Then We Came to the End

by Joshua Ferris

  There were several more — the “Got Cancer?” ad, the “Absolut Ether” ad, in which a hand with long painted fingernails grips the neck of a half-empty vodka bottle like a claw. Jim handed them all across the bed and she got very close to each one, inspecting and reading them. When she got to the Absolut ad, she offered us a genuine smile.

  She continued to smile as she thanked us. We said our good-byes. We told her to feel better. Out in the hallway, we encountered more nurses and medical equipment. We said we thought she liked them. We asked Joe if he agreed. We said we nailed it, didn’t we, Joe? Didn’t we nail it? We walked together down the hall. We were a full car heading down the elevator.

  “Do you really think she liked those ads, Joe?” asked Marcia. “Or do you think she was smiling because of how atrocious they were?”

  “Hey!” cried Jim.

  “Sorry, Jim, nothing personal. I just happen to think they’re atrocious,” she said. “It’s not your fault, you did better than any of us. I’m just saying it was an impossible assignment.”

  We grew introspective and quiet for the remainder of the ride. When we reached the lobby floor, there was a delay before the doors opened, and that’s when Genevieve broke the silence.

  “Maybe she wasn’t smiling because of the ads,” she said. “Maybe she was smiling because of us. What we did.”

  “Because it was a nice gesture,” said Marcia.

  “Or maybe,” said Jim, with uncharacteristic conviction, “you guys just don’t know anything about advertising.”

  WHEN, A FEW WEEKS LATER, they let go of Jim Jackers, we said they lifted him off his seat by the middle belt loop of his jeans and threw him from the building. We said he went flying three stairs at a time until he landed on the curb, where he picked himself up and checked his forehead for blood. After that, we said, he collected his useless shit, which had spilled everywhere during his propeller dive at the sidewalk. Jim was not one to leave without a box.

  When next they came for Amber, a few weeks after that, we said she was tossed into the streetlamp outside the building without any concern for her unborn baby. We had just come back from lunch at T.G.I. Friday’s when she got the news. It was at that lunch we presented her with things we had bought for the baby — a diaper bag, a stroller — all of which was tossed out with her. She lay trying to recover, head spinning, on the wet cement in a light summer rain. We said people walking past stared down at the spectacle and refused to help, and we imagined the bum with the Dunkin Donuts cup bending down to the stroller, opening it up, and rolling it away with him.

  We said Don Blattner was thrown headfirst into the window of a parked taxi with such force he wheeled around 180 degrees, rolled his eyes a couple of times, and slumped down between the car and the curb. He settled, head hanging down like a heavy melon, and appeared to all passersby like a drunk sleeping off a bender. We said the movie stills that had adorned his office walls were taken down and flung at his drooping head. Most of them just hit the car and shattered, but a few landed, and the cuts began to bleed. More movie memorabilia — action figures, back issues of Vanity Fair — was dumped on his prone body. Eventually, we said, Don was carted off by city officials.

  It was all fun and games after they were gone. Easier to make cartoons of them than to wonder for any amount of time how Amber was going to find a new job before the baby came, or how unjust they were to let go of her while keeping Larry on. Easier to joke than to feel sorry for Jim, who had been everyone’s whipping boy for so long that we had nothing left after his departure but loathsome memories of our bullying and cruel remarks. None of us cared to revisit the fun we’d made of him for fear our laughter might now stick in our throats.

  In reality, when we heard Jim was let go we went down to his cubicle, miserable with happiness that he had been chosen over us. Everyone who had spoken ill of him at one time or another was there to offer him condolences. Jim’s reaction was magnanimous and pathetic at once. When people extended their hands and told him how sorry they were, he nodded and smiled and said, “Thanks,” as if he had just been named Employee of the Month. He almost seemed to be enjoying himself, which was curious but later made sense, because it was probably the only time during his entire tenure that so many people had approached him with a universal consensus of support instead of with ridicule or scorn. He didn’t point out the hypocrisy or seek to settle scores. He soaked up the attention with an indulgence he deserved, stretching out his allotted half hour to forty-five minutes until Roland, who was standing against the wall as he had done with Marcia, finally told Jim he really had to be out of the building. So Jim said his final good-byes and shook a few hands and left with his box, never to return.

