Then We Came to the End

by Joshua Ferris

  “Can you believe it’s only three-fifteen?” Amber asked Larry Novotny. You bet Larry could believe it was three-fifteen. Larry could believe it was eleven-fifty-nine and the clock was about to strike midnight and the governor had yet to call. Time was seriously running out for Larry. Was she or was she not going to have the abortion? It wasn’t something he could ask every fifteen minutes, certainly not every five minutes, though time moved for him now in five-minute intervals, at the end of which he debated asking her once again if she was going to do it or what. He usually decided against asking her again, having asked only twelve five-minute intervals ago, which, before all this started, was only an hour, but which now felt more like twelve or even fourteen hours. Amber had made it clear that she did not want to be asked every hour if she was going to have an abortion.

  “Are they still down there?” she asked Larry. “What do you think they’re doing down there?”

  Larry got up and peeked his head down the hall to Lynn Mason’s office where the door remained closed. They had seen Genevieve and Joe enter ten minutes ago, or nearly two hours ago, according to Larry’s new clock, and during those ten minutes Larry had debated seriously with himself, twice, whether or not to bring the matter up again with Amber. On his return he slapped his cap on his jeans three times and then screwed it on his head, nodding in the affirmative. They were still down there.

  “What do you think they’re talking about?” she asked.

  Larry thought they were probably talking about whether or not Amber should have the abortion. They were probably discussing the misfortune Larry was facing, and how little desired it was that he tell his wife not only that he was having an affair but that the woman was pregnant and intended to keep the baby. There was no way to put a good spin on that, no way of saying cheerfully, “Charlie’s going to have a half brother!”

  “How long have they been in there?” asked Amber. “Ten minutes? It feels more like twenty.”

  “It feels more like two hours,” said Larry.

  It was disappointing and a little irritating that Amber was fixated on a crisis unraveling in some other office when the more significant crisis was taking place right here. “Have you, uh . . .” he began, “thought any more about, uh —”

  She had been working the little white lever on a windup toy. It was a kid’s toy from a Happy Meal, a cheeseburger with a sesame seed bun and all the fixings painted on. It also had a pair of enormous white feet. At last the toy could be wound no further and she leaned over in her chair and set the cheeseburger down on the carpeting. Some slight imperfection in the feet made it go in a gradual circle, which it did over and over again until finally it died and the room went silent again.

  When she looked him in the eye at last he noticed her eyes had reddened. Oh, no, he thought. Not this again. He removed his cap once more and smoothed back his hair. Then he put the cap back on.

  “I go back and forth,” she said.

  JIM JACKERS WAS HARD at work on the pro bono ads and had been working on them steadily for a few hours, since his return from helping Chris Yop throw his chair into Lake Michigan. Looking up from the blank page to the blinking clock, he discovered it was only three-fifteen. He decided that today was perhaps the longest day of his life. Not only had he been called an idiot to his face, but he could do nothing to counter that opinion, because he couldn’t come up with even a single funny thing to say about breast cancer.

  “WHAT TIME IS IT, JOE?” asked Lynn Mason.

  Joe glanced down at his watch. “Three-fifteen,” he answered.

  She reached up to set the hands of a grandfather clock. It was standing against the far wall, to the left of the white leather sofa, and it was a testament to how cluttered that office had been before she and the office coordinator cleared everything away that none of us had any memory of a grandfather clock. It had blended into the background along with everything else, or had perhaps been obscured by lawyers’ boxes full of old files. Or perhaps we were just not very perceptive people. But now that the layers of old magazines, dead files, and the like had been removed, it was possible to discern an attempt to make her office look like a proper one. The desk was located farthest from the door, so that when she sat at it, she could see everything before her — the door itself, the glass-top table to the left, the bookshelves and antique armchair against the right wall, and the sofa and the grandfather clock looking back at her from the far wall.

  Ten minutes earlier, Genevieve and Joe’s knock had interrupted her at her cleaning. Most of the work had been done the day before, but that afternoon she had been called away by meetings with the other partners to discuss strategy for the two upcoming new business pitches. Now she was putting the final touches on what was essentially a brand-new office. She answered the knock on the door by calling out and Joe put his head in. “I’m here with Genevieve,” he said. “Do you have a minute?” She motioned them inside with a quick whip of a dirty rag. When Genevieve walked in behind Joe, she said, “Hi, Lynn.” “Come in,” said Lynn, “have a seat.” How odd to see Lynn Mason with a can of polish and a rag, bending in her skirt and buffing the wood to the side of her desk. They did as they were told and sat down in the twin chairs placed directly in front of her desk. Immediately they had to turn to their left as she moved on to polish the bookshelves and then the wood inlays on her antique armchair. While she worked, she told Joe that she had asked Mike Boroshansky to dedicate one of his guys full-time to their five floors.

  “A security guy?” said Joe. “How come?”

  “Because we just can’t take any chances,” she replied.

  Genevieve thought she dusted the way she did everything else, with great gusto and command. It was the first time she had ever been intimidated by someone else’s dusting. She sat quietly.

  “But Lynn,” he said, “there are only one or two people who genuinely believe he poses a threat. Most of it is just idle chatter.”

