Olivia was on her second cigarette. Class breaks could get fairly long. Kruger, a former smoker, always came down to the sidewalk with his students to get whiffs of tobacco. He often encouraged Marianne and Olivia to light a second cigarette, sometimes even a third. He never seemed to want to go back into the building.
Marianne was smoking in his face, a few yards away from Olivia, telling Kruger everything she knew about Henri Bergson. Olivia was jealous of Marianne’s confidence, her skin, all the things she knew—her European education. At least she wasn’t jealous of her work. She had to constantly remind herself that this was the most important thing.
“Look at me, I’m so French,” Jo whispered in Olivia’s ear, impersonating Marianne. “I need to read a book about laughter in order to understand the concept.”
“She’s not French,” Olivia said. “She’s Swiss.”
“Same difference.”
Phil came to them and apologized to Olivia for not answering her call earlier.
“I’m sorry I missed it,” he said. “I was writing.”
Her classmates, as far as Olivia could tell, used the term loosely. To them, “writing” could mean thinking, it could mean getting high and staring at the wall, it could mean taking a walk alone at night.
“I’m working on this bit,” Phil said, “where I’m impersonating Aristotle. So the writing has to be extra good.”
“Right,” Olivia said.
She overheard Marianne say “Henri Bergson” again, pronouncing “Henry” the French way, like ennui. So pretentious, Olivia thought. She didn’t know Bergson had in fact been French.
“Do you guys know where Artie went?” she asked Phil and Jo.
They didn’t. No one knew anything, Olivia thought. She certainly didn’t. She hadn’t learned one thing so far, in this Master’s of Stand-Up Comedy, and taking breaks in the middle of classes where you weren’t learning anything made the fact even more obvious. It was exhausting, actually. They’d been on break for almost half an hour. She decided to look up Henri Bergson’s Laughter on Wikipedia, and was offered the following page:
Instead of clicking the link to Bergson’s book, Olivia visited the page on laughter itself. For all that she’d tried to cause it in people, she realized, she’d never been curious about the physiological phenomenon. She learned that you started to laugh around your fourth month of life. That you laughed twelve times more, on average, when with another person than when alone. That a certain Chrysippus (a Greek Stoic philosopher from the third century b.c.) had died of laughter after seeing a donkey eat his figs. She read about kuru, a disorder also known as “the laughing sickness”—one of its symptoms was you kept shaking with uncontrollable, pathological bursts of laughter. You could die from it. She read that on some old battlefield, a soldier’s head had been chopped off and catapulted back to his men, and one of them picked it up to find the head was still laughing. (Still laughing? Olivia thought. Why had it been laughing in the first place?) She learned that rats laughed when you tickled them. They had to know the tickler, though. If they didn’t know the tickler, they didn’t laugh. Which made perfect sense to Olivia. She felt close to the rat in that moment.
She tried paying attention to the description of what happened in your body when you laughed, which muscles contracted, what the larynx did, but it didn’t speak to her much. She hated thinking about the body anyway, about the whole thing being a mere reactionary machine, pretty much the same for everyone. She focused on the photos that Wikipedia contributors had chosen for the page, and was happy to see one of a “crowd laughing at Manny Reinhardt’s HBO special Figure It Out.” But the other two images were puzzling to her. Of all the faces, famous and anonymous, that they could’ve picked to illustrate laughter, the authors had gone with politicians. Theodore Roosevelt (“Theodore Roosevelt laughing”), Bill Clinton, and Boris Yeltsin (“Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton having a fit of laughter, October 24, 1995”). She wondered why politicians laughing would be considered a perfect illustration of the phenomenon. Was it another case of what she’d said herself in workshop? That because you expected men to be strong and keep all types of emotion at bay, you couldn’t help but empathize with them whenever they showed one? All the more if they were supposed to be solid and composed at all times? Because yes, just watching these photos of powerful men laughing made her smile. Their laughter, even frozen in time, had something contagious, whereas she wasn’t sure a picture of Angela Merkel laughing would’ve had the same effect. Was she a misogynist? She showed Jo the photos.
“What the fuck?” Jo said. “What did they choose for the ice cream entry? The picture of Putin and Erdogan eating some together?”
