Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

“That was a disgusting display of power,” said Karen Woo.

We told Jim he had to leave if he was the one attracting Joe Pope’s attention. If he was the reason Joe was on the move in our direction, Jim had to go.

“But this is my cubicle,” said Jim.

“Maybe he was just trying to be friendly,” Genevieve Latko-Devine suggested. Genevieve had blond hair, cobalt eyes, and a tall, gelid grace. Even the women admitted her superior beauty. For Christmas one year, she was given as a gag gift a set of twisted redneck teeth, which she was instructed to wear year-round in an effort to even us all out. But when she put them on, we discovered — the men among us, that is — a desire for rotted teeth we never knew we had. We told Benny to go on with his story.

He picked up where he’d left off. Carl and his wife sat in silence a long time after hanging up their respective cell phones. Finally Marilynn, with tender, firm insistence, turned to him and said, “You need help, Carl.”

Shaking his head resolutely, Carl replied, “I don’t need help.”

“You need medical attention,” said his wife, “and you won’t admit it, and you’re hurting our marriage because of it.”

“I’m not depressed,” said Carl.

“You are a textbook case of depression,” Marilynn persisted, “and you need medication so badly —”

“How would you know?” he asked, cutting her short. He had turned at last to stare at her with an outraged and lonely expression. “You aren’t a psychiatrist, Marilynn, are you? You can’t know every angle of medicine — can you, can you possibly?”

“Cancer patients, Carl,” she said, exasperation rising in her tone, “are not the happiest people, believe it or not. I recommend antidepressants for many, many of my patients. I know a depressed person when I see one, I know the symptoms, I know the damage it can do to families, to. .”

He let Marilynn fade out. Just then, crossing the street on her way to work, was Janine Gorjanc.

Janine looked to Carl perfectly motherlike. Unpretty but not ugly. Hippy but not fat. Puffy about the face but with a youthful cuteness buried somewhere in there that might have caused someone to be crazy about taking her to the high school prom. A child, thought Carl, is not the only result of childbirth. A mother, too, is born. You see them every day — nondescript women with a bulge just above the groin, slightly double-chinned. Perpetually forty. Someone’s mother, you think. There is a child somewhere who has made this woman into a mother, and for the sake of the child she has altered her appearance to better play the part. Insulated from her as he was by the car, he could look without the urge to turn and flee, and it was the first time he had seen her in months, maybe years. “Carl?” Marilynn was saying. “Carl??”

“Marilynn,” he said. “Do you see that woman? That woman there, in the wrinkled blouse. She looks like a mother, doesn’t she?” Marilynn followed his gaze. “That’s Janine Gorjanc,” he said. “That’s the woman, I’ve told you about her,” he said. “Her daughter was killed. You remember? She was abducted. I told you about her. I went to the funeral?”

“I remember,” she said.

“She stinks,” he said.

“She stinks?”

“She emits some kind of smell, I don’t know what it is. It’s not every day. But some days, I think she just lets herself go. She doesn’t shower or something.” He watched her enter the building. Marilynn was looking at her husband, not at Janine. She was listening, trying to understand. “Marilynn,” he said, “I hate the woman for how she smells.”

“Have you ever tried talking to her about it?” she asked.

“But I hate myself even more,” he continued, unbuttoning his oxford, “for hating her. Can you even imagine what she’s been through?”

“Carl,” Marilynn said, “what are you doing?”

“The abduction,” he continued obliviously, “then the waiting, the terrible waiting.”

“ What are you doing?” she cried.

“Then finding the body. Imagine finding the body, Marilynn.”

He was naked to his waist by then. He had removed the oxford and flung his undershirt over his head. “I don’t want to go into work today,” he announced, turning to his wife. He was breathing up and down with his paunch exposed, a hair-brushed hillock of pale, glowing belly. When Benny recounted all this to us, he said Carl had told him later he hoped Lynn Mason would walk by right then and see that unattractive feature and walk him Spanish for the sake of aesthetics. “Put your clothes on!” cried Marilynn.

“I don’t want to be the person that hates Janine Gorjanc,” he said. “If I go inside I will be that person because I will smell her. I don’t want to have to smell her. If I smell her I will hate her and I don’t want to be that person. You have to take me home.”

“Have you gone completely out of your mind?” she asked as she watched him yank off his tennis shoes, unzip his jeans and pull them down to his ankles.

He sat up in the front seat in nothing but his underwear. “I’m wearied,” he said, turning to her. “That’s what it is, Marilynn. I’m really very wearied. If you make me go inside, I’m going inside like this.”

“That,” she bellowed, “no —” She shook her head and laughed. “That is no threat to me, Carl.”

“I’m so wearied,” he repeated.

“Carl, put your clothes on,” she said, “and go inside, and by this afternoon, I will have made you an appointment to see a very good psychiatrist.”

“I’m not putting my clothes on until you take me home,” he said.

“Carl,” she cried, “I have to be in surgery in ten minutes! I can’t take you home!”

“Don’t make me get out,” he said. “Please don’t make me get out, Marilynn.”

“Oh, Jim, just one more thing —”

We looked up and saw Joe Pope just as he was peeking his head over Jim Jackers’ cube wall a second time. Benny shut up and Jim swirled around and Amber Ludwig started in fright and Marcia Dwyer took the opportunity to grab her Diet Coke and leave, while the few of us who stuck around listened to Joe inform Jim that he had just come back from Lynn Mason’s office. They had been discussing the mock-ups due out later that day, and they had thrown around some ideas about making changes to this and making changes to that, and when we heard that, one by one we got up and left because we knew what Joe Pope’s changes were all about — more work. It was always more work with that guy. The last of us overheard Joe saying, “I’m sorry to interrupt, Jim — is it an okay time?” and Jim replied, “Sure, sure, Joe, it’s a fine time. Come in and have a seat.”

Later that day it spread like wildfire. Joe Pope had received his second promotion.

He was our new Roger Highnote. He had a unique fashion sense that didn’t exactly fall in line with seasonal approbation and we wondered where he’d picked it up. What magazines was he reading? The following year we were all wearing similarly prestressed denims but by that point it hardly mattered. For an entire year he looked like an idiot. “Good-looking?” we said to Genevieve. “Joe Pope?” No, he was seriously one inch too short. He made our lives a living hell. And he was very awkward. But how to explain it? For it wasn’t the same awkwardness we felt with Jim Jackers. In the hallways Jim greeted everyone by saying, “What up, dawg?” a question he had the temerity to ask even Lynn Mason when passing her by. That was confused behavior. We all went to a party once, and Jim carried around his own box of wine. He also referred openly to his bowels as “Mr. B.” “Excuse me,” he would say, before departing for the restroom. “But Mr. B’s making it happen.”