Then We Came to the End

by Joshua Ferris

  We, too, thought it would never end.

  Enter a New Century

  1

  LAYOFFS — TOM’S FINAL HOUR — JANINE GORJANC’S TRAGEDY — THE DOWNTURN — DRASTIC MEASURES — THE DEBATE OVER TOM — CREEPY PICTURES — THE STORY OF TOM MOTA’S CHAIR — WALKING SPANISH DOWN THE HALL — SANDERSON — TWO E-MAILS — THE STORY OF TOM MOTA’S CHAIR, PART II — THE PRO BONO FUND-RAISER ADS — LASTIVE ACID — LYNN MASON

  LAYOFFS WERE UPON US. They had been rumored for months, but now it was official. If you were lucky, you could sue. If you were black, aged, female, Catholic, Jewish, gay, obese, or physically handicapped, at least you had grounds. At one point or another we have all been deposed. We plan on being deposed for Tom’s suit — we have no doubt there will be one. Though he has no grounds unless asshole has been added to the list. And that’s not just us talking. His ex-wife hates the guy. Restraining order. He can’t see his two young kids without supervision. She moved to Phoenix just to get away from him. We wouldn’t call him an asshole without having reached a very high consensus. Amber Ludwig objects to the specific designation because she has objected to profanity since becoming pregnant, but really there is no other word, and her objection is really just an abstention.

  When Tom found out he was being let go, he wanted to throw his computer against his office window. Benny Shassburger was in there with him. Benny wasn’t like a great friend of Tom’s or anything but he was the guy who on occasion would have lunch with Tom and then report back to the rest of us. Word spread fast that Tom had been laid off and naturally Benny was the guy to go down there. He said Tom was pacing in his office like a man recently jailed. He said he could picture what Tom had looked like the night he went to the Naperville house with the aluminum bat and the authorities were called to restrain him. We had never heard that story before. Right there and then we had to stop Benny from telling us the story of Tom’s final hour so he could first tell us the story of the aluminum bat. Benny was shocked we had never heard that story; he was sure we had. No, we never had. “Get out of here,” he said. “You’ve heard that story.” No, we hadn’t. This was always how these conversations went. So Benny told us the story of Tom and the bat and then he told us the story of Tom’s final hour. Both were good stories and together they killed a good hour. Some of us loved killing an hour of the company’s time and others felt guilty for it afterward. But whatever your personal feelings on the matter, you still had to account for the hour, so you billed it to a client. By the end of the fiscal year, our clients had paid us a substantial amount of money to sit around and bullshit, expenses they then passed on to you, the consumer. It was the cost of doing business, but some of us feared it was an indication that the end was near, like the profligacy that preceded the downfall of the Roman Empire. There was so much money involved, and some of it even trickled down to us, a small amount that allowed us to live among the top one-percent of the wealthiest in the world. It was lasting fun, until layoffs came.

  Tom wanted to throw his computer against the window, but only if he could guarantee it would break the glass and land on the street below. He was under his desk removing cords. “That’s sixty-two stories, Tom,” Benny said. And Tom agreed it was a bad idea if he couldn’t break the glass. If glass didn’t break they would say Tom Mota couldn’t even fuck up right — he didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of that, the bastards. We were the bastards he was referring to, in part. “But I don’t think it’ll break the glass,” said Benny. Tom stopped tooling around with his computer. “But I gotta do something,” he said, sitting back on his heels.

  We lacked that kind of urgency. Our building was on the Magnificent Mile, in downtown Chicago, on a corner a few blocks from Lake Michigan. It had tones of art deco and two gilded revolving doors. We shuffled up the stairs toward the revolving doors slowly, afraid of what awaited us inside. In the beginning, we were let go in large numbers. Then, as the practice was refined, one by one, as they saw fit. We feared ending up on Lower Wacker Drive. Unemployed, we would be unpaid; unpaid, we’d be evicted from our homes; evicted, we would end up on Lower Wacker, sharing space with shopping carts and developing our own winterized and blackened feet. Instead of scrabbling for the addition of “Senior” to our current titles, we would search the alleyways for smokable butts. It was fun, imagining our eventual despair. It was also despairing. We didn’t really believe we would be honked at from the Lexuses of our former colleagues as they drove down Lower Wacker on their way home to the suburbs. We didn’t think we would be forced to wave at them from our lit oil drums. But that we might have to fill out an unemployment form over the Internet was not out of the question. That we might struggle to make rent or a mortgage payment was a real and frightening prospect.

