Then We Came to the End (41 page)
“You can’t leave, Reiser!” said Benny. “You haven’t said a word about the people you’re with now. What are they like? Are you happy?”
Reiser rose as Benny fired off his round of questions, shrugging nonchalantly at each one.
“But do you miss it?” Benny persisted.
“Miss what?” asked Reiser.
“I’ll tell you who I miss,” Benny said. Suddenly he was pulling out his cell phone. “Let’s call Joe Pope!”
We watched Reiser hobble out of the bar, and for some reason it was comforting to see that he still walked with a limp. As soon as he was gone Benny put his phone up to his ear and tried to get an answer.
“I must have dialed the wrong extension,” he concluded, hitting end. “That was the desk of someone named Brian Bayer. Anybody recognize that name?”
Nobody did. He must have come after our time. Odd to think they were hiring again. We had a hard time picturing those familiar surroundings peopled by strangers, unfamiliar voices calling out from behind the plasterboard partitions of our old cubicles, unrecognizable men and women sitting in our chairs.
We asked Benny what extension he was dialing. He had it right — that was Joe’s extension. Nobody could forget it, we had dialed it so often. He hit end a second time. “Brian Bayer again,” he said. He had the ingenious solution of calling the main switchboard. When prompted, he pressed “P” for Pope. “His name isn’t coming up,” he said.
Don Blattner came back from the men’s room and asked Dan Wisdom if he was ready to go. They had driven together.
“His name didn’t come up,” said Benny.
“We had better get going, too, Benny,” said Marcia. “It’s getting late.”
Don and Dan threw money down on the table and we said good-bye to them. “Hey, wait!” Benny cried out. But he was too distracted to get off the phone, and eventually they left.
“Where is he?” he said, setting his cell phone down and looking around at the rest of us. “Where’s Joe Pope?”
“Come on, Benny,” said Marcia, “I’m taking you home.”
“He’s not in the directory, Marcia. Where is he?”
“Benny, honey, you’re drunk.”
“It’s Joe,” he said. “He never leaves his desk.”
“Benny,” she said.
“Where’s Genevieve? Where is she? She’ll know where he is.”
“Genevieve? Benny, honey, she left hours ago.”
She pried him from his chair.
“Hank, you must know what happened. What happened to Joe, Hank?”
But if Hank knew anything, he wasn’t saying. We watched Benny stumble drunkenly to his feet. “But it’s Joe, Marcia,” he said. “Joe doesn’t leave.”
“Benny,” she said. “Sometimes you just lose track.”
Soon they were out the door, followed by the last strains of one of Marcia’s hair-band ballads.
Most of us followed them out soon after, and, in the end, last call was announced. The lights came up, the jukebox went quiet. We could hear the clink of glasses and the exhausted silence of the waitstaff as they began to clean up, wiping down the shiny surfaces, placing the padded barstools on top of the bar. Their work would soon be done, they could see something waiting for them at home — a bed, a meal, a lover. But we didn’t want the night to end. We kept hanging on, waiting for them to send over the big guy who’d force us out with a final command. And we would leave, eventually. Out to the parking lot, a few parting words. “Sure was good to see you again,” we’d say. And with that, we’d get in our cars and open the windows and drive off, tapping the horn a final time. But for the moment, it was nice just to sit there together. We were the only two left. Just the two of us, you and me.
THE TITLE OF THIS BOOK
owes a debt of gratitude to Don DeLillo’s
Americana.
A special thanks to early teachers: Jane Rice, Anna Keesey, and Brooks Landon. A very special thanks to the codirectors of the MFA program at the University of California at Irvine, Michelle Latiolais and Geoffrey Wolff. Jim Shepard made me a better writer, but just as important, a better reader. Thanks also to Mark Richard and Michael Ryan.
Thank you, Julie Barer, agent extraordinaire. Reagan Arthur at Little, Brown and Mary Mount at Viking UK — wonderful editors. A big thanks to the whole team at Little, Brown.
Thanks to Kathy Bucaro-Zobens, Doug Davis, Amanda Gillespie, Robert Howell, Dave and Deb Kennedy, Dan Kraus, Chris and Keeli Mickus, Dave Morse, Barry and Jennifer Neumann, Arielle Read, Grant Rosenberg, Matthew Thomas, E-fly and Tere, and the Kennedys of Naples, Florida.
Thanks to the UCI Humanities Department, and to Glenn Schaeffer, the International Institute of Modern Letters, and the International Center for Writing and Translation at UCI for establishing the Glenn Schaeffer Award, which provided me with crucial funding.
And to my family, from Illinois to Indonesia, without whom, no book.
JOSHUA FERRIS RECEIVED A BA
in English and Philosophy from the University of Iowa and attended the MFA program at the University of California at Irvine. His fiction has appeared in
The Iowa Review, Best New American Voices 2005,
and
Prairie Schooner.
He was born in Danville, Illinois, and grew up in Key West, Florida. He lives in Brooklyn.