In an old house by the canal, people were telling jokes. Stories of the Knock Knock Club had been passed down from comedian to comedian: that the club was originally a hospital for lepers, a nunnery, the manor of a New France furrier. That it had been used as a silent film set. The Watchmaker was shot here, Vinny and Vito, Turtle Soup. It was satisfying to imagine that its linked rooms had seen life and death, fervour and genius, in the years before vodka Red Bulls and 2-4-1 Wednesdays. Now the gambrelled mansion smelled of spilled drinks and subterranean mould; on cold nights it shivered like a loose tooth. Whatever it had been before Annette took over the lease, in the final years of the 1980s comedy boom, that evidence had been worn away by successive surf-swells of laughter and silence, heckling, and the chintzy strains of “Eye of the Tiger,” which rolled out every night like a tide. By now the Knock Knock’s floorboards sagged. Its front steps sloped. The carmine roof looked ready to slide onto the lawn.
Theo pulled up onto the grass and locked up on the club’s lone shrub. It was dark. It was Monday. But there were cars at the meters, a certain buzz by the door. Two comedians were standing at the foot of the steps, sharing a teacup ashtray. Theo walked past the new kid doing the door and into the early show, where a regular had just finished her set and Lucien, the MC, bounded up beside her, seizing the energy of the performer’s last joke. It was as if a brisk wind had blown through the audience. The MC spoke in a wonderful, ribald franglais, his hair wild at the sides but smoothly combed on top – “the ’air-do of a father oo is losing ’is mind,” as he called it that night. “A father oose wife is leaving ’im and oose kids are terrible and oo thinks to himseff that ’e’ll be okay if ’e jus’ drags a comb through ’is ’air two more time, packs a lunch for everybody and writes a note to the kids that says ‘Be good’ and one for the wife that says ‘I still love you’ and jus’ smiles, smiles, always smiles at everyone, with an ’air-do that promises ’is capabilities are greater than what ’e ’as demonstrated so far.”
Lucien was Theo’s favourite kind of comic, neither overly quippy nor banal. Too many comedians came canned – their gags cued up like pinballs – or else drifted at the mic, uncertain which course to take. Theo’s sets would sometimes call for search parties. He savoured Lucien’s patience and his discipline, but also suspected that down deep he had another reason for admiring him: given Lucien’s accent, his (merely) regional appeal, he didn’t seem much like competition.
Rivalry could make stand-up feel cruel. Its hierarchies were plain to see. A cohort of amateurs would come up together, clashing at the same open mics, jockeying for the same spots, but it wasn’t actually enough to be funny. The work required doggedness, and an almost supernatural limberness – an elasticity of soul. A comic doesn’t just make people laugh: he bombs and bombs and bombs again while he sorts out what works from what doesn’t.
Although the Knock Knock’s regulars relied on each other – for small loans, solidarity, designated drives home – they envied and begrudged each other too, relishing their rivals’ small defeats. Only time helped. Eventually a hierarchy settled in. Once the contenders knew who was good and who was not, they could choose exactly whom to resent.
That Monday night, Theo watched for a little while then went over to stand beside Annette. She was at the back of the room, hidden in the half-shadow of the disused popcorn machine. She didn’t acknowledge his arrival. Theo waited – he wasn’t sure for what, was never sure what he was doing with Annette. She was a kind of sphinx. Even after all these years, he hadn’t cracked the code – whether to stand in silence or make small-talk, to laugh or crack wise, or to play hard to get. Annette chose who got up and when, but her logic was unknowable. Sometimes Theo just waved from across the room and she put him on straight away. There were other weeks that he lingered, buying her drinks, shooting the shit, and he didn’t make the programme at all. One night several years ago, she promised a mid-tier set and he loitered at the rear of the club, waiting to hear his name – as 10 p.m. became 11, as 11 p.m. became midnight, and into the wee hours of the morning. He watched comic after comic, the bad amid the good, with upset growing in his chest; he kept trying to catch Annette’s eye, shooting daggers at her. Theo needed to get up; he deserved to. He tapped his notebook against the tabletop, sucked gin-and-tonics through stunted straws, couldn’t bring himself to applaud. As the clock-hand inched toward two o’clock, Theo’s fury reached a boil. He had so much he had to say; he had so much that needed saying. He wanted to throw things. Then it was three and Lucien said goodnight and Theo had been forgotten. The feeling that swept over him, like a soft tide, was relief.
