On their way to the diner, Dorothy wanted to talk about snow, tell everyone how her mother hadn’t seen snow before the age of thirty-six, when she’d gone to Colorado for a friend’s wedding. She’d found snow so beautiful she’d filled a glass bottle with it to bring home to her daughter. Dorothy remembered her mother coming home with the bottle, a green-tinted Coke one with a metal screw cap. “Didn’t you know it would melt?” she’d asked. Her mother had known, of course. It had melted instantly. She’d just thought that putting it in the freezer would make it turn to snow again. Dorothy, who’d been ten years old then, had wondered whether her mother was mentally impaired. Still, part of her had hoped for the transformation to occur in the freezer. When she’d finally seen snow for herself, years later (her first winter in New York), she’d been excited and moved, yes, but unable to decide whether it was truly the first snow she was seeing, or if the water in the Coke bottle had counted for something.
Snow was falling lightly on them now, and Dorothy was about to tell this story to the group when Manny spoke first.
“What was it you wanted to tell me about Scooch?” he asked her.
“What?”
“Earlier, backstage. You asked if I remembered Scooch.”
“Right,” Dorothy said.
That guy Scooch, from their New York days. His last name had been so confusing (Skuzheskowski?) and he’d been so used to hearing people mispronounce it that he’d forgotten how to say it himself, where the stresses fell. Scooch was what everyone had agreed to call him after a while.
“I didn’t really have anything to say about him,” Dorothy said. “I’d completely forgotten about him, to be honest. But when I was back there with you, trying to cheer you up, I remembered him all at once. Out of nowhere. The whole person. Scooch. I don’t know. Just the fact of his existence was funny to me.”
“How could you forget about Scooch?” Manny asked. “You put him in a bit back then.”
“I did?”
It had amazed her earlier to remember Scooch so vividly, after years spent not thinking about him. How extraordinary the human brain was! But now, what, there were whole bits she’d forgotten? That she’d written herself?
“Randy Scooch,” Manny said. “That was a good bit.”
“His name wasn’t Randy,” Dorothy said. “His name was Perry.”
“I know. But in your bit, he was Randy.”
She’d had entire conversations with Scooch, followed by thoughts about Scooch, sentences written with Scooch in mind. Why wasn’t any of this readily available? The memories there for her to peruse? The bit kept almost appearing, in spots of color, a spotlight shining on it for split seconds at a time before plunging it back in darkness.
“Why would I have called him Randy if his name was Perry?”
“How the hell would I know that?” Manny said.
They made it to the place, and talked about other things. Mainly, while they waited for their food, they talked about Severin. Manny told everyone about his conversation with Severin at O’Hare’s Hudson News, and they all felt bad for the guy. For years, a boy had waited for a letter from Eddie Murphy. Then he’d become a man and stopped waiting. Now that he’d just met Manny, he would start waiting again.
“Maybe we should write to him,” Phil said.
“And pretend we’re Eddie Murphy?”
“Of course not. Just write and say that, you know, we feel for him.”
“What good would that do?”
Olivia asked if anyone at the table had ever written fan mail. Only Manny, Ashbee, and Dorothy had, though Kruger had thought about it.
“I guess it’s a generational thing,” Manny said. “I bet you guys have never even licked a stamp in your life.”
Olivia recalled all the stamps she’d gone through in college to post her specs to Hollywood. She’d been sending fan mail then, in a way.
“Stamps are self-stick now,” she said.
“Every day, in every way, the world gets better and better,” Manny said.
The food arrived as he said it, and they laughed at how big it all was, the buns like Frisbees, the onion rings like handcuffs. Where did anyone find such big onions? America was so easy to make fun of, Marianne said, and everyone ignored her because it was true. Once they were done eating, it would look like they hadn’t eaten anything at all. And perhaps that was the idea behind the big portions, to make people feel like they were just getting started, like there would always be more waiting for them.
“Maybe Phil’s right, though,” Manny said, not aware of how long it had been since Phil had heard someone say these words. “Maybe we should write this guy a letter.”
