Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

SOME OF US RETURNED to Marcia’s office and explained what we thought she needed to do.

“Are you out, ” she said, “of your fucking minds?”

Benny happened to fall by.

“Benny,” said Marcia, “listen to what these yahoos want me to do.”

Dan Wisdom, painter of fish, showed up and insisted on interrupting. He said he had come across Chris Yop at a print station and told him that Lynn Mason was in fact in the office that day.

“We were just standing there,” said Dan, “and he’s got about fifty resumes coming out on the heavy bonded stuff, you know, the really good stuff, when I tell him that Lynn’s not in surgery after all. And immediately he’s like, ‘But I been walking the halls this whole time!’ You should have seen his face. So I ask him, ‘Weren’t you at least afraid security would see you?’ And he says, ‘Security? Security’s a joke. Security never comes up here.’ He makes a good point.”

We all agreed he did.

“But now that he knows that Lynn’s in? You should have seen how scared he was leaving the print station. Checking both ways down the hall like he was in some parody of a spy movie. It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Have you ever seen Top Secret, with Val Kilmer?” Don Blattner asked. “Now that’s funny.”

“Hank,” Marcia called out. She rolled to the side of her desk in the chair that once belonged to Tom Mota, to better see into the hallway. “Hank!”

Hank reversed in his tracks to stand just outside Marcia’s office. He straightened his bulky glasses, a nervous tic of his, and they fell right back down his nose.

“Listen to what these yahoos want me to do, Hank,” she said. “They want me to call the hospital, right — listen to this — and pretend that I’m Lynn, and say, ‘Oh, I’m a little confused — something — blah blah blah — and I was wondering, was I scheduled to be in surgery today?’ Yeah, I’m supposed to call up and impersonate my boss while, excuse me, we’re not just going through layoffs — and I happen to have the wrong chair — but this is a woman who might be really sick. And they want me to call up and say, ‘Oh, can you tell me, do you happen to know if I have cancer?’”

“That sounds like a bad idea,” said Hank.

We tried to explain to him why it was really our only option, if we were going to know one way or another with absolute certainty.

“Under normal circumstances,” said Amber, who had returned with Larry to the office and was now eating a Cobb salad from her lap, “I wouldn’t think it’s such a good idea, either. But if she had an appointment this morning and she didn’t go, don’t you think we should be worried about her?”

“Well, then, you make the call,” said Marcia.

“I don’t think —” said Hank.

“It wasn’t my —” said Amber.

“No way that would —” said Don.

“. . be trafficking in rumors,” said Larry. “And you’d be doing everyone a big —”

“STOP IT,” said Joe Pope.

He was standing right behind Hank in Marcia’s doorway and no one had noticed. Everyone turned and some got to their feet as he moved to stand just inside the office and the room went cold. “I can hear you guys from inside the elevator, ” he said. There was a new command in his tone and his brow was menaced with possible disdain. “Now, please,” he said. “Just knock it off.”

THE UNBELIEVABLE REPORT — ON NOT KNOWING SOMETHING — CHAIRS — FURTHER DEBATE — BENNY’S OPTIONS — THINKING ABOUT BRIZZ — THE U-STOR-IT — THE YOPANWOO INDIANS — THE TRIPLE MEETING — CHANGES TO THE PROJECT — JIM ALWAYS THE LAST TO KNOW — TOM’S MOTHER DIES — SCREWY ASSIGNMENT — UNCLE MAX — JIM TAPPED — YOP’S REQUEST — WE STAND UP TO KAREN

SOMEONE PASSED AROUND a link once to a news article posted on a reputable website that we all read and talked about for days. A man working at an office much like ours had a heart attack at his desk, and for the rest of the day people passing by his workstation failed to notice. That wasn’t the newsworthy bit — there are, what, a hundred and fifty million of us in the workplace? It was bound to happen to somebody. What we couldn’t wrap our heads around, what made this man’s commonplace death national news, was the unlikely information provided in the first sentence of the dispatch: “A man working in an Arlington, Virginia, insurance firm died of a heart attack at his desk recently and wasn’t discovered until four days later, when coworkers complained of a bad-fruit smell.”