They looked up the Wikipedia page for ice cream. It was longer than the one about laughter.
They didn’t pay attention to the first two police cars, and when all Michigan Avenue traffic split to make way for the third, the fourth, and the fifth, they plugged their ears, assuming it was but a temporary disturbance—those sirens, to their minds, only ever passed by you on their way to other places. When it became obvious that the cars’ last stop was the admin building, Olivia, again, wondered where Artie was.
“They’re setting up a perimeter!” Phil said.
Kruger and Marianne stopped talking about Bergson and moved closer to the rest of the group. Traffic was already being redirected, cars U-turning on Michigan.
“Should we go see what’s happening?” Marianne asked.
Sword and Dorothy were walk-running toward them, having exited the administration building just before the police arrived. They explained to everyone that there was a shooter in there, and that the shooter was Artie.
“Artie was just in class with us,” Olivia said.
“Did you hear gunfire?” Phil asked.
Kruger thought of his father again. The image of Artie holding a gun made no sense to him, but it hadn’t made sense either, a few months back, when the Naperville Police Department had called to inform him that his father was in custody after shooting someone at the bar.
Olivia and the others established that Artie couldn’t be the shooter, given the time at which Sword and Dorothy had received the first active shooter alert.
“We didn’t get any alert,” Marianne said. “Shouldn’t the message that there was a shooter on campus have been sent to the whole community?”
“Absolutely,” Sword said. He remembered this from safety training. He hated what he felt in that moment, that every university mishap was somehow his responsibility. “We’ll have to look into it,” he said.
Could he go home now, though? He should probably let Lydia know he’d be late. He’d refrained from calling or texting this whole time, not wanting to worry her, but now that he’d made it out alive, he could tell her what was happening. Maybe the day’s events could even work as a wake-up call for his wife, he thought, propel her back into the world. She could’ve lost him! Maybe this was a blessing in disguise.
Marianne said something European about gun violence. People tried not to pay attention, but she insisted. This would never happen where she was from, she said. How many more deaths would it take, etc. Some might’ve waited to know more before they started joking, but for Dan and Jo, it was never too soon.
“We need gun violence,” Dan said. “Just like we need unaffordable healthcare. It’s what makes us who we are.”
“It keeps us angry,” Jo said. “It keeps us on edge.”
“That’s why no one’s funny in France,” Dan said. “Because you French people have it too easy.”
“I’m not fucking French,” Marianne said.
“I wouldn’t boast about being Swiss. Switzerland is even worse. You guys don’t even have homeless people. What do you even get angry about?”
“There are lots of amazing French and Swiss comedians,” Marianne insisted.
She named names, but no one had heard of them.
Sword couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The kids had just been told about a shooter on campus, that perhaps one of their friends was in the building he targeted, and they’d already changed the subject. They’d discussed it for a second as something that was happening far away, then moved on to teasing the one foreign student in the group. His eyes searched for Dorothy’s, for Kruger’s. Were they finding this normal? Was this normal comedian behavior? He knew comedians were wired to find levity in horrible situations, but this? Dorothy looked about ready for bed, like she could fall asleep any minute. Kruger was nowhere to be seen. Kruger had left.
TV crews were trickling in. WGN, ABC-7, NBC-5. Bystanders were starting to press against police barriers. Phil asked if anyone else thought they should get closer to the perimeter.
“You just want to be on camera,” Jo said.
“I want to see what’s up.”
“You want to skip your own workshop.”
“I don’t think we’re going back to class,” Phil said, and he looked around for Kruger to confirm. “Where did Kruger go?”
While they all debated where Kruger might’ve disappeared to, Olivia approached Sword to ask, simply, how he was doing.
“You must’ve been so scared,” she told him.
“I kept it together for Ms. Michaels,” Sword said, winking at Dorothy.
Why the wink? Wasn’t winking illegal now? Dorothy didn’t notice anyway. She was in her own world, typing fast on her phone. Texts to loved ones, Sword thought. Notes for a future bit, Olivia assumed.
“Did you think you were going to die?” she asked him.
Olivia’d been about to die once herself, back in high school, but she never talked about it. The cause of death would’ve been suicide, and she knew people wouldn’t consider it as close an encounter with death as they would a hostage situation, or a car crash. To her, though, it was all the same. She’d looked at death head-on, she’d felt it seconds away. An acceleration.