Tonight he’d been there only a few moments when Annette asked, “You want to get up?”
“Yeah.”
“Late show. After Emmy.”
“Cool,” Theo said, acting as if he barely cared.
Twelve years of coming to the Knock Knock and it still contained a terror.
Lucien began to introduce Fuckin’ Stevie. Theo decided it was his cue to go stand somewhere else. He wound past a knot of regulars and lowered himself into a chair, slipping his bike helmet underneath. A stocky man sat beside him in a long black trenchcoat, his dark green shirt buttoned up to the collar. The man – Severin – had bedraggled dark hair – authentically bedraggled, sincerely bedraggled, something coaxed and pleaded with until finally it just lay the way it did, curling at the edges, gelled into place. He had a thin brown moustache. He smelled like toothpaste.
“Theo,” Severin murmured.
Theo nodded to him. They sat together and watched Steve Murray – Fuckin’ Stevie. He was a man with a Roman nose, long hair and fine blond eyelashes. In another age, he would have had a regal nickname – Blueblood, Lionheart. Here he was called Fuckin’ Stevie, because he was always swearing. He stood at the microphone, let the room softly settle, and then pronounced one swear word after another, curse after curse, surfing the swells of laughter. It was cheerleading more than comedy – dirty cheerleading, pom-poms dredged in barf. And it killed. “People will laugh at anything,” Theo murmured.
“What?”
“Fuckin’ Stevie.”
“Fuckin’ Stevie,” Severin agreed. He began riffling through the pages of his notebook, a faux-leather journal that looked like it had been through a thunderstorm. Finally he sat back with an expression of defeat. He picked up his drink. “Sometimes I find myself thinking: I should be more like Stevie.” He took a sip. “I find myself thinking this, and I notice this thought, and I try to look it down.”
“Stare it down?” Theo said.
Severin nodded. “Stare it down.”
He was from somewhere else – Armenia, Turkmenistan, somewhere like that. He didn’t like to talk about it, not even on stage. That would have been the best place to talk about it, in Theo’s opinion. But Severin wanted to be Leno, not Pryor. He wanted the audience to disregard his weird name, his spurred accent, the grasshoppers he clutched and sipped and which made him smell like toothpaste. He wished to be liked more than he wished to be himself.
When Stevie finished, he walked past them, through the audience, heading out for a smoke.
“Good set,” said Severin.
Stevie flashed a thumbs-up.
“What?” Severin said to Theo.
“Don’t encourage him.”
“You think he gives two shit? ‘So happy you approve, Severin. Huge relief for me.’ ”
“Why say anything?”
“Because maybe he likes me. Maybe one day when his hack schtick gets booked for a week in Boston he says, ‘Hey Severin – want to open for me?’ And I go and do Boston for five nights, and see the Space Needle, and actually get paid in real dollars, not drink tickets, while you sit here at the back of the Knock Knock being an asshole.”
“The Space Needle’s in Seattle,” Theo said.
“Suddenly you’re an astronaut?” said Severin. He shifted in his seat. “You gonna get up?”
“Yeah,” Theo said.
“You do not seem confident.”
“Annette said yeah.”
Severin stared at his glass. He must have known he was picking on Theo, and also that Theo didn’t need to be sitting here with him. He ran a finger along his moustache. “How are you?”
“Good.”
“Doing new stuff?”
“Yes.”
“You always got new stuff.”
“I don’t like repeating myself,” Theo said.
“Sure.”
On stage, Lucien was aggravating a table of bachelorettes. Each of the ladies wore a pair of fuzzy pink rabbit ears. Theo almost felt sorry for them. The bunnies didn’t know that bachelorette parties were comedy-audience stereotypes; they didn’t know they were despised as soon as they walked in the door. High on matrimony, lubricated by vodka, the women would soon begin to heckle, and the comics would not let it stand. Then it was only a matter of time before the bride began to cry, or her maid of honour began to cry, or the whole group got chucked out the club’s front door. Sure enough, one of the women stood up and started shouting ripostes at Lucien. She pointed and pointed at him. On her third gesticulation Theo felt the room’s atmosphere change. The fun was over. In the darkness Theo saw the slope-shouldered outline of the bouncer moving between the chairs. He had the jowly affect of a Saint Bernard. He laid a doughy palm on the women’s crowded little table. They stared at him with awed round eyes, as if a moose had come striding from the woods. “Mesdames,” he murmured, “I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” The whole room held its breath. The bride began to cry.
