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If Improv Teaches Us Anything


by Steve Sklar

Scene 1.

     A couple of years ago, I’m shopping for a birthday card for my wife, Nikki, in Words Bookstore in downtown Maplewood, New Jersey, when I get into a nonverbal altercation with a young kid.  I’ve taken up a position at the card carousel that stands between the checkout counter and the window to the street.  I’ve gravitated to this particular rack because the cards on it have that wry and understated quality Nikki and I have tended to favor in the cards we exchange on birthdays and anniversaries.  Elsewhere in the store are racks that hold cards featuring literary quotes in block print, “March to the sound of a different drummer,” that kind of thing, quotes that are all well and good in and of themselves but that in the context of a greeting card manage to sound insipid.
     As I’m looking over the cards at the rack near the window I become aware of the kid, who looks to be about seven years old.  He’s standing near me, also looking in the direction of the rack.  I begin to get this vibe from him that he resents my having taken up a position there.  But really, this is the good rack and this space is tight; there’s nowhere else for me to stand.  This is pre-pandemic, so social distancing is not an issue.
    My suspicion about the vibe is confirmed when he reaches over and turns the rack.  I haven’t finished reading the column of cards in front of me when he does that but, no problem, I start reading the next column.  Then he turns the rack again, and I notice he isn’t looking at the cards.
    Okay, I think, I see what this is.  This, here, is a contest of wills.  And I am not going to give him the satisfaction of knowing that this is bothering me.  So I don’t look at him, I look straight ahead at the cards while he continues turning the rack.  I figure, he’s a kid, what does he know, for all he knows maybe I can speed-read cards.
    As he starts turning the rack faster, I think: I know something he doesn’t know — because I’m a grownup and he’s just a kid.  I know that time is on my side.  My office is just a block away, I’m here on my lunch break, I have a solo immigration law practice and I don’t have any case emergencies this day.  As a matter of fact, business has been kind of dead for a while now, and that’s probably made me a bit touchy, but never mind that, what’s important is, I have all the time in the world to ride with this thing here at the card rack.  Meanwhile, I figure, this kid is probably here with his mother.  With his mom.  With his mommy.  She’s bound to be his transportation.  She’s probably got better things to do with her day than hang out in this bookstore.
     Now you may think, why don’t I just say to the kid, Look, could you please stop turning the rack.  However, this particular day — like others, let’s face it — I don’t seem to have a middle gear.  I certainly don’t want to unleash The Beast.  I mean, I could say to him, Listen, you little shit.  But this is a family bookstore, come on, I’m not going to do that.  So I just keep looking straight ahead at the card rack as the cards go whizzing by.
     Soon enough my assessment of our respective strategic positions is shown to be astute because his mother comes and collects him and they walk out of the store.  And as they leave and the card rack comes to a stop and I select a card for my wife, I don’t look at the kid and I don’t need to look at him.  Because we both know who won that contest.
     Okay.
     A couple of days later I’m visiting my mother.  My mom.  My mommy.  I tell her the story of the bookstore encounter figuring it’ll amuse her, and it does.  I have a great relationship with my mother.  We seem to be able to confide fairly freely in each other.  One thing I love about my mom is that she’s a straight shooter when it comes to giving feedback.  If you have a person like that in your life, hang on to them.  Because if improv, which is something I’ve been studying for the past few years, teaches us anything, it’s that a genuine reaction, even one that catches you off-guard, is more valuable than a canned one any day.
     So after I tell her this story, I say to her, Listen, mom, I realize that this story doesn’t paint me in a very flattering light.  I mean, how petty is that, to get into a contest of wills with a seven-year-old?  And, I tell her, it’s true that I’ve often taken pride in the fact that I consider myself to be the designated grudge-holder in the family.  And you know I’ve been worried lately that maybe I’m just becoming a mass of pet peeves and petty annoyances.  But really, I tell her, the improv I’ve been working on has, I think, enabled me to see fairly quickly that that bookstore encounter is a noteworthy scene.  And I think it’s also let me see that I’m getting annoyed more frequently lately, and that gives me the chance to improve my outlook.
     What I’m hoping she’ll say to me, after giving me credit for the nice self-awareness I’ve shown in assessing my character in the bookstore encounter as petty, is what she has in fact been saying to me lately: Improv has changed your life, Steve.  I think it’s made you a more joyful person.
     But that’s not what she says.
     She says, About the grudge-holding and the peevishness — you’ve always been that way.  I think, she says, that’s just your nature.
     Which is not what I wanted to hear.