“I don’t believe I did,” Sword said.
Olivia gave him time to think about it and elaborate, but he didn’t add anything. He was like those people who answered, “Can’t complain” when you asked how they were doing, Olivia thought. She’d always felt there was something aggressive about that. How could anyone not have anything to complain about? They didn’t want to share it with you, was what it was, they didn’t think you were worth sharing it with. She considered telling Sword about the day she’d almost killed herself, see if that helped him say something interesting. He would probably have to call some kind of university counseling service, though, if she told him.
“Are you worried about your friend?” Sword asked her, and it took Olivia a second to understand that he was talking about Artie.
“Not really,” she said. “Artie can charm his way out of any situation.”
The charm thing was an exaggeration, of course, but she did believe Artie’s life was in no danger at all. No one had heard gunshots. No one was running out of the building covered in blood. She and Artie would have something to talk about in the car now, at least, on their way to O’Hare. Though once they picked up Sally, it would probably be best not to mention the shooter incident.
Sally hadn’t been home that day, years ago, when Olivia had thought so seriously about killing herself. “Seriously” wasn’t the word, really. “Seriously” implied a certain length of time. More like “vividly.” The thought had been vivid that day, for the first time. Before, there had always been a buffer between any suicidal thought Olivia had had and the idea that she could act upon it—the two had never quite aligned and faced each other. If she thought, I want to die, something within her immediately shrugged its shoulders and said, Tough shit. Or, depending on its energy level, just hung there all sorry and dumb, like a bad salesman. That “something within her” was her sadness, Olivia thought, its own character in her life. An annoying presence, but also comforting, like a mother, not anything that would ever want to cause her harm. Or so she believed, until that day. Because that day, Olivia had thought, I want to jump out the window, and her sadness’s answer had been Do it. In a split second, it had all appeared clearly to her—that suicide wasn’t just for other people, that she could do it, too, that she could do it anytime, in fact, and most of all do it now. Until then, her suicidal thoughts had been like bird-watching through broken binoculars—she’d been looking at shapes so far, splashes of color, quick movements, the possibility of a bird (the possibility of suicide)—but now it was as if someone had, on a whim, decided to fix the focus wheel, and not only was the bird all of a sudden high-def and undeniable in the collecting lens, it was staring right back at her. Death was staring right at her. She wanted to ask Sword if he’d felt the same thing she had, in the face of death, a sort of grand-scale hypnic jerk—that falling sensation, right after going to sleep, your body trying to catch itself on the sheets. That impression of at once falling inside of yourself and through a narrow tunnel straight to the center of the earth. She’d thought that day that perhaps that was all that death was, a big hypnic jerk, except instead of waking yourself up, you got to see what was at the bottom of the tunnel. And she was almost there. She could already picture her body on the sidewalk, eight floors below. Her aunts gathering around Sally, poor Sally, to have to see her twin do this to herself, to have to see and bury her own dead body, in a way. And also, wasn’t Sally the one who’d suffered the most? Why would Olivia do such a thing?
Sword was looking elsewhere now. They were done talking. No one wanted to talk about death with her. Death was only something to joke about.
“I have to make a phone call,” Sword said. “I have to call my wife.”
“Of course.”
“She has depression.”
Was he just going to tell everybody now? He’d said nothing for months, and now, what, it was time to cash in on some sympathy? Sympathy from comedians? He’d just witnessed how cold their breed was.
“She must be worried sick,” Olivia said.
She tried to eavesdrop on Sword’s phone conversation with his wife, but only heard a few words about ordering in and calling a neighbor for company. She considered going up to Dorothy to ask about her brush with death, but Dorothy scared her. Women scared her, in general. Accomplished women like Dorothy, but even just regular women like her mother, and her mother’s friends. They all seemed to know something she didn’t, to be both annoyed that she didn’t know it and reluctant to share it with her. Maybe it was something to do with love, she thought, with being in love. That was something Olivia had never experienced. She wondered sometimes whether that was because she’d never met the right person or because she was incapable of the feeling. She’d tried everything to experience it. She’d dated the boys everyone wanted to date, the boys no one wanted to date, and a few in the middle. She’d had fun (especially with the middle category), but not much more. Six boys had told her they loved her so far, and she’d felt embarrassed for all of them. She’d broken off contact with each immediately.
