Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

“Is that how you judge it?” she asked. “It’s a percentage game?”

“I don’t know.”

“But what do they know,” she asked, “that I don’t know? That if I knew, I would prefer not to be here, too?”

“Maybe nothing,” he said.

Was she thinking of Martin, a home with Martin in Oak Park, a Volvo in the driveway and a bottle of wine breathing on the French tiles of the kitchen counter, while her child plays with a friend in the backyard? Was she thinking, Then I would be healthy? No one dies in Oak Park. Everyone in Oak Park is happy and no one ever dies.

“Or maybe everything,” he said. “I work about as much as you do. I don’t know what they know, either.”

They sat in silence.

“When should I tell them?” he asked.

“I’m rescheduled for Thursday,” she said. “You can tell them then.” She paused. “But this is the important thing,” she added. “I mean this. Above all else, Joe. Win this new business.”

TOM MOTA LEFT CARL’S OFFICE and proceeded down the interior stairs to sixty, where most of the good people he wanted to take the piss out of were located in their tidy workstations, like that fuck Jim Jackers who had always been an idiot, and Benny Shassburger who still hadn’t responded to the heartfelt e-mail Tom had sent him in which he recounted his mother’s painful, ugly death. He would have liked to pump Karen Woo full of red pellets, and Dan Wisdom, painter of fish, that movie-quoting fuck Don Blattner, and the agency’s real ballbuster, Marcia Dwyer. Unfortunately for Tom, many of us were already marching down sixty flights of emergency stairs, owing to the good work of Roland. Unfortunately for the rest of us, any given floor was a circuitous blueprint of cubicle clusters, hallway offshoots, print stations, mount rooms — spaces easily overlooked — and Roland, as Benny predicted, missed many of them in his haste to reach the other floors. Tom had a fair share of unfortunate souls to shoot at once his melee began, and the bullets that came from his gun were every bit as real to us as those in the guns of the Chicago police who had just arrived outside our building, pulling up along the curb with their sirens blaring.

“‘It came into him, life,’” Tom declaimed to the fleeing backside of Doug Dion, “‘it went out from him, truth.’” He shot Doug in the back and Doug went down, bringing several of us out into the halls with his cries of traumatic certainty. Like Andy Smeejack before him, Doug confused a sting for the real thing. Tom merely needed to turn to find a new target. “‘It came to him, business,’” he trumpeted preposterously before shooting someone new, “‘it went from him, poetry.’” And also, “‘The day is always his, who works in it with serenity and great aims.’” And with a smile, he let go of another round.

They actually believed he could shoot at someone and intend them harm. That’s how little those fucks ever really knew him. He stopped midhallway to load more pellets into the gun.

We behaved as you might expect. We recoiled, hovering under our timberstick desks, collecting under conference room tables like game hens in a shooting gallery, and generally scampering for our lives. Amber Ludwig in the server closet heard shrieking from outside and went into overdrive trembling and hyperventilating, just as Larry, who had abandoned her there, disgusted by his revelation that Amber planned to carry the baby to term and convinced that her crying was baseless, backed away from the door he was tempted to open. He made no attempt to reattach himself to her. She wouldn’t have had him anyway. Instead, he took position behind the nearest of the metal shelves and prepared to push it over on Tom and beat him with wired hardware should he enter the server closet.

Benny found Jim exactly where he had predicted he would, listening to music through headphones and working on the new business. The two men tried to avoid the shrill and fearsome noises coming from unseen parts of their familiar floor by heading in the opposite direction. They had just rounded the corner past the potted tree nearest Joe Pope’s office when they ran into Genevieve, who had been frantically searching for Joe ever since the clown’s spooky greeting sent her back to Carl’s doorway and she overheard Tom telling Carl that he wasn’t going to shoot him. She worried that Joe was an obvious target and wanted to warn him, but when she couldn’t find him and people started screaming she turned distraught and now she was in tears.

“Shh, calm down,” Benny told her.

“Let’s take the elevator,” said Jim, since they were right there.

“No, we can’t,” Benny replied. “We have to take the emergency stairs.”

“Why?”

“Because Mike Boroshansky said so.”

So the three of them started off in the direction of the other potted tree and the emergency stairs on that side of the hallway, and had almost reached Benny’s office at the midway point when Tom’s voice rose up behind them in the hall and Jim suddenly went down.

“‘I content myself with the fact that the general system of our trade —’” Tom thundered, as he advanced toward them at a steady though not particularly fast pace down the hall.

“I’ve been shot!” cried Jim. “I’ve been shot!”

Benny pulled Genevieve into his office and pushed her behind the desk.

“‘— is a system of selfishness —’”

“It hurts!” cried Jim, writhing on his back. “Oh, it hurts!”

Hovering low in his doorway, Benny reached out to grab one of Jim’s hands to pull him inside the office.

“‘— is not dictated by the high sentiments of human nature —’”

Tom’s stentorian, little big man voice was growing closer. Benny pulled Jim in further as Tom shot him twice more, once in the torso and once in the leg. The skeleton with the Buck Rogers gun looked on helplessly from inside Benny’s office.

“Ow!” cried Jim. “Oh!” His eyes were as wide and fearful as a wounded dog’s.

“‘— much less by the sentiments of love and heroism —’”

Benny paused to get a closer look. That wasn’t blood. That was —

“‘— but is a system of distrust —’”

Benny stood up and entered the hallway. “Tom,” he said, “are those just fucking paintballs?”

“‘— not of giving, but of taking advantage,’” concluded Tom, standing but two feet from Benny and taking aim at his chest.

Just at that moment, Lynn and Joe stepped off the elevator and stopped abruptly in front of Joe’s office, peering down the hall. Seeing the clown with the gun, Lynn shouted, “What’s going on? Hey — what do you think you’re doing down there?”

Tom swiveled around to face them.

“Joe,” he said, resting the gun at his side. “I’ve come to take you to lunch.”

It was too late. A shirtless, shrieking Andy Smeejack had rounded the opposite corner, barreling down the hallway with bouncing man breasts and a belly white as a whale’s, leaping over Jim just as Benny turned to make room for him, and landing with crushing severity upon Tom’s absurdly festooned smallness. Both men careened into the wall and bounced off, landing with hard, nearly soundless thuds on the carpet, Smeejack on top, pinning with his tub of guts Tom’s body to the floor while pummeling him madly with sidewinders and haymakers until Joe and Benny pried him from his determination to kill the bastard with his bitter, fat, paint-flecked hands, and then the police swarmed in.

THE AMERICAN DREAM AND WHY WE DESERVE IT — WHO SHOULD BE DEAD — “GARBEDIAN AND SON” — USELESS SHIT — THE END OF AN ERA — WE URGE BENNY TO SAY SOMETHING — ROLAND TRICKED — A NOTE TO JIM — D.O.C. — JOE AND WHERE HE’S AT (“UP HERE”) — TOM IN LOVE — A VISIT TO THE HOSPITAL — DERIVATIVE CONCEPTS — DEPARTURES