  Yet we were still alive, we had to remember that. The sun still shone in as we sat at our desks. Certain days it was enough just to look out at the clouds and at the tops of buildings. We were buoyed by it, momentarily. It made us “happy.” We could even turn uncommonly kind. Take, for instance, the time we smuggled Old Golds into Frank Brizzolera’s hospital room. Or when we attended the funeral of Janine Gorjanc’s little girl, found strangled in an empty lot. It was hard for us to believe something like that could happen to someone we knew. You have never seen someone weep until you have witnessed a mother at the funeral of her murdered child. The girl was nine years old. She was removed at night from an open window. It was all over the papers. First she was missing. Then her body was found. To watch Janine at the funeral, surrounded by pictures of Jessica, her family trying to hold her up — even Tom Mota’s heart broke. We were outside the funeral home afterward, in the parking lot speaking somberly to one another, when Tom began to beat on his ’94 Miata. It didn’t take long before everyone noticed him. He hit the windows with his fists and let out terrible cries of “Fuck!” He kicked the doors and the tires. Finally he collapsed near the trunk, wracked with sobs. It was not unreasonable behavior given the circumstances, but we were a little surprised that Tom appeared the most affected. He was sprawled out on the funeral home parking lot in his suit and tie, sobbing like a child. A few people went over to comfort him. We assumed in part his behavior had something to do with his ex-wife taking his kids to Phoenix. One thing we knew for certain — despite all our certainties, it was very difficult to guess what one individual was thinking at any given moment.

  We believed that downturns had been rendered obsolete by the ingenious technology of the new economy. We thought ourselves immune from things like plant closings in Iowa and Nebraska, where remote Americans struggled against falling-in roofs and credit card debt. We watched these blue-collar workers being interviewed on TV. For the length of the segment, it was impossible not to feel the sadness and anxiety they must have felt for themselves and their families. But soon we moved on to weather and sports and by the time we thought about them again, it was a different plant in a different city, and the state was offering dislocated worker programs, readjustment and retraining services, and skills workshops. They’d be fine. Thank god we didn’t have to worry about a misfortune like that. We were corporate citizens, buttressed by advanced degrees and padded by corporate fat. We were above the fickle market forces of overproduction and mismanaged inventory.

  What we didn’t consider was that in a downturn, we were the mismanaged inventory, and we were about to be dumped like a glut of imported circuit boards. On the drive home we puzzled over who was next. Scott McMichaels was next. His wife had just had a baby. Sharon Turner was next. She and her husband had just purchased a house. Names — just names to anyone else, but to us they were the individuals who generated our greatest sympathy. The ones who put their things in a box, shook a few hands, and left without complaint. They had no choice in the matter, and they possessed a quiet resignation to their ill-timed fates. As they departed, it almost felt to us like self-sacrifice. They left, so that we might stay. And stay we did, though our hearts went out to them. Then there was Tom Mota, who want
ed to throw his computer against the window.