Scene 2.

     A month ago, I’m standing outside the ATM machine in downtown Maplewood, New Jersey, trying to think of a word for something that’s good that rhymes with “Steve.”  I’m doing this because I’d started keeping a journal on the little things that bug me during the course of a day.  At first I was going to call this list “The Daily Peeve,” but then my younger kid, Mal, says to me, No, a better name for that would be “Steve’s Peeves.”  And I love that, it’s perfect.
     So I’d started keeping a list of the things that bugged me, Steve’s Peeves, not just my go-to peeve — people tailgating me while I’m driving — but things like the fact that people talking loudly on their cell phones while I’m walking down the street has started bothering me more frequently.  I’ve become especially annoyed at people using a voice I’ve started to notice lately, what I would call a bro voice, a bro-ey kind of voice.  You know, where they might bray into their phone, MAKE SURE TO CALL HIM TUESDAY BECAUSE WE HAVE THE POINT-OF-SALE MEETING THEN AND WE HAVE TO–
     That kind of thing.
     I’ll look around to see where the voice is coming from, and invariably it’ll be coming from someone taller and thinner and younger than I’d pictured.  That will annoy me, too.  Then I’ll look down at their feet, and they’ll be wearing a kind of light brown shoe with a navy blue suit, and for some reason that will annoy me.
     I’m writing these things down and also my reaction to them.
     Because if improv teaches us anything, it’s that if you can get a sense of what a character is feeling, even your own character, then you have a chance to create strong, empathetic scenes with that character.
     However, the whole point of my writing these things down is to improve my outlook, so I begin trying to also become aware of little things that happen during the course of the day that make me happy.  And there are some things.  Like I’ll pass a stranger on the street on my way to work, and the sun is shining, and I’ll smile at them, and they’ll smile at me, and I’ll say hello, and they’ll say hello back.  Then a little while later on my walk to work the same thing will happen again with another stranger.
     Accordingly, I’m standing outside the ATM machine in downtown Maplewood, New Jersey, waiting my turn to go in and get cash, and while I’m waiting I’m trying to think of a word for something that’s upbeat that rhymes with Steve.  Because I have the name for the negative list, Steve’s Peeves, and I need a corresponding title for the positive list.  So while I’m standing there waiting, to help me focus on this difficult linguistic problem I’m scowling down at my feet while I go through the alphabet to come up with a rhyme.  A, beeve, ceeve, deeve.  I’m up to around “h” when this woman happens to walk by me on the sidewalk where I’m standing.  She stops a few feet past me, looks back at me and says:

Are you okay?

I tell her, No, I was just thinking!  Thank you!  I was just thinking!  I’m fine!
     Eventually she seems satisfied, because she leaves.  It occurs to me then that that was a nice thing she just did there.  That should definitely go on the Steve’s … Whatever list.  But it also occurs to me, Oh my God, I’ve never had anything like that happen to me before.  What was my face giving out that it would stop a person in the street, make them feel like they need to perform an intervention!
     Because if improv teaches us anything, it’s that the way our scene partner reacts to us can reveal who we really are.
     That question: Are you okay?
     I mean, I thought I was…

Scene 3.

     It’s 5:19 a.m. when I hear the drilling.  It’s loud, and it sounds like PPPPPPPPP!!!! — like a pneumatic drill — but it sounds like someone’s drilling on the other side of the wall of the bedroom, in Maplewood, New Jersey, where my wife and I are sleeping.  And I know what this is.
     It’s a woodpecker, and he’s drilling on the metal gutter above the attic way up at the back of the house.  I know this because we had heard the noise several times in the week previous, though not that early in the morning, and at one point I had caught a glimpse of the bird.
     I’m not an early morning person.  To be honest, I’m not even a 9 a.m. person.  But it’s loud, and I’ve had it, so I drag myself out of bed, pull on my pants, slip on my sneakers, and head downstairs and out the back of the house.  I look up and sure enough, way up there at the corner of the gutter I see the silhouette of a fairly large woodpecker.  I have a clear view of him and I know he has a clear view of me, because almost immediately after I spot him he kind of scurries off into the sky.  You know, like, Ooo, that guy is pissed off.  Pffft.
     I’m satisfied I’ve made my point.  I go back in the house.  Back to bed.  Twenty minutes later: PPPPPPPPP!!!!.
     Out of bed, pants on, tiptoe up the stairs to the attic.  I kind of sclathe my way around the worktable piled with the art project works-in-progress Nikki is working on and make my way to the window under that corner of the roof.
     I pull down the top half of the window and stick my head out.  I look up, but all I can see is the bottom of the gutter ledge.  So I yell out into the air:

YOU GONNA KEEP DOING THAT???

