I Could Die Laughing
Every day there was laughter. Laughter that filled the halls like a group of nut jobs at the pharmacy. And every time Bill heard the laughter, he felt alone. The four white walls of his studio caught the happy notes like a first grader catches headlice, and Bill would sit, tortured, by the sound he himself could not make.
And every night there was a stillness which rode through Bill's spine like a Hitachi magic wand. Bill was tortured by this stillness, which fell in such stark contrast to the laughter of the day.
Where does it come from? he sometimes wondered. Surely he wasn't the only one in the complex to notice it, but none of his neighbors ever mentioned the incessant chiming of her voice.
One afternoon, last Tuesday to be exact, Bill's chest was feeling more like an overinflated balloon than it usually did. After pacing around his apartment for what seemed like hours, but was really only seven minutes, Bill went down to the first floor of his apartment complex and lit up the butt of a Parliament Light cigarette which he found in an ashtray. Bill took two deep drags on the cigarette before realizing that the rhododendron bush to his right was the source of the laughter.
Can it be? Is this where she hides? Bill thought. The laughter was getting higher, louder, more desperate. Bill thought it was beginning to sound like something between a wet cat, a glockenspiel, and a loose fan belt, so he moved closer to the bush to ask the concealed woman to please be quiet.
Bill poked his head behind the massive bush and was almost blinded by the scene his eyes beheld. GOOD GOD! Bill thought. Bill saw a woman, as thin as the twigs of the bush, clad in a rhinestone body suit, who was strapped to a gurney on the ground. At her feet a spider monkey, who wore a top hat, a bow tie, and Levi's jeans, and who smoked a Winston cigarette, was tickling her foot with a peacock feather. To top it all off, someone was shining a spotlight on her and as she writhed in the pain of her laughter, shimmering light scattered between the leaves of the rhododendron and the tan stucco walls like some sort of alien disco ball. The woman's eyes caught Bill's, and he could sense her desperation. Bill thought for a moment about how to distract the monkey. He noticed he had something pinned to his bow tie. "Hello, My name is Charles," said the standard issue label.
"Charles," Bill said. The monkey tapped the ashes of his cigarette into the dirt by his feet and glanced impatiently at Bill.
"Listen, Charles, I know you're a busy man, but I have a Romeo Y Julieta cigar in my room. Fresh from Cuba. If you go run and grab it, I'll be more than willing to share it with you."
Charles stood silently for a moment, grabbed a piece of paper from his back pocket, handed it to Bill, and headed up to Bill's apartment.
"Call me Chuck," the note said.
"Oh, you saved me! My hero!" the woman exclaimed. "Oh thank goodness. Charles just won't quit. I was about to die laughing."
"It's, erm, nothing. Er, why did he do this to you?" Bill asked.
"Well, it's sort of silly, you know. I have this slight problem. I'm sort of… a paradox, if you will. If I'm not laughing, I'm oh so sad. So sad that I just can't bear to go on. If I am laughing, my laughing grows so violent that I can't eat, I can't move, I can barely breathe, and I could just die laughing! My only respite comes at night when he injects me with enough Ketamine to knock out a family of lemurs. It's silly, isn't it?" she asked, beginning to sniffle. A silver tear slipped out of her left eye. She could have been wearing a bodysuit of tears, as sad as she was beginning to look.
"You see," she continued, "Charles… Charles was only trying to help me. But there's no helping me. I'm, I'm… I'm a complete and total wreck!"
With that, the woman collapsed into Bill's arms. She started to cry, low, like a distant freight train. Soon her low sobs grew in speed and pitch, and in just the course of five minutes, she was howling like a cage of Chucks at the zoo. Tears shot out of her eyes like squirt guns, she shook like a dryer full of shoes, and soon, right before Bill's very eyes, she cried herself to death.
Bill stood a moment, trying to soak in what had just happened. He felt a tingling in his cheeks, a shudder in his chest. Before he knew it, he was laughing.
