Then We Came to the End

by Joshua Ferris

  “I could not believe it,” said Benny Shassburger, leaving his office just as we had settled in. This was an old trick of Benny’s — to abandon us at the moment we needed him most, so that we knew never to take him for granted. He stopped briefly in the doorway and turned back. “Hold on a sec while I fill up my coffee and I’ll tell you the whole story.”

  We talked among ourselves until he returned. “Okay,” he said, coming into the room with a full mug and a trailing odor of stale coffee grounds. He sat down and the delicately webbed seat sank for him a little more than it did for the rest of us. He squared himself to his desk and said, “So who did I see this morning parked right outside the building but — what?” He stopped midsentence. He had something — “Where?” It was on his other cheek — we hoped to god he’d find it fast. He wiped his whiskerless face and looked down. “Doughnut glaze,” he said.

  There were doughnuts? Benny’s story would have to wait for those of us wanting doughnuts. Those of us who’d already eaten, or who were watching their weight, or Amber Ludwig, who had just split open a brown banana and was already halfway through it, filling Benny’s office with its singular ripe musk — we sat tight.

  Benny proceeded to tell us that he’d seen Carl Garbedian parked in the drop-off zone just outside the building, Marilynn in the driver’s seat beside him. Was it possible? Our understanding was that Carl and Marilynn were separated. “Of course they’re separated,” he said impatiently. “But if you’ll just let me tell you my story . . .”

  CARL SAT IN THE PASSENGER SEAT of the car looking out upon the day. There was his building, up ahead, with the beggar he knew so well sitting cross-legged near the revolving doors, tired this hour of the morning, it seemed, as he hardly had the energy to shake his Dunkin Donuts cup at all those entering. As Carl glanced around, he recognized people from the office converging upon the building, but nobody he cared to talk to.

  Directly to his right, something curious was going on. Two men in tan uniforms were hosing down the alleyway — a small dead-end loading dock between our building and the one next to it. Carl watched them at their work. White water shot from their hoses. They moved the spray around the asphalt. The pressure looked mighty, for the men gripped their slender black guns, the kind seen at a manual car wash, with both hands. They lifted the guns up and sprayed the Dumpster and the brick walls as well. They spot cleaned, they moved refuse around with the stream. For all intents and purposes, they were cleaning an alleyway. An alleyway! Cleaning it! Carl was mesmerized. It was the sort of thing, six months ago, that would have sent him right over the edge, seeing these men, these first-generation Americans without much choice in the matter, spend their morning in the dark recess of a loading dock power-spraying the asphalt and the Dumpster — good god, was work so meaningless? Was life so meaningless? It reminded him of when an ad got watered down by a client, and watered down, until everything interesting about the ad disappeared. Carl still had to write the copy for it. The art director still had to put the drop shadow where the drop shadow belonged and the logo in its proper place. That was the process known as polishing the turd. Those two poor saps hosing down the alleyway were just doing the same thing. All over America, in fact, people were up and out of their beds today in a continuing effort to polish turds. Sure, for the sake of survival, but more immediately, for the sake of some sadistic manager or shit-brained client whose small imagination and numbingly dumb ideas were bleaching the world of all relevancy and hope. And meanwhile, that mad-bearded fellow there with his crossed legs could hardly lift his grease-caked hands to make it a little easier for someone to flip him a quarter.

  “Well, we have to find some way of getting her in,” Marilynn was saying into her cell.

  Carl turned his attention back to the noble fools scouring the bricks. Another thing that would have sent him spiraling was how quickly he could come up with the advertising copy designed to sell power sprayers to those shit-brained managers. “Uniform liquid distribution guarantees remarkable scouring intensity for maximum coverage and time efficiency,” he thought to himself as he watched the men work, “while the high impact of our spray angles makes cleaning any surface a snap!” His quick command of that cloying and unctuous language, that false-speak, while his wife was next to him talking to Susan about mammography results or negative drug reactions, whatever — it would have been all too much to bear.

