Manny hadn’t opened the blinds in a week. There were too many windows in his brownstone, and he feared paparazzi might be hanging around the block. Though, in all honesty, it wasn’t just that: natural light depressed him, too. Always had. He only came to life at sunset, when someone (or something, most likely—a sensor, an algorithm) turned the streetlights on.
Maybe he should move to Iceland, Manny thought. More nighttime there. Iceland in the winter, then the South Pole in the summer, whatever city they had near there. This reminded him of something stupid he’d seen on Twitter. Everything did. Someone had tweeted that, in an effort to be more inclusive, Americans should stop using “Northern hemisphere–specific seasonal language,” because people had to be aware that what was summer for them wasn’t summer for everybody else on the planet. The person suggested we only use month names from now on, or refer to chunks of time by quarter number (Q1, Q2, and so forth). A lot of people had congratulated the person on her idea, but then someone had immediately made fun of her, responded that another tiny inclusive thing we could do as a species was avoid heliocentric temporal language and replace today’s date with “Stardate 36992.4.8,” for example. This had made Manny both laugh and want to shoot himself in the face. Not because the original tweet confirmed how stupid the world was becoming, but because it had only taken someone else four minutes to come up with and type out the Stardate response. Manny thought people were too fast now. Jokes were coming in too fast. He didn’t post to Twitter himself and didn’t understand comedians who did. Why would they kill a joke instantly by giving it to the whole world at once? And for free? There was something admirable there, in a way. These people had to believe the well would never go dry, that jokes would just keep on coming and coming. He wished he had that kind of faith in himself. Was the new generation just better? More confident? The Stardate guy wasn’t even a comedian, Manny didn’t think. Probably just someone bored at work.
Manny’d talked about it with Bill Burr once, why Burr was releasing good material for free all the time on his podcast, but Burr had said Manny was an idiot: of course he wasn’t doing it for free. Still. Twitter, a podcast, those were not venues for comedy. Good material was for the stage. Live TV, perhaps. It was for a physical audience, first and foremost. If you couldn’t hear a laugh, the joke was wasted. And as long as you could tell it and hear new people laugh, it was still alive. That’s why comedians before radio, before TV, had been able to sell their jokes to younger performers when they retired. Not everyone had heard them yet. Not that Manny would ever want to buy a joke from someone else. It was just how it used to be. The business changed all the time.
His ex-wife called. She’d been calling once a day since the first scandal (the beating at the Comedy Strip), twice since the second (the marriage proposals), to check on him. Rachel called in the morning, to make sure Manny wasn’t too hungover, and again in the dead of the afternoon (which she knew had always been the worst time of day for him), to try delaying the hour at which he would start drinking.
“I’m not going to quit,” Manny told her. “You know that. I don’t believe in that.”
“You don’t believe in sobriety?”
“All the AA bullshit. It’s too extreme.”
He’d actually started and abandoned a bit about AA years ago. It was based on an actor he’d met at a charity event who’d gone onstage to tell his story and kept repeating he’d been sober a year, a little over, in fact. He’d given the audience the exact number of days, and everyone had applauded. Manny had, too (he wasn’t an asshole), but really, as he was clapping, he’d wondered why the number mattered. The way he understood the “One day at a time” motto was that every day of sobriety was so excruciating that it didn’t help to think about the future, yet AA gave you color-coded chips to mark the length of your sobriety, certain anniversaries, and there was a contradiction there, to Manny’s mind. It seemed greedy to want people to know both the endlessness of your pain and how much of that endlessness you’d gone through already. And what did the chips even mean? If you never recovered but were always recovering, if you could slip at any moment and all there was to do was get to the end of the one day you were in without a drink and in the morning the clock started all over again, then who cared how long you’d been suffering? You don’t ask Sisyphus how long he’s been doing this, with the stone. Or you could, but there isn’t much to do with the answer.
“It’s not like I beat up women when I’m drunk,” he told his ex-wife on the phone.
“I know. It’s the timing. It’s making people conflate all the stories,” Rachel said.
“I just propose marriage to them,” Manny said. “Apparently.”
“Some would argue that’s worse.”
“Don’t give in to this shit, Rach. Words hurting more than physical violence. You’re smarter than this.”
“I was making a joke.”
“Leave the jokes to me.”
Why was he being such a dick? It was nice of Rachel to call. Rachel had always been good to him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and he asked about their son. “Has August heard back from Boothe yet?”
August would take the bar exam in February. In the meantime, he was interning at Boothe, Bloom & Boghosian in Chicago. He’d been waiting to hear if they’d let him assist in the courtroom on the Delgado trial, which was starting tomorrow.
