GAZEBO TIMES

A MAN STARTS WAVING a gun around when Conrad is on his break.

Conrad only gets a half-hour for lunch, which is stupid. That’s barely enough time to grab a burger from the burger place and take the escalator up to the next floor and find a free spot on a bench and sit down to enjoy his meal. And then it takes him one or two minutes to get his headphones out of his bag and put them on, but obviously that has to happen because being on break means he gets to listen to music instead of listening to all the stupid idiots in the mall like he has to do for the rest of the time.

Conrad works at the falafel stand. All day long he drops chick-pea balls into boiling oil and then he squashes each one with a fork before adding the toppings and sauces. He only squashes them a little bit, though, because if he squashes them too much, the customers will complain that the ball doesn’t look like a ball anymore, it looks more like a squashed thing that they don’t want to eat.

He used to squash the falafel balls way too much, but then he learned.

The purpose of the squashing is so the tahini can penetrate the crunchy fried outer shell of the falafel. It’s a special technique invented by the owner. And yet the customers don’t know that Conrad and the rest of the staff are trying their best to give them the tastiest lunch possible. They have no idea.

While Conrad is upstairs eating his burger, which he prefers to falafels because it’s meat, the workers at the choose-your-own salad place take shelter under their gleaming white counter. The workers at the burger place can’t hide because somebody’s trademark paper hat with the cartoon of the dancing all-beef patty has fallen onto the grill and started to smoke. That cartoon always makes Conrad smile when he sees it. It’s this sort of oblong brown lump with little legs and arms twirling around under a disco ball, which is funny. And Conrad knows comedy.

Right now, though, Conrad isn’t smiling. On top of having to rush to eat his food, he has to rush even more today because he has to go and buy baby wipes. His pregnant wife told him to. So now he has to figure out what store would sell baby wipes. A store that sells clothes for babies? Who knows? Plus why does she need baby wipes when they don’t even have a baby yet?

Back in the food court, the man holding the gun steps up onto a formed plastic table in the middle of all the other formed plastic tables and says, “Today is a good day to walk your dog if you have a dog. If you don’t have a dog, then God help you. I got my first dog when I was three. That’s young to have a dog. But my mother and father thought that having a pet would teach me a thing or two about the world. One day I decided to see how long my dog, which was a little dog because I was a little boy, could hold his breath underwater. We made a game of it. I said, ‘It’s time for your bath, Moonbeam!’ Moonbeam was the name of my little dog. I thought of it because I had always liked moonbeams. I said, ‘Look, it’s nice in the water!’ I made as if to get in the bathtub myself. I was just faking, though.”

Early that morning there had been a meeting of all the food- court workers, and Conrad had walked away from the meeting feeling really good because they’d learned that a gazebo would soon be installed in the collective outdoor break area. There were already four picnic tables out there, in the rectangle of grass between the delivery zone and the garbage bins. On pleasant-weather days it was a pretty big deal to score a seat on one of those picnic tables.

But now there would be another spot for the workers to sit and rest and eat their lunches and talk about what they liked and didn’t like about their families, and in this case there would also be shade from the sun when it was sunny. There was already some shade under an overhanging metal sheet that nobody knew the reason for — it just hung there providing shade — but hey, nobody was complaining.

Right now, although it was winter, Conrad was looking forward to sitting in the gazebo in the spring and talking about his baby, who was going to be born soon and then Conrad would be a father, which was absolutely crazy when he really took the time to think about it.

Over by the falafel stand, Conrad’s wife goes into labour. Her water breaks and floods around her shoes. She had arrived secretly at the mall to surprise him and thought it would be nice to shop for baby wipes together, but unfortunately she arrived too late.

The food-court workers had been given an artist’s rendering of the gazebo to pass around — “to get you guys super psyched,” said the mall manager, who had a time-share in Mexico that she liked to tell everybody about. Then she’d always say, “There are way more tourists than Mexicans so crime isn’t a problem. The only problem is what to do with all that tequila! Ha ha ha.” The circular roofed structure in the drawing was breathtaking, with stately latticework and whimsical curlicues and a jaunty spike at the top.

The gazebo had a maximum capacity so there would only be space for six food-court workers to enjoy it at once. There would be a sign-up sheet by the lockers where employees could put their names. The sign-up sheet would be refreshed daily and would have the title “Gazebo Times.”

Conrad’s wife shrieks, and the man with the gun tells her to be quiet because he has a headache.

