Then We Came to the End

by Joshua Ferris

  “. . . and said he had a package to deliver,” Roland continued, “so I sent him up on the express elevator. Because I can’t get ahold of Boroshansky,” Roland added, belatedly answering Benny’s question, “and I thought somebody up there should know about this.”

  “Wait, Roland — you mean to say he approached you, and you looked at him, and you still can’t be sure it was him?”

  “Because of the makeup!” cried Roland, exasperated.

  “What makeup?”

  “Haven’t you been listening to me?”

  Benny hadn’t heard a word he’d said. “No,” he said. “What are you talking about, makeup?”

  “Hold on a second,” said Roland. “That’s Mike on the Motorola.”

  Benny waited. What was he waiting for? Instructions from a bleary-eyed, untrained security guard with scant natural aptitude for his post, debilitated by a double shift. The smart thing would be to hang up. He waited. Roland came back on.

  “Benny? Yeah, it’s Roland.”

  “Well, who else would you be?” Benny replied impatiently.

  “Mike thinks you should warn people.”

  Benny hung up. He walked out into the hallway. To his left he caught sight of Marcia, who at that instant had reached the end of the hallway, turned left, and disappeared, leaving nothing but the dusty leaves of the fake potted tree to quiver in her wake. He thought of running after her, but he was distracted by movement to his right. Hank had rounded the opposite corner in perfect synchronization with Marcia and then he, too, disappeared, into his office. Benny was left to stare at the other potted tree, the mirror image of the one he just turned away from. For the briefest moment he stood frozen, equidistant from both trees, uncertain what to do.

  Roland couldn’t say for sure that the man he had seen was Tom, so Benny couldn’t say for sure that it was Tom coming up on the express elevator. Even if it was him, Benny couldn’t say that Tom intended anyone any harm. He had no instinct for what to do with the limited information he did have. Should he start to scream? Cower under his desk? Or should he go stand by the elevator and be the first to greet Tom? During that brief moment, the empty hallway felt possessed of a haunted tranquillity that gave the impression that all down the hall, and down the other hallways and offshoots of hallways and the passageways between cubicle partitions, the offices and workstations had been suddenly and irrevocably vacated, and that all the corporate, animating, human life that once burbled and cackled and Xeroxed and inputted had ended with an inextricable filing away, and that all the days spent here, the time served, the camaraderie enjoyed, were now casualties of some unhappy, indeterminate fate.

  In the next instant, there was a flurry of activity. Hank reemerged from his office and disappeared around the same corner he had lately come from, Marcia returned around the same corner where she had lately disappeared, and Reiser, in need of a hallway break, limped out of his office to the right of Benny. Reiser gripped the Louisville Slugger he kept in one corner of his office and tapped it on the heel of his shoe, as if approaching home plate. Larry and Amber, on the other side of Benny, suddenly spilled out into the hallway too, trying to contain a quiet, fierce disagreement just as Marcia approached, forcing her to pass tenderly between the two lovers as if trying to avoid a land mine. She was preparing to pass Benny with nothing more than a grimace of discomfort for having to walk past such office awkwardness. Benny thought it wiser to whisper than to wail, so very casually he reached out and took Marcia’s arm. She was wearing the pink cotton hoodie she wore whenever she complained of being cold. Beneath it, her arm was soft and thin and felt good in his hand.

  “Marcia,” he said. “Tom Mota might be back in the building.”

  TOM MOTA TOOK THE EXPRESS elevator past sixty all the way up to sixty-two. Sixty, sixty-one, and sixty-two were connected by interior stairs, so anyone could move freely between them. No one saw Tom as he stepped from the elevator.

  He must have walked straight and then taken a right at the wall that dead-ended at the print station. He walked on until he reached the hallway juncture, allowing him to go in either direction. He chose to proceed left, passing the men’s and women’s restrooms to his right, turned left again, and walked down that hallway, flanked on one side by beige cubicle walls and on the other by the windowed offices coveted by those inside the beige cubicles. Overhead the ceiling panels alternated, two white tiles for every panel of fluorescent light. Tom proceeded to walk on the beige carpet beneath them.

