Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

“Make them laugh?” said Benny. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I,” said Jim, from the floor.

“You come up with an ad,” said Joe, “that makes the cancer patient laugh. It’s that simple.”

“What are we selling?”

“We’re not selling anything.”

“So what’s the point?”

“Think of it — okay,” he said, sitting forward and putting his elbows on his knees. “Think of it as an awareness campaign, okay? Only you’re not making the target audience aware of anything, you’re just making them laugh.” When that still made little sense, he added, “Okay, if we’re selling something, we’re selling comfort and hope to the cancer patient through the power of laughter. How’s that?”

“That’s an unusual product,” Genevieve remarked.

“It is an unusual product,” he agreed. “We have no product. We have no features or benefits, we have no call-to-action, we have no competition in the marketplace. We also have no guidelines on design, format, color, type styles, images, or copy.”

“What do we have?” she asked.

“We have a target audience — women suffering from breast cancer — and an objective — to make them laugh.”

“Why did the project change?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Lynn just forwarded me the e-mail with the changes and asked me to pass them on to you.”

“Who’s paying for the ad now that it’s no longer for a fund-raiser?” asked Dan Wisdom.

“Good question. Same people, I think. The Alliance Against Breast Cancer.”

“Joe,” said Karen, “how come I can’t find any presence for this ‘Alliance Against Breast Cancer’ on the Internet?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Can’t you?”

Karen shook her head. “There are charities, institutes, research centers, and about a thousand alliances, but none with the name ‘Alliance Against Breast Cancer.’”

Joe suggested that Alliance Against Breast Cancer might be some kind of umbrella group of regional organizations, each of which had their own website.

“So what are we supposed to do now with the fund-raiser concepts that we already have?”

“Shelve them.”

“Well, that blows,” said Karen.

“It’s not like we had anything good anyway,” said Larry.

“We did, too, Larry. We had ‘Loved Ones,’ okay? Joe, when did this change occur?”

“Like I said, Lynn just forwarded me the e-mail.”

“I thought Lynn was off today.”

“Change of plans, I guess.”

“So everybody knows that Lynn’s in today?” said Jim, looking around at us. “How come I was the last to know?”

“Because you’re an idiot,” said Marcia.

“Okay, guys,” said Joe. “Let’s get to work.”

HEADING BACK FROM the couches, knowing we had to toss out our ad concepts for the fund-raiser and start over again in the disagreeable hours of the afternoon — which tended to stretch on and on — we felt a little fatigued. All that work for nothing. And if we happened to cast back, in search of edification, to days past and jobs completed — oh, what a bad idea, for what had all that amounted to? And anticipating future work just made the present moment even more miserable. There was so much unpleasantness in the workaday world. The last thing you ever wanted to do at night was go home and do the dishes. And just the idea that part of the weekend had to be dedicated to getting the oil changed and doing the laundry was enough to make those of us still full from lunch want to lie down in the hallway and force anyone dumb enough to remain committed to walk around us. It might not be so bad. They could drop food down to us, or if that was not possible, crumbs from their PowerBars and bags of microwave popcorn would surely end up within an arm’s length sooner or later. The cleaning crews, needing to vacuum, would inevitably turn us on our sides, preventing bedsores, and we could make little toys out of runs in the carpet, which, in moments of extreme regression, we might suck on for comfort.

But enough daydreaming. Our desks were waiting, we had work to do. And work was everything. We liked to think it was family, it was God, it was following football on Sundays, it was shopping with the girls or a strong drink on Saturday night, that it was love, that it was sex, that it was keeping our eye on retirement. But at two in the afternoon with bills to pay and layoffs hovering over us, it was all about the work.

YET SOMETHING HAPPENED that afternoon that made it hard to concentrate. Benny Shassburger called Joe into his office to inform him he had received an e-mail from Tom Mota. The subject line read, “Jim tells me you’re doing some pro bono cancer ad.”

“So he’s been in touch with Jim, too?” asked Joe, taking a seat across the desk.

“Apparently. Like I said, I only got this a few minutes ago.”

“Read it to me.”

Benny turned to his computer. “It’s kinda long.”

“That’s okay. Read it.”

