Then We Came to the End (35 page)

They
actually
believed he could shoot at someone and intend them harm. That’s how little those fucks ever really knew him. He stopped midhallway to load more pellets into the gun.

We behaved as you might expect. We recoiled, hovering under our timberstick desks, collecting under conference room tables like game hens in a shooting gallery, and generally scampering for our lives. Amber Ludwig in the server closet heard shrieking from outside and went into overdrive trembling and hyperventilating, just as Larry, who had abandoned her there, disgusted by his revelation that Amber planned to carry the baby to term and convinced that her crying was baseless, backed away from the door he was tempted to open. He made no attempt to reattach himself to her. She wouldn’t have had him anyway. Instead, he took position behind the nearest of the metal shelves and prepared to push it over on Tom and beat him with wired hardware should he enter the server closet.

Benny found Jim exactly where he had predicted he would, listening to music through headphones and working on the new business. The two men tried to avoid the shrill and fearsome noises coming from unseen parts of their familiar floor by heading in the opposite direction. They had just rounded the corner past the potted tree nearest Joe Pope’s office when they ran into Genevieve, who had been frantically searching for Joe ever since the clown’s spooky greeting sent her back to Carl’s doorway and she overheard Tom telling Carl that he wasn’t going to shoot
him.
She worried that Joe was an obvious target and wanted to warn him, but when she couldn’t find him and people started screaming she turned distraught and now she was in tears.

“Shh, calm down,” Benny told her.

“Let’s take the elevator,” said Jim, since they were right there.

“No, we can’t,” Benny replied. “We have to take the emergency stairs.”

“Why?”

“Because Mike Boroshansky said so.”

So the three of them started off in the direction of the other potted tree and the emergency stairs on that side of the hallway, and had almost reached Benny’s office at the midway point when Tom’s voice rose up behind them in the hall and Jim suddenly went down.

“‘I content myself with the fact that the general system of our trade —’” Tom thundered, as he advanced toward them at a steady though not particularly fast pace down the hall.

“I’ve been shot!” cried Jim. “I’ve been shot!”

Benny pulled Genevieve into his office and pushed her behind the desk.

“‘— is a system of selfishness —’”

“It hurts!” cried Jim, writhing on his back. “Oh, it hurts!”

Hovering low in his doorway, Benny reached out to grab one of Jim’s hands to pull him inside the office.

“‘— is not dictated by the high sentiments of human nature —’”

Tom’s stentorian, little big man voice was growing closer. Benny pulled Jim in further as Tom shot him twice more, once in the torso and once in the leg. The skeleton with the Buck Rogers gun looked on helplessly from inside Benny’s office.

“Ow!” cried Jim. “Oh!” His eyes were as wide and fearful as a wounded dog’s.

“‘— much less by the sentiments of love and heroism —’”

Benny paused to get a closer look. That wasn’t blood. That was —

“‘— but is a system of distrust —’”

Benny stood up and entered the hallway. “Tom,” he said, “are those just fucking paintballs?”

“‘— not of giving, but of taking advantage,’” concluded Tom, standing but two feet from Benny and taking aim at his chest.

Just at that moment, Lynn and Joe stepped off the elevator and stopped abruptly in front of Joe’s office, peering down the hall. Seeing the clown with the gun, Lynn shouted, “What’s going on? Hey — what do you think you’re doing down there?”

Tom swiveled around to face them.

“Joe,” he said, resting the gun at his side. “I’ve come to take you to lunch.”

It was too late. A shirtless, shrieking Andy Smeejack had rounded the opposite corner, barreling down the hallway with bouncing man breasts and a belly white as a whale’s, leaping over Jim just as Benny turned to make room for him, and landing with crushing severity upon Tom’s absurdly festooned smallness. Both men careened into the wall and bounced off, landing with hard, nearly soundless thuds on the carpet, Smeejack on top, pinning with his tub of guts Tom’s body to the floor while pummeling him madly with sidewinders and haymakers until Joe and Benny pried him from his determination to kill the bastard with his bitter, fat, paint-flecked hands, and then the police swarmed in.