  He wore a goatee and was built like a bulldog, stocky, with foreshortened limbs and a rippling succession of necks. He didn’t belong where we were. That’s not condescension so much as an attempt at a charitable truth. He would have been happier elsewhere — felling trees in a forest, or throwing nets for an Alaskan fishery. Instead, he was dressed in khakis, drinking a latte on a sectional sofa, discussing the best way to make our diaper client’s brand synonymous with “more absorbent.” That is, when we still had our diaper client. After deciding not to throw his computer against the window, Tom fixated on his magazines. He said to Benny, “Benny, man, you gotta get my magazines from Jim. That fuck’s had them two months. I’m not leaving here without them — but I can’t go out there. I don’t want to have to see anybody.” When Benny told us that, we felt pity for Tom. Of course Tom would not have wanted that. He would have spit our pity back in our faces. Nobody wants pity. They just want to get the hell out of there, out of sight, to alleviate the sting of ridicule, and then they want to forget about the entire miserable experience. They can’t do that walking the halls to retrieve magazines. Benny returned to Tom’s office ten minutes later with back copies of Car and Driver, Rolling Stone, Guns and Ammo. Tom was sitting on the floor of his office, winding his watch. Benny said, “Tom.” Tom didn’t answer. “Tom?” said Benny. Tom continued to wind his watch. Then he stood, opened a desk drawer, and pulled out one of the corporate polos he used to wear many days in a row. The blue one (Benny’s) and the green one (Jim’s) were also in the desk drawer. Tom took off his button-down and put the red polo on. “They think I’m a clown,” he said to Benny. Benny replied, “No. Nobody thinks you’re a clown, Tom. They got you by the balls, man — everybody knows that.” “Hand me those scissors,” said Tom. Benny said he looked behind him and saw a pair of scissors on Tom’s bookshelf. Benny told us he didn’t want to hand scissors to Tom. “They think I’m a clown,” Tom repeated as he walked over to his bookshelf and grabbed the scissors himself and began to cut into his nice pleated slacks at the knee. “What are you doing, Tom?” asked Benny, with an uneasy chuckle. He was still holding Tom’s old magazines. He watched as Tom cut all the way around with the scissors until the trouser leg fell to his ankle. Then he started working on one sleeve of the polo, on the opposite side to the cut-off trouser leg. “Tom,” said Benny. Tom’s tan-lined arm was soon visible all the way to the shoulder. A tattoo of barbed wire snaked around his biceps. “Tom, seriously — what are you doing?”

  “Will you do me a favor,” asked Tom, “and cut a hole from the backside of my shirt?”

  “Tom, why are you doing this?”

  Sometimes drastic measures were called for. There were occasions when someone needed to get into a car with a package and drive all the way out to Palatine to the FedEx station that had the latest drop-off time in the state just to guarantee the arrival of an overnight delivery. A new client pitch due Monday meant a full week of one o’clock nights and a few hours of sleep on random sofas on Sunday. It was called a fire alarm, and when one came along you had to drop everything. There was no going to the gym. Theater tickets were canceled. You saw no one, not your five-year-old, not your marriage counselor, not your sponsor, not even your dog. We feared the fire alarm. At the same time, we were all in it together, and we could be taken by surprise, after five days of grind, by the transformation of the team. Eating takeout, laughing around a cubicle, putting our minds together to solve something hard — five or six days of that and there was no immunization against the camaraderie. The people we worked with, with all their tics and pieties and limitations — we had to admit it to ourselves, they weren’t all that bad. Where did that come from? Whence this friendliness? “‘The love flooding you for your brother,’” said Hank Neary, quoting something or other. He was always quoting something or other and we hated him for it, unless we were in the middle of a fire alarm, in which case we loved him like a brother. That love would dissipate in a week. But while it lasted, work was a wellspring, a real source of light, the nurture of a beloved community.

  Then the downturn came and there were no more fire alarms. No speeding out to Palatine, no one o’clock nights, no love flooding us for our brother.

  Benny went down the elevator with Tom. With his clothes cut to shreds, Tom looked like someone washed up on shore after a shipwreck, tattered and clinging to a single plank. His shoes and socks were off, left inside the office with the abandoned magazines, the Kmart portraits of his kids, and the discarded swatches from his trousers and polo.

  “What are you going to do?” asked Benny.

  “What do you think I’m gonna do?” Tom asked rhetorically, just as they had reached the lobby. “I’m gonna find a new job.”

  “No,” said Benny. “I mean right now. What are you doing right now?”

  They exited the elevator. Tom had emptied out the pens and pencils from a mug he kept on his desk and that empty mug was now his only possession. Tom stopped in the marble elevator bank and watched for the descent of the other elevators. “You ever read Ralph Waldo Emerson?” Tom asked Benny. Benny didn’t know where to stand. He told us he didn’t know why they had just stopped in the elevator bank. “What are you planning to do, Tom?” “Listen to what Emerson said,” said Tom. Tom began to quote. “‘For all our penny-wisdom,’” he said, “‘for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all men have sublime thoughts.’ Did you hear that, Benny? Did you hear it, or you need me to repeat it to you?” “I heard it,” Benny replied. “They never knew me,” Tom said, shaking his head and pointing up at those bastards. “They never did.”