“Okay. He starts off, ‘So Jim tells me you’re doing some pro bono cancer ad over there. YEEE-HOOO! I’m free!!! But as you aren’t, for what it’s worth, I thought I’d tell you the story of my mother’s cancer, and you can use it if you want. My mother was one mean bitch. When she wasn’t being a mean bitch, she was being deaf and mute. And when she wasn’t being deaf and mute, she was crying in the bathtub. And when she wasn’t crying in the bathtub, she was sharing a bottle with Mr. Hughes. Let me tell you, that there was one slimy glass-eyed fuck, Mr. Hughes. Anyway, those are my four memories of my mom. She looked like Rosie the Riveter — you know the woman I’m talking about, who wears the bandana and says “We Can Do It!”? It was the unsmiling face they shared. But that’s where the similarity stopped because my mom couldn’t do anything and she had Xs over her eyes like in a cartoon of someone dead. I never bought her a Mother’s Day card but I’m sure they never wrote one for her either. Can you imagine? “Happy Depressive’s Day, Ma. Love, Tommy.” But then she started to die. None of us wanted a THING to do with her. I got one brother on a ranch in Omaha, he didn’t want her. I got another brother in Newport Beach in Orange County, California — they only want their red convertibles and their yachts out that way, rich fucks. Anyway, my sister, she was doing my mom one better in the Tenderloin. That’s a little piece of paradise full of whores and drunks in San Francisco. No way SHE could have taken the old lady in. (My sister’s a whole different story. I’ll tell you about her sometime.) So anyway, my mom was still in the same apartment we grew up in — imagine living your whole goddamn life in the same two rooms in Romeoville. Me being about six miles from there, I had to be the one to go pick her up and bring her over to the house. BUT NOT THOSE FUCKING CATS! NO WAY. NO CATS. Barb couldn’t believe that my mom was on her deathbed and I didn’t want a thing to do with her. But that’s because she never knew the woman when she was throwing dishes at the wall in her goddamn robe. The point I’m trying to make here is that it was Barb who convinced me to go over there and get her, and man, just between you and me, Benny, I REALLY, REALLY fucked things up, to be honest with you. With Barb, I mean. Don’t you think you and I should get together and have a beer? I miss her and I’d like to talk about it. Anyway, we put my mom up in the attic until she died and eventually she did die and it was even painful to watch. She absolutely refused to go to the hospital and then she refused to sit up for the home nurse we hired. But then, I couldn’t believe THIS. She asked for a priest. I had no idea she had a religious bone in her body. So we brought in a priest and if I could only tell you what it was like to watch my mom hold a priest’s hand. She was pretty out of it by then, without her dentures and looking like HELL. I felt sorry for whatever Higher Power was about to receive her but I also have to admit that I felt some envy for how God or whatever could convince her to hold the hand of His servant when I couldn’t even recall the last time she’d held MY hand, if ever. And that’s because she was a mean bitch, but also because her father was a drunk and an abusive son-of-a-bitch and all of THAT daytime talk-show psychology. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself, because before she asked for the priest, between the time I picked her up in Romeoville (WITHOUT CATS) and the time she lay dying in the attic, I sat with her after I got home from work and we would watch Wheel of Fortune together. And while we were silent and just watching TV, it was more than I remember us ever doing together when I was a kid. We’d watch Wheel of Fortune while Barb made dinner downstairs, and over four or five months I saw how no matter what kind of a mean bitch you have for a mother, it’s tough to watch her die, because ovarian cancer is a much meaner bitch than any bitch it ever consumes. It just WASTED her, Benny. I did not even recognize her. She looked more like the skeleton in your office than my mom. Man did I cry when she died. I kept asking Barbara WHY, WHY was I crying? And she kept saying, of course you’re crying, she’s your mom. But WHY? I hadn’t talked to her in ten years. And I didn’t give one fuck about her. But then you see someone just WASTE like that. And if there is ONE THING I wish I could take back, ONE THING in my entire life I wish I could do differently, it would be when we were going through all that shit during the divorce when I REALLY lost it one time and I just screamed at Barb, I HOPE OVARIAN CANCER EATS YOUR CUNT! I didn’t mean it. I’m ashamed of it now. No, that doesn’t even half describe it. You’re the only one I’ve told that to. Can you tell me WHAT THE FUCK I WAS THINKING? Man oh man oh man. Anyway. Use any of this in your ads if you want, and hello to all those fucks. Tom.’”