Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

“I’ll stay home for you and wait for the cable guy,” she said.

Lynn looked at her. “I’m sorry?”

“If you need me to,” she said. “I’ll come over and wait for him.”

Lynn laughed, but not in a mocking way. It was a gentle expression of surprise. “That’s okay,” she said. “I’ll manage it somehow. Maybe my doorman can let him in.”

Amber’s sympathy for Lynn during the days we believed she had cancer had permeated so deeply into her psyche that even now, when the rumor had been retired, she still looked upon Lynn as ailing and in need of help. It was absurd and touching. Lynn changed subjects.

“Sorry, what are you guys here for again?” she asked. “Did we have a meeting?”

We all turned to Joe Pope. He reminded her that she had asked to see concepts for the pro bono ad —

“Oh, shit,” she interrupted. “That was today, wasn’t it?”

He nodded.

Lynn placed fingertips at her temples. “Joe, it completely slipped my mind.” She shook her head. She looked around. “I’m sorry, guys. My mind is entirely on this new business.”

“Should we come back?” he asked.

Simultaneously we all fell to the hard carpet and began to pray. We prostrated ourselves before her, our pathetic and undeserving selves, and pleaded for mercy. More time — please give us more time! It must be said: we were a small, scared, spineless people. In reality we sat perfectly still, silently holding our breath.

“No no,” she said. “Show me what you got.”

“Well,” he said, “after the change came in from the client —”

“Change?” she said. “What change?”

“The e-mail you forwarded me?”

“Oh, right,” she said. “Remind me?”

Remind me? What the hell was going on here? We had spent hours and hours speculating on the nature of this pro bono project, and she didn’t seem to recall the first thing about it. So Joe explained the change, as well as the difficulties we had been encountering. He went so far as to suggest that what the client now requested might be impossible to achieve, but if we were to achieve it, we’d certainly need more time.

“Well, that’s the one thing we no longer have,” she said. “Our first priority is to win this new business for the agency. We can’t waste any more time on charity work.”

She asked us if we had generated concepts for the fund-raiser. We all said we did.

“Then bring them to me,” she said. “That’s what they wanted initially, that’s what they’re getting.”

So we left her office to retrieve our fund-raiser concepts. When we returned, she looked through them and, in the end, chose Karen Woo’s “Loved Ones” campaign. It was disgusting to look over and see Karen’s face just then. Lynn asked Karen to forward them to her. She would PDF them over to the client herself. “And if they don’t like them,” she concluded, “they can find a new agency. Because right now, we have bigger fish to fry.”

“Lynn,” said Karen. “How come I can’t find any presence for this Alliance Against Breast Cancer on the Internet?”

“Karen,” said Joe.

“Thank you for your hard work, everyone,” said Lynn.

And with that, our pro bono project came to an end.

BECAUSE OF THE NEW BUSINESS, we didn’t have much of a chance to talk over this unexpected development. We had an input meeting midmorning during which we discussed the caffeinated water client and their needs. Directly after that we had another input meeting to go over the creative needs of the running shoe manufacturer. We all knew the importance of winning new business, so after these meetings we returned to our desks and started to brainstorm.

And so it was a full office when, near noon, Benny got a call from Roland. Roland was manning the front desk of the downstairs lobby, midway through a double shift. Benny had noticed that on days Roland worked a double shift, his eyes were glassy and red and stuck at half mast, that he yawned every thirty seconds, throwing his oblong, open-mouthed face up like a wolf howling at the moon, and that he sometimes stole away to fifty-nine for a twenty-minute nap. This was a postretirement gig for Roland so he could supplement his Social Security. Who was going to begrudge the man twenty minutes? According to Benny, the naps were badly needed. “One Friday,” Benny told us once, “he kept calling me Brice. I didn’t say anything to him because I knew he knew my name and I didn’t want to embarrass him, but Brice? Why Brice?” Jim Jackers suggested “Lenny” would have been more likely, or even “Timmy.” “Timmy makes more sense than Brice,” said Jim. “At least it rhymes with Benny.” “Jim, Nancy makes more sense than Brice,” said Benny. “Who calls somebody Brice? Anyway, I didn’t say anything to him, and by Monday he was calling me Benny again. It’s those double shifts, man. They muddle his brain.”

When Benny picked up the phone, Roland told him that he believed Tom Mota might be in the building. “And maybe he just got on the express elevator,” he added. “What do you mean maybe?” asked Benny. Later, when recounting the story, Benny thought it was perfectly possible the man was hallucinating, given that it was a Friday and he was on the tail end of a double shift. “What makes you think it was even Tom?” he asked. But instead of listening to Roland’s response, in his head, Benny heard Amber. Again he dismissed her prognostications of Tom’s return as the anxieties of a worrying homebody. He trusted in Tom’s better instincts and wasn’t inclined to think that anyone was in any immediate danger. But regardless of how he felt, if Tom really was back, some people would definitely want to know. There was also the possibility that Benny knew nothing about Tom’s better instincts. “Why are you calling me about this?” Benny suddenly interrupted Roland in midspeech.

“. . and said he had a package to deliver,” Roland continued, “so I sent him up on the express elevator. Because I can’t get ahold of Boroshansky,” Roland added, belatedly answering Benny’s question, “and I thought somebody up there should know about this.”

“Wait, Roland — you mean to say he approached you, and you looked at him, and you still can’t be sure it was him?”

“Because of the makeup!” cried Roland, exasperated.

“What makeup?”

“Haven’t you been listening to me?”

Benny hadn’t heard a word he’d said. “No,” he said. “What are you talking about, makeup?”

“Hold on a second,” said Roland. “That’s Mike on the Motorola.”

Benny waited. What was he waiting for? Instructions from a bleary-eyed, untrained security guard with scant natural aptitude for his post, debilitated by a double shift. The smart thing would be to hang up. He waited. Roland came back on.

“Benny? Yeah, it’s Roland.”

“Well, who else would you be?” Benny replied impatiently.

“Mike thinks you should warn people.”

Benny hung up. He walked out into the hallway. To his left he caught sight of Marcia, who at that instant had reached the end of the hallway, turned left, and disappeared, leaving nothing but the dusty leaves of the fake potted tree to quiver in her wake. He thought of running after her, but he was distracted by movement to his right. Hank had rounded the opposite corner in perfect synchronization with Marcia and then he, too, disappeared, into his office. Benny was left to stare at the other potted tree, the mirror image of the one he just turned away from. For the briefest moment he stood frozen, equidistant from both trees, uncertain what to do.

Roland couldn’t say for sure that the man he had seen was Tom, so Benny couldn’t say for sure that it was Tom coming up on the express elevator. Even if it was him, Benny couldn’t say that Tom intended anyone any harm. He had no instinct for what to do with the limited information he did have. Should he start to scream? Cower under his desk? Or should he go stand by the elevator and be the first to greet Tom? During that brief moment, the empty hallway felt possessed of a haunted tranquillity that gave the impression that all down the hall, and down the other hallways and offshoots of hallways and the passageways between cubicle partitions, the offices and workstations had been suddenly and irrevocably vacated, and that all the corporate, animating, human life that once burbled and cackled and Xeroxed and inputted had ended with an inextricable filing away, and that all the days spent here, the time served, the camaraderie enjoyed, were now casualties of some unhappy, indeterminate fate.