Just like that.  I’m talking to a bird like that.
     I get a broomstick and bang on the gutter.  I close the window and go back to bed.  The rest of the morning is totally quiet.  I go back to sleep.
     When I wake up, though, I’m worried, because I realize I haven’t had the gutters cleaned in over a year.  I Google “Woodpeckers attacking gutters.”   One thing the articles that pop up do say is that the birds may be finding bugs in there.  In which case you’ve got to get your gutters cleaned.
     The articles also talk about another possibility, though.  Sometimes, they say, a male woodpecker will drill a gutter because he’s trying to attract a mate.  Apparently, in the woodpecking world this is the sexiest thing.
     When I read this, oddly enough it takes the edge completely off my anger at the bird.  I realize, he’s just doing his best to take care of his social life.
     And once I think of that, it occurs to me, really, how much difference is there between these woodpeckers and the bros on their phones?  I mean, the bros are transacting business during the day, they’re prospering, and who can blame them if they maybe want to share that with the public a little?
     Or how about that kid at the bookstore?  I now remember that Words Bookstore caters to kids on the autistic spectrum.  The store owners have someone near and dear to them on the spectrum.  Considering that I do, too, how has it taken months for it to occur to me that maybe that kid is on the spectrum?  In any event, there’s a good chance that he was uncomfortable in close proximity to a relatively large person staring intently at cards and was just trying to create space the only way he knew how.
     Come to think of it, how different am I from any of these characters?  Here I am, putting this out there, albeit via a keyboard rather than a roof gutter, putting out stories, a thing I apparently need to do.
     I mean, aren’t we all just trying to make an impression on the world, make our presence known?
     Because if improv teaches us anything, it’s that listening deeply to your scene partner pays off.  That’s not just about hearing the words they’re saying or seeing the movements they’re making.  If you can get a sense of why they’re saying what they’re saying or doing what they’re doing, then you can really build strong scenes together.
     And so that question outside the ATM:

Are you okay?

     I’m getting there.

Writings

Here is a list of the titles of Steve Sklar’s written works that have been published on this site (so far). Click on a title to read the work.

The Last Outpost of Reason (a work in progress)

