ReRe’s Last Joke of the Night

The funniest voice on the radio went quiet when a caller recognized her laugh.

Until then, the evening had been going well enough that Bethany allowed us to turn the kitchen receiver louder than the rattling stove.

Her public kitchen served Ashfall’s river neighborhoods, and I had come from my photography work to help with the washing.

ReRe was telling a story about two lovers who brought flowers to the same empty house, each convinced that the person inside had chosen them.

One had purchased roses and removed the thorns with such determination that only half the stems remained.

The other brought a pot of onions because an aunt had insisted that useful gifts survived disappointment better than beautiful ones.

ReRe gave both of them terrible advice in the solemn voice of someone who charged by the hour.

Bella, who kept the bridge lamp, laughed into her cup, and a spoon slid from my hand into the washing water.

In the booth across the square, Rhea, who broadcast under the name ReRe, could not hear us, but she seemed to know exactly how long a room would need before it was ready for the next sentence.

She left that space and then spoiled the imaginary aunt’s dignity with a remark in Mandarin.

She translated its meaning into English, explaining that the aunt had three husbands’ worth of experience and refused to say whether she had acquired them together or in succession.

Bethany told me to rescue the spoon before I applauded.

The programme allowed a short period for calls, usually requests, corrections, or listeners offering better advice to people who did not exist.

ReRe rang a little desk bell and invited the city to repair the lovers’ evening.

A woman recommended that both take their flowers home and go to bed.

A carrier said the house probably belonged to a tax collector and they should leave at once.

Then a man’s voice came through, slightly thin with distance, and said she used to laugh like that before she left the old district.

No one in the kitchen moved.

He had not spoken sharply or suggested a scandal.

There was affection in the recognition, and the beginning of another sentence that never quite reached us.

ReRe’s silence lasted only a few seconds.

On the radio, where she usually placed every pause herself, it felt much longer.

Then she made a joke about the wires developing nostalgia, thanked him, and ended the call.

She finished the programme early with a song from the record shelf, its first notes arriving louder than they should have.

Bella lowered the receiver’s volume.

Bethany returned to drying the cups and did not offer a theory about the caller.

I found myself listening for something under the music, as though I might hear the room from which ReRe had withdrawn.

There was nothing to hear but a scratch in the recording and the low sound of the stove.

I went to the Archive afterward to clean a lens I had put off attending to all afternoon.

Aurelian, the synthetic man who served as our archive witness, was arranging records on a table by the inner door, leaving the front room open for people who had messages to collect.

The rain began lightly against the window, then became steady enough to blur the lamps across the square.

ReRe arrived with the broadcast recording in a hard case beneath her coat.

She had changed out of the bright scarf she wore in the booth, but the rest of her clothes were the same, and a strip of paper still clung to her sleeve.

It was a cue for the final joke.

She asked Aurelian to remove the pause before the programme was copied for the morning repeat.

Her voice had a practical briskness that made the request sound like correcting a misspelled word.

Aurelian asked where she wanted the cut to begin.

“Before I cease being useful,” she said, and smiled.

I looked up before I could help it.

She saw me listening and gave me another smile, faster and less convincing than the first.

It was the smile people wear while a door closes behind their eyes.

I put the lens away and asked whether she wanted tea or an empty room.

“Is that your entire selection?” she asked.

“There may be a biscuit.”

“A dangerous promise at this hour.”

She chose tea, then sat with the recording balanced on her knees as though she expected to leave before the water boiled.

Aurelian put a plain cover over the case and told her the morning repeat could wait until she decided what she wanted people to hear.

She started explaining that there were listeners who depended on the programme’s usual time, and he asked whether one of her older readings could fill it if necessary.

That seemed to surprise her more than any offer of comfort.

She had spent so many evenings making something new that she had forgotten the shelf of things she had already made.

I brought three cups, then remembered that she liked hers without the chipped rim and exchanged it before filling it.

She watched this small operation with excessive interest.

“The caller knows me,” she said eventually.

Neither of us asked how.

“He knew me before the radio.”

The rain reached the lower window frame and ran along the sill in a thin silver line.

I put a cloth beneath it, grateful for an ordinary task that did not demand an answer from her.

She peeled the paper cue from her sleeve and read the joke silently.

Then she folded it into a square too small to be useful and placed it beneath her cup.

“It was a good ending,” she said.

I asked whether she meant the programme or the story.

She thought about it while the tea cooled.

“I did not finish either of them.”

