Then We Came to the End

by Joshua Ferris

  “Yeah, I know,” said Carl, cutting him short. “I know all about that, trust me. I’m married to a doctor.”

  “Right,” said Tom. “So what I guess I’m asking is, why steal it? Why not have somebody prescribe something that’s right for you?”

  “Because I don’t want to have to see a doctor,” said Carl. “I hate doctors.”

  “Your wife’s a doctor,” said Tom.

  “It’s a problem,” said Carl. “Plus if I did that, it might get back to her somehow, and then she would know that she was right about me being depressed. It’s just easier to go into Janine’s and take it from her. She has a million of these things in there,” he said.

  He reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a prescription bottle and handed it to Tom.

  “Do you know anything about what’s in here?” asked Tom, shaking the bottle gently and reading the label. It was a three-month supply. “Three hundred milligrams,” he said. “That sounds like a lot.”

  “I just follow the instructions on the label,” said Carl.

  Tom asked him if he had noticed any change in his mood.

  “It’s only been a week,” Carl replied. “It’s probably too early yet.”

  There was a knock at the door. In silence Tom handed Janine’s drugs back to Carl and Carl returned the bottle to his desk. When Carl called out, Joe Pope appeared.

  “Sorry to interrupt you at your lunch, Carl,” he said.

  “That’s okay.”

  “I’m actually here for Tom,” said Joe.

  Tom turned in his chair and gave Joe a sidewinder gaze.

  “I wondered if you wouldn’t mind joining us for an input meeting later this afternoon,” Joe inquired of him.

  “Sure,” Tom said. “What time?”

  “Three-thirty, Lynn’s office?”

  “You bet.”

  When that got around — Sure, what time? You bet. — we didn’t know what to make of it. All Tom would say was, “What was I supposed to say — no? Go shove it up your ass, Joe, no input meeting for me? I got child support to pay, man. Believe it or not, I need this job.”

  We didn’t doubt that. It was just that we could recall a time in the Michigan Room when Tom Mota was less agreeably disposed toward Joe Pope. All of our conference rooms were named after streets running along the Magnificent Mile, and the view from Michigan was stupendous. The whole city was spread out before our eyes, layer after layer of buildings tall and squat, wide and thin, a giant matrix of architectural variation cut up by taxi-glinting thoroughfares and back alleyways and the snaking Chicago River, and every surface from burnished window to ancient brick was brightening under the August sun. The irony of the view from the Michigan Room was that it drove us mad with desire to be out there, walking the city sidewalks, looking up at the buildings, joining the swell of other people and enjoying the sun, but the only time we ever felt that urgency was when we were stuck at the window in the Michigan Room. Otherwise we left for the night and all we could think about was getting around the goddamn tourists and heading the fuck home.

  On the day Tom and Joe really had it out, a month or so before Tom’s gift to Carl, it had evidently gotten back to Joe what was said here and there — at a lunch, before a meeting. Idle speculation, you know. Sometimes material for an honest debate where everyone took sides, but more often just as a joke. It’s what we did, we talked. We weren’t doing anything the Greeks weren’t doing around their shadowy, promiscuous campfires. And neither, apparently, was Joe Pope, because just as we were capping our pens, all our notes taken and questions answered, and now only a half minute’s distance from the restroom or telephone or coffee bar — whatever beckoned loudest — Joe, who was running his own input meetings by then, said to us, “Oh, one last thing.” He paused. “Sorry, just give me one more minute here.” We settled back down. “I feel the need to bring this to our attention,” he said. “Look, I understand the need to talk. Most of the time, that’s a good thing. We talk, we laugh. It makes time go faster. But I’m not sure we’re always aware of some of the things we’re saying. We might not mean anything by them, this or that or the other thing might just be a joke, but it gets around, and sometimes, one person or another hears about it and they get upset. Not everybody. Some people just laugh it off. Look, as an example, I know I’m talked about. No big deal to me. I take no offense. But other people, they hear things, it hits them in a certain way. You can’t blame them. They get bothered, or hurt, or it embarrasses them. I’d prefer those type of things we try to keep to a minimum. I’m not saying don’t talk. I’m just saying, reduce the volume a little, make sure that what you’re saying doesn’t hurt anybody. Okay?”