“Ladies and gentleman, please put your ’ands together for the funniest man in Malta, the golem of Prague, the guy ’oo puts the el oh el in Vladivostok – Severin Jones!” Lucien said.
Severin rose. As the bridal party made its way to the door, Severin smiled a forced smile, passing through the tables and chairs and onto the stage. He put down his notebook and drink, adjusted the microphone. He was holding the room with the whites of his eyes, the promise of the comic who has yet to say a word.
“Aloha,” he said at last – his opening catchphrase, weird but not quite funny. Theo leaned back in his chair, shook his head. Severin, man.
Comedians’ friendships are unwieldy things. When Theo had started at the club, he met two types of performers: the ones who couldn’t stand him and the ones who ignored him. He preferred the former to the latter. A comic’s opprobrium could actually mean anything: jealousy, insecurity, misanthropy, prickly bonhomie. These were men and women who had learned the lesson, growing up, that you show someone you like them by making a joke at their expense. Professionally speaking, making an impression was more important than making friends. “Keep kicking them in the nuts, keep putting things on the shelf,” George Carlin had said. Theo’s brain was full of quotes like these, absorbed as a teenager with a limitless appetite for aphorism. A zine called BUNCHA HACKS had opened a portal in his brain, transforming him from the sort of kid who watched SNL to the kind who memorized Rant in E-Minor and Live on the Sunset Strip, making pilgrimages to the video store for Alan Partridge, Andy Kaufman and the Kids in the Hall. Every couple of months, another issue of BUNCHA HACKS arrived from New York: twenty-four pages typed, photocopied, folded and stapled by a guy called Max Paumgarten. Paumgarten rattled on about what was true comedy and what wasn’t, who made him laugh and who didn’t; he wrote essays and interviewed comics and reviewed hundreds of sets at Carolines and the Cellar. His opinions formed the bedrock of Theo’s comedy philosophy: that the essence of stand-up is perspective; that its secret is cadence; that the best jokes are jokes that nobody else can tell.
On stage, Severin sighed. “Let me tell you. My father-in-law is a real pain in the neck.”
For a long time, all that Theo wanted was to merit his own profile in BUNCHA HACKS. Six years ago, at the height of his comedy success, he had received a phone call from a 212 area code. Theo experienced the moment as an apogee: the sensation of a dream become real. “I caught you on Conan,” Max Paumgarten had said. His voice was puckish, brash. “I’d like to do a little piece.”
Now Theo gazed at Severin. His friend wasn’t being himself; he wasn’t taking the risk. Such a hoary sequence of set-ups and punchlines – gags about marriage, bike lanes, the phrase “banana split.” But about ten minutes into his set, after a bit about dishonest politicians, Severin turned a page in his water-damaged notebook.
“When I was a kid, I wore a fedora,” he said. “I wore a fedora all the time, okay? I didn’t leave my house without it. Like I was some time-travelling detective. Like I was a jazz guy or something – Charlie Parker in the body of an immigrant teenager. Everyone at school laughed at me – my English was so lousy, I didn’t know Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and I didn’t know who Nirvana was. But I had this idea: maybe if I wore a fedora all day every day I would be hip. Popular.
“Fantastic idea, yes? What is hipper than an old-style hat? When girls see a guy with an old-style hat they always think, ‘That guy is a winner.’ Even if you are a straight guy you see a guy in a fedora and part of you thinks, ‘Maybe that is the man for me. Maybe I will change my whole life so I can hang with that guy in a fedora.’ Yes?
“No, not yes. The fedora does not do this. Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you: the fedora does not do this.”
Severin squinted. “Is there anyone out there wearing a fedora right now? No? That’s good.” He looked at his page.
“Even though the fedora made me seem like a visitor from the land of noir cinema, I thought it was my best feature. My old-style hat. With its brim. With its uh, top. With its feather. I swaggered a bit, maybe, with my fedora. I talked to people I didn’t know. I ran for school president. (I lost.) Maybe at a birthday party I offered a beautiful girl my slice of cake.
