Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

That e-mail got forwarded around pretty quickly, and some of us felt vindicated. He was talking about having a beer with Benny, and how he regretted the awful thing he had said to Barb. Those weren’t the ravings of an imminently homicidal former employee seeking to even a score. Even Amber, though horrified by practically everything he had written, reluctantly agreed that it might have indicated a more stable person than the one she had imagined moving in and out of Tinley Park gun stores since the day he walked Spanish. One thing she couldn’t let go of, however, was wanting to know just exactly what Tom had done with his mother’s cats.

“Did he just leave them behind when he went to pick her up?” she asked. “He didn’t just leave the cats in the apartment, did he?” She wanted Benny to e-mail him back to inquire about the fate of the abandoned animals, but nobody else thought that was a good idea. “But what happened to them?” she persisted.

“Oh, will you just shut the fuck up about the goddamn cats, Amber?” said Larry.

We knew there was some domestic tension between the two, owing to the ongoing abortion debate, but nothing on the order of that. Trouble in paradise, folks. Those of us in Amber’s office at the time departed it hastily.

JOE WENT DOWN TO Jim’s cubicle to ask what he’d heard from Tom. “Building security asked us to relay to them any communications that we might get from Tom,” he told Jim.

“I didn’t know that,” said Jim. “Nobody told me that.”

“Don’t sweat it. Just be sure to forward the message to Mike Boroshansky.”

“Why am I always the last person to know anything around here?” he asked Joe. Joe didn’t have an answer for him. Jim squared himself to his computer and opened Tom’s e-mail. “You really want me to read this to you?”

“Please,” said Joe. “First tell me what the subject line says.”

“The subject line,” said Jim. “It says, ‘I Need a Wetter Mare.’”

“I’m sorry. It says what?”

“That’s what he wrote. ‘I Need a Wetter Mare.’”

“Is that some private thing between you and Tom?”

“‘I Need a Wetter Mare’? No, I don’t know what the hell that means. What could that mean? How the hell should I know?”

“Jim, relax. Go ahead and read me the e-mail,” said Joe.

“‘Smalls — remember when we shot that laundry detergent commercial? I’m talking about the one of all the guys playing a game of football, and bringing home their grass-stained clothes to their loving wives? Well, they weren’t really landing on the grass when they were tackled, were they? They were actors. We laid mattresses down for them. They were landing on mattresses! Gotcha, TV America! But anyway, my question to YOU, JIMBO, is this: when Captain Murdoch throws his grenades at the BAD GUYS, and the BAD GUYS go leaping up, do those BAD GUYS have mattresses, too? Wouldn’t it hurt, JIMBO, to have a grenade explode and to be NOWHERE NEAR a mattress?’”

When that got forwarded, we just thought Tom was having a good time with his old friend Smalls. Convincing Amber of that, of course, was impossible. It sent us right back to square one with her. She even pressed and pressed until we were forced to agree that at the very least, the variance in tone between the two e-mails indicated that Tom Mota had his bad hours along with his good.

AFTER LEARNING OF THE CHANGE to the project, Genevieve stepped out of the office and walked down Michigan Avenue to the Borders near the Water Tower, where she purchased a few books. She came back to the office and started reading. Halfway through a breast cancer survivor’s memoir, she was interrupted by Joe. “Hey,” he said, knocking on her open door.

“Oh, this stuff is just way too emotional,” she said. “Oh, I have to stop reading it.” She put the book down. She stretched her face out and ran her fingers under her eyes to dry them. “Oh,” she said. She took a deep breath and sighed.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yes. I’m okay.”

“I just stopped by to make sure you were clear on what we’re doing.”

They were a team, Joe and Genevieve, copywriter and art director, and they worked together in greater harmony than the majority of other teams. “I guess so,” she said finally. “Although to be honest, I can’t imagine coming up with anything.”

He moved inside and sat down across from her. “Why not?”

“So I’m reading this memoir, right?” she said, lifting the book off her desk and setting it down again. “And basically it’s all sadness. It’s panic, fear, anguish, a lot of bravery. There’s some crying. Everyone in the family is wonderful. The woman’s brother quits his job to take care of his sister. He’s a saint. The woman is a hero. Because there’s nothing but bad news for her, and then more bad news. But every once in a while there’s a little dollop of humor. Without it, trust me, you’d kill yourself reading it. Like the brother comes in, right. The woman has just found out like two pages earlier that her cancer’s not responding to the treatments. Then the brother comes in — he’s shaved his head so she won’t be the only one who’s bald. He comes in wearing a big, bushy blond wig, and the woman just dies laughing for how ridiculous he looks. And you die, too, it’s such a relief. But of course midway through laughing, she breaks down into tears for how much she loves him, how good he is to her — I mean, he’s just her brother, for god’s sake. He isn’t required to, to. . oh, and here I go again,” said Genevieve, returning her fingers to just below her eyes. She let out a long sigh. “The point I’m trying to make,” she said, grabbing a tissue forcefully from a box on the desk, “is that there is really very little humor in a diagnosis of cancer. And what humor there is, is humorous only in the context of a whole lot of sadness. Now, how can we be expected to do that with a stock photo and a ten-word headline?”

Joe sat back in the chair. “Yeah,” he said. “I agree.”

“You do?”

No one ever expected Joe Pope to say something was hard because, when it came to thinking up ads, the guy was something of a savant.

“Make the cancer patient laugh,” he said, and his voice got quiet. “Isn’t this assignment a little screwy?”

THE IMPORTANT THING was that it was our screwy assignment, and it was all we had. By late afternoon Genevieve had finished her memoir, while Hank Neary, combing carefully through Internet sites, could soon pass himself off as a practicing oncologist. Benny Shassburger took the opposite approach. He found a stock photo of a beautiful woman draping herself across the red felt of a pool table. He doctored it in Photoshop by covering her breasts with surgical masks. That, he thought, was a brilliant image. The cancer patient would really laugh once he had the right headline in place. Two hours went by before he condemned the brilliant image to the dustbin of bad ideas and moved himself down to the coffee bar for a late-afternoon latte.

Jim Jackers got on the phone and started calling people. With no inspiration and frightened by the blank page, his only recourse was the imaginations of other people. He caught his mother, a librarian, at the checkout desk of the Woodridge Public Library.

“Let’s say you have breast cancer,” he began.

“Oh, Jim,” she whispered, “please let’s not even think about it.”

She quickly changed subjects, asking him what he wanted for dinner. His mother was a sensitive and superstitious woman who believed even the most casual mention of disease was a morbid flirtation with death that conjured bad luck and evil spirits and should be avoided at all costs. He should have known better than to call her first.