The Feeling at the Peak

Thread: "What would it feel like to go out at the exact peak?" (started 8:02 PM, 640 replies)

cold_open_77 · 8:15 PM · 702 likes: At least you'd miss the morning-after awkwardness.

mothlight · 8:22 PM · 655 likes: Finally, a way to leave a party on a high note.

marrow_and_salt · 8:40 PM · 530 likes: Best possible reason to cancel the Monday meeting.

On Tuesday at a quarter to noon Dana stopped at the entrance to the fourth-floor bullpen with her coat already on and her bag over her shoulder, and said, to the room at large but with her eyes on Asher, that a few of them were going to the Thai place across the street and that anyone who wanted to come was welcome.

It was a small invitation. Nobody in the room took it for anything more. Two of the associates said they had a call, a paralegal named Corinne said she would meet them there, and Dana waited a moment longer than the others in the doorway with her hand on the frame, looking at the back of Asher's head.

"I can't," said Asher, without turning. "I'm in the middle of something."

"It's lunch, Asher. It's forty minutes."

"There's a thread I need to finish." He said it in the tone of a man referring to a brief due in court. "It's a very active discussion. Somebody has to keep up with it."

Dana looked at the screen over his shoulder. She did not see what was on it, because he tilted the laptop an inch to the left, the way a boy shifts his arm over a test. She stood another second in the doorway. Her mouth moved as though she were about to say something. Then she lifted one shoulder, in a gesture that was not annoyance, not even disappointment, but something smaller and more tired, as though a window she had been holding open for a long time had finally been allowed to close, and she said "Okay," and went out, and he heard the elevator.

He did not think about it. He had forty minutes, and the thread had grown by sixty comments since breakfast.

At ten past one Hargrove came down the aisle between the desks with a thick binder under his arm and stopped at the end of Asher's row, and Asher, who had been laughing alone at something on the screen, straightened so abruptly that the chair squeaked.

"Cole."

"Yes, sir."

"The Pelham summary." Hargrove set the binder on the corner of the desk. It was Asher's own binder, with its colored tabs, and it had been opened and closed and opened again, and had a coffee ring on the cover. "I read it on the train. It runs to a hundred and eleven pages."

"I wanted it to be complete."

"It was complete." There was a pause, in which the senior man seemed to look for the correct word and decline it. "The finding that matters is on page ninety-four, in a footnote. A client will not read to page ninety-four, Cole. Neither will I, in the ordinary course of things. I would like two pages by Thursday. The first page says what happened. The second says what we do."

"Of course. I can do that."

"Good."

"Would you like me to keep the long version as an appendix?"

Hargrove looked at him with his tired, level, unreadable face, and the pen, which he had taken out of his pocket without noticing, made one slow tap against the binder.

"If you wish," he said. "Nobody will read it."

He walked on. Asher stayed where he was for a few seconds with his heart going and his jaw set, and then he relaxed it, by an effort, and told himself that this was in fact a compliment, since an appendix was the sign of a thorough mind. By the time Hargrove reached the end of the aisle, he had almost persuaded himself that he had been praised.

On the screen, the thread had reached five hundred and ninety.

…

On the subway home the thread stood at six hundred and forty.

He read it on the train, standing, with one hand around the pole and the phone held close to his chest, in the swaying yellow light of the six-fifteen from downtown, with a woman's umbrella dripping onto his shoe. It was the loudest the forum had ever been. It had started the night before as a single question, put to the room by someone named velvet_hour, and by the next evening it had swallowed everything else, and the whole of the room was in it, shouting and laughing over one another like a party where the host has gone upstairs.

He could not have said why it appealed to him so much. He supposed it was the energy. He had lived all his life in rooms that went quiet when he entered them, and this one had never once gone quiet, and now, when he scrolled, the jokes arrived faster than he could read them.

At least you'd miss the morning-after awkwardness, wrote cold_open_77, and seven hundred people had liked it.

Finally, a way to leave a party on a high note, wrote mothlight.

Best possible reason to cancel the Monday meeting.

Think of the funeral. "He always did know when to leave."

Worst case, your hairdresser will be furious.

