The Forty-Year Laugh

The museum was inside the hospital, between the garden elevators and the surgery wing, because the hospital believed waiting rooms should not only have chairs.

Maya approved of this. Chairs were where questions went to get bored.

The gallery was called Chemistry That Changed Hurt. Its walls were soft blue. Its ceiling showed slow clouds made of light. At the entrance stood a glass case with a brown bottle, a silver breathing mask, and a row of empty brass hooks.

The hooks bothered Maya before anything else did.

Soren stopped beside her, his paper notebook tucked under one arm. He had come because the museum wanted eleven-year-old testers. Maya had come because Soren had said there was a chemistry room that was not finished, and unfinished rooms were practically invitations.

A woman in a bright orange jacket hurried over with a tablet against her chest and a strip of measuring tape stuck to her sleeve.

"You are the testers," she said. "Good. Excellent. I need you to tell me whether the new timeline makes sense before the morning tour. It has to be cheerful. Some of the children who come through here are on their way to operations. We do not need gloom in the anesthesia gallery. We need courage, sparkle, a little wow. Press the green button if anything jams. I will be over there arguing with a wall projector."

She hurried away and immediately began arguing with the wall projector.

Maya pressed the first button.

The brown bottle lit from below. A voice said, "In seventeen seventy-two, Joseph Priestley prepared a new gas. Later it would be called nitrous oxide."

In the air above the case, tiny balls of light joined and spun. Two blue lights. One red light. They tilted like a little bent triangle.

Soren leaned closer. "Two nitrogen. One oxygen. N two O."

"It looks like a lopsided mouse," Maya said.

"It does not."

"It does if the mouse is running."

The next case brightened. Music floated out, thin and fancy. Hologram ladies and gentlemen in old clothes gathered in a glittering room. One man held a silk bag to his mouth, breathed, and began laughing so hard he had to sit down. Other people clapped. A woman in feathers laughed too, though Maya could not tell if she had breathed the gas or only liked watching people fall over politely.

The gallery voice said, "At the beginning of the nineteenth century, nitrous oxide became famous at public demonstrations and private parties. Some people called it laughing gas."

Soren wrote two words, then frowned and crossed one out.

"What?" Maya asked.

"The voice sounds like it thinks that part is cute."

"It is cute," Maya said. "Also strange. Rich people in feather hats breathing chemistry for fun."

The third case lit.

The music stopped.

A dentist's chair appeared, tall and stiff. A man in a dark coat stood beside it. The voice said, "In eighteen forty-four, dentist Horace Wells saw nitrous oxide used at a demonstration and realized it could prevent pain during dental surgery. Soon, gases would help make operations possible in new ways."

A silver mask glowed.

Then the whole timeline made a pleasant chiming sound, as if everything had gone exactly on time.

Maya looked back at the laughing room.

Then at the dentist's chair.

Then at the row of brass hooks.

"No," she said.

Soren looked up. "No what?"

"It chimed wrong."

"Chimes can be wrong?"

"That one was. It sounded like step, step, step. But it was step, then a hole big enough to lose a city in."

Soren turned to the dates. His pencil moved. "Seventeen seventy-two to eighteen forty-four is seventy-two years. But the parties started later. Still, from the famous laughing gas demonstrations to Wells, about forty years."

Maya pointed to the brass hooks. "Those are not decorations."

They were set between the laughing room and the dentist's chair, forty of them, each empty, each polished at the tip as if something had once hung there and been taken away.

Soren pressed the second button again.

The laughing room returned. This time he touched the small square marked archive, which was the sort of square adults put on exhibits when they hoped children would ignore it.

A page of old writing appeared in the air. The letters were curly and difficult. Soren squinted.

"Humphry Davy," he said. "Eighteen hundred. He experimented with nitrous oxide. Listen."

He tapped the audio.

A calm voice read, "As nitrous oxide in its extensive operation appears capable of destroying physical pain, it may probably be used with advantage during surgical operations."

The laughing guests kept laughing behind the words.

Maya felt the room change size.

The same gas. The same body. The same clue, sitting in the middle of the laughing room with music and feathers around it. Someone had even written the useful sentence down. Then the sentence had waited.

Behind them, the woman in the orange jacket called, "If the archive text is too much, skip it. We may cut that. It slows the sparkle."

Maya and Soren looked at each other.

"Do not press green," Maya said.

"I was not going to."

They went to the row of hooks. Under each hook was a tiny slot for a label. The labels lay in a tray below, blank white rectangles.

Soren counted them twice. "Forty."

Maya took the first label and slid it into the first slot.

"What are you writing?" Soren asked.

"Nothing."

"That is not usually how labels work."

"Exactly."

She slid in another blank label. Soren watched her for three hooks, then took half the stack.

They worked quickly. The laughing room played on one side. The dentist's chair waited on the other. Between them, the blank labels made a white fence of unsaid things.

When they finished, Soren stood back. "It still needs something."

Maya looked at the case with Davy's sentence. "Put the sentence at the start of the gap. Not in archive. Big."

"The curator said it slows the sparkle."

"Good."

The control panel had a layout mode. It asked for a staff code. Soren tried guest. It refused. Maya tried tester. It opened.

"That is terrible security," Soren said.

"Wonderful security," Maya said.

They enlarged the old sentence until it stretched above the first empty hook. Soren adjusted the spelling display so children could tap any old word and see a modern one beside it. Maya turned down the music in the laughing room until the laughter sounded far away.

Then Soren did one more thing.

At the end of the forty blank labels, before the dentist's chair, he placed a small mirror panel. When a visitor stood there, their face appeared between the laughter and the mask.

Maya saw herself in it. Dark hair escaping its clip. One eyebrow up. A person caught in the place where the question had been waiting.

The woman in orange came back, still carrying the tablet. "All right, what have my testers done to my cheerful gallery?"

Nobody answered. Soren pressed the start button.

The timeline began again.

Priestley's bottle glowed. The molecule turned. The laughing room filled with feathers and music. People breathed the gas and laughed. Then Davy's sentence appeared above the hooks.

As nitrous oxide in its extensive operation appears capable of destroying physical pain, it may probably be used with advantage during surgical operations.

The tour voice did not chime.

The next forty hooks lit one by one. Under each hook, a blank label. No music. No screams. Just the small click of light moving to the next empty place.

Click.

Click.

Click.

Halfway down the row, the woman in orange lowered her tablet.

Click.

Click.

Click.

At the mirror, Maya and Soren's faces appeared in the glass, and behind their reflections stood the laughing guests, still laughing at a gas that was also waiting to become mercy.

The woman did not say cheerful. She did not say sparkle. She walked to the controls and changed the title at the entrance.

The new title read, The Question Came Before The Answer.

"No," Maya said.

The woman blinked. "No?"

"Too finished."

Soren picked up the last unused label from the tray. "May we?"

The woman looked at the forty blank years, then at the children reflected in the mirror panel. She handed him the stylus.

Soren printed two words on the label. Maya took it from him and fixed it under the empty glass case beside the brown bottle.

Not Yet.

The lights reset. The first tour of the morning gathered at the entrance, small hospital slippers squeaking on the floor.

Maya clipped a blank white tag below the first empty hook. Soren slid the tiny brown bottle into its holder, and the tag rocked without a name.