  It was different with Benny. Earnings were down across the board. Stock prices were in free fall. We were just about to awaken from a decade of unadulterated dreaming. Benny had to call his father to come with a car, he had so much useless shit in his office.

  “Roland,” he said, “have a seat. This may take a while.”

  “You know I gotta stand, Benny.”

  “What do they think I’m going to do, Roland? Stab you with a highlighter?”

  “They can’t take any chances since the incident,” Roland tried to explain for the hundredth time. “I’m not even supposed to be conversing.”

  “I bet I can make you converse.”

  Soon Benny and Roland were conversing about whether or not Benny could make Roland converse, until Roland, catching himself in Benny’s trap, said, “Please, Benny, I’m just trying to do my job.”

  “Come on, man,” said Benny. “I thought you and me were friends?”

  “You think this is easy for me?” asked the older man.

  When at last Benny’s father arrived, it took the three men four trips down the freight elevator. Benny had so much stuff in his office it was like he was moving out of an apartment. If a general sadness overtook us when Marcia and Amber and Jim were let go, a veritable pall cast itself about the hallways during Benny’s last hour. Who would regale us with stories now? Into whose office would we go to confide, to gossip, to horse around? And who, what with Paulette Singletary gone, too, could we point to now and agree that there was the one person who stood head and shoulders above the rest? Garrulousness and a natural amiability — that was the nature of heroism in the confines we shared during that more innocent time, and when they took Benny, they took away our hero.

  After that we fell into even greater recrimination and bickering. Needless to say, the caffeinated water people went with a different firm, and the running shoe people ended up staying with their original agency. Without any new business things got worse. What little work remained was never any fun. All that summer no one took advantage of the city or the proximity of the lake for an aimless stroll during a lunch hour because we were too rabid with speculation about how dire things had become and who would be the next to go. We could enjoy nothing but our own dull rumoring. Conversation never extended beyond our walls, walls that were closing in on us, and we failed to take stock of anything happening beyond them. One topic — that was all we knew, and it tyrannized every conversation. We fell into it helplessly, the way jilted lovers know only one subject, the way true bores never transcend the sorry limitations of their own lives. It was a shrill, carping, frenzied time, and as poisonous an atmosphere as anyone had ever known — and we wanted nothing more than to stay in it forever. In the last week of August 2001, and in the first ten days of that September, there were more layoffs than in all the months preceding them. But by the grace of god, the rest of us hung on, hating each other more than we ever thought possible. Then we came to the end of another bright and tranquil summer.

  5

  FIVE YEARS LATER — WHO’S HANK? — THE DAY OF THE GODFATHER — THE MONTAGUES AND THE CAPULETS — JIM GOES TO A MEETING — FOR US IT WAS NEVER A WORRY — HANK’S READING — HANDLEBAR HARRY — TO LYNN, AND LATER, TO TOM — THE REFORMED LAMA — IN THE END

  IN THE SUMMER
OF 2006, Benny Shassburger received an e-mail from someone he couldn’t place. The name was familiar, he knew he should know it, but the longer he stared at it the more it eluded him. He said the name aloud. His cubicle neighbor, a lank, annoying person who never let anything go by without making inquiries, popped his sandy groundhog’s head over the cube wall and said, “What’d you say?” Benny hardly had the energy to explain. “I’m just talking to myself,” he said. Ian replied that there was a new study claiming that whenever anyone said something out loud and then someone else asked, “What did you say?” and that person responded that he was just talking to himself, that that person wasn’t just talking to himself, but in fact was most likely addressing someone specific, even if only subconsciously. Ian kept abreast of all the new studies. Benny felt tired.

