Then We Came to the End (18 page)

“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

SOMEONE 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.

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.