“Still waiting,” Rachel said. “He’s pretty confident they’ll say yes, though.”
Where did that confidence come from? Manny wondered. Certainly not from him. And Rachel wasn’t a glass-half-full type either. None of the role models they’d picked for August had been.
“Did you tell him I was moving to Chicago for a few months?”
Rachel didn’t respond right away.
“They still want you to teach there?”
“Of course,” Manny said. “They’re reasonable people. They understand the situation is absurd.”
Rachel took another second.
“I don’t want to tell Auggie anything about Chicago unless you’re absolutely certain you’re going,” she said.
Manny thought he shouldn’t have mentioned August. When he mentioned August, their conversations started sounding like after-school specials.
“He’s twenty-six years old,” he said. “He can take it if there’s a change of plans.”
Manny and his son hadn’t talked much the past few years. A handful of emails, birthday calls, a couple strained days around Christmas every year. Rachel was convinced it had to do with the divorce, that August was mad at his father for cheating, but Manny wanted to believe his son simply had a life to live. It was so unusual, someone living his own life, not judging the way other people did it. He told Rachel she should stop protecting him so much.
“How about you start?” Rachel said.
Manny knew all the money he’d put into his son’s education didn’t make him a good father, so he didn’t mention it, but the soundproof walls in the basement so August could play drums, the martial arts lessons, the French tutor, all the books he wanted…didn’t that count as protection, too?
“Your son is blowing big-shot lawyers to be first row on a fucking murder trial, and you think he needs some kind of psychological preparation before he sees his father?”
“It’s a Ponzi scheme trial,” Rachel said. “Not murder.”
“Didn’t the guy’s daughter die, too?”
“Suicide. Unrelated. And don’t talk about Auggie like that. He’s not blowing anyone. He works very hard.”
Manny knew Rachel would’ve hung up on him just a few weeks ago for the “blowing” comment.
“All I’m saying is, I’m a fucking cliché,” he said. “Not a monster. There’s a big difference.”
“At least he’s on your side in all this,” Rachel said.
“Is he?”
“He says these women have no case against you.”
That was different from being on his side, Manny thought.
“What about me breaking Shitlip’s nose?”
“Auggie says if Lipschitz doesn’t sue, there’s no reason not to go back to your life.”
Manny respected that his son saw the world through a specialized prism. Even if that prism was law. At least it wasn’t social media. August didn’t claim to know everything, the way other kids his age did. He had one area of expertise, he knew to stick to it, and that was perhaps the best you could hope for—for your child to know enough about one thing that he could recognize the things he didn’t know about. It had been hard for Manny, though, to accept his son’s career choice. As an artist, you were supposed to say you didn’t want your kid to follow in your footsteps, it was such a hard and unfair world, so unpredictable, and you didn’t want your baby to suffer and be rejected all the time, the way you had been, etc., but then when your son became a lawyer, you had to wonder where you fucked up, what he saw in you that disgusted him so much.
“Still,” Manny told Rachel. “I think I’ll have to apologize. No way around it.”
“I’m sure Auggie would love that,” Rachel said.
“I was talking about a public apology.”
“Right.”
“What would I have to apologize to August for? I cheated on you, not him.”
“Never mind,” Rachel said. “I misunderstood you. Public apology, yes, that’s a good idea. You’ll have to address the drinking thing too, for sure. All three women said you drank a lot. Do you have a draft you want me to look at?”
Of course he didn’t have a draft. When his agent had first suggested he apologize about Lipschitz, Manny had asked to think about it, and in the time it had taken him to think about it, the women had come forward with their stories of marriage proposals, and now he didn’t know what he was supposed to apologize for. If he wrapped it all up in the same statement, it would add to the confusion. People would think he’d been violent to the women, too. His head was exploding. He’d been worried for a week that he had brain cancer and these were the symptoms—frequent headaches, punching guys at comedy clubs. He’d cried a couple of times, too, since the shitstorm had started. In fact, he’d wanted to cry when Lipschitz had called him a wash-up at the Strip, a dinosaur (“And not even the good kind,” Lipschitz had said, “not even one we remember”). It was because Manny had wanted to cry that he’d punched him. He’d punched him in order not to cry. Maybe crying was a symptom. He tried to chase the cancer thoughts away, like he’d been doing for days.
“I don’t have a draft,” he told Rachel. “Michelle keeps telling me the agency has apology specialists that can write one for me. I think she’s getting impatient.”