  Andy Smeejack was sitting behind his desk in one of the windowed offices, trying with his stubby, maladroit fingers to crack a hard-boiled egg. Andy was in Account Management. Cracking it was easy — he held the egg like a polished stone and tapped it softly against the edge of his desk. He had laid a napkin down where he planned to collect the bits of shell, but that particular egg clung to each and every piece like a stubborn, protective motherland, and Andy was forced to get surgical on it — probably a comical sight, this hulking, dieting giant patiently picking off the shell of his desperately meager, entirely unsatisfying lunch. He was loath to yield even a fraction of rubbery egg white to the smallest bit of shell. Unfortunately, his clumsy fingers were much more spry at grabbing juicy Italian beef sandwiches and greasy fat cheeseburgers, and now large swaths of his lunch were being ripped off in his haste, leaving him with a moon-cratered egg darkened by the gray yolk inside. When he finally looked up, taking half the egg in his mouth, he saw the clown standing in eerie, carnivalesque incongruity in his doorway. The clown’s face was painted bright red, with a broad white band encircling his mouth. A fat red ball made of foam was attached to his nose. The clown’s head was a carrot-colored mass of jubilant curls, and his oversized bow tie was red and white striped. He wore suspenders and baggy blue pants. Andy, halted from chewing and unable to say much with his mouth full, looked closer at the clown. He was holding a backpack in one hand, and in the other . . .

  Tom and Andy once got into a shouting match over a miscommunication that resulted in the missing of an important deadline, and neither of them had ever forgotten it.

  “You know what’s so great about a silencer, Smeejack?” Tom asked, raising the gun. He pulled the trigger. “It silences,” he said.

  “OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD,” Amber kept saying. She placed her hands on her still-flat belly and all that was just then growing inside. Her plump knees buckled a little, and Larry had to reach out for her. “Amber,” he said. “Amber, we should move. We should move, Amber.” Benny and Marcia exchanged a look.

  “Amber,” Benny repeated, “I don’t know for sure that he’s even in the building, do you understand?”

  “Oh my god, oh my god.”

  Larry was holding her up by her arms. “Amber, let’s just move, okay? Let’s not stay here.”

  “She might be hyperventilating,” said Benny.

  “Benny,” said Marcia, “there’s Joe.”

  Benny looked down the hall just as Joe was entering his office at the far end, near the elevators.

  “Oh my god, oh my god.”

  Her panicky, tear-inflected singsong quavered as if she had already been witness to unspeakable violence.

  “Larry, Marcia and I are going down to tell Joe,” said Benny, “so it’s up to you to get her to calm down.”

  “What do you think I’m trying to do here?” asked Larry. “Amber, are you listening to Benny? You have to calm down. We’re going to take the emergency stairs, okay? Let’s just take the emergency stairs.”

  But Amber didn’t want to take the emergency stairs. She didn’t want to take the elevator because he was coming up in the elevator. She didn’t want to go back into her office because he was coming for her in her office. To go anywhere at all she had to walk the hall, and the hall was the worst place of all, exposed and defenseless and easily targeted, so she remained frozen, trying not to collapse, saying over and over, “Oh my god, oh my god,” as copious and automatic tears flowed easily from her eyes and Larry tried to coax he
r, convince her, wake her, budge her — something, anything, before Tom Mota showed his face.

  Benny and Marcia hurried down to Joe’s office. While they had been wasting time with Amber, Joe had left it again.

  SMEEJACK LOOKED DOWN at his classic oxford and tie at the place where he had been shot and was astonished by the bright red color and how quickly it had appeared and how smartly he stung beneath it, and randomly it came back to him, the vivid memory of shopping for the shirt at the big-and-tall store in the Fox Valley Mall, the Muzak and burbling fountain, and the popcorn and the hot pretzel he ate, and he couldn’t repress the thought, “My last meal was an egg.” Then out loud he said, “Ow. Fuck.” And a little yolk flew from his mouth.

  He called 911 and realized that he couldn’t speak. He spit the egg violently from his mouth. “Please send an ambulance,” he said. Then he began to cry.

