Then We Came to the End

by Joshua Ferris

  Marcia hated not knowing what might come of being caught with Tom Mota’s chair, with its serial numbers that would not match up with the office coordinator’s master list. So she swapped Tom’s chair for Ernie’s and left Tom’s in Tom’s old office. Even so, she was still scared that the office coordinator would look for Ernie’s chair in Ernie’s old office — from which Chris Yop had taken it, swapping it with his own lesser chair when Ernie retired — and discover not Ernie’s serial numbers but Chris Yop’s, and upon that discovery, go in search of Ernie’s chair, which Marcia was presently sitting on. Sooner or later, Marcia feared, the office coordinator was bound to find out what she had done. So she felt the need to get her original chair back from Karen Woo, who had received it some months prior when Marcia took Reiser’s chair when Reiser offered it to her after taking Sean Smith’s chair after Sean got canned. She went to Karen to ask for her chair back, but Karen didn’t want to part with her chair, which she claimed wasn’t the one Marcia had given her at all, but was Bob Yagley’s chair, which she had swapped with Marcia’s late one night after gentle, soft-spoken Bob was let go. Bob’s old office was currently occupied by a woman named Dana Rettig who had made the leap from cubicle to office less by virtue of merit than by management’s perception that so many vacated offices looked bad to potential visitors. When Dana made that leap, she brought along her own chair, which had once belonged to someone in Account Management and was a better chair than Bob’s, which was really Marcia’s. “What was wrong with my chair?” Marcia asked her. Dana replied that nothing was wrong with it per se; she had just gotten attached to the Account Management person’s chair. “So where is my chair, then?” asked Marcia. Dana told her it was probably in the same place she left it, Dana’s old cubicle, but when she and Marcia walked down to that particular workstation, they found some production person fresh out of college — he looked all of fifteen — where Dana used to sit, who told them that somebody a few months back had passed down the hall only to return, pull rank, and take his chair, which was replaced by the cheap plastic thing he had been sitting on ever since. All attempts to get the fresh-faced peon to pony up a little information on who had strong-armed him out of his chair were for naught until Marcia asked him point-blank how he expected to get out of production hell and make it to Assistant Art Director if he couldn’t even sketch a face on a legal pad. So the production kid made a rough sketch from memory of the man who took his chair, and when he was through filling in the hair and putting the final touches on the eyes, Marcia and Dana examined it and determined it was a dead ringer for Chris Yop. Was it possible that Yop had grown bored with Ernie Kessler’s chair, walked past a chair he liked better and bullied it out from under a production nobody, and walked away with Marcia’s chair, which he sat on until the office coordinator came around giving him heat and he found himself without any alternative but to take it down to Tom’s office and pretend it was Tom’s, so that when Marcia went in to swap Tom’s real chair with Ernie Kessler’s, it wasn’t Ernie’s chair at all but Marcia’s original one that she took back with her? Did Marcia have her own chair again? “Are you absolutely sure that this is the guy who took your chair?” she asked the production peon. The production peon said no, he wasn’t sure of that at all. Marcia had no idea whose chair she had. It might have been hers, it might have been Ernie Kessler’s, or it might have been the chair of some indeterminate third party. The only person who knew for certain was the office coordinator, who owned the master list. Marcia returned to her office beset by the high anxiety typical of the time.

  Larry Novotny hated not knowing if Amber Ludwig could be convinced that it was in both of their best interests for her to have the abortion, because he hated not knowing what his wife might do to him if the affair came to light, while Amber hated not knowing what God would do to her if she were to go through with it. Amber was a Catholic who hated not knowing a lot of the mysterious ways in which God worked. Was it possible, for instance, that God could send Tom Mota back into the office with all of God’s wrath to rectify the sins Amber had committed there on desks we hoped to god were not ours?

