Then We Came to the End

by Joshua Ferris

  “Gonna try.”

  “I bought you these crummy flowers,” she said. It was in fact a pretty pathetic bouquet. We all thought, Shit! We forgot flowers! Lynn turned to Genevieve. “In-house florists at a hospital, and this is all they had.”

  After she left, we asked Dan if he was offended by how she had responded to his innocuous remark about the team.

  “Are you kidding me?” he said. “I thought that was terrific.”

  SIX MONTHS LATER, Carl had recovered from toxic poisoning and was now on a regimen of antidepressants tailored personally to him. None of us could say we had noticed much of a change. Perhaps it was a victory just to see him stable. He wasn’t cleaning other people’s offices during his downtime, or doing laps around the hall. But on the other hand he still wore off-brand blue jeans and bad shoes and spent his lunch hour behind a closed door eating the same meal.

  “Sorry to interrupt, Carl,” said Amber. A few of us had come with her, and now we were standing behind her in Carl’s doorway. We had elected Amber as our spokeswoman.

  “That’s okay,” he said. “What’s up?”

  Amber took a step inside the office. She grabbed the back of a chair and paused. She looked back at us. We were like, “Go on. Go on!”

  Finally she told Carl that Karen Woo had informed everyone that he was the source.

  Carl wiped his mouth with his napkin. He shrugged. “The source of what?” he replied.

  ON THE DAY LYNN MASON was scheduled for surgery, she showed up at the office.

  Karen saw her first. Karen was always the first to know everything. We expected her to know everything first, just as we expected Jim Jackers to be the last to know anything. This time was no different — Lynn Mason was in the office, and Karen had been the first to see her. She had come across her in the women’s room.

  Genevieve was next. On her way to Marissa Lopchek’s in HR, she saw Lynn standing at the window in the Michigan Room. “At first I didn’t think it was her,” she said, “because how could it be her? She’s supposed to be in surgery. But on my way back from Marissa’s, she was still at the window. She’d been there for, I don’t know, twenty minutes? She must have felt me staring or something because she turned, and just as she turned I started to walk away real quick because I didn’t want her to catch me staring, but she saw me anyway and said hello, but by then I was halfway down the hall, so I had to go all the way back to the doorway to say hi because I didn’t want to seem rude, but by then she had turned back to the window and — oh, it was so awkward. What is she doing here?” she asked.

  Dan Wisdom saw Lynn cleaning her office. She and the office coordinator were boxing things up in there. We asked him what kind of things and he started to list them: stock-photo books, outdated computers, long-dead advertising magazines, half-empty soda bottles. . . . It was your right and privilege as a partner to keep as cluttered an office as you wanted, and we had all grown accustomed to shifting things to the floor whenever we went into Lynn’s office for a meeting. “You wouldn’t recognize it,” said Dan. “One of the custodians came up with a cart. He took down . . . I can’t even tell you how many boxes full of old crap.” We asked him why she was cleaning. “I have no idea why,” he said. “I thought she was supposed to be in surgery.”

  Benny had seen her, too. Certain pockets of office space had been unoccupied for some time, workstations vacated by those who had walked Spanish down the hall. Benny found Lynn at a desk in one of the more fallow clusters of our formerly occupied cubicles.

  “You know the place,” he asked us, “on fifty-nine?”

  We knew it by heart: all the cubicle walls barren, no radio playing, the printers off-line, and the only hope for corporate revitalization the fact that no one had yet turned off the overhead lights — we, too, had been victimized by the dot-coms. None of us liked it down there; it was too naked a reminder of the times we lived in. But if you needed someplace where you could hear yourself think and weren’t likely to be disturbed, there was no better place than that deserted section of fifty-nine.

  “She was sitting on top of one of the cubicle desks,” said Benny, “with her legs hanging down. It was funny to see her like that. What was she doing sitting inside a cubicle? I was so surprised to see someone in there I almost jumped back. But then to look closer and see it was her? Way strange. I would have said something but, man, she was all spaced out. She was just zonked out. She had to have heard me, but she didn’t look up. So you know what I did. I got the hell out of there.”

