The Laughing Crusade
After finishing my treatise on the New Anarchist Revolution I decide to head out to the back porch for a beer and a cigarette. The television lies on the floor in a broken, smoldering heap. I pull a beer out of the refrigerator, cross the kitchen and go outside. It’s hot and humid. Quiet, but the neighborhood kind of quiet, which isn’t really quiet at all. Wind in the trees. The humming of a neighbor’s air conditioner. Buzzing streetlamps. Televisions murmuring through open windows. A telephone ringing. Distant traffic. Distant trains. Distant sirens. All the real noise is distant.
I light a cigarette and take the first deep drag and all the quiet unquiet is shattered. Someone laughs. It’s loud and continuous, emitted from somewhere high up in the nasal passages. Female. It’s like she has some sort of loudspeaker between her eyes. I don’t hear anyone else. Just this one woman, laughing and laughing. I sit down in a chair, rest my beer bottle on the small patio table, and try to block out that heinous laughter and focus on my next treatise. I can’t. Jesus. She sounds like a braying donkey. I finish the rest of my beer in a single gulp, take the last drag from my cigarette and toss both of them out into the yard.
Inside, I can still hear the laughter. I picture her standing there on her porch, leaning out over the steps, laughing and laughing and laughing.
I urinate on the busted television and head upstairs. I lie down next to the woman who has been lying comatose in this bed since I moved in nearly two years ago. She breathes slowly and steadily. Normally, her breathing is soporific but tonight it is drowned out by the braying donkey. She must live in the house across the street and just to the north.
Hours later, pillows piled around my head, I finally fall asleep.
And wake up to laughter. Loud. Raucous. Bursting forth in unrelenting waves.
What can possibly be so funny? This woman has laughed more in one night than I have my entire life. In fact, I have only laughed three times I can remember. Each time, something dreadful happened in the following days and I don’t know if I remember the laughter because of the funny things that happened or because of the subsequent tragedies.
I curl my hands into tightly balled fists and hop out of bed. I will wait until nightfall, I decide. And then I will have to find out what donkey girl is laughing at, if anything.
The laughter continues unabated throughout the day. At dusk, I delve into the closet and suit up—a black jumpsuit, black leather gloves, and a black ski mask—items I keep around for just such occasions.
The laughter has tapered only slightly. It seems she must have gone inside. No bother. I still had to find out what all the laughing was about. I go outside.
Unseen, I slowly approach the house until I am at eye level with what must be her living room. She doesn’t use any curtains or blinds. There’s practically no one in the neighborhood anyway and, even if there were, surely someone who laughs with such reckless abandon is not the least bit interested in privacy.
A burly female with short, spiky hair and skin like a potato’s sits on the couch, staring at her television and laughing uproariously. A large caramel-colored dog stands on the couch next to her, licking the side of her head. Where the dog has licked, the hair is wet, matted down to that gross skin. I notice what’s happening on her television and her laughter shocks me even further. Mushroom clouds, atrocity slaughter footage, torture, buildings crumbling, farms burning, people screaming before being consumed by conflagrations.
Not funny stuff.
Amidst the laughter I hear footsteps. I duck behind a row of shrubs and watch three people in gas masks approach the house. Not bothering to knock on the door, they just walk right in.
Now I’m totally enthralled. Perhaps they’ve come to take her away. That kind of thing happens all the time.
Simultaneously, they pull off their gas masks. Even more laughter rips through the night. So they weren’t gas masks at all. They were anti-laugh masks. How full of joy or insanity must one be before needing an anti-laugh mask?
Now the burly laugher rises and they all head toward the front door, led by the dog, the atrocity footage still playing on the television. That kind of thing was exactly the reason I had to deactivate my television. The world had become a brutal place and I didn’t want it in my home.
The dog sniffed a trail to the neighboring house. No one lives there, I thought. The dog sniffs the door, raises its paw and scratches. Maybe someone does live there. A squatter, perhaps. Someone hiding out. The laughers enter the house and come back out with a withered, sad-looking old man. They circle around him, laughing and laughing. They tap him on the shoulder, indicating for him to share a laugh. He tries. He bleats out a laugh, raising his arms in the air. Forced. Unnatural. Even I can tell and I’m not even very close. They shackle him, drag him down onto the ground, and strip off all his clothes—choking him, beating him until he is dead.
What’s the point of this?
Are these people with the government? Are they law enforcement? Is it now a requirement to be a laughing hyena?
Apparently it is.
I retreat to my rooftop and, through powerful night vision binoculars, watch the laughers continue their cruel crusade. Or is it a hilarious crusade? They drag the quiet and the sober from their homes, beat them to unconsciousness, and toss them out into the road where a large truck equipped with a giant clown head comes along and scoops them up with a creepily fleshy, oversized hand. Meanwhile, people like Jimmy, the neighborhood drunk, the one who pisses in his lawn all the time, are able to join their ranks, increasing their overall volume of laughter.
I don’t know what to do. What will become of me if they rush into the house and find the television all broken or, worse, what if they find my treatise? I flush it down the toilet. I try to be quick about it but I have to go nearly page by page to avoid clogs. Now they are knocking on the door. Has it always been like this? I can’t remember. I can’t remember much of anything. Still, they knock on the door. My memories are not important. Was I ever one of them? Did I ever laugh like that? I can’t imagine it.
The dog scratches.
The laughers laugh and knock and laugh.
I look at the comatose woman.
What if I was in a coma?
Where did that truck take all of the non-laughers?
The front door opens downstairs. I throw myself in bed next to the comatose woman. She smiles, opens her eyes and says, “It works. I’ve been faking all this time,” before snapping them shut and resuming her breathing. I close my eyes as the laughers enter the room and wonder what the comatose life will be like.
