Then We Came to the End

  ONE DAY CARL GARBEDIAN lifted his computer monitor and placed it on the other side of his desk. He didn’t like it there, so by the end of the day he had returned it. But in the interim he noticed how dusty the desk was, so the following morning he brought cleaning supplies from home and dusted his desk, his credenza, and his bookshelves. He stayed late and dusted the furniture in offices down the hall from his own. Marilynn was working late, of course, and he had nothing better to do, and, surprisingly, he found pleasure in the task. The next night he did the desks and credenzas in offices on other floors until Hank Neary, working late one night on his failed novel, returned from the bathroom and found Carl inside his office, dusting the legs of his chair. “What are you doing to my chair, Carl?” he asked.

  Earlier Carl had taken to shielding his eyes with a legal pad during input meetings. He came into the conference room, plopped the legal pad down on the table, and squinted under the sudden light. “Jesus Christ, that’s bright,” he said, bringing his hand up to where the legal pad had been. He was blinking and squinting, trying to adjust, but eventually he had to resume the use of the legal pad. “Christ, it’s bright in here. Can’t we turn that light off?” Out of the corners of our own dimmed and puzzled eyes, we looked around at one another. Finally Tom Mota said to him, “Carl, man. It is off.” And it was true — sometimes, sunlight coming in from the windows convinced us to keep the overhead lights off. Yet he kept squinting and hovering under the legal pad throughout the entire meeting.

  Some time later he ran down the hall. He ran down the hall a second time. The third time it was like he was doing laps or something. A few of us were in Benny Shassburger’s doorway, standing around chatting to Benny on the inside. When Carl came around again, Tom shouted out at him. “Carl! What the hell, man — what are you doing?”

  Carl stopped, shaking his head breathlessly at Tom. Then, like a cat you can’t reason with, he darted off again.

  “What’s up with him?” Benny asked.

  Tom shrugged. “How should I know?”

  Within the week, Carl had blacked out his windows with construction paper. The paper, if not exactly sanctioned by management or the office coordinator, was the sort of thing usually tolerated in our office, on the basis that we should enjoy a creative environment and have our quirks indulged, so that we might continue to think up clever headlines and catchy designs. On the other hand, Carl was questioned about it, and he explained that out of nowhere he had acquired an extreme sensitivity to light, producing as proof a pair of the boxy black sunglasses one typically sees only on the elderly, which he claimed he wore everywhere nowadays, including, sometimes, in the office itself. The specter of a worker’s comp claim seemed to hover over the handling of Carl’s delicate eyes, so Lynn Mason instructed the office coordinator to tell Carl he could keep the paper up. Then, when she had two minutes to think, Lynn went down to Carl’s office.

  “A sudden sensitivity to light doesn’t sound healthy,” she said, standing in Carl’s doorway. “Maybe you need to see an ophthalmologist.”

  “Oh, no,” said Carl.

  “I don’t mean to pry, Carl, but when was the last time you had a physical?”

  “Oh, I don’t need a physical,” said Carl.

  He went on to explain that if it weren’t for his sensitivity to light and the occasional excruciating headache, and some dizziness and uncommon sweating, he had never felt better his entire life. “It has cleared up,” he said to her, “all my thoughts of suicide.”

  Lynn was too taken aback by Carl’s frank admission of thoughts of suicide to stop and say, What’s it? What’s cleared it up? Instead she moved from the doorway into Carl’s office, shut the door halfway, and said to him, “Carl, you were having thoughts of suicide?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Carl said. “Oh, big time. I had done research, Lynn. I knew . . . well, I seriously doubt you want to hear all the details. But I’m here to tell you, I was prepared.”

  Lynn listened to him as she sometimes can, like a person being paid by the hour to do so. She took a seat on one corner of his desk and her brow was furrowed with concern as Carl told her the story of his long nights when Marilynn worked late and he was alone, how envious he was of her career choice compared to his own, and how all activity had at once lost its luster. And then he said something that gave her a sense of the depth, the incomprehensible depth of his onetime despair.

  “Don’t be alarmed when I tell you this,” he said, “because I can promise you it has all passed, but one of the reasons — and I feel so ashamed of this — but one of the reasons I wanted to kill myself was so that she would find my body.” Abruptly Carl burst into tears. “My wife,” he said. “My beautiful wife! She is so loving, so good,” he said, as the force of his tears began to quell. “I cannot tell you how good she is, Lynn, and how much she loves me. And you know, she has the hardest job? She sees the sickest people. They die on her constantly. But she loves them, and she loves me, and I wanted to do this terrible thing to her.”

  By then Lynn had come closer and put her hand on Carl’s shoulder. She moved her hand gently over his shoulder and all that could be heard was his soft crying and the friction of the fabric under her hand.

  “Why would I want to do that?” he asked. “For attention? How shameful. I’m terrible,” he said. “A terrible person.” She continued to comfort him, and after a moment, he wheeled back in his swivel chair, stood, and hugged her — he needed someone to hug. Lynn hugged back without hesitation, and likely without any regard for who passed by and saw them hugging because the door, after all, was only half-closed. They stood in his office hugging.

  Lynn said, “Oh, Carl,” patting him gently on the back, and by the time they parted, he had stopped crying and started to clear the tears from his eyes.

