Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

We would turn at our desks and watch the planes descend into O’Hare. We would put our headphones on. We would lean our heads back and close our eyes. We all had the same thought: thank god it wasn’t me.

Jim knocked at Benny’s doorway. “You seen Sanderson around lately, Benny?”

“Who?”

“Sanderson. Will Sanderson.”

Benny still didn’t know who Jim was talking about.

“Come on, Benny. Sanderson. With the mustache.”

“Oh, right,” said Benny. “Bill Sanderson? I thought his name was Bill.”

“His name is Will,” said Jim.

“I haven’t seen that guy around for. . weeks.”

“Weeks? You don’t think. .”

They were quiet.

“Sanderson,” said Benny. “Man oh man,” he said. “They got Will Sanderson.”

A FUN THING TO DO to let off steam after layoffs began was to go into someone’s office and send an e-mail from their computer addressed to the entire agency. It might say something simple like “My name is Shaw-NEE! You are captured, Ha! I poopie I poopie I poopie.” People came in in the morning and read that and the reactions were so varied.

Jim Jackers read it and immediately sent out an e-mail that read, “Obviously someone came into my office last night and composed an e-mail in my name and sent it out to everyone. I apologize for any inconvenience or offense, although it wasn’t my fault, and I would appreciate from whoever did this a public apology. I have read that e-mail five times now and I still don’t even understand it.”

We knew who did it. There was never an apology. Jim knew who did it because he was one of us, and Jim confronted Tom Mota about it. This was some months before Tom walked Spanish. What do you think Tom did? Tom told Benny about the encounter at lunch, about how Jim’s fury was off the charts, and how Tom egged Smalls on to hit him. “Smalls” was Tom’s nickname for Jim, though both men were about the same height. “Come on, Smalls, you little fucker, please hit me,” Tom told Benny he told Jim, and how funny it all was. We were only into our third month of layoffs then. Jim never left the office again without closing out of his e-mail program.

Tom’s e-mails were not always antic provocations — sometimes they were earnest and came from his own computer. We were amused by his sincere tone and his talk of man’s infinite worthiness. These heartfelt, long-winded missives, of sentiment wildly clashing with Tom’s real-life behavior, were laughably inappropriate, schizophrenic in tone and content, and always welcome respites in an otherwise ordinary day. He was written up for their profanities and for composing them on company time, because he had the balls to send them not only to all of us, including Lynn Mason, but to the other partners as well — always organizing the send-to list according to seniority, an unspoken rule. He also cc’d the accounts people, the media buyers, project services, human resources, the support staff, and the barista manning the coffee bar. “I passed a bad night last night,” his final e-mail in this vein began. The subject line read, “I Consign You and Your Golf Shoes to Lower Wacker Drive.” “The tomatoes in my garden are not coming out,” he continued. “Maybe because I only have the weekend to work the garden, or maybe because the garden keeps getting mowed over by the goddamn Hispanics who tend to the grounds of the apartment complex I’ve been living in since the state forced me to sell my house in Naperville and Barbara took the kids to Phoenix to live with Pilot Bob. Do I have an actual garden? The answer to that is a big fat no, because the goddamn woman in the property office won’t listen to reason. She keeps insisting that this is a rental property, not your backyard. Flower borders, that’s all we want, she says. So the goddamn Hispanics go out and tend the marigolds along the borders. But do you understand, I’m talking about fat, ripe, juicy, delicious red tomatoes that I want to grow with my own two hands through the bountiful mystery and generosity of nature! That dream ended when Barb started sleeping with Pilot Bob and we gave up Naperville. Anyway, would I like a garden? YES. Matter of fact I would like a farm. But at the present moment I’m afraid all I have is apartment 4H at Bell Harbor Manor, which is neither a harbor nor a manor and contains NOT ONE SINGLE BELL. Which one of you wit-wizards came up with the name ‘Bell Harbor Manor’? May your clever tongues be ripped from their cushy red linings and left to dry on pikes under the native sun of a cannibal land. Ha! I will be called into the office for that one but I’m leaving it, because what I’m trying to get at here is that I’M NOT SURE ANY OF US KNOWS just how far we have removed ourselves not only from nature but from the natural conditions of life that have prevailed for centuries and have forced men to the extreme limits of their physical capacity in order simply to feed, clothe and otherwise provide for their families, sending them every night to a sweet, exhausted, restorative, unstirred, deserved sleep such as we will never know again. Now there’s Phoenix, and airplanes to get you there, and Pilot Bob who can take care of EVERYTHING, though he probably doesn’t even know how to mow his own lawn. But don’t forget, Bob, and all you Bobs out there, that ‘Manual labor is the study of the external world.’ I believe that to be true. Now, the question you’re all probably asking yourselves is, what is he doing then, Tom Mota? Why is Tom wasting his days in a carpeted office trying to hide the coffee stain on his khakis? How is he any better than Pilot Bob? Unfortunately, I don’t think I am any better. I’m not studying the external world. What I’m doing is trying to generate a buck for a client so as to generate a quarter for us so that I can generate a nickel for me and have a penny left over after Barbara gets what the court demands. For that reason I love my job and never want to lose it, so I hope no one reading this finds me smug or ungrateful. I’m only trying to suggest that as we find ourselves in this particularly unfortunate, misconstrued, ungodly juncture of civilization, let’s not lose sight of the nobler manifestations of man and of the greater half of his character, which consists not of taglines and bottom lines but of love, heroism, reciprocity, ecstasy, kindness and truth. What a bloated bunch of horseshit, you will say. And good for you. I welcome you to shoot me up close in the head. Peace, Tom.”

Not long after hitting send, Tom was let go, and if not for the paltry severance, we might have been inclined to think that his was not another in a series of layoffs, but an outright firing. But the truth was, Tom was probably in the pipeline already. His e-mail just hastened things along, the way pneumonia can spell doom for a cancer patient.

LYNN MASON WAS STILL running late to the twelve-fifteen meeting on that Tuesday in May, so Chris Yop continued telling us the story of Tom Mota’s chair. That very morning he had looked up from cleaning his desk to find the office coordinator standing in his doorway once again, arms folded. “So she says to me,” he said to us, “‘I see you put Tom’s buckshelves back.’ So I act totally ignorant, I say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what it is you’re talking about,’ and I go back to cleaning my desk, but she’s not leaving, so I look up again and she says, ‘And I see you no longer have his chair, either.’ So I say, ‘I would appreciate you not harassing me anymore. There are rules against that sort of thing in the employee handbook.’ And she says, ‘You think I’m harassing you?’ And I say, ‘Yes. And I don’t appreciate it.’ And she says, ‘Well, maybe we should take it up with Lynn.’ And I say, ‘I would welcome that,’ and she says, ‘What are you doing right now?’ and I say, ‘Well, unlike some people, I’m trying to get some work done. Some people actually generate revenue around here, you handjob.’ I shouldn’t have said that — I was just, you know, pointing out the difference between an office coordinator and a copywriter like me who generates revenue. So she says back to me, ‘Oh, sure, I understand how incredibly important you are, how everything would just crumble all around us without you, but if you wouldn’t mind, will you follow me, please?’ And I say, ‘Follow you? Follow you where?’ And she says, ‘Lynn would like a word.’ ‘What, now?’ I say. And she says, ‘If you can pull yourself away.’ And I say, ‘She wants to see me right now? ’ She doesn’t say another word — just motions for me to follow. So I get off my chair, that piece of crap — I mean, my ass is like on Novocain on that thing — and together we head down to Lynn’s office. I mean, what choice do I have? If she’s telling me Lynn wants to see me, what choice do I have?”