They took the stairs quickly. They said nothing, but it was still good to be the one accompanying her from the building. He was glad it was him and not somebody else, and the only thing that could have improved matters was if he had had the nerve to take her by the hand. But that was the same nerve he needed to admit his crush, a nerve he didn’t seem to possess. Nerve, he thought — and the next thing he knew, he was seized with a thought as inappropriate as confessing his love: when all was said and done, would she think he was a coward for having fled with her down the stairs, when what he should have done was stay with Roland and tell the others to evacuate? He wanted nothing more right then than to share the experience of fleeing the building with Marcia. What couple could say they had done that together? But was it more important than letting her know that he wasn’t a coward? He regretted his next thought even more: wasn’t it in fact more important not to be a coward than to flee the building? Without considering his duty or the question of his courage, he had followed Roland’s instructions from Mike Boroshansky and hurried out the heavy gray door. Was it the right thing to have done? To leave everyone’s fate in the hands of Roland — that was dicey business. Suddenly the final, most inappropriate thought of all came to him, and he forgot Marcia entirely. Grabbing hold of the rail to halt his momentum, he stopped abruptly in the middle of a flight of stairs. Marcia made it to the bottom before turning back, and on the landing between the forty-eighth and forty-seventh floors, she looked up at him and saw that he had stopped, and the expression on his face was full of reticence and uncertainty. “What did you forget?” she asked. He just stood there, not looking at her, but not not looking at her, either, staring indeterminately with eyes glassy and faraway. He focused finally just as the fleeing footsteps of others began to descend upon them.
“Jim,” he said.
LARRY HAD FINALLY MANAGED to coax Amber into the server closet on sixty, which felt more like a walk-in refrigerator. The small room was bright, well insulated, and maintained at a steady temperature so the elaborate machines didn’t overheat. Larry and Amber went to the back and hid behind the black metal shelving that supported the hardware, while Larry tried to calm her hyperventilating tears by saying, “Shh.” “Shh,” he kept saying, as she clung to him in their contorted, half-fallen position in the far corner behind the massive wire coils spilling from the well-spaced servers humming like fans on their shelves. “Shh,” he said, as she buried her face into his chest and wept as soundlessly as she possibly could, heaving in his arms with her great waves of irrepressible fear, until his T-shirt had soaked up so many of her tears that he felt them cooling on his skin in the intemperate air. “Shh,” he said, even as a malignant, hopeful thought crept over him, as sinister and troll-like as an evil wish in a fairy tale doomed to end badly: rather than killing them, maybe Tom Mota was actually saving Larry’s life by traumatizing Amber so thoroughly that she would have a miscarriage. Wouldn’t that be a great turn of events. Because if the trauma wasn’t sufficient to rid them of the problem at hand, and if she fell on the wrong divide of the debate, which seemed more and more likely as the days progressed — to put it plainly, if that baby didn’t disappear, Larry Novotny might as well throw open the door and holler at Tom wherever he may be to please come spray them with automatic fire because his life was over. Over. His wife had given birth to a child herself just a little over a year ago, and their marriage was too fragile, too young, too troubled already to withstand the revelation of an infidelity, even a little workday one that had meant nothing, Susanna, swear to god it meant nothing. “Shh,” he kept saying, as he grew more and more angry with Amber and her crying. She was always concentrating on crises happening elsewhere, while paying little attention to the one growing and dividing, dividing and growing within her very body, the body of the woman he had once desperately desired but now had come to mildly hate, the woman he held in his arms as she wept and trembled like a child but as only an adult can tremble, fully aware of the possibilities of violence and death. “Shh,” he said, when what he wanted to say was, “Listen, I really need you to tell me once and for all that you’re having this abortion.” Because if she wanted to avoid carnage and annihilation, if she cared a whit about limiting the destruction, she would do something about those cells activating and organs maturing right there inside of her — otherwise his marriage was in bloody fucking tatters. “Shh,” he said, and this time he added, “Amber, shh. Why are you so hysterical?” She lifted her head off his chest and looked at him. The raw rims of her nose were bright red and her pale cheeks were wet and puffy. “Because I’m scared,” she whispered breathlessly between sobs. “But we don’t even know that he’s out there.” “I’m not scared for me,” she said. “Can we please stop talking?” But he didn’t want to stop talking. “Who are you scared for?” he asked, with a creeping concern. “Me?” he suggested. “Are you scared for me?” She put her head back on his chest and resumed trembling. “Lynn Mason?” he asked. She wouldn’t reply. He went down the list. Was it Marcia? Benny? Joe Pope? How could any of them be the cause of such emotion?
And then the scales fell from his eyes. The day she had decided to keep the baby had come and gone and he had not known it. Hers were the tears of a mother, her fear a mother’s fear.
TOM WALKED INTO CARL GARBEDIAN’S OFFICE without so much as a knock and sat down across from him. He stared at Carl without saying a word, relishing with a smug smile the confused expression on Carl’s face at the sudden sight of a clown, resolving to say nothing until he spoke. Carl looked, and then looked closer. “Tom?” he said.
“You guessed it,” said Tom.
