Parking downtown: three hours, thirty-five dollars. A week’s worth of groceries. Artie couldn’t let Olivia know this. It would make him look desperate, like he’d do anything for her. Though he guessed agreeing to pick up her sister at O’Hare in rush-hour traffic was already a big step in that direction. But no, he thought, doing her this favor, that was just nice of him. Being nice was good. It was never the thing that swept her off her feet and got you the girl, but if it was down to you and another guy later on, all other things being equal (were they ever?), if a pros-and-cons list was drawn to determine who was the better party…He tried to think up ways for Olivia not to find out that he’d parked there, right under Millennium Park. Maybe he could tell her he’d parked too far? To just wait for him in the lobby while he went to get the car? Olivia loved walking, though. She’d want to walk with him, even in the cold. And then she’d see that he’d lied, that he hadn’t parked that far, just expensively, and she’d know what kind of man he was—not only the kind of man who lied about small things but, worse, the kind of man who couldn’t find good street parking, the kind of man who was either too unlucky or too impatient to be given, or wait for, a small, good thing.
He was supposed to make his classmates laugh at some point in the next two hours, but it was okay to be focused on something else. Maybe he’d find that not thinking about his act so close to showtime would make him a better comedian. It was counterintuitive, but intuition was overrated, he thought. Intuition was for lazy people, it was for people who didn’t want to think too hard.
His phone lit up in his hand. He hadn’t let it out of his sight much since his call with Olivia, in case she called again. He thought it was a text, and in a way, it was, only it was one from the phone itself. “You have a new memory,” the message said, and Artie took the bait, tapped his screen to see it. “On this day 5 years ago,” the screen said, right above a picture of Mickey, Artie, and their grandfather eating ice cream in the snow. None of them were smiling in the photo, but they’d been happy, Artie remembered, celebrating the first big snowfall of the season the way they’d always done: two scoops each in a sugar cone. Artie’s grandfather only ever ate ice cream when it was freezing outside. He maintained that he couldn’t digest it otherwise. He was dead now. And who knew where Mickey was.
“Wow, thanks a lot, dude,” Artie said to his phone, and his words echoed in the parking garage.
It was the third or fourth time the phone had forced him, unprompted, to look at an old picture, but Artie only now realized the absurdity of the phrasing: “You have a new memory.” What did that even mean? That he hadn’t had it before? Also, the screen wasn’t showing him a memory, only a stupid selfie. More of that imprecision, he thought, more of that turning words into more or less than they actually were—manicures into “self-care,” meat into “protein.” A photo wasn’t a memory. A photo was a photo. The memories Artie had of that day weren’t at that angle, the light was different. They might end up reduced to that angle and that light, though, if he looked at the photo long enough. He deleted it. He decided to never take a photo again.
He tried to imagine the idiot at Apple who’d come up with the idea. He pictured a big conference table, a dozen ugly men brainstorming, one of them having a eureka moment, another completing his colleague’s inspired hunch by saying “We’ll call them…memories,” everyone else in the room getting chills, crying genius. Had no one at that meeting thought, Maybe we’ll cause people to think of dead loved ones at completely inopportune moments? Had no one in that room ever suffered at all? That’s what you were left with when you let human stupidity program artificial intelligence, Artie thought: artificial stupidity.
He was out walking on Columbus Drive now, making a right on Monroe. Turning his back to the lake, he thought this had to be one of the best views of downtown, how beautiful Chicago was when the sky was gray. He reminded himself not to take a photo.
He imagined other things “smarter” smartphones would alert you to in the future. Maybe your contact list would soon be synced with hospital records so that no one would have to make the tough phone calls anymore—“You have a new death in the family.”
