As they got to his car, Artie received the email his mother had promised him earlier, containing the list of topics he could and couldn’t joke about. Artie opened the passenger door for Olivia and debated reading the email aloud to her. He couldn’t tell how much was okay to talk about your mother with a girl. His most recent girlfriend had thought it funny, the one before that creepy, and Olivia was hard to read. She didn’t say much about her own family. Not onstage, not when she was drunk, and certainly not when she was sober. By the time he’d walked around the car to his door, Artie had decided to keep the mom talk to a minimum. Let this trip be about Olivia, he thought. Let her talk about whatever she wanted.
Olivia wasn’t talking, though. On the way from the bar to the parking lot, she’d only broken her silence once, to reiterate how much she appreciated Artie’s driving her to O’Hare. Silence while walking to the car was okay, Artie had told himself, especially in this cold, but now that they’d made it to the comfort of his Golf, now that the engine was running and heat slowly bringing blood back to the tips of their fingers, he couldn’t let it take hold. He had to talk before they left the garage. Set the pace.
“Are you excited to see your sister?”
Olivia lit a cigarette.
“I’m Larry David,” she said, cracking the window, letting all the heat out. “I don’t get excited.”
Artie didn’t mention that she’d looked pretty excited to hear that Manny Reinhardt would be their teacher next semester. He didn’t say anything about opening the window either, opening the window while the heat was on, something his parents would’ve crucified him for.
“Where is Sally coming from anyway?” he said instead. “I never asked.”
“Maine.”
He really had nothing to say about Maine.
“Isn’t that where Jo thinks Andy Kaufman is hiding?” he tried.
“No,” Olivia said. “Jo thinks Andy Kaufman is in Vermont.”
“Right.”
Olivia knew she wasn’t making it easy for Artie, but she had other things on her mind. Since Dorothy had told them that Manny might come to the Empty Bottle tonight, she was going over everything she had, her strongest material, what would impress him the most (she’d previously thought about bringing second-tier bits to the show, always worried that some other aspiring comedian in the room might steal her best stuff). She was cursing Sally in her head, too, for coming tonight. She’d have to take care of her. She wouldn’t be free to be herself, whatever that meant. She didn’t know exactly who she was, deep down, but she knew it wasn’t the Olivia she was around Sally.
“Do you have other siblings?” Artie asked.
“Just Sally,” Olivia said. “But twins count double.”
“Sally’s your twin?”
“Did I not mention it?”
“Identical?”
“I take issue with that qualification. But yes.”
“That’s so cool.”
Maybe Artie could take care of Sally for her, Olivia thought. Maybe he could get a crush on Sally instead of her.
“I have a brother,” Artie said, determined to get a conversation going. “We’re not twins, but I like him a lot.”
“Liking someone is hard,” Olivia said. “Loving’s easier.”
“You think so? Do you love a lot of people?”
“I mean, not really, but I love Jo, for example. I just met her a few months ago, and I loved her instantly. I’m not sure I like her, though. She can get pretty annoying with the Andy stuff.”
Olivia dragged deeply on her cigarette, angry at herself for launching this thing about love vs. like. She neither loved nor liked her twin (which had to be some sort of crime, she thought, for which there had to be a special place in hell), so why say anything at all?
“What bit are you gonna do tonight?” she asked.
Artie said he wasn’t sure. He’d hoped that what he’d prepared for workshop would’ve been deemed ready, but since Kruger hadn’t let him go past the first line…
“Maybe I should just go for it anyway,” he said. “Prove Kruger wrong.”
“If he comes,” Olivia said. “Guy just fucking ghosted us midworkshop.”
The air looked liquid around them, the cars up front and in all three mirrors like their tail- and headlights were melting. Staring at them, Artie felt one of his heavy pangs of sadness. This wasn’t going like he’d imagined. He’d imagined depressing weather, sure, but that the inside of his car would act as a rampart against the dissolving sky, a few cubic feet of warmth in which he and Olivia would joke and share personal stories. Instead, Olivia was letting the outside leak in through the window, he was freezing, and they were talking about work. Maybe silence was better than this, he thought. Olivia noticed his mood switch. Perhaps she wasn’t that uninterested in him. She asked what was wrong.
