Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

In the next instant, there was a flurry of activity. Hank reemerged from his office and disappeared around the same corner he had lately come from, Marcia returned around the same corner where she had lately disappeared, and Reiser, in need of a hallway break, limped out of his office to the right of Benny. Reiser gripped the Louisville Slugger he kept in one corner of his office and tapped it on the heel of his shoe, as if approaching home plate. Larry and Amber, on the other side of Benny, suddenly spilled out into the hallway too, trying to contain a quiet, fierce disagreement just as Marcia approached, forcing her to pass tenderly between the two lovers as if trying to avoid a land mine. She was preparing to pass Benny with nothing more than a grimace of discomfort for having to walk past such office awkwardness. Benny thought it wiser to whisper than to wail, so very casually he reached out and took Marcia’s arm. She was wearing the pink cotton hoodie she wore whenever she complained of being cold. Beneath it, her arm was soft and thin and felt good in his hand.

“Marcia,” he said. “Tom Mota might be back in the building.”

TOM MOTA TOOK THE EXPRESS elevator past sixty all the way up to sixty-two. Sixty, sixty-one, and sixty-two were connected by interior stairs, so anyone could move freely between them. No one saw Tom as he stepped from the elevator.

He must have walked straight and then taken a right at the wall that dead-ended at the print station. He walked on until he reached the hallway juncture, allowing him to go in either direction. He chose to proceed left, passing the men’s and women’s restrooms to his right, turned left again, and walked down that hallway, flanked on one side by beige cubicle walls and on the other by the windowed offices coveted by those inside the beige cubicles. Overhead the ceiling panels alternated, two white tiles for every panel of fluorescent light. Tom proceeded to walk on the beige carpet beneath them.

Andy Smeejack was sitting behind his desk in one of the windowed offices, trying with his stubby, maladroit fingers to crack a hard-boiled egg. Andy was in Account Management. Cracking it was easy — he held the egg like a polished stone and tapped it softly against the edge of his desk. He had laid a napkin down where he planned to collect the bits of shell, but that particular egg clung to each and every piece like a stubborn, protective motherland, and Andy was forced to get surgical on it — probably a comical sight, this hulking, dieting giant patiently picking off the shell of his desperately meager, entirely unsatisfying lunch. He was loath to yield even a fraction of rubbery egg white to the smallest bit of shell. Unfortunately, his clumsy fingers were much more spry at grabbing juicy Italian beef sandwiches and greasy fat cheeseburgers, and now large swaths of his lunch were being ripped off in his haste, leaving him with a moon-cratered egg darkened by the gray yolk inside. When he finally looked up, taking half the egg in his mouth, he saw the clown standing in eerie, carnivalesque incongruity in his doorway. The clown’s face was painted bright red, with a broad white band encircling his mouth. A fat red ball made of foam was attached to his nose. The clown’s head was a carrot-colored mass of jubilant curls, and his oversized bow tie was red and white striped. He wore suspenders and baggy blue pants. Andy, halted from chewing and unable to say much with his mouth full, looked closer at the clown. He was holding a backpack in one hand, and in the other. .

Tom and Andy once got into a shouting match over a miscommunication that resulted in the missing of an important deadline, and neither of them had ever forgotten it.

“You know what’s so great about a silencer, Smeejack?” Tom asked, raising the gun. He pulled the trigger. “It silences,” he said.

“OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD,” Amber kept saying. She placed her hands on her still-flat belly and all that was just then growing inside. Her plump knees buckled a little, and Larry had to reach out for her. “Amber,” he said. “Amber, we should move. We should move, Amber.” Benny and Marcia exchanged a look.

“Amber,” Benny repeated, “I don’t know for sure that he’s even in the building, do you understand?”

“Oh my god, oh my god.”

Larry was holding her up by her arms. “Amber, let’s just move, okay? Let’s not stay here.”

“She might be hyperventilating,” said Benny.

“Benny,” said Marcia, “there’s Joe.”

Benny looked down the hall just as Joe was entering his office at the far end, near the elevators.

“Oh my god, oh my god.”

Her panicky, tear-inflected singsong quavered as if she had already been witness to unspeakable violence.

“Larry, Marcia and I are going down to tell Joe,” said Benny, “so it’s up to you to get her to calm down.”

“What do you think I’m trying to do here?” asked Larry. “Amber, are you listening to Benny? You have to calm down. We’re going to take the emergency stairs, okay? Let’s just take the emergency stairs.”

But Amber didn’t want to take the emergency stairs. She didn’t want to take the elevator because he was coming up in the elevator. She didn’t want to go back into her office because he was coming for her in her office. To go anywhere at all she had to walk the hall, and the hall was the worst place of all, exposed and defenseless and easily targeted, so she remained frozen, trying not to collapse, saying over and over, “Oh my god, oh my god,” as copious and automatic tears flowed easily from her eyes and Larry tried to coax her, convince her, wake her, budge her — something, anything, before Tom Mota showed his face.

Benny and Marcia hurried down to Joe’s office. While they had been wasting time with Amber, Joe had left it again.

SMEEJACK LOOKED DOWN at his classic oxford and tie at the place where he had been shot and was astonished by the bright red color and how quickly it had appeared and how smartly he stung beneath it, and randomly it came back to him, the vivid memory of shopping for the shirt at the big-and-tall store in the Fox Valley Mall, the Muzak and burbling fountain, and the popcorn and the hot pretzel he ate, and he couldn’t repress the thought, “My last meal was an egg.” Then out loud he said, “Ow. Fuck.” And a little yolk flew from his mouth.

He called 911 and realized that he couldn’t speak. He spit the egg violently from his mouth. “Please send an ambulance,” he said. Then he began to cry.

By then Tom had moved on.

CARL GARBEDIAN WAS SINGING. Genevieve Latko-Devine was sure of it. Sure that someone was singing, anyway, and from where she sat in her office on sixty-one, she believed it was coming from next door — yes, from Carl’s office. Singing! Really it was more like an atonal mumble, and she hadn’t picked up on it immediately, as all her energy and attention were dedicated to coming up with caffeinated water concepts. But at some point the warble reached the outer limit of her radar, and she thought, “Is Carl singing?” So she got up from her desk and entered the hallway and crept along the few feet of wall separating her doorway from Carl’s, and sure enough, he was singing. He had a mirthless, workaday voice, half the words were unknown to him, and he kept repeating the same stanza over and over again — but it was in fact a song:

“He got himself a homemade special

Something something full of sand

And it feels just like a something

The way it fits into his hand. .”

Carl Garbedian was singing! He was offering hellos in the morning, he was saying good evenings at night, and now at midday, he was singing. And it wasn’t the mad loud caterwauling spontaneously indulged during his whacked-out days of popping Janine Gorjanc’s pills. No, this was regular old passing-the-time, happy-to-be-alive singing. She thought this surprising show of life might have something to do with the possibility that Carl and his wife were reconciling. If Carl had only known how delighted his simple singing made her! She wouldn’t do something so stupid as interrupt and explain — that would only ruin the moment, and make them both feel awkward. But if she could have communicated to him how his singing was a simple reinforcement of something essential, which commonly went missing on a day-to-day basis — that his singing was to her what Marcia’s haircut had been to him — he might have organized a talent show and performed a number from A Chorus Line with gold-spangled top hat and cane.