Then We Came to the End (37 page)

He and Joe were sequestered in a small, windowless room. We expected something different: a booth, some bulletproof glass, a pair of red phones. But according to Joe it was a room no bigger than the average office on sixty. It was almost possible to imagine their unlikely conversation unfolding where conversations always unfolded for us, only this time, the door locked from the inside, and Tom wasn’t allowed any thumbtacks with which to pin up his ludicrous and heartfelt quotations. Joe was sitting at the table when Tom was escorted in by two guards. He was wearing a tan jumpsuit with
D.O.C.
stenciled on the back, and he was shackled with handcuffs. The guards told them they had fifteen minutes.

“Being treated okay, Tom?”

“How are those fucks?” asked Tom. “Recovering?”

Joe gave Tom the general rundown of events after he was arrested. Tom said he was happy we got Friday afternoon off. They talked about Tom’s situation, what his lawyers were saying they could do for him if he pled guilty and acted penitent. Then Joe asked him what he had come there to ask him.

“I just said, ‘What did you want to talk to me about that day, Tom?’” Joe said to us. “And finally he admitted that he was the one who had Sharpied
FAG
on my wall.”

“No shit,” said Benny.

“I thought you did that to yourself,” said Jim Jackers.

“No,” said Joe.

“Jim, think about it,” said Karen. “Why would Joe do that to his own office? God.”

“I can’t tell you how many times I asked him, Joe,” said Benny. “I said, ‘Tom, come on, man, tell me the truth. Did you do that to Joe’s wall?’ Every time he denied it.”

Tom tried to explain himself. “I refused to conform,” he said to Joe. “When somebody said something stupid, everybody smiled and simpered and shook their heads. But me, I told them it was stupid. Everyone listened to the same goddamn radio station. Fuck that. I stayed late and went by everybody’s desk and spun the dial. I wore three polos on top of each other for a month, Joe, because I wasn’t being fooled and I wanted people to know it. I learned all that from reading Emerson. To conform is to lose your soul. So I dissented every chance I got and I told them fuck you and eventually they fired me for it, but I thought, Ralph Waldo Emerson would be proud of Tom Mota.”

Genevieve spoke up from down the conference room table. “He’s pleased with himself?”

“No, he’s not pleased with himself,” said Joe. “Hang on.”

“But what I didn’t know for a long time, Joe,” Tom had continued, “was that I was down here.” Joe demonstrated in order to explain what Tom meant. Tom had rattled his handcuffs in a sudden vortex whipped up by his spinning hands, which hovered just above the table. “Down here, resenting everything. The rut I was in. My never-enough salary. The people. I stormed around. I poked my nose into everyone’s business. When there was an insult to be made, I made it. When I could disparage someone, I took the opportunity. I Sharpied
FAG
on your wall. And I thought, it’s because I refuse to conform. If they don’t like it, they can fire me, because I can’t live like everybody else. But then you walked in and found what I’d written, Joe, and what did you do? Do you remember?”

“I couldn’t remember exactly,” Joe said to us. “I remember I called Mike Boroshansky and told him that someone had vandalized my office. But that wasn’t what Tom meant. After that, he said. After the official notification and all that. Did I remember what I did then? And I told him I couldn’t remember specifically.”

“You left it up there,” said Tom. “
You left it up there.
The building people and the office coordinator, who knows what those fucks had going on, but whatever it was, it must have had them by the balls, because it wasn’t until the following day — don’t you remember? — that they got around to removing it.”

We asked Joe if that was right. Did it really take them until the following day to remove
FAG
from his wall?

“Maybe,” he replied. “I remember it took them a while. But to be honest, I’m just going on what Tom told me.”

“I’m telling you,” said Tom, “it wasn’t until the next day. Whenever I’d walk by, the first thing I’d do is look in at you. I expected to see you all up in arms, screaming into the phone at someone about why it was still up there. But what did I find you doing instead?
You were working.
You were . . . I don’t know what. If it had been me, I’d have been hollering at someone every five minutes until they came with a goddamn can of paint and covered over that fucker, because who likes to be called a fag? But you? You didn’t care. It couldn’t touch you. Because you’re up
here,
Joe,” said Tom.