  Where had we located the energy? Updating our resumes, interviewing again, learning a new commute route. We had spread out across the industry, finding work at other agencies, at design firms and in-house marketing departments, usually the first place that would have us. The less fortunate or talented among us went to direct-mail shops or turned to the temp agencies for uninsured day jobs. The floor plans, the shapes of the desks, the names of the people, and the colors of the corporate logos were all new and different, but the song and dance remained the same. We were delighted to have jobs. We bitched about them constantly. We walked around our new offices with our two minds. All those new faces and names to memorize, the strange coffee pots and unfamiliar toilet seats. We had new W-4s to fill out and never knew if it was zero or one that would give us more money back. HR was there to assist, but they were never as good as our old HR. We spent the first two or three weeks, and some of us more like a month or two, in isolation and anonymity. For an unbearable spell, lunch was a solitary affair. Only slowly did we get folded into the mix, only slowly did the new political realities start to dawn. Who was wrangling and for what, who was crass, arrogant, stupid, powerful, fake, prepossessing, double-crossing, or a good person all around — all this began to shake out. But it didn’t happen overnight. It took weeks, it took months, and that we mustered up the oomph to start over again at new agencies was a testament to our tenacity. It was a sign that buried beneath all the bitching, there were parts of the job we loved. It was proof we needed the money.

  “You know I’m a friendly guy,” Benny said into the phone, peering over the cube wall to be sure Ian hadn’t returned. “But I don’t know how much more I can take. I’m telling you, this guy Ian? He’s destroying my core personality.”

  Some had adjusted better than others. There was freedom in starting over because nobody knew yet if you were crass, arrogant, stupid, powerful, fake, prepossessing, double-crossing, or a good person all around. You could reinvent yourself. Wasn’t that part of the promise of America? A few blissful months passed in which pigeonholing was impossible. Lessons learned from past mistakes held us in good stead. Some of us displayed a rapid growth in political savvy. Others wondered what happened. “I used to be such a mensch,” Benny continued. “Remember? People used to come into my office and I would regale them with stories. With the exception of maybe Paulette Singletary, I was the person everybody loved the most. What happened?”

  “Why don’t you come down to my office and let’s talk about it,” Jim said to him.

  When Benny arrived, there he was. Jim Jackers. Composing an e-mail. If the expression on Jim’s face was any indication, thought Benny, the fate of the entire agency depended on that one e-mail. Benny took a seat across from him and waited. He disliked being on this side of the desk. He wanted to be on that side. Jim’s side.

  “Okay, listen,” said Jim, once he had finished composing the all-important e-mail. “You’re next in line for an office, okay? You just have to be patient.”

  “How do you know I’m next?” asked Benny.

  “I’ll take care of it, don’t worry. But you gotta wait until somebody vacates. We can’t just kick somebody out of an office they’re already in and send them to a cube.”

  “I was kicked out of an office and sent to a cube.”

  “Because you lost your job,” said Jim.

  “A technicality,” Benny replied. He sat back in his chair. “Don’t get me wrong, Jim. I’m eternally grateful to you for hiring me. I’ve been doing freelance too long. But a small agency doesn’t suit me the way it suits you. I can’t look at the same thirty people over and over again every day. I need multiple floors. I’ve learned this about myself. I’m a creature whose natural habitat is multiple floors. And I need an office. I miss my old office. I miss the people. You know who I miss? I’ll tell you who I miss,” he said. “I miss Old Brizz.”

  “How can you miss Old Brizz?” asked Jim. “You never really knew him. If you miss him at all, it’s because he was old and he died and nobody here currently occupying an office fits that description.”

  “Jim, you have turned into a cynical man,” Benny said. “I blame the corrupting influence of power. I miss Old Brizz because I got ten bucks a pop from all you Charlton Heston hopefuls when poor Old Brizz kicked off.” He got closer to Jim across the desk and lowered his voice. “What I miss, Jim, is Celebrity Death Watch. I can’t even get a Super Bowl pool going on around here. What is wrong with these people? I’m not clicking and it’s driving me crazy. I miss clicking. Speaking of which,” he said, sitting back. “Who’s Hank Neary?”

  Jim’s attention was seized by the sound of the name. “Hank Neary,” he said. “Hank Neary.” Furrowing his brow and looking away, he slowly, methodically incanted the name as a word absent of all meaning. “Hank,” he said. “Hank. Hank.”

  “We worked with him, right?”

  “Hank Neary,” said Jim. “Hank Neary.”

  “Didn’t we work with him, Jimmy? At the old agency?”

  “Hold on. Give me a minute,” said Jim. “We worked with him.”

  “Neary,” said Benny, slitting his eyes at Jim. “Hank Neary.”

