Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

The first elevator arrived, and lunchgoers from the law firm emerged. Tom held his empty mug before them. “Help out the unemployed?” he asked them, shaking the cup. “Hey, help out the jobless?”

“Tom,” said Benny.

“Benny, get the fuck off me! — Help me out, guy, please? I just lost my job today.”

And that was Tom’s final hour.

We heard it from Benny just after he told us the story of how Tom arrived at the Naperville house with an aluminum bat when he knew the children were at the grandmother’s and everything deemed legally “Tom’s” in the divorce settlement, everything that was “Tom’s” and could be smashed or shattered with an aluminum bat, suffered Tom’s swing until the authorities arrived to subdue him.

Amber Ludwig, who had the compact, athletic body of a seal, with very small hands and dark, closely set eyes, said she feared Tom was going to return like you hear on the news and open fire. “No, seriously,” she said. “I think he’s come undone. I don’t think he was ever done to begin with.”

Amber wasn’t showing yet but everyone already knew. She was debating an abortion but, to Larry Novotny’s great disappointment, looked to be leaning against it. Larry would have to decide what to do about his wife, who had just had a child herself not that long ago. We felt sorry for Larry, who worried the curved, finger-smudged bill of his Cubs cap endlessly that spring, but we also thought it was pretty obvious that he should have kept his pecker in his pants. We felt sorry for Amber, too, but as everyone knows, it takes two to tango. We just hoped they weren’t doing it on our desks.

We asked Amber if she really, honestly thought Tom capable of a bloodbath.

“Yes,” she said. “I wouldn’t put anything past him. He’s a madman.”

We tried to convince her that that sort of thing happened only in factories and warehouses, and then only on the South Side. A debate ensued. Was Tom certifiable? Or was he just a clown? What was that at Janine’s little girl’s funeral, when he wept and continued weeping even after we got to the bar? Wasn’t that proof the guy had a heart?

“Okay,” said Amber, “okay, but what do you call standing on the heating vent and mooning the swimmers from his office window? What was that?” she asked.

She was referring to the Holiday Inn rooftop pool Tom’s office looked down on, and Tom’s tendency to get right up to the glass with his butt cheeks. Hijinks! we cried. Fun! That’s not insanity. Amber was outvoted. We knew Tom. We knew Alan Glew, Linda Blanton, Paul Saunier. We knew Neil Hotchkiss and Cora Lee Brower and Harold Oak. They weren’t any of them coming back here with a nightmare in a backpack. They had been let go. They packed their things. They left us for good, never to return.

IT WAS A SURPRISE to everyone when Janine came back. Of course it was understood she could come back whenever she wanted. We just didn’t think, given all she had gone through, that coming back here, resuming the old routine — how could that ease her suffering? But maybe it was exactly what she needed, something to take her mind off it. She looked older, especially in the eyes. Her blouses were all wrinkled. Her brown hair was flat and dry where before she had styled it every day, and some days she smelled bad. Her first day back, she thanked us for the flyers. Lynn Mason had had the idea of printing up flyers when we heard that the girl had gone missing. Genevieve Latko-Devine, arguably the kindest and sweetest among us, drove out to North Aurora, where the Gorjancs lived, to get a photograph of Jessica. She returned to the office by noon with a fourth-grade school portrait. We scanned it, loaded it onto the server, and began to build the ad.

Genevieve was at the computer doing the work. Jessica was a plain girl with fair hair and pale skin and an unfortunately crooked smile. We told Genevieve that Jessica was getting washed out.

“What do you want me to do about that?” she asked.

“Let’s work on her,” said Joe Pope. “Drop her into Photoshop.”

We worked on Macs. Some of us had new Macs, some had high-powered notebooks, and some unfortunate souls had to pedal furiously under their desks to keep a spark running through their extinct models. We made layouts in QuarkXPress; all our image manipulation we did in Photoshop. Genevieve dropped the image of the girl into Photoshop and started playing up the girl’s hair and freckles. We took a look and everyone agreed she was still getting washed out.

“Try making this area here darker,” said Joe, circumscribing the girl’s face with a finger. “God, your screen is filthy,” he added. He removed a tissue from her box and dusted it. He took a new look. “Now she’s more washed out than ever.”

Genevieve tried a few things. We looked at the girl. Joe shook his head. “Now she looks sunburned,” he said. “Bring it back some.”

“I think we’re losing sight of what our ultimate goal is here,” said Genevieve.

But we feared that if she was washed out, people would look right past the flyer.

Genevieve didn’t lack for more suggestions. “Pump ‘MISSING’ up a little,” said Jim Jackers.

“And play up the $10,000 reward,” suggested Tom. “I don’t know how, just. . use a different font or something.”

“And you have some kerning issues,” Benny reminded her from the sidelines.

We all wanted to help. Genevieve worked on it another hour, tweaking this and that, until someone recommended that she fix the little girl’s smile to be less crooked. Jessica would look prettier that way.

“All right,” she concluded, “we’re officially through here.”

That afternoon we ripped color print after color print and scored them in the mount room. Several of us drove out to North Aurora and spent the evening posting them — in the public library, the YMCA, the entrance aisles of the grocery stores, in the Starbucks and movie theaters and in the Toys“ R”Us, and on all the neighborhood telephone poles. Three days later she was found in an empty lot wrapped in plastic sheeting.

We put up bunting and had cake for Janine’s return. Next day Joe Pope found her crying in front of the mirror in the men’s room. She had gotten confused and gone through the wrong door. It was rare to get news by way of Joe Pope, since he didn’t talk to many people, so we probably shouldn’t have known that he found Janine in the men’s room. But he did talk to Genevieve Latko-Devine, and Genevieve talked to Marcia Dwyer, and Marcia talked to Benny Shassburger, and Shassburger talked to Jim and Amber, who talked to Larry and Dan Wisdom and Karen Woo, and Karen never met anybody she didn’t talk to. Sooner or later everyone found out everything, which is how we came to know that Janine was not over her grief, not by a long shot, because she had gotten confused and wandered into the men’s room. We pictured her at the sinks, holding on to the marble ledge for support, her head downcast and her tired eyes shedding momentous tears, oblivious to the urinals in the mirror. After her return, she almost never spoke at lunch.

We talked about Janine wandering into the men’s room. No one thought it should be kept a secret, but we were careful not to ridicule the event or turn it into a joke. A few of us did, but not many. It was obviously a tragic thing. We knew about it, but how could we possibly know the first thing about it? Some of us discussed the matter to break up the routine, but most of us used the information to explain why she was quiet at lunch. Then we filed the incident away. That is, until Janine started bringing pictures of Jessica into the office and placing them on the credenza and the bookshelves and hanging them from the walls. The pictures crowded in, elbowing each other for room. A hundred pictures of her dead daughter in the seventy-five square feet of her office. The three on the wall facing her were the most mournful things we’d ever seen. It was also downright creepy. It got to the point where we tried to avoid entering her office. When we were forced to, for some pressing item of business, we never knew where to rest our eyes.