4

THE AMERICAN DREAM AND WHY WE DESERVE IT — WHO SHOULD BE DEAD — “GARBEDIAN AND SON” — USELESS SHIT — THE END OF AN ERA — WE URGE BENNY TO SAY SOMETHING — ROLAND TRICKED — A NOTE TO JIM — D.O.C. — JOE AND WHERE HE’S AT (“UP HERE”) — TOM IN LOVE — A VISIT TO THE HOSPITAL — DERIVATIVE CONCEPTS — DEPARTURES

WE BOUNCED BACK.
Or we quit. Or we took a vacation. For two or three weeks there we had a tough time resisting the urge to replay events. Everyone had a version. Conflicting accounts never diminished one side or the other, they only made the matter richer. We were blowing the whole thing way out of proportion, because nobody had died, but we talked about it as if death imagined were as good as real. We stayed later than normal to talk about it or we took days off or else we called it quits. Someone from Project Services sued us, citing negligence. It was a little awkward because we still had to work with her. She approached us at the coffeemaker and the microwave to make sure we knew it was nothing personal. She was suing the building, too, along with Tom Mota and the paintball gun manufacturer. She was out of the building and two blocks down when the shooting began, but who were we to say what damages this individual or that deserved? That would be up to a jury of our peers. We had all been deposed before and would likely be deposed for this. In the meantime we had our conflicting accounts to perfect and our insatiable appetite to revisit them.

The bottled water and the running shoe were no competition against Tom Mota’s shenanigans. Something as exciting as this had not struck us since the premiere season of
The Sopranos.
Before that, we had to stretch back to the Clinton impeachment and the summer of Monica. But those things couldn’t hold a candle. This happened to
us.
And the great thing was, we could talk and talk without any of the casualties or long-term psychological damage of a Columbine or an Oklahoma City. We pretended to know something about what they had gone through. Maybe we did, who knows. Probably not.

All that week and the week following we played at the game of corporate win-win-win but our real occupation was replaying events and reflecting on the consequences of still being alive. India reentered our horizons. Again we took stock of our ultimate purpose. The idea of self-sacrifice, of unsung dedication and of dying a noble death, again reached the innermost sanctum where ordinarily resided our bank account numbers and retirement summaries. Maybe there was an alternative to wealth and success as the fulfillment of the American dream. Or maybe that was the dream of a different nation, in some future world order, and we were stuck in the dark ages of luxury and comfort. How could we be expected to break out of it, we who were overpaid, well insured, and bonanza’d with credit, we who were untrained in the enlightened practice of putting ourselves second? As Tom Mota was taking aim at our lives, we felt for a split second the ambiguous, foreign, confounding certainty that maybe we were getting what we deserved. Luckily that feeling soon passed, and when we rose up alive and returned to our desks and, later, to our lofts and condos and suburban sprawls, the feeling was that of course we deserved all that we had, we had worked long, hard hours for it all, and how dare that fucker even pretend to take it away? How grateful we were to be around to enjoy everything we deserved.

We speculated about who should be dead. Who should be in critical condition right now and who in stable condition and who would have been paralyzed for life? If Amber Ludwig had been there she would have objected to such morbid games, but Amber had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and given time off. She retreated to her mother’s house in Cleveland where she could revisit her stuffed animals and reflect on Larry’s behavior in the server closet. The rest of us would have liked some time off. They only gave us that Friday afternoon, which we took gladly, but we, too, suffered from stress and all sorts of disorders and would have liked more than an afternoon. Some of us said Friday afternoon, wow, behold the generosity. But others tried to see it from their perspective. If they didn’t win the new business, they were screwed. And who did they screw when they got screwed? You betcha. So we hustled back Monday morning and pretended to work while carrying on the conversation that started Friday after Tom’s arrest and continued unflagging through the weekend, over the phone and at brunch, with relatives and news reporters, and the central message we wanted to convey, the moral of the story and the kernel of truth, was how relieved we were not to have died at work. The last thing we wanted was to expire between cubicle partitions or in the doorways of the offices where we spent our days. Hank Neary had a quote and we told him politely to shove the quote up his ass. “When death comes, let it find me at my work.” He said he couldn’t remember if it was Ovid or Horace who said that and we replied we could give a good goddamn what Ovid the Horse said. Ovid the Horse got it wrong about death and work. We wanted to die on a boat. We wanted to die on an island, or in a log cabin on a mountainside, or on a ten-acre farm with an open window and a gentle breeze.