There was room at the table for the recording, but she kept it on her lap until Aurelian asked whether she wanted him to put it somewhere safe.

Only then did she let go.

Rhea told me how ReRe had begun on a later afternoon, when she was no longer trying to decide what the entire city should hear about the previous night.

I record her account here because the pause on the broadcast was brief, while the habits that made it frightening had taken years to form.

In the old district, she read romantic stories to friends after work.

They met in a room above a shop where the floor sloped toward the window and one chair had to be kept against the wall so its occupant would not slowly migrate across the room.

Nobody had arranged the gatherings as a performance.

A friend brought a book with an implausible cover, another brought leftovers, and Rhea began reading aloud while somebody searched for the missing lid of the kettle.

The story involved a missed train, a letter delivered to the wrong brother, and a woman who seemed unable to enter a room without fainting.

Rhea grew impatient with the woman and gave her a second voice in which she complained about the quality of the floor.

The room laughed, and the next evening somebody asked what happened after she got up.

That was how Rhea inherited the book.

She could make the same missed train sound tragic in English and absurd in Mandarin.

For friends who knew only one language, she carried the meaning between them, sometimes explaining why a phrase became funnier when its shape changed.

The explanations became part of the pleasure.

People interrupted, argued about the lovers’ decisions, or asked her to repeat a sentence because they had been at the stove when she read it.

A neighbour banged on the wall whenever the laughter grew too loud.

The group learned to pause for the knock, apologize, and continue at a volume that rarely lasted more than a page.

The caller had been one of those friends.

He repaired things around the room badly enough that his efforts supplied them with material for weeks, but he always came back when a hinge or latch failed again.

Rhea remembered him sitting on the floor to hold the leaning chair steady while another friend ate from a bowl balanced on her knees.

He had heard her laugh when she was tired, irritated, pleased with herself, or unable to continue reading because a sentence had defeated her.

He did not possess a secret explanation of her life.

He knew the sound before it acquired a schedule.

When Rhea moved away, she expected the gatherings to continue somewhere else with the same ease.

At first they did, though somebody worked late and somebody else lived farther from the new room than the old one.

Then the intervals lengthened.

No dramatic quarrel divided them, and no single departure explained why a familiar evening had become difficult to assemble.

She began broadcasting partly because a microphone could reach friends who could no longer gather around one table.

Her first programme was too quiet, and she apologized so frequently that a listener wrote to ask whether apology was the title of the series.

She kept the letter because it made her laugh.

With practice she learned how to place her voice, how to mark a page so the paper would not rustle, and how to end a sentence before she ran out of breath.

The work delighted her.

There was pleasure in making a whole city lean toward a speaker at the same moment, and she did not want that pleasure described as a disguise for unhappiness.

ReRe was not an invented person who had stolen Rhea’s life.

She was Rhea’s voice with its hesitations polished out, her timing sharpened by attention and repetition.

The difficulty began when Rhea assumed that everything she removed from a performance should also disappear from the person who made it.

If she was tired before a broadcast, she drank stronger tea and recorded the opening twice.

If a letter hurt her feelings, she made a joke about it before anybody could ask whether it had hurt.

Listeners praised her for lifting their spirits after difficult days.

She began to fear that an ordinary sad evening might feel to them like a failure to keep her part of an agreement.

I asked whether anyone had actually made that agreement with her.

She said no, then asked whether I could really be certain that people did not expect it.

I could not give her certainty about every listener.

Some would prefer the polished voice, just as some preferred a particular story or disliked the music she played between readings.

That did not explain why their imagined preferences had become the only room she permitted herself to occupy.

She took a pencil from my desk and straightened it beside the edge of the page.

“The old friend might know,” she said.

“What might he know?”

“That I am still lonely.”

She looked annoyed as soon as she said it, as though the admission sounded too small for the trouble it had caused.

Everybody recognized her voice now.

People sent flowers to the booth, requested songs, and stopped her in the market to repeat their favourite lines.

She liked many of them and still sometimes ate supper while listening to another programme because she could not bear how quiet her room became when she stopped speaking.

The caller had reached past the apparent contradiction without intending to.

He remembered a room where she could stop being interesting and remain included.

She had feared he would hear the distance between that room and the life she had made.

I did not offer to explain his thoughts, because I did not know them.

I asked whether she wanted to hear his interrupted sentence again.

“Not yet,” she said.

I closed the recording without playing it.

She left the pencil slightly crooked when she gave it back, which I noticed and did not correct.