Artie’s name appeared on her phone. Olivia thought that meant he was about to die. The shooter must be closing in on him, she thought, maybe he hears him approaching, and he wants me to be the last person he writes to. In a split second, she pictured her whole life after this point, the tragic story she would tell herself and others about her aborted love story with a young comic talent, bright future ahead, a promise cut short by senseless violence. Could you fall in love with someone after he was dead? Maybe that was the key. You felt the feeling without having to share it with the person. Then you told your story to whoever asked about your love life, and you got all the sympathy. People understood if you never fell in love again after that. You were excused from the whole charade for the rest of your life.
She was already bracing herself for a declaration of love from Artie, words she could memorize and repeat to herself before bed every night if he died. Maybe she could fall in love with him right now, she thought, a few minutes before he died, rather than after the fact—that would be more powerful. The text said:
A bit disappointing, but still something she could twist a little. To the very end, Artie was thinking about how he could make my life easier. She had to text back, didn’t she? That’s what people did when they were in love. She started typing something, but what if he hadn’t muted his phone and her text revealed his position? Precipitated his demise? She held off on sending and rejoined the group, Jo and Phil and Marianne and Dan. They were still wondering where Kruger was, if he’d run away out of fear or what.
“I hope Artie’s all right,” Olivia said, trying to get into character.
“Relax,” Jo said. “I’m sure he’s not even in the building. All we know is Dorothy thought she heard him sigh.”
“He just texted me. He’s inside.”
That sent a cold wave over them all, colder than the icy air coming from the lake.
“What the fuck is he doing in admin?” Marianne said. She was shivering. Her lips almost blue.
“People take shits there after hours,” Dan said. “It’s nice and quiet.”
They all thought about it. Dying on the toilet. Like Gigi Cestone in The Sopranos, and Elvis, and Evelyn Waugh, and King George II, and Lenny Bruce. Even if Artie was shot in a hallway, the story would be that he died on the shitter.
The wind brought down screeching sounds from a train braking on an L line nearby. That sound was all Olivia had known about life in Chicago before moving there. She’d heard it on ER reruns as a kid. Not a program suited for children, but one her mother had wanted her and Sally to watch every week, in the hopes that it would both instill medical vocations in her daughters and show them that good men existed.
“Wait, are they leaving?” Phil had been studying every move the police made, and the camera crews. Equipment was being loaded back on vans. “Did they arrest the guy?”
Word came in long minutes later that there had been no shooter. Active shooter message: a prank fomented by an undergraduate student who’d hacked the university system and sent an alert to all phones in a certain perimeter. The kid was going in for questioning. “Probably just wanted to skip class,” one of the cops said. He didn’t even seem that angry.
What could’ve been prolonged collective relief (No one was dead! No one would die!) immediately turned into individual frustrations. Sword’s inbox would fill with indignant emails, he thought, each one of his colleagues demanding he take to different deans different and highly specific questions about the failure of the university security system. It was better than having to send condolence emails, of course, but no death or injury in the community also meant that there wouldn’t be a moment of silence and dignity before the email storm.
Olivia was disappointed. The first quivering signs of romantic interest vanished the second she understood that Artie’s life had never been threatened. She wouldn’t fall in love today.
For Dorothy, it was mostly annoyance at the afternoon’s outcome. This was bad storytelling, she thought. “It was all a prank!”—you couldn’t end a story that way. She usually liked giving up on bits. It felt like deep-cleaning her apartment, but without the physical effort. She should’ve been glad, then, that this prank ending was making the decision for her—it was such a silly punch line, useless to write toward—but something prevented her contentment. It wasn’t as simple as “I felt all this fear for nothing,” but that was definitely part of it. The idea that everything in her life had the potential to become material had always soothed as much as exasperated her. She was never able to tell whether she was living something or already writing it. But to know that a third party, a bored undergrad, had been pulling the strings of her life and work the last couple of hours…that was new. That was infuriating. At least her email to Manny had bounced back, she thought. She wouldn’t have to edit the story she’d told him.