Then We Came to the End (34 page)

And then the scales fell from his eyes. The day she had decided to keep the baby had come and gone and he had not known it. Hers were the tears of a mother, her fear a mother’s fear.

TOM WALKED INTO CARL GARBEDIAN’S OFFICE
without so much as a knock and sat down across from him. He stared at Carl without saying a word, relishing with a smug smile the confused expression on Carl’s face at the sudden sight of a clown, resolving to say nothing until he spoke. Carl looked, and then looked closer. “Tom?” he said.

“You guessed it,” said Tom.

Carl leaned back warily in his chair and reconnoitered the full scope of Tom’s appearance with a skeptical and hesitant eye. “Tom, why are you dressed like that?” he asked with a quiet temerity.

“Carl, of all people, I would think that
you
would see the humor in this,” Tom said. “Why aren’t you laughing? Why aren’t you shitting your pants with laughter right now?”

If Carl was tempted right then to shit his pants, the cause was probably not laughter.

“Don’t you think this is funny?” asked Tom. “I come back here dressed as a clown! It’s my homecoming, and look at me! I would think you would think this was funny, Carl.”

Carl managed to make something like a smile and agreed with Tom that it was funny. “It’s just the meds,” he added, by way of explaining the delayed hilarity. “They tend to even me out.”

Tom looked away in perfect disappointment. He turned back and asked, with a petulant and exasperated tone, “Doesn’t anybody have a sense of humor around here?” He was offended once again by our failures of character. “‘TOM, THAT YOU, TOM? YOU COME TO BLOW US ALL AWAY IN A CLOWN OUTFIT, TOM?’ Is that all I get from you guys? Why do you see me dressed like this and take it so goddamn seriously?”

“Because clowns are kind of scary, I guess,” Carl ventured. “To me, at least. And especially when you don’t know why somebody would be dressed up like one.”

“Well, maybe I got me a job as a clown,” said Tom, widening his eyes so their whites really popped amid all that red makeup. “Ever think of that?”

“Is it true?” asked Carl hopefully.

He wanted to call his wife. From the moment the clown came in and sat down Carl knew something was wrong and wanted the opportunity to speak to Marilynn one last time. She was so good. She had the hardest job. She had loved him very much.

Tom situated his backpack on the chair next to him and leaned forward, interlocking his fingers and placing his folded hands on the edge of Carl’s desk. “Let me ask you a serious question, Carl, and you be honest with me, okay? You tell me the truth. You fucks thought I was coming back here for target practice, didn’t you? Honestly — everybody was predicting it, weren’t they?”

Weirded-out, and reluctant to say just about anything, Carl didn’t know the prudent answer.

“Just answer the question, Carl. It’s a simple question.”

“Well,” Carl began, “a few people —”

“I knew it!” cried Tom, jolting out of his chair and looming over Carl’s desk. “I fucking knew it!” He was pointing at Carl as if Carl were the spokesman for all the fucks in the world.

“You didn’t let me finish,” said Carl.

“You fucks
actually
thought I was coming back here to blow people to bits,” said Tom, shaking his orange curls in grave, exaggerated disappointment and violently tapping Carl’s desk three times. “Unbelievable.”

“Why
are
you back here, Tom — isn’t that a fair question? And why the clown outfit?”

Tom sat back down again and struck a less aggressive perch on his seat. Carl was grateful for it. Since walking in, Tom seemed to be right up in his face. “I’ll tell you why I’m back here,” he said. “I came to ask Joe Pope to lunch, that’s why. That’s right — Joe. But then this other idea came to me, and it sort of took on a life of its own. So now I’m dressed like a clown. Why? I’ll tell you why I’m dressed like a clown,” he said, reaching over and unzipping his backpack, from which he removed his gun.

Carl wheeled back hastily, all the way to the credenza, and hoisted his clammy palms in the air. “Hey, Tom,” he said, just as tears sprang instinctively to his eyes.

He wanted so badly to talk to his wife. He was reminded of that distant, phantasmagoric episode in his life when he had stood at the pawn shop fingering a Luger. He recalled all the pills he had hoarded, and the time he sat in the garage with the key in the ignition, towels plugging every gap where the exhaust might escape, so that once he had the nerve to turn over the engine, it would be done. Who was that person? Not him, not any longer. He wanted to live! He wanted to
landscape!
He wanted more than anything just to call his wife.