  Marcia Dwyer found her at a print station. She was standing against the wall, next to the recycling bin and the stacks of boxes holding copy paper. Marcia was there to photocopy something for the rest of us, a list of interesting facts about breast cancer found on the Internet. She greeted Lynn, and the greeting seemed to wrench the older woman out from underwater.

  “What was that?” Lynn asked.

  “Oh,” said Marcia, “I was just saying hello.”

  “Oh. Hi.”

  Marcia advanced toward the copier. Lynn was just standing there against the wall. “Oh, do you need to use this?” Marcia asked suddenly.

  Lynn shook her head.

  “Oh. Okay.”

  She made her copies. “Bye,” said Marcia, when she had finished.

  Lynn looked up. “All done?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay.”

  “I don’t think I’ve ever had a more awkward exchange my entire life,” Marcia told us. We were discussing these run-ins in Marcia’s office. “What was she doing just standing there against the wall?”

  “Maybe all this happened yesterday,” someone suggested.

  It wasn’t as absurd a notion as it might sound. Some days, time passed way too slowly here, other days far too quickly, so that what happened in the morning could seem like eons ago while what took place six months earlier was as fresh in our minds as if an hour had yet to pass. It was only natural that on occasion we confused the two.

  “No, it was this morning,” Karen assured us. “Trust me. I saw her. Lynn’s in.”

  “What probably happened,” Amber suggested, “was that she stopped by the office to finish up some last-minute business, and then she walked over to the hospital. So she’s not in in. She just stopped by on her way.”

  “Cleaning her office?” said Larry. “Standing in the Michigan Room for half an hour? That’s last-minute business?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or maybe,” said Larry, “there never was an operation.”

  “What do you mean, there never was an operation? Of course there was an operation.”

  “Because,” Larry continued, “she doesn’t have cancer.”

  “How can you say that, Larry? Of course she has cancer.”

  “How do you know it’s not just a rumor, Amber?”

  “Because I just know.”

  “Anyway,” said Karen, “her operation was scheduled for nine. She couldn’t have recovered in that time, so she must have missed it.”

  “It was scheduled for nine?” said Genevieve. “I thought nobody knew when it was scheduled for. Where are you getting nine from, Karen?”

  “I always get my information directly from the source,” Karen said.

  WE DIDN’T HAVE much else to do, you see. We had the pro bono fund-raiser ads, sure — but what were they when compared to our workload of yore? We had already made headway on them; they would be finished in no time. The more pressing matter that morning seemed to be discovering why Lynn had chosen to come into work instead of dealing with a life-threatening illness. And so when Karen Woo told us who her source was, naturally we went in search of answers.

  “I’m not the source of that information,” said Carl in front of his penne alla vodka. He denied knowing anything about Lynn Mason going into surgery at nine. And if he had known, he wouldn’t have said anything — certainly not to Karen Woo.

  “But Lynn did receive a diagnosis of cancer, did she not?” asked Amber, inside his of
fice.

  “As far as I know she did,” he said. “But I’m not the source of that information, either, and I don’t know why Karen’s saying I am — unless it’s because Marilynn’s an oncologist at Northwestern. But what Karen doesn’t know is that I moved out six weeks ago, and besides, Marilynn wouldn’t tell me anything — not if Lynn were a patient.”

  It was the first we had heard of Carl and Marilynn’s separation. We didn’t inquire further because we didn’t care to pry. We asked in the most general way how he was holding up, and he replied clinically that it was the best decision for both parties. We deduced from that that Carl had probably not been the prime mover.

  “I don’t mean to change the subject,” said Amber.

  “Please do,” said Carl.

  “But then so you’re not the source.”

  “The source of what?” he repeated, a little edgier this time.

  “Of the fact that she has cancer.”

  Carl shook his head. “I first heard that from Sandy Green,” he said.

  SOME OF US THOUGHT Sandy Green in payroll was the second coming, others the devil incarnate — it all depended on what you were getting paid. Her office was a firetrap of put-off filing. Sandy had gray hair and wore one of those ribbed finger condoms that gives one speed in the sport of accounting. Off a remote corridor at the far end of sixty-one, her windowless office was known as the Bat Cave for its general darkness and inaccessibility. “I talked to Carl a couple days ago for about five minutes about FICA withholdings,” said Sandy. “I doubt very seriously that in five minutes I would have said something to him about Lynn’s cancer.”

