Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

“It’s like seeing African kids starve on the TV, Karen. Maybe we can get Sally Struthers involved.”

“Joe,” said Karen.

“Larry,” said Joe.

“I’m just saying, Joe,” said Larry.

We hated Karen Woo. We hated hating Karen Woo because we feared we might be racists. The white guys especially. But it wasn’t just the white guys. Benny, who was Jewish, and Hank, who was black, hated Karen too. Maybe we hated Karen not because she was Korean but because she was a woman with strong opinions in a male-dominated world. But it wasn’t just the men; Marcia couldn’t stand her and she was a woman. And Marcia loved Donald Sato, so she couldn’t be a racist. Donald wasn’t Korean but he was Asian of some kind, and everybody liked him as much as Marcia did even though he didn’t say a whole lot. One time, Donald did say, as he turned away from his computer for a brief moment, toward a group of four or five of us, “My grandpa has this weird collection of Chinese ears.” We had been discussing something, it wasn’t like it just came out of nowhere. But at the same time, it wasn’t unusual for an entire day to go by where Donald said only, “Uh, maybe,” like four or five times, half of them without even directing his attention away from his computer, and then five o’clock hit and no more Donald. Now he’s telling us about his grandpa’s — “What do you mean, a collection of ears?” asked Benny. “Are you talking real ears, like real ears?” “Ears from the heads of Chinese people, yes,” Donald assented, having turned back to his computer screen. “A whole sack of them.” The mystery deepened. “A sack? What kind of a sack?” Sam Ludd, who smoked a lot of pot and frequently smelled like Funyuns, turned to Benny to communicate something to him in the secret language of laughter. “But seriously,” Benny persisted, pivoting on the window ledge to look at Donald straight on, “what the fuck are you talking about, Don?” “And what would constitute a nonweird collection of Chinese ears?” asked Sam, who lasted about two and a half seconds after layoffs began. “They’re from the war,” Don told the screen. “He doesn’t like to talk about it.” “But you’ve seen it?” said Benny. “There’s more than just one,” said Don. “No, the sack, the sack,” said Benny. Don looked at him and nodded. “Yeah.” “Well did he, like, cut them off himself? did he buy them? were they given to him as a gift? Don, talk to me.” “I don’t really know much more. I know he was in the war. Maybe he cut them off, I don’t know. That’s not something you can really ask your grandpa.” “Okay, but. .” Benny was flustered, “you shouldn’t bring it up then, man, if you don’t have more information.” “I think you’re wrong, Don,” said Sam. “I think you can ask a grandpa if he cut the ears off Chinese people.” “What did they look like?” asked Benny. “Can you tell me that?” Don told the screen he didn’t really know what they looked like. They looked like ears. Dead old shriveled ears. And the sack was just a felt thing with a drawstring. Benny nodded and bit his cheek.

Anyway, Karen Woo. Did we dislike her because we were racists, because we were misogynists, because her “initiative” rankled and her ambition was so bald, because she wore her senior title like a flamboyant ring, or because she was who she was and we were forced by fate to be around her all the time? Our diversity pretty much guaranteed it was a combination of all of the above.

“I think the problem I’m having with this project, Joe,” said Benny, astraddle a sofa arm, “is knowing the fundamental approach we should be taking here. Is this just a benign reminder that breast cancer research needs money, or do we want to kick some ass à la Karen’s dead relatives there and get people to send checks overnight?”

“Maybe somewhere in between,” Joe answered, after a moment’s thought. “That’s not to rule these out, Karen. I like them. Let’s just have some of us go in one direction and the rest of us go in the other.”

We discussed print dates, who the project services people would be, and then we broke into teams. Joe was the first to stand. Just before leaving he announced that we would not be showing finished concepts to Lynn; we would be showing them to him.

We all wanted to know how come. Joe replied that it was because Lynn would be out of the office for the rest of the week.

“The rest of the week?” said Benny. “Is she on vacation?”

“I don’t know,” said Joe.

But he did know. He knew just as we knew that she was in surgery that day and would be in recovery when the concepts were due — the difference being that he probably got his information straight from Lynn, whereas we had to get ours from other sources. We never disliked Joe more than when he had information that we had, too, which he then refused to tell us.

“CAN WE PLEASE STOP talking about Joe Pope for two minutes?” asked Amber Ludwig when Joe had left the couches after the double meeting. We had stuck around to discuss the fact that we knew what he didn’t think we knew and how annoying that was.

“What should we be talking about, Amber?” asked Larry. “Karen’s dead people?”

“They’re called Loved Ones, Larry.”

Amber was, we all knew, preoccupied by something that had come to light just last week, when Lynn Mason received a call from Tom Mota’s ex-wife informing her that Tom had apparently dropped out of sight.

Barbara, the ex-wife, had received some curious communications — voice mails, e-mails, handwritten letters — full of quotations from various sources: the Bible, Emerson, Karl Marx, The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm, but also, disconcertingly, The Anarchist’s Philosophy, a McLenox publication. Amber looked on the McLenox website and discovered they brought out such titles as Hiding Places Both Underwater and Underground and How to Make a Fake Birth Certificate on Your Home Computer.

Tom’s messages to his wife were oddly lucid arguments for correcting the awful predicament of an individual who found himself stuck in a rut, with many allusions to love, compassion, tenderness, humility, and honesty, along with some not-so-lucid references to doing something that would “shock the world,” as he put it, that would make his name go down in history. “‘All history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons,’” quoted Tom in an e-mail that had, by three o’clock the previous Friday afternoon, been forwarded to everyone in the office. “Barbara,” it concluded, “you laugh, but I intend to be one of those persons.”

Barbara called Lynn to find out if anyone else had heard from Tom. “And I guess to sort of warn you,” Barbara added. “I hate to put it that way, because I never used to think of him like that. But then he shows up at the house with a baseball bat and destroys everything in sight, which causes you to think, maybe I never really knew this person. I didn’t know him then and I don’t know what he’s capable of now, and I don’t really want to stick around to find out.”

“I can’t say I blame you,” Lynn replied.

“So I’m calling just to say that I’ve been trying to get in touch with him, just to make sure. . you know. But. . and I don’t want you to think he’s going to do anything. . unexpected. I just thought I should let you know I can’t find him.”

“I appreciate the call,” said Lynn.

She got off the phone and called Mike Boroshansky, the South Side Pole in charge of building security. Mike let everyone on security detail know about the possible situation. They taped a picture of Tom to the security desk in the lobby, and during the day, Benny’s friend Roland compared it with visitors coming in through the revolving doors, and at night, the other security guard did the same.