Carl leaned back warily in his chair and reconnoitered the full scope of Tom’s appearance with a skeptical and hesitant eye. “Tom, why are you dressed like that?” he asked with a quiet temerity.
“Carl, of all people, I would think that you would see the humor in this,” Tom said. “Why aren’t you laughing? Why aren’t you shitting your pants with laughter right now?”
If Carl was tempted right then to shit his pants, the cause was probably not laughter.
“Don’t you think this is funny?” asked Tom. “I come back here dressed as a clown! It’s my homecoming, and look at me! I would think you would think this was funny, Carl.”
Carl managed to make something like a smile and agreed with Tom that it was funny. “It’s just the meds,” he added, by way of explaining the delayed hilarity. “They tend to even me out.”
Tom looked away in perfect disappointment. He turned back and asked, with a petulant and exasperated tone, “Doesn’t anybody have a sense of humor around here?” He was offended once again by our failures of character. “‘TOM, THAT YOU, TOM? YOU COME TO BLOW US ALL AWAY IN A CLOWN OUTFIT, TOM?’ Is that all I get from you guys? Why do you see me dressed like this and take it so goddamn seriously?”
“Because clowns are kind of scary, I guess,” Carl ventured. “To me, at least. And especially when you don’t know why somebody would be dressed up like one.”
“Well, maybe I got me a job as a clown,” said Tom, widening his eyes so their whites really popped amid all that red makeup. “Ever think of that?”
“Is it true?” asked Carl hopefully.
He wanted to call his wife. From the moment the clown came in and sat down Carl knew something was wrong and wanted the opportunity to speak to Marilynn one last time. She was so good. She had the hardest job. She had loved him very much.
Tom situated his backpack on the chair next to him and leaned forward, interlocking his fingers and placing his folded hands on the edge of Carl’s desk. “Let me ask you a serious question, Carl, and you be honest with me, okay? You tell me the truth. You fucks thought I was coming back here for target practice, didn’t you? Honestly — everybody was predicting it, weren’t they?”
Weirded-out, and reluctant to say just about anything, Carl didn’t know the prudent answer.
“Just answer the question, Carl. It’s a simple question.”
“I knew it!” cried Tom, jolting out of his chair and looming over Carl’s desk. “I fucking knew it!” He was pointing at Carl as if Carl were the spokesman for all the fucks in the world.
“You didn’t let me finish,” said Carl.
“You fucks actually thought I was coming back here to blow people to bits,” said Tom, shaking his orange curls in grave, exaggerated disappointment and violently tapping Carl’s desk three times. “Unbelievable.”
“Why are you back here, Tom — isn’t that a fair question? And why the clown outfit?”
Tom sat back down again and struck a less aggressive perch on his seat. Carl was grateful for it. Since walking in, Tom seemed to be right up in his face. “I’ll tell you why I’m back here,” he said. “I came to ask Joe Pope to lunch, that’s why. That’s right — Joe. But then this other idea came to me, and it sort of took on a life of its own. So now I’m dressed like a clown. Why? I’ll tell you why I’m dressed like a clown,” he said, reaching over and unzipping his backpack, from which he removed his gun.
Carl wheeled back hastily, all the way to the credenza, and hoisted his clammy palms in the air. “Hey, Tom,” he said, just as tears sprang instinctively to his eyes.
He wanted so badly to talk to his wife. He was reminded of that distant, phantasmagoric episode in his life when he had stood at the pawn shop fingering a Luger. He recalled all the pills he had hoarded, and the time he sat in the garage with the key in the ignition, towels plugging every gap where the exhaust might escape, so that once he had the nerve to turn over the engine, it would be done. Who was that person? Not him, not any longer. He wanted to live! He wanted to landscape! He wanted more than anything just to call his wife.
“Oh, put your hands down, Carl,” said Tom. “I’m not going to shoot you, you fuck.”
“I thought you wanted to start a landscaping company,” said Carl. “I’ve been thinking about it all morning. The sun on my neck, remember? You and me — I could come up with some money, I love the idea. Why would you want to do something stupid?” He clattered unthinkingly, hoping to say the right thing.
“Listen to me, Carl,” said Tom. “Carl, shut up! Listen to me. I’m dressed like a clown because every single one of you fucks in this office at one time or another thought that Tom Mota was nothing but a clown, am I right? Be honest with me, Carl. Am I right?”
“To be honest with you, Tom, it’s hard to be honest with you when you’ve got a gun pointed at me.”
“I’m not going to shoot you, Carl! Just be honest. Everybody thought I was a clown, didn’t they?”
“I think,” Carl began, trying to breathe, to contain his fear, to gauge what action he might need to take, “I think everyone knew you were going through a tough time, Tom . . . and that you probably . . . you weren’t behaving like your normal self. I think that’s —”
“In other words,” said Tom, “a clown.”
“I never once heard anyone use that particular expression,” replied Carl, who still had his hands up.