The Solo

If Improv Teaches Us Anything

The Solo


by Steve Sklar

     At first, as the fever to fly took hold out at the cliffs, the young man only watched from the comfort of the crowd.  The antics of the hopefuls with their contraptions amused him.  And, he noticed, even the more cautious among them, those who kept to the flats, could get hurt.  Not for him the torn shirt and the mangled knee, the bridge of the nose dragged in the rocky dirt.  He was content to enjoy the festive air among the spectators, the men in their top hats and the young ladies in their graceful bonnets.
     Then one day he caught the fever himself.  To soar!  If he did not boast of his new ambition as two or three other fellows in his classes at the local university did, perhaps it was because he’d had only a smattering of science, and that mostly chemistry.  He’d laid out his design, it was true, but it was guesswork.
     Nevertheless, he would run up and down a grassy field for hours, out of sight of everyone, bearing a rig of black silk above his head.  When fatigue overwhelmed him, he’d sit resting under an oak.  Then the prospect of taking up his place at his father’s apothecary, never far from his mind, weighed on him.  Eventually, a breeze would dry his sweat and cool him off and he’d be at it again.
     Although in three weeks his effort took on the acrid quality of a longing destined never to be fulfilled, he continued to spend an hour a day with the contrivance.  By the standards of a time yet to come the thing was heavy.  There were thick leather straps where a simple cloth harness ought to go, a knobby wooden handle where an aluminum steering-bar might be and wax-coated silk that would have been lighter as nylon.
     Early one evening that late September, the young man grew annoyed at a loud creak the handle had developed.  He resolved to go home to oil it.  One last run and he would call it a day.  He picked up the machine, strapped in and loped down the field.  His face registered surprise when favorable winds swept him into the sky.  More by luck than by insight he had shaped a wing.  Months before the world ever heard of the first non-balloon flight at Kitty Hawk he was lifted on an updraft, up, up, to the height of the low mountaintops nearby, then higher still.
     The air aloft was thin, cold.  In the ecstasy of being airborne, the young man, in his frock coat, hardly noticed it.  A plummet of three hundred feet did him no more harm than it would a hunting hawk.  He banked in a turn near a cloud and saw the vast horizon slowly tilt and right itself.  And the rush of air!
     Miles of farmland, forestland, farmland again, swept below him, eight towns in what seemed like minutes.  Half an hour passed, more, and still he flew.  Behind him he saw the last of daylight making its retreat.  Up ahead in the distance, below the setting sun, the great river glinted bronze in the oncoming darkness.  Then, once he had crossed above the river, the lights of some farmhouse flickered up at him from tiny windows.  The winds were dying. Down into the last gusts of the night sky he dropped.
     At three thousand feet, the air still clear, he had a crescent of rising moon and the first glimmering of starlight to see by.  He could make out the cloth of his taut canopy against the sky, velvet-black against silver-grey, shadow on greater shadow.  His cold hands shone white.
     At one thousand feet, at five hundred, at two hundred, he sank through a low-lying cloud.  This became ground fog and was joined by a fine drizzle.  Ahead through the haze he could see the pillars of a large estate.  He landed on the lawn that stretched behind it, running a few steps on wet grass before skidding to a stop.  Amber light from lamps somewhere inside the house lit his way across the lawn.  At the steps to the back porch, he paused to savor the details of the journey just ended.  He pictured the movement of tiny figures, the townspeople he’d been able to make out in twilight during the descent that had started back near the river; he would have been visible to them, too.  Even now, these figures must be stumbling over themselves, shouting in amazement that echoed his own.  They’d be rushing to find this town, this house.
     But more immediate considerations crowded in on him.  Where was he?  This must be one of the towns at the edge of the state.  Which one?  He’d never been this far from home.  Who lived in the great house?  Might he stay here for the night?
     In the blackness of the porch he knocked on the door.  No one answered.  Putting aside his rig, he tried the large oval brass doorknob.  The door swung at his touch, letting him into a dark foyer.  Light spilled from a dining room up ahead; navigating by this, he moved through empty drawing rooms and parlors.  He heard voices, expecting that at any moment a butler or at least a footman would intercept him.  He reached the main dining room unopposed.  He was surprised at the gathering he found in its light.
     Not that they were so odd in themselves.  Three boys, a burly young man and a skinny adolescent girl talked loudly as they ate, their mouths smeared with gravy.  A pleasant-looking young woman, whose ringlets of reddish-blonde hair fell over her linen smock, sat at one end of the long, polished mahogany table, spooning pablum into the mouth of her wailing baby.  A stooped woman in a worn black bonnet helped a suspendered old man in a soiled, collarless shirt to a portion of roast potatoes.  These she speared from a sturdy iron pot.  The pot was dented and smudged with ashes, as out of place in the middle of the gleaming table as were these people and the din they made in the middle of this grand house.
     They received him calmly.  Apparently used to feeding the occasional weary traveler, they invited him to join them.
     He described his journey.  Their reaction left him dissatisfied.  The ringleted young woman laughed at him and would not believe his story.  What was perhaps worse, the others considered his feat natural and accepted it as a matter of course, their easy, murmured assent due, he saw, to a ready acceptance of miracles.  They would believe anything.  He took off his coat and fell to eating silently, while the chatter resumed around him.
     He would have left the next day, but illness delayed his departure.  The time he’d spent in the sky, exposed to mountaintop temperatures, left him shivering that night; when he awoke he was sweating and could hardly stand.  Under the matter-of-fact care of the house’s ragged inhabitants, however, his strength returned.  In two days, he was up and around.
