Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

Tom had assumed Carl’s office was empty. From where he stood, he could see no one inside. “Carl?” he said, stepping in.

Carl was laid out across the hard corporate carpet behind his desk, gripping his hair. Fists full of hair, almost yanking it from its roots, and even in the dim light, Tom could see how pinched and red the poor man’s face had become. Carl did not open his eyes at Tom’s approach.

Tom went back to his office, picked up the receiver, and, before putting it to his ear, as the dial tone hummed in the air, he shook his head and whispered, “Fuck.”

He left his name and number for Carl’s wife, who worked in the oncology department of Northwestern Memorial next door. Then he remembered that before being sidetracked by Carl, he had been taking work down to Joe Pope, so he got up again, but before he could darken his doorway, the phone rang.

“Goddamn,” he said to Marilynn, “I never had a doctor return a call so fast in my life.”

“I’m worried about Carl,” she explained.

“So if I was just a regular patient,” Tom wondered aloud, “how long would you have kept me waiting?”

“Please tell me what’s going on,” she said.

He explained everything he knew — the day he’d gone into Carl’s office with the book, Carl’s admission that he was taking Janine’s meds, the bottle with the three-month supply, everything. He told her that Hank had walked in on him dusting his chair, that he had been shielding his eyes with a legal pad during inputs, that he had jogged a half-dozen laps around the far perimeter of the sixtieth floor, and that once not long ago, he came across Carl at his desk staring with a pensive, almost scientific expression at one of his hands, turning it slowly, turning and staring at the hand as if it were a rare find or a foreign object. Then Tom said, “He’s currently lying on the floor of his office, he’s blacked out all his windows with construction paper. I think he needs medical attention.”

Marilynn was most certainly a doctor in that she didn’t waste time before grilling him on specifics. What was the medication? How long had he been taking it? Tom didn’t have too many answers. The questions he liked least came last, back to back, so he didn’t have a chance to answer them — they sounded rhetorical and accusatory. “How long have you known about this? How could you possibly, possibly not have said something sooner?”

“You want to know why I didn’t tell you sooner?” he said. “Because I hate my wife, that’s why.”

Marilynn was incredulous; he could tell even over the phone.

“Because you hate your wife?” she said. “What kind of answer is that?”

Tom, ever the logician, replied, “Because she’s a fucking bitch — and if you were a man doctor, I’d call her even worse.”

Marilynn, understandably, must not have known how to respond to that, as a period of silence ensued.

“Look,” Tom said finally, “I’m not proud of it, but when he said he was doing this without your knowledge because he hated when you were right, I could relate, because my bitch of an ex-wife is another one who’s always right, a lot of the goddamn time, anyway — except for her taking the KIDS to fucking PHOENIX and letting them call some FUCKING PILOT FOR FUCKING UNITED DADDY BOB, AS IF THEY HAVE TWO DADDIES, WHEN I’M THEIR ONLY FUCKING DADDY! SO THAT’S WHY! SUE ME! ”

He hung up. He collected himself. She called back.

“I just need to know,” she said, “if you think he’ll come in on his own, or if I need to get somebody.”

“Like to restrain him?”

“He hasn’t been home for two days,” she told him. “I’ve been calling and calling. I have no idea where his head is at.”

“He doesn’t need restraining,” said Tom. “He needs somebody to help him off the ground.”

Tom went down to Carl’s office and asked him if he wouldn’t mind accompanying him next door to the hospital. When Carl said nothing, Tom got him to his feet and walked him over.

He was diagnosed with toxic poisoning. When we visited him, his lips were chapped and his skin looked windburned. Last we had all been together in a hospital was for Brizz. “Hope you don’t end up like him, Carl,” said Jim Jackers.

“Jim,” said Marcia. “If you’re going to make bad jokes, at least make them half-funny.” She turned back to Carl. “Just ignore that idiot,” she said to him. “How are you feeling?” Carl had several big white pillows behind him and he was hooked up to an IV.

“Everything looks double,” he replied, “and red.”

We found that exceedingly hard to respond to. Everything looks double and red? Oh, well, that’ll go away, Carl. That’s just a temporary side effect of permanent brain damage.

“Carl,” said Benny, “you’re going to be back on your feet in no time.”

“Will I be able to play the piano?” Carl asked tiredly.

It was a measure of how odd he had been acting, and how strange some of his comments had been, that this old joke did not register, and someone replied in all sincerity, “Oh, of course you will, Carl. Of course you’ll play the piano again.”

“I was joking,” said Carl, lifting his hands lethargically — an indication, maybe, that those hands didn’t play the piano. “Hey, is Janine here?” he asked.

Everyone knew by now that Carl had stolen Janine’s drugs.

“She isn’t here right now, Carl,” said Genevieve, who was standing across the bed from Marcia. “But she wanted me to tell you that she sends you her best.”

In reality, Janine was back at the office, trying to take stock of just how many bottles Carl had gotten into. It seemed that the three-month supply of whatever he first took had not been enough for Carl, that he had diverted from the instructions on the label, and that over the course of several weeks he had returned to Janine’s desk late at night, taking other drugs, and conducting an incautious and unregulated experiment on himself.

As you can witness a child who has just banged his head pause before his face slowly transforms into a sad mask of pain, we watched Carl register the news that Janine was not among us, and struggle not to cry.

“Carl, would you like us to come back later?” Genevieve asked softly. As she was bending down to him, her ear lost its hold on her hair and a strand of it spilled over and she had to put it behind her ear again with that unself-conscious grace she possessed when dealing on an everyday basis with her unearthly hair. “Carl,” she said, “should we come back?”

“I wanted to tell her something,” Carl said, biting his upper lip.

“Would you like me to give her a message?” she asked.

“I wanted to sing her a song.”

“You wanted to sing her a song?” said Genevieve.

“I wanted to sing her a song,” said Carl.

Out in the hallway we reported to Carl’s doctor that he’d been saying and doing a number of peculiar things for a matter of weeks. “I have no doubt,” the doctor said. “He was all over the board with those drugs and the dosages were incredibly high.” He turned back to reassure Marilynn that they were getting Carl cleaned out, and that he foresaw no permanent damage. Once Carl was detoxified, they’d put him on the right medication with the right dosage, and he’d be back to his better self.

We thought that was like saying Carl would play the piano again. Did he have a better self to begin with?

Marilynn, also lab-coated and pinned with ID — she was an attractive woman with short blond hair — thanked the doctor by name. He smiled and gently squeezed her shoulder.

After he left, Marilynn turned to Tom Mota and said, “Thank you for your help.”