“Nothing,” Artie said. He couldn’t tell her what was wrong, that the world looked ugly and that no one liked him. Or loved him, or whatever. That he felt alone, violently so. “I was just thinking about my brother,” he said. It wasn’t exactly a lie. In a way, Mickey was always on his mind. “He goes missing sometimes. He’s missing right now. I was just wondering what he could be doing.”
“What do you mean, he goes missing?”
“I mean he doesn’t answer his phone, his friends don’t know where he is, and my mother freaks out.”
“Like, for how long?”
“He always comes back,” Artie said.
Olivia had a lot more questions. She wanted to know where Mickey usually went, where they usually found him, and why Artie never talked about him onstage.
“Funny you should mention it,” Artie said. “I just received an email from my mother in which she lists all the topics she feels I should and shouldn’t joke about. I didn’t have time to read and see if my brother being a flaky junkie was in any of the categories.”
“You didn’t say he was a junkie.”
“Do you want to see the list?”
“You know, you talk about your mother a lot.”
“I don’t.”
“You kind of always slip her into your bits,” Olivia insisted.
“It makes her happy,” Artie said.
“It’s not like she’s in workshop with us.”
“It’s normal to talk about your family onstage. Every comedian does it.”
“I don’t do it,” Olivia said. “Jo never does it.”
She was right, of course. There was no reason for Artie to bring up his mother this much.
“Want to see my mom’s list?” he repeated, and he handed Olivia his phone.
There was such trust in that gesture, Artie thought. He hoped Olivia could feel it. His phone in her hands looked like any other phone—it in fact looked like Olivia’s own phone—but Artie knew it was his, that the way the apps were organized on the screen would take her a second to figure out, that at any moment, an image might pop up, another “memory,” or an ex’s text, divulging something extremely personal about him. He wondered what would be better: a text from an ex who missed him, or one from his brother. He could tell that talking about Mickey had earned him some points. Girls liked stories about mysterious men, unfit for the world. Few could think of those men as boyfriend material, though, and that’s when the “concerned brother” character came in. Artie knew he owed a good portion of his sex life to Mickey. Mickey was the fascinating one: he painted, he made music, he suffered, and, occasionally, he disappeared. When you waited for him at the bar, you never knew what he would come in looking like. Skinny and translucent, pink and bloated, fit as a boxer, wearing bum clothes, good clothes, or even once, unexplained to this day, emerald surgical scrubs. But Mickey was a moving target, an impossible catch. It didn’t matter how interested in him you got: he had to pick you (and in his whole life, he’d only ever picked Ethel). Whereas Artie was always available as the next best thing. The good brother. The safer bet. Girls could stay in proximity to Mickey’s aura of excitement and danger, hear all the stories about him and feel Artie’s pain, without risking anything more than a boring date night once in a while. They could have both the tragic story and the decent guy.
Olivia was opening his email now. For the next however many minutes, she would be in control of his life. Maybe she was right now deleting an important email he’d just received and would never see. Maybe Mickey was calling and she was sending him to voicemail.
“Here we go,” Olivia said. “ ‘From: Leora Kessler.’ The subject line is ‘Ideas for Material.’ ”
“I’m all ears,” Artie said.
“ ‘Part One: What You Can Joke About.’ ”
Artie, according to his mother, could joke about the following:
“Who wants to hear about car trouble?” Olivia said after getting to the bottom of the list.
“My father is always interested,” Artie said.
“What’s his name?”
“Leonard.”
“Leonard and Leora,” Olivia said. “That’s very nice.”
“Leora means ‘light’ in Hebrew,” Artie said, and wondered why he said it. Olivia hadn’t asked about the meaning of Leora, and he’d decided not to talk about his mother more than necessary. What was so hard about that?
“You’re Jewish?” Olivia asked.
“Well, yeah.”
Artie always thought it was obvious, what he was. He’d grown up convinced it was written on his forehead. He hadn’t believed it when he’d heard that 40 percent of Americans didn’t personally know any Jews.
“You never talk about that in your comedy either,” Olivia said.
“About being Jewish? It’s not that funny.”
“I like it when Reinhardt does it.”
“You like everything he does.”
“He’s a genius.”
Artie said that Jews were basically seen as white people nowadays, so no one thought it was interesting.
