Then We Came to the End

by Joshua Ferris

  “I’m sorry if I offended you,” said Benny. “I was just trying to say it looked nice.”

  “No, I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t take compliments very well. Was I mean to you just then?”

  “No, no, not at all,” he assured her.

  Suddenly Genevieve was standing in his doorway. Benny went quiet. Marcia saw his attention diverted and turned and saw Genevieve, too.

  “Marcia, can I talk to you?”

  Like that, Genevieve was gone. Marcia looked back at Benny. “Sure,” she called out after her, rising quickly. Benny had never seen Marcia’s eyes so wide.

  “Benny,” she whispered.

  “Go,” he said.

  When Marcia left, Benny called Jim to tell him the news but Jim wasn’t picking up. He stood and walked out into the hallway. Things were quiet. He went back inside and put another call in to Jim. Again no answer. He went back out into the hallway. Everything was calm and empty. The large fake plants stood unstirred at both ends of the hall, and on the walls between the doorways hung all of the agency’s past advertising awards, collecting dust. He returned and called Jim a third time. Then he e-mailed him to tell him to listen to his voice mails. He spent two minutes waiting for a reply at his desk before deciding to hunt Jim down. He went back out into the hallway, but he stopped when he saw Karen Woo approaching. He had no desire to be the one to let Karen know that Genevieve had emerged from Lynn’s office. She would only spread the news around. So he casually lifted his arms and grabbed ahold of the top of the doorway, as if he were just hanging out, having a stretch. Karen grew closer, and he thought they might just greet each other and nothing more. And in fact, she seemed to have no intention of stopping and chatting, which was a relief. She just said, “Turns out Lynn doesn’t have cancer after all,” and then she passed by and disappeared down the hall.

  MARCIA STOOD WITH HER BACK against the closed door of Genevieve’s office while Genevieve paced behind her desk, occasionally stopping to grab the back of her chair, as if to throttle it.

  It was very simple. Lynn sat down at her desk and the question of where to start, how to broach the subject, eluded Genevieve entirely. Luckily, Joe began to speak. She couldn’t remember what he said, exactly, but he was very direct. Genevieve was nervous. She had to keep reminding herself of why she was there. This person who could so thoroughly dominate every other aspect of life — who dusted with domination — was really very sick inside, and weak, and in need of intervention, even if that intervention came from a cowed underling sitting mutely beside Joe. If she had not kept that in mind, she would have had to excuse herself for being so nervous. Joe said, basically, that a rumor had emerged, he did not know from where, that she had been diagnosed with cancer. Normally he didn’t put much stock in rumors, but he hoped she would understand why he’d give second thought to one that claimed she wasn’t well. There was the conviction among certain individuals that an important operation had been scheduled for yesterday, but that she had missed it. Perhaps deliberately. Her aversion to hospitals — something of a well-known fact — might explain why. He was there — and then he remembered Genevieve and turned to her. “The two of us are here,” he said, turning back to Lynn, “to let you know that these rumors are out there, they’re floating around, I don’t know to what degree of truth, but if there is something we can do for you, if we can help you in any way —”

  “Joe, have they suckered you into it at last?” she asked him.

  It? What was she referring to specifically, Genevieve wondered. While Joe was speaking, the tricky smile Lynn sometimes wore to express disbelief or bemusement appeared on her face. Joe must have seen it, too. Yet he persevered. Genevieve didn’t know where he found the will to continue with Lynn Mason looking at him like that. He stopped briefly when she interrupted to ask if he’d been suckered in, but then something truly remarkable happened. He kept at it.

  “No, I don’t think I’ve been suckered into anything,” he replied. “I’m not here on their behalf. I’m here for myself — and Genevieve — because I believe there might be something wrong with you.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with me,” she said simply, drawing into her hands a silver letter opener in the shape of a stiletto.

  “That maybe you’re sick,” he continued — Genevieve did not know how or why and wanted him to stop — “but because of your fear, you aren’t letting yourself get looked after properly.”

  “There is nothing wrong with me,” she repeated.

  Joe was silent. Genevieve was ready to leave. Okay, Joe, she’s okay — let’s go. “A person with a genuine fear,” he continued, slowly, not apprehensively but patiently, as if trying to coax something out of her, “somebody incapacitated by fear, would say she wasn’t sick, if it meant she could continue with her life and not face that fear.”