He saw Olivia and Jo in the distance, smoking by the classroom building. Kruger was approaching from the south, coming to class, as always, holding his Dunkin’ coffee. If Artie kept up the same pace, he would have to walk alone with him for about a block, he calculated, and so he slowed down, pretended, in case someone saw, to have received an important text. Artie was under the impression that Kruger hated him, which of course Kruger didn’t, he also told himself. Couldn’t famous people only hate other famous people? Still. Artie should’ve said something about Kruger’s first movie appearance when his classmates had. They’d all gone to see The Widow’s Comedy Club back in September and come up with compliments to serve Kruger, about his scenes, about pacing. Artie had stayed silent, which Kruger must have noticed. The movie, in which Meryl Streep discovers in herself a vocation for stand-up after the death of her husband, wasn’t bad. Artie had even been moved by the speech Paul Rudd (playing her son) gave Streep near the end. He simply hadn’t found anything to say about Kruger’s performance specifically. He wasn’t even sure what he’d thought of it, whether Kruger’s acting had been great or terrible. It was hard to tell the difference sometimes.
“Shit, fuck,” Artie said to himself. Kruger had seen him across Michigan Avenue. Kruger was now raising his Dunkin’ cup in Artie’s direction. He was going to wait for Artie to cross the street. They would walk that last block to class together. It was all happening. And right away, a preview of the discomfort to come: the awkwardness of having to wait for the light to change while someone else was watching from the opposite sidewalk. What was the etiquette there? Did you have to look at the other person? Mind the traffic? Gaze in the distance, pretend to be deep in thought?
Artie opted to look at his phone again.
Kruger stared at him the whole time. I’ll make fun of him, he thought, because that’s what comedians did when they felt discomfort oozing out of other people, and Artie’s discomfort was palpable across six lanes of traffic.
Also: of course Kruger had noticed that Artie hadn’t commented on his movie. It was his job to notice things. He’d also noticed that he’d noticed, had already berated himself for noticing, for caring about such petty things.
The light changed. Artie didn’t look Kruger’s way as he crossed the street, but Kruger continued staring, to ensure maximum unease on Artie’s part, and that their eyes would meet the second Artie stopped pretending to have anything on his mind other than the upcoming torture of having to walk to school with his teacher. There were many ways to make people uncomfortable, Kruger knew, but he favored a solid stare. A stare was simple, efficient. Worked every time. Had on Kruger, at least, who’d endured it all as a kid—the words and the fists and the looks. The looks had always been the worst.
The more he looked at Artie, though, the less Kruger wanted to toy with him. Artie made him sad, really. The boy had no future in comedy. He was just too pretty. Kruger knew that pretty boys could be funny, and that they had feelings, too, but no audience would ever give them a chance. People didn’t want more doors open to the beautiful. Fuck you, Artie was what the world was telling Artie. You’re white and you’re handsome, and now you want a career? Did you think this was the sixties? And yet there was Artie, trying, hopeful. He was even coming to workshop with…what? What could there be in that cardboard tube in his armpit? Props for his bit? Jesus. You had to feel sorry for the kid. Kruger decided not to make fun, not to ask what was in the tube. He didn’t want to know unless and until he absolutely had to. He could do small talk instead. Small talk was good. People expected comedians to always be on, to be funny even offstage, jocular, at the very least, but Artie wasn’t people, Kruger thought, Artie was a comedy student, his student, and it was part of his job as a teacher to show him that real-life comedians were nothing more than real-life people, some of them high energy and a joy to be around, some of them mean and biting nonstop, most of them mildly depressed and misanthropic.
“You didn’t have to wait for me,” Artie said when he reached Kruger. “I would’ve understood. It’s too fucking cold out here.”
“It’s going to get a lot worse, you know that?”
Artie didn’t. He’d seen it in movies, but this was his first Chicago winter. Not that New Jersey was much better.
“How much worse?” he asked Kruger, and neither of them could believe they were still talking about the weather.
