City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter

Author:Temim Fruchter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove Atlantic

Eleven

At this point in the telling, it bears explaining that laughter is a cosmically moderate element, wispy as lace. But when enough of it amasses, it becomes substantial. Palpable, too, a shift in the weather you feel but can’t quite place.

One season, though, the laughter accumulated well past moderation. It gathered, quietly collecting in one corner of the universe, until there was, frankly, way too much of it.

I’m not sure what you’d call it in your languages. A clot? A mass? I think these words may connote something dangerous. An ingathering? A disproportion? Maybe there is nothing you would call it. This isn’t the kind of naming you are generally expected to do.

At the end of the day, be it a threat or a glut, an excess of laughter needs to be dealt with.

And this was the most dramatic excess of it any of us had ever seen. While laughter is, of course, thought to be a joyful thing, a surfeit means a disturbance. A rare and unexpected spike in the stratosphere. An imbalance; an overwhelm.

No one was quite sure what to do about it. Given that the challenge we were facing was the redistribution of something at once mysterious and effulgent, I was tapped for the job. Everybody knows I possess uncommon depth of feeling. So this would be either the most perfect task for me or the most difficult. What do I know, after all? That I love more easily than my kind. That I love easily. That I love at all. That I would love so wildly, even once.

I promised I would deal with the excess of laughter. I would find the right thing, the right place, the right way to make things even again.

I watched closely, collecting stories. This is what I do. I wanted to be strategic.

There was the middle-aged neurosurgeon who began to complain about the tedium of his work, prestigious as it was, until one day, a man around his own age came into his office for a consultation. The neurosurgeon began reviewing the man’s chart, clucking politely to let the patient know that he was paying close attention and stopping to ask things like So, you drink plenty of water? And So, your grandfather suffered from gout? At the word gout, the man doubled over, and for a moment, the neurosurgeon wondered if the man was weeping or in fact vomiting on his office floor. But when the man lifted his face, it was stretched into a mouth-gaping grin, eyes squeezed shut, tears, the pained guffaw of someone who is being mercilessly tickled. The neurosurgeon, confounded, let the man laugh for the three minutes and twenty-four seconds it took for him to compose himself; and then compose himself he did, graying, slightly exhausted, wiping a tear streak from his left cheek.

“You see my problem,” said the man, wheezing a little bit as he spoke. “I can’t control it. It just happens.”

The neurosurgeon’s cheeks went hot then. He was moved by what he had just witnessed and made shy by the knowledge that he could still be surprised.

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