  “Okay,” said Genevieve, “but what we’re trying to determine is if Lynn even has cancer, and if you happen to be the one who knows that for a fact.”

  Sandy looked genuinely perplexed — then suddenly her face ironed out and she raised her plastic finger in the air and gave it a three-time shake. “I remember now,” she said. “I said something to him like, ‘I would take this issue up with Lynn,’ and he said, ‘Okay, I’ll talk to Lynn about it,’ and I said, ‘But you had better do it today, because . . .’ But I didn’t say anything more. I waited for him to say something. And he did, he said, ‘Oh, right, I’ll do it today, right.’ So that’s when I said, ‘Poor Lynn,’ and he said, ‘Yes, it’s too bad.’ So he already knew. He got his information from someone else.”

  “But how did you get your information?” asked Genevieve.

  “How did I get my information?”

  “Yes, that’s what we’re trying to find out.”

  Sandy put her elbow on her desk, and her cheek in her palm, and there was silence as she tried to remember. “Hold on,” she said. She picked up the phone. “Deirdre, was it you who told me about Lynn’s cancer? Or did Michelle tell the two of us, I can’t remember. Are you sure? All right, honey.” There was a long pause. Sandy startled us with a wicked cackle. “Leave your mirror at home next time, honey! Okay, bye-bye.” She hung up the phone and turned to us. “Deirdre tells me she told me.”

  DEIRDRE INFORMED US that she received her information about Lynn’s cancer from Account Executive Robbie Stokes. “Oh, good,” said Deirdre, “my new door’s here.”

  With that, the building guys came in with her new door and everyone got out of their way.

  ROBBIE STOKES’ office was empty. He was in Account Management, and, strange for any account person, he had hung something non-Monet on the wall: a neon Yuengling sign, intended for a bar window. It hummed and flickered in the deafening silence.

  Someone from inside a cubicle cried out, “Bring me the world!”

  ON THEIR WAY OUT of the building, Amber and Larry ran into Robbie. “I hear you guys have been looking for me,” he said. “I didn’t start that rumor. I got that rumor from Doug Dion.”

  Larry assured Robbie that nobody was saying he started anything. We were just trying to get to the bottom of it.

  “Well, just do me a favor,” said Robbie, “and don’t say I started it, okay? Because I don’t want this to get me into trouble with Lynn.”

  Amber assured him we were being discreet.

  “No, just leave me out of it,” he demanded. “Don’t even say the name Robbie Stokes.”

  SOME OF US RETURNED to Marcia’s office and explained what we thought she needed to do.

  “Are you out,” she said, “of your fucking minds?”

  Benny happened to fall by.

  “Benny,” said Marcia, “listen to what these yahoos want me to do.”

  Dan Wisdom, painter of fish, showed up and insisted on interrupting. He said he had come across Chris Yop at a print station and told him that Lynn Mason was in fact in the office that day.

  “We were just standing there,” said Dan, “and he’s got about fifty resumes coming out on the heavy bonded stuff, you know, the really good stuff, when I tell him that Lynn’s not in surgery after all. And immediately he’s like, ‘But I been walking the halls this whole time!’ You should have seen his face. So I ask him, ‘Weren’t you at least afraid security would see you?’ And he says, ‘Security? Security’s a joke. Security never comes up here.’ He makes a good point.”

  We all agreed he did.

  “But now that he knows that Lynn’s in? You should have seen how scared he was leaving the print station. Checking both ways down the hall like he was in some parody of a spy movie. It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”

  “Have you ever seen Top Secret, with Val Kilmer?” Don Blattner asked. “Now that’s funny.”

  “Hank,” Marcia called out. She rolled to the side of her desk in the chair that once belonged to Tom Mota, to better see into the hallway. “Hank!”

  Hank reversed in his tracks to stand just outside Marcia’s office. He straightened his bulky glasses, a nervous tic of his, and they fell right back down his nose.