  There was a long, unendurable pause as he looked around at all of us in case we had questions. “Okay, that’s my little speech,” he concluded. “Thanks for indulging me.” At last we were released. We started to get up again. We had no idea Joe carried with him the reformer’s spirit. We had mixed feelings about reformers. Some of us thought they were noble, and likely to change nothing. Others were outright hostile. Who the fuck is he — that sort of response.

  “You know, Joe,” Tom Mota said, just as we had started to file out. “There’s really nothing wrong with being gay.”

  Joe cocked an ear at him, but managed still to look him firmly in the eye. “With what?” he asked.

  “Hank Neary’s gay,” Tom continued, avoiding the direct question. Hank was just then pushing his chair in. He looked startled to be the sudden subject of conversation. “Aren’t you, Hank? And he has no problem with it.”

  “Tom,” said Joe. “You must not have heard anything I just said.”

  “No, I heard you, Joe. I heard you loud and clear.”

  People halfway out the door halted in their tracks.

  “Then maybe you didn’t understand,” Joe tried to clarify. “The point was there’s right talk, Tom, and there’s wrong talk, and who’s gay or who isn’t gay, that’s the wrong talk, understand? That kind of talk could be construed as slander.”

  “Slander?” said Tom. “Whoa, slander — Joe, that’s an expensive word, slander. Do we need to involve lawyers? I have lawyers, Joe. I have so many fucking lawyers it would be no problem putting them to work on this one.”

  “Tom,” said Joe. “Your anger.”

  “Excuse me?” said Tom.

  “Your anger,” Joe repeated.

  “What the fuck does that mean,” said Tom, “‘Your anger’? Is that what you just said, ‘Your anger’?” Joe didn’t reply. “What the fuck does it mean, ‘Your anger’?” Joe left the room. “Does anybody know what the fuck he means by ‘Your anger’?” asked Tom.

  We knew what “Your anger” meant because we suffered from the same anger from time to time. We suffered all sorts of ailments — heart conditions, nervous tics, thrown-out backs. We had the mother of all headaches. We were affected by changes in weather conditions, by mood swings and by lingering high school insecurities. We were deeply concerned about who was next, and what criteria for dismissal the partners were operating under. Billy Reiser came in with a broken leg. At first everyone was excited. How did it happen? We gathered down at his office as soon as word spread, as if guided by a voice or a high-pitched frequency. Talk was like the flu: if it started with one, soon it infected all. But unlike the flu, we couldn’t afford to be left out if something was going around. We wanted Billy to tell us how it happened. “Softball,” he explained. That was it? “Bad slide,” he elaborated. We couldn’t help feeling disappointed. We told Billy we hoped he felt better soon and left again for our desks. A reason like that was hardly worth getting up for. Then over the next ten or twelve months, Billy proceeded to hobble around on his crutches, and swear to god you could hear the guy coming from six miles away. Jesus, we said eventually, aren’t you off those things yet? “Complications,” he said. He went through a series of surgeries. There were metal pins involved. Doctors said he might walk forever with a limp, so he was considering a lawsuit. We
felt sorry for him, but at the same time, Billy heaving himself across a hallway, the joints of his crutches creaking like a nineteenth-century whaler — it might not sound like much, but day-in day-out, it started to grate. We understood “Your anger” whenever Billy passed by, irrational and unforgiving anger which caused some of us to call him, at one point or another, every derogatory name for a handicapped person in the book — mean and insensitive names like “crip,” “gimp,” and “wobbler” — while others we made up on our own. “The guy’s name is Reiser,” said Larry Novotny, “but he can’t even stand up on his own two legs.” Amber clucked at him for shame and the rest of us for the poverty of the pun but from then on we never called Billy by his first name again. It was always Reiser. Of course we took pains not to let Reiser get wind of our frustrations with him, most days. Most days we let human foibles run right off of us, as Jesus commanded. “Let he that is without sin cast the first stone,” for we had among us our fair share of believers. We had a Bible study group. They met for lunch every Thursday in the cafeteria. A motley crew of condo-board executives, South Siders, recovering anorexics, building people, receptionists. It was an ebb-and-flow crowd, mimicking faith itself. The Word was the source that brought us all together. We drifted in and out of it, trying to make sense of the Word as it applied to us in our personal lives as well as in the corporate setting, but most of us just stayed away. More power to them, we liked to say. What were we missing? we wondered at night. How boring to listen to them go on and on about God, we thought every Thursday around noon. We had to ask, was this really the place for God? The sight of a dozen Bibles open on a cafeteria table and the familiar heads now bowed in a wild transformation of our long-established expectations of who they were shook us a little, as if forcing us to confront the possibility that we knew nothing, absolutely nothing about the inner lives of anyone here. But that soon passed. Our scope was infinite, our reach almighty, our knowledge was complete. Goddamn it, sometimes it felt like we were God. Was it such a blasphemy? We knew everything, we had terrible powers, we would never die. Was it a surprise that most of us did not join in at Bible study?

