Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

Genevieve spoke up from down the conference room table. “He’s pleased with himself?”

“No, he’s not pleased with himself,” said Joe. “Hang on.”

“But what I didn’t know for a long time, Joe,” Tom had continued, “was that I was down here.” Joe demonstrated in order to explain what Tom meant. Tom had rattled his handcuffs in a sudden vortex whipped up by his spinning hands, which hovered just above the table. “Down here, resenting everything. The rut I was in. My never-enough salary. The people. I stormed around. I poked my nose into everyone’s business. When there was an insult to be made, I made it. When I could disparage someone, I took the opportunity. I Sharpied FAG on your wall. And I thought, it’s because I refuse to conform. If they don’t like it, they can fire me, because I can’t live like everybody else. But then you walked in and found what I’d written, Joe, and what did you do? Do you remember?”

“I couldn’t remember exactly,” Joe said to us. “I remember I called Mike Boroshansky and told him that someone had vandalized my office. But that wasn’t what Tom meant. After that, he said. After the official notification and all that. Did I remember what I did then? And I told him I couldn’t remember specifically.”

“You left it up there,” said Tom. “ You left it up there. The building people and the office coordinator, who knows what those fucks had going on, but whatever it was, it must have had them by the balls, because it wasn’t until the following day — don’t you remember? — that they got around to removing it.”

We asked Joe if that was right. Did it really take them until the following day to remove FAG from his wall?

“Maybe,” he replied. “I remember it took them a while. But to be honest, I’m just going on what Tom told me.”

“I’m telling you,” said Tom, “it wasn’t until the next day. Whenever I’d walk by, the first thing I’d do is look in at you. I expected to see you all up in arms, screaming into the phone at someone about why it was still up there. But what did I find you doing instead? You were working. You were. . I don’t know what. If it had been me, I’d have been hollering at someone every five minutes until they came with a goddamn can of paint and covered over that fucker, because who likes to be called a fag? But you? You didn’t care. It couldn’t touch you. Because you’re up here, Joe,” said Tom.

Joe demonstrated once again. Tom had lifted one of his manacled hands as high as it would go to demonstrate where he thought Joe was, the second hand having no choice but to follow.

“I thought I was up there, but no, that whole time, I was down here, with everybody else — churning, spinning, talking, lying, circling, whipping myself up into a frenzy. I was doing everything they were doing, just in my own way. But you,” he said, “you stay here, Joe. You’re up here.” His hand delineated Joe’s place with such vigor it made the second hand jerk back and forth.

“I tried to tell him that wasn’t necessarily true,” said Joe. “I could be way down here for all he knew,” he said, bending his chin down to the conference room table so he could touch the floor. “But Tom had made up his mind. I was up here.” Joe extended his arm in the air once more.

“I thought I was the one living right,” said Tom. “I was the one saying fuck you to the miseries of office life. Nobody could resist conforming in the corporate setting, but I managed it. Making it a point every day to show how different I was from everybody else. Proving I was better, smarter, funnier. Then I saw you sitting side by side with the word FAG on the wall — working — at peace — and I knew — you were the one. Not me. I used to think it was just because you were arrogant. But then I knew it wasn’t arrogance. It was just your nature. And I hated you for it. You had it, and I didn’t, and I hated you.”

We asked Joe if he had really been at peace the day he found FAG on his wall.

“At peace?” he said. “I’m not sure that describes it. Tom thinks he knows me, but he doesn’t. And I tried to tell him that, I said, ‘Tom, finding my office vandalized like that, you have no idea how that made me feel. Maybe I was mortified. Maybe I wanted to kill myself. Maybe I went into the bathroom and cried. Don’t assume you know.’ But he wouldn’t listen.”

“Did you cry, Joe?” asked Jim.

“Jim, he’s not going to tell us if he cried,” said Karen.

“I didn’t cry,” said Joe.

