Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

We didn’t want to interrupt him again, but we felt the need to remind him that it was her job, as the office coordinator, to keep track of office furniture and the like.

Yop ignored us. “What is that she has on her wrist?” he asked.

Yop was asking about the office coordinator’s tattoo. It was of a scorpion whose tail wrapped around her left wrist.

“Now why would a woman do that to herself?” he asked. “And why would we hire a woman who would do that to herself?”

It was a good question. We assumed he knew the joke.

“What’s the joke?” he asked.

The scorpion was there to protect her ring finger.

“Let me tell you something,” he said. “That’s funny, but that ring finger doesn’t need any protecting. But okay, whatever — she’s just doing her job. How we ever hired a person with a scorpion on her wrist is far beyond me, but okay, she’s doing her job. But that’s my legitimate chair. It’s my chair. She takes my chair, that’s not her mandate. So she says to me, she says, ‘Why would you offer me your buckshelves if, as you say, they’re really your buckshelves? I don’t want them if they’re yours,’ she says, ‘I only want them if they’re Tom’s. All of Tom’s stuff has disappeared and it’s my job to get it back.’ So I say, trying to act all innocent and unknowing, I say, ‘What all did they take?’ And she says, ‘Well, let’s see. His desk,’ she says. ‘His chair, his buckshelves, his —’”

We apologized for interrupting, but he was doing it again.

“What’s that?” he asked.

Saying buck shelves.

Yop raised his arms in the air. He was wearing a ratty Hawaiian shirt — the hair on his arms was going gray. “Will you listen to me, please?” he cried. “Will you all just please hear what I’m trying to say? I’m trying to tell you something really important here. They know everything! They knew everything we’d taken! So what choice did I have? ‘You can have the buckshelves, okay?’ I say to her. Just don’t take my chair. ‘But are they Tom’s? ’ she asks me. That’s what’s important to her. She wants to know, ‘Did you take these buckshelves from Tom’s office?’ And that’s when it hits me. I’m going to get shitcanned just because I took Tom’s buckshelves.”

Book shelves! we cried out.

“Right!” he cried back. “And for something as simple as that I’m going to get shitcanned! Hey, I have a mortgage. I have a wife. I’m a fucking professional. I get shitcanned this late in my career, that’s it for me. It’s a young man’s game. I’m too old. Who’s going to hire me if I get shitcanned? I see no alternative but to come clean, so I say to her, ‘Okay, listen. These buckshelves, right? I’ll get them back down to Tom’s office. I promise. I’m sorry.’ And she says, ‘But you’re not answering my question. Are they his? Did you take them?’ So you know what I’m thinking at this point. I’ve tried to be somewhat honest with her. I’ve tried to tap into something human and feeling in her. But it’s not working. She ain’t nothin’ but a bureaucrat. So what I say is, I say, ‘All I know is, they were here when I came back from lunch.’ And she says, she looks at her watch, she says, ‘It’s ten-fifteen.’ And I say, ‘Yeah?’ ‘Ten-fifteen in the morning,’ she says. ‘You took lunch at, what? Nine-thirty?’ Then she points at the buckshelves and she says, ‘And I guess all these bucks just appeared when you came back from lunch, too, huh? Your nine-thirty lunch?’ And I don’t say anything, and she says, ‘And what about the nice chair you’re sitting on? That suddenly appear out of nowhere, too?’ And I don’t say anything, and she says, ‘I’ll be back after I’ve had a chance to crosscheck your serial numbers. I would suggest that if those are Tom’s buckshelves you have them back in his office pronto. And the same goes for anything else that belongs to Tom.’ And that’s when I say to her, ‘Hey, hold the fuck up, missy. What do you mean, belongs to Tom? Nothing belongs to Tom. Tom just worked here. Nothing ever belonged to Tom. Nothing belongs to anyone here, because they can take it away from you like that. ’” Yop snapped his fingers. “Listen to how she responds,” he said. “‘Uh, sorry, no,’ she says. ‘I’m afraid all of this belongs to me.’”

Yop threw out his hands in supplication and his eyes bulged out. He expected us to be outraged that the office coordinator would say a thing like that, but the truth was, it didn’t surprise us at all. In a way, it did belong to her. She wasn’t going to be laid off. Everyone needs an office coordinator.

“Oh, I was so fucking irate,” he said. “ Nothing gets me more than the petty-minded people around here who have just this much power, and then they wield it and they wield it until they have TOTAL control over you. And now she’s going to check her serial numbers and find out that I have Ernie Kessler’s old chair.”

Wait a minute. It wasn’t his chair?

“From when he retired,” Yop said, in a calmer voice. “Last year.”

We couldn’t believe it wasn’t his chair.

“It is now. It was Ernie’s chair. From when he retired.”

We felt deceived. He had given us the impression that at the very least it was his chair.

“It is my chair,” he said. “He rolled it down to me. Ernie did. I asked him for it and he rolled it down to me and he rolled my chair away and put it in his office. When he retired. We just swapped chairs. We didn’t know about the serial numbers. Now that I know about the serial numbers, I’m thinking, That’s it for me. This office coordinator, she’s going to tell Lynn I took Tom’s buckshelves — and that I took Ernie Kessler’s chair, too, even though he gave it to me. So what choice do I have? If I want to keep my job I have to pretend it is Tom’s chair and roll it down to his office! It’s not his chair — somebody else has Tom’s chair — but last week, that’s exactly what I did. I rolled Ernie Kessler’s chair down to Tom Mota’s office after everyone had gone home. I had to pretend it was Tom’s chair, and for a week now I’ve gone on pretending, while I’ve had to sit on this other chair, this little piece-of-crap chair, just so I can avoid getting shitcanned. That was my legitimate chair,” he said, his fists quivering in anguish before him.

We didn’t blame him for being upset. His chair was a wonderful chair — adjustable, with webbed seating, giving just a little when you first sat down.

THE AUSTERITY MEASURES BEGAN in the lobby, with the flowers and bowls of candy. Benny liked to smell the flowers. “I miss the nice flowers,” he said. Then we got an officewide memo taking away our summer days. “I miss my summer days even more than the flowers,” he remarked. At an all-agency meeting the following month, they announced a hiring freeze. Next thing we knew, no one was receiving a bonus. “I couldn’t give a damn about summer days,” he said, “but my bonus now, too?” Finally, layoffs began. “Flowers, summer days, bonuses — fine by me,” said Benny. “Just leave me my job.”

At first we called it what you would expect — getting laid off, being let go. Then we got creative. We said he’d gotten the ax, she’d been sacked, they’d all been shitcanned. Lately, a new phrase had appeared and really taken off. “Walking Spanish down the hall.” Somebody had picked it up from a Tom Waits song, but it was an old, old expression, as we learned from our Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins. “In the days of piracy on the Spanish Main,” Morris writes, “a favorite trick of pirates was to lift their captives by the scruff of the neck and make them walk with their toes barely touching the deck.” That sounded about right to us. In the song, Tom Waits sings about walking toward an execution, and that sounded right, too. We’d watch the singled-out walk the long carpeted hallway with the office coordinator leading the way, and then he or she would disappear behind Lynn Mason’s door, and a few minutes later we’d see the lights dim from the voltage drop and we’d hear the electricity sizzle and the smell of cooked flesh would waft out into the insulated spaces.