  But not so much this morning, not so much somehow. Oh, he was still clear-eyed and sober about the day’s dim prospects. He knew he had affixed himself, by some accursed fate, to this massive, mind-boggling effort — to work, to the polishing of the turds. And yet, he was changed. For Marilynn was beside him talking on the phone, and he felt no need to call her and leave a voice mail. He was not inclined to undress in the car. Marilynn had picked up the cell phone, and this was a delicate morning — the first morning after the first night they had shared together in six weeks. She might have had the good sense to ignore its ring until he had gotten out of the car. But no, she answered it as she always did, despite its being a delicate morning — yet when Carl searched himself, he did not feel ignored or preempted, at least not cripplingly so. Why was that? Because Marilynn had a job to do. Was it not that simple? Just as those men had to power-wash an alleyway, just as he had to polish the turd of an ad, Marilynn had to pick up the phone at inconvenient times and discuss estrogen receptors with goddamn Susan. Realizing this, he did not sit in the passenger seat pouting and devising schemes to draw her attention toward him. That, as he measured things, was progress. That was the promise of those little pink pills in their proper dosage. That was some kind of miracle. And when Benny shambled up and banged on the car window, it wasn’t Carl’s first instinct to dismiss him irritably, but to half-smile and offer a little wave. Benny being Benny, he went over to watch the unexpected pair from the drop box.

  “No,” his wife said, “I don’t feel comfortable bringing him into this.”

  Just then Carl noticed a woman crossing the street. She looked familiar, even if he had a hard time placing who it was right away. Suddenly it dawned on him. Unbelievable! — she was completely transformed. Into a vision. A genuine beauty. No Genevieve Latko-Devine, but my god, thought Carl, who could have guessed such a thing were possible? It was Marcia Dwyer, and she had cut her hair. Gone was that flap that crested just above her forehead like a hard black wave, gone was that wall of glossy curls that hung between her shoulder blades like a cheap curtain of beads. In its place was now a delicate and textured cut, short in the back, curving under her chin in front and free to move in the wind. Its color was no longer tar black but a rich chestnut brown. She looked as fashionable as a model in a shampoo commercial. Carl was overcome by the change. “I cannot — will you — Marilynn,” he said, tapping his wife, “Marilynn, will you look at that?” He was pointing through the windshield. “Do you see what I see?”

  Marilynn was preoccupied at the moment, but Carl’s excitement was alarming. “Susan?” she said. “Susan, can I ask you to hold, please?”

  “Marilynn,” he continued, “do you see that girl there, that woman?” He was pointing through the windshield. “Look right there, the one that just stepped up on the sidewalk, you see her?”

  “The one carrying the denim purse?”

  “Yes,” he said. “But — ignore that for a minute, if you can. And look at her! See her!”

  “What am I looking at?” she asked.

  “That’s Marcia!” he cried. “Marcia Dwyer! Marcia cut her hair!”

  “Oh,” said Marilynn.

  The two of them watched Marcia enter the building. Marilynn peered over at her husband, waiting for him to say something more. But he was still watching the building, lost to his thoughts. Marilynn waited another beat before resuming her conversation with Susan, just in case there was something more Carl wanted to say.

  With some maneuvering to obscure the fact that he had been spying, Benny came around again to the Garbedian car. Benny dropped to a
squat, and Carl rolled down the window.

  “Did you just see Marcia Dwyer?” asked Benny.

  “She looks terrific!” cried Carl.

  Benny looked toward the building as if to catch a final glimpse. “She does look terrific,” he agreed.

  “If I had had to place odds,” said Carl, “I would have said Marcia Dwyer would have gone to her grave with that old haircut. I never would have thought, not in a million years, that she would wake up out of it and realize how crappy she’s looked all this time.”

  Benny looked back at Carl, who was not really paying any attention to him while he spoke.

  “Would you really call her crappy-looking?”

  “Not in a million years!” cried Carl, ignoring the question. “But she did! She woke up, looked at herself, and said no, this is not working out.”

  “She has a cute face, don’t you think?” said Benny.

