Then We Came to the End

by Joshua Ferris

  He set his coffee down on the table and took her hands. “It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while now. It predates all . . . this,” he said. “And it is bad timing, but it’s not the time to be dishonest. Not now. And so I’ll just say it — I’ve been thinking for a while now that you and I are not right for each other. In the long term, I mean. And I would hate to go through this with you and the whole time you’re thinking . . . well, I don’t know what — that I’m doing it because I’m in for the long haul. I am in for the long haul to make you better, but not because —”

  “Yeah, I get it, I know!” she cried, cutting him short. “You’re not the marrying type, I get it!”

  “No, it’s not just that,” he said. “It’s that, you and I . . . I’m just being honest here. I am totally committed to seeing you through this. But as a friend,” he said. “Only as a friend.”

  Well, wasn’t that something? Martin Grant was honest. He was an honest man. Of course he had had to give her a swift kick in the ass before she could realize it. He had had to knock the wind out of her to show her just how honest he was. Tending to her, nursing her — he’d take that. Breast cancer, that part was fine. It was the sum of her parts that was not, in the end, what he wanted. She told him she couldn’t do it that way, impose on him that way if he . . . and he tried to object by saying . . . but she said I’m sorry, I just can’t . . . and he said will you think it over . . . and she said no. He left soon after. She spent a sad Sunday afternoon alone.

  And now, maybe she should ease off the gas a little. Doing ninety down Lake Shore Drive — that’s a suicide mission, which can sometimes be a dream of rescue. They don’t fix the potholes this far south. There are longer spells between working streetlights, too, when the black sky descends through the open sunroof, blotting her out again — until, first hood, then dash, then her hand on the wheel, she is lit all too brightly once more. She’s avoiding her face in the mirror and all the lachrymose self-pity etched there. Fuck that. And for those of you who think Lynn Mason in addition to cancer suffers from the disease the talk shows diagnose as Needing the Man, if you think that’s why she was parked outside Martin’s office building, then you haven’t yet understood the special circumstances of this Tuesday night, the forces at play that make her desperate and wanting in a way that is wholly unlike her. She has never — or not often — suffered from Needing the Man. Self-sufficiency has always been her first and last commandment. And not because she was of a generation of girls taught to reject the dependency suffered by their mothers and grandmothers. It wasn’t a man she was afraid of losing herself to. It was a person, another person. It wasn’t political, this headstrong determination to answer to no one, to achieve, to be the boss, to earn and sock it away, to use foul language whenever she goddamn well pleased, to eat rich, to fuck who she wanted to fuck and to fire who needed to be fired even if they broke into tears. It was personal. She did not care to hitch her wagon to anyone else, because she knew truth, happiness, success, all of what was deep and holy, was already present in the car with her. She just didn’t have access to any of it tonight and wanted someone with her in the passenger seat.

  Because fear of death, boy, that has a way of menacing your convictions and making you feel lonely. Death has a way of ruining your plans and sending you on a tailspin on what should be a work night. Really, Lynn, better slow down, she tells herself. If not for your life, at least for the price of a ticket. She looks at the clock in the dash: midnight. She loves the Saab. What will happen to the Saab if she does, in fact, die? Better question: just where is she headed in the Saab at midnight at ninety miles an hour down Lake Shore Drive? Well, it’s probably not the ideal place to be, this club she knows on the South Side — this club Martin introduced her to, where they spent some time together, called the Velvet Lounge. And the thing she plans on doing, catching the midnight set — is not something she’s doing out of a genuine love of jazz, she admits that. She’s going there for Martin, to remember Martin, to mourn Martin. She’s going for nostalgia’s sake. So isn’t it just perfectly appropriate that the Velvet Lounge should be closed on Tuesdays? She sits in her car outside the bar, listening to “St. Louis Blues” on a CD Martin had left behind. Got the St. Louis Blues! / Blue as I can be! / Man’s got a heart like a rock cast in the sea! Appropriately, it’s a very short song. These stupid enduring artifacts — a bar, a song — that stick around after the lover has cast his heart into the sea, they are solace and agony both. She is drawn toward them for the promise of renewal, but the main experience is a deepening of the woe.