  “Listen to what these yahoos want me to do, Hank,” she said. “They want me to call the hospital, right — listen to this — and pretend that I’m Lynn, and say, ‘Oh, I’m a little confused — something — blah blah blah — and I was wondering, was I scheduled to be in surgery today?’ Yeah, I’m supposed to call up and impersonate my boss while, excuse me, we’re not just going through layoffs — and I happen to have the wrong chair — but this is a woman who might be really sick. And they want me to call up and say, ‘Oh, can you tell me, do you happen to know if I have cancer?’”

  “That sounds like a bad idea,” said Hank.

  We tried to explain to him why it was really our only option, if we were going to know one way or another with absolute certainty.

  “Under normal circumstances,” said Amber, who had returned with Larry to the office and was now eating a Cobb salad from her lap, “I wouldn’t think it’s such a good idea, either. But if she had an appointment this morning and she didn’t go, don’t you think we should be worried about her?”

  “Well, then, you make the call,” said Marcia.

  “I don’t think —” said Hank.

  “It wasn’t my —” said Amber.

  “No way that would —” said Don.

  “. . . be trafficking in rumors,” said Larry. “And you’d be doing everyone a big —”

  “STOP IT,” said Joe Pope.

  He was standing right behind Hank in Marcia’s doorway and no one had noticed. Everyone turned and some got to their feet as he moved to stand just inside the office and the room went cold. “I can hear you guys from inside the elevator,” he said. There was a new command in his tone and his brow was menaced with possible disdain. “Now, please,” he said. “Just knock it off.”

  5

  THE UNBELIEVABLE REPORT — ON NOT KNOWING SOMETHING — CHAIRS — FURTHER DEBATE — BENNY’S OPTIONS — THINKING ABOUT BRIZZ — THE U-STOR-IT — THE YOPANWOO INDIANS —THE TRIPLE MEETING — CHANGES TO THE PROJECT — JIM ALWAYS THE LAST TO KNOW — TOM’S MOTHER DIES — SCREWY ASSIGNMENT — UNCLE MAX — JIM TAPPED — YOP’S REQUEST — WE STAND UP TO KAREN

  SOM
EONE PASSED AROUND a link once to a news article posted on a reputable website that we all read and talked about for days. A man working at an office much like ours had a heart attack at his desk, and for the rest of the day people passing by his workstation failed to notice. That wasn’t the newsworthy bit — there are, what, a hundred and fifty million of us in the workplace? It was bound to happen to somebody. What we couldn’t wrap our heads around, what made this man’s commonplace death national news, was the unlikely information provided in the first sentence of the dispatch: “A man working in an Arlington, Virginia, insurance firm died of a heart attack at his desk recently and wasn’t discovered until four days later, when coworkers complained of a bad-fruit smell.”

  The article went on to explain that Friday had passed, and then the weekend, and no one had discovered this man fallen in his cubicle. Not a coworker, not a building guy, not someone collecting the trash. Then we were supposed to believe that Monday came around, Monday with its meetings and returned phone calls, its resumption of routine and reinstatement of duty, Monday came and went, and they didn’t find him then, either. It wasn’t until Tuesday, Tuesday afternoon, when they all went in search of a rotten banana, that they saw one of their own dead on the floor by his desk, obscured by his chair. We kept asking ourselves how could that be possible? Surely someone had to come by with a request for a meeting. Someone had to come by to inquire why a meeting was missed. But no — this poor jerk was the subject of not so much as a morning greeting from one of his cube neighbors. We didn’t know how that could happen.

  We hated not knowing something. We hated not knowing who was next to walk Spanish down the hall. How would our bills get paid? And where would we find new work? We knew the power of the credit card companies and the collection agencies and the consequences of bankruptcy. Those institutions were without appeal. They put your name into a system, and from that point forward vital parts of the American dream were foreclosed upon. A backyard swimming pool. A long weekend in Vegas. A low-end BMW. These were not Jeffersonian ideals, perhaps, on par with life and liberty, but at this advanced stage, with the West won and the Cold War over, they, too, seemed among our inalienable rights. This was just before the fall of the dollar, before the stormy debate about corporate outsourcing, and the specter of a juggernaut of Chinese and Indian youths overtaking our advantages in broadband.