Milo was a friendly man but he had a laugh like a slug dropped in an acid bath. If you heat the oil too much and watch as the garlic blackens soon after putting it in, Milo’s laugh is like that. Milo was tall, thin, and his fingers were long. On the subject of Milo’s laugh, one of his friends said, “You sound like you’re being torn in half.”
“But it was a funny joke,” Milo would say in his pleasant way after completing his laugh.
Milo was well liked. He worked hard. But he had difficulty with intimate relationships.
“It’s your laugh,” his friends told him. “Not your chuckle, but the big one.”
“What’s wrong with it?” Milo asked. “What’s the matter with you guys. When I hear or see something funny, I laugh.”
Milo’s laugh became the joke for comedians at clubs. “What the hell just happened out there?” a comedian said. “Who out there just vomited up a bag of jacks?” At the matinee, George, one of Milo’s friends, nudged his shoulder with an elbow. “Dude, you’re freakin me out.”
“That was so funny,” Milo said.
When Milo wasn’t laughing he was calm and steady. His face displayed little emotion or reaction, which explained why people liked Milo. He would listen and nod his head. He would ask a question and people would say, “I hadn’t thought of asking that.” At items of minimal humor, he would simply chuckle in a bearable way.
At a party one Friday, Bernand introduced his friends to a woman named Beatrice. George, Harold, Tito, and Milo crowded around and each in turn was introduced to Beatrice. But when Beatrice opened her mouth to say “Hi. Please to meet you” to Milo she showed them all a dark green snag of spinach in between two otherwise normal front teeth.
“Did you see everyone turn? Shit,” Tito said.
“And Beatrice. She was humiliated and I was humiliated,” Bernard said. “Jesus, Milo. You always do this.”
“She was so pretty that the dirt in her teeth stood out and I found the combination just too funny,” Milo said. “I’m sorry.”
One day when Milo had just begun work for the Company, the boss had a sudden countenance of alarm. He ran into the room where the snack machines were kept. He saw Milo talking on the phone with his customary calm, just chatting away on his lunch break.
The boss shrugged. He ran back into the hall when he heard that sound, a high-pitched bitterness, a crescendo of childhood nightmares that filled the office like a fire alarm. But the boss only saw Milo, closing his phone, and turning to the coffee machine with a fresh bill.
“You lose all control when you laugh,” George said on their way to the movies. “And not only that, you laugh at inappropriate things.”
“It’s just the way I laugh. It doesn’t hurt anyone,” Milo said.
That’s when they saw the accident, just as George turned the corner. “Shit,” George said. They saw steam rising from crumpled front ends. George and Milo stopped and got out. “911,” Milo told George, “and hurry,” so cool-headed most of the time, always ready to lend aid.
A man and woman stumbled out of a car. From the other car came the sound of a crying toddler, the mother inside asking it if it were okay and reaching for the release buttons on the belt. George went to the mother with the child, Milo to the man and woman who’d sat on the curb. The man had a slash above his eye and the woman asked Milo if he had a tissue with which to dab the wound. Everyone seemed okay and already they could hear sirens in the distance.
Thats when Milo turned to see George, the mother and the child. The mother was red with terror and relief. George was carrying the child. Milo’s eyes went to the child’s face. The child’s lips, chin, and nose were spattered with what must have been yogurt, blueberry yogurt, and there was one perfect little blueberry pasted close to the child’s left nostril, so that when he breathed in his current state of subsiding shock, the blueberry rolled a little distance down his upper lip, then was snatched back up when the child sniffed.
When the police arrived they found everyone laughing. Some of them were bleeding and steam was still rising from broken radiators but all of them were laughing, dabbing each other with tissues, wiping at tears, and laughing, even the child, and the tallest of them, Milo, shook with the ugliest and bitterest laughter of all.
“Hey, someone could’ve been killed here,” one of the officers said.
“That’s exactly right,” Charles said with difficulty. “That’s exactly right.”
