Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

“I would love that,” said Tom.

So Benny gave Tom his polo, but Tom didn’t use it to switch off. Instead he wore Benny’s on top of his own. Two polos, one under the other. He approached the rest of us and solicited our polos as well. Jim Jackers grasped at any opportunity to ingratiate himself, and soon Tom was walking around in three polos.

“Lynn Mason’s starting to ask questions,” said Benny.

“Company pride,” said Tom.

“But three at a time?”

“You don’t know what’s in my heart,” said Tom, pounding his fist against the corporate logo three times. “Company pride.”

Some days green was on top, some days red, some days blue. Later we found out he was the one responsible for taping the sunshine roll to the back of Joe’s bookshelf. He was responsible for many things, including changing everyone’s radio stations, making pornographic screensavers, and leaving his seed on the floor of the men’s rooms on sixty and sixty-one. We knew he was responsible because once he was laid off, the radios went unmolested and the custodians no longer complained to management.

It was the era of take-ones and tchotchkes. The world was flush with Internet cash and we got our fair share of it. It was our position that logo design was every bit as important as product performance and distribution systems. “Wicked cool” were the words we used to describe our logo designs. “Bush league” were the words we used to describe the logo designs of other agencies — unless it was a really well-designed logo, in which case we bowed down before it, much like the ancient Mayans did their pagan gods.

We, too, thought it would never end.

LAYOFFS — TOM’S FINAL HOUR — JANINE GORJANC’S TRAGEDY — THE DOWNTURN — DRASTIC MEASURES — THE DEBATE OVER TOM — CREEPY PICTURES — THE STORY OF TOM MOTA’S CHAIR — WALKING SPANISH DOWN THE HALL — SANDERSON — TWO E-MAILS — THE STORY OF TOM MOTA’S CHAIR, PART II — THE PRO BONO FUND-RAISER ADS — LASTIVE ACID — LYNN MASON

LAYOFFS WERE UPON US. They had been rumored for months, but now it was official. If you were lucky, you could sue. If you were black, aged, female, Catholic, Jewish, gay, obese, or physically handicapped, at least you had grounds. At one point or another we have all been deposed. We plan on being deposed for Tom’s suit — we have no doubt there will be one. Though he has no grounds unless asshole has been added to the list. And that’s not just us talking. His ex-wife hates the guy. Restraining order. He can’t see his two young kids without supervision. She moved to Phoenix just to get away from him. We wouldn’t call him an asshole without having reached a very high consensus. Amber Ludwig objects to the specific designation because she has objected to profanity since becoming pregnant, but really there is no other word, and her objection is really just an abstention.

When Tom found out he was being let go, he wanted to throw his computer against his office window. Benny Shassburger was in there with him. Benny wasn’t like a great friend of Tom’s or anything but he was the guy who on occasion would have lunch with Tom and then report back to the rest of us. Word spread fast that Tom had been laid off and naturally Benny was the guy to go down there. He said Tom was pacing in his office like a man recently jailed. He said he could picture what Tom had looked like the night he went to the Naperville house with the aluminum bat and the authorities were called to restrain him. We had never heard that story before. Right there and then we had to stop Benny from telling us the story of Tom’s final hour so he could first tell us the story of the aluminum bat. Benny was shocked we had never heard that story; he was sure we had. No, we never had. “Get out of here,” he said. “You’ve heard that story.” No, we hadn’t. This was always how these conversations went. So Benny told us the story of Tom and the bat and then he told us the story of Tom’s final hour. Both were good stories and together they killed a good hour. Some of us loved killing an hour of the company’s time and others felt guilty for it afterward. But whatever your personal feelings on the matter, you still had to account for the hour, so you billed it to a client. By the end of the fiscal year, our clients had paid us a substantial amount of money to sit around and bullshit, expenses they then passed on to you, the consumer. It was the cost of doing business, but some of us feared it was an indication that the end was near, like the profligacy that preceded the downfall of the Roman Empire. There was so much money involved, and some of it even trickled down to us, a small amount that allowed us to live among the top one-percent of the wealthiest in the world. It was lasting fun, until layoffs came.

Tom wanted to throw his computer against the window, but only if he could guarantee it would break the glass and land on the street below. He was under his desk removing cords. “That’s sixty-two stories, Tom,” Benny said. And Tom agreed it was a bad idea if he couldn’t break the glass. If glass didn’t break they would say Tom Mota couldn’t even fuck up right — he didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of that, the bastards. We were the bastards he was referring to, in part. “But I don’t think it’ll break the glass,” said Benny. Tom stopped tooling around with his computer. “But I gotta do some thing,” he said, sitting back on his heels.

We lacked that kind of urgency. Our building was on the Magnificent Mile, in downtown Chicago, on a corner a few blocks from Lake Michigan. It had tones of art deco and two gilded revolving doors. We shuffled up the stairs toward the revolving doors slowly, afraid of what awaited us inside. In the beginning, we were let go in large numbers. Then, as the practice was refined, one by one, as they saw fit. We feared ending up on Lower Wacker Drive. Unemployed, we would be unpaid; unpaid, we’d be evicted from our homes; evicted, we would end up on Lower Wacker, sharing space with shopping carts and developing our own winterized and blackened feet. Instead of scrabbling for the addition of “Senior” to our current titles, we would search the alleyways for smokable butts. It was fun, imagining our eventual despair. It was also despairing. We didn’t really believe we would be honked at from the Lexuses of our former colleagues as they drove down Lower Wacker on their way home to the suburbs. We didn’t think we would be forced to wave at them from our lit oil drums. But that we might have to fill out an unemployment form over the Internet was not out of the question. That we might struggle to make rent or a mortgage payment was a real and frightening prospect.

Yet we were still alive, we had to remember that. The sun still shone in as we sat at our desks. Certain days it was enough just to look out at the clouds and at the tops of buildings. We were buoyed by it, momentarily. It made us “happy.” We could even turn uncommonly kind. Take, for instance, the time we smuggled Old Golds into Frank Brizzolera’s hospital room. Or when we attended the funeral of Janine Gorjanc’s little girl, found strangled in an empty lot. It was hard for us to believe something like that could happen to someone we knew. You have never seen someone weep until you have witnessed a mother at the funeral of her murdered child. The girl was nine years old. She was removed at night from an open window. It was all over the papers. First she was missing. Then her body was found. To watch Janine at the funeral, surrounded by pictures of Jessica, her family trying to hold her up — even Tom Mota’s heart broke. We were outside the funeral home afterward, in the parking lot speaking somberly to one another, when Tom began to beat on his ’94 Miata. It didn’t take long before everyone noticed him. He hit the windows with his fists and let out terrible cries of “Fuck!” He kicked the doors and the tires. Finally he collapsed near the trunk, wracked with sobs. It was not unreasonable behavior given the circumstances, but we were a little surprised that Tom appeared the most affected. He was sprawled out on the funeral home parking lot in his suit and tie, sobbing like a child. A few people went over to comfort him. We assumed in part his behavior had something to do with his ex-wife taking his kids to Phoenix. One thing we knew for certain — despite all our certainties, it was very difficult to guess what one individual was thinking at any given moment.