Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

We respected the fact that Benny hadn’t named any names. It was nice to know that if one of us did something stupid, he would probably keep that to himself, too.

Later that afternoon we saw Joe Pope walking in the direction of the coffee bar, which is to say, our direction — there were a few of us down there enjoying a break — and we were curious: what would he order? What does the inscrutable Joe Pope have for a pick-me-up? But then he walked past the ordering place and kept coming. He stopped directly in the middle of our conversation, halting it, and we thought, Oh, shit — here it comes. He’d reached a breaking point. Our hearts started beating in our chests. We wondered in a flash — how defensive should we be? How dissembling? It was our custom to dissemble shamelessly to Joe Pope, usually in matters of whose fault this was, or what had gone wrong with that, and then after he’d leave and our sensors relocated their moral north, we’d likely feel a tinge of regret for our dishonesty. Of course he would return soon enough and, born into sin, forgetful and unreformed, we dissembled once more. But maybe we wouldn’t dissemble this time. Maybe in fact we owed him an apology. The guy had been railroaded, after all — he had every reason to be pissed off. And when he began to speak, in a steady quiet voice, looking each of us in the eye, each according to our turn, and for the same length of time — “I have tried my best,” he began, “not to let certain things get to me, and to deal with each of you on an individual basis, as fairly as I know how” — we couldn’t argue with what he said and thought he probably did deserve an apology, though it was still far from certain that he’d get one. We’d already been upbraided by Lynn and made to feel small by Genevieve, who said, as she had on other occasions, that she was done with us forever. “My fairness comes to an end, however,” Joe continued, “the minute you turn Janine Gorjanc into one of your games.”

“Janine Gorjanc?” said Hank Neary, just as surprised as the rest of us to hear Joe speak her name. “Who would do a thing to Janine?”

Joe just stood there with the prepossessing silence that made us monumentally uneasy. He didn’t look an inch too short just then. He didn’t offer an explanation or make any threats. He wasn’t there to seek redress for the wrong done to him. He just said: “No more. Don’t bother her on her lunch hour. Don’t stand in front of the bathroom so you can gawk. Just let the woman be.”

Tom Mota had gone to Joe and told him what we were up to at the McDonald’s. Tom Mota, of all people! We couldn’t believe it. Then we heard that he’d gone to Janine and told her too. After that, we had to file in there one after the other in order to apologize. Amber Ludwig, Larry Novotny, Benny and Jim. Don Blattner said something to her at a print station. Genevieve Latko-Devine called her at home. Monday came around again, and we apologized on Monday, too.

“It is odd,” Janine admitted to us.

We told Janine that she didn’t need to explain a single thing to any of us.

“No, it is, ” she insisted. “I know it’s odd. But it was one of her places. She was only nine, you know. She had her places. I still go to the Toys‘R’Us, and the Gymboree. They think I’m crazy there, too. The McDonald’s people think I’m just nuts. But those are my places now, too. They became my places. I was with her when she was in those places. And I just don’t know how to give them up yet. I would be there anyway, right, had she lived?”

We felt like hell. We apologized some more. We had made a spectacle of Janine’s life, and of her grief, and we made a solemn vow — most of us did, anyway — that there would be no new spectacles.

TOM CLIMBED THE ROTTING RUNGS, keeping careful hold of the wooden pole’s rusted handrails. The ladder’s disrepair was one sign of the inattention the billboard had suffered in its remote, abandoned location so far west, where the traffic lanes narrowed from eight to four and the distance between exits stretched out to miles. But it would have been a mistake to attribute the shoddy decrepitude of the element-battered billboard to location alone. Other billboards that far west, especially those advertising the casino boats, were sturdy new metal constructions without a speck of chipped paint, some lit by twenty-four-hour spotlights. It was the goddamn vendor who deserved a lot of the blame for letting the thing go, and as he climbed, Tom puzzled over the mystery of why more wasn’t made of the space. Some hustle could always be found. That Jessica Gorjanc’s fourth-grade picture blown up to inhuman dimensions had been left to languish long after her actual body was put underground wasn’t just cruel disregard for human suffering. It was bad business practice.

Dawn hadn’t broken when he nosed his aging Miata deep into the off-road recess where a small woods grew up a hundred yards from the highway. His climb up the ladder was slow and cumbersome owing to all the supplies he carried in his backpack, including, importantly, a Thermos half-full of martinis which he had shaken briefly with ice cubes before closing the trunk and following his flashlight’s lead. Crickets chirped in the sleepy dark. Survivalist tactics had taught him a nifty trick: masking tape on the base of the powerful yet compact light allowed him to hold the thing comfortably between his front teeth while he climbed, illuminating the path above him while freeing up his hands, one of which he needed to hold on to the roller. This he placed first on the scaffold once he reached the top. He lifted himself up and removed the capacious hiker’s pack from his shoulders and set it next to the roller. Passing the light down the length of the scaffold, he saw the thing for what it was: three graying wooden planks affording him no more room than what was given a window washer hanging outside his window on sixty-two. Before the first pink in the sky, he unscrewed the Thermos and poured himself a drink, his bartending aided immeasurably by the Maglite in his mouth. He removed the light and took a sip.

He unpacked his supplies — two cans of white house paint, a deep-well roller tray, two roller heads, and a telescoping extension pole. He sipped from the Thermos lid as he mixed and poured out the paint and the fumes rose up to greet him. The faint sun barely touched on him as he walked the length of the scaffold, running the roller up and down the face of the billboard, working efficiently and thoroughly to cover the girl’s fading image. It had been up there a number of months, all through the bad midwestern winter and the start of the spring rains, puckered in places, bubbles of paint cracked in half. Thanks to the extension pole, he covered more than he thought he would, but he still had a good bit to go yet, so he set the roller down and finished the martini and took out a paintball gun from the backpack. He poured a second martini and then loaded the gun. From his position on the scaffold, he could see the girl’s face only at a steep angle, which prevented him from knowing exactly how to aim. But he had brought with him plenty of white pellets which he had chosen to match the house paint, and as he sipped the second martini and the sky announced the beginning of another empty, interminable weekend, he walked back and forth along the planks loading and shooting, covering over the dead girl’s image one bitter blot at a time, because his complaints to Jane Trimble had gotten him nowhere — and because in conversation the previous morning, Janine said she couldn’t bear to look at it one day longer.

CARL’S EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES — AN ADMISSION TO LYNN — TOM’S CALL GETS RETURNED QUICKLY — DOUBLE AND RED — A NEW LOW — TEAM-TALK BULLSHIT — THE SOURCE — A CONVERSATION WITH CARL–LYNN IN — A CONVERSATION WITH SANDY — DEIRDRE’S NEW DOOR — LEAVE ROBBIE STOKES OUT OF IT — WILL MARCIA PLEASE JUST CALL? — KNOCK IT OFF