They were harmless. He told himself so, as he read them, moving along the aisle with the train. They were jokes of the kind that people told at wakes, nervous and affectionate and slightly dumb, aimed at nobody, and there was not a single line in the whole six hundred and forty that anyone could have pointed to afterward as dangerous. Not one of them said how. Not one said who. They were only people being funny about the end of things, which was what people had always done, and he felt the same tight pleasure in his chest that he had felt on Saturday, the pleasure of belonging to a roomful of people who did not take themselves too seriously.

At the Fenwick Street stop a man with a guitar case got on and stood against the door. Asher scrolled.

He had written two lines himself. He had thought about them for most of the afternoon, at his desk, between the Pelham exhibits, and he had put them in at lunch while the others were out. I'd like it noted for the record that I have never once left a party on a high note, and, beneath it, because the first had done well: If anyone has a complaint, please direct it to the estate. They had both done very well. The second was at three hundred and ten and rising, and the thrill of it ran all the way down his arms.

Then he saw the small gray line under the thread.

Exterminators replied.

It was a short comment, as it always was. Thank you, everyone, for contributing so many perspectives, it said. It is a pleasure to see the room so lively. Please continue.

He read it, and he smiled. It sounded like the chairman of a garden club thanking the volunteers. It sounded like the end of a meeting. It was so mild, so courteous, so entirely the voice of someone who had arranged for the coffee, that there was a flash of affection in him for the man, and the train came up out of the tunnel into the last light, and the whole river was copper.

…

His phone buzzed twice in his hand.

Noah: Dude. This thread is a bit much.

Asher glanced at it. He thumbed a reply with one hand, the other still wrapped around the pole. It's a joke thread.

Noah: I know it's jokes. I've been reading it for an hour. Something about it is giving me the creeps.

You're getting soft.

Noah: Maybe.

The train lurched around a bend, and the woman with the umbrella staggered into him, and apologized, and he nodded without looking up. The three dots on the screen came and went. He waited, and he found that he was a little angry, not because Noah had said anything unreasonable but because he had said it into the middle of something Asher was enjoying.

Noah: What if it's not fake though?

Then I'll defend whoever got sued, typed Asher. I'm going to be a lawyer, Noah. That's the job. It's real or it's not, and either way I come out with a case.

Noah: That's not what I meant.

I know what you meant. You're nervous. You're nervous because you've never read anything that didn't have a happy ending.

Noah: Okay.

There was a long pause, and then, as the train slowed into his station, a last line, the kind of thing a person sends when he has decided to stop: Okay. Just don't forget it's people on the other end.

Asher put the phone in his pocket without answering. He felt a quick sour stab of resentment, and he thought, going up the steps into the rain, that it was a pity that Noah, who was so intelligent, should have been made so timid by life.

…

The apartment smelled of damp coats and the laundromat's warm detergent.

He ate his cereal at the counter. He answered four emails for Hargrove and sent a text to Marcus that said only Pizza Saturday? and was answered, after twenty minutes, with a thumbs-up. He washed his bowl and then stood for a time at the window with his hands in his pockets, watching the laundromat's blue-white sign flicker in the puddles, and he thought, in a vague contented way, that he was perhaps the only person on the block who knew what the entire block was doing at that moment. He was the only one who read. It gave him a feeling of intimacy with the street, as though he were a lighthouse keeper.

At eleven he went back to the thread to read it for the last time before sleep.

It had grown to nine hundred. The jokes had slowed. The room was tired, he could tell, the way a party is tired at one in the morning, with the fun gone out of it and a few stubborn voices going on without much heart. He scrolled quickly past the last of the funny ones. He scrolled past a long argument about whether a bad haircut counted as a worse way to die. He was about to close the screen when he saw, near the very bottom, a comment with no likes at all.

It had been posted twenty minutes before. It carried the plain white mask.

It said no thanks. It made no joke. It did not smile. It said, in one line, with no punctuation but the period, as if it were the last line of some larger text that Asher had not been shown:

Every act begins with words.

He read it, and the room was quiet. Outside the window, the dryers in the laundromat turned over and over, and a car went by with its radio on, and then the bass faded and the street was still. He told himself that it was a nice line. It was the kind of thing that went on a poster in a school hallway, he thought, over the picture of a mountain.

He closed the laptop. He lay down in the dark with his hands on his chest and tried to remember what he had been about to do, and could not, and fell asleep.