  Lynn offered a grudging, humorless chuckle. “I’m sorry, Joe,” she said. “Do you have access to my medical file?”

  “No.”

  “No,” she said, “no, I didn’t think so.”

  “No, this is pure speculation, Lynn,” he continued, and by then, Genevieve felt the definite need to distance herself from Joe somehow. Not sick, Joe! Please stop talking! “Speculation that is probably not justifiable,” he continued. “But if you are sick, and scared, and keeping yourself from medical attention —”

  “It was a mole,” she said.

  All look of disbelief drained from her face. Now she wore a deadpan, ice-cold, corporate expression that said, simply, this is none of your business. “It was a mole they feared was cancerous, and I had the appointment rescheduled, if you must know, because of the urgency of the new business pitches. Genevieve,” she said, glancing down at the letter opener which she had been fingering while Joe spoke, “will you excuse Joe and me, please?” When she looked up at Genevieve, Genevieve said of course and left the silent office and closed the door behind her.

  “A mole?” said Marcia. “This whole time it was only a mole?”

  After Marcia left we heard Genevieve talking on the phone to her husband, screaming at him, though he had done nothing, poor guy. But that someone somewhere had done something terribly wrong, she was dead certain. She knew she was angry. She knew something had to be done to someone. She just didn’t know exactly what.

  “Who was it?” she demanded of us. “Who was the first to say it was cancer?” We tried to tell her, Genevieve, no one knows who. No one will probably ever know who. “Well, who spread it then?” she hollered. “Who was responsible for spreading it?” She was with us yesterday when we tried figuring that one out, we reminded her, and she knew as well as we did that it was almost impossible to say who spread it. “Then whose idea was it to send Joe in there?” she asked. “Was this just some elaborate hoax to get Joe?” Well, that was just crazy talk, and we told her so — delicately, and not in so many words, because by then she had worked herself up into a fury. “Why did I get involved?” she asked. “How could I have let myself get wrapped up in this?” Now she was addressing herself, and we had no answers for her. She threw up her hands and left our offices.

  We thought Joe Pope handled the whole thing with equanimity. At one point, Jim Jackers called out as Joe passed by his cube. They didn’t say a word about Lynn Mason. Jim just wanted to know if it was true that the ads for the breast cancer patient were now running in Spanish. “Does that mean we should be gearing our message toward a Latino market?” he asked.

  “That’s the first I’ve heard of that,” replied Joe. “I would be very surprised if that were true. Who gave you that information?”

  “I think they’re playing a joke on me,” said Jim.

  “I would have to assume it’s a joke,” Joe said. It was just about the funniest joke ever.

  Late in the afternoon, Genevieve sent us a group e-mail — the address list was a foot long — that denounced our “tactics,” our “sham sentiments.” We were “pathetic” and “dumb.” We had been “led by the nose” to “set Jo
e up.” That was ridiculous — for who would we have allowed to take us by the nose? What an elaborate and fainthearted conspiracy she envisioned. She never used the word, but it was hard not to read between the lines. How could it be a conspiracy? Was someone — say, Karen Woo — so diabolical, so shrewd, so capable of manipulating circumstance, that she could pull off with such delicacy the very subtlest of conspiracies, by spreading an outlandish yet eminently believable rumor, and then distorting the conversation she had had on the phone with the nurse at Northwestern to seal the veracity of her lies and set the fall guy up? Wasn’t that a little far-fetched, even if none of us had actually heard what the nurse had said — or could confirm that there was even a nurse on the other end? And what real damage could she have hoped to achieve? This was not, as only Hank could put it, “the sweaty Moor’s murder of Desdemona.” No way, we thought, no way it was Karen Woo. If she really wanted to stick it to Joe, we gave her enough credit to bleed the fucker dry. Besides, Genevieve had to face facts. A conspiracy was an impossible thing to prove. The most anyone could say was that this was how these things worked, here and elsewhere. Mistakes were made. Accountability got lost.

  “I am DONE,” she concluded in her e-mail, and went on to list all the things she would no longer be doing with us in the future. Lunch and after-work drinks, mainly. We had heard it before. We wondered how long it would last this time.