That first night, before she told Aurelian the history of the old room, ReRe tried to give us the ending she had planned for the broadcast.

The two lovers would discover that each had mistaken the same address.

The roses belonged at a house across the river, and the onions were intended for a woman who had sensibly gone out when the first suitor began describing his feelings.

Neither visitor would receive the welcome they expected, but they would share a walk home and argue about which flowers could be eaten.

ReRe started the aunt’s voice and stopped halfway through its first complaint.

I asked whether she wanted to tell the rest now.

She put her cup down with a small, hard sound.

“I do not want to perform.”

I had meant to offer something pleasant and familiar.

What I had actually offered was the thing she had come away from the booth to escape.

I said I was sorry and moved the recording farther from the tea tray.

For a while we sat without a story.

The rain on the glass kept finding new rhythms, softening when the wind turned and returning in a rush whenever it changed its mind.

Aurelian went to answer a knock at the outer door, leaving us with the stove, the cups, and the damp smell of our coats.

ReRe watched him go and asked whether people would come in looking for her.

I said I did not know who knew she was here, but I could put a notice on the front room saying we were occupied.

She hesitated, then nodded.

I wrote it plainly, without her name or any explanation, and hung it where somebody could read it before opening the inner door.

When I returned, she had taken the folded cue from beneath her cup and smoothed it against her knee.

“You need not throw that away,” I said.

“I know.”

“I keep photographs that did not work.”

“Do you invite people over and ask them to admire the failures?”

“Only when I want them to leave early.”

She laughed once, unexpectedly, then covered her mouth as if she had made a noise in a room where someone was sleeping.

I pretended to have difficulty with the stove latch while she decided whether to be embarrassed.

The kettle began its thin complaint, and she said the old one had been much louder.

It had screamed with such conviction that neighbours assumed something serious was happening whenever they made tea.

Somebody had tried to repair its lid with a strip of wire, which only gave the sound a second note.

She described the chair that leaned, the window that opened only if a person stood on the correct floorboard, and the neighbour’s knock against the wall.

“I miss him too,” she said.

“The neighbour?”

“He was impossible.”

She appeared offended by the discovery.

I told her I had once lived beside a man who sharpened knives before dawn and still occasionally missed the sound, though at the time I had composed several speeches against him.

“Did you deliver them?”

“No.”

“Perhaps that is why you miss him.”

The conversation went nowhere useful for several minutes, which was useful in a way neither of us needed to name.

She told me that the man who had called was particularly bad at keeping his own cup separate from everybody else’s.

He would take a sip, make a disappointed face, and announce that someone had ruined his tea with sugar.

The sugar had usually been his.

I asked whether she had spoken to him since leaving the district.

A few letters, she said, and one awkward meeting where they both tried to explain several years in the time it took to cross a market.

He had mentioned a new job and she had described the broadcast equipment in more detail than either of them wanted.

They had promised to meet properly and then failed to choose a day.

“That sounds ordinary,” I said.

“It is ordinary.”

She looked down at her hands.

“That is why I cannot understand making such a mess of it.”

I had no answer that would make the feeling tidy.

I said I sometimes became most awkward when nothing terrible was happening, because then I could not explain the awkwardness by pointing at an obvious danger.

She considered this without thanking me for it, which I preferred.

Aurelian returned with fresh water and asked whether we wanted the front room left empty for another half hour.

ReRe said yes, then asked whether the half hour could contain no questions about the recording.

He agreed and took a chair near the stove.

I found the promised biscuit in a tin and discovered that it had broken into three uneven pieces.

ReRe selected the smallest, changed her mind, and took the largest instead.

Nobody remarked on it.

The rain eased enough for us to hear a cart on the square, and she began talking about a book she had bought because its cover was beautiful and abandoned because its hero would not stop describing curtains.

This led to an argument about whether a bad book could justify its existence by being enjoyable to complain about.

Aurelian gave an answer so careful that ReRe accused him of protecting the curtains.

Her laugh came without preparation that time.

It was quieter than the radio laugh, and much easier to sit beside.

Later, when the half hour had become nearly an hour, she rose and put on her coat.

She left the recording with Aurelian and said she would decide about the pause after sleeping.

At the door, she looked back at the chairs and the unfinished tea.

“Can this room sometimes remain off air?” she asked.

I said we would have to check with the other people who used it, but yes, we could arrange a time.

She nodded as if we had discussed the lending of an ordinary table, and that made the agreement easier to keep.