“People fucking hate you, though,” Olivia said. “White people and Black people hate you. Arabs, Mexicans…everyone hates you. I guess maybe Asians are okay with Jews, but I might be wrong about that.”
“Do you hate Jews?”
“I don’t discriminate,” Olivia said. “Default setting: I hate everyone equally. I hate myself. I hate people for being people, though, mostly, not for looking a certain way or believing in this or that bullshit.”
“That’s fair,” Artie said. “People are horrible.”
Except he didn’t believe that. He liked people. He liked meeting new ones at parties. What was he thinking, agreeing with Olivia on everything? Did he think women liked that?
“I mean, some people are fine,” he corrected himself. “Like you, for example. Even though you’re an antisemite.”
Olivia enjoyed being called an antisemite. She laughed a little. She insisted he should hone his Jewish material.
“Especially since joking about Hitler is allowed,” she added. “Your mom’s pretty open minded, by the way.”
“Are you kidding? I don’t know what we would talk about at home if we didn’t talk about Hitler. Her favorite books are about Nazis. Her favorite work of art is a statue of Hitler kneeling.”
“Oh, I know what you’re talking about!” Olivia said.
She’d heard about the Hitler sculpture in college art history. Artie had actually seen it in Warsaw ten or so years earlier with his parents—his only trip to Europe. He and Olivia were bonding, Artie thought. Bonding over Him (the title of the Hitler sculpture). His sadness was gone. Olivia had finished her cigarette and closed the window. He was getting warmer, and the traffic ahead was starting to look like a seventies movie more than the depressing present, the lights in the windshield sharp clusters of grains rather than droopy blobs of red. Olivia was making suggestions about what he should work on, Artie thought. She was interested. And he did have one idea for a bit about Holocaust survivors. She might like that. She might like to hear about it. It wasn’t ready at all, but it could be good one day. He started giving her the beats.
About two years earlier, he said, his great-uncle, a Holocaust survivor, had been approached by a museum in Seattle to have his interactive hologram made. A handful of museums had started doing this, filming and recording the few remaining Holocaust survivors for hours in a special 360-degree studio while asking them hundreds upon hundreds of questions about their experience and their life before and after the war. Certainly Olivia had heard of this? She hadn’t. From that footage, Artie explained, nerds in California made three-dimensional holograms of each Holocaust survivor, holograms who would be capable of answering any question future generations might have about the Shoah. The survivor would, through technology, become a new kind of survivor, Artie explained, a supersurvivor, a survivor of his own death. His great-uncle had agreed to do it, and the whole family had gotten to see a preview of his hologram before it went up for a temporary exhibition. Even Mickey had come to see it. Mickey and Artie had gotten a little drunk beforehand, to better deal with their great-uncle’s hologram. They’d laughed when they’d first seen it appear, but then they’d quickly started crying. They’d told themselves it was the alcohol, but Artie wasn’t so sure about that. He’d actually been moved by the hologram, and the other three he’d seen. His parents and cousins had remained in the room with their relative’s hologram, but Artie and Mickey had paid a visit to the others, in other rooms. They wouldn’t have dared ask their great-uncle’s hologram anything, but alone with the 3D ghost of a certain Ezra Gluck, Artie had loosened up. He’d asked the stranger’s hologram if he felt like a badass for surviving the war, and the hologram had replied that he didn’t really think in those terms, that if he really thought about it, the way he saw it was he’d been selfish, that all those who hadn’t survived had probably been less selfish than him. “Jesus,” Mickey had said. “Do you have more uplifting questions for Ezra?” and Artie had responded, “What uplifting question can one ask a Holocaust survivor in a Holocaust museum?” after which Mickey had taken the microphone and asked Ezra’s hologram what his favorite Holocaust movie was.
“What did the hologram say?” Olivia asked, ready to light another cigarette.
“He said that it was hard for him to watch reconstitutions of the camps. But as far as World War II movies went, everyone should see Au Revoir les Enfants.”
“Interesting,” Olivia said. “It’s like an oracle you can discuss pop culture with.”
“I wouldn’t call Au Revoir les Enfants pop culture,” Artie said.
“You go there to ask a ghost deep questions about the past, you can ask him anything, and you end up talking about movies.”