“For a long time I wore my fedora everywhere. I was debonair and amazing. I was cool and interesting. I had only two friends – they were losers – but that was okay, no problem, maybe they would get hats too and we would all three be cool.”
Severin took a sip of his drink. “And then one day I was on a school trip to New York. From the small city to the big city. So many skyscrapers and taxis and crowded sidewalks. We went to the museum with the squid and to this restaurant with an all-day breakfast buffet, and at night to a musical with a line of high-kicking dancers, like an animated comb. And we had free time, too. Time for me to wander around, striding the big city streets in my fedora.
“So one afternoon I was walking along this quiet street, striding, and there was this car. Long grey car, wide like a milk cow, and it was passing me and then it started to slow down. After a sec I realized it was kinda matching my pace. I looked at it. The driver was maybe in his fifties. Most of his hair gone, he had nice eyes – you know, like someone who you can tell is a good guy and means well? And he had this sideways smile on his face, and he was lowering his window, staring at me. So I halted there, tipped my head toward him, and waited. Finally in a quiet voice, he said, ‘Hey.’
“I said, ‘Hey.’
“And he said, ‘Lose the hat.’ ”
That was it, the punchline. The meagre punchline. While others were wincing at the pathos, Theo, alone in the room, was laughing. He was hooting, feeling his heart happily hurt. As Severin left the stage, Theo thumped his tabletop. This was why he loved comedy, for its hilarious solace.
Around him, tea-lights flickered on the tables. Locals and tourists, mothers and sons, spouses and lovers, all seemed untouched.
Hours stuttered past, fast then slow then fast again. Theo caught some sets and neglected others, drifting around the club. “You gonna do the one about the flooded basement?” somebody asked. “Nah,” Theo said. A pretty wunderkind got up, her jokes like puzzle boxes. A big lug from the suburbs, with gags about his wife and their Doberman pinschers. Toward midnight, Theo watched a woman named Emmy, one of the regulars, from a corner by the bar. He stood with one knee against a panel, felt the hot whirring of the dishwasher on the other side. She told jokes about life and just absolutely destroyed. You don’t watch the comic just before you perform, not if they’re any good, and Theo should have been reviewing his material, getting juiced up. Anyway he had already heard this stuff: Emmy’s set had been refined over the course of entire months, seasons, line by line, pause by pause, tag by tag, so well-practised that Theo knew the moments she’d take a sip from her jack and ginger. Yet he laughed along with all the others, he couldn’t help it, even as his chest filled with dread, and when Emmy was finished Lucien warbled into the microphone: “Now put your ’ands together for Theo Potiris.”
Three or four tables immediately got up to leave. Nothing personal: this was the late show, it was late. When Theo arrived at the front of the room, he tried not to see the empty chairs. Brightly, bravely, he said, “If it’s all right with you, I’m gonna tell some jokes now.”
He opened with something about how nobody eats the shells of peanuts. It didn’t really work. He tried something about his brother’s suits, then about how much it physically hurt to actually write an entire letter by hand. The laughs were patchy. He considered turning that corner where you call attention to the lack of laughs but that was a last resort, it risked everything; instead he talked about the bride and the bachelorettes, even though only some of the crowd had been there for the early show. “Tonight was a night she won’t remember for the rest of her life,” he said. This cruelty didn’t feel right. Maybe he should be talking about shame, or drunkenness, or a wedding morning hangover. He tried imagining out loud the bride’s vows, and then the splendour of the ceremony, half mocking, half not. He wished the bride well: “When you hold your husband on his death bed, I hope you remember getting kicked out of a crummy comedy club.” There was something deeply funny in all of this, he was certain, and maybe he would find it if he kept talking.
Theo stepped over to the stool where he had put down his drink. The audience was silent. Theo raised the glass to his lips and in his peripheral vision he could see Severin and Emmy standing by the bar, wearing tolerant expressions. Theo tilted the gin and tonic until the ice cubes slid to touch his teeth. He should stop, his time was up. He should keep going, he should say the one about the flooded basement. But he couldn’t bear to tell a joke these other comics had already heard; he couldn’t bear to quit the stage, a comedian merely humoured. He began talking about his gambling. His Friday night, his ritual, biking to the track and laying a wager. “Every week, finally, I find out if I’m a winner or a loser. It’s nothing but math. I’m a winner or a loser, nothing in between.”
