It was a first for Artie: badly needing to take a shit after a performance. He darted out of the classroom the second Kruger called the break. He ran a block to the administration building, where he knew the bathrooms would be empty. He’d received no active shooter message. There was no special security protocol laid out downstairs. All he had to do to get in the lobby was scan his university ID. The usual.
In the elevator, he faced two options: go up to the ninth floor, the one he was familiar with, where the English Department administration was, or try any of the other floors, where other departments had their quarters, and look for a bathroom where he would be less likely to run into someone he knew. He pressed 9 and felt like a loser. He had no spirit of adventure, he thought. It was what Dorothy had said to him in class on Monday: he never tried anything new. He was twenty-four years old and set in his ways. Taking a shit on the ninth floor. Walking in his father’s footsteps.
The need to shit had arisen when his classmates had started laughing at his “bit.” He’d always thought that a room erupting in laughter at something he did onstage would be glorious, would allow him immediate access to a new stratum of life, one for better people, that he would perhaps stop feeling his body for a minute. When he’d imagined that moment, he’d pictured the world suddenly acquiring a warmer tint, a new glow, and inspiration being unlocked—which meant, to him, not that jokes would pour out of his mouth easily and forever from then on but that he would see a way forward, if only briefly, through a life as a comedian. But everything around him still looked pasty, and all that his cohorts’ laughter had unlocked was his bowels. What was so funny about what he’d done? He’d simply stayed silent for five minutes next to a photo of himself as a kid. Was it just better when he didn’t talk?
His mother texted him to ask how workshop had gone, and whether he’d called Ethel yet. Artie was surprised to get reception in the elevator. Maybe only a mother’s message could make it through all the layers of steel. He tried texting back, but his answer wouldn’t send.
The words “better not to try at all than risk failing” crossed his mind. He knew that wasn’t the actual phrase, but for years, he’d heard Mickey say it like that, words in the wrong order, in relation to their father—“better not to try at all than risk failing” being, to Mickey, a good summary of their old man’s mindset. (“God forbid I should try something new,” Mickey had once yelled at their father after getting grounded for some adventurous behavior—back when he’d still engaged in adventurous behavior, before heroin. “You’d rather be burned alive than see someone have a little fun and get out of their fucking lane for a second.” To which their father had responded that lanes were there for a reason, that they kept life running smooth, and that true freedom was not in switching lanes but in finding a way to have fun in your own, words that Artie had found extremely wise in the moment but that Mickey had convinced him minutes later were all wrong: freedom was in crossing the lines.) Artie wasn’t sure why he was thinking about the phrase now, exiting the elevator. He had tried something. It was unclear whether he’d failed or not, but he had tried. In that way, he was already more accomplished than his father. His father had a good job, though. He made money. Artie couldn’t quite see money in the cards for himself. And his father had found love, too (his parents did love each other, it seemed). Which reminded him: text Mom. He stopped in the middle of the hallway, by the conference room, to write to her that he hadn’t been able to reach Ethel, but that she should try not to worry. “Mickey always comes back,” he typed, then erased, then typed, then erased again, the whole process causing him to sigh the first sigh Sword and Dorothy heard from behind the door.
The bathroom was only a few steps away now, but Artie’s need to shit had receded. He hoped for a temporary recession rather than a full-on disappearance. He knew, though, that on occasion, a shit that had felt impossible to ignore, a shit that had demanded his whole attention and constant little physical adjustments on his part not to come out when it wasn’t supposed to, could just vanish into the ether, never to be heard from again. Like a tornado. That’s the image that crossed Artie’s mind. This had happened to him countless times since childhood, usually around presentation days at school. It had happened to him at his grandfather’s funeral, too. The need to shit had been so intense that day, during the service, and the impossibility of leaving the room to attend to the need so very obvious, that Artie had almost made peace with the idea that he would shit himself in front of everyone on his way to the lectern (he, unlike Mickey, or their father, had wanted to say a few words). But the pain in his stomach had ceased the second he’d made it to the stand. He’d been able to focus entirely on his speech, to return to his seat walking normally (though still with the heaviness that a funeral required), and he hadn’t felt the need to shit again for a whole twenty-four hours. Where had that pre-eulogy shit gone? he’d wondered at the time. Where did vanishing stress shits go, in general? There had to have been studies about it, Artie thought. He wondered if certain needs to shit weren’t just mirages your brain whipped together for you when it felt you were sinking, to lure you away from sad thoughts. Smoke and mirrors.