“Well, that’s essentially what the bit will be,” Artie said. “Idiot me talking to a Holocaust survivor’s hologram about World War II movies.”
“It’s kind of Pythonesque in spirit,” Olivia said.
A big compliment for Artie. The bit wasn’t yet written, but it already had a spirit! And it was Pythonesque!
“It’s just a framework for now,” he said.
Olivia was about to open the window again, for the smoke, but Artie said to keep it closed, he could stand it. They were silent for a minute after that, but it wasn’t uncomfortable—Artie could tell that Olivia was thinking about what they’d just been saying, and that was good, because Olivia loved thinking, and she might love someone who made her think about new things. She still had his phone in her hand, her hand in her lap. The phone had locked and gone black.
“It’s really cool that you’ll get to ask your great-uncle anything once he’s dead,” she ended up saying. “I think they should make holograms of everyone’s parents so you can ask them whatever you want without them having to know. That would be a major hit.”
“Maybe it will happen in our lifetime,” Artie said. “They’re made by Spielberg in California, the Holocaust survivor holograms. It won’t be long before someone uses the technology for profit.”
“They’re made by Spielberg?”
“I mean, his foundation,” Artie said.
“Did you ask the hologram what he thought of Schindler’s List?”
“I did, actually. He said, ‘No comment.’ ”
They were about halfway to O’Hare now, and Olivia was laughing. She went on about how the hologram could become the perfect gift for old people in a few decades. Kids and grandkids, instead of giving their parents and grandparents genealogy kits for Christmas, or a few sessions with the ghostwriter who’d put together the shitty memoir of their lives, would buy them an appointment to be made into a talking hologram.
“It will be a win-win situation,” she said. “Like, the grandparent becoming a hologram will think, They love me! They’re making me immortal! And the grandchildren will feel like they don’t need to visit so often.”
“I loved visiting my grandfather,” Artie said.
“I dislike my whole family,” Olivia said.
“Even your twin?”
“Especially Sally.”
Artie didn’t believe her. Everything he knew about twins had come to him mediated by Hollywood, little girls finishing each other’s sentences and so on. In sixth grade, he’d been in class with a pair, too, he remembered now. Jean and Louise. The way the teachers told them apart was Louise had a stutter and Jean didn’t, but according to Jean, Louise never stuttered when they were alone together.
While Artie silently went over his twin knowledge, Olivia was regretting telling him she disliked Sally, but also hating herself for regretting it, and regretting always having to hate herself for saying things. This was how the inside of her head was at all times: layers upon layers of self-hatred, mixed in with a lot of pride, ideas for bits, and attempts to solve whatever else was going on that day. She was always working on three or four issues simultaneously. Right now, for instance, while talking to Artie, she was thinking about how she’d have to change her tampon at the airport (she’d forgotten to do it at the bar), but also trying to think up what she would say to Manny Reinhardt if she met him in a few hours. Because she was more focused on that than on her conversation with Artie, she was answering his questions way too fast and honestly. She had to switch priorities. She had to pay attention to Artie. She remembered she might want to make Sally his burden tonight. She had to find nice things to say about her.
“I mean, she’s my twin,” she said. “Of course I love her. But inasmuch as I hate myself, it’s hard to be fully indulgent with my spitting image.” Great work, Olivia thought. You’re making Sally sound so lovely. “You’ll like her, for sure,” she added. “She’s me, but nicer. Which isn’t such an impressive feat, but whatever. She cares about people.”
“Is she funny?” Artie asked.
Honesty was probably best.
“She can appreciate dark humor,” Olivia said. “But not mine so much. She’s always analyzing what comes out of my mouth.”
Sally was convinced, for example, because of some of the low-self-esteem jokes she’d heard her make, that Olivia had been abused by their stepfather, too, and that she was repressing the memory. She’d suggested many times that Olivia go see a hypnotist to retrieve the trauma.
And of course Olivia had been abused by their stepfather. If she thought back on those years (she tried not to, but when she did), she assumed the man hadn’t even always known which sister was which when he grabbed a hand to put on his lap (it always started that way). She and Sally had looked much more alike back then.
“Are you all right?” Artie asked. Olivia had been quiet for a minute.