  We, too, hated not knowing the specifics of Tom’s intentions to change history. Most of us thought Tom Mota was not a psychopath, and that if he had wanted to return he would have done it a day or two after being let go. He had had time to cool off now and collect his wits. But some of us remembered the way he treated Marilynn Garbedian in the hospital the day her husband was admitted for a serious illness, remembered how he smirked in his trench coat and stared at her neck, as if he were about to land a blow in that delicate place, and couldn’t help thinking that that was perfectly psychopathic behavior. But to others that was just good old-fashioned misogyny. Tom was just confusing Marilynn Garbedian for Barb Mota, his ex-wife, and was taking out on Marilynn what he wanted to take out on Barb. But if that were the case, some of us argued, who was he going to take it out on next? Tom subscribed to Guns and Ammo. He had a sizable collection of firearms in his possession. Most of those guns, however, were collectors’ items and probably couldn’t even fire anymore. Well, some of us thought, what’s stopping Tom from going out and buying new guns? How easy it was to visit a gun show and three days later find yourself in possession of the assault weapons ideal for a situation like the one we were envisioning. We had to remind ourselves that because of Barb’s restraining order, he’d probably have to wait more like ninety days. Besides, he was on record saying those items were unsportsmanlike. “Automatic rifles, man — where’s the sport in that?” he used to say. That was little relief to some. It would be unsportsmanlike to kill us with anything more than old-fashioned handguns, therefore Tom won’t kill us? That was not a winning argument. Tom could have easily had a change of heart with respect to those heavier items, owing to the more recent setbacks of his failed life, and after some less-than-truthful data entry, using a shady Internet dealer, he might be taking possession of those unsportsmanlike items from a UPS man even as our debate raged. Some of us said that was absurd. Tom was not coming back. Tom was trying to move on. But others pointed out that we had had the very same conviction that Lynn Mason wouldn’t show up for work on the day she was scheduled for surgery, and look how that turned out.

  We hated not knowing what Lynn Mason was doing showing up for work on the day she was scheduled for surgery.

  JIM JACKERS SPENT his lunch hour in the waiting room of the oncology ward at Rush-Presbyterian surrounded by some very sick people. Present also were a number of robust family members, either staring off into the distance with their arms folded, or retrieving water for their loved ones. Jim waited and waited for the doctor with whom his father had put him in touch. Jim’s father sold medical equipment, and when Jim told him of his recent project, he contacted an oncologist on his son’s behalf and told Jim the doctor was willing to speak with him. Jim wanted to talk to the doctor in the hopes of gaining the insight necessary to arrive at the winning concept for the fund-raiser, but at that particular hour the doctor proved too busy to spare any time, so Jim thanked the nurse and returned to the office.

  He was taking the elevator up to sixty, where his cubicle was located, when at fifty-nine the elevator came to a stop and Lynn Mason got on. They greeted each other and talked briefly about Jim’s shirt, which Lynn said she liked. Jim turned around and showed her his favorite feature, the hula dancer stitched on back. The dress code of any creative department will always be casual; they may reserve the right to take our jobs away, but never our Hawaiian shirts, our jean jackets, our flip-flops. Lynn said she liked the hula dancer’s skirt, which Jim could make shimmy back and forth by moving his shoulders up and down. He turned around once again and demonstrated.

  “I used to be a hula girl,” said Lynn. “In college.”

  Jim turned back to her. “Serious?” he said.

  Lynn smiled at him and shook her head. “Kidding.”

  “Oh.” Jim smiled. “I thought you were serious.”

  “From time
to time I do kid, Jim.”

  The elevator bell rang and Jim stepped off. He walked down the hall to his cubicle, thinking how stupid it was to ask Lynn if she had really been a hula girl.

