Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

“I won’t apologize for not helping sooner,” he said. “And I won’t apologize for yelling at you over the phone.” He was like a child in that he wouldn’t look her in the eye as he addressed her. “I can’t apologize for something I don’t feel sorry for.”

“I wasn’t asking for an apology,” Marilynn said, tall enough to look down on him. “I just wanted to thank you.” She started to walk away.

“Do you mind if I ask you a question?” Tom said. She turned back. Tom moved toward her and got, we thought, a little close, cocking his shaved head as he tended to do when exercised. He was wearing a tan trench coat, which he must have thought made him look taller. The loose belt was hanging down. “Just out of curiosity,” he said, and he made that terrible smirk. It was creepy how he insisted on staring only at her neck. “Why is it that he finds it necessary to medicate himself nearly to death? You have an answer for that, as a medical practitioner? What one person does to drive the other person to poison himself?” Marilynn was stunned into silence. “Just out of idle curiosity,” he said, lifting his shoulders. Finally he looked her in the eye.

We couldn’t believe how out of line he was. He had hit an all-time low.

“You are. . extremely rude,” she said at last, her lips trembling, “at a time my husband is very sick —”

“Oh, go fuck yourself,” he said, turning away, dismissing her with both hands.

“— when all I’ve done —” She struggled not to break down. “— is try to help him. I tried to help him,” she said.

“Hey, I’m just trying to understand,” he said, turning around and pointing at her, “why you hate us. And why we hate you.”

We went in to say a final good-bye to Carl — all except Tom. Lynn Mason arrived. That was surprising. “I didn’t think you did hospitals,” said Benny, in reference to her phobia.

“I don’t do them when I’m the subject under investigation,” Lynn replied. “When it’s somebody else, I do hospitals.” She turned to the man in the bed. “Carl, what the hell? Just what the hell?”

Her words sounded accusatory but her tone was one of tender confusion.

“I fucked up,” Carl said.

He seemed to become more coherent with her arrival. It was a delicate time, given that layoffs were happening all around us, but business appeared to be set aside for the moment, and for ten minutes there we were almost a healthy functioning team again. Someone even said something to that effect — Dan Wisdom, painter of fish, who had positioned himself against the wall so as to be out of people’s way. He said Carl needed to feel better soon because he was a vital member of the team. Lynn looked over at him and shook her head.

“No, let’s not have any of that team-talk bullshit right now,” she said. “Let’s leave team-talk bullshit at the office for now and just talk about the fact that you guys, if you guys are in need of something — whatever it is, I don’t care — Christ, come see me before you do something like this. Carl, for Christ’s sake.”

“I fucked up,” he repeated.

“You gonna get better?”

“Gonna try.”

“I bought you these crummy flowers,” she said. It was in fact a pretty pathetic bouquet. We all thought, Shit! We forgot flowers! Lynn turned to Genevieve. “In-house florists at a hospital, and this is all they had.”

After she left, we asked Dan if he was offended by how she had responded to his innocuous remark about the team.

“Are you kidding me?” he said. “I thought that was terrific.”

SIX MONTHS LATER, Carl had recovered from toxic poisoning and was now on a regimen of antidepressants tailored personally to him. None of us could say we had noticed much of a change. Perhaps it was a victory just to see him stable. He wasn’t cleaning other people’s offices during his downtime, or doing laps around the hall. But on the other hand he still wore off-brand blue jeans and bad shoes and spent his lunch hour behind a closed door eating the same meal.

“Sorry to interrupt, Carl,” said Amber. A few of us had come with her, and now we were standing behind her in Carl’s doorway. We had elected Amber as our spokeswoman.

“That’s okay,” he said. “What’s up?”

Amber took a step inside the office. She grabbed the back of a chair and paused. She looked back at us. We were like, “Go on. Go on!”

Finally she told Carl that Karen Woo had informed everyone that he was the source.

Carl wiped his mouth with his napkin. He shrugged. “The source of what?” he replied.

ON THE DAY LYNN MASON was scheduled for surgery, she showed up at the office.

Karen saw her first. Karen was always the first to know everything. We expected her to know everything first, just as we expected Jim Jackers to be the last to know anything. This time was no different — Lynn Mason was in the office, and Karen had been the first to see her. She had come across her in the women’s room.

Genevieve was next. On her way to Marissa Lopchek’s in HR, she saw Lynn standing at the window in the Michigan Room. “At first I didn’t think it was her,” she said, “because how could it be her? She’s supposed to be in surgery. But on my way back from Marissa’s, she was still at the window. She’d been there for, I don’t know, twenty minutes? She must have felt me staring or something because she turned, and just as she turned I started to walk away real quick because I didn’t want her to catch me staring, but she saw me anyway and said hello, but by then I was halfway down the hall, so I had to go all the way back to the doorway to say hi because I didn’t want to seem rude, but by then she had turned back to the window and — oh, it was so awkward. What is she doing here?” she asked.

Dan Wisdom saw Lynn cleaning her office. She and the office coordinator were boxing things up in there. We asked him what kind of things and he started to list them: stock-photo books, outdated computers, long-dead advertising magazines, half-empty soda bottles. . It was your right and privilege as a partner to keep as cluttered an office as you wanted, and we had all grown accustomed to shifting things to the floor whenever we went into Lynn’s office for a meeting. “You wouldn’t recognize it,” said Dan. “One of the custodians came up with a cart. He took down. . I can’t even tell you how many boxes full of old crap.” We asked him why she was cleaning. “I have no idea why,” he said. “I thought she was supposed to be in surgery.”

Benny had seen her, too. Certain pockets of office space had been unoccupied for some time, workstations vacated by those who had walked Spanish down the hall. Benny found Lynn at a desk in one of the more fallow clusters of our formerly occupied cubicles.

“You know the place,” he asked us, “on fifty-nine?”

We knew it by heart: all the cubicle walls barren, no radio playing, the printers off-line, and the only hope for corporate revitalization the fact that no one had yet turned off the overhead lights — we, too, had been victimized by the dot-coms. None of us liked it down there; it was too naked a reminder of the times we lived in. But if you needed someplace where you could hear yourself think and weren’t likely to be disturbed, there was no better place than that deserted section of fifty-nine.

“She was sitting on top of one of the cubicle desks,” said Benny, “with her legs hanging down. It was funny to see her like that. What was she doing sitting inside a cubicle? I was so surprised to see someone in there I almost jumped back. But then to look closer and see it was her? Way strange. I would have said something but, man, she was all spaced out. She was just zonked out. She had to have heard me, but she didn’t look up. So you know what I did. I got the hell out of there.”