Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

“So why do you need me in there at all?”

“I need you. .” she said. She bit her nail again while thinking and then said, “I don’t need you, to be honest. I’ll go in there on my own, if I have to. I’d like you in there because I think you can make the difference. Everyone knows Lynn’s opinion of you.”

He was skeptical. “What does everyone think they know about Lynn’s opinion of me?”

“That she respects you,” she said. “That you’re a voice of reason. That she listens to your suggestions and delegates to you and even defers to you. She doesn’t do that with the rest of us.”

“I think,” said Joe, “that what most of them see is Lynn and me talking, they see me in her office at night and they think whatever it is they want to think.”

“Well,” she said, “what should they think? Don’t you talk privately with her?”

“But about what, Genevieve? It isn’t. . is Larry screwing Amber? It’s not what pathetic thing did Carl do today. We’re not talking personal matters, we’re discussing business. We’re talking about ways to keep this place from going under.”

She left it at that. He had said no. Not out of any lack of sympathy, but for his own perhaps valid reasons, and better to stay friends than to push too hard. And besides, she was startled to hear him say so baldly, We’re trying to keep this place from going under. Such an admission momentarily distracted her from the question of Lynn’s health. When it got around, it distracted us, too.

But the first thing he did when he got back to his desk was call Genevieve on the phone.

“So if it’s so important to them,” he said, “if they’re so concerned, why don’t they go in and talk to her? What’s stopping them?”

“She’s an intimidating person.”

“So they’re cowards.”

“That’s a little harsh,” she said. “Haven’t you ever been intimidated?”

“Of course,” he said. “But if I feel strongly about something, I go in with my knees knocking and try to get the job done.”

“And that’s why you are where you are,” she said, “and they are where they are. That’s the difference between you and them, Joe.”

He hung up the phone, no change in his decision. Within fifteen minutes he knocked again and shut the door and sat down. His seat was practically still warm from their earlier conversation. “So because Karen Woo makes a telephone call, Lynn has cancer?” he said. “Do you know who we’re talking about here? These people get things very, very wrong, Genevieve. It’s the same group that’s absolutely convinced that Tom Mota’s coming back here to blow everyone to pieces.”

“Hold on,” she said. “That’s unfair. There are only a few people who actually believe that. And then maybe just Amber. Most of them don’t think that.”

“But they sure do talk about it. And talk, and talk, and talk. But okay, forget that. One time, I overheard Jim Jackers saying that he believes Freemasons rule the world. Jim Jackers doesn’t even know what a Freemason is. ”

“Jim Jackers is only one of many,” she said.

“I listened to Karen Woo give an explanation of photosynthesis once,” he said. “God only knows why they were discussing photosynthesis. They hung on her every word, like she was a PBS special. Her explanation didn’t even involve sunlight. These people will believe anything. They will say anything.”

“Joe —”

“Genevieve, you know the way things work here. One person says something at lunch, and next you know they’re all walking into Lynn’s office as one big mob to carry her over to the hospital for a disease she might not have. These people — you can’t trust anything they say.”

“I had no idea you were such a cynic, Joe.”

“No,” he said, “it’s not cynicism.” He leaned back in his chair. “Trust me. Not just yet it’s not.”

He left, and that really should have been the end of it. But as she sat trying to concentrate on her work, bits and pieces of their conversation kept nagging at her, objections she had been too slow to consider came to her suddenly, subtleties she had let pass now demanded she speak for them.

She found him on the phone. She waited for him to get off without taking a seat. “‘These people,’” she said, when his call ended. “You kept saying that. You said it several times — ‘these people.’ I want to know what you meant by it.”

“What do you mean,” he said, “what did I mean by it?”

“When somebody says ‘these people,’” she said, “you can hear it, can’t you, Joe? A little condescension? I’m just wondering what sort of opinion you have of the people who work for you.”

He leaned back in his chair and clasped his hands together behind the back of his head. “They don’t work for me,” he said. “They work for Lynn.”

“Oh, you know what I mean,” she said.

“Genevieve, I’m not really their boss. I’m not Lynn. But I’m not really one of them, either. I’m caught somewhere between being a partner, and being the guy in the cubicle, and they know that, so they come to me for certain things if it’s in their interest, but on the other hand, if they don’t like something, I’m usually the one they blame.”

“And for that,” said Genevieve, and she began to count off on her fingers, “you have a better title than the rest of us, you make more money, and you have a lot more job security.”

She had yet to sit down. Neither of them spoke. You didn’t talk about money or job security during a time of layoffs, not in the tone she had taken, and not when you were friends. The silence extended into awkward territory.

“You’re right,” he said at last. He let his hands fall from his head to the padded armrests of his chair. “I have advantages others don’t, and I shouldn’t complain about the price I might have to pay for those advantages. I’m sorry if I came across as some kind of martyr or something.”

“And I wasn’t trying to be snide just then,” she said, finally sitting down, reaching out to touch the edge of his desk as if it were a surrogate for his hand. “You do get mistreated here. I don’t blame you if you’re frustrated. But you kept saying ‘these people,’” she said, “lumping everyone together, and that didn’t sound fair to me, Joe. Because some of them happen to be good people.”

“I agree,” he said.

“But then you lump them all together as ‘these people’ who will ‘say anything’ and ‘believe anything,’ and it just makes you sound like an elitist.”

Which was the criticism we made of Joe most often — that he was aloof, that he held himself apart, that he held himself above. More than the juvenile speculation over his sexual orientation, more than the exaggerated claim of his social awkwardness, it was his elitism we kept coming back to time and again, like the stereotype that must have some truth to it if it gains such traction. “An elitist,” he said, as if hearing the word for the first time.

“I’m not saying you are one,” she said. “I’m just saying that I’m one of ‘those people’ this time, because I happen to think they’re right — I think something’s wrong with her. So when you lump me in with a guy who believes Freemasons rule the world — which I’m not sure he actually does, by the way. I think he might just think he’s being funny. Jim’s very desperate to be funny. He’s very desperate to be liked. But, anyway, you can’t dismiss all of us just because of Jim Jackers.”

He looked at her. He swiveled almost imperceptibly in his chair. “An elitist,” he said again — not defensively, but with a tone of curiosity, as if Genevieve had just introduced him to a new word. “What is an elitist?” he asked.