“I was just thinking,” she said. “Maybe your brother is having a crisis.”
“No shit,” Artie said.
“Maybe he’s having a crisis, and he went to ask the Holocaust survivor hologram more questions about the meaning of life.”
Artie took a second to imagine it. Mickey, alone with an old man’s ghost, a man-made ghost—laser beams and mirrors—looking for answers.
“You should write for TV,” he said to Olivia. “That’s pretty good.”
“Right? The Holocaust hologram as a shrink for millennials.”
They riffed on that for a minute. The millennial asking stupid questions, the hologram answering with pragmatic advice.
“Ezra, why do I feel so empty?”
“You should read more books.”
“Ezra, when is my life going to start?”
“You should read the book Who Moved My Cheese?”
“Ezra, have you ever had that feeling? That you couldn’t spend one more fucking minute in your own body?”
“There should be temporary suicide, for sure.” (Here, it wasn’t clear whether Olivia was answering as the hologram or as herself.) “I hope someone’s working on it.”
They went back to their own voices after that, and Olivia said maybe Mickey was actually going to surprise Artie tonight, that maybe he was on his way to Chicago to see him perform.
“Now that’s even cheesier than your previous scenario,” Artie said. “If you don’t make it as a comedian, definitely try to get staffed on Togetherness.”
“I think that show was canceled.”
“You know what I mean. There’s always something like it on TV.”
He hadn’t even watched Togetherness. Just the title—he’d assumed it was the kind of show where brothers showed up, supported each other no matter what.
Olivia didn’t take Artie’s suggestion as an insult. In college, she’d written spec episodes for all kinds of shows, even shows that’d been off the air for years, like Cheers and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, sending them straight to networks in hopes of getting noticed and called to Los Angeles right away for a lifetime of bottled beer and bad puns in musty writers’ rooms. That had been her dream. She’d loved writing specs, getting inside the heads of characters who were already established, whose flaws the audience already knew, who didn’t need to go through fundamental changes, only new situations, problems that would be solved by the end of the episode.
“I’d love to write for TV,” she admitted to Artie. “I wrote a spec episode of Mad Men once, for fun.” She left out the other twenty-six specs she’d written, she left out the fact that “for fun” meant she’d sent them all Priority Mail Express to Hollywood.
“I didn’t know you wrote dramatic stuff,” Artie said.
“It’s an episode where Don Draper has to find a pitch for Paper Mate, for their felt-tip pens,” she went on. “He gives a pen to everyone in his family to see how they react to it, how they use it and all.”
“Sounds very intense,” Artie said.
Olivia punched him in the shoulder, but it was playful, Artie thought. They were flirting.
“I’m serious,” he said. “The suspense is killing me. What do his children do with their felt-tip pens? Does the family ever recover from it?”
“Shut up,” Olivia said. “You don’t deserve to hear it.”
They were approaching the airport, cars were jerking at the last second to be in the proper terminal lane.
“I’ve actually never seen Mad Men,” Artie confessed. “I did watch the scene you were all talking about in workshop, though. It’s pretty great.”
Olivia tried to gauge the level of sincerity in Artie’s voice. She didn’t think he could possibly have caught all the nuances of the scene if he hadn’t seen the twelve episodes that came before it. He was probably making fun of her.
“For those of us who had to look for father figures in works of fiction,” she said, “that scene was a big moment.”
“Did you not know your father?” Artie asked.
“Just had a stepfather,” Olivia said. “Pretty shitty guy. The worst, really.”
A “pretty shitty guy” could mean a lot of different things, Artie thought. So could “the worst.” He decided not to press. They were at the terminal anyway. He stayed in the car while Olivia went in to get Sally. She’d asked her to wait by the McDonald’s, and there she was, good old Sally, always doing as she was told. She was sitting next to a family of four, all sleeping in positions that looked painful, necks at weird angles, feet near faces. On the other side of her, a young woman was watching videos on her phone, eating chips, looking all cozy. It always made Olivia uneasy, seeing how quickly some people could make a public space their own. Since she’d moved to Chicago, she hadn’t even magnetized a take-out menu to the fridge, or taped a photo to a wall. At least Sally looked out of place, she thought, at least Sally looked uncomfortable. They would always have that in common.