Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

There were several more — the “Got Cancer?” ad, the “Absolut Ether” ad, in which a hand with long painted fingernails grips the neck of a half-empty vodka bottle like a claw. Jim handed them all across the bed and she got very close to each one, inspecting and reading them. When she got to the Absolut ad, she offered us a genuine smile.

She continued to smile as she thanked us. We said our good-byes. We told her to feel better. Out in the hallway, we encountered more nurses and medical equipment. We said we thought she liked them. We asked Joe if he agreed. We said we nailed it, didn’t we, Joe? Didn’t we nail it? We walked together down the hall. We were a full car heading down the elevator.

“Do you really think she liked those ads, Joe?” asked Marcia. “Or do you think she was smiling because of how atrocious they were?”

“Hey!” cried Jim.

“Sorry, Jim, nothing personal. I just happen to think they’re atrocious,” she said. “It’s not your fault, you did better than any of us. I’m just saying it was an impossible assignment.”

We grew introspective and quiet for the remainder of the ride. When we reached the lobby floor, there was a delay before the doors opened, and that’s when Genevieve broke the silence.

“Maybe she wasn’t smiling because of the ads,” she said. “Maybe she was smiling because of us. What we did.”

“Because it was a nice gesture,” said Marcia.

“Or maybe,” said Jim, with uncharacteristic conviction, “you guys just don’t know anything about advertising.”

WHEN, A FEW WEEKS LATER, they let go of Jim Jackers, we said they lifted him off his seat by the middle belt loop of his jeans and threw him from the building. We said he went flying three stairs at a time until he landed on the curb, where he picked himself up and checked his forehead for blood. After that, we said, he collected his useless shit, which had spilled everywhere during his propeller dive at the sidewalk. Jim was not one to leave without a box.

When next they came for Amber, a few weeks after that, we said she was tossed into the streetlamp outside the building without any concern for her unborn baby. We had just come back from lunch at T.G.I. Friday’s when she got the news. It was at that lunch we presented her with things we had bought for the baby — a diaper bag, a stroller — all of which was tossed out with her. She lay trying to recover, head spinning, on the wet cement in a light summer rain. We said people walking past stared down at the spectacle and refused to help, and we imagined the bum with the Dunkin Donuts cup bending down to the stroller, opening it up, and rolling it away with him.

We said Don Blattner was thrown headfirst into the window of a parked taxi with such force he wheeled around 180 degrees, rolled his eyes a couple of times, and slumped down between the car and the curb. He settled, head hanging down like a heavy melon, and appeared to all passersby like a drunk sleeping off a bender. We said the movie stills that had adorned his office walls were taken down and flung at his drooping head. Most of them just hit the car and shattered, but a few landed, and the cuts began to bleed. More movie memorabilia — action figures, back issues of Vanity Fair — was dumped on his prone body. Eventually, we said, Don was carted off by city officials.

It was all fun and games after they were gone. Easier to make cartoons of them than to wonder for any amount of time how Amber was going to find a new job before the baby came, or how unjust they were to let go of her while keeping Larry on. Easier to joke than to feel sorry for Jim, who had been everyone’s whipping boy for so long that we had nothing left after his departure but loathsome memories of our bullying and cruel remarks. None of us cared to revisit the fun we’d made of him for fear our laughter might now stick in our throats.

In reality, when we heard Jim was let go we went down to his cubicle, miserable with happiness that he had been chosen over us. Everyone who had spoken ill of him at one time or another was there to offer him condolences. Jim’s reaction was magnanimous and pathetic at once. When people extended their hands and told him how sorry they were, he nodded and smiled and said, “Thanks,” as if he had just been named Employee of the Month. He almost seemed to be enjoying himself, which was curious but later made sense, because it was probably the only time during his entire tenure that so many people had approached him with a universal consensus of support instead of with ridicule or scorn. He didn’t point out the hypocrisy or seek to settle scores. He soaked up the attention with an indulgence he deserved, stretching out his allotted half hour to forty-five minutes until Roland, who was standing against the wall as he had done with Marcia, finally told Jim he really had to be out of the building. So Jim said his final good-byes and shook a few hands and left with his box, never to return.

It was different with Benny. Earnings were down across the board. Stock prices were in free fall. We were just about to awaken from a decade of unadulterated dreaming. Benny had to call his father to come with a car, he had so much useless shit in his office.

“Roland,” he said, “have a seat. This may take a while.”

“You know I gotta stand, Benny.”

“What do they think I’m going to do, Roland? Stab you with a highlighter?”

“They can’t take any chances since the incident,” Roland tried to explain for the hundredth time. “I’m not even supposed to be conversing.”

“I bet I can make you converse.”

Soon Benny and Roland were conversing about whether or not Benny could make Roland converse, until Roland, catching himself in Benny’s trap, said, “Please, Benny, I’m just trying to do my job.”

“Come on, man,” said Benny. “I thought you and me were friends?”

“You think this is easy for me?” asked the older man.

When at last Benny’s father arrived, it took the three men four trips down the freight elevator. Benny had so much stuff in his office it was like he was moving out of an apartment. If a general sadness overtook us when Marcia and Amber and Jim were let go, a veritable pall cast itself about the hallways during Benny’s last hour. Who would regale us with stories now? Into whose office would we go to confide, to gossip, to horse around? And who, what with Paulette Singletary gone, too, could we point to now and agree that there was the one person who stood head and shoulders above the rest? Garrulousness and a natural amiability — that was the nature of heroism in the confines we shared during that more innocent time, and when they took Benny, they took away our hero.

After that we fell into even greater recrimination and bickering. Needless to say, the caffeinated water people went with a different firm, and the running shoe people ended up staying with their original agency. Without any new business things got worse. What little work remained was never any fun. All that summer no one took advantage of the city or the proximity of the lake for an aimless stroll during a lunch hour because we were too rabid with speculation about how dire things had become and who would be the next to go. We could enjoy nothing but our own dull rumoring. Conversation never extended beyond our walls, walls that were closing in on us, and we failed to take stock of anything happening beyond them. One topic — that was all we knew, and it tyrannized every conversation. We fell into it helplessly, the way jilted lovers know only one subject, the way true bores never transcend the sorry limitations of their own lives. It was a shrill, carping, frenzied time, and as poisonous an atmosphere as anyone had ever known — and we wanted nothing more than to stay in it forever. In the last week of August 2001, and in the first ten days of that September, there were more layoffs than in all the months preceding them. But by the grace of god, the rest of us hung on, hating each other more than we ever thought possible. Then we came to the end of another bright and tranquil summer.