  When he got back to his desk, he began to stress out about his lack of insight into the fund-raiser ads. He was disappointed he hadn’t been able to speak to the oncologist, whom he hoped would give him inspiration. He sat down but didn’t know where to start. He checked his e-mail, he got up and ate a stale cookie from a communal plate in the kitchen. He came back and there it was, the same ogle-eyed computer screen. There was a quotation pinned to Jim’s cube wall that read, “The Blank Page Fears Me.” Everyone knew it had been mounted up there out of insecurity and self-doubt, and that there was nothing more true than that statement’s opposite. But whenever Jim found himself in the position he was currently in, staring helplessly at the blank page with a deadline and a complete lack of inspiration, he looked up and read that quotation and took comfort. The blank page fears me, he thought. Then he thought, What was Lynn Mason doing in the elevator with me on the day she was scheduled for surgery?

  He went down to Benny Shassburger’s office. Benny was the first guy Jim went to when he had something. We all had someone like that, someone we took our best stuff to, who then typically took that information somewhere else. Benny was on the phone. Jim went in and sat down and started listening to Benny’s end of the conversation. Benny was saying something about renegotiated prices — he was trying to get the person on the other end to come down a little. He said over and over again he couldn’t afford it. Jim wondered momentarily what that was all about, but then he returned to the fact that he had just shared the elevator with Lynn Mason on the day she was scheduled — and it wasn’t just surgery, was it? A mastectomy, that wasn’t like an outpatient sort of thing, thought Jim, where you go in in the morning and they patch you up and you’re back at work by one. An operation like that takes days to recover from. He didn’t know much about breast cancer but he knew that much. He wanted Benny off the phone. We accumulated days and days in other people’s offices, waiting for them to get off the phone.

  “That was the U-Stor-It,” said Benny once he was off. “They’re jacking up my fees.”

  “Oh, man,” said Jim. “To what?”

  Jim’s red eyes bugged out when Benny told him the price. “Steep, huh?” said Benny. “But I don’t know what else to do, man. I gotta keep it somewhere.”

  When we found out Benny had received a totem pole from Old Brizz, we told him he had a few easy options. Leave it for the future owners of Brizz’s house to deal with — that would probably be the easiest. Or he could find a collector and they’d probably come and take it away for free. Chris Yop suggested he leave it on the corner of Clark and Addison and watch until one of the homeless carried it away in a shopping cart. Karen Woo said he should hire a stump-grinding company to go over to Brizz’s and turn that totem pole into multicolored wood chips. Tom Mota liked the idea of sawing it into pieces and giving each one of us a head to decorate our offices with in remembrance of Brizz.

  “Are you guys not in the least curious why Brizz had it in his backyard to begin with?” Benny asked.

  Sure we were curious. But there was probably a simple explanation for it. Brizz himself had inherited the thing from those who sold him the house, or something along those lines.

  “So why did he leave it to me in his will,” asked Benny, “if he just found it in his backyard when he bought the place? Why deliberately leave it to me?”

  One night we had drinks after work at this nearby underground sports bar. We brought together several checkerboard-cloth tables and talked around pitchers of beer in various stages of consumption. We were getting buzzed on that airless bunker’s dank fumes more powerfully than on the watered-down swill they served, when Karen Woo asked if we knew what Benny was doing with his totem pole. We ran through Benny’s options for her. “No,” she insisted, “no, that’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking if you know what he’s actually doing with it.”

  We did not.

  “He’s visiting it,” she said.

  We asked her what she meant by that.

  “He’s going down to Brizz’s,” she said, “and spending time with it.”

  There were several plausible answers for why Benny would do a thing like that. It was a novelty item, and Benny got a kick out of owning a novelty item. Or he was measuring it for removal. Or he was meeting with someone to appraise it. Maybe it was worth some money.

  “No, you guys don’t understand,” Karen said, “this isn’t a onetime deal. He’s been down there . . . Jim,” she said, just as Jim returned to his seat after tending to some business with Mr. B. “Tell them how many times Benny’s been down there to see that totem pole.”

  “I don’t know,” said Jim, shrugging his shoulders.

  “You do too know, Jim — how many times?” Jim was reluctant to give up his friend. “Ten times!” cried Karen. “In a month! Isn’t that right, Jim?”

  We asked Jim what Benny was doing down there.