Carl Garbedian, god bless him, turned in his letter of resignation. If you must know the very end of our story, a story set in the pages of an Office Depot catalog, of lives not nearly as interesting as an old man and the sea, or watery-world dwellers dispelling the hypos with a maniacal peg leg, then this is its conclusion: Carl Garbedian was the only one of us who got out of advertising for good. The rest of us didn’t have the luxury of concluding like the hero of a Don Blattner screenplay, shaking off the ennui with a Himalayan trek in search of emeralds and gurus. We had our bills to pay and our limitations to consider. We had our families to support and our weekends to distract us. We suffered failures of imagination just like everyone else, our daring was wanting, and our daily contentment too nearly adequate for us to give it up. It was only Carl who got out. And wait until you hear the nail-biting adventure he embarked upon. He tendered his resignation the Monday after the shooting, and when his two weeks expired, he began implementing a business plan for the creation of a suburban landscaping company. Daredeviling to put every Blattnerian hero to shame! But good for him, we thought. If that’s really what he wants. You’d have to be a fool to give up a climate-controlled office for the Chicago heat in July, but good for him. We asked him what he planned to do in the winter. “Shovel snow for the city,” he said. We said good for you, Carl. Great Jesus! we thought. Shoveling snow? In a truck at three in the morning in a freezing February blizzard? And how much payola would he have to part with to get a snow-shoveling contract from the city? We asked him what he planned to call his landscaping company. “Garbedian and Son,” he replied. No shit? He was entering into business with his father? “No, no,” he grinned. “That’s just a little trick I picked up in advertising.”

The trick was to play loose with words. Eventually, if everything went well, “Garbedian and Son” meant three Hispanics would come to your home and manicure your lawn. When we said, “Don’t miss out on these great savings!” we really meant we gotta unload these fuckers fast. “No-Fee Rewards” meant prepare to pay out the ass. Words and meaning were almost always at odds with us. We knew it, you knew it, they knew it, we all knew it. The only words that ever meant a goddamn were, “We’re really very sorry about this, but we’re going to have to let you go.”

THEY LET GO OF MARCIA DWYER.
They came for her even before the building people had finished removing the splatters of paint from the walls and carpet. Jim Jackers had seemed the next logical choice. Who in their right minds would choose Marcia over Jim? But for reasons that would remain ever obscure, they took Marcia. “Restructuring,” they said. “Lost clients.” How many times had we heard that? It still said nothing about why Marcia and not Jim. We might as well have been inquiring about the random and inscrutable selection process of fatal diseases.

They gave her a half hour in which to collect her personal items. It was part of a new protocol for the physical removal of former employees that Roland had to stand against the wall with his hands folded, mutely watching her pack. They were treating Marcia like an inmate at the Joliet Correctional Center. Perhaps it had to be that way after Tom’s arrest, but the only dangerous thing about Marcia was her glower. Did he really have to just stand there like that, as if vigilant against sudden movement? We’d seen firsthand how the man handled a crisis. If Marcia decided suddenly to brandish a stapler in a half-threatening manner, he’d fumble with his Motorola and forget his name. The least he could do was offer to help. Failing that, he could take a seat and relax.

Marcia picked her way across the desk, the credenza, and the bookshelves, removing a clock, a figurine, a cluster of books. She unplugged her radio and wound the cord around its brown plastic body and placed it in a box. Then she went through the desk drawers one redundant item at a time, investigating every matchbook, business card, hairband, Band-Aid, aspirin container, lotion bottle, bendy straw, multivitamin, magazine, nail file, nail polish, lip balm, and cough drop that had languished in her desk for who knows how long. Did it belong in a box or in the trash? She unpinned from her corkboard a collage of photographs, receipts, coupons, utility bills, personal reminders, wisdom quotes, greeting cards, ticket stubs, and drawings in her hand and in the hands of professional artists she admired, and those, too, she either threw away or put into a box. Marcia’s office reverted back to the anonymous — nothing on the desk but a computer and telephone, the walls blank, the divot-ridden corkboard bereft of all sign of her two thousand days among us. It was a swift and stultifying transformation, depressing to watch.

