Dave Chappelle, Standing In Front of His Living Room Window, 3pm, Sunday

He was looking at a bird when it happened, but it didn’t have anything to do with birds and who knows why your brain makes these connections, if there are even connections to make, if getting an idea isn’t just a spasm that pitches something deep in the subconscious to the tip of your tongue. But there was the bird and there was the idea, if you want to track inspiration like a series of direct trades.

And then Dave laughed that smoker’s rasp laugh. He was alone in the house. His wife and kids were out doing something, who knows, he hadn’t been listening when she’d explained her plans for the afternoon— but a laugh kicking out of the silence wouldn’t have been surprising even if there had been anybody around to hear it. The family was used to Dad, always thinking, always following some private train of thought to its funniest conclusion. Sometimes you’d be watching a deadly serious documentary with him and he’d crack up, not at what was on screen but at all the little ideas he’d thought up while half of his mind was focused on the TV and the other half was juggling a dozen new puzzle pieces around, rearranging them until the perfect joke was formed.

And this was a good one. This new idea had him laughing long enough that he’d started up the other tradition-- slapping his leg with a microphone. The laughs continued and Dave gently tapped the microphone against the knee of his jeans, which said “CHAPPELLE” down each leg, and perfectly matched his jacket, which said “CHAPPELLE” on the right breast pocket and across the back and which had a large “C” on each shoulder.

“Good” may have been too modest. The idea was refined, a structurally solid beauty that you could admire from every angle, and you could feel good about it, knowing your spontaneity matched or exceeded the complexity of another person's labored over material. That's what he thought about as he slapped his knee: other men could spend a month trying to make a cog and I can hiccup out a Swiss watch on command. The old wisdom went that if you were the smartest person in a room, it was time to leave the room, but he was always the smartest person in the room, always the most successful and genuinely content, too, and it felt great. You work this hard, you're allowed to take some pleasure in your successes. He slapped his knee again.

But where had the microphone come from? Dave hadn't been holding one before, as he was idly standing by his window, had he? It had begun to sting and he could feel a bruise forming under his jeans where the head of the microphone knocked into his skin. But he was still laughing, still slapping his knee, and why should he stop, if he was having fun? Why should he feel anything but proud? The microphone had hit so many times in the same spot that it had begun to impress its grid onto Dave's pants, like a footprint in the sand.

He wanted to call Donnell or Louis or Jeff and tell them about the idea. He would. As soon as he had gotten the laugh out of his system. God damn, did it feel good to know he'd be making them crack up this hard soon. Donnell would tell him if the joke wasn't funny, Dave was open to criticism, but obviously that wouldn't happen. He slapped his knee again.

The bird was sitting in the tree, still and beautiful, unaware anything funny was happening. The microphone wore through the knee of Dave's pants, working between the threads softly, nudging them aside, making a connection with the skin. I should write this down, he thought. It's funny, but I've forgotten funny things before.

That was always the worst, and it was why he kept a notepad and pen by his bedside and in every room of the house. He slapped his knee again. It was impossible to say how many specials he could have crafted purely from the jokes he had forgotten to record, and even if he never had the time to consult all the scraps of paper he'd accumulated, he could give the whole box of them to his family and make sure they'd be okay. His kids could burn through all of the Netflix money and they'd still be able to get a book deal with any publisher in the world with the promise of a posthumous Dave Chappelle collection. He slapped his knee again.

He fell to the ground. As his chest hit the carpet, Dave realized his hand, his leg, his microphone, everything, was caked in blood. The microphone was hitting bone, had chiseled away at the flesh until the front of Dave's leg had the consistency of wet cake. Instinctively, he rolled onto his back and continued to slap his knee.

As he tried to stand up, Dave immediately fell, his femur cracking apart, and this time he hit the hard wood next to the carpet, making a thud loud enough that the bird, for the first time in twenty minutes, looked up and flitted away. It was the bird leaving that upset Dave. The bones in his hand, numb from gripping the microphone, had turned to powder. He kept slapping his knee, the limp, sagging skin balloon that had once been a functional hand rubbing against the bone shards and oatmeal-feeling viscera that had once been a functional knee. This was ecstasy, the joy of creation, the immediate visualization of a perfect joke. It did not bother him. But he would rather have not upset nature.

Dave dragged himself, one hand pulling his body across the floor, the other slapping his knee, to the table where his notepad and pen were. How could a person feel bad about this? It was a privilege to think up jokes, to push boundaries, to explore the limits of the human mind.

That night, Dave's family returned home. It had been a long day picketing the affordable multifamily housing project but you had to stand up for what you believed in. And Dave's oldest son was still riding the high of the protest as he walked into the living room and found his father's leg, three feet away from his father's body, and in what might have been his father’s hand, now just blood and folded skin, a small, handwritten note that read "What if a dog was trans?"