Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

“I thought it was like a, you know,” said Karen, “something unhealthy.”

“But what is it?”

“Sounds terrible, whatever it is,” said Jim.

“It’s probably not something you want in your body,” said Karen, “from the sound of it. Lastive acid. Sounds like it would stay with you longer than the formaldehyde.”

Meanwhile Lynn had gone searching through the input document provided by the accounts people. “I don’t see anything about ‘lastive acid’ in here,” she said, gazing at Karen.

“No, I came up with it,” said Karen.

Lynn’s face, which had aged into the early years of her forties with little modification of her cool detached beauty, was architecturally designed for such outrageous confessions. Her high cheekbones kept her eyes buttressed from the collapse of a disbelieving brow, her nearly crow’s-feet-free eyes never gave way to an off-putting squint, and her mouth, flanked on both sides by a single parenthesis of a gently etched laugh line, remained in perfect equipoise when presented with revelations that would have provoked in lesser professionals fallen jaws of slackened disgust or a steady stream of rebuke. She simply gazed across the desk at Karen and asked soberly, “You just made it up?”

“Well, not the part about there being zero grams.”

“Karen,” she said — and Jim told us later that the only show of irritation she allowed herself was to pull her chair closer to her desk and to place two fingers at her left temple.

“I was trying to think out of the box,” explained Karen.

“I. . myself, Lynn, I didn’t know. .” Jim stammered.

Lynn shifted her focus briefly to address him. “Jim, will you excuse us for a minute, please?”

It was this sort of thing that showed us how Lynn had developed over the years a moral principle that guided her in the practice of advertising, which she abided by with strict authority. We respected her for it and wanted to live up to those high standards. Whenever we did something thoughtless or dull, or when we didn’t perform at the level we had hoped to on one project or another, we would, in our own individual ways, try to hint to her that we were just as disappointed in ourselves as she was while implying that we were making every effort to improve. Failing, perhaps, to pick up on these subtle apologies — not wanting to advertise our shortcomings, we rarely came right out and admitted them — she usually didn’t respond, but when she did, her communiqués were brief, inconclusive, and often bewildering. She might leave us a voice mail that said, “Forget about it,” or drop an e-mail that said only, “Don’t worry so much — Lynn.” We spent hours trying to decode these simple messages. We went into other people’s offices, demanded they stop what they were doing, and conscripted them into the ceaseless political labors of puzzling out her woefully inadequate responses to our pleas for reassurance. “Don’t worry so much? ” we asked each other. “Why not at all? ” We wanted to ask her directly but no one dared, except Jim Jackers, whose insatiable demand for confirmation that he wasn’t a hopelessly unreformed boob sent him into Lynn’s office with the regularity of therapist appointments. Where she found the time, and why she had a soft spot for Jim, were mysteries on the order of her gnomic e-mails, and someone’s absurd suggestion that she might be just as receptive to any of the rest of us if we only had the nerve to knock at her door was dismissed as sadly out of touch.

So she wasn’t going to say anything to us about her diagnosis. We were disturbed and upset and at a bit of a loss. We wanted her to open up, if only for ten minutes. What were we here for if not, on occasion, that? Just work? We hoped not. Yet we got nothing. Not even for the sake of a better ad. We still had no official word that she would be out of the office while recuperating from surgery. Officially, she’d be in all week, and when the time came, we’d be expected to show her ad concepts for what she had sold to us as a pain-in-the-ass fund-raiser she had been pestered into doing against her will.

MORNINGS — BENNY’S CHALLENGE — WHO IS JOE POPE? — CARL GARBEDIAN — THE FIRST INTERRUPTION — KAREN WOO WEIGHS IN — TAKE ME HOME — THE SECOND INTERRUPTION — THE JOE POPE DOLL — A BETTER STORY THAN THIS ONE — BENNY UPLOADS — BRIZZ’S BEQUEST TO BENNY — WALKING BLITHELY PAST BRIZZ — TOM’S GIFT TO CARL–CARL’S CONFESSION — TOM’S “ANGER” — GOD IN THE WORKPLACE — COLD SORE GUY — THE WRITING ON THE WALL

THE BEST TIME WAS always early in the morning. Mornings had going for them the quiet in the hallways, the lights not yet at full capacity, and a forestalled sense of urgency. It was the worst time, too, because of the anticipation of the end of those things.

We liked to gather in Benny’s office. He came back with a full mug and said, “So yesterday —”

We could hardly look at him. “What?” he said. We told him he had something — “Where?” It was on his lip. He went searching. It was on the other side. We hoped to god he would find it soon. Finally he thumbed it off and looked at it. “Cream cheese,” he said. There were bagels? “In the kitchen,” he replied. Benny’s story would have to wait for those of us wanting bagels. Those of us more interested in his story stuck around. “All right, so yesterday,” he resumed, “I wanted to see if I could go the entire day without touching my mouse or my keyboard.” He settled himself with constrained gusto into his chair, careful not to spill. “The whole day without touching my mouse or my keyboard — impossible, right? I mean, how many times a day do we use those two things? If you’re like me and you’re putting an ad together, you’re clicking or keying maybe ten thousand times a day. Twenty thousand. I don’t even know, I never counted. The point is, a lot of times. You start to think your whole life is slowly clicking away. So I decided yesterday, what if I could go the whole day? What do I have to do? I have to click and open, click and drag, click and color, click and align, click and resize, click and drop-shadow —”

He went on and on, using his chubby fingers to count off.

“Then there’s keyboard functions, right? Control-x, control-c, control-v, control-f —”

We told him to get on with it. We liked wasting time, but almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on.

“So listen to how I did it,” said Benny, his dough face smiling wryly.

“You did no work all day long,” said Marcia.

“Not true,” Benny objected, suddenly uncharacteristically solemn. “I had things to give Joe, I had deadlines. I had to use my mouse and my keyboard yesterday. So listen to how I did it.”

So Benny told us the story of how he went the entire day without clicking by teaching Roland how to use Photoshop. Roland said he didn’t think he could learn Photoshop, he had never even been to college. But Benny told him that was crazy talk. What with the right instructor, it wouldn’t take more than a couple hours. Roland worked for security. He stood watch at the front desk in the downstairs lobby, or else he trolled the perimeter of the building in his security guard’s generic navy suit coat. All day long he sat at his lonely lobby post or he went back and forth around the building on his aching feet. To sit in an office with Benny would be a pleasure. The only stipulation he gave Benny was that if he got chirped on the Motorola by Mike Boroshansky, chief of security, he’d probably have to go. We expected so little from security in those days.

“So what I want to know,” Benny had said to him, “is which one of these photos do you think works best for this ad?” Roland looked at Benny’s screen and said, “I don’t know. That one?” and Benny said, “Come on, Roland, man — you have over a thousand photos to choose from up there, and you’ve looked at a total of six. Scroll down, man! Click through.” So Roland ended up clicking through about an hour’s worth of stock photos while Benny sat off to the side mouse-free. It was a pleasure for Roland — good company and a cushioned seat. “No, not that one,” Benny kept saying. “You don’t have much of an artistic intuition, Roland, no offense.” “Hey, Benny,” Roland said defensively, “I didn’t go to school for this or anything, if you don’t mind.” But still he clicked to the next page, and scrolled down, and clicked to the next page and scrolled down. Whenever Roland came across a photo Benny liked, Benny wrote down its reference number on a Post-it. When he had enough reference numbers, he kicked Roland out of his office and called the rep from the stock house and they messengered over the thumbnails for him to choose from. That’s when he went to lunch. Then, when he got back from the Potbelly and it was time to start putting the ad together, he picked up the phone and called down to security and asked for Roland.