  3

  ORDERING CABLE — LYNN FORGETS — BACK TO THE FUND-RAISER — ROLAND CALLS BENNY — AN INDETERMINATE FATE — ANDY SMEEJACK’S LUNCH — WHAT’S GREAT ABOUT A SILENCER — AMBER FREAKS — CARL SINGS — A QUESTION OF COURAGE — LARRY’S REVELATION — CARL GETS WEIRDED-OUT — A CONVERSATION ABOUT WORK — THE MELEE BEGINS — CHICAGO’S FINEST

  THE FACT THAT LYNN MASON did indeed have breast cancer came out eventually. By then it was no longer a subject of our speculation. We had moved on, or regressed, rather, back to the question of who would be the next to go. For the morning following Genevieve’s freak-out, when we woke up all across the city and the greater metropolitan area, we still had no concepts for the pro bono project.

  We didn’t give up entirely. If nothing came to us in the hour between waking and leaving, we still had the commute to work and the ride up the elevator. We had coffee at our desks and the alchemical kick of insight it promised. What would make them laugh? The ailing, the nauseous, the prepped and stitched and scarred, the toxic, the irradiated — what would make them laugh? What was funny about frailty and bad luck, about limping home to await the bad news, about wheeling around an IV pole? What was ticklish about the possibility of death — a perfectly ordinary and thus utterly baffling death?

  We met at Lynn’s office at the appointed time. The dread was palpable. We found her office clean and orderly. She was sitting behind the desk, inspecting her middle drawer for things that could be tossed into the trash. She gestured silently for us to enter, as she was on the phone. She tested a Bic that gave her nothing and so she threw it out. We took our seats, criminals on the trundle cart awaiting their turn at the gallows.

  “I can’t believe how hard it is to arrange for a cable guy to come to your house,” she said, after hanging up. “It’s astonishing that anyone has cable at all. Do you guys have cable?” she asked.

  We all said we did.

  “So somebody had to stay home one day,” she said, “and wait for the cable guy to come?”

  We weren’t sure how to answer that one. An honest response would reveal that there had been a day in our dark pasts when we had taken a morning off and stayed home to await the cable guy instead of coming in to work. We didn’t want her to think we’d ever choose cable over work. Work was what allowed us to afford cable. On the other hand, there were times when we came home and really needed to veg out with some cable, and those nights reminded us that we’d have feigned the flu for an entire week if that’s what it took to get cable.

  “I’m just saying there has to be an easier way,” she said. “They can’t expect you to wait home on a Tuesday from ten to two for the cable guy to come, can they?”

  “They got you by the balls,” said Jim Jackers.

  To Lynn he said that. It was awful. We winced terribly.

  “They do got you by the balls,” Lynn agreed.

  “You don’t have cable already, Lynn?” asked Benny Shassburger.

  “Rabbit ears,” she said. “Pathetic, I know. But I do get The Simpsons on rerun.”

  We were amazed that Lynn watched The Simpsons. Nobody was more amazed than Benny, who asked her what her favorite episode was. She had an answer for him right away. It was different from Benny’s, although each of them knew and respected the other’s favorite episode. Soon they were reciting lines. To hear Lynn Mason quote Homer Simpson was shocking. More shocking, though, was the remark Amber made when she interrupted them.

  “I’ll stay home for you and wait for the cable guy,” she said.

  Lynn looked at her. “I’m sorry?”

  “If you need me to,” she said. “I’ll come over and wait for him.”

  Lynn laughed, but not in a mocking way. It was a gentle expression of surprise. “That’s okay,” she said. “I’ll manage it somehow. Maybe my doorman can let him in.”

  Amber’s sympathy for Lynn during the days we believed she had cancer had permeated so deeply into her psyche that even now, when the rumor had been retired, she still looked upon Lynn as ailing and in need of help. It was absurd and touching. Lynn changed subjects.

  “Sorry, what are you guys here for again?” she asked. “Did we have a meeting?”

  We all turned to Joe Pope. He reminded her that she had asked to see concepts for the pro bono ad —

  “Oh, shit,” she interrupted. “That was today, wasn’t it?”

  He nodded.