Rhea returned the next afternoon with a page of new lines, crossed-out lines, and one corner devoted to a drawing of the kettle she remembered.

She asked to hear the programme from the beginning, including the part she had wanted removed.

We sat beside the playback device with the door closed and the public channel disconnected.

She checked that last detail herself.

I showed her the indicator, then left the switch where she could reach it.

The story about the lovers remained funny after a night’s distance, although she winced at one comparison and wrote a better one in the margin.

When the caller spoke, she leaned forward without appearing to notice.

He recognized her laugh and began to say that it was good to hear it again.

The last words had been partly covered by her joke about poor reception.

She listened twice, then asked me to stop.

“He was not asking me to explain anything,” she said.

I agreed that I could hear no such request in the recording.

That was as far as the evidence allowed us to go.

She had spent the night imagining an accusation inside an unfinished sentence, but discovering a kinder possibility did not make the embarrassment vanish immediately.

She tapped the pencil against her page, frowned at the sound, and laid it down.

We discussed the edit as a practical task.

There would be an original kept privately under her control and a public version for the repeat.

She did not want the caller’s name included, because his decision to telephone a programme did not mean he had offered his private history for our account of her evening.

We removed it cleanly and checked that the cut did not distort the meaning of what remained.

The pause required a different decision.

At first she suggested shortening it by half.

Then she asked to hear the result and disliked how her joke seemed to arrive before the caller had finished.

I restored the original interval.

She listened with her eyes closed, opened them, and said it sounded like a person thinking.

“It sounded longer last night,” she added.

“It was longer to you.”

She asked whether I thought leaving it would seem like a performance of honesty.

I told her that I could help her compare the versions, but I could not make the choice innocent of every possible interpretation.

For a moment she looked disappointed, then laughed at the size of the guarantee she had requested.

We kept the pause.

She did not add an account of her loneliness, her old room, or the conversation over tea.

The programme could contain an unplanned silence without owing the city a key to everything behind it.

To finish, she recorded a short passage in Mandarin, speaking slowly enough that the words did not become a decoration for listeners who could not understand them.

“有些晚上，很难把话说完,” she said.

Then she gave the meaning in English: some evenings, it is hard to finish what we want to say.

She left a little space after the translation and continued with the lovers outside the wrong house.

The man with the roses offered an apology to the woman who was not there.

The man with the onions suggested delivering it to an address that actually existed.

They argued, became cold, and eventually began walking together because their routes shared the bridge.

Neither was rewarded with a sudden love story for being disappointed politely.

They did find a stall still open, and they traded two onions for a bowl of soup.

Rhea gave the aunt the last word and got it right on the first recording.

She wanted a second take anyway, then heard the first again and decided to leave it.

When we finished, she asked if I could keep the private version somewhere other than the shelf used for broadcast copies.

We chose a labelled case inside a closed drawer, with permission required before listening.

The public copy went to the booth that evening.

Rhea did not stay to watch me put the other one away.

During the next two days she expected letters of disappointment.

She checked the post so often that the person sorting it began handing her empty baskets as a joke.

One listener complained that she had ended too soon, without specifying whether he meant the story or the whole programme.

Another sent a recipe for dumplings and explained that the dough should rest even if the cook refused to.

A third corrected the route across the bridge used by the fictional lovers.

Rhea accepted the correction because she had indeed placed the soup stall on the wrong side.

Her old friend wrote a short note asking whether she wanted to talk without a microphone.

He did not ask about the pause or say that he had understood what it meant.

He mentioned a day when he would be free and admitted that another day could also work if he moved a repair appointment.

She read the note standing by the Archive door, then read it again sitting on the step.

I happened to pass with a bundle of records, and she turned it over before remembering that I had not asked to see it.

“Must I decide now?” she asked.

I said the note appeared unlikely to expire before supper.

She put it in her coat and left the Archive before deciding what to say.

Later she told me that she had answered, but did not offer the reply for our records.

I did not ask for it.

The programme continued, sometimes bright, sometimes uneven, and she still prepared it with considerable care.

She also began marking a small period after each broadcast during which the booth door stayed closed and nobody expected a second show.

The first person to respect that notice was the man who delivered the post.

He left the basket outside and went to find his own supper.

A week later, ReRe invited us to a reading with no broadcast and gave everyone the wrong address by mistake.

The error was small enough to look trustworthy.