“How many of you gamble?” he asked them. A few people clapped. “Suckers,” he said, to a bigger laugh. “We’re all suckers. I’m so tired of losing.”
He wiped his mouth with the inside of his wrist. “On Friday I went to the race course. I bet on a horse called Expiry Date.” He looked out. “How much does it cost to keep a racehorse? Fifty thousand a year? Daily steel-cut oats and Kobe steak, regular massages. Trainers and agents and nutritionists. Fifty thousand easy. And what do they decide to call it? Expiry Date.” He shook his head. “ ‘What’s something that’s vaguely threatening in as low-stakes a way as possible? That’s what we’ll call our horse.’
“Anyway, Expiry Date and I won thirty dollars. I’m a winner, I thought. I’m inarguably a winner.” He glanced at his shoes, still flecked with onion. “And then later that night my mother died.”
They laughed, but then a silence fell. They weren’t sure they had heard him right.
He went on. His tone was steady. “I mean it,” he said. He explained that he had gone home and discovered that his mother had passed away. “Her eyes were closed, like she was making a wish.”
Somebody laughed then – a sharp, almost wretched sound. Theo ran a hand through the tangle of his hair. He talked a little about the paramedics, the family argument about who should ride with her corpse to the hospital. He talked about the way the ambulance was the same size as one of the grocery store’s delivery trucks, how he had found himself wondering how many boxes of groceries could fit inside. He talked about preparing for the memorial, the quarrel about low-fat versus regular cream cheese at the reception, which flavours of cupcakes to buy. “After screaming at each other for eighty-five minutes we agreed that the flavour we would ask for was ‘a variety.’ ”
They laughed.
“Then there was the funeral, which is a high-pressure situation for a comic,” Theo said. He fingered the mic. “Speaking of – were any of you there?” He craned his neck. “Can I get a ‘woo’ if you were at my mother’s funeral?”
“No? No regulars?” He smiled, looked at the floor. “Well, you missed a great quiche.” A breath came out of him as if he had cut himself, but his eyes didn’t leave the spot on the floor. “You know what? I killed,” he said. “My set – I mean, my eulogy,” he was still smiling that tight smile, “it was sad. It was happy. It was upsetting and also funny. People cried or laughed. They were smiling through tears. I could see it: my family, her friends. I could see it, I’m not exaggerating, right in front of me, on people’s faces. I could feel it myself, in myself, like a bright light. Killing at a funeral. The best set of my life. For once everything landed.”
At the end of the bar, a cash register began printing a receipt. “So what do you do with that?” Theo asked. “At your mother’s memorial, on the worst day of your life, thinking: ‘This would crush on YouTube.’ An original eulogy album. Live at the Funeral. All Downhill from Here. Or maybe, yeah: Unplugged.”
He gazed at the empty space above the chairs.
“Anyway, that’s my time,” he said, and he put down the mic.
“Everybody put your ’ands together for Theo Potiris!” Lucien leapt onto the stage. “Theo Potiris, our little ray of sunshine!” Theo slipped backstage as the crowd applauded, trying not to hear it, trying not to hear how much or how little, how eager or how hollow, trying not to hear it and also trying to hear it, ravenous for every separate touch of palm to palm.
He listened to the next set from the dressing room. At the break, Emmy appeared. “Good set,” she told him.
She led him back to his friends at the bar, bought him another G & T. Severin put his arms around him. “Sorry, man,” he whispered in his ear.
Fuckin’ Stevie nudged up beside them. “That scraping sound was the whole crowd slitting their wrists.”
“Not a bad way to go,” Theo said.
“You know, I’ve always said that being funny is overrated,” Stevie went on. “We don’t get enough grief-stricken comedy.”
“Fuck off,” said Emmy.
Theo looked around at the empty tables cluttered with glasses, the small clusters of audience members staring at him. He nodded to the comics then headed for the back door, leaning his full weight into the push bar of the emergency exit. Outside was a clear sky, a few stars. Cool air fluttered over him. Annette’s Camry was parked crooked beside the crumbling brick wall. What was that? he thought. He walked past the car, to the street, and lowered himself to the curb. It was what it was, he told himself. You didn’t have anything to lose.