  “He’s just looking at it,” said Jim. “It’s something to look at. I got goosebumps the first time I saw it.”

  “The Art Institute has things in it that’ll give you goosebumps, too,” Karen replied. “Not many people go there ten times a month, Jim.”

  The following day we asked Benny if he was really going down to Brizz’s to visit the totem pole. If so, we asked, why? We said Jim Jackers mentioned he’d been down there ten times in the past month. Was that true?

  “I don’t know, I don’t count,” Benny said. “What’s with the third degree?”

  We asked if he was going down there to meet with someone to appraise it because maybe it was worth money. Or if he was measuring it for its eventual removal. Or if he got a kick out of owning a novelty item.

  “What does it matter?” he replied. “I go down there. What’s the big deal?”

  We didn’t understand, that was the big deal. Because soon we found out that he wasn’t just going down there. He was leaving direct from work. In other words, he was driving down there during rush hour. We asked him why he would brave traffic just to look at a totem pole. He mumbled something evasive and wouldn’t commit to an answer. Had he given any more thought, we asked him, to what he was going to do with it when Bizarro Brizz put Old Brizz’s house on the market? The sensible thing was to leave it for the future owners. Benny replied he didn’t think he would do that. In that case, we wondered, what were his plans for it? Somebody mentioned there might be some real Indians out there who’d like to have their totem pole back, who would know what to do with it better than he would. Benny’s response?

  “Brizz gave that totem pole to me,” he said. “He didn’t give it to a real Indian.”

  That was the stupidest thing we ever heard. A month earlier, there had been no totem pole. The idea of owning a totem pole would have probably seemed totally absurd to Benny. Then Brizz leaves him a totem pole, and he’s braving traffic to go visit the thing. We just wanted to know why.

  “You guys need to get a life,” he said.

  We asked a favor of Dan Wisdom. He lived in Brizz’s neighborhood. We asked Dan to take a few hours off one night from his fish paintings, drive by Old Brizz’s, and find out what Benny was doing — you know, how he spent his time.

  “He told us how he spends his time,” said Dan. “He looks at the thing.”

  Yes, but it had to be more complicated than that. Get out of the car, we told Dan, and look at it with him, and then ask him what’s going through his head.

  “Who knows what’s going through his head?” said Dan. “What’s going through his head is his own business. Besides,” he added, “I don’t really live in Brizz’s neighborhood. I do live on the South Side, but the South Side, you know, it’s a big place.”

  We told Marcia Dwyer that Benny had had a crush on her for a long time. Just ask to go down there with him, we urged her. Tell him you want to see
it. He would be thrilled to have you join him. Then ask him why he’s become so obsessed with the thing.

  “Okay, first of all,” Marcia said, “you guys are losers. And second of all, I don’t really care what he’s doing down there. Maybe he’s finding out something about himself. Maybe — and I know, this sounds crazy to you guys — but maybe he’s looking for something. A signal from Brizz. Some sort of sign.”

  We had forgotten that Marcia was into Buddhism in a big, sloppy way — reincarnation, the laws of karma. Religious fancies she probably didn’t know the first authentic thing about.

  “And third,” she said, “Benny Shassburger has a crush on me?”

  We’re not sure what you may or may not know, we said one day when, happily, we stumbled upon Benny’s father, waiting for Benny in the main lobby. Some of us recognized him from the picture in Benny’s office, an imposing man with beard and skullcap. But about a month ago, we said to him, his son was given an odd little bequest by a guy who used to work here. Did he know what we were referring to?

  “The totem pole?” his father asked.

  Yes, the totem pole. And did he also know that during the past six weeks, Benny had gone to the guy’s house a dozen or more times? After work, when he had to sit in traffic, he went all the way down to 115th Street to look at the totem pole. We asked him if he was aware of that.

  “I knew he went down there.” His father nodded. “I didn’t know it was that many times, but I knew he went down there, sure. I’ve been down there with him.”

  He had been down there with him?

  “Sure.”

  And what did the two of them do while down there?