  “It’s not just me, Joe. It’s the other partners,” she said.

  She moved from the armchair over to the leather sofa behind them and began to wipe that down as well. Joe twisted in the chair to keep her in his sights and talked to her over the backrest. Genevieve chose to keep staring straight ahead.

  “These recent e-mails to Benny and Jim,” Lynn was saying, “the way he left this place, his behavior toward his wife — the man destroyed all his belongings with a baseball bat. Now, I’m not saying I definitely think he’s on his way back here,” she said, looking at Joe during a brief interlude in her dusting, “but when he’s swept up in something, he doesn’t act right, not like a normal person, and I don’t think we can take the chance.”

  She returned her attention to the sofa. “But how is one guy from security going to stop him if he does come back?” asked Joe. Genevieve was surprised by his contrariness, and had new insight into the openness of dialogue that passed between them when the rest of the team was out of the room.

  But that wasn’t the real news. The real news was that Lynn Mason now entertained the notion of Tom Mota planning a return. That point of view had had only one serious spokesperson until then — Amber Ludwig, who worried about everything. Security had posted his picture at the lobby desk, but they were screwball comedies down there. Lynn Mason’s concern legitimized the idea. That was a new and uncomfortable development.

  “We’re working on getting an order keeping him from the premises,” she said, “but in the meantime, Mike’s giving us a guy, and we’re putting him outside your office.”

  “Why my office?” Joe asked.

  “Because your office looks directly onto the elevators, and if he comes back here, this is the floor I think he’d visit first, and to be honest with you, Joe, I think the biggest grudge he has might be against you. With maybe me being the exception.”

  “I disagree,” said Joe. “It’s true he didn’t care for me in the beginning, but by the time he left, for whatever reason, I think I’d earned his respect. And to be honest with you, L
ynn, I think we’re blowing this whole thing way out of proportion.”

  “Well,” she said, with her back to him. “There’s still going to be a man outside your office.”

  Through with her cleaning at last, she opened the door to the grandfather clock. When Joe informed her of the time, she set the hands accordingly and wound the clock with a key. She set the brass pendulum in motion and then shut the door and watched it swing. In the intervening silence Genevieve glanced back to see what she was doing, found her standing before the clock, and once again realized how small she was in real life. Joe could probably lift her off the ground. He was no muscleman but he was no slouch, either, and he could probably take her by her two arms and lift her, maybe all the way until his own arms were extended, and at the very thought of Joe holding Lynn Mason up in the air like that, like a child, and with a little extra effort, even spinning her around, Genevieve had to choke back the laughter rising in her throat, because Lynn was just then coming around to her desk and pulling her chair out to have a seat. All at once she loomed larger and more intimidating than ever before.

  “Now,” she said, “what did you want to talk about?”

  “NOW I REMEMBER WHAT IT WAS!” cried Marcia.

  It had finally come to her. She had heard Benny was selling the totem pole and she wanted to stop him. “Who told you I was doing that?” he asked. It was making the rounds — the rise in rental rates and his reluctance to pay the difference. “But who ever said I was selling it?” he asked. “Don’t do it,” Marcia pleaded. “Please, Benny. Do you want to see them win?” “Who’s ‘they’?” he asked cautiously. “Every single one of those motherfuckers,” she replied. She had momentarily forgotten her vow never to be mean again. “If you sell it, Benny, you will be handing a victory to every ignorant motherfucker on the payroll. You don’t want to do that, Benny, you don’t. And I don’t want to see it happen.” “What I want to do,” he said with sincerity, “is I want to stop giving three hundred bucks a month that I don’t have to that storage place — that’s what I really want.” “I’ll pay the difference,” she said. “You’ll do what?” “The difference between what you’re paying right now and the rise in rates,” she said. “What is it? I’ll pay it. I’ll write you a check every month.” “Why would you do that?” he asked.

  Part of it, she explained, was to help rectify every despicable, hateful thing she had done since that happy day she had been hired. It was an effort to restore the balance, to reclaim her right to raise her head and stand up proudly. Benny did not need reminding that Marcia was a dabbler in Asian religions. In fact he had been reading up on them. He had been studying the Four Sights, the Eightfold Path, and the Ten Perfections in the hope that one of them might come up in conversation. He was slipping allusions to the Bo tree into many of the stories he told. Marcia hadn’t responded to any of them as he had hoped she would, either because she wasn’t paying attention, or because the allusions meant nothing to her. We said nothing because Benny was Jewish, and we assumed he, as a Jew, knew more about religion than the rest of us. But in fact he had mistakenly been studying Buddhism, while Marcia considered herself more of a student of the Hindu religion. The only thing he got right was a copy of the Bhagavad Gita sitting on his desk, on top of some papers, with the spine facing conspicuously in her direction.

  “So let me see if I get it,” he said. “You want to help your karma.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “From good must come good,” he said, “and from evil, evil. Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yes!” she cried. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. How’d you even know that?”

  “I’ve been reading about it lately,” he said.