The article went on to explain that Friday had passed, and then the weekend, and no one had discovered this man fallen in his cubicle. Not a coworker, not a building guy, not someone collecting the trash. Then we were supposed to believe that Monday came around, Monday with its meetings and returned phone calls, its resumption of routine and reinstatement of duty, Monday came and went, and they didn’t find him then, either. It wasn’t until Tuesday, Tuesday afternoon, when they all went in search of a rotten banana, that they saw one of their own dead on the floor by his desk, obscured by his chair. We kept asking ourselves how could that be possible? Surely someone had to come by with a request for a meeting. Someone had to come by to inquire why a meeting was missed. But no — this poor jerk was the subject of not so much as a morning greeting from one of his cube neighbors. We didn’t know how that could happen.

We hated not knowing something. We hated not knowing who was next to walk Spanish down the hall. How would our bills get paid? And where would we find new work? We knew the power of the credit card companies and the collection agencies and the consequences of bankruptcy. Those institutions were without appeal. They put your name into a system, and from that point forward vital parts of the American dream were foreclosed upon. A backyard swimming pool. A long weekend in Vegas. A low-end BMW. These were not Jeffersonian ideals, perhaps, on par with life and liberty, but at this advanced stage, with the West won and the Cold War over, they, too, seemed among our inalienable rights. This was just before the fall of the dollar, before the stormy debate about corporate outsourcing, and the specter of a juggernaut of Chinese and Indian youths overtaking our advantages in broadband.

Marcia hated not knowing what might come of being caught with Tom Mota’s chair, with its serial numbers that would not match up with the office coordinator’s master list. So she swapped Tom’s chair for Ernie’s and left Tom’s in Tom’s old office. Even so, she was still scared that the office coordinator would look for Ernie’s chair in Ernie’s old office — from which Chris Yop had taken it, swapping it with his own lesser chair when Ernie retired — and discover not Ernie’s serial numbers but Chris Yop’s, and upon that discovery, go in search of Ernie’s chair, which Marcia was presently sitting on. Sooner or later, Marcia feared, the office coordinator was bound to find out what she had done. So she felt the need to get her original chair back from Karen Woo, who had received it some months prior when Marcia took Reiser’s chair when Reiser offered it to her after taking Sean Smith’s chair after Sean got canned. She went to Karen to ask for her chair back, but Karen didn’t want to part with her chair, which she claimed wasn’t the one Marcia had given her at all, but was Bob Yagley’s chair, which she had swapped with Marcia’s late one night after gentle, soft-spoken Bob was let go. Bob’s old office was currently occupied by a woman named Dana Rettig who had made the leap from cubicle to office less by virtue of merit than by management’s perception that so many vacated offices looked bad to potential visitors. When Dana made that leap, she brought along her own chair, which had once belonged to someone in Account Management and was a better chair than Bob’s, which was really Marcia’s. “What was wrong with my chair?” Marcia asked her. Dana replied that nothing was wrong with it per se; she had just gotten attached to the Account Management person’s chair. “So where is my chair, then?” asked Marcia. Dana told her it was probably in the same place she left it, Dana’s old cubicle, but when she and Marcia walked down to that particular workstation, they found some production person fresh out of college — he looked all of fifteen — where Dana used to sit, who told them that somebody a few months back had passed down the hall only to return, pull rank, and take his chair, which was replaced by the cheap plastic thing he had been sitting on ever since. All attempts to get the fresh-faced peon to pony up a little information on who had strong-armed him out of his chair were for naught until Marcia asked him point-blank how he expected to get out of production hell and make it to Assistant Art Director if he couldn’t even sketch a face on a legal pad. So the production kid made a rough sketch from memory of the man who took his chair, and when he was through filling in the hair and putting the final touches on the eyes, Marcia and Dana examined it and determined it was a dead ringer for Chris Yop. Was it possible that Yop had grown bored with Ernie Kessler’s chair, walked past a chair he liked better and bullied it out from under a production nobody, and walked away with Marcia’s chair, which he sat on until the office coordinator came around giving him heat and he found himself without any alternative but to take it down to Tom’s office and pretend it was Tom’s, so that when Marcia went in to swap Tom’s real chair with Ernie Kessler’s, it wasn’t Ernie’s chair at all but Marcia’s original one that she took back with her? Did Marcia have her own chair again? “Are you absolutely sure that this is the guy who took your chair?” she asked the production peon. The production peon said no, he wasn’t sure of that at all. Marcia had no idea whose chair she had. It might have been hers, it might have been Ernie Kessler’s, or it might have been the chair of some indeterminate third party. The only person who knew for certain was the office coordinator, who owned the master list. Marcia returned to her office beset by the high anxiety typical of the time.