“Maybe you should trust her.”
“I don’t want anyone to ever write anything on my behalf. And I’m okay apologizing for the punch. It’s the marriage proposals that I’m not apologizing for. That shit’s ridiculous. Also, I didn’t propose. I didn’t say, ‘Will you marry me.’ I don’t think I said that. I probably said, ‘Maybe we should get married.’ That’s what I usually say. As you may recall. ‘Maybe we should get married’ is very different. You’re the first person I said it to that took it seriously, by the way. Everyone does now. You were ahead of your time.”
“Don’t be an asshole,” Rachel said. “Don’t pretend you were joking when you proposed to me.”
“You’ll never know.”
He promised her he wouldn’t drink until he had a draft of an apology, and that he would send it to her.
“I’ll show it to Auggie then,” Rachel said. “If that’s okay.”
What could Manny say? August would have to see it anyway.
“Brilliant,” he said. “We can work on it as a family. Create new memories.”
They hung up. Manny opened Word on his computer. He’d judged all public apologies so harshly before, the same words for everyone. Now it was his turn, and he couldn’t find better ones. The problem was, he had to keep it bland, he thought. You couldn’t be funny in an apology, or try to be clever. Apologies had become mere phatic functions of language, automatic responses no one really paid attention to, or noticed, unless they never came. Dullness was the goal. The reader/witness of the apology had to forget that the apologizer was a real person, and apologizing a hard thing to do. Manny wrote:
He wrote about his childhood, how hard it had been, and how he realized that the amount of anger he carried was perhaps a form of disease. He struck the word “disease.” Claiming a disease was making excuses, not apologizing. The key was for people to come out of this thinking he had a disease without him having to say the word. Which should be easy to do, he thought. Everyone saw diseases everywhere now. Everyone was sick. He’d almost convinced August, on his law school applications, to check the “disability” box, because August had a very high IQ, and Manny thought hyperintelligence should be considered a mental illness.
He wrote about August and Rachel, how much he loved them, and how sorry he was to have brought shame onto them. He wrote about Lipschitz, of course, though he’d learned from reading other apologies that it was better not to go into much detail when it came to your victim. He stuck to the words “promising” and “talented,” even though Lipschitz had never made him laugh, and insisted that there was never any excuse for violence, even though he didn’t believe that was true either.
Manny knew the draft was far from clean, but he wanted to start drinking, so he sent it to Rachel. That’s when he saw Dorothy’s email. Since the Strip, he’d set it up so any email he received triggered a fake and immediate “System Delivery Failure” response—people would think he was off the grid, but he could still see everything everyone wrote to him. He thought it was a joke at first, that Dorothy was joking about being stuck at school with a school shooter, but it wasn’t funny, and Dorothy had always been funny. He hadn’t seen her in years, sure, but funny people didn’t just become boring. Especially if they remained childless, which, to his knowledge, was still Dorothy’s situation. He wanted to call her, but didn’t have her number anymore. He called Ashbee, and seemed to wake him from a nap. Ashbee wasn’t aware of any shooters anywhere. He was home, five miles from campus. He was pretty sure Dorothy was joking, and told Manny not to worry.
“I just want Dorothy’s number,” Manny said.
He’d never much liked Ashbee. Ashbee had always struck him as a try-hard. When he’d heard about Ashbee starting up a graduate comedy program twelve or so years before, Manny had first thought it was a joke (it would’ve been Ashbee’s best), but then when different sources had confirmed it wasn’t, he’d understood it might’ve been Ashbee’s true calling, teaching what he couldn’t do but had spent his life attempting.
Ashbee gave him Dorothy’s number.
“And we agree that you don’t care for Kruger’s number,” he added.
“Correct,” Manny said.
Ashbee wanted to riff. He didn’t talk to Manny Reinhardt every day.
“Only Dorothy’s. Dorothy: you’d like to know if she’s alive. Kruger: can die a slow and lonely death.”
“Correct,” Manny repeated.
“Very well.”
Manny thought calling Ashbee with such a pressing request would spare him from lousy jokes and small talk. But Ashbee was going to be his colleague now. Manny had to give him a little something.
“Does teaching leave you any time to work on your own stuff?” he asked. “We haven’t seen a new Ashbee show in a while.”
“Not sure that’s what the world needs right now,” Ashbee said. “Another middle-aged man ranting about his experience as a middle-aged man.”
“Except you’re a Black middle-aged man,” Manny said. “I don’t know about needs, but the world definitely wants to hear what you have to say.”