Still standing in the hallway, Artie wrote down some of these ideas in the new note-taking app he’d downloaded. He typed:
In the process of saving this to his phone, Artie saw the first line of the last few notes he’d consulted. The last note he’d opened was the bit he should’ve done in workshop today, the one Kruger had discarded right out of the gate. They’d been told by Kruger himself that it was wise to keep everything they wrote, that one never knew when a bit would unlock, that it took years, sometimes, for a joke to reveal where it was it’d always intended to go, but Artie still deleted the note. He heard for the first time the sound that the app made when it deleted something, the sound that Dorothy, on the other side of the door, heard as “mother shushing child.” To Artie, it sounded more like a wind gust in the desert. It was only when he heard it that he realized the sound on his phone was still on. He thought of his imminent one-on-one car trip with Olivia and sighed. The pressure in his stomach came back. He walked to the bathroom.
There, he doused a wad of toilet paper with Purell and wiped the toilet seat before he pulled down his pants. He sat on the clean, still-humid ring, took his phone out, and watched on YouTube the Mad Men scene everyone had talked about in workshop, the one in which Don Draper/Jon Hamm pitches Kodak a way to sell their brand-new slide projector. Solid stuff, he thought. Easy to write a comedic parody of because every line in the original was sharp and clear. It would only be a matter of mirroring the beats. The Mad Men scene played on the idea of nostalgia. The slide projector had the power to take you back to “a place where [you] ache[d] to go again,” it said. The mirroring parodic line could go something like “takes you back to a place you wish you’d never been,” Artie thought. The parody would work around the idea that the slide projector Artie presented onstage only held your most shameful memories, for you to watch and browse and relive in the dark. He would have to show embarrassing photos of himself. The one he’d brought today would work, but there would need to be a lot more, like in Don Draper’s pitch. In his pitch for Kodak, Draper showed company executives photos of his own pregnant wife, beaming, photos of their wedding, of friends dancing, photos of children playing and children sleeping. Artie would have to show his audience at least ten embarrassing pictures, to stay on the same pattern, the same kind of rhythm. Maybe he could take a selfie on the toilet right now? He still hadn’t managed to shit. The need seemed to have evaporated once more. He watched the Mad Men scene again. Kruger had told them before that specificity was tantamount to good writing, but in the case of the Mad Men scene, Artie thought, it was the genericness of Don Draper’s family photos that made his presentation work. We all had a place we ached to go again. Time passed for everybody. If Draper had been too specific in his choice of photos, his nostalgia wouldn’t have been contagious. Whereas shame, Artie thought, shame relied on detail. If he wrote a parody of the scene in which he replaced nostalgia with shame, the embarrassing photos he showed would have to be hyperspecific. He gave out a long fart and wondered if shame wasn’t, in fact, the opposite of nostalgia. Maybe his bit would be smarter than he’d realized. He played the scene once more. In it, Don Draper said, “Teddy told me that, in Greek, ‘nostalgia’ literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’ ” It could be funny to open on it. “Teddy told me that, in Greek, ‘shame’ literally means ‘the pain from an old wound.’ ”
Did you need permission to write a parody of something? You probably did. Should he use background music onstage? The music in the scene was so pretty, but that was probably another permission to get. Artie was a sucker for film scores. He got goosebumps every time he heard the theme from Jurassic Park, for example. Just the thought of it now…He played the Jurassic Park theme on YouTube at full volume. When the music ended, he heard crying in the next stall.
“Is everything all right?” Artie asked through the partition.
“Please don’t kill me,” a woman responded. “I have a son.”
“Professor Reeve?”
Artie had met with Vivian Reeve in her office once—his aunt Sophie was a big fan, he’d had to ask Reeve to sign copies of her novels for her.
“What are you doing in the men’s room?” Artie asked. “Why would I kill you?”
Reeve said the men’s bathroom was the nearest door when she received the active shooter/take shelter message.
“What message?”
“There’s a shooter in the building.”
“I didn’t get any message.”
It took Artie a minute to convince Vivian that he wasn’t the shooter. Once she decided to trust he wouldn’t kill her, they both exited their stalls, and Vivian showed him the message.
“Did you call the cops?” Artie asked.
“The police get pinged automatically when there’s an alert like that.”
“How long has it been since you got it? I didn’t see any police outside.”
“Almost an hour.”
“They should be here by now.”
Artie had always assumed he would be a coward in such circumstances. It surprised him not to be afraid, to be taking matters into his own hands. Maybe it was because Vivian Reeve had heard him fart and listen to the Jurassic Park theme while on the toilet. He understood that she had other things on her mind right now and wouldn’t bring it up, but he knew she would remember all of it later and think strange thoughts about him. He had to present her with another Artie right away. A dependable Artie. An Artie who reassured and took charge. He called 911. They hadn’t received any calls or information about an active shooter on campus. They were on their way.
“Stay where you are,” the operator said. “Someone will come for you.”