     He prolonged his stay.  Days became weeks, then months.  In order to be credited for the flight, he would have to be acknowledged by witnesses of the event.  He made forays farther and farther afield; these told him that this was sparsely populated country.  He decided that the stately house would be the best base from which to encounter his witnesses.  In any case, he could scarcely afford to make many land journeys back and forth along the route his flight had taken in search of corroborators, and he was loathe to write his parents to ask them to fund that effort.
     His hosts were hospitable with their rambling mansion, and made only the smallest demands on the young man in return for room and board.  He worked in the fields nearby, helping them to harvest the potatoes and cabbages they raised.  If he thought it odd at first that this family made so few inquiries about his background, if he wondered whether they had done away with the estate’s original owners, he decided soon enough that they were squatters or servants who’d remained behind while the wealthier occupants had moved on, and left it at that.
     He spent his days working in the fields and making scouting trips.  Despite the drudgery of farming, he was relieved to be away from the grind of schoolwork.  And the cheerfulness of the ringleted young woman, undoubtedly a servant-girl in her past, gradually sparked his interest in conversation.  Anticipation of fame bestowed on him a certain charm.  In their little chats, she seemed to feel its attraction.  For his part, he was pleased to be able to recognize when they talked that her hair was the color of sunlight glinting off a river at day’s end.
     Again he began devoting some time each day to the cloth glider, running up and down in a cool, soggy area separated by trees from the potato field.  He did this partly out of a desire to repeat the wonderful event that had carried him there, partly out of pride: the former servant-girl, whenever their chats came to that subject, still burst out in laughter.
     It was just as well that no one in the household bothered to come watch him practice.  At this low elevation, without wind, his determined runs never helped him to flights of over thirty feet.
     His good mood began to wane.  The daily visits out to the road beyond the log fence failed to reveal visitors.  He grew restless and short-tempered.  In his restlessness, he fell into a dalliance with the ringleted girl, collecting on his earlier charm.
     In the first weeks of the affair, it was exciting for him to carry on with her in the attic, over the very heads of her burly husband and her old father, who was shrewder than he looked.  But by November, it had become merely interesting — interesting, that is, that they never caught on.  He had been thrilled just to hear her name around the house — she was called Becky — and liked that she called him Joseph, not Joe.  But her skepticism about his feat began to wear on him.  He came to wonder if the trips to the attic were worth the domestic discomfort they were bound one day to cause.
     He took to debating with himself whether it might not be time, in spite of the cold, to try carrying his contraption back home.  The weight of the thing, which seemed to him somehow to have increased, dissuaded him.  There were no horses about the place, let alone a carriage, and the trip on foot would be hard.
     By the same token, winter was coming on.  For most of the year, the only way to convey a heavy silken rig across the great river would be to cross it by boat.  Since the young man had not hired or acquired a boat, he might in theory still prove to the world that he had to have crossed the river by air.  But soon the river would be frozen.  At that point anyone could cross it on foot, and then only the members of this household, such as they were, would be left to affirm the date of his arrival.  More and more, he took to spending his free mornings out at the side steps, in vest and shirtsleeves under a slate-grey sky, gazing into the distance, restive.
     Standing like this one day, indifferent to the rare bit of sun that peeked through the cloud cover, he spotted a group of people making their way toward the house.  They walked down a muddy slope of ground that wound through twisted pine trees alongside the log fence.  The men wore costly beaver hats and long black coats brushed clean even to the tails.  There were two women also, wearing many-buttoned overcoats of a fashionable rose color.  One white-haired man, with gold-rimmed spectacles, looked to be a lawyer or a judge; the others might have been merchants in one of the nearer towns.  They moved past the woodpile, dusted white with the year’s first light snow like confectioner’s sugar atop a nubbly chocolate cake.  They picked their way tentatively amid the logs and tree roots, clearly unfamiliar with the whitened ground, helping each other along and looking up at the estate with curiosity.  The young man caught the sound of one of the women’s voices on the air.
     “This must be it!” she said. “This is just the sort of residence that was described.”
     The young man felt his heart beat quickly.  In a comical flutter, he wondered whether to go to his silken glider in the backyard or stand humbly for their reception.  Becky’s mother rushed out of the house to greet the visitors; the young man stopped his fussing to listen.
     “Rebecca,” she called back inside, for once using the girl’s formal name. “Come out here, will you?”  From twenty yards off he could hear everything that was said with perfect clarity.
     The man in spectacles beamed. “This is Rebecca Dooley,” he announced. “She, ladies and gentlemen, is I believe the one who developed that wonderful apple diet that was so successful with the rubella-laden child.
     The young man took this in, immobilized.
     “The paper shall have an article about this, doctor,” one of the ladies piped up.
     “By all means,” said a bewhiskered man beside the spectacled one.  Becky smiled pleasantly at her mother.
     As the group began to file into the house, the young man could still make out their words in spite of himself.
     “Where is the child?  Oh, yes, this is the little Jeremy.  Oh, yes, definitely.  He is very healthy.”
     The young man turned at last in disgust and walked back along the house.  He crossed to the back lawn so he could no longer hear the visitors or see them.
     He stood looking up at the sky that had greyed over again. “But I’ve been up there,” he thought.  Not all the leaves had fallen; the scent of ice was not yet in the air.  He decided he would wait only two or three more weeks for the recognition that was sure to come.

