The doctor said six months and Milo Brink laughed. Not the polite laugh of a man absorbing terrible news. The real thing. Shoulders shaking, eyes wet, the full catastrophe. He laughed because the doctor's name was Dr. Graves, and Dr. Graves had a mole on his left cheek shaped exactly like a coffin, and Milo had spent forty-one years as a professional clown, which meant he'd spent forty-one years noticing things like that.
"Should I give you a moment?" Dr. Graves asked.
"You just did," Milo said.
He drove home through the kind of October light that makes everything look like a painting someone's about to sell. His apartment was small and smelled like coffee and the particular loneliness of a man who'd outlived his act. On the kitchen counter: a stack of unpaid bills, half a crossword, and a red rubber nose he kept there the way other men keep wedding rings they can't bring themselves to throw away.
He picked up the nose. Squeezed it. It still worked.
That night, Milo Brink did something he hadn't done in eleven years. He wrote a joke. Not a good one, not yet. He wrote it on a napkin, walked six blocks in the dark, and taped it to a bus stop bench on Kimball Avenue.
It said: "What do you call a clown in a hospital? A patient."
Underneath, smaller: "If you're reading this, your day just got either better or worse. Either way, you're welcome."
He went home and slept like the dead. A poor choice of simile, under the circumstances, but sleep doesn't care about your diagnosis.
* * *
By the end of the first week, there were fourteen jokes hidden across the east side of the city. Taped under handrails. Tucked into the plastic sleeves of bus schedules. Slipped between the pages of free newspapers in coffee shops. A dry cleaner on Fifth found one pinned inside a returned jacket and laughed so hard she had to sit down.
The jokes were not all good. Some were terrible. Milo believed this was important. "The bad ones," he'd once told his wife, "are what make the good ones possible. You have to earn the groan before you earn the laugh." His wife, Helen, who had earned every single one of his jokes for thirty-two years, had said: "Or you could just be funny."
Helen had been dead for eleven years. The math was not a coincidence.
* * *
On day nine, someone wrote back.
Milo found it at the bus stop on Kimball, right below his original napkin. A Post-it note in green ink: "That's not a joke, that's a cry for help disguised as a setup. Here's a real one: What do you call a bus that never comes? Reliable."
Milo stared at it for a long time. Then he laughed. It was a terrible joke. Which meant it was perfect.
He wrote back the next morning. Taped a new napkin beside the Post-it: "Your joke is bad and you should feel bad. But since you asked: Why did the clown retire? He got tired of everyone laughing at him. Yours in mediocrity, The Management."
The next day, another green Post-it: "The Management has clearly never worked in an office. Nobody laughs there. I should know. PS: Your handwriting is atrocious."
This went on for three weeks.
Milo planted jokes. The stranger annotated them. Milo started writing jokes specifically calibrated to provoke the stranger's particular brand of irritated wit. The stranger started drawing tiny cartoons in the margins. They were stick figures, mostly, and they were awful, and Milo thought they were the best things he'd ever seen because they were for him, or at least for whoever he was pretending to be in these napkin dispatches.
He was dying, and he was having the best month of his life. There is probably something profound in that, but Milo was a clown, not a philosopher, and he didn't trust profundity any further than he could throw it.
* * *
On a Tuesday in November, Milo walked to a bench in Rosewood Park—a bench he hadn't visited in over a decade—to plant joke number forty-three. He reached under the seat to tape the napkin and his fingers touched paper already there.
Old paper. Yellowed. Brittle at the edges.
He pulled it out and unfolded it carefully, the way you handle something that might be a love letter or a bomb. It was neither. It was a joke, written in his own handwriting, in ink that had faded to a pale brown ghost of itself:
"Knock knock. Who's there? The future. The future who? That's the whole joke. You'll get it later."
Milo sat down on the bench. His hands were shaking. He recognized the handwriting—not just as his own but as a specific version of his own, the cramped anxious version from the year Helen was sick. He'd done this before. He'd done all of this before. Planted jokes around the city like seeds he hoped someone would water, because his wife was dying and the only alternative to being funny was being something he couldn't afford to be.
He'd forgotten. Eleven years and a whole ocean of grief, and he'd forgotten that he'd already invented this ritual, already walked these blocks in the dark, already tried to turn his worst year into a scavenger hunt for strangers.
He checked three more of his old spots. Under the railing at the Kimball Avenue overpass: a joke about a man who kept losing his keys. Behind the drainpipe at the library on Sycamore: a joke about a book that nobody checked out because it was too sad, so the librarian started reading it aloud to the other books at night.