“I guess I just don’t want to partake,” Ashbee said. “I’m not much into all that stuff. I’m selfish at heart. I’ve never wanted to speak for anyone other than myself.”
They exchanged banalities about writing, how speaking for oneself was the only thing one could do in the end, one’s best shot at universality, etc. Ashbee said something about animal memes. He had a theory that, soon, comedians would only be able to joke about other species if they wanted to stay clear of scandal. After that, it would only be a question of time before people started getting offended on behalf of the animals in question, but still, there was a window there for now. With animals. People recognized themselves in animals. You just had to look at the most popular memes on the internet. Like the swan meme, the swan at the party. Did Manny know what he was talking about? Manny didn’t. He didn’t follow the animal memes.
“I’ll send you a link,” Ashbee said, and a few minutes later, he did.
He sent Manny a link to an essay about memes, too. Manny wasn’t a reader of essays. Would he have to read essays now? On comedy? Would that be asked of him now that he was going to teach stand-up classes?
He dialed Dorothy. No response. Hearing her voice on the outgoing message, Manny realized he couldn’t quite match a face to it anymore. He’d spent three or so years with her in the nineties closing every cheap bar in the West Village, and they’d slept together, too, a handful of times, he’d seen all her shows, but he couldn’t remember anything specific about her features. He didn’t pay a lot of attention to faces. He’d even had a hard time distinguishing August from other short, dark-haired boys in kindergarten. He remembered a lot of things Dorothy said, though. One in particular, not long after he’d met Rachel. He must’ve talked about Rachel a lot back then, he’d fallen so hard. Rachel was writing for Sex and the City at the time, and when he’d told this to Dorothy, Dorothy had said that Sex and the City was an unrealistic portrayal of women, not because the women onscreen paid too much for shoes and never gained weight in spite of all the food they had between already lavish meals, but because none of them ever talked about their mothers. Manny had used the line a couple of years later, in his first Letterman interview, not mentioning that it was Dorothy’s. Letterman had asked him about Rachel, by then his wife, and what he thought of the show she worked on, because Manny’s brand of comedy was so far from the Sex and the City vibe, and Manny had said, “I actually love the show. I’m a Charlotte through and through,” to which the audience had laughed too generously. “The only critique I would have,” he’d added while they were still laughing, “the only critique I would have—and I tell my wife this all the time—is the show is a bit unrealistic because the girls never really talk about their mothers.” Even louder laughs had ensued. “I would like to hear them talk about their mothers a little, you know? Understand where they’re coming from.” Women had come to him after the show to tell him it was so true, what he’d said, that they’d never noticed it, but yes, the absence of mother talk in Sex and the City was astounding, now that they thought about it. Rachel hadn’t appreciated the comment. She’d told Manny that night, when he’d come home, that the show’s creators had made a deliberate decision not to have Carrie and the girls talk about their families (“not just their mothers, by the way, their whole families”), that the show was about something else, and now they were going to get letters, her bosses, and they would blame her, and Manny should never have undermined her work so publicly. “It was just a joke,” Manny had said, and thought, Someone else’s joke, at that. The whole way home, he’d worried that Dorothy would call him, angry that he’d used her line on Letterman. She hadn’t said at the time that it was a line she wanted to use for something, but still. Manny felt like shit for blurting it out. It had presented itself in a moment of stress (the biggest interview of his life so far), and he’d grabbed onto it.
Dorothy never called about the line, never mentioned it, but twenty-some years later, alone in his curtained living room, Manny was still mad at himself for stealing it. He was vulnerable these days. Because he was being attacked left and right in the press, he was afraid that it might surface, that Dorothy would decide to let the world know that Manny Reinhardt had once stolen a joke from her, a less successful female comedian.
The email she’d just sent, though, insisted that she was on his side. And maybe she was dead now. Maybe one of the only people who was on his side had been shot, Manny thought. His phone rang, but it wasn’t Dorothy, only Rachel telling him what he already knew, that his apology needed a lot more work. Manny promised he’d draft something else right away and poured himself another bourbon. Contrition came easier this time. Not because of the bourbon, but because he’d just remembered how bad he’d felt that night after Letterman, using a line that wasn’t his. He tapped into that old guilt and wrote something decent.
Rachel said that version was better, more heartfelt. That she would send it to Auggie for legal advice. Manny asked his ex-wife if they called their son Auggie at work, or August. She said everyone called him Auggie, even clients.
“It’s a shame,” Manny said. “We gave him such a good name. August Reinhardt. He could have been a novelist with that name. An astronaut.”