  “Hank Neary,” said Jim. “It’s escaping me.”

  “My memory,” said Benny, shaking his head.

  “Mine, too. You know what? Call Marcia. She’ll know.”

  Benny shook his head. “Can’t call Marcia right now,” he replied. “Marcia’s mad at me.”

  “What’s she mad at you for?”

  “Jim, have I got a story to tell you,” he exclaimed. “I’ve got the best story you’ve ever heard. Hold on a second while I get more coffee.”

  “No, Benny —”

  “What?”

  “I got a meeting in ten minutes.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well, don’t get defeated,” said Jim, seeing Benny’s disappointment. “I still got ten minutes.”

  “All right, I’ll do without the coffee. But do me a favor,” said Benny. “Let me sit in your chair while I tell it.”

  “Are you serious?”

  Benny got up. Jim got up reluctantly and they switched places. Benny smiled. He was on the right side of the desk again. He could look out into the hall and see all the people passing by and call them in.

  “Michael!” he hollered out into the hall. “Michael, get in here and listen to my story. It’s a terrific story, you’ll love it.”

  Michael barely paused to stick his head inside Jim’s office. “Can’t,” he said. “I’m on deadline with this newsletter.”

  He quickly departed, and Benny held up his hands to demonstrate his disbelief. “Do you see that?” he asked. “Do you see now, Jim, what I’m talking about? There’s something wrong with these people.”

  “Benny, he’s on deadline.”

  “Who doesn’t have ten minutes to hear a good story?”

  “Benny. Tell me the story.”

  So Benny told Jim the story of why Marcia was mad at him. Since becoming employed full-time again, he had grown aware of a phenomenon that seemed to happen only at work, or at least happened with more frequency at work than other places in life, and the phenomenon was this: one person would say som
ething and the person listening would have positively no idea what he or she meant, but not wanting to appear rude, or worse, stupid, or alternatively, not caring to waste any more time, it was easier just to nod or laugh along than it was to pause and inquire what that person really meant. This was especially true with hallway banter and kitchen talk and other types of inconsequential daily exchanges. People were indifferent to what was said, or were preoccupied by other things, or had long ago concluded that what passed for speech during the course of a workday was mostly the babble of idiots. “So I thought, Would it make a difference, really? Would it honestly make a difference if instead of replying the way I would normally, I answered everybody with quotes from The Godfather?”

  Jim was curious. “How would you manage that?” he said.

  Benny explained that he gave himself a simple rule: nothing could come from his mouth that had not come first from the mouths of Michael, Sonny, Fredo, Tom Hagen, or the Don himself — or anybody at all in the first two films.

  “Why only the first two?” asked Jim.

  “Come on, Jim,” said Benny. “You know why. Do we have to call Don Blattner?”

  “Because the third one sucks?”

  “Boy, I miss that old Don Blattner,” said Benny.

  At the conclusion of a morning meeting, during which he had remained perfectly silent, as everyone was packing up their things, Benny had turned to Heidi Savoca and said, “‘I spent my whole life trying not to be careless. Women and children can be careless, but not men.’” Heidi’s expression indicated she didn’t know where Benny’s comment was coming from, but more pressing than her confusion was her distaste for the remark itself. “That’s a very sexist thing to say, Benny,” she replied. Later that morning, Seth Keegan stopped by Benny’s cube to ask him a question about some revisions for a project the two had been working on over the course of the previous few weeks. “Do you have a minute?” Seth asked Benny. Benny swiveled in his chair. “‘This one time,’” he said. “‘This one time I’ll let you ask me about my affairs.’” “Cool,” said Seth, who entered the cubicle more fully. “I’m wondering what you think we should do about these drop shadows. What I was thinking we could do is . . .” Benny let him talk, nodding from time to time, and before long, Seth had arrived at a conclusion without needing any input from Benny at all. Just as he was leaving, Benny thought what the hell, and called out to him. “‘Hey, it’s my sister’s wedding,’” he said, angrily. “Oh, yeah?” said Seth. “Your sister’s getting married?” “‘And when the boss tells me to push a button on a guy,’” Benny continued, “‘I push a button.’” Seth stared at him. “Cool,” he said. He nodded. Then he walked away.