Part Four of “The Agreement,” a special Valentine’s Week series

“ARE YOU KIDDING?” All caps. No question about it. Actually: “ARE YOU KIDDING?!?” Emphasis in the original. Phonetically, “URYEW KHIHDDINGH?!?”, the first two words slurred into one, the third fired out of a shotgun. An incredulous gasp and a barbaric yawp. The voice of the world’s happiest man, at the very moment he becomes the world’s happiest man, and realizes he’s become the world’s happiest man, simultaneously. The instant when the Gawker crosses the threshold to become the Groper, a three-word doorway he creates and passes through, pulling it shut behind him. A sound effect that accompanies a fantastical contortion of the facial muscles responsible for grinning, taxed to their limit. The noise of a large head on a large neck, jutting forward, physically penetrating the barrier between the potential and the actual. The cry of sweepstakes winners, of hidden-camera prank-show targets, of people who’ve been told this one’s on the house. When you both can’t believe it and you gotta believe! A sound like none heard before or since. An uncommon expression of a familiar sentiment. A singular verbalization of a universal sensation. A sleeveless shirt of a sentence. A microphone held to beer-moistened bluejeans. A line reading greater than any other in a film full of the best line readings in the action-movie canon. The calling card. The fanmaker. The callback generator. The line most likely to be repeated by the inebriated audience. The equal and opposite reaction to “Pain don’t hurt.” A record-player needle dropped into the Venn diagram overlap of drunk, dumb, and horny. A death-row pardon for a man sentenced to never whack it again. The end of “A Day in the Life” but with belches. “Yakety Sax” with a Tristan Chord. Cleavage synesthesia. Happiness is a warm pair a’ attitudes. All you need is twenty dollars and a wet dream. Actor Michael Wise as Gawker in the film Road House, responding to the news that he can kiss the marvelous breasts of a total stranger, provided he pays her husband twenty bucks for the privilege. Perfection.