“Oh, put your hands down, Carl,” said Tom. “I’m not going to shoot
you,
you fuck.”

“I thought you wanted to start a landscaping company,” said Carl. “I’ve been thinking about it all morning. The sun on my neck, remember? You and me — I could come up with some money, I love the idea. Why would you want to do something stupid?” He clattered unthinkingly, hoping to say the right thing.

“Listen to me, Carl,” said Tom. “Carl, shut up! Listen to me. I’m dressed like a clown because every single one of you fucks in this office at one time or another thought that Tom Mota was nothing but a clown, am I right? Be honest with me, Carl. Am I right?”

“To be honest with you, Tom, it’s hard to be honest with you when you’ve got a gun pointed at me.”

“I’m not going to shoot you, Carl! Just be honest. Everybody thought I was a clown, didn’t they?”

“I think,” Carl began, trying to breathe, to contain his fear, to gauge what action he might need to take, “I think everyone knew you were going through a tough time, Tom . . . and that you probably . . . you weren’t behaving like your normal self. I think that’s —”

“In other words,” said Tom, “a clown.”

“I never once heard anyone use that particular expression,” replied Carl, who still had his hands up.

“Carl, will you relax, please, Jesus. It’s not a real gun. Doesn’t anybody know the difference? Here, watch —”

Tom pointed the gun at one corner of the office and pulled the trigger.
Splat!
went the pellet, and a dousing of red paint coated the corner walls in a comic-book-like blot. Carl looked in wild-eyed astonishment, yet still refused to put his hands down. His shirt was dusted with red blowback from the pellet. He looked back at Tom.

“Are you fucking crazy?” he asked.

“No, I’m a clown,” said Tom. “And you know what clowns do, don’t you, Carl?”

“No, you fucking maniac!”

“Careful, Carl,” said Tom, motioning with the gun to the backpack in the seat beside him. “I might have a real one in there.”

“What do clowns do?” asked Carl, a little more mildly.

Tom warped his mouth into a severe hangdog frown and raised his brows to complete a picture of melancholy. “We’re such sad creatures at heart, us clowns,” said Tom. “Down-and-out and full of woe. So to make ourselves feel better —” Tom’s face blossomed into a smile like a flower drawn from his sleeve — “we pull pranks!”

JOE NEEDED A NICKEL.
He could have sworn that when he left his office he had had every coin he needed to get a pop from the machine but he was shy a nickel and had to return. He took it from the mug where he kept spare change and left the office again, spying Benny and Marcia and Amber and Larry in the hallway engaged in some new drama, not exactly working on winning the new business. The elevator doors had yet to close again and he raced to catch them. If he had lingered in the hall to speculate why they were all in hysterics, they would have silently accused him of scolding them from afar, and that was a tired accusation — though on this occasion it would have been correct. Because Jesus Christ, did they not understand? We had to win the new business!

He returned to the cafeteria on fifty-nine to buy his pop and was about to leave when he saw Lynn sitting in the far back at one of the round tables under the bright and appalling fluorescence. “What are you doing down here?” he asked, approaching her. She was alone and, despite all the noise he had made, the dropping coins and the falling can, she seemed to be taking notice of him for the first time.

She watched him draw closer, two fingers at her temple.

He set the pop on the table. She kicked out a chair for him. He sat down and opened the pop and the thing hissed and spit and he hunched over to slurp up the fizzing soda before it spilled over.

They sat in silence. Then she spoke to him again of things they had gone over yesterday after Genevieve had left the office — which partner would oversee the effort to secure the new business, and the ways in which he, Joe, would need to step up and assume more responsibility.

“Can I ask you a question?” he said.

“Of course.”

“Why did you lie about it to Genevieve yesterday, and then tell me the truth after she left?”

She removed her two fingers from her temple and turned them into a kind of shrug and then returned them to her temple. “I just don’t want them to know about it until the last possible second,” she replied. “I want to be in the hospital under anesthesia before they start talking.”

He nodded. “Understandable.”

“And I know I can trust you to keep it to yourself.”

They sat in silence, the only sound the refrigerated hum from the vending machines in the distance.

“Not that I believe I’ll be able to escape it,” she said. “I’ll be way, way under and their voices will probably still penetrate.”

He smiled. “Probably,” he said.

“But until they carry me kicking and screaming toward the operating room in one of those terrible green gowns, I’d prefer to keep them in the dark. Or at the very least, second-guessing.”

