sound engineer to do warm-up at the premiere."

Every head turned to the booth. Ansel, behind the glass, put his face in his hands.

"Also," said Mortimer, and paused. It was a long pause, the longest any of us had heard from him. "Note. Keep the honk."

---

The wrap party was in the commissary on Friday night, under paper lanterns and a banner that said SEASON FOUR: WE MADE IT. Someone had added (LIVE) in marker.

There was the question of the bet.

Mitch argued that Ansel had laughed on the house speakers, not the talkback. Therefore, technically, Ansel had won, and the T-shirt was optional. He argued this for eleven minutes, with diagrams. It was the first argument I had ever seen anyone lose on purpose.

Paulette settled it. She stood on a chair with her headset on, although nothing was being broadcast.

"The house speakers," she announced, "are the talkback with ambition. The engineer laughed. Ruling stands. Five, four, three, done."

So Ansel came to the wrap party in a T-shirt. It was the same white one. He'd finally cut the tag off.

He looked strange without wool. Smaller, and also much more relaxed, like a turtle who had found out the shell was optional. People kept coming up to shake his hand. Every one of them asked first.

Mitch came in the Fortress.

He hadn't lost. Nobody had asked him to wear it. He had borrowed it from the booth that afternoon, with permission, and he wore it all night in a room that was eighty degrees. At nine o'clock he climbed onto a table, red-faced and sweating, and grabbed a microphone.

"Where," he croaked, "are my birthday people?"

Vince Esposito, still on vocal rest, raised his hand from the back of the room. It was not his birthday. Nobody said anything. The universe provided.

Halfway through the party, I saw Ansel talking to Benedetta by the dessert table. She was telling him a story. I could tell from the way she tilted her head that it started with "On my second show."

I waited for the part where someone got fired.

It didn't come. She finished the story, patted his arm, and said something I couldn't hear.

Ansel laughed. It wasn't the Goose. It was just a regular laugh, the kind people make at parties, about forty decibels. Nobody had touched him.

I realized I'd never heard that one before either.

Near midnight, Mitch peeled himself out of the Fortress. He folded it with great care and carried it over to Ansel like a flag at a ceremony.

"Can I hug you?" he asked. "Arms only. Above the elbow. I've been planning the route."

Ansel considered this for a long moment. "Yes," he said. "Brief."

It was brief. Mitch hugged him, and Ansel made a very small noise, about a third of a goose. The whole room heard it and laughed. Ansel laughed too, which made it worse, and then better.

"That one's not on the talkback," said Mitch. "I'm just saying."

"Strike," said Ansel, and Mitch let go at once, grinning, with both hands up.

When Mitch left at one in the morning, I walked out to the parking lot with him. He unlocked his car. From somewhere under the passenger seat came a single, patient chirp.

He closed his eyes. "It's August."

"He said Labor Day," I said.

"He said Labor Day," Mitch agreed, and got in, and drove home with the cricket.

---

In December, a large box arrived at the studio from Duluth.

Aunt Dorit, who was seventy-three, had watched the finale. She had called Ansel the next morning and told him, he said, that he'd taken off her sweater on national television. Then she had been quiet for a while. Then she had asked for everyone's sizes.

Inside the box were seven sweaters: one each for Benedetta, Yasmin, Mitch, Paulette, Mortimer, Vince and me. They were cable-knit and very thick, and on the front of every one, Aunt Dorit had knitted a white goose.

There was no sweater for Ansel. There was a card.

You have plenty, it said. Wear them because you want to.

He did. Some days he wore wool, and some days he didn't. He told me the difference was about thirty decibels, and that it was manageable.

---

On the first taping night of season five, I climbed the stairs to the booth early. The bleachers were filling up below. Somewhere down there, a man was telling his wife he'd been in the ninth row.

Ansel was at the Pantry, in the reindeer sweater, checking his levels. In twenty minutes he'd go down and do the warm-up. He had been practicing the birthday line for a week. He was up to fifty decibels.

On the screen, the folder with no name was open. Laugh 47 sat inside with its red label.

I watched him click on it. He deleted the old label, DO NOT TOUCH, and typed a new one.

ASK FIRST.

Then he saved it, stood up, picked up Vince's microphone, and went down to find his birthday people.