Who Would Dare?

Thread: "Who would dare to do it for real?" (started 10:51 PM, 312 replies)

cold_open_77 · 10:58 PM · 340 likes: Not me. I faint at the dentist.

mothlight · 11:03 PM · 411 likes: I'd do it if it was on a Tuesday and I didn't have to talk to anyone after.

marrow_and_salt · 11:09 PM · 290 likes: Everyone here would hold the door open and apologize to the victim.

Moderator note · 11:15 PM: Reminder, this is a fiction-adjacent space. Keep it theoretical.

On Saturday morning Hargrove's assistant dropped a thin file on Asher's desk with a yellow sticky note on the front, and the note said, in a hand that was not Hargrove's, Weekend. Mon. 8am. —H.

He knew what it meant. It was the Pelham matter, the one that had been going wrong for weeks, and it was a mess of unlabeled exhibits and contradictory dates that no associate had wanted to touch. He was to sort it by Monday. Nobody had asked whether he had plans. Nobody, he reflected, ever did, and it was a point of pride with him that he had never had any.

"Is it all right?" said the assistant, a nervous young man named Curtis, who stood in the doorway and shifted from one foot to the other. "I can tell him you're booked."

"No," said Asher, in a firm, light voice. "It's an honor to be trusted with it."

Curtis looked at him with great respect, and perhaps a faint shade of pity, and went away.

Asher sat with the file for a long time without opening it. There was a stain on the cover, shaped like Ohio. He thought of Hargrove's pen tapping on the table. He thought of the phone lying face down on the wood. His jaw had begun to ache, and he realized that he had been grinding his teeth, and made himself stop, and opened the folder, and began on page one.

At six that evening the floor was empty except for one other lamp, burning in the paralegal pool, and he heard footsteps and a rustle of paper, and Dana came down the aisle between the cubicles with her coat over her arm and a brown paper bag in her hand.

"I forgot my charger," she said. "What are you doing here?"

"Pelham."

"On a Saturday?" She set the bag on the corner of his desk with the air of someone who has decided not to make a speech. "Here. It's a turkey sandwich. I bought two by mistake."

"I'll pay you for it."

"You don't have to pay me for a sandwich."

"I'd prefer to." He was already looking for his wallet, and took out five dollars, and held it out across the desk. She looked at the bill and then at him, with her head a little on one side, and he saw something go across her face that was neither anger nor amusement, a kind of tender, exasperated weariness, and she took the money and put it in her pocket without a word.

"Thanks," said Dana. "Don't stay too late, okay? He's not going to read it until Tuesday."

"Hargrove said Monday at eight."

"He says Monday at eight about everything." She stopped at the end of the aisle and looked back at him over her shoulder, a small, tired, sensible woman in a green coat. "You know you're allowed to go home, Asher."

He nodded, politely, as one nods to a person speaking in another language, and when she was gone he tore a scrap of paper from his pad and wrote on it, Sandwich, $5, Dana, and slipped it into the envelope. It gave him a glow of rectitude. He had paid his debt, and now it was in the books.

He did not go home until a quarter to ten.

…

The thread had been going for nearly three hours by the time he opened it.

It was called Who would dare to do it for real? and it had been started by someone he did not know, and it had already reached three hundred and twelve replies. He read it standing at the counter in his kitchenette, with his coat still on and a bowl of canned soup going cold beside the laptop, and he found, to his surprise, that he was grinning.

It was funny. That was the astonishing thing. The thread had started with a question that should have been horrifying, and the whole room had turned it, in about forty minutes, into a kind of stand-up show. Everyone was insisting on his own cowardice. I once fainted at a blood drive, wrote someone. I returned a library book three years late and haven't slept since, wrote another. I cannot even use the self-checkout without apologizing to the machine. It rolled on and on. The numbers beside them climbed into the hundreds. And it came to Asher, as he read, that it was the first time since he arrived at the firm that he had been part of a room laughing at the same thing.

He pulled out a chair. He thought for ten minutes, with a real pleasure, as he used to think over an essay question, and then he wrote:

I'd like to think I'd be the one who files a motion to dismiss the plan on procedural grounds.

He posted it and sat back.

