Chapter 101 – Rehearsal for Misery
Joey came through the door of Central Perk approximately four minutes after Bruce hung up the phone, which meant he had gotten dressed at a speed that suggested genuine motivation. His hair was doing the thing it did when he'd run a hand through it once and decided that counted.
He spotted Erica immediately, and the grin that followed was the specific one he deployed when he felt the situation called for it — which was most situations involving an attractive woman.
"Hey!" He crossed the café with his hand already out. "I'm Joey."
Erica stood up halfway off her chair. "Dr. Drake!" She shook his hand with both of hers, eyes lit up like someone had flipped a switch. "I cannot believe this is actually happening. I'm Erica. I have watched you for so long — the way you handled Lisa's brain surgery last season? When the pressure monitor failed and you just knew what to do? That was legitimately one of the greatest moments in the history of television medicine."
Joey blinked. Processed the fact that she had called him Dr. Drake. Registered her expression — open, adoring, entirely sincere. Made a decision.
"Lisa's case," he said, nodding slowly, with the gravity of a man who had definitely performed that surgery. "Yeah. That was... a tough one. Cranial pressure was through the roof. But when you've got the hands, you've got the hands." He glanced down at his hands briefly, acknowledging them.
Bruce, sitting two feet away, watched this unfold with the expression of a man watching a car pull out of a driveway toward a very obvious pothole.
The conversation accelerated from there. Joey and Erica fell into an enthusiastic discussion of Dr. Drake Ramoray's case history, Erica supplying specific episode details with the precision of someone who had watched them multiple times, Joey improvising medical expertise with the confidence of someone who absolutely had not. Bruce drank his coffee and felt, with increasing certainty, that he had wandered into a one-act play nobody had given him the script for.
Then Erica turned, bright-eyed, and pointed at Bruce. "Okay, we should all go to lunch! Dr. Drake — you've mentioned that diner on the show, the one near the hospital? Bruce manages a place just like it, right?" She looked between them. "I've been wanting to check it out!"
"Erica, I think there might be a small misunder—" Bruce started.
Behind her, Joey made a gesture so frantic and specific that it communicated an entire paragraph: Please. I am begging you. Do not finish that sentence. I will owe you forever. Do not do this to me.
Bruce stopped. Coughed once. Thought fast.
He remembered a diner in Queens — a real place, a family-run operation — that the Days of Our Lives location team had used for an exterior shot. He'd driven past it with Joey once. He rattled off the address with the calm of a man who had definitely worked there. "The original location is out in Queens. This is just... a smaller concept. The real experience is out there."
"Perfect!" Joey clapped his hands together. "Erica, let's go. Bruce will point us in the right direction and we'll check it out — most authentic food in the city, trust me." He shot Bruce a look over her shoulder that was equal parts gratitude and the expression of a man who knew he was making questionable choices and was at peace with it.
Bruce watched them head for the door — Joey holding it open, Erica already talking about another episode — and sat with a very specific sense of dread settling in his chest like a stone.
The next morning Bruce was at his usual window table, second cup in, when Joey appeared in the doorway of Central Perk. It was early. Joey was never early.
He also looked like a man who had recently had an extremely eventful twelve hours and was still processing several of them.
"You're up early," Bruce said.
Joey dropped into the chair across from him. "Early." He almost laughed. "I just got back."
Bruce set his cup down. "You were with Erica. The whole night."
"Yep."
"And you're... fine?"
"Of course I'm fine!" Joey looked briefly offended. "Why does everyone assume something went wrong?"
"Joey." Bruce leaned forward. "She thinks you're a brain surgeon. She thinks I manage a diner. She has constructed an entire parallel reality based on a soap opera and she is living in it. Have you ever seen Misery?"
"The Kathy Bates movie?"
"The Kathy Bates movie. You are the writer. She is Kathy Bates. Except instead of a novelist, you're a daytime television actor, which in some ways makes it worse because she's not even in love with you — she's in love with a character who does not exist and whom she currently believes you actually are."
Joey shifted in his seat. "I mean... when you say it like that—"
"How was dinner?"
Joey was quiet for a moment. "Fine. Good. She was really into the... the whole doctor thing. Asked about my hands a lot. Called them..." He paused. "'Life-saving.' Said she'd always wondered if the hands of a great surgeon felt different from regular hands."
Bruce stared at him. "And then?"
"And then she..." Joey cleared his throat. "She kind of... licked one of my fingers. To test the theory."
"She licked your finger."
"Very sincerely," Joey confirmed. "Like it was a scientific inquiry."
Bruce picked up his coffee cup, put it down again without drinking, and looked out the window for a moment.
"What else?" he asked, in the tone of someone who needs the full picture even if they don't want it.
"Okay, so, later — we're still at the diner, it's getting busy — and some guy at the counter starts choking. Like actually choking, it's a whole thing, people are panicking." Joey leaned in. "And Erica jumps up and grabs my arm and goes, 'It's okay, everyone — we have a doctor! The best doctor! Dr. Drake will handle this!'" He did a pitch-perfect impression of her delivery. "And suddenly thirty people are looking at me like I'm about to save a life."
"What did you do?"
"I said — very calmly, very professionally — that as a neurosurgeon, this was really outside my specialty, and that what this gentleman needed was someone trained in emergency response, and that the responsible thing was to step back and let the paramedics handle it." He nodded. "Then I got us out of there."
Bruce was quiet for a moment.
Then he raised his coffee cup in a small, deliberate salute. "Joey. After all of that — the finger situation, the near-medical-emergency, the complete and ongoing dissolution of the line between fiction and reality — you still spent the night. I genuinely respect the commitment. May your fake surgical credentials continue to protect you."
Joey shifted. "It's not as bad as you're making it sound."
"It's a little bad."
"She's fun. Mostly." He picked at the edge of a napkin. "It's just... a lot."
"Yeah," Bruce said. "I know."
They sat with that for a moment. Outside, Bedford Street was doing its normal morning thing — coffee cups, dog walkers, a delivery truck idling on the corner. Normal, ordinary, non-hallucinating reality.
"You should probably tell her who you actually are," Bruce said eventually. "The longer this goes, the more complicated the correction becomes."
Joey nodded slowly, with the expression of someone who understood this completely and had no immediate plans to act on it.
"Yeah," he said. "Probably."
He reached over and stole a corner of Bruce's muffin.
"Probably soon," he added.
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