  “I don’t really give a shit if the guy’s a homo or not,” said Tom Mota, a week or so after his encounter with Joe Pope in the Michigan Room. “I just want to know what the fuck he means by ‘Your anger.’” There was an opening between two clusters of cubicles that allowed enough room for a couple of round tables and several chairs where we found ourselves congregating some mornings around a box of Krispy Kremes or a bag of bagels that someone, inspired by the possibility of a brightened day, purchased and brought in and shared with the rest of us. The human spirit shining through against all adversity. We were enjoying our breakfast, drinking our first cups of coffee of the morning, when Joe Pope comes by carrying some ad freshly ripped from the printer and asks who brought in the bagels. “May I have one?” he asked. Genevieve Latko-Devine said of course he could and he thanked her and we expected him to be on his way after that but he lingered to spread some cream cheese and then he sat down among us, thanking Genevieve again. It was all very casual, as if routine, nothing out of the ordinary. We felt it, though, right here — Joe Pope’s unexpected presence. Bonhomie took a holiday.

  Things got very quiet, until Joe himself finally broke the ice. “By the way,” he said. “How are you all doing with the cold sore spots?”

  We were in the process of coming up with a series of TV spots for one of our clients who manufactured an analgesic to reduce cold sore pain and swelling. We took in Joe’s question kind of slowly, without any immediate response. We might have even exchanged a look or two. This wasn’t long after his second promotion. Doing okay, more or less, we said, in effect. And then we probably nodded, you know, noncommittal half nods. The thing was, his question — “How are you all doing with the cold sore spots?” — didn’t seem a simple question in search of a simple answer. So soon after his promotion, it seemed more like a shrewd, highly evolved assertion of his new entitlement. We didn’t think it was actual concern or curiosity for how we were progressing on the cold sore spots so much as a pretense to prod our asses.

  “You do know, Joe,” Karen Woo finally said, “that it’s only nine-thirty in the morning, right? Believe it or not, we are going to get to the cold sore spots today.”

  Joe looked genuinely misunderstood. “That’s not why I was asking, Karen,” he said. “I have every confidence you’ll get to it. I was asking because I’ve been having trouble coming up with something myself.”

  We remained suspicious. He rarely had a hard time coming up with anything.

  “The difficulty I’m having,” he explained, “is that they want us to be funny and irreverent and all that, but at the same time, they don’t want us to offend anybody who suffers from cold sores. It seems to me those two things are mutually exclusive. At least it makes it hard for me to come up with an ad that’s worth a damn.”

  By noon, we knew that the son of a bitch was right. It was extremely tough to strike a balance between being funny about the unsightly effects of a cold sore while protecting against offending anyone watching who might suffer the unsightly effects of cold sores. It was one of those impossible, harebrained paradoxes that only a roundtable of corporate marketers smelling of competing aftershaves could have dreamed up — in a different land, in a different era, those tools would have come up with the dynasty’s favorite koans. We had to admit maybe Joe Pope had no other intention in asking his question that morning but to inquire if we were having as hard a time with the cold sore spots as he was, and that our hasty assumptions were the result of a miscommunication. Some of us continued to suspect him, however, and as the fine points faded, on balance the episode probably didn’t go in his favor.