  It’s past midnight. She’s miles from him. Home. The word she wants is home. She doesn’t believe she will have the strength to submit herself to the doctors tomorrow without him. In a moment of clarity, she asks herself, is she really in love with Martin, with Martin, or is her broken heart circumstantial? Would she feel such emotion for him if she were not going into the hospital tomorrow, if he hadn’t arranged her first trip to the doctor with such compassion, if he were not the last man to know her body intimately before it would be grievously altered? And then the answer comes to her: all broken hearts are circumstantial. Every lovelorn jerk is the victim of bad timing, good intentions, and someone else’s poor decision making. She might as well admit it — yes, she’s in love with Martin, and she’s discovered it at the worst possible time, after he’s broken her heart. In a sudden reversal of all that conviction she had when peeling away from the curb that Martin’s office was the worst place to be, and contacting Martin the worst thing she could do, she goes in search of a pay phone. She has her cell phone, but if she calls on the cell she won’t have the option of hanging up at the last minute without Caller ID informing him who was calling.

  She calls from the pay phone of a closed gas station. It isn’t unreasonable to expect to catch him at his desk. In fact, despite the late hour, it doesn’t even cross her mind that he could be anywhere else. The familiar ring, the familiar voice mail — speak now or forever hold on to your self-respect. She hangs up. Wise choice. She calls back. “Martin, I’m at this number, it’s —” She gives him the number. “Can you call me here when you get back to your desk, please? It’s urgent.” She peers about as she waits. There is a dark orange light cast above the gas pumps that is almost supernatural in its hazy Halloween glow, illuminating, though that’s not the right word — animating the pumps and the oil stains and the pockmarks and the overflowing garbage pails into something ugly and vaguely menacing, and when a man pushing a shopping cart rattles his way across the pavement in the dark, the noise unnerves her, and she looks around. Great, now she’s frightened of being attacked, too, of rapists and murderers and of all men lurking this late at night. Talk about a landslide of shit. At this eerie-ass gas station at the witching hour, folks, she has officially been buried in it. All she needs now is the start of rain, the motor failing to turn over, a car with tinted windows to stop at an uncomfortable distance, and a plague of locusts. Wouldn’t that make the night complete? A football field’s distance away the highway looms. She hears the faint whir of whizzing cars. Has it been two minutes, or four hours, since she called? She tries again. “Martin,” she says. “I need to talk, please call me back.” “Martin,” she says, on her third try. “Are you at home?”

  He is at home, sleeping. “What time is it?” he says, after the sixth ring. Oh, no — how long has he been at home? Why is he home? How could he be home? Now in the time before her reply, the entire evening requires rethinking. She envisioned him in familiar surroundings — refilling his coffee and pulling out a file and popping aspirin and readjusting his trousers after sitting down. She took comfort knowing where he was, even if she wasn’t with him. Finding him at home, however, waking him up, she realizes she knows nothing of where he might have been or what he was doing, and that’s very, very unsettling. She thinks the worst — a drink with someone new, fresh conversation, the beginning of what he does want. She’s lost him. “What are you doing home?” sh
e asks. “What am I doing?” he says. “I’m sleeping.” “When did you leave work?” she asks. “I don’t know,” he says. “Seven?” Seven? She doesn’t say it aloud but inside it’s a scream as loud as that in the dressing room. Seven? She’s been picturing him for five hours in a place she thought she knew and now she knows nothing. What she badly needs is a step-by-step explanation of everything he’s done tonight. But she can’t ask for that. Better come to the business at hand before she says something pathetic. Too late: “What have you been doing at home since seven?” she asks. “I mean, isn’t it unlike you, to go home at seven?” “I was tired,” he explains. “I wanted to come home.” “So you went home at seven?” “Yes, Lynn,” he says. “I came home at seven. I ordered food, I watched TV — what’s going on?” So nothing out of the ordinary, she thinks. Nothing social. No dates. He’s honest with her, she knows that by now — at last, tell the man why you’re calling.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” she says. “I need you to go with me. I don’t know what I was thinking. I won’t be able to do it without you.”