She had exchanged the last two numbers of a room above a shop, placing us in front of a locked storeroom whose only audience was a stack of empty crates visible through the window.

Bella arrived first, then me, then Criminal Code, the hacker our friends called CC, carrying a parcel she said contained food if we behaved ourselves.

We checked our notes and discovered that all three agreed with one another and with the wrong door.

“I admire consistency,” Criminal Code said.

Aurelian came down the lane with another guest, and we repeated the exercise as if a fifth copy might alter the building.

Someone suggested that this was part of the evening’s theme.

Bella pointed out that if ReRe had arranged an elaborate joke, she would have supplied chairs.

We found the right room after asking a woman closing the shop beneath it whether she had heard anyone swearing about dumplings.

The woman looked upstairs and said that the dumplings had apparently become a subject of great importance.

ReRe opened the door before we knocked properly.

She had flour on one sleeve and the furious expression of a person who had been imagining several different rejections when the actual problem was arithmetic.

A tray of cold dumplings stood on the table behind her.

Criminal Code held up the invitation and said the wrong address represented an impressive commitment to the theme.

ReRe threw a folded napkin at her.

The napkin missed and landed in Aurelian’s hands, which made her laugh and then look annoyed that she had laughed.

We crowded into the room, taking coats, moving a chair, and asking where the food should go until there was no space left for a formal arrival.

The old friend was already there.

He had found the place because ReRe had described the shop to him separately, then spent half an hour assuring her that people were probably just delayed.

He looked as unsure of his place as anybody else and offered to move from a chair nobody had claimed.

Bella told him to stay where he was while she set the parcel on the table.

Nobody asked them to explain their history.

I recognized his voice when he greeted me and felt the oddness of hearing a person who had previously existed only as a few seconds inside a kitchen speaker.

He had a small tear at the cuff of his coat and brought a bottle wrapped in a cloth to keep it from knocking against his tools.

ReRe introduced him as her friend and moved on to explaining which dumplings contained mushrooms.

The room was modest, with enough chairs only if two people took the window seat and someone accepted a stool that complained under weight.

There was no leaning chair, no screaming kettle, and no need to pretend we had rebuilt her old life.

She had brought different cups and a book she had chosen because the story pleased her.

The microphone lay in its case beneath a side table.

I saw her look toward it once when the conversation became loud, as though she were estimating whether the sound would distort.

Then she caught herself and asked Criminal Code to pass the vinegar.

We ate before she read, and the dumplings improved after Bethany’s suggested method of warming them over a shallow pan of water.

ReRe declared that anyone praising their texture must praise Bethany by name.

Her old friend admitted that he had eaten three cold ones while waiting and thought they had been entirely respectable.

“You have very low standards,” she told him.

“I have a long memory of your first attempts.”

She threatened to give him the stool.

When the table was cleared, she opened the book and read one story in Mandarin.

For those of us who did not know the words, she gave the meaning before moving to the next part, preserving the shape of the scene rather than pausing after every sentence.

A woman in the story was trying to retrieve a borrowed umbrella without admitting that she wanted to see its borrower again.

ReRe enjoyed the character’s evasions, but she did not push every opportunity into a joke.

At one point somebody outside dropped a metal lid and we all lost the next line.

She repeated it without apologizing or beginning the page again.

The second story was in English and concerned a man who found himself looking after a neighbour’s disagreeable bird.

Her old friend laughed before the rest of us at one particular description, and she glanced at him, smiling, before continuing.

Whatever shared memory lay behind the glance remained theirs.

We stayed long after the last page.

Nobody rang a bell to mark the end, and no music arrived to carry us away from the room.

The talk wandered through recipes, badly labelled streets, and the question of whether the bird in the story had been treated unfairly.

Aurelian argued that the evidence was incomplete, which caused Criminal Code to demand a statement from the bird.

ReRe leaned back in her chair and listened to other people make the room noisy.

When she began clearing the table, I helped stack the cups while the others argued over who had brought which coat.

She asked whether the room had been too quiet during the reading.

I told her I could hear people listening.

She looked toward the table, where her friend was folding the cloth around the empty bottle with unnecessary precision.

Then she asked him if he would help carry the leftover food downstairs.

He said yes and asked whether the address would remain the same on the way out.

This time her napkin found its target.

I left them by the door with the containers between them and went down the stairs carrying the cups Bella had lent.

From the street I could hear ReRe explaining how the invitation had gone wrong, and someone else laughing at a part I had missed.

She left the microphone in its case.