Joe demonstrated once again. Tom had lifted one of his manacled hands as high as it would go to demonstrate where he thought Joe was, the second hand having no choice but to follow.

“I thought
I
was up there, but no, that whole time, I was down
here,
with everybody else — churning, spinning, talking, lying, circling, whipping myself up into a frenzy. I was doing everything they were doing, just in my own way. But you,” he said, “you stay here, Joe. You’re up here.” His hand delineated Joe’s place with such vigor it made the second hand jerk back and forth.

“I tried to tell him that wasn’t necessarily true,” said Joe. “I could be way down here for all he knew,” he said, bending his chin down to the conference room table so he could touch the floor. “But Tom had made up his mind. I was up here.” Joe extended his arm in the air once more.

“I thought I was the one living right,” said Tom. “I was the one saying fuck you to the miseries of office life. Nobody could resist conforming in the corporate setting, but I managed it. Making it a point every day to show how different I was from everybody else. Proving I was better, smarter, funnier. Then I saw you sitting side by side with the word
FAG
on the wall — working —
at peace
— and I knew —
you
were the one. Not me. I used to think it was just because you were arrogant. But then I knew it wasn’t arrogance. It was just your nature. And I hated you for it. You had it, and I didn’t, and I hated you.”

We asked Joe if he had really been at peace the day he found
FAG
on his wall.

“At peace?” he said. “I’m not sure that describes it. Tom thinks he knows me, but he doesn’t. And I tried to tell him that, I said, ‘Tom, finding my office vandalized like that, you have no idea how that made me feel. Maybe I was mortified. Maybe I wanted to kill myself. Maybe I went into the bathroom and cried. Don’t assume you know.’ But he wouldn’t listen.”

“Did you cry, Joe?” asked Jim.

“Jim, he’s not going to tell us if he cried,” said Karen.

“I didn’t cry,” said Joe.

“I know you didn’t cry, Joe,” said Tom. “Because you weren’t bothered. And I had no choice but to respect you for it, even though I hated you. I still hated you the day they let me go, and probably the day after, but on the third day, it disappeared, all of it . . . just . . .
poof,
I don’t know why. Probably because I wasn’t working there anymore. I had distance, suddenly. And what I was left feeling toward you was admiration. More than admiration. It was love —”

We couldn’t help it, it was so absurd, Tom saying that he loved Joe — we just cracked up.

“Don’t laugh,” said Joe sternly. “You wanted to hear it. Let me finish.”

The table got quiet again.

“I had wanted to smash your face in,” said Tom. “I couldn’t stomach the sight of you. I wanted to apologize for that. That’s why I wanted to take you to lunch,” he said. “I really did want to take you to lunch. But as that fuck so eloquently puts it, ‘Character teaches above our wills.’ And before I knew it, I had the paintball gun thing all worked out in my head and I just couldn’t stop myself.”

The two guards came into the room just then and announced that Joe’s time was up. He looked at his watch and couldn’t believe that fifteen minutes had passed. Joe stood, but the guard immediately told him to sit down again. “There was a whole procedure to it,” he explained to us. “Tom would be led out by the first guard, and I would be led out by the second one. I had to remain seated until Tom was out of sight.”

“Thanks for coming, Joe,” Tom said, as the guard approached and took his arm. “I appreciate it.”

“Is there anything I can do for you, Tom?”

“Yeah.” Tom raised his manacled hands abruptly. “Stay up here, you fuck,” he said.

Immediately the guard reacted and Tom put his hands back down.

With that, Joe began to pass handouts around the table. “Like I said,” he added, not looking at any of us. “Tom Mota thinks he knows me, but he doesn’t. Not really.”

We each took a handout.

“Okay,” he said. He straightened in his chair, and the meeting began.

OUR VISIT TO LYNN
in the hospital was a rough twenty minutes. We shared oblique glances and sweaty palms and the crippling fear of pauses in the conversation. There was no easy breathing from the moment we arrived. She was sitting up in her hospital bed, swimming in her blue cotton gown, a plastic ID bracelet around her child’s wrist. It was a well-known phenomenon that she was a small woman physically who loomed in our imaginations as a towering and indomitable giant. She looked even smaller now, lost in all the blankets and pillows of the hospital bed, and her arms, which we had never seen so much of before, looked as undefined and reedy as a little girl’s.