  There’s silence on his end. “But I thought . . .” he begins. “Okay,” he resumes, a second later. “I’ll go with you.”

  “You don’t have to worry,” she says. “I understand the conditions. I fully accept the conditions.”

  “Okay, but . . . what’s changed? Because on Sunday you said —”

  “I’m scared,” she says simply. He doesn’t reply. “It’s just that I’m scared.”

  “Okay,” he says. “What time do you need me to pick you up?”

  HEADING BACK ON LAKE SHORE DRIVE, she is calm as a dove in a cage. No music, just the wind coming in from the sunroof and the Saab’s faithful trill. To her right is the quiet lake. She remembers the time the car went kapooey. As she drove along someone might have been strapped to the underbelly banging on it with a monkey wrench. It jerked and tottered, and the strange movement and the clanking filled her with anxiety, as if she were the extension of consciousness of the machine she loved. She took it in and when she got it back three days later, all had been returned — the familiar purr of the motor, the smooth palpable glide of the tires on the street. She feels like that now: steady, quiet, functioning, recovered. No longer gadding, flitting like a pinball. Those hours are behind her, and only now can she see it: at twelve-forty-eight AM enveloped by the sturdy Saab and moving north at a reasonable speed she knows exactly where it is, the right place that has eluded her all evening, and what she should have been doing all along. The night’s drama had muddled her, obscuring her rightful destination, and within fifteen minutes she arrives. She enters the building and greets the man who watches over it at night. He knows her by name. “Surprised to see you here this late!” he says, and with these words she knows instantly that her biggest mistake was ever leaving to begin with. It was climbing into that cab and heading home. She takes the elevator to sixty and walks down to her office. Has anyone but her yet recognized the critical importance to the agency’s future of these two new business pitches? And the strategies haven’t even been worked out yet! They have two weeks until presentation. It’s insane to think she even has a moment to spare. She sits down at her desk. Here is a good place to be, right here, thinking, What must be done? What must I do first? Amazing how energized she feels, given these last few months of everyday fatigue. No different than waking up after a long night’s rest, and she is ready to start the morning. She reaches out to her mouse, disrupting the screensaver. The clock says it’s just after one. Just a very early morning, that’s all. She works until six.

  She’s exhausted. She rises off her chair and goes to the window. Just now the sun is coming up, the city dot-matrixing into life again, one dark spot at a time turning into light, brightening the buildings and the streets and distant highways. The stippling reminds her of the giant Seurat painting in the Art Institute, the one Martin liked. Not that Chicago, with its hard charm and gray surfaces — practically still with inactivity at this hour — is anything like Seurat’s colorful sprawling picnic. But watching the sky open at her window, it is magnificent, especially after all the work she’s put in, and a minor epiphany hits. We’ve got it all wrong. Normal business hours should be from nine p.m. to five A.M. so that we’re greeted by the sun when work is through. All that was despairing and hopeless the night before has evaporated, and all that talk about the transformative power of the light of day has come true for her. She is strong again, on firm ground again. She has done things as best as she could imagine doing them, and if her imagination is an impoverished one, if it lacks in some fundamental way and the result has been a default to working harder, working longer, her life defaulted to the American dream — hasn’t it been a pursuit of happiness all the same? Her pursuit of happiness. And no one, not Martin, not anyone, can take that away from her. It can be taken away only by death. And because of these new business opportunities, death, she’s afraid, will have to wait.

  She picks up the phone. She just wants to let him know that last night she went a little crazy — who knows why. But with the light of day, her senses have returned, and she doesn’t need him to take her to the hospital after all.

  “What are you talking about?” he says. “I was just about to leave to pick you up.”

  “No,” she says. “That’s not necessary.”

  “Lynn,” he says, “I’m picking you up.”

  “Martin, I’m already at work. I’m a block away from the hospital. I don’t need to be picked up.”

  “Lynn, why are you doing this?”