“Auggie Reinhardt is nice, too,” Rachel said. “It has a nice ring.”
“It sounds like he’ll only ever defend small-time crooks.”
Rachel said small-time crooks needed defending, too.
While he was on the phone with Rachel, Ashbee left a message to let him know that the shooter thing had been a prank. Everyone was safe and sound. “Got to go,” the message ended. “I’m at the barber’s, I have a date tonight.”
The news that Ashbee had a date, the bad music playing at the barber’s in the background, all intensified the silence in Manny’s own apartment. He hadn’t seen anyone in days. Even food deliveries were left on his doorstep. All contact with the outside world was mediated through the phone in his hand, that black rectangle that suddenly reminded Manny of the monolith in 2001. It was the same black, wasn’t it? Shiny and opaque. Malevolent. He felt as lonely as he had in hospitals, when August was sick as a baby. That feeling he’d had back then that he would never again be anywhere else. That life would go on for others outside the hospital, but not for him, and not for August, that hospital time would be their time, the entirety of it, their lifetime. Remembering this, he felt his heart compress, a sponge being squeezed. Was he having a heart attack? Was it cancer? Was it just sadness? Maybe he was lonely, Manny thought. Maybe that was it. What did lonely people do? They read books. He should read something.
He read the essay Ashbee sent, about memes. Meme writers were even less understandable to Manny than comedians on Twitter. At least comedians on Twitter were trying to get something out of their posts, expand their following or whatever, generate buzz, while meme writers…these people didn’t even want credit. That made no sense to Manny. No sense at all. Although anonymity was the best way not to have anyone mess with you if your joke didn’t please. That was unfair, Manny thought. If you had the guts to show your face, you got in trouble. But if you gave up on putting your name out there, you could make any joke you wanted, unsavory, downright appalling, even not funny at all: the joke would find its audience, and no one would ever wonder whether the person who’d made it had been allowed to make it. No one cared who they were.
Manny reread these lines several times. A pure expression. Our society’s unconscious, the collective dreams we dreamed at night. Of course. Memes couldn’t have authors. Memes were our tea leaves, our oracles. If we found out who wrote them, the spell would be broken. Maybe one guy wrote them all in New Zealand, or Siberia. All the memes. Maybe an artificial intelligence did, a web of computers, an alien civilization, a god. Memes were the last bastion of comic freedom, Manny realized. He called Ashbee again, but Ashbee didn’t pick up, Ashbee was getting ready for his date. Manny wanted to tell him it wasn’t animal memes that were safe, but memes in general, all of them. That you could still say whatever you wanted to say there. That they should teach their students how to write memes, not stand-up, that memes were the future.
About two minutes later, the idea struck Manny for what it was: ridiculous. Anonymity—who wanted that? What comic didn’t want the world to know that a good joke was his? Manny never believed people (people like Rachel) who said they didn’t want to be famous, that all they needed was for their work to be recognized in the very small circle that mattered. They said they didn’t want to lose control over their image, that fame was toxic, and fame was toxic, yes, people knew too much about you, Manny thought, people knew too much about him, especially, right this minute, but if he was being honest, wasn’t it better than them knowing nothing at all? Than them not even knowing his name? Wasn’t everyone knowing what a shitty person he was better than having to introduce himself to new people all the time? Introducing yourself sucked. Starting from scratch. Figuring out what to put forth, what lies to tell. Of course he was ashamed that everyone with an internet connection knew he slept with women thirty years younger than him and became an idiot who brought up marriage after too many drinks, but he would be ashamed anyway, famous or not—shame had always been his motor, what kept him writing. He’d always written to erase previous shameful stuff with new material, new material he became ashamed of after he toured it long enough, and so on and so forth. That was the cycle he’d been in for decades, so what if he was ashamed on a grander scale now? Maybe it would get him to a new level, writing-wise. He’d been stuck on the same plateau for years. He’d been stuck at home, too, for over a week now, with the blinds drawn, because he’d been told to lie low, that was what one did in his situation, but really, he couldn’t wait to show himself again, and maybe he should get back into the world right this instant, not listen to what others recommended. It was his life, and he didn’t want to hide. Manny wanted to be seen. It wasn’t purely selfish—he wanted to see others, too, and not just the front they presented to the world but who they really were. He wanted to know their fears, their favorite jokes, what kept them up at night. He wanted to see his son. He looked up flight times to Chicago. He could be there in five hours if he left his apartment in the next few minutes. Arrive at O’Hare at 10:02 p.m. August worked late. They’d have a drink together. They’d talk. Manny booked his ticket.