Six years ago, Theo talked to Max Paumgarten on the telephone. Shortly thereafter, before any piece had run, BUNCHA HACKS announced it was folding. Paumgarten had been hired as a staff writer at the New Yorker. When Theo heard the news he felt at first a kind of pride – as if he too had graduated, come of age – and later a sense of anticipation – that Paumgarten might bring him with him somehow, into the pages of his new home. But Theo never heard from him again. Instead, Paumgarten wrote about pop stars, drone racers, an Indiana mayor. Theo’s window closed. The dream subsided. It was what it was.
An owl made an owl sound, out of nowhere. Theo turned, startled, as the hoot reverberated. The shadows at the roof met in an X and he couldn’t distinguish anything besides the place where an owl might be. Theo stared at the X-like space. He swallowed a little more of his gin.
“I’m sorry about your mom,” said a voice.
She was sitting not far away, a silhouetted figure with her arms resting loosely on her knees. On the same curb, among the same shadows, facing out into the street.
“Thanks.”
“You were funny.”
He heard a sound he mistook for a lighter flicking open, but he realized the woman was simply scraping a stone along the pavement. He couldn’t really see her face, just jeans, boots, the matte folds of a windbreaker, her hair.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Have you heard of the Rabbit’s Foot?”
“No. Is it another club?”
“It’s an association.”
“What kind of association?”
“Professional gamblers.”
“Sounds unseemly,” he said.
He heard her smile. “In fact you would not believe how seemly. Resolutely seemly. They’re methodical, humourless, et cetera.”
“Boring.”
“However: winners,” she said.
“Ah. Lucky for them.”
She shook her head. “Luck has nothing to do with it. What’s the opposite of an inveterate gambler? A veterate one? The association’s all mathematicians, actuaries, programmers. Systems analysts. Algorithm people. They deconstruct horse-racing and football and tennis and whatever, boil it down to its parts. Then build it up again – movements into numbers into data, as many contests as they can, so the math gets a chance to work. And they can earn their fortune.”
Theo squinted at her.
“You said you were tired of losing bets, right? You could join them.”
He gave a ragged laugh. “The Rabbit’s Foot doesn’t lose?”
She shrugged. “That’s their whole thing: figuring out how not to.”
“Huh,” he said.
“Yeah – ‘Huh.’ ” She tilted her head at him. “You know how sometimes you’ll look at something, like a box of matches, and you’ll think, ‘Someone’s getting rich off these things.’ And someone is getting rich off matches. Off everything. That’s how it is with Mitsou. So many people making bets, all around the world, and someone’s making a mint. It’s her.”
He wondered now if she was pulling his leg. “Mitsou?”
“My sister,” she said.
“This is her company?”
“Association.”
“She doesn’t cut you in?”
“She and I run on different tracks.” The woman brought a knee to her chest. “Maybe when my luck runs out.”
After a pause, in the same tone of voice, she said, “You were really funny.”
He looked away. “Thanks.”
“Don’t act so humble. You were!”
“That’s the job,” he said.
“Did your mom used to come to see you?”
A feeling had gradually been opening up around them, between them, an unguarded air. He could say anything into it.
“Now and then,” he said.
“Did she like it?”
“She liked me. She thought the other comics were too dirty. She said, ‘They talk too lightly about sex.’ ”
The woman laughed.
“Are you a comic?” he asked.
“No.”
He remembered the owl that had made its owl sound and wondered if it would speak again into this space, filling in the silence.
She said, “Sometimes you look at the world and it’s either laugh or cry, right?”
“I try to ignore it.”
“The world?”
“Things I can’t change.”
“How Zen.”
“Is that what Zen is?” he said.
“You’re asking the wrong person,” she said. “It sounds weird but sometimes I like to go to things alone. I always have, even when I’ve been in relationships. Movies, galleries, even concerts. Plays.”
“There’s less social pressure?”
“It’s just easier to remember what you like. What you’re experiencing. You don’t need to worry about anybody else.”
“I’m a worrier,” he admitted.
“We need to stop worrying. Go dancing.”
He tried to imagine her dancing.
“So you came alone.”
“Yeah.”
“And was it a success?”
“It would have been more fun with a friend.” She laughed, and Theo laughed too.
Then he said, “Maybe I should find a new gig. Something I can count on.”