The Last Outpost Of Reason


by Steve Sklar



1.

     Ludovic sat regarding the defective hard drive one more time, motionless, as he’d seen the cat who shared this space with him do in similar if not identical circumstances.  Ludovic had observed the cat, William, a Persian, grey, inscrutable, watching things, still, attentive.  A cricket, a mouse, some little creature rustling and invisible to anyone else.  Maybe the thing to do to suss out a problem was to just look at it for a while.
     The hard drive was a hefty rectangle of black metal, three times the size of a deck of playing cards.  Inside it, he knew, was a mass of chips and silvery pathways soldered onto silicon platforms.  It had been the brain of a PC five years earlier.  With probes and the appropriate tech specs gleaned from his collection of dog-eared manuals — and renewed patience — Ludovic could probably repair the thing after all.  You could fix anything, given enough time.
     But why bother?
     Why indeed.
     What had motivated him to give it another try was the guy who had brought it in.
     The shop had not always been called The Last Outpost of Reason.  For most of its existence, it had been Bresson’s Sales and Repair, the main computer store in Linden, New Jersey.  But come the Decline, when everything went sideways and retail, as such, disappeared, so did Charlie Bresson, bound for where, no one knew.  Ludovic, who had been Charlie’s main tech, took over the place, or what remained of it.  Eventually he settled on the name that now appeared on a carved and painted wooden plaque above the store.
     The man who had brought him the hard drive had done little more than shrug when he’d dropped it off, thereby making it clear that he had little expectation the thing could be repaired.  He was paunchy, no longer in his prime, yet something about the faint limp in his walk hinted at an athletic past.  More than that, he projected an air of both timidity and confidence, a baffling combination of vibes.  Ludovic peered through the smudgy plate glass window of his shop, past the empty parking spots across what was still technically Main Street, watching the man leave in a dusty green Jeep.  Ludovic and the cat chose this moment to look at each other, mute, as if sharing one thought: who was that guy?
     The repairman returned to his counter and with a probe somehow, uncannily, revived a digital pathway.  The monitor screen he’d hooked up to the hard drive flickered for a moment, then displayed the unmistakable signs of a short written work, black letters in Literata font on a white background.   At the top of Page One appeared the words:

The Solo

2.

    When he’d dropped off his hard drive, this customer had given his name as Stephen Sklar.  What, Ludovic wondered, could he tell about the man based on the story he’d just read on that apparently reviving device?
    Not much, other than this: the man was probably a frustrated seeker after fame himself, like the callow youth in his story.  Wouldn’t it be true for fiction, as it was said to be true for dreams, that each character you imagine is in some way yourself?
    Come to that, might it not be that Ludovic, too, was a frustrated seeker after fame?  After all, he had had a moment in his youth, as had the Joseph character in Sklar’s story, when renown had seemed within reach.  Then, he had developed code for the programming of computers that was innovative in its simplicity.  Or so his teachers had told him.  He had even been interviewed on a talk show on account of it.  And if a character of one’s imagining or dreams could be a reflection of oneself, why not also a character encountered in fiction that one found it easy to identify with?
    The hard drive was now unresponsive to Ludovic’s further probes.  Accordingly, he busied himself with other repair items.  Not, however, before thinking, with a wry smile — knowing that Sklar was bound to return later that month to check up on his item — “The repairman decided he would wait only two or three more weeks for more insight into this customer.”
    As it happened, he only had to wait ten days.  Here, now, came this customer, ambling, favoring his good knee, to sit without a word a Ludovic’s counter, typing on the keyboard Ludovic had hooked up to the hard drive and then driving off in his faded green Jeep.
    Ludovic looked at the monitor screen.  There on it was a second piece of writing.  As the Jeep disappeared in a swirl of dust, Ludovic found himself annoyed.  What the hell.  Does this guy know how to fix his own device, that he can conjure up more data on it seemingly at will?  And if so, what the hell am I doing with it?
    In spite of himself, he read the newly revealed piece:

If Improv Teaches Us Anything