Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

ON A TUESDAY IN MAY at twelve-fifteen in the afternoon, Lynn Mason scheduled an input meeting. We gathered in her office to be a part of it. Input meetings made us happy because they meant we had work to do. We worked in the creative department developing ads and we considered our ad work creative, but it wasn’t half as creative as the work we’d put in to pad our time sheets every Monday morning since layoffs began. An input meeting meant we’d have actual work that would make our time sheets less intimidating the following week. But some of us didn’t like input meetings when they were scheduled for twelve-fifteen. “That’s when most of us — hello? — go to lunch,” said Karen Woo. Lunch for Karen was a sacrament. “Why not schedule it for eleven-fifteen?” she asked. “Or even one o’clock?” Most of the rest of us just thought, no big deal, so lunch comes an hour late. “But I’m hungry,” said Karen. She didn’t seem to have much sympathy for the fact that Lynn Mason had just found out she had cancer and might have other things on her mind. Besides, Lynn could schedule an input whenever she wanted — she was a partner. “Of course she can schedule an input whenever she wants,” said Karen. “But ought she? That’s the question. Ought she.” Many of us thought Karen should consider herself lucky to still have a job.

While waiting for Lynn to arrive, we killed time listening to Chris Yop tell us the story of Tom Mota’s chair. We loved killing time and had perfected several ways of doing so. We wandered the hallways carrying papers that indicated some mission of business when in reality we were in search of free candy. We refilled our coffee mugs on floors we didn’t belong on. Hank Neary was an avid reader. He arrived early in his brown corduroy coat with a book taken from the library, copied all its pages on the Xerox machine, and sat at his desk reading what looked to passersby like the honest pages of business. He’d make it through a three-hundred-page novel every two or three days. Billy Reiser, who worked on another team and walked with a limp, was a huge Cubs fan. He had a friend who installed satellites. They gained illegal access to the roof, secured a remote satellite in an out-of-the-way place, and situated it so that the signal beamed off the next-door building into Billy’s office. Then Billy’s friend set up a television under his desk, mounted at an angle so if Billy was sitting just a foot back in his chair, he could look down and see the picture. When it was all through, he had two hundred stations and could watch the Cubs even on away games. We gathered down there in limited numbers when Sammy Sosa was going for the home run record. The problem was Billy was worried someone would find out about the satellite, so every time Sammy hit a homer and we cheered like mad, we got kicked out.

Tom Mota had been laid off the week before Chris Yop told us the story of his chair. Yop said he had been cleaning off his desk when he looked up and found the office coordinator standing in his doorway. Our office coordinator smelled of witch hazel and carpet fiber, had a considerable mole on her left cheek, and never said hello to anyone. It was rumored that, like an ant, her back could bear the burden of something several times her body weight. She stood in Yop’s doorway with her arms crossed, leaning against the doorjamb and peering in at Yop’s bookshelves. She asked if they were Tom Mota’s. “So I say to her,” Yop said to us, “‘Tom Mota’s? What, those?’ ‘The bookshelves,’ she says. ‘Are those Tom’s?’ ‘The bookshelves? No,’ I say, ‘those aren’t Tom’s. Those are mine.’ ‘Well, someone took Tom’s bookshelves out of his office,’ she says to me, ‘and I have to get them back.’ At this point, Tom’s been shitcanned, what? a day? This was last Tuesday — I mean, the body’s not even cold yet, and she’s standing in my doorway accusing me of stealing? So I repeat to her, I say, ‘Those aren’t his bookshelves, those are my bookshelves.’ But then she walks into my office, right, get this. She walks into my office and she says, ‘Is that his chair? Is that Tom’s chair you’re sitting on?’ She’s pointing at it, right. She thinks it’s his chair. It’s my chair. Those are his bookshelves, sure. I took them out of his office when he got shitcanned and brought them down to mine. But it’s for damn sure not his chair. It’s my chair! So I say, ‘This? This is my chair. This chair is mine.’ And she says, she walks into my office and stands very close to me, she says, she’s about a foot, maybe two feet from me, she says, pointing at my chair, ‘Do you mind if I look at the serial numbers?’ Now, who knew about this?” he asked us. “Who knew about these serial numbers?” None of us had ever heard anything about serial numbers. “Yeah, serial numbers,” Yop continued. “They keep serial numbers on the back of everything. That way they can track everything, who has what and what office it’s in. Did you know about this?”

We let him go on about the serial numbers because his outrage was typical of the time. Chris was a nervous man, and as he spoke, his whole face seemed to quiver. His animating hands shook a little, as if battling a caffeine dip. He had encouraged us to call him Yop because it made him feel younger, cooler, and more accepted. He kept his graying hair long, so it curled up near the ears, but age had thinned it on top. He was married to a woman named Terry and on weekends he played bad rock songs for a seventies cover band. He was always asking everyone what they were listening to these days. We considered it half-noble, half-pathetic when passing his office to hear some new rap album issuing from his CD player, when everyone knew what he really wanted to be listening to was Blood on the Tracks. We listened to his story about Tom Mota’s chair from various locations in Lynn’s cluttered office. She had a glass-top table and a white leather sofa and we hung in the doorway and leaned against the walls, killing time while waiting for her. Karen Woo kept looking at her watch and sighing because Lynn was running late to her own meeting.

“I was like, ‘Serial numbers?’” Yop continued. “And she says, she’s standing behind me, right, she says, ‘Have a look.’ So I get off my chair, I take a look — serial numbers! On the back of my chair! ‘Where’d these come from?’ I ask her. She doesn’t answer me. Instead she says, ‘Can I borrow a pen?’ She wants to borrow a pen so she can take down the serial numbers! I’m thinking, what sort of fascist organization — ‘Hello?’ I say. ‘This is my chair.’ But she’s not paying any attention to me — she’s taking down the serial numbers! Then she goes over to the buckshelves, she starts taking down the serial numbers on them and she says, ‘And what about these buckshelves?’ Now I’m in a fix, because I lied about the buckshelves, sure, but I’m telling the truth about the chair. I could give a shit about the buckshelves. Take the buckshelves. Just leave me my chair.”

We told Yop he meant to say bookshelves.

“What’d I say?” he asked us.

We told him he was saying buck shelves.

“Buckshelves?”

Right — at first it was book shelves, but then he started saying buck shelves.

“Listen, don’t pay any attention to me,” he said. “That’s just me getting my words wrong. The point is, take the bookshelves. Just leave me my chair. It’s my chair. ‘But are they yours? ’ she asks me. It’s a moral question for this woman, whose they are. So I say, ‘Yeah, they’re mine, but you take them, okay. I don’t want them anymore.’ I don’t want them anymore? Who wouldn’t want those bookshelves? But I don’t want to lose my chair — my legitimate chair, so I say, ‘Go ahead, take ’em.’”