For about a minute nothing happened. Then the number beside it said 12. Then 80. Then, like the first drops of a thunderstorm, it was 300, and 700, and there were comments under it with strings of laughing faces. "On procedural grounds," wrote mothlight. Lawyer-boy strikes again, but this time it's actually funny. Someone had copied the joke and put it in a thread of its own. By the time he had finished the soup, which was cold, it stood at twelve hundred and six, and it was the best thing he had ever written.

He felt himself turn red from the collar to the hairline. It was such a bright, hot, uncomplicated happiness that he got up from the chair and walked around the room, and sat down again, and read the number once more.

The group chat lit up on the table. Dude, wrote Marcus. 1,200 likes?? Are you famous now? And under it Noah, who had written, Honestly funny. Asher read the three words several times. He had not realized how long he had been waiting to be told, by those particular three people, that something he had said was funny, and he sat for a moment with his hand flat on his chest, like a man at a flag ceremony, before he typed back Thanks. I have a gift for procedural humor.

Priya sent a laughing face. Marcus sent a skull. Neither of them wrote anything else.

Then there was a small gray dot on the corner of the screen.

Exterminators liked your comment.

Asher stared at it, and did not breathe.

He did not stop to ask what the room had really been laughing about, or who besides the three hundred and twelve might be sitting quietly in the dark, reading each line to see whose courage it would flatter. It was a joke, and a good one, harmless as a pun, the sort of thing that people say at parties, and he would have been astonished to be told that a line could travel from the person who wrote it to a person he would never meet and arrive there as something else. It seemed to him only that he had been seen by the best reader on the page, and that for once in his life the laughter in a room had been on his side.

…

His phone rang at eleven-thirty. It was Priya, on video, in her green hoodie with the towel on her head, and a cat the color of a storm cloud sprawled across her shoulders.

"You're up," said Priya.

"I'm working."

"On a Saturday night? That's grim." She leaned toward the screen. Behind her he could see a corner of her bookshelf, and the glow of a lamp. "I saw your comment, by the way. The motion to dismiss. That was actually good. I told Marcus. He said it was a fluke."

"It wasn't a fluke."

"Okay, it wasn't a fluke." She tugged on the towel. She was smiling, but it was a careful smile, the way one smiles at a patient. "Can I ask you something, though? And you can tell me to shut up."

"Go ahead."

"You know that the group is fake, right? The whole thing. The posts and the comments and everyone pretending." She looked at him directly through the screen. "I just want to hear you say it. Because you've been in there a lot, and I know what it's like to get really into a story."

"Of course it's fake," said Asher.

"Okay."

"It's a creative community. It's a game. Everyone knows that, it's right in the rules."

"Okay. I believe you." She exhaled, and the cat shifted on her shoulders. "Sorry. I'm being weird. Noah says I worry."

"You do worry."

"Goodnight, Asher."

He hung up before she could say anything else, and the screen went dark, and he sat looking at his own reflection in it for a moment. Then he turned the laptop toward him again. He did not even pretend to himself that there was a reason. He clicked on the joke, and looked at the number, and it said fourteen hundred and nineteen.

…

Past one, the mask spoke.

Asher had been about to close the laptop. His eyes were burning and his neck was stiff, and the file for Monday lay unopened on the floor beside the bed, and he had decided that he would rise at five and finish it. But the page refreshed, as it had a hundred times that night, and at the very top of the thread a new line had appeared, a single paragraph, set apart from the rest in the plain white type.

Everyone here has told us what they would not do. That is worth knowing. It is not worth worrying about. If someone truly wanted to, they would wait. We are not in a hurry.

There was a beat when the thread stopped, as a classroom stops when the teacher comes in. Then the replies began to arrive, one on top of another, with the same word: Brilliant. Chills. This is the best thing on the site. The number beside the post was already past five hundred.

Asher read it three times.

He had a feeling that was almost physical, a hand closing slowly in his chest, and he could not have said whether it was dread or delight. It was so beautifully put. It was a line that belonged in a novel, he thought, at the end of a chapter, where the stranger sits at the window of the inn and says what everyone will remember afterward. He opened the spreadsheet, and with a smile that he could feel on his face, he took a screenshot and saved it in the folder with the others.

He named the file with the date and the time, and then, because it seemed fitting, he added a title of his own, and looked at it with satisfaction before he turned off the lamp.

Chilling. Excellent.