He asked the kids if they had paper, or just their stupid phones. They needed paper for this. Only Marianne had paper. She handed everyone sheets. Dorothy asked a waiter for pens.
“This is my first assignment to you, as your teacher,” Manny announced. “According to everything I’ve told you about Severin, write the man a letter that will make him happy.”
“Happy?” Marianne said, like she’d never heard the word.
“We don’t really know anything about him other than he works at Hudson News and his dad is dying,” Dan said.
Olivia and Artie were already writing.
“Does it have to be funny?” Phil asked.
“You have an hour,” Manny said.
They all focused on the task at hand, unperturbed by the ambient noise, the all-night crowd. At some point, the waiter who’d given them pens came to clear their near-full plates, but he didn’t dare ask if they wanted anything else.
They wrote in silence for the prescribed hour. Manny, Kruger, Ashbee, and Dorothy wrote their own letters, too. Even August and Sally gave it a shot. Jo made herself laugh on several occasions. They all assumed there would be a communal reading of the letters at the end, that judgment would be passed on their quality, and that perhaps the best one would be sent to Severin. But they wouldn’t send any letters. In fact, no note any of them had taken all day would result in anything of importance. Manny, once time was up, simply asked everyone to fold the letter they’d written and keep it for themselves.
“What are we supposed to learn from this?” Phil asked. “If we don’t share our work?”
Dan said they were supposed to learn that 99 percent of what they wrote was garbage and no one cared.
“That is not the lesson I want you to take away from this,” Manny said, but he didn’t explain what the intended lesson had been.
Artie didn’t much care what the intended lesson had been. He’d written to Severin as if they were friends, he’d asked about cobblers, what kind of cobbler he liked best, as if Severin would answer and Artie would write back, and so on and so forth, but finding out that it wouldn’t happen like that was no great disappointment—it was just another nice thing he’d believed in for a moment.
“I think you should give us feedback on our letters,” Phil told Manny.
Manny said that he might, at some point, that maybe he would keep it for class, that maybe his class would be called Letters to Severin.
“I think I’m going to confession after this,” Artie announced. “Anyone want to join me?”
“I’ll come with you,” Olivia said.
“Wait, is ‘confession’ code for something?” Phil asked.
“It’s just research,” Artie said. “For my bit.”
Jo asked if Artie was going to confess to a real thing or a fake thing, and Artie said he didn’t know yet.
“I bet you’ve never done anything out of line in your life anyway,” Jo said, and she was right, Artie thought. Why did he always feel like he had?
Jo told him he should record the confession on his phone so he could focus on being in the moment rather than worry about getting the wording right if the priest said anything funny.
“Are you allowed to record confession?” Artie asked.
“I don’t think it’s ethical,” Marianne said. “Or even legal.”
“I record pretty much everything people tell me,” Jo said.
She said Andy Kaufman used to record people all the time, too.
“Are you recording us right now?”
“I don’t record you guys. I meant real people. People who are real. Like my florist, or the person who waxes my legs.”
“You buy flowers?” Olivia said.
“All the time.”
“I’ve never seen you buy flowers. There are never any flowers in your apartment.”
“Well, I don’t buy them for myself,” Jo said.
A rat the color of rust dashed out from under their table before anyone could ask Jo who she bought flowers for. How long had it been there? Had the rat been sleeping at their feet the whole time? If so, what had it seen, or heard, that suddenly made it want to run away? Some customers started screaming in the rat’s wake, but Olivia felt compelled to follow it, to take its picture. She unlocked her phone to set up her camera, but was confused by the screen she saw, disoriented by all the numbers there, spinning in a straight line at different speeds, some faster than her eyes could make out, others more slowly, like worry beads, thumbed by an invisible hand. She remembered then what the stopwatch was recording—the seconds, the minutes, and now the hours since Phil’s seizure. She watched the numbers add up for a second too long, registering a chunk of time no one in the world would ever get back. By the time she hit the stop button, the rat was gone.