  The first elevator arrived, and lunchgoers from the law firm emerged. Tom held his empty mug before them. “Help out the unemployed?” he asked them, shaking the cup. “Hey, help out the jobless?”

  “Tom,” said Benny.

  “Benny, get the fuck off me! — Help me out, guy, please? I just lost my job today.”

  And that was Tom’s final hour.

  We heard it from Benny just after he told us the story of how Tom arrived at the Naperville house with an aluminum bat when he knew the children were at the grandmother’s and everything deemed legally “Tom’s” in the divorce settlement, everything that was “Tom’s” and could be smashed or shattered with an aluminum bat, suffered Tom’s swing until the authorities arrived to subdue him.

  Amber Ludwig, who had the compact, athletic body of a seal, with very small hands and dark, closely set eyes, said she feared Tom was going to return like you hear on the news and open fire. “No, seriously,” she said. “I think he’s come undone. I don’t think he was ever done to begin with.”

  Amber wasn’t showing yet but everyone already knew. She was debating an abortion but, to Larry Novotny’s great disappointment, looked to be leaning against it. Larry would have to decide what to do about his wife, who had just had a child herself not that long ago. We felt sorry for Larry, who worried the curved, finger-smudged bill of his Cubs cap endlessly that spring, but we also thought it was pretty obvious that he should have kept his pecker in his pants. We felt sorry for Amber, too, but as everyone knows, it takes two to tango. We just hoped they weren’t doing it on our desks.

  We asked Amber if she really, honestly thought Tom capable of a bloodbath.

  “Yes,” she said. “I wouldn’t put anything past him. He’s a madman.”

  We tried to convince her that that sort of thing happened only in factories and warehouses, and then only on the South Side. A debate ensued. Was Tom certifiable? Or was he just a clown? What was that at Janine’s little girl’s funeral, when he wept and continued weeping even after we got to the bar? Wasn’t that proof the guy had a heart?

  “Okay,” said Amber, “okay, but what do you call standing on the heating vent and mooning the swimmers from his office window? What was that?” she asked.

  She was referring to the Holiday Inn rooftop pool Tom’s office looked down on
, and Tom’s tendency to get right up to the glass with his butt cheeks. Hijinks! we cried. Fun! That’s not insanity. Amber was outvoted. We knew Tom. We knew Alan Glew, Linda Blanton, Paul Saunier. We knew Neil Hotchkiss and Cora Lee Brower and Harold Oak. They weren’t any of them coming back here with a nightmare in a backpack. They had been let go. They packed their things. They left us for good, never to return.

  IT WAS A SURPRISE to everyone when Janine came back. Of course it was understood she could come back whenever she wanted. We just didn’t think, given all she had gone through, that coming back here, resuming the old routine — how could that ease her suffering? But maybe it was exactly what she needed, something to take her mind off it. She looked older, especially in the eyes. Her blouses were all wrinkled. Her brown hair was flat and dry where before she had styled it every day, and some days she smelled bad. Her first day back, she thanked us for the flyers. Lynn Mason had had the idea of printing up flyers when we heard that the girl had gone missing. Genevieve Latko-Devine, arguably the kindest and sweetest among us, drove out to North Aurora, where the Gorjancs lived, to get a photograph of Jessica. She returned to the office by noon with a fourth-grade school portrait. We scanned it, loaded it onto the server, and began to build the ad.

  Genevieve was at the computer doing the work. Jessica was a plain girl with fair hair and pale skin and an unfortunately crooked smile. We told Genevieve that Jessica was getting washed out.

  “What do you want me to do about that?” she asked.

  “Let’s work on her,” said Joe Pope. “Drop her into Photoshop.”

  We worked on Macs. Some of us had new Macs, some had high-powered notebooks, and some unfortunate souls had to pedal furiously under their desks to keep a spark running through their extinct models. We made layouts in QuarkXPress; all our image manipulation we did in Photoshop. Genevieve dropped the image of the girl into Photoshop and started playing up the girl’s hair and freckles. We took a look and everyone agreed she was still getting washed out.