  “And who cares,” said Carl, “if it was some stylist who suggested it. She went with it. She said yes! She said let’s make a change. Benny, it’s inspiring! It inspires me to want to lose some of this weight — I mean, look at this thing,” he said, looking down at his belly as if it were something quite independent of himself. When he looked up, he found that Benny had stood and was walking away.

  A second later, Carl got out of the car and tried catching up with him. “Hey, man, wait up!” he called out. He forgot entirely about Marilynn. The good-bye kiss that at one time had been so important to him — not in and of itself, of course, but as a gauge of Marilynn’s morning attentiveness to him, of her willingness to put him before the phone call — must not have mattered much now, because without even saying so much as a good-bye, he abandoned his wife to catch up with his coworker. Marilynn, surprised by this, thought who-knows-what about Carl’s sudden departure. She asked Susan to hold on again and honked the horn. Carl looked back, realized that he had forgotten about his wife — she had just slipped his mind! — and halfway between the two, asked Benny to please wait while he said good-bye to Marilynn real quick. Being curious about what Carl had to say, as much as he was about what might happen back at the Garbedian car, Benny put a foot on the first stair leading up to the building and turned back to watch. Carl leaned through the passenger-side window, a few words were exchanged, and then the separated couple kissed each other good-bye. When Carl emerged from the car and headed toward Benny, he did so almost at a gallop, as if skipping a step for the sake of urgency — and that, Benny said, that he had never seen before.

  “Carl hurrying?” he said. “I’ve never seen that before.”

  That’s where Benny ended the story. But we sensed there was more to it. So at lunch hour, finding Carl’s door open for the first time in eons, a few of us went in. He was at his desk eating a low-cal Subway sandwich and drinking a diet iced tea. It was astonishing. We asked him for his version of events.

  “I had completely forgotten about his crush on Marcia,” he told us, sitting back in his chair, “and I had just called her crappy-looking. What an idiot. So I told him, I said, ‘Benny, I’m sorry if I offended you back there.’ But he just shrugged it off. ‘You didn’t offend me,’ he said. ‘You offended Marcia, I think, but not me.’ So I said, ‘I completely forgot about your crush, man, I’m sorry.’ And he said, ‘My what?’”

  It didn’t take long before Benny was spilling his guts down by the lake, which was only a few blocks east of us. The two men climbed over the breakers and stood at the edge of the runners’ path that dropped off into the water, where Benny admitted to Carl a love for Marcia that he called paralyzing. It was taking away his nights, he said. It was starting to hurt just seeing her in the halls. Sitting across from her in a meeting, that was torture. And coming upon her alone in the kitchen took his speech away. “And you know me,” he said to Carl. “I never lack for something to say. But now, I’m starting not to enjoy this.” “So what are you going to do about it?” asked Carl. Benny said what he always said, the same thing he had said to all of us: his love for Marcia was complicated because Marcia was not Jewish, and it was important to him — for reasons heathens like us couldn’t understand — that he marry a Jew. Stores a totem pole for three-nineteen a month and calls us heathens — that was rich, we thought. And what’s more, everyone knew it was just an excuse in case Marcia found out about the crush and didn’t like him back.

  Benny’s crush wasn’t news. He had told each and every one of us about it at one point or another, and in great detail. The news wasn’t even Marcia’s haircut. Marcia had finally crawled her way out of her Megadeth-and-Marlboros origins and staggered into the fashionable reality of a new century, and her looks had improved for it. She was no longer reliving the smoke-and-screw glory days of George Washington High. Her haircut was a jump up in three income levels, it was a move to Paris, it was the opening of some seventh seal on the South Side, and if Benny’s encounters with her in the hall had smarted before, he was in for a world of hurt now.

  Carl leaving the car without a kiss good-bye, that was interesting, too. Carl engaged with the world — when did that happen? After stealing Janine’s drugs, overdosing, poisoning himself into the hospital, and being released under a psychiatrist’s supervision, Carl had gone from reproachful insolence to mild indifference. But when did he go from indifference to galloping and gossiping and chasing after Benny? Had we been forced to lay down odds, all our money would have been on the unlikely haircut long before Carl leaving the car without a kiss from Marilynn.

