Joshua Ferris - Then We Came to the End

We asked Yop how long ago this was.

“Maybe an hour ago,” he said. “So we go down there. I’m not going to lie to you. My heart’s going. I’m forty-eight. This is a young man’s game. Who’s going to hire me if I get shitcanned? I don’t know Photoshop. Some days, I don’t even understand Outlook, okay. You know me and the e-mail. I get shitcanned, who’s going to pay me what I deserve? I’m an old man. I get paid too much. But I gotta go down there. The office coordinator goes in first. I follow her in and close the door. ‘Okay,’ says Lynn. And you know how she can lean forward at her desk and look at you like she’s about to carve your skull out with her laser eyes? She says, ‘Now what’s going on?’ The office coordinator comes right out of the gate — first, I stole Tom’s buckshelves. ‘Where’s the proof?’ I cry out. I mean she’s not letting me talk. ‘Huh? Where’s the proof?’ I ask. She doesn’t answer. Then she tells Lynn I’ve been harassing her. Me harassing her! I can’t believe my ears. But what she doesn’t say a thing about, not one word about — she says not one word about the chair. The whole point is the chair! That’s the reason we’re here! I was trying to protect my chair. So I say, ‘What about the chair?’ And she says, you want to know what she says? She says, ‘What chair?’ What do you mean, what chair, right? So I say, ‘Come on, what chair. The chair. My chair.’ And she says, ‘I don’t know what he’s talking about, this chair.’ To Lynn she says this! She denies there was ever a chair! So I say, I’m so pissed off, I say, ‘COME ON, WHAT CHAIR! You know what chair, goddamn it!’ And there’s silence, and then she says, ‘I’m sorry, Lynn. I don’t know what he’s talking about.’ And I say, ‘YOU GODDAMN WELL KNOW WHAT CHAIR! She knows what chair, Lynn! She tried to take my chair away from me. My legitimate chair.’ So there’s silence, and then Lynn says, ‘Kathy —’ Kathy — did any of you know her name was Kathy? She says, ‘Kathy, can you give Chris and me a minute please?’ So ‘Kathy’ says of course and Lynn says, ‘Can you shut the door, please, Kathy?’ and ‘Kathy’ says, ‘Sure,’ and we hear the door close, and my heart’s going, you know, and Lynn says, ‘Chris, I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to let you go.’”

Yop stopped speaking. He shook his lowered head slowly. There was silence. “I was speechless,” he continued after a while. His voice had dropped. “I asked her if it had something to do with Ernie Kessler’s chair. She says no. She says it has nothing to do with Ernie’s chair. ‘Because I don’t need Ernie’s chair,’ I tell her. ‘Honest — I’ve been sitting on one of the cheap plastic ones for the past week and it’s fine. It’s a fine chair.’ And she says, ‘This has nothing to do with Ernie’s chair.’ I can’t believe it. I can’t believe what she’s telling me. So I say, ‘Is it the mistakes? Because I’m getting better,’ I tell her. ‘It’s how my brain works sometimes,’ I tell her, ‘but I’m getting better. Most of them get caught when we run spell-check anyway. I know it’s not ideal in a copywriter, I appreciate your patience,’ I say to her. ‘But I am getting better.’ And she says, ‘It’s not the mistakes, Chris.’ ‘So what is it then?’ I ask. ‘It’s nothing personal,’ she says to me. ‘It’s just business.’ ‘Is it because I make too much money? Is that it?’ And she says, ‘No, not exactly.’ ‘Can I maybe take a cut in pay?’ I ask. I’m asking her, ‘Can I take a pay cut and stay on?’ ‘It’s not exactly the money, Chris,’ she says. So what the hell is it then, right? ‘Now, listen,’ she says. ‘We’re going to give you a month’s severance, and COBRA will cover your health benefits through the year. It’s really nothing personal,’ she says. She keeps saying that — it’s nothing personal, Chris — so I figure it must be something personal. ‘So what is it then, Lynn?’ I ask her. And maybe my voice cracks a little. ‘If it’s not personal, what is it?’ ‘Chris, please,’ she says. Because by now I’m breaking down. .”

We asked him what he meant by that.

“I started crying,” he said. “It wasn’t just the job,” he added. “It was the whole feeling of being me. Being old. Thinking about Terry. Not having a kid. And now, not having a job.” He and his wife had tried to conceive for years, and by the time they gave up, they were considered too old to adopt by the agencies. “I was thinking about having to go home to Terry and telling her I’d been shitcanned. I didn’t want to cry,” he said, “god knows, I just got overcome. I put my head down, and I lost it for a minute. I just wasn’t in control. So, you know, I had to leave. I never cried in front of someone like that before. I couldn’t stick around. ‘Come on, Chris,’ she says to me. ‘Come back. You’re going to be fine,’ she says. ‘You’re a fine copywriter.’ This is what she’s saying to me while I’m being shitcanned. I haven’t talked to her since.”

We couldn’t blame him for being upset, but it would be just like Yop, tough-acting Yop, to give up the chair he fought so hard for just like that if it would save his ass, and if that didn’t work, it would be just like Yop to beg for a cut in pay, and if that still didn’t save his job, Chris Yop would be the one among us to break down. Tom Mota wanted to throw a computer through the window; Chris Yop threw himself at Lynn’s feet.

Just before Lynn showed up, fifteen minutes late for her own input, we asked Yop what he was still doing here.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t go home, not yet. It doesn’t feel right.”

But should you really be here? we asked him. In Lynn’s office?

“Well, Lynn and me,” he said, “we didn’t get a chance to finish our conversation. I broke down. I left. You guys don’t think I should have to leave leave, do you, when we didn’t get a chance to finish our conversation?”

No one replied — meaning, well, yeah, Yop. You should probably leave.

“I don’t know,” he said, looking around. “This meeting’s been on my calendar for a long time.”

ALL TALK TAPERED OFF when Lynn finally arrived. When the time came to get down to business, we got down to business. We didn’t fuck around in input meetings. We fucked around before them and sometimes we fucked around after them, but during them, there might be the occasional wisecrack, but otherwise we were solemn as churchgoers. Any one of us could be let go at any time, and that fact was continually on our minds.

Lynn Mason was intimidating, mercurial, unapproachable, fashionable, and consummately professional. She was not a big woman — in fact, she was rather petite — but when we thought of her from home at night, she loomed large. When she was in a mood, she didn’t make small talk. She dressed like a Bloomingdale’s model and ate like a Buddhist monk. On the day of the twelve-fifteen she was dressed in an olive-hued skirt suit and a simple ivory blouse. What you really admired about her, though, were her shoes. As aficionados of design, we — the women among us especially — sat in awe of their sleek singularity, exquisite color, and contoured elegance, marveling at them as others might the armrest of a chair by Charles Eames, or the black wing of a Pentagon jetfighter. Each pair — and she must have had fifty of them — deserved their own Plexiglas display case at the Museum of Contemporary Art, next to that polyethylene thing and those neon signs. We had never seen anything so beautiful as those shoes. When someone finally got up the nerve to ask her what brand they were, no one recognized the name, leaving us to conclude that they were made by boutique Italian designers who refused to export their product, but which Lynn’s friends picked up for her on their international travels, because everyone knew Lynn never took vacation.