  By then Tom had moved on.

  CARL GARBEDIAN WAS SINGING. Genevieve Latko-Devine was sure of it. Sure that someone was singing, anyway, and from where she sat in her office on sixty-one, she believed it was coming from next door — yes, from Carl’s office. Singing! Really it was more like an atonal mumble, and she hadn’t picked up on it immediately, as all her energy and attention were dedicated to coming up with caffeinated water concepts. But at some point the warble reached the outer limit of her radar, and she thought, “Is Carl singing?” So she got up from her desk and entered the hallway and crept along the few feet of wall separating her doorway from Carl’s, and sure enough, he was singing. He had a mirthless, workaday voice, half the words were unknown to him, and he kept repeating the same stanza over and over again — but it was in fact a song:

  “He got himself a homemade special

  Something something full of sand

  And it feels just like a something

  The way it fits into his hand . . .”

  Carl Garbedian was singing! He was offering hellos in the morning, he was saying good evenings at night, and now at midday, he was singing. And it wasn’t the mad loud caterwauling spontaneously indulged during his whacked-out days of popping Janine Gorjanc’s pills. No, this was regular old passing-the-time, happy-to-be-alive singing. She thought this surprising show of life might have something to do with the possibility that Carl and his wife were reconciling. If Carl had only known how delighted his simple singing made her! She wouldn’t do something so stupid as interrupt and explain — that would only ruin the moment, and make them both feel awkward. But if she could have communicated to him how his singing was a simple reinforcement of something essential, which commonly went missing on a day-to-day basis — that his singing was to her what Marcia’s haircut had been to him — he might have organized a talent show and performed a number from A Chorus Line with gold-spangled top hat and cane.

  REALLY THE SONG WAS just stuck in Carl’s head, and the motivation to sing purely mechanical. The work he had before him, this new business, it was just more of the same, really. Not something that would cause him to break out into song. And the recent developments with Marilynn, they were positive, but the two of them had a long way to go — she was still picking up her phone when they were saying good-bye, and he was still living alone in the suburban town house they had been unable to rent for months. The medication was working, no doubt about it, but his life still seemed empty, at least when he compared it to his wife’s, and he still puzzled over how one could be thirty-six and still not know what to do with one’s life. Which is not to say he wasn’t, strictly speaking, in a song-singing mood. Because he did have a little something to fantasize about, as he sat working methodically and joylessly at the tedious, somewhat anxiety-producing task of winning new business.

  “Why not quit?” Tom Mota had asked him in an e-mail sent earlier that day. “I’m sure you’ve had this thought a million times, and probably answered yourself with a million good reasons why not. Can I guess at a few? You have no other training. You’ve let too many years go by to start a new profession or return to school. And how could you let your wife be the main breadwinner? Etc etc etc. But have I got the answer for you! (Two weeks after being jerked off by Lynn Mason and I still can’t stop sounding like a goddamn ad.) Anyway, I was thinking the other day, what am I going to do with myself? What do I got? I got no wife. I got no kids. I do have a dead-end, routinized, enervating, obsequious, numbingly dull — oops! Nope, don’t even got a job anymore, do I? A small amount of money left over from the sale of my house — that’s it. When that’s gone, what will I do? Get another job in advertising? First of all, not given the current job climate. Second of all, NO FUCKING WAY, NOT IN THIS LIFETIME! So what am I suggesting? I’ll tell you what I’m suggesting. I’m suggesting starting my own landscaping business. And I want you, Carl, to join me. I think that some communion with nature, even if it is just the goddamn lawns of suburban yokels, and the pathetic green postage stamps in the industrial parks of Hoffman Estates or Elk Grove Village, I think it might be exactly what’s missing in your life, Carl — what you lack without knowing you lack it. Think of it. The sun on the back of your neck. The taste of cold water after you’ve worked up a genuine thirst. The pleasures of a well-groomed lawn. And the sleep you will enjoy when every bone and muscle in your body has been thoroughly exhausted. I plan on being in the office later today to talk to Joe Pope. I’ll stop by your office. THINK ABOUT IT. Peace, Tom.”