“I know you didn’t cry, Joe,” said Tom. “Because you weren’t bothered. And I had no choice but to respect you for it, even though I hated you. I still hated you the day they let me go, and probably the day after, but on the third day, it disappeared, all of it. . just. . poof, I don’t know why. Probably because I wasn’t working there anymore. I had distance, suddenly. And what I was left feeling toward you was admiration. More than admiration. It was love —”

We couldn’t help it, it was so absurd, Tom saying that he loved Joe — we just cracked up.

“Don’t laugh,” said Joe sternly. “You wanted to hear it. Let me finish.”

The table got quiet again.

“I had wanted to smash your face in,” said Tom. “I couldn’t stomach the sight of you. I wanted to apologize for that. That’s why I wanted to take you to lunch,” he said. “I really did want to take you to lunch. But as that fuck so eloquently puts it, ‘Character teaches above our wills.’ And before I knew it, I had the paintball gun thing all worked out in my head and I just couldn’t stop myself.”

The two guards came into the room just then and announced that Joe’s time was up. He looked at his watch and couldn’t believe that fifteen minutes had passed. Joe stood, but the guard immediately told him to sit down again. “There was a whole procedure to it,” he explained to us. “Tom would be led out by the first guard, and I would be led out by the second one. I had to remain seated until Tom was out of sight.”

“Thanks for coming, Joe,” Tom said, as the guard approached and took his arm. “I appreciate it.”

“Is there anything I can do for you, Tom?”

“Yeah.” Tom raised his manacled hands abruptly. “Stay up here, you fuck,” he said.

Immediately the guard reacted and Tom put his hands back down.

With that, Joe began to pass handouts around the table. “Like I said,” he added, not looking at any of us. “Tom Mota thinks he knows me, but he doesn’t. Not really.”

We each took a handout.

“Okay,” he said. He straightened in his chair, and the meeting began.

OUR VISIT TO LYNN in the hospital was a rough twenty minutes. We shared oblique glances and sweaty palms and the crippling fear of pauses in the conversation. There was no easy breathing from the moment we arrived. She was sitting up in her hospital bed, swimming in her blue cotton gown, a plastic ID bracelet around her child’s wrist. It was a well-known phenomenon that she was a small woman physically who loomed in our imaginations as a towering and indomitable giant. She looked even smaller now, lost in all the blankets and pillows of the hospital bed, and her arms, which we had never seen so much of before, looked as undefined and reedy as a little girl’s.

We had nothing in common with the dying and so never knew what to say to them. Our presence seemed a vague and threatening insult, something that could easily spill over into cruel laughter, and so we chose our words carefully and moved with caution gathering around the bed and restricted our jokes and bantering. It would not be appropriate to storm in and be our full flush selves, encouraging her with loud voices to return to us because, just beneath the spoken words, the real truth ran fast as a current: she may never be one of us again. So we minced and pussyfooted and swallowed our words, mumbled and deflected and softened our voices, and she saw right through it. “Come in,” she said when we first arrived. “Get in here. What are you all being so shy for?” One after the other we filed in. Her hair was back in a ponytail, she wasn’t wearing any makeup, and there was no sign of a single pair of designer shoes. She had just undergone a grievous surgery and was suffering from unspecified complications. Yet she still generated the greatest energy in the room. It was a private room about the size of her office and so it felt a little like entering that enervating space to receive dreaded news about some irrevocable and costly error we had committed at the agency’s expense. We greeted her. We presented her with flowers. “Will you look at all your funeral faces,” she said, looking toward the foot of the bed, and to the right of her and to the left. “You’d think I was dead already. Would it have killed you to practice your expression in the mirror before coming in here, Benny?” Benny smiled and apologized. She looked next at Genevieve. “And you,” she said. “Did you have a conversation with my doctors I should know about?” Genevieve also smiled and shook her head. “Well, so what’s next, then?” she asked. “A reading from the Bible?” We tried to explain that we had been ambivalent about coming. We thought maybe she would have preferred her privacy. “I would have preferred never to have stepped foot in this dreary hell,” she said. “But if I have to be here, it’s nice to see some familiar faces. But somebody start acting like a jackass or I’ll hardly know you.”