Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

“When I got there, nobody else was around. Turns out later they were down talking to the doctor. I walked in and took one look at Mikey in his hospital bed — Jim, he was all fucked up. Broken arm, black eyes. Big gash in his chin. But he was awake. The kid was going to be fine. And you know what I said? I just couldn’t help myself. I went right up to him and I said, ‘My boy! Look what they done to my boy!’”

Marcia found out later why Benny hadn’t been picking up the phone, and that’s why she was mad at him. She thought it was a thoughtless and juvenile game to play and it explained why he was still in a cube. “Why can’t you be more like Jim?” she asked.

Carter Shilling stopped by again. “Jim, you coming?”

“Carter,” said Jim, rising at the sound of the man’s voice. “Coming.”

“Jim, it was priceless,” Benny said, once Carter had departed.

“I gotta go do this meeting,” said Jim.

He collected some papers off his desk and Benny was left sitting alone in another man’s office. He was trying to decide whether or not to get up — he supposed there was some work he could do back at his cube, if Ian didn’t interrupt him — when Jim reappeared in the doorway. “So what now?” he asked.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean if you can get by with quotes from The Godfather, and nothing you say matters, that’s pretty bleak, don’t you think? Don’t we want what we say to matter?”

Benny swiveled effortlessly in the chair that wasn’t his and gave Jim a puzzled, surprised look. He unsteepled his fingers and opened his hands into a shrug. “What is this, Jim, what’s wrong with you? I was just having some fun.”

“Don’t you want people to take you seriously, Benny?”

“But why do you have to phrase it like that? Why does Marcia have to ask me why I can’t be more like you, and why can’t Michael listen to my story for ten stupid minutes? What’s happened to everybody? You’re all so serious.”

Jim hung in the doorway, ponderous and unresponsive. “Why did you keep Old Brizz’s totem pole?” he said at last.

“What?” said Benny. “What are you talking about? I didn’t. I gave it away.”

“No, you kept it in storage for six months. Why did you do that?”

“Where is this coming from?”

“I’ve always wanted to know.”

“But why are you bringing it up now?” Benny asked.

“Did you think,” said Jim, “that he was trying to communicate something to you?”

Benny stopped swiveling and grabbed Jim’s armrests. “Like what?”

“I don’t know,” said Jim. “I’m asking you.”

“Maybe he was just playing a practical joke on me. Maybe because he knew I had him at the top of my list in Celebrity Death Watch.”

“Maybe,” said Jim. “But Brizz wasn’t one to play practical jokes.”

Benny nodded in agreement. “No, he wasn’t.”

“And as it turns out, that thing was worth a lot of money,” Jim added. “Leaving someone a lot of money isn’t a very mean practical joke.”

“No, it isn’t.”

“So why’d you store it? Why’d you keep it for six months?”

“It meant something to me, I guess.”

“What?”

“I don’t know,” said Benny.

“You don’t know?”

“I do and I don’t,” said Benny. “You know what I mean?”

Jim bit the inside of his cheek. He nodded slowly in a sign of respectful resignation.

“Hank Neary,” he said finally, shaking his head. He said it again: “Hank Neary.” Then he threw up his hands and went off down the hall to his meeting.

SOME PEOPLE WOULD NEVER FORGET certain people, a few people would remember everyone, and most of us would mostly be forgotten. Sometimes it was for the best. Larry Novotny wanted to be forgotten for his dalliance with Amber Ludwig. Tom Mota wanted to be forgotten for that incident involving the paintballs. But did anybody want to be forgotten about completely? We had dedicated years to that place, we labored under the notion we were making names for ourselves, we had to believe in our hearts that each one of us was memorable. And yet who wanted to be remembered for their poor taste or bad breath? Still, better to be remembered for those things than forgotten for your perfect parboiled blandness.

In other words, amnesty was a gift, but oblivion was terror.

Most of us recalled in a general way this person or that, their features exaggerated by memory, their names lost forever. Of others we could pull up only the murkiest general outline, as if rather than walking past them in the hall a hundred times a day, we’d encountered them in a cloud once, mumbled a polite exchange, and moved on. Once in a great while, every random detail — tone of voice, where the mole was — came screaming out of the clear blue. What a weird sensation that was. And then there were some people some of us could not shake. Janine Gorjanc couldn’t shake the memory of her lost child. Benny couldn’t shake Frank Brizzolera because Frank had died and bequeathed him a totem pole. Uncle Max would never forget his Edna.

As for us, it was never a worry. We would never be forgotten by anyone.

“You jackass,” Marcia said to Benny later that day. “How could you forget Hank Neary?”

Benny hurried down to Jim’s doorway. “The black dude!” he cried. “With the corduroy coat!”

“Aw, man! I wanted to tell you that!” said Jim. He was reading Hank’s e-mail, which had gone to him as well, to an e-mail account he rarely checked. “His face just now came to me,” he said. “How could we have forgotten Hank, Benny?”

“I don’t know,” replied Benny. “I guess it just happens.”

EVERYONE HAD RECEIVED the same e-mail as Benny and Jim and we all wondered how Hank had managed to track us down, scattered as we were. Most of us remembered him perfectly and recognized his name right away, because it wasn’t every day you worked with a black guy who dressed like a poetry don at Oxford. We used to joke that the only thing missing was a pipe which he could grip with his teeth as he gave ponderous consideration to the iambic pentameter’s slow demise. But no, he wasn’t a poet, he was a failed novelist, and when we got his e-mail, it was like hearing that one of Don Blattner’s screenplays had been picked up by Warner Brothers and George Clooney was starring. It turned out that Hank had published a book, and his reading was taking place at a bookstore on the campus of the University of Chicago. We were intrigued and disbelieving.

We packed the room full. We hardly had time to say hello to everyone when he appeared, book in hand, alongside a stooped, bearded gentleman who took to the podium and introduced him. He had many nice things to say about Hank, whose bashful, averted gaze we took note of as the man spoke. We also noticed that instead of the corduroy coat, Hank now wore a plain white Fruit-of-the-Loom T-shirt that accentuated his dark lanky arms and boyish torso. Without his bulky glasses his face was leaner, more handsome. He wore a pair of jeans and a simple black belt. It was a better look for him all around, and we were pleased to see that he’d moved beyond his weird ersatz professorial phase. We didn’t say so at the time, but it never seemed appropriate.

As the introduction continued, we looked around at some of the familiar faces. Amber Ludwig sat at the end of the third row with a kid in her lap, a little girl who played industriously with a dirty, undressed doll. The poor kid had Larry’s masculine features but Amber’s stout, seal-like body. Larry Novotny himself sat in back, alone, hiding beneath a brand-new Cubs cap. Dan Wisdom was seated next to Don Blattner, and to the right, in the front row, Genevieve Latko-Devine sat beside her husband. He was holding a baby to his chest, which suddenly let out a succession of unhappy cries. In rapid response he shifted the child in his arms and rubbed its back tenderly and it was sleeping again in no time.