We had nothing in common with the dying and so never knew what to say to them. Our presence seemed a vague and threatening insult, something that could easily spill over into cruel laughter, and so we chose our words carefully and moved with caution gathering around the bed and restricted our jokes and bantering. It would not be appropriate to storm in and be our full flush selves, encouraging her with loud voices to return to us because, just beneath the spoken words, the real truth ran fast as a current: she may never be one of us again. So we minced and pussyfooted and swallowed our words, mumbled and deflected and softened our voices, and she saw right through it. “Come in,” she said when we first arrived. “Get in here. What are you all being so shy for?” One after the other we filed in. Her hair was back in a ponytail, she wasn’t wearing any makeup, and there was no sign of a single pair of designer shoes. She had just undergone a grievous surgery and was suffering from unspecified complications. Yet she still generated the greatest energy in the room. It was a private room about the size of her office and so it felt a little like entering that enervating space to receive dreaded news about some irrevocable and costly error we had committed at the agency’s expense. We greeted her. We presented her with flowers. “Will you look at all your funeral faces,” she said, looking toward the foot of the bed, and to the right of her and to the left. “You’d think I was dead already. Would it have killed you to practice your expression in the mirror before coming in here, Benny?” Benny smiled and apologized. She looked next at Genevieve. “And you,” she said. “Did you have a conversation with my doctors I should know about?” Genevieve also smiled and shook her head. “Well, so what’s next, then?” she asked. “A reading from the Bible?” We tried to explain that we had been ambivalent about coming. We thought maybe she would have preferred her privacy. “I would have preferred never to have stepped foot in this dreary hell,” she said. “But if I have to be here, it’s nice to see some familiar faces. But somebody start acting like a jackass or I’ll hardly know you.”

“I do a mean imitation of James Brown doing an imitation of Clint Eastwood,” offered Benny. “Want to see it?”

“I can’t picture that,” said Lynn.

“Believe it or not, it’s true,” said Jim.

So Benny did his imitation of James Brown doing Clint Eastwood, which defied description to anyone who hadn’t seen it, but had us laughing within a few seconds, and that finally broke the ice.

We talked about Tom Mota and the incident, and Joe told of seeing him in jail. And we talked about Carl’s resignation, which came as a surprise to Lynn. “You’re leaving us, Carl?” “I am,” he said. “Well, I think that is terrific news,” Lynn said. We were shocked to hear how in favor she was of Carl’s departure until she elaborated. “Advertising isn’t your thing,” she explained. “It doesn’t make you happy.” Carl agreed and told her of his ambitions for Garbedian and Son. She said the same thing we said: “Good for you, Carl.” Though she was probably thinking, Who wants to be twirling a weedwhacker around a subdivision in the middle of a heatstroke summer? Give me my chair over that any day of the week. Oh, what I’d give to be back in my chair — she was probably thinking that, too.

After a while we could tell she was starting to flag, so we told her we’d better let her get some sleep. But first Jim Jackers had a presentation to make.

We thought it was a terrible idea from the very beginning. Lynn had asked us to do a pro bono project for a breast cancer awareness fund-raiser, claiming to know some committee chair who had pestered her. The next day, the project morphs from a fund-raiser into a public service announcement, with the baffling mandate to inspire laughter in the breast cancer patient. What happened to the fund-raiser? No one knows. Is there really a pestering committee chair? No word on that, either. Just Joe Pope instructing us on the changes. We say okay, whatever. We get down to work. We read books, we do research. We come up with squat. We file into Lynn’s office at the eleventh hour — she’s forgotten about it entirely. We unload the “Loved Ones” campaign on the “client.” The project ends. Tom comes in and shoots us with paintballs.

But then we found out Lynn did in fact have cancer. When that came to light, Jim Jackers suggested we revive the ads we failed at so miserably and present them to her in the hospital, in order to cheer her up.

“Because what if she did make up that assignment?” he asked. “Don’t you think she’d like to see those ads more than ever, now that she’s actually in the hospital?”

“Don’t be an idiot, Jim,” said Karen Woo. “Of course she didn’t make up that assignment.”

“Well, that’s a different tune you’re singing all of a sudden, Karen.”