  Lynn placed fingertips at her temples. “Joe, it completely slipped my mind.” She shook her head. She looked around. “I’m sorry, guys. My mind is entirely on this new business.”

  “Should we come back?” he asked.

  Simultaneously we all fell to the hard carpet and began to pray. We prostrated ourselves before her, our pathetic and undeserving selves, and pleaded for mercy. More time — please give us more time! It must be said: we were a small, scared, spineless people. In reality we sat perfectly still, silently holding our breath.

  “No no,” she said. “Show me what you got.”

  “Well,” he said, “after the change came in from the client —”

  “Change?” she said. “What change?”

  “The e-mail you forwarded me?”

  “Oh, right,” she said. “Remind me?”

  Remind me? What the hell was going on here? We had spent hours and hours speculating on the nature of this pro bono project, and she didn’t seem to recall the first thing about it. So Joe explained the change, as well as the difficulties we had been encountering. He went so far as to suggest that what the client now requested might be impossible to achieve, but if we were to achieve it, we’d certainly need more time.

  “Well, that’s the one thing we no longer have,” she said. “Our first priority is to win this new business for the agency. We can’t waste any more time on charity work.”

  She asked us if we had generated concepts for the fund-raiser. We all said we did.

  “Then bring them to me,” she said. “That’s what they wanted initially, that’s what they’re getting.”

  So we left her office to retrieve our fund-raiser concepts. When we returned, she looked through them and, in the end, chose Karen Woo’s “Loved Ones” campaign. It was disgusting to look over and see Karen’s face just then. Lynn asked Karen to forward them to her. She would PDF them over to the client herself. “And if they don’t like them,” she concluded, “they can find a new agency. Because right now, we have bigger fish to fry.”

  “Lynn,” said Karen. “How come I can’t find any presence for this Alliance Against Breast Cancer on the Internet?”

  “Karen,” said Joe.<
br />
  “Thank you for your hard work, everyone,” said Lynn.

  And with that, our pro bono project came to an end.

  BECAUSE OF THE NEW BUSINESS, we didn’t have much of a chance to talk over this unexpected development. We had an input meeting midmorning during which we discussed the caffeinated water client and their needs. Directly after that we had another input meeting to go over the creative needs of the running shoe manufacturer. We all knew the importance of winning new business, so after these meetings we returned to our desks and started to brainstorm.

  And so it was a full office when, near noon, Benny got a call from Roland. Roland was manning the front desk of the downstairs lobby, midway through a double shift. Benny had noticed that on days Roland worked a double shift, his eyes were glassy and red and stuck at half mast, that he yawned every thirty seconds, throwing his oblong, open-mouthed face up like a wolf howling at the moon, and that he sometimes stole away to fifty-nine for a twenty-minute nap. This was a postretirement gig for Roland so he could supplement his Social Security. Who was going to begrudge the man twenty minutes? According to Benny, the naps were badly needed. “One Friday,” Benny told us once, “he kept calling me Brice. I didn’t say anything to him because I knew he knew my name and I didn’t want to embarrass him, but Brice? Why Brice?” Jim Jackers suggested “Lenny” would have been more likely, or even “Timmy.” “Timmy makes more sense than Brice,” said Jim. “At least it rhymes with Benny.” “Jim, Nancy makes more sense than Brice,” said Benny. “Who calls somebody Brice? Anyway, I didn’t say anything to him, and by Monday he was calling me Benny again. It’s those double shifts, man. They muddle his brain.”

  When Benny picked up the phone, Roland told him that he believed Tom Mota might be in the building. “And maybe he just got on the express elevator,” he added. “What do you mean maybe?” asked Benny. Later, when recounting the story, Benny thought it was perfectly possible the man was hallucinating, given that it was a Friday and he was on the tail end of a double shift. “What makes you think it was even Tom?” he asked. But instead of listening to Roland’s response, in his head, Benny heard Amber. Again he dismissed her prognostications of Tom’s return as the anxieties of a worrying homebody. He trusted in Tom’s better instincts and wasn’t inclined to think that anyone was in any immediate danger. But regardless of how he felt, if Tom really was back, some people would definitely want to know. There was also the possibility that Benny knew nothing about Tom’s better instincts. “Why are you calling me about this?” Benny suddenly interrupted Roland in midspeech.