Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

ONE DAY CARL GARBEDIAN lifted his computer monitor and placed it on the other side of his desk. He didn’t like it there, so by the end of the day he had returned it. But in the interim he noticed how dusty the desk was, so the following morning he brought cleaning supplies from home and dusted his desk, his credenza, and his bookshelves. He stayed late and dusted the furniture in offices down the hall from his own. Marilynn was working late, of course, and he had nothing better to do, and, surprisingly, he found pleasure in the task. The next night he did the desks and credenzas in offices on other floors until Hank Neary, working late one night on his failed novel, returned from the bathroom and found Carl inside his office, dusting the legs of his chair. “What are you doing to my chair, Carl?” he asked.

Earlier Carl had taken to shielding his eyes with a legal pad during input meetings. He came into the conference room, plopped the legal pad down on the table, and squinted under the sudden light. “Jesus Christ, that’s bright,” he said, bringing his hand up to where the legal pad had been. He was blinking and squinting, trying to adjust, but eventually he had to resume the use of the legal pad. “Christ, it’s bright in here. Can’t we turn that light off?” Out of the corners of our own dimmed and puzzled eyes, we looked around at one another. Finally Tom Mota said to him, “Carl, man. It is off.” And it was true — sometimes, sunlight coming in from the windows convinced us to keep the overhead lights off. Yet he kept squinting and hovering under the legal pad throughout the entire meeting.

Some time later he ran down the hall. He ran down the hall a second time. The third time it was like he was doing laps or something. A few of us were in Benny Shassburger’s doorway, standing around chatting to Benny on the inside. When Carl came around again, Tom shouted out at him. “Carl! What the hell, man — what are you doing?”

Carl stopped, shaking his head breathlessly at Tom. Then, like a cat you can’t reason with, he darted off again.

“What’s up with him?” Benny asked.

Tom shrugged. “How should I know?”

Within the week, Carl had blacked out his windows with construction paper. The paper, if not exactly sanctioned by management or the office coordinator, was the sort of thing usually tolerated in our office, on the basis that we should enjoy a creative environment and have our quirks indulged, so that we might continue to think up clever headlines and catchy designs. On the other hand, Carl was questioned about it, and he explained that out of nowhere he had acquired an extreme sensitivity to light, producing as proof a pair of the boxy black sunglasses one typically sees only on the elderly, which he claimed he wore everywhere nowadays, including, sometimes, in the office itself. The specter of a worker’s comp claim seemed to hover over the handling of Carl’s delicate eyes, so Lynn Mason instructed the office coordinator to tell Carl he could keep the paper up. Then, when she had two minutes to think, Lynn went down to Carl’s office.

“A sudden sensitivity to light doesn’t sound healthy,” she said, standing in Carl’s doorway. “Maybe you need to see an ophthalmologist.”

“Oh, no,” said Carl.

“I don’t mean to pry, Carl, but when was the last time you had a physical?”

“Oh, I don’t need a physical,” said Carl.

He went on to explain that if it weren’t for his sensitivity to light and the occasional excruciating headache, and some dizziness and uncommon sweating, he had never felt better his entire life. “It has cleared up,” he said to her, “all my thoughts of suicide.”

Lynn was too taken aback by Carl’s frank admission of thoughts of suicide to stop and say, What’s it? What’s cleared it up? Instead she moved from the doorway into Carl’s office, shut the door halfway, and said to him, “Carl, you were having thoughts of suicide?”

“Oh, yeah,” Carl said. “Oh, big time. I had done research, Lynn. I knew. . well, I seriously doubt you want to hear all the details. But I’m here to tell you, I was prepared.”

Lynn listened to him as she sometimes can, like a person being paid by the hour to do so. She took a seat on one corner of his desk and her brow was furrowed with concern as Carl told her the story of his long nights when Marilynn worked late and he was alone, how envious he was of her career choice compared to his own, and how all activity had at once lost its luster. And then he said something that gave her a sense of the depth, the incomprehensible depth of his onetime despair.

“Don’t be alarmed when I tell you this,” he said, “because I can promise you it has all passed, but one of the reasons — and I feel so ashamed of this — but one of the reasons I wanted to kill myself was so that she would find my body.” Abruptly Carl burst into tears. “My wife,” he said. “My beautiful wife! She is so loving, so good,” he said, as the force of his tears began to quell. “I cannot tell you how good she is, Lynn, and how much she loves me. And you know, she has the hardest job? She sees the sickest people. They die on her constantly. But she loves them, and she loves me, and I wanted to do this terrible thing to her.”

By then Lynn had come closer and put her hand on Carl’s shoulder. She moved her hand gently over his shoulder and all that could be heard was his soft crying and the friction of the fabric under her hand.

“Why would I want to do that?” he asked. “For attention? How shameful. I’m terrible,” he said. “A terrible person.” She continued to comfort him, and after a moment, he wheeled back in his swivel chair, stood, and hugged her — he needed someone to hug. Lynn hugged back without hesitation, and likely without any regard for who passed by and saw them hugging because the door, after all, was only half-closed. They stood in his office hugging.

Lynn said, “Oh, Carl,” patting him gently on the back, and by the time they parted, he had stopped crying and started to clear the tears from his eyes.

They talked a little longer, and that’s when she asked him what had changed that he no longer felt the way he had, and he told her that he was finally taking medication. He didn’t mention whose medication he was taking, but no matter. When she left, no doubt she realized how little she knew about the individual lives of the people who worked for her, how impossible it was to get to know them despite little efforts here and there, and she probably also felt the slightest, just the very smallest discomfort for how it seemed Carl had hugged her for an uncommonly long time, as he had hugged so many of us during those berserk and unpredictable days.

When Tom Mota saw Carl’s blacked-out windows, he knew the day had come and gone when he should have said something to someone about what he knew. He didn’t want to say anything. First of all, another man’s business was none of his own. Second, Carl had confided in him, and Tom had no desire to betray that confidence. And then there was a third thing, something slimy and unpleasant: a familiar, expectorant, implacable hatred. Carl had told Tom that he didn’t want his wife to know that he was depressed because his wife had told him he was depressed and he didn’t want her to know that she was right. Tom had had a wife who was right all the time, too, and so he could understand Carl’s desire to deprive the person who loves him most the righteousness of confirmed knowledge. Tom was standing outside Carl’s office gazing at the blacked-out windows when a cry came from within.

It was a howl, really, a grumbling cry of pain that erupted into a throttle. Had it not been a slow day at lunch hour, this terrible noise would have brought people out into the halls.