She sat up and placed her feet back inside her heels. She glanced over at him as she did so. “It’s very quick,” she said, “from what they tell me. A day or two and they have you out of there.”

“Is it next door?” he asked.

“Yes. Carl’s wife, actually.”

“No kidding.”

“She scares me.”

“Is that why you missed your first appointment?”

She nodded.

“What’s changed?”

“I have a friend,” she said. “He isn’t letting me get away with it this time.”

“You have a friend,” he said. He smiled.

“Is that so hard to believe?”

“No.”

“It isn’t a boyfriend,” she said.

“I’m happy to hear you have a friend,” he said. There was silence, then he said, “Do you feel sick, Lynn?”

“Do I feel sick,” she said. She thought about it. “Yes. I feel sick.”

“Would you like me to be there during the operation? Or is there something I can do for you afterward?”

“You can win this new business,” she said.

“For you, I mean.”

“That would be for me,” she said. “This is it, Joe. This is my life.”

He was silent. “You’ve worked hard.”

“Yes,” she agreed. She had finished putting on her shoes and was now sitting perpendicular to the table with her hands holding her knees. “Too hard?”

There was a note of vulnerability in the question that he wasn’t expecting. But it was also clear, the way she was looking at him, that she wanted him to answer truthfully. “I don’t know,” he said. “What’s too hard?”

“All these other people have so much going on in their lives. Their nights, their weekends. Vacations, activities. I’ve never been able to do that.”

“Which is why you’re a partner.”

“But what am I missing? What have I missed?”

“Have you been happy doing it?”

“Happy?”

“Content. Has it been worthwhile? The work.”

“Yes,” she said. “Maybe. I suppose.”

“Then you may be better off than they are. Many of them would prefer not to be here, and yet this is where they spend most of their time. Percentagewise, maybe you’re the happiest.”

“Is that how you judge it?” she asked. “It’s a percentage game?”

“I don’t know.”

“But what do they know,” she asked, “that I don’t know? That if I knew, I would prefer not to be here, too?”

“Maybe nothing,” he said.

Was she thinking of Martin, a home with Martin in Oak Park, a Volvo in the driveway and a bottle of wine breathing on the French tiles of the kitchen counter, while her child plays with a friend in the backyard? Was she thinking, Then I would be healthy? No one dies in Oak Park. Everyone in Oak Park is happy and no one ever dies.

“Or maybe everything,” he said. “I work about as much as you do. I don’t know what they know, either.”

They sat in silence.

“When should I tell them?” he asked.

“I’m rescheduled for Thursday,” she said. “You can tell them then.” She paused. “But this is the important thing,” she added. “I mean this. Above all else, Joe. Win this new business.”

TOM MOTA LEFT CARL’S OFFICE
and proceeded down the interior stairs to sixty, where most of the good people he wanted to take the piss out of were located in their tidy workstations, like that fuck Jim Jackers who had always been an idiot, and Benny Shassburger who still hadn’t responded to the heartfelt e-mail Tom had sent him in which he recounted his mother’s painful, ugly death. He would have liked to pump Karen Woo full of red pellets, and Dan Wisdom, painter of fish, that movie-quoting fuck Don Blattner, and the agency’s real ballbuster, Marcia Dwyer. Unfortunately for Tom, many of us were already marching down sixty flights of emergency stairs, owing to the good work of Roland. Unfortunately for the rest of us, any given floor was a circuitous blueprint of cubicle clusters, hallway offshoots, print stations, mount rooms — spaces easily overlooked — and Roland, as Benny predicted, missed many of them in his haste to reach the other floors. Tom had a fair share of unfortunate souls to shoot at once his melee began, and the bullets that came from his gun were every bit as real to us as those in the guns of the Chicago police who had just arrived outside our building, pulling up along the curb with their sirens blaring.

“‘It came into him, life,’” Tom declaimed to the fleeing backside of Doug Dion, “‘it went out from him, truth.’” He shot Doug in the back and Doug went down, bringing several of us out into the halls with his cries of traumatic certainty. Like Andy Smeejack before him, Doug confused a sting for the real thing. Tom merely needed to turn to find a new target. “‘It came to him, business,’” he trumpeted preposterously before shooting someone new, “‘it went from him, poetry.’” And also, “‘The day is always his, who works in it with serenity and great aims.’” And with a smile, he let go of another round.