Genevieve Latko-Devine arrived in her doorway looking ashen and out of breath. “I just heard,” she said.

“Roland, you’re annoying me,” said Benny. “Do you really have to stand against the wall like that?”

“Sorry, Benny. It’s part of the new rules.”

The mood in the office was solemn and wistful until Jim Jackers showed up and asked Marcia if she was planning to return dressed as a clown to terrorize us all with a paintball gun. Any other day, Marcia would have shut him up with a quick put-down, but his inappropriateness could no longer touch her. What clung to us because of Jim no longer clung to her.

“I have been a total bitch for a year now,” she said, taking a seat for the last time in Ernie Kessler’s chair. “I hated everybody, you know why? Because I thought no way they deserved to stay on if I was going to be laid off. But all that time, I didn’t get laid off. I only got laid off today. I was thinking ahead, and hating everybody for it. Now I can finally stop being a bitch. You know how good that makes me feel? Why didn’t they do this a year ago?” she asked.

This was one of several possible responses — the silver-lining response. Marcia had found a spin clever enough to carry her out of the building with her head up. We had no desire to expose it for what it was, and so we all agreed it was a good thing that she could finally stop being a bitch. If Amber had been there, there would have been tears.

“Do you know that since layoffs began,” she continued, “I haven’t been able to enjoy a single cup of coffee at the coffee bar? I was always too worried someone might come along and see me and think I should be working and not at the coffee bar enjoying a cup of coffee. I can enjoy coffee again,” she said.

Not enjoying your coffee at the coffee bar was far better than no coffee bar at all. Twenty minutes earlier, Marcia herself would have said the same thing. Now a great distance had grown between us. She had fallen into the dark abyss, while the rest of us still stood at the brink, watching her plummet. Soon we would lose sight of her completely. It was tough to behold, but there she was — no longer one of us. An era was coming to an end. The era of browbeating, sarcasm, belittlement, and berating. The era of bad ballads from eighties hair bands issuing from her office. The era of conscience-riddled insults followed by profuse apologies to anyone but the insulted. We would not have Marcia’s new haircut to look forward to anymore. To be honest, we had already grown pretty much accustomed to it.

“Can I take these boxes home for you in my car?” asked Genevieve. “I’d be happy to drop them off.” We didn’t think Genevieve had a clue what she was asking. Genevieve lived in a gorgeous loft in Lincoln Park with her lawyer husband. Did she know how far Bridgeport was? Was she even aware there was a South Side?

“Why you?” Benny said to Marcia. “What bullshit. Why not Jim here?”

“Hey!” said Jim.

“Do you remember last week,” Marcia continued, with a conviction that would have impressed the biggest cynic, “when I ran into Chris Yop at the print station? And do you remember how worked up I was over having Tom Mota’s chair, with the wrong serial numbers? You guys told me to go in and replace Tom’s chair with Yop’s chair, that used to be Ernie’s chair, remember? Because it would be better to be caught with Ernie’s chair than to be caught with Tom’s? Do you remember that?” she asked. “Do you realize how insane we’ve all become?”

She got off the chair and stood before the partially filled boxes on her desk with her hands on her hips, wrists turned inward. She looked around a final time at what remained to be done and found there was nothing. “Wow,” she said.

“Are you ready?” asked Roland.

She didn’t even look at him. She didn’t look at us, either. She looked through us, to the dusty surfaces where her things had been, to the barren walls between which for six straight years she had completed the work that had earned her a living. Was this it, then? Was there to be no ceremony, beyond Roland’s aid out the door?

“I’ll help you down with those boxes,” said Benny.

“You know what?” she said. “Hold on.” She opened them up again and peered inside each one for a full minute or two. “I don’t want any of this shit,” she concluded at last. “Will you look at this? What is this?” She pulled out a cheap die-cast statuette of Lady Liberty. Next she held up a small book entitled
50 Tips for the Direct-Mail Marketer.
“Roland,” she said, “can you just have these boxes thrown out for me?”