Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

“It was a mole,” she said.

All look of disbelief drained from her face. Now she wore a deadpan, ice-cold, corporate expression that said, simply, this is none of your business. “It was a mole they feared was cancerous, and I had the appointment rescheduled, if you must know, because of the urgency of the new business pitches. Genevieve,” she said, glancing down at the letter opener which she had been fingering while Joe spoke, “will you excuse Joe and me, please?” When she looked up at Genevieve, Genevieve said of course and left the silent office and closed the door behind her.

“A mole?” said Marcia. “This whole time it was only a mole?”

After Marcia left we heard Genevieve talking on the phone to her husband, screaming at him, though he had done nothing, poor guy. But that someone somewhere had done something terribly wrong, she was dead certain. She knew she was angry. She knew something had to be done to someone. She just didn’t know exactly what.

“Who was it?” she demanded of us. “Who was the first to say it was cancer?” We tried to tell her, Genevieve, no one knows who. No one will probably ever know who. “Well, who spread it then?” she hollered. “Who was responsible for spreading it?” She was with us yesterday when we tried figuring that one out, we reminded her, and she knew as well as we did that it was almost impossible to say who spread it. “Then whose idea was it to send Joe in there?” she asked. “Was this just some elaborate hoax to get Joe?” Well, that was just crazy talk, and we told her so — delicately, and not in so many words, because by then she had worked herself up into a fury. “Why did I get involved?” she asked. “How could I have let myself get wrapped up in this?” Now she was addressing herself, and we had no answers for her. She threw up her hands and left our offices.

We thought Joe Pope handled the whole thing with equanimity. At one point, Jim Jackers called out as Joe passed by his cube. They didn’t say a word about Lynn Mason. Jim just wanted to know if it was true that the ads for the breast cancer patient were now running in Spanish. “Does that mean we should be gearing our message toward a Latino market?” he asked.

“That’s the first I’ve heard of that,” replied Joe. “I would be very surprised if that were true. Who gave you that information?”

“I think they’re playing a joke on me,” said Jim.

“I would have to assume it’s a joke,” Joe said. It was just about the funniest joke ever.

Late in the afternoon, Genevieve sent us a group e-mail — the address list was a foot long — that denounced our “tactics,” our “sham sentiments.” We were “pathetic” and “dumb.” We had been “led by the nose” to “set Joe up.” That was ridiculous — for who would we have allowed to take us by the nose? What an elaborate and fainthearted conspiracy she envisioned. She never used the word, but it was hard not to read between the lines. How could it be a conspiracy? Was someone — say, Karen Woo — so diabolical, so shrewd, so capable of manipulating circumstance, that she could pull off with such delicacy the very subtlest of conspiracies, by spreading an outlandish yet eminently believable rumor, and then distorting the conversation she had had on the phone with the nurse at Northwestern to seal the veracity of her lies and set the fall guy up? Wasn’t that a little far-fetched, even if none of us had actually heard what the nurse had said — or could confirm that there was even a nurse on the other end? And what real damage could she have hoped to achieve? This was not, as only Hank could put it, “the sweaty Moor’s murder of Desdemona.” No way, we thought, no way it was Karen Woo. If she really wanted to stick it to Joe, we gave her enough credit to bleed the fucker dry. Besides, Genevieve had to face facts. A conspiracy was an impossible thing to prove. The most anyone could say was that this was how these things worked, here and elsewhere. Mistakes were made. Accountability got lost.

“I am DONE,” she concluded in her e-mail, and went on to list all the things she would no longer be doing with us in the future. Lunch and after-work drinks, mainly. We had heard it before. We wondered how long it would last this time.

ORDERING CABLE — LYNN FORGETS — BACK TO THE FUND-RAISER — ROLAND CALLS BENNY — AN INDETERMINATE FATE — ANDY SMEEJACK’S LUNCH — WHAT’S GREAT ABOUT A SILENCER — AMBER FREAKS — CARL SINGS — A QUESTION OF COURAGE — LARRY’S REVELATION — CARL GETS WEIRDED-OUT — A CONVERSATION ABOUT WORK — THE MELEE BEGINS — CHICAGO’S FINEST

THE FACT THAT LYNN MASON did indeed have breast cancer came out eventually. By then it was no longer a subject of our speculation. We had moved on, or regressed, rather, back to the question of who would be the next to go. For the morning following Genevieve’s freak-out, when we woke up all across the city and the greater metropolitan area, we still had no concepts for the pro bono project.

We didn’t give up entirely. If nothing came to us in the hour between waking and leaving, we still had the commute to work and the ride up the elevator. We had coffee at our desks and the alchemical kick of insight it promised. What would make them laugh? The ailing, the nauseous, the prepped and stitched and scarred, the toxic, the irradiated — what would make them laugh? What was funny about frailty and bad luck, about limping home to await the bad news, about wheeling around an IV pole? What was ticklish about the possibility of death — a perfectly ordinary and thus utterly baffling death?

We met at Lynn’s office at the appointed time. The dread was palpable. We found her office clean and orderly. She was sitting behind the desk, inspecting her middle drawer for things that could be tossed into the trash. She gestured silently for us to enter, as she was on the phone. She tested a Bic that gave her nothing and so she threw it out. We took our seats, criminals on the trundle cart awaiting their turn at the gallows.

“I can’t believe how hard it is to arrange for a cable guy to come to your house,” she said, after hanging up. “It’s astonishing that anyone has cable at all. Do you guys have cable?” she asked.

We all said we did.

“So somebody had to stay home one day,” she said, “and wait for the cable guy to come?”

We weren’t sure how to answer that one. An honest response would reveal that there had been a day in our dark pasts when we had taken a morning off and stayed home to await the cable guy instead of coming in to work. We didn’t want her to think we’d ever choose cable over work. Work was what allowed us to afford cable. On the other hand, there were times when we came home and really needed to veg out with some cable, and those nights reminded us that we’d have feigned the flu for an entire week if that’s what it took to get cable.

“I’m just saying there has to be an easier way,” she said. “They can’t expect you to wait home on a Tuesday from ten to two for the cable guy to come, can they?”

“They got you by the balls,” said Jim Jackers.

To Lynn he said that. It was awful. We winced terribly.

“They do got you by the balls,” Lynn agreed.

“You don’t have cable already, Lynn?” asked Benny Shassburger.

“Rabbit ears,” she said. “Pathetic, I know. But I do get The Simpsons on rerun.”

We were amazed that Lynn watched The Simpsons. Nobody was more amazed than Benny, who asked her what her favorite episode was. She had an answer for him right away. It was different from Benny’s, although each of them knew and respected the other’s favorite episode. Soon they were reciting lines. To hear Lynn Mason quote Homer Simpson was shocking. More shocking, though, was the remark Amber made when she interrupted them.