  She promises to call when she’s out of surgery. He protests again, but she insists. She hangs up and staggers over to the white leather sofa. It’s cluttered with free samples of former client products — cans of motor oil, boxes of lightbulbs — and accordion file folders full of documents. Moving all this to the floor she lies down and, just before falling asleep, resolves that when she wakes up, the first thing she will do tomorrow — today — is clean this shameful office, and make a new start of things.

  Returns and Departures

  1

  ON NOT GETTING IT — BENNY SPOTS CARL — HOSING THE ALLEYWAY — MARCIA’S HAIRCUT — AN INADVERTENT OFFENSE — THE NEW BUSINESS — A REQUEST FOR GENEVIEVE — THE CAFETERIA — GOING UNDER — THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN JOE AND THE REST OF US — “THESE PEOPLE” — AN ELITIST — THE WATER TOWER — WHY IT WASN’T CYNICISM — THE GARDEN HOSES — JOE MAKES A DECISION

  IN THE MORNING WE CAME in and hung our spring coats on the back of the door and sat down at our desks and sifted through last night’s e-mail for something good. We sipped our first cups of coffee and cleared our voice mails and checked our bookmarked websites. It might have been a day like any other, and we should have been grateful, ecstatic even, to find no declaration of bankruptcy waiting for us in our in-boxes and no officewide memo announcing eviction from the building. We had every reason to believe that payroll management still acknowledged our existence, that Aetna had been paid and remained committed to our well-being, and that no one had been granted a seizure order to repossess our chairs.

  Why, then, did discomfort pervade the hallways and offices? What made this morning different from others like it?

  The unfinished pro bono ads that had eluded us the day before. We had been asked — was it possible? — to create an ad that made breast cancer patients laugh, a strange and vexing assignment. What was the point of it? No matter. Our job wasn’t to ask what the point was. If that had been our job, nothing articulated to prospective clients in our capabilities brochure and on our website would have escaped our rolled eyes. The point of another billboard outside O’Hare? Another mass mailer on your kitchen table? Good luck mustering an argument for more of that glut. If we had to call into question the point, we’d have fallen into an existential crisis that would have quickly led us to question the entire American enterprise. We had to keep telling ourselves to forget about the point and keep our noses down and focus on the fractured and isolat
ed task at hand. What was funny about breast cancer?

  We didn’t have an answer, and it was making us nervous. Jim Jackers, fearing the blank page and searching for direction among the hoi polloi, was not the only one who suffered anxiety about turning in crap work. One crap ad could make the difference between the person they kept on and the one they let go. No one could say that was the criterion, but no one could say it wasn’t.

  But it wasn’t just our jobs at stake, was it? When we had trouble nailing an ad, our reputations were on the line. A good deal of our self-esteem was predicated on the belief that we were good marketers, that we understood what made the world tick — that in fact, we told the world how to tick. We got it, we got it better than others, we got it so well we could teach it to them. Using a wide variety of media, we could demonstrate for our fellow Americans their anxieties, desires, insufficiencies, and frustrations — and how to assuage them all. We informed you in six seconds that you needed something you didn’t know you lacked. We made you want anything that anyone willing to pay us wanted you to want. We were hired guns of the human soul. We pulled the strings on the people across the land and by god they got to their feet and they danced for us.

  What, then, were we to make of an empty sketch pad or blank computer screen? How could we understand our failure as anything but an indictment of us as benighted, disconnected frauds? We were unhip, off-brand. We had no real clue how to tap basic human desire. We lacked a fundamental understanding of how to motivate the low sleepwalking hordes. We couldn’t even play upon that simple instrument, embedded within the country’s collective primal cortex, that generates fear — a crude and single-note song. Our souls were as screwy and in need of guidance as all the rest. What were we but sheep like them? We were them. We were all we — whereas for so long we had believed ourselves to be just a little bit above the others. One unfinished ad could throw us into these paroxysms of self-doubt and intimations of averageness, and for these reasons — not the promise of gossip or the need for caffeine — we found ourselves driven out of our individual offices that morning and into the company of others.