“Lawyer? Accountant?”
“I’ll call up the Rabbit’s Foot. Ask Mitsou for a job. Tell her I know her sister.”
“Better not to use my name.”
“I don’t know your name.”
“Tell them you want to be a processor. They’re always looking for processors. Maybe it will give you some material.”
“Ah, material.”
“Isn’t that what comedians want? Material?”
“I don’t know what I want any more,” Theo said. “Except I want to catch a break.”
She nodded.
He found himself telling her, “I was on Conan once. Six years ago. Dressing room, fruit platter, network TV. I thought that was it. Next stop, sitcom. Fame or infamy. My favourite writer called me for an interview. ‘What’s next for you?’ he asked. ‘Everything,’ I said. I thought it was going to happen to me like it happened to other people, that I just needed to…How did you put it? Give the math a chance to work out?”
“Reversion to the mean,” she said.
“But the interview never ran. The jackpot never came.”
“Maybe their computer crashed.”
“He’s just taking his time,” Theo said. “Waiting for me to reach my season.”
“Like a wine.”
“Like a really funny wine.”
“I’m Simone.” She leaned over to him, extended her hand.
He took it. “Theo.”
The sound of a faint, distant engine grew closer, then almost deafening, as its source appeared – a motorcycle turning the corner, its headlight shearing the street.
“Who’s the asshole?” Theo said.
Simone rose to her feet. “Sebald!” she shouted, raising her arm. The rider spotted her, accelerating to a stop just in front of them. A hunched black motorcycle, like a Halloween cat; a rider in a daffodil-yellow helmet, his face was hidden behind mirrored glass. Sitting on the curb, Theo felt tiny, boyish. He got up too, brushed off the seat of his jeans.
Sebald took off his helmet, smoothed a hand across his scalp. He was older than Theo expected, with a face that reminded him of a portrait out of one of his childhood history books, like Archimedes – sharp nose, strong brow, a scientist’s inquiring eyes. And also dark-skinned, Afro-Caribbean.
Sebald gazed evenly at him.
“Theo,” Theo said finally.
“This is Sebald,” Simone said. “Sebald, meet Theo.”
The rider nodded. The solemnity of the gesture made Theo chuckle. He offered a thumbs-up.
Sebald nodded again and lifted his hand to his throat, touched two fingers to his Adam’s apple. The gesture seemed vaguely threatening.
“He has laryngitis,” explained Simone.
Yes, Sebald mouthed.
“Join us for a nightcap?” said Simone.
Theo was surprised. “I don’t see a sidecar,” he joked.
Simone sauntered into the road. “You could ride with me.”
As she passed into the beam of Sebald’s headlight, Theo examined the details of her features: straight bangs over deep-set eyes, brown hair that landed at the nape of her neck, full lips. A windbreaker hung loose around her body. He guessed she was his age, but her movements had a carelessness that reminded him of someone younger.
She kept walking, crossing the street to a different patch of shadow where another motorbike sat – a chassis in black and chrome, with a bloom of gold patina across the fuel tank. Simone knocked away the bike’s side stand and hiked herself over its saddle. The engine snarled to life.
“How’d you get here?” she asked him.
“Bicycle,” he said, which made her smile.
“You should come,” she said.
He realized that he had forgotten his helmet inside, beside the bar or under a chair. He imagined the scene in there, wilted drunks and bitter comedians, and the gin swilled in his stomach.
“Maybe some other time,” he said.
It was hard to hear anything over the two motorcycles. “What?” Simone asked.
He could have told her he had a girlfriend, on a clarity retreat in the desert. He could have clambered behind her on the bike. In the end he merely said, “I have to water my plants.”
“Suit yourself,” said Simone.
She lifted her helmet over her head – a piece of interlocking pearl and gold, with slashes of blood red and phosphorescent blue. The word “seldom” had been stencilled on the side of her motorcycle’s tank. Sebald revved his engine. Simone flicked on her headlight and the bikes’ lights were like solid beams, struts, steadying the night.
“So long!” he thought he heard her shout.
He shielded his eyes. A single star was out. The audience had laughed at some of his jokes. His mother was dead.
Theo raised his hand in a wave. “Goodnight,” he called, and within a few moments the motorcyclists had disappeared, two cinders flicked away from a fire. Only their sound remained.