Kruger had grown up in Naperville, just thirty miles west. He had a few stories about the cold. For the past ten years, in L.A., he’d told exaggerated versions of them to waitresses and barbacks who’d never seen snow. He told Artie about a girl he went to school with whose eyes had frozen shut one winter morning before first period. The girl had teared up from the cold, blinked, and been unable to open her eyes back up. Kruger’s father, who’d been a teacher at the school, had brought her inside, and her eyelids had thawed immediately, but the way Kruger told the story now, she’d been blinded for hours and the rest of the kids had tried to get their own eyes to freeze shut all day so that classes would be canceled.
“Your father was a teacher at your school?” Artie asked.
They were walking fast at least. Jo and Olivia were getting closer.
“He taught history, yes,” Kruger said.
“Were you ever in his class?”
“I had other teachers than him, but the way I remember junior high, I was never not in his class,” Kruger said. “And my mother was my fourth-grade teacher. Can you imagine?”
Artie couldn’t. A parent, to his mind, was someone whose day had to remain a mystery. You had to be able, as a child, to imagine that Mom and Dad became something amazing when you weren’t looking—otherwise, what hope was there left for you?
“At least it made it so you weren’t bullied, I guess. Being the teacher’s kid.”
“That’s funny,” Kruger said. “You should write that down.”
Kruger didn’t want to talk about his father. Why had he brought him up? Louis, like Artie, hadn’t said anything about his movie. Kruger had sent him a link. He had to have watched it by now. What else was there to do at the old folks’ home?
When they reached the building, Jo immediately pointed at the tube under Artie’s arm.
“What the fuck is this?”
“You’ll see,” Artie said.
“Prop comedy is the worst,” Jo said.
“Andy Kaufman did props.”
“Don’t even say his name.”
Olivia thanked Artie again for agreeing to drive her to O’Hare later.
“No sweat,” Artie said, but why? He hated the phrase. Calling attention to bodily fluids. “I parked like a loser, though,” he added.
Honesty was his best option. Preemptive self-criticism, too, using a word like “loser” to describe himself—this would keep Olivia from having to come up with it herself, and if she didn’t say the word herself, then she wouldn’t quite internalize it.
“What do you mean, like a loser?” Olivia said, blowing cigarette smoke in Artie’s face. Smoking was a habit Artie would want her to get rid of if they were ever to be together, but one he pretended to have no issue with at the moment.
“Millennium Garage,” he said.
Olivia was still exhaling.
“I’ll give you some cash,” she said.
“That’s not what—”
“Very classy, Artie,” Jo said. “Asking the girl for parking money.”
Kruger watched the kids give one another shit for a minute. It was always nice when he realized he liked them, that it was only teaching he wasn’t fond of. More than nice, it was a relief. He’d been worried, at first, to think that his dislike of teaching could mean he was jealous of his students, their youth and energy. He didn’t want to be jealous, or bitter. Bitterness was bad for comedy. Bitter comedians tried to convince themselves they weren’t bitter, just another shade of angry (and anger was good, all performers agreed on that, anger was funny), but people recognized a bitter man when they saw one. If Kruger liked his students, if he liked them as people, then it meant he wasn’t there yet.
Artie mentioned something he’d seen on Twitter, and Jo said to get off Twitter, Twitter was for squares.
“Oh, but wait,” she added. “You are square. Never mind. By all means, keep reading about every idiot’s opinion on what category of people gets kicked out of inclusivity today. That way you’ll know exactly what jokes you can and cannot make, and everybody will laugh.”
“Isn’t that the goal?” Artie asked. “To make people laugh?”
Jo stared at him and shaped a square in the air with her finger.
The wind blew Au Bon Pain’s sidewalk sign toward them, slowly. They’d all seen similar signs knocked by wind gusts before—A-frames fold onto themselves and fall flat on the pavement—but never one dragged like that, solid on its four feet. The sign moved like a reluctant child pushed by his mother on the first day of school, or a bad spy. It looked so human Artie almost expected it to stop for a chat when it reached them. But the sign passed them by and went on its way, and though they all looked at it in awe, no one mentioned it. Artie breathed in air so cold it burned and said that, as a square, it was perhaps his role to remind everyone that it was time for class.