  It didn’t improve matters when we gathered down at Lynn Mason’s cluttered office two days later to present to her our concepts for cold sore spots and Joe and Genevieve unveiled Cold Sore Guy. We knew right away that not only would Cold Sore Guy be one of the three concepts we’d send to the client, but that it would be the spot they ran, and ran, and ran, until you and everybody else in America grew intimate with Cold Sore Guy. The fucker nailed it, he and Genevieve, who was the art director of the pair, just fucking nailed the great koan of the cold sore marketers. Door opens on the background of suburbia, and standing in the bright doorway is a pair of attractive young lovebirds. “Hi, Mom!” says the girl. “I’d like you to meet my special someone.” Cold Sore Guy offers Mom his hand. He indeed has an unsightly, somewhat exaggerated cold sore on the right corner of his upper lip. “Hi, I’m Cold Sore Guy.” “Of course you are!” says Mom, taking Cold Sore Guy’s hand. “Come on in!” Cut to Kitchen. Stern-looking Father. “Daddy,” says the girl. “I’d like you to meet Cold Sore Guy.” “Cold Sore Guy,” says Daddy sternly. “It’s nice to finally meet you, sir,” says Cold Sore Guy, giving Daddy’s hand a firm shake and smiling wide as a bell with his egregious cold sore. Cut to Living Room. Alzheimer’s-looking Grandmother. “Grandma?” says the girl, shaking the frail woman vigorously. “Grandma?” Grandma comes to, sits up, looks at Cold Sore Guy and says, “Well, you must be Cold Sore Guy!” “Hi, Grandma,” says Cold Sore Guy. Voice-over explains features and benefits of the product. Tagline: “Don’t let a cold sore interfere with your life.” Final cut to Dining Room. Stern-looking Father: “More mashed potatoes, Cold Sore Guy?” “Oh, love some, sir!” Fade.

  We had all this for the first time only on storyboards, but the immediacy was undeniable, and we just knew he’d nailed it, him and Genevieve. The entire family was welcoming. They liked the guy. They shook hands with him. It was funny, but the subject of the fun was embraced. Cold Sore Guy was the hero. Plus, he could eat mashed potatoes. No one eats mashed potatoes with a cold sore like his, but superhero Cold Sore Guy did. And what’s more, it never said we could cure a cold sore. That was always the toughest maneuver we had to make with that particular client. We could say we could treat a cold sore, but we were forbidden from
saying that we could cure one. Joe’s spot said nothing about treating or curing — he just managed to make the cold sore sufferer a sympathetic person. The client loved it. And when they cast it with the right actor, the guy looked even more sympathetic and performed it hilariously, and the ad was replayed on the Internet and took home awards and all the rest.

  The day following the unveiling of Cold Sore Guy, Joe came into his office with his bicycle as he did every morning and found the word FAG written on the wall with a black Sharpie. It slanted up, in the hand of a child or a man in haste, not unlike what you might see on the back of a stall door in a bar. Now something was on his wall — nothing big, but definitely noticeable. We thought, sure, we’re a dysfunctional office sometimes, but nobody we know could do a thing like that. Maybe it was somebody harboring animosity against Joe in some other realm of his life, who snuck past security one night, found Joe’s office, and Sharpied away his soul. But in the end, that didn’t sound very likely, and we had no choice but to conclude that Joe, in search of some local attention, had put it up there himself before leaving late the night before.

  3

  MORE LAYOFFS — WHY MEDIA BUYERS SUCK — THE BILLBOARD — YOP AT THE PRINT STATION — THE DOUBLE MEETING — LYNN IN SURGERY — WE KNOW WHAT JOE KNOWS — THE TWO-MARTINI LUNCH — AMBER’S REAL CONCERN — HONEST WORK — SOME GUY TALKS TO BENNY — GENEVIEVE’S ACCUSATION — JANINE GORJANC IN THE POOL OF PLASTIC BALLS — THE SETUP — WE APOLOGIZE — PAINTBALLS

  IN THE EARLY WEEKS of 2001, they let go of Kelly Corma, Sandra Hochstadt, and Toby Wise. Toby had a custom-made desk in his office, which he’d commissioned out of a favorite surfboard — he was a great surfing fanatic. The desk took a while to dismantle, extending his period of stay beyond the usual protocol. Then he asked for help carrying the pieces down to the parking garage. We loaded the desk in the back of his new Trailblazer and prepared to say good-bye. This was always the most awkward time. Everyone had to decide — handshake, or hug? We heard Toby shut the tailgate on the Trailblazer and expected him to come around to where we had congregated. Instead he hopped into the driver’s seat and powered down the tinted window. “So I guess I’ll be seeing ya,” he said, with a jolly lack of ceremony. Then he powered up the window again and took off. We felt a little slighted. Was a handshake too much to ask? If he was just bluffing his way out of a bad hand, if that was just his poker face, it sure was an exuberant and bouncy one. He stopped at the curb to look for cars and then pulled out with a little squeal. It was the last we ever saw of him.