  But it was not as simple as cutting him a check, she explained to the novice. Karma did not take if an offer was made only in the anticipation of a return. A genuine and pure impulse had to precede the selfless act. “So what’s your impulse?” he asked. “Not to see those bastards win,” she replied simply. Benny said he was just hazarding a guess here, but that didn’t sound very pure to him. Marcia reminded him of the Yopanwoo Indians. The Yopanwoo Indians had made a mockery of every real Native American tribe ever to suffer an injustice. The practical joking had turned a tragedy into a farce. She promised Benny it was as pure as they came. “I’m from Bridgeport, I never met an Indian in my life,” she said. “But I was still offended. And I thought what you were doing with it — with Brizz’s totem pole, I mean. To be honest, I didn’t know what you were doing with it, but I thought whatever it was was . . . was —” “Weird?” he said. “No,” she said, shaking her head and its all-too-lovely new contoured hair. “No, not weird. Noble.” “Noble?” he said. “You thought it was noble?” He wondered briefly where she had been with this talk of nobility when they were hooting at him from the hallway and bloodying that skinned toupee on his desk — though he said nothing about that and took the compliment with pleasure. Her good opinion was well worth three-nineteen a month — though that wasn’t why he had done it. “So to stick up for the Indians,” she said, “and to see that those bastards don’t win, and to help you do whatever it is you think you need to do with Old Brizz’s totem pole, you tell me the difference and I’ll write you a check.” There was a fourth reason, too, of course, which was that it might help Marcia improve her karma, but she left that off the litany.

  “Marcia,” he said, “that won’t be necessary.”

  “I know it’s not necessary,” she said. “I want to do it.”

  “I’m afraid I’ve already gotten rid of it,” he said.

  The appraiser who had come out to the U-Stor-It had informed Benny not only of the totem pole’s market value but also a thing or two of its origins. He believed it to be the work of a tribe whose descendants were still living in southeastern Arizona. Their onetime woodworking skills were unsurpassed, producing some of the most virtuosic and dazzling Indian art in the world — that is, until the number of tribesmen declined and survival became more difficult and their craftsmanship suffered. That morning, Benny had received a call from the appraiser, who had sent snapshots of the totem pole taken at the storage facility to members of the tribe in Arizona. He informed Benny that the chief of the tribe had confirmed with near-absolute certainty that the pole was theirs. “And there are like . . . ten of these Indians left in the world,” said Benny. “I’m exaggerating, but just barely. And they can’t make these things anymore — not like how they used to. Which explains the hefty price tag. It’s irreplaceable.” “How on earth,” said Marcia, “did Brizz ever get ahold of it?” “The sixty-thousand-dollar question,” replied Benny. “Or why didn’t he sell it when he needed the money? I have no idea — and I have no idea why he gave it to me and not somebody else. So not knowing why, I hung on to it. But now, I don’t see I have much of a choice but to give it back to them, knowing how few of them there are left.” “Maybe that’s why he gave it to you, Benny — because he knew you’d find the right guys to give it to.” “Maybe,” said Benny. “But one thing I told those Indians, I’m not paying the shipping and handling. That’s up to you guys.” “You spoke to them?” “On the phone,” he said. “By the way, I meant to tell you. I like your new haircut.”

  Immediately she turned away from him and her hand rose up to greet her hair in a tentative and self-conscious manner, as if she were trying to hide it from him. “Don’t talk about my hair right now,” she said.

  “Why not?”

  “Because it’s stupid. We’re talking about something else.”

  “Don’t you like it?” he asked.

  She turned to the opposite wall, as if expecting a mirror there, something reflective to see herself in. “I don’t know,” she said. “Let’s not talk about it.”

  “I think it’s a great update,” he said.

  She turned back to him. “Update?” she said. “What the hell does that mean?”

  “No, I just meant —”

  “That’s a pretty shitty thing to
say,” she said.

  “No —”

  “I have no idea what the hell it means,” she said, “but it sounds pretty shitty.”

  “No, I was just saying I liked it.”

  “Update,” she said. “You don’t say ‘update,’ Benny. That’s the wrong word.”

  No! NO! He had tried to say it just right! He had considered other options, alternative phrases, but he thought what he had settled on was perfect. He had rehearsed it over and over again, practicing a nonchalance in his voice, then waited for the exact right moment — and still he flubbed it! He probably should have run it by a copywriter.

  Even with the best of intentions, it was impossible not to offend one another. We fretted over the many insignificant exchanges we found ourselves in from day to day. We weren’t thinking, words just flew from our mouths — unfettered, un-thought-out — and next we knew, we had offended someone with an offhand and innocent remark. We might have implied someone was fat, or intellectually simple, or hideously ugly. Most of the time we probably felt it was true. We worked with some fat, simple people, and the hideously ugly walked among us as well. But by god we wanted to keep quiet about it. If in large part we were concerned only with making it through another day without getting laid off, there was a smaller part just hoping to leave for the night without contributing to someone’s lifetime of hurt. And then there were those, like Marcia, who had the ability to turn even a compliment into an insult, bringing us (Benny especially) to our knees so that the only way to win was to remain silent, absolutely silent — unless, of course, the opportunity presented itself to bloody a scalp and leave it on Benny’s desk.