Conrad became temporarily famous the previous year. He co-wrote a live comedy sketch about doing an intervention on a baby who is drinking too much breast milk. At the time he didn’t plan on becoming a parent but he had friends who were parents, and they had gotten kind of boring, but their infants gave him all sorts of amusing ideas.

The way the sketch went was there’s a guy playing the baby by sucking his thumb and saying, “Goo goo, ga ga!” over and over. Then a bunch of people crowd into the room, including the man who is playing the mother by wearing a bra hilariously stuffed with balloons. Somebody says to the baby, “Okay Joe, you’d better sit down for this.” Which is part of the humour because babies are always sitting down! Or else lying down. The interveners all stand around what is supposed to be the crib but is actually just a pile of chairs arranged to be crib-like. The best thing about live comedy is you create a reality out of thin air. There are hardly any props, only the sheer talent of the actors involved to help the audience see the world they have brought to life.

The man with the gun says he’s hungry and will somebody please bring him some fries. Nobody volunteers, so he points his gun at Conrad’s wife and shouts, “Now will somebody bring me some goddamn fries?” A frantic whispering spreads through the food court, becoming louder and more insistent. Eventually the guy who sold Conrad his burger scurries over with a trademark paper cone full of golden fries, and he pees his pants when he hands it to the man with the gun.

The man frowns at the cartoon of the dancing potato on the cone and says, “Is this supposed to be funny? Because it’s not.” Then Conrad’s wife loses her balance and falls into the puddle at her feet, and the man says, “Now that’s funny.” He sticks a few fries into his mouth and chews. “My parents loved me a lot,” he says. “And I have always enjoyed those perfect-weather days when the sun is shining and the dog parks are full of dogs. You say you are a cat person? Get out of my face. I don’t want to talk to you. Just the other day I saw a cat and I kicked it straight in the head. That was for trying to come inside my house. This cat had tried that trick on me before. It succeeded once, and I said, ‘If you don’t get out, you’ll find out pretty quick there’s a dog in here.’ I have a big dog now, he is a big, curly dog. I pretend his curls are rings and I stick my hands deep into his coat and then I have rings on all my fingers, like Liberace.” The man eats a few more fries and says, “You should know another thing about me: I am not into jewellery, because jewellery is for women. But just with my dog’s fur I like to pretend.”

On the floor in front of the falafel stand, Conrad’s wife lies on her side in a pool of amniotic fluid that grows larger until it surrounds her like a miniature lake. Her clothes are soaked and even her hair is wet now and she wants to reach up and wring it out, but the man with the gun is watching her so she doesn’t do anything.

In the comedy sketch, the guy playing the baby sort of blinks around at the people who are supposed to be his concerned father and older siblings and grandparents. The interveners put on serious faces and take turns telling the baby that they are very worried about his health and well-being because of his excessive breast-milk drinking.

Conrad’s wife is one of those lucky pregnant women who does not look like she’s going to give birth imminently. She’s always been small, and throughout her pregnancy she would get nasty looks from other women who were secretly jealous of her smallness but to her face they would say, “Are you sure your baby’s getting enough food in there?” The contractions are more painful now but she tries not to move or make any sounds. She wonders if she’s having a boy or a girl. She only has a girl’s name picked out so far because she is really hoping for a daughter. But of course as long as the child is healthy, that’s the most important thing. And she is going to be a way better mother than her cousin Patricia, who lets her eight-year-old daughter go to sleepovers at her friends’ houses even when Patricia doesn’t know the parents very well. And one time Conrad’s wife said, “Patricia, how can you let her spend the night with these adults who are basically strangers? Don’t you think that’s unsafe?” And Patricia said, “Oh, they’re fine. It’s nice to have the house to ourselves once in a while. You’ll understand when you’re a mom.” But Conrad’s wife doesn’t think she will.

The sketch was such a hit that audiences started yelling out requests for it during shows that had totally different themes, and the actors started tossing dollar-store bibs out into the crowd at the end of the night. It became a phenomenon — audience members would stream out of the comedy club wearing these cheap bibs, which were too tight on their fully grown necks. The bib-wearers on Twitter would tweet about it immediately — I got a bib! #comedybib — and the ones not on Twitter would tell their friends about it later — “I got a bib!” “What kind of bib?” “A comedy bib!” “Fucking right on.” Eventually people got tired of it, though, because people always get tired of things.

Conrad finishes his burger and feels disappointed that it wasn’t as good as usual. The normally charred bits weren’t charred enough this time. He crumples the wrapper and wipes his mouth with it because he forgot to get a napkin. Then he sits and tries to remember what else he was supposed to do on his break. Because there was definitely something.