And on the fourth bench, the one by the duck pond where he'd proposed to Helen in 1979, he found this:
"You'll be back here someday, reading this. Hi. I'm sorry it's happening again. But look—you survived it the first time. That's not nothing. That's actually the whole thing."
Milo Brink, sixty-seven years old, formerly the Great Brinkini, who had made eleven thousand people laugh on purpose and at least twice that many by accident, sat on a bench by a duck pond and cried. Not the dignified kind. The ugly kind, where your face does things you didn't authorize and your chest makes sounds that belong to an animal, not a man. He cried because his younger self had known him better than he knew himself, and because Helen had been alive when those words were written, and because the ducks didn't care, and because not caring was, in its own way, a kind of grace.
* * *
He went back to Kimball Avenue that evening. The green Post-it was there, the latest one: "You've been quiet. Did you finally run out of bad material, or did you just die? (Sorry. Too dark? I work in insurance. We're like this.)"
Milo wrote back: "I found some old jokes I wrote a long time ago. Turns out I've been plagiarizing myself. Turns out I've been having the same conversation with the same city for years and the city keeps answering in different voices. Turns out the punchline is that there isn't one. Also: what kind of insurance?"
The next morning: "Life insurance. Yes, I know. Don't."
Milo didn't.
* * *
December came and the jokes kept going but Milo was getting tired. Not in the way you get tired from staying up late. Tired the way a candle gets tired. He wrote slower. His walks got shorter. He started leaving jokes closer to home, within a few blocks, then on his own street, then in the lobby of his building.
The super found one in the mailroom and taped it to the wall. Someone in 4B added a Post-it: "This is the funniest thing in this building and I include Mr. Henderson's toupee."
On December 14th, Milo walked to the duck pond bench for what he suspected would be the last time. The air was cold enough to make his teeth ache. He sat down. He did not have a joke to leave. He had come to read the old one again—the one from his younger self, the one that said he'd survived it the first time.
But there was something new on the bench. A green Post-it, stuck right next to the old yellowed paper.
"I followed your trail backwards. Took me two weeks. I found the old ones and the new ones and I sat here yesterday and read this note you wrote to yourself years ago and I want you to know that I'm not writing back because I'm clever. I'm writing back because in September my daughter told me she doesn't want to see me anymore, and in October I found your first joke on that bus stop bench and it was so bad it made me angry, and being angry was so much better than being sad that I kept coming back. So thank you. For the bad jokes especially. Those were the ones that worked."
Below that, in smaller letters: "PS: I don't actually work in insurance. I'm a middle school teacher. The insurance thing was funnier."
And below that: "PPS: Knock knock."
Milo stared at it. He looked around the park. A woman was walking a dog the size of a dinner roll. Two kids were throwing bread at ducks who frankly did not deserve it. An old man in a wool coat was sitting on the next bench over, reading a newspaper, and when Milo looked at him the man lowered the paper slightly and raised an eyebrow.
"Knock knock," the man said.
"Who's there?" said Milo.
"I have absolutely no idea," the man said. "I thought you'd have a punchline. I've been sitting here for forty minutes."
Milo looked at him. The man was about fifty, with the specific kind of tired face that belongs to people who spend their days being patient with other people's children. He was holding a green pen.
"The punchline," Milo said, "is that you came."
"That's not a punchline."
"No," Milo agreed. "It's better."
The man folded his newspaper. Milo squeezed over on the bench. They sat there for a while, two men on a bench in December, not saying much, watching the ducks negotiate for bread with the relentless optimism of creatures who have never once been told they're dying.
"I'm Milo," Milo said.
"David," said the man.
"David, I'm going to be honest with you. I'm not well."
"I know," David said. "The jokes got shorter."
Milo laughed. It hurt. It was wonderful.
"Let me buy you a coffee," David said. "You can tell me the one about the book the librarian reads to the other books. I found it behind a drainpipe and the rain got to the punchline."
"The punchline," Milo said, standing up slowly, "is that the other books listened."
"That's not funny."
"No," said Milo. "But it's true."
They walked to the coffee shop on the corner, and Milo told him the joke properly, and David laughed in the wrong place, which made Milo laugh, which made the barista look up from her phone, which made her smile, which she would not remember doing but which was, in the grand accounting of things, worth more than she would ever know.
Milo Brink died on February 3rd. The obituary said he was a retired entertainer. It did not mention the napkins. But if you walk the east side of the city in the right light, and you check under the benches and behind the drainpipes, and you read carefully, you will find that someone has been there before you, leaving small stupid pieces of themselves behind, and that someone else has been there too, writing back in green ink, and that the conversation is still going, because David never stopped, and because the city keeps answering in different voices, and because a joke without a punchline is just a question, and a question is just a door, and a door is only a wall if you forget to open it.
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