  But that wasn’t the news.

  The news was delivered by Joe Pope, who came by Benny’s office to announce that in a few days, we would start work on two important new business pitches. A beverage company was about to launch their first caffeinated bottled water, and a popular brand of running shoe had seen their market share dip over the previous few years. Both were looking for new agencies and had graciously invited us to pitch them ideas. The next step was to present them with creative that would bowl them over. Joe didn’t have to tell us how important winning new business was, but he did anyway. “So we need to clear our plates of this pro bono project as quickly as possible,” he said. “You’ll be presenting concepts on what makes a breast cancer patient laugh first thing in the morning.”

  “As in tomorrow morning?” said Benny. “I thought we had till next week.”

  “Priorities have changed,” said Joe. “Now it’s tomorrow morning.”

  “Christ, Joe,” said Larry. “You serious?”

  It was like a fire alarm we weren’t even getting paid for.

  “Is she in today?” asked Amber Ludwig. Her tone of voice and downcast eyes might have indicated she was inquiring of someone trying to pull out of critical condition.

  “Is who in?” replied Joe. He knew who she meant. We all knew.

  “Listen,” he said, moving more fully into Benny’s office. “Does anyone have anything to show her?”

  Ordinarily we would have taken this question, coming from Joe, as a kind of accusation. But the reality was that no one had a thing, and so what was the point of dissembling? We just sort of stared at him.

  “I don’t have anything, either,” he admitted. “Not a damn thing, and I’ve been thinking about it all night.”

  It was good to hear that even he was struggling. He went on to offer us a few modest strategies he had come up with, general directions we might consider, which was kind of him. But that still didn’t help cushion the blow of his bad news, and in the end it didn’t get us any closer to figuring out what was funny about breast cancer.

  GENEVIEVE WAS AT HER DESK, reading the breast cancer companion guide that had absorbed her attention yesterday evening after she’d finished the survivor’s memoir, when Amber came to her doorway. Genevieve put the book down and moved her blond hair behind an ear. “What’s up?” she said. Amber walked in and sat down, tucking one of her thick legs under the thigh of the other. “You don’t know about Karen’s phone call to the hospital yesterday, do you?” Genevieve sh
ook her head and took a sip of her diet pop. She had not been with us during the call. “Then let me fill you in,” said Amber.

  Amber spoke. Both women turned to look at Larry in the doorway when he appeared in his Cubs cap, popping M&M’s into his mouth one at a time. Amber turned back to Genevieve and continued talking while Larry moved inside and stood directly behind her.

  “And remind her of her fear,” he said, interrupting. Larry had been convinced by Karen’s call to the hospital that Lynn’s cancer wasn’t a rumor after all.

  Amber ignored him for the moment, but eventually came around to his point — Lynn’s aversion to hospitals. It would be extremely hard for someone in the grip of a fear of hospitals to willingly admit herself to one.

  Benny Shassburger came to the doorway and in a low voice said, “Are you guys talking about Lynn?” Genevieve nodded, and Benny, his khakis rustling, moved through the office to the back credenza, where he placed a haunch on the sharp wood corner. “Here’s what I keep coming back to,” he said. And he went on to remind her that the pro bono ads, which concerned themselves with breast cancer awareness, arrived at the same time that she was going into the hospital. “Was that just a coincidence?” he asked.

  “What are you trying to say?” asked Genevieve.

  “That she definitely has breast cancer,” said Jim Jackers, who had been listening from the doorway. “And that she wants us to know about it.”

  “Why would she want us to know?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jim. “Maybe just subconsciously.”

  Chewing on the last of his M&M’s, Larry Novotny now began to rub Amber’s shoulders with his free hands. Genevieve had turned in her chair to better talk with Benny, but her attention was pulled back to Amber when Amber abruptly stood and moved over to the chair closer to the wall. Larry, whose hands were still in the massage position, watched her go. Amber looked straight ahead at Genevieve, who looked at Larry, who lifted his cap in the air and smoothed back his hair. He left the office, passing Jim standing in the doorway.