“Carl, will you relax, please, Jesus. It’s not a real gun. Doesn’t anybody know the difference? Here, watch —”
Tom pointed the gun at one corner of the office and pulled the trigger. Splat! went the pellet, and a dousing of red paint coated the corner walls in a comic-book-like blot. Carl looked in wild-eyed astonishment, yet still refused to put his hands down. His shirt was dusted with red blowback from the pellet. He looked back at Tom.
“Are you fucking crazy?” he asked.
“No, I’m a clown,” said Tom. “And you know what clowns do, don’t you, Carl?”
“No, you fucking maniac!”
“Careful, Carl,” said Tom, motioning with the gun to the backpack in the seat beside him. “I might have a real one in there.”
“What do clowns do?” asked Carl, a little more mildly.
Tom warped his mouth into a severe hangdog frown and raised his brows to complete a picture of melancholy. “We’re such sad creatures at heart, us clowns,” said Tom. “Down-and-out and full of woe. So to make ourselves feel better —” Tom’s face blossomed into a smile like a flower drawn from his sleeve — “we pull pranks!”
JOE NEEDED A NICKEL. He could have sworn that when he left his office he had had every coin he needed to get a pop from the machine but he was shy a nickel and had to return. He took it from the mug where he kept spare change and left the office again, spying Benny and Marcia and Amber and Larry in the hallway engaged in some new drama, not exactly working on winning the new business. The elevator doors had yet to close again and he raced to catch them. If he had lingered in the hall to speculate why they were all in hysterics, they would have silently accused him of scolding them from afar, and that was a tired accusation — though on this occasion it would have been correct. Because Jesus Christ, did they not understand? We had to win the new business!
He returned to the cafeteria on fifty-nine to buy his pop and was about to leave when he saw Lynn sitting in the far back at one of the round tables under the bright and appalling fluorescence. “What are you doing down here?” he asked, approaching her. She was alone and, despite all the noise he had made, the dropping coins and the falling can, she seemed to be taking notice of him for the first time.
She watched him draw closer, two fingers at her temple.
He set the pop on the table. She kicked out a chair for him. He sat down and opened the pop and the thing hissed and spit and he hunched over to slurp up the fizzing soda before it spilled over.
They sat in silence. Then she spoke to him again of things they had gone over yesterday after Genevieve had left the office — which partner would oversee the effort to secure the new business, and the ways in which he, Joe, would need to step up and assume more responsibility.
“Can I ask you a question?” he said.
“Of course.”
“Why did you lie about it to Genevieve yesterday, and then tell me the truth after she left?”
She removed her two fingers from her temple and turned them into a kind of shrug and then returned them to her temple. “I just don’t want them to know about it until the last possible second,” she replied. “I want to be in the hospital under anesthesia before they start talking.”
He nodded. “Understandable.”
“And I know I can trust you to keep it to yourself.”
They sat in silence, the only sound the refrigerated hum from the vending machines in the distance.
“Not that I believe I’ll be able to escape it,” she said. “I’ll be way, way under and their voices will probably still penetrate.”
He smiled. “Probably,” he said.
“But until they carry me kicking and screaming toward the operating room in one of those terrible green gowns, I’d prefer to keep them in the dark. Or at the very least, second-guessing.”
She sat up and placed her feet back inside her heels. She glanced over at him as she did so. “It’s very quick,” she said, “from what they tell me. A day or two and they have you out of there.”
“Is it next door?” he asked.
“Yes. Carl’s wife, actually.”
“No kidding.”
“She scares me.”
“Is that why you missed your first appointment?”
She nodded.
“What’s changed?”
“I have a friend,” she said. “He isn’t letting me get away with it this time.”
“You have a friend,” he said. He smiled.
“Is that so hard to believe?”
“No.”
“It isn’t a boyfriend,” she said.
“I’m happy to hear you have a friend,” he said. There was silence, then he said, “Do you feel sick, Lynn?”
“Do I feel sick,” she said. She thought about it. “Yes. I feel sick.”
“Would you like me to be there during the operation? Or is there something I can do for you afterward?”
/> “You can win this new business,” she said.
“For you, I mean.”
“That would be for me,” she said. “This is it, Joe. This is my life.”
He was silent. “You’ve worked hard.”
“Yes,” she agreed. She had finished putting on her shoes and was now sitting perpendicular to the table with her hands holding her knees. “Too hard?”
There was a note of vulnerability in the question that he wasn’t expecting. But it was also clear, the way she was looking at him, that she wanted him to answer truthfully. “I don’t know,” he said. “What’s too hard?”
“All these other people have so much going on in their lives. Their nights, their weekends. Vacations, activities. I’ve never been able to do that.”
“Which is why you’re a partner.”
“But what am I missing? What have I missed?”
“Have you been happy doing it?”
“Happy?”
“Content. Has it been worthwhile? The work.”
“Yes,” she said. “Maybe. I suppose.”
“Then you may be better off than they are. Many of them would prefer not to be here, and yet this is where they spend most of their time. Percentagewise, maybe you’re the happiest.”
“Is that how you judge it?” she asked. “It’s a percentage game?”
“I don’t know.”
“But what do they know,” she asked, “that I don’t know? That if I knew, I would prefer not to be here, too?”
“Maybe nothing,” he said.
Then We Came to the End Page 30