Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

“Can you believe it’s only three-fifteen?” Amber asked Larry Novotny. You bet Larry could believe it was three-fifteen. Larry could believe it was eleven-fifty-nine and the clock was about to strike midnight and the governor had yet to call. Time was seriously running out for Larry. Was she or was she not going to have the abortion? It wasn’t something he could ask every fifteen minutes, certainly not every five minutes, though time moved for him now in five-minute intervals, at the end of which he debated asking her once again if she was going to do it or what. He usually decided against asking her again, having asked only twelve five-minute intervals ago, which, before all this started, was only an hour, but which now felt more like twelve or even fourteen hours. Amber had made it clear that she did not want to be asked every hour if she was going to have an abortion.

“Are they still down there?” she asked Larry. “What do you think they’re doing down there?”

Larry got up and peeked his head down the hall to Lynn Mason’s office where the door remained closed. They had seen Genevieve and Joe enter ten minutes ago, or nearly two hours ago, according to Larry’s new clock, and during those ten minutes Larry had debated seriously with himself, twice, whether or not to bring the matter up again with Amber. On his return he slapped his cap on his jeans three times and then screwed it on his head, nodding in the affirmative. They were still down there.

“What do you think they’re talking about?” she asked.

Larry thought they were probably talking about whether or not Amber should have the abortion. They were probably discussing the misfortune Larry was facing, and how little desired it was that he tell his wife not only that he was having an affair but that the woman was pregnant and intended to keep the baby. There was no way to put a good spin on that, no way of saying cheerfully, “Charlie’s going to have a half brother!”

“How long have they been in there?” asked Amber. “Ten minutes? It feels more like twenty.”

“It feels more like two hours,” said Larry.

It was disappointing and a little irritating that Amber was fixated on a crisis unraveling in some other office when the more significant crisis was taking place right here. “Have you, uh. .” he began, “thought any more about, uh —”

She had been working the little white lever on a windup toy. It was a kid’s toy from a Happy Meal, a cheeseburger with a sesame seed bun and all the fixings painted on. It also had a pair of enormous white feet. At last the toy could be wound no further and she leaned over in her chair and set the cheeseburger down on the carpeting. Some slight imperfection in the feet made it go in a gradual circle, which it did over and over again until finally it died and the room went silent again.

When she looked him in the eye at last he noticed her eyes had reddened. Oh, no, he thought. Not this again. He removed his cap once more and smoothed back his hair. Then he put the cap back on.

“I go back and forth,” she said.

JIM JACKERS WAS HARD at work on the pro bono ads and had been working on them steadily for a few hours, since his return from helping Chris Yop throw his chair into Lake Michigan. Looking up from the blank page to the blinking clock, he discovered it was only three-fifteen. He decided that today was perhaps the longest day of his life. Not only had he been called an idiot to his face, but he could do nothing to counter that opinion, because he couldn’t come up with even a single funny thing to say about breast cancer.

“WHAT TIME IS IT, JOE?” asked Lynn Mason.

Joe glanced down at his watch. “Three-fifteen,” he answered.

She reached up to set the hands of a grandfather clock. It was standing against the far wall, to the left of the white leather sofa, and it was a testament to how cluttered that office had been before she and the office coordinator cleared everything away that none of us had any memory of a grandfather clock. It had blended into the background along with everything else, or had perhaps been obscured by lawyers’ boxes full of old files. Or perhaps we were just not very perceptive people. But now that the layers of old magazines, dead files, and the like had been removed, it was possible to discern an attempt to make her office look like a proper one. The desk was located farthest from the door, so that when she sat at it, she could see everything before her — the door itself, the glass-top table to the left, the bookshelves and antique armchair against the right wall, and the sofa and the grandfather clock looking back at her from the far wall.

Ten minutes earlier, Genevieve and Joe’s knock had interrupted her at her cleaning. Most of the work had been done the day before, but that afternoon she had been called away by meetings with the other partners to discuss strategy for the two upcoming new business pitches. Now she was putting the final touches on what was essentially a brand-new office. She answered the knock on the door by calling out and Joe put his head in. “I’m here with Genevieve,” he said. “Do you have a minute?” She motioned them inside with a quick whip of a dirty rag. When Genevieve walked in behind Joe, she said, “Hi, Lynn.” “Come in,” said Lynn, “have a seat.” How odd to see Lynn Mason with a can of polish and a rag, bending in her skirt and buffing the wood to the side of her desk. They did as they were told and sat down in the twin chairs placed directly in front of her desk. Immediately they had to turn to their left as she moved on to polish the bookshelves and then the wood inlays on her antique armchair. While she worked, she told Joe that she had asked Mike Boroshansky to dedicate one of his guys full-time to their five floors.

“A security guy?” said Joe. “How come?”

“Because we just can’t take any chances,” she replied.

Genevieve thought she dusted the way she did everything else, with great gusto and command. It was the first time she had ever been intimidated by someone else’s dusting. She sat quietly.

“But Lynn,” he said, “there are only one or two people who genuinely believe he poses a threat. Most of it is just idle chatter.”

“It’s not just me, Joe. It’s the other partners,” she said.

She moved from the armchair over to the leather sofa behind them and began to wipe that down as well. Joe twisted in the chair to keep her in his sights and talked to her over the backrest. Genevieve chose to keep staring straight ahead.

“These recent e-mails to Benny and Jim,” Lynn was saying, “the way he left this place, his behavior toward his wife — the man destroyed all his belongings with a baseball bat. Now, I’m not saying I definitely think he’s on his way back here,” she said, looking at Joe during a brief interlude in her dusting, “but when he’s swept up in something, he doesn’t act right, not like a normal person, and I don’t think we can take the chance.”

She returned her attention to the sofa. “But how is one guy from security going to stop him if he does come back?” asked Joe. Genevieve was surprised by his contrariness, and had new insight into the openness of dialogue that passed between them when the rest of the team was out of the room.

But that wasn’t the real news. The real news was that Lynn Mason now entertained the notion of Tom Mota planning a return. That point of view had had only one serious spokesperson until then — Amber Ludwig, who worried about everything. Security had posted his picture at the lobby desk, but they were screwball comedies down there. Lynn Mason’s concern legitimized the idea. That was a new and uncomfortable development.

“We’re working on getting an order keeping him from the premises,” she said, “but in the meantime, Mike’s giving us a guy, and we’re putting him outside your office.”