  ONCE SHE HAD DETERMINED that Carl Garbedian was actually singing, Genevieve snuck away from his door and walked in the direction of the kitchen. In the cupboards we had an endless supply of individually packaged, calorie-free powders that we kept next to the cup-o-soups and the silver bags of coffee grounds, and all you had to do for a fruit punch was add cold water from the cooler. On her way down the hall, she passed a man dressed as a clown. She tried not to look. It was obviously someone hired for a singing telegram or some other professional service and he was probably sick of being stared at in office buildings. “Genevieve,” said the clown as he went by, as if he were tipping his hat to her on a dusty street of the Old West. It startled her, halted her abruptly, turned her around in her tracks. The clown continued on without an explanation or even a backward glance. “Who is that?” she asked. But whoever it was didn’t answer, and entered Carl Garbedian’s office without so much as a knock.

  WHEN BENNY AND MARCIA WALKED into Joe’s office and discovered he wasn’t there, Marcia, who had not left Benny’s side since he reached out and took her arm, looked at him and asked, “What do we do now?”

  He had no immediate answer. “We don’t even know that Tom’s in the building,” he said. “We could be totally overreacting. Roland’s not the sharpest knife in the drawer.”

  “But what if he is here?”

  “What if?” said Benny. “Maybe he’s just come to say hello.”

  “What if not?” said Marcia.

  Gone, suddenly, was her spunk, her sass, her strutting and calling out how she saw things without softening or accounting for feeling. Replacing all that now in Joe’s office was someone much smaller — a hundred and ten pounds with a very thin, pale neck and bright Irish eyes, spooked by Amber’s hysterical reaction. And now she was asking him, Benny Shassburger, the boy-faced and slightly overweight Jew from Skokie who, despite the Jews’ well-documented historical peril, had grown up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago knowing no greater danger than a wild curveball thrown at his head during a pony league game. Marcia Dwyer, who had laughed at him yesterday for not knowing the difference between an Allen wrench and a socket wrench. Marcia, who he was madly in love with. She was asking him to take charge. Do something! Save lives, if lives need saving! See me to safety! He nearly collapsed under the weight of it. But then he rose to the occasion. Recalling suddenly that they were standing in Joe’s office, and the ongoing antagonism between Joe and Tom in their day, he said, “We leave this office, that’s the first thing we do.”

  As they departed, for a brief second, in the midst of confusion and fear, he felt flat
tered. My love Marcia, looking to me for guidance!

  In the next instant, pure, blood-chilling fear snapped him out of it. The doors to the elevator opposite them suddenly flew open.

  It was only that clueless goober Roland, finally making his way up from the ground floor.

  “Have you seen him yet?”

  “You’re not even sure it is him!” cried Benny.

  “I know,” said Roland, “I know.” He shook his head, deeply disappointed with himself. “But Mike wants everybody to evacuate anyway,” he said, “just to be on the safe side. He told me to tell everyone to take the emergency stairs.”

  “Why not the elevators?” asked Benny.

  “Because Mike said,” said Roland.

  So Benny and Marcia hurried to the emergency stairs. As they started their descent in the cold echoing stairwell, Benny could not stop himself from thinking — much as he couldn’t help feeling flattered in Joe’s office when she had turned to him for help — that in its way, this was romantic. Taking the stairs with Marcia, their hearts racing, fleeing death together. He had to consciously stop himself from turning to her on one of the landings and grabbing both of her doe-like arms and finally declaring his love for her. It would have been a poorly timed moment, and much more likely that she would have replied not by saying, “You like me, Benny?” but “Are you out of your fucking mind, telling me this right now?” Better to tell her after all this was over, which he promised himself he would do. Finally he would get up the courage. That whole business about Marcia not being Jewish, that was only to protect himself from the humility of rejection if it turned out Marcia didn’t feel the same way. As long as Marcia would agree to raise the children as Jews, he really didn’t give a damn what his aunt Rachel on her West Bank settlement thought of his apostasy.