  They talked a little longer, and that’s when she asked him what had changed that he no longer felt the way he had, and he told her that he was finally taking medication. He didn’t mention whose medication he was taking, but no matter. When she left, no doubt she realized how little she knew about the individual lives of the people who worked for her, how impossible it was to get to know them despite little efforts here and there, and she probably also felt the slightest, just the very smallest discomfort for how it seemed Carl had hugged her for an uncommonly long time, as he had hugged so many of us during those berserk and unpredictable days.

  When Tom Mota saw Carl’s blacked-out windows, he knew the day had come and gone when he should have said something to someone about what he knew. He didn’t want to say anything. First of all, another man’s business was none of his own. Second, Carl had confided in him, and Tom had no desire to betray that confidence. And then there was a third thing, something slimy and unpleasant: a familiar, expectorant, implacable hatred. Carl had told Tom that he didn’t want his wife to know that he was depressed because his wife had told him he was depressed and he didn’t want her to know that she was right. Tom had had a wife who was right all the time, too, and so he could understand Carl’s desire to deprive the person who loves him most the righteousness of confirmed knowledge. Tom was standing outside Carl’s office gazing at the blacked-out windows when a cry came from within.

  It was a howl, really, a grumbling cry of pain that erupted into a throttle. Had it not been a slow day at lunch hour, this terrible noise would have brought people out into the halls.

  Tom had assumed Carl’s office was empty. From where he stood, he could see no one inside. “Carl?” he said, stepping in.

  Carl was laid out across the hard corporate carpet behind his desk, gripping his hair. Fists full of hair, almost yanking it from its roots, and even in the dim light, Tom could see how pinched and red the poor man’s face had become. Carl did not open his eyes at Tom’s approach.

  Tom went back to his office, picked up the receiver, and, before putting it to his ear, as the dial tone hummed in the air, he shook his head and whispered, “Fuck.”

  He left his name and number for Carl’s
wife, who worked in the oncology department of Northwestern Memorial next door. Then he remembered that before being sidetracked by Carl, he had been taking work down to Joe Pope, so he got up again, but before he could darken his doorway, the phone rang.

  “Goddamn,” he said to Marilynn, “I never had a doctor return a call so fast in my life.”

  “I’m worried about Carl,” she explained.

  “So if I was just a regular patient,” Tom wondered aloud, “how long would you have kept me waiting?”

  “Please tell me what’s going on,” she said.

  He explained everything he knew — the day he’d gone into Carl’s office with the book, Carl’s admission that he was taking Janine’s meds, the bottle with the three-month supply, everything. He told her that Hank had walked in on him dusting his chair, that he had been shielding his eyes with a legal pad during inputs, that he had jogged a half-dozen laps around the far perimeter of the sixtieth floor, and that once not long ago, he came across Carl at his desk staring with a pensive, almost scientific expression at one of his hands, turning it slowly, turning and staring at the hand as if it were a rare find or a foreign object. Then Tom said, “He’s currently lying on the floor of his office, he’s blacked out all his windows with construction paper. I think he needs medical attention.”

  Marilynn was most certainly a doctor in that she didn’t waste time before grilling him on specifics. What was the medication? How long had he been taking it? Tom didn’t have too many answers. The questions he liked least came last, back to back, so he didn’t have a chance to answer them — they sounded rhetorical and accusatory. “How long have you known about this? How could you possibly, possibly not have said something sooner?”

  “You want to know why I didn’t tell you sooner?” he said. “Because I hate my wife, that’s why.”

  Marilynn was incredulous; he could tell even over the phone.

  “Because you hate your wife?” she said. “What kind of answer is that?”

  Tom, ever the logician, replied, “Because she’s a fucking bitch — and if you were a man doctor, I’d call her even worse.”

  Marilynn, understandably, must not have known how to respond to that, as a period of silence ensued.

  “Look,” Tom said finally, “I’m not proud of it, but when he said he was doing this without your knowledge because he hated when you were right, I could relate, because my bitch of an ex-wife is another one who’s always right, a lot of the goddamn time, anyway — except for her taking the KIDS to fucking PHOENIX and letting them call some FUCKING PILOT FOR FUCKING UNITED DADDY BOB, AS IF THEY HAVE TWO DADDIES, WHEN I’M THEIR ONLY FUCKING DADDY! SO THAT’S WHY! SUE ME!”

  He hung up. He collected himself. She called back.

  “I just need to know,” she said, “if you think he’ll come in on his own, or if I need to get somebody.”

  “Like to restrain him?”

  “He hasn’t been home for two days,” she told him. “I’ve been calling and calling. I have no idea where his head is at.”

  “He doesn’t need restraining,” said Tom. “He needs somebody to help him off the ground.”

  Tom went down to Carl’s office and asked him if he wouldn’t mind accompanying him next door to the hospital. When Carl said nothing, Tom got him to his feet and walked him over.

  He was diagnosed with toxic poisoning. When we visited him, his lips were chapped and his skin looked windburned. Last we had all been together in a hospital was for Brizz. “Hope you don’t end up like him, Carl,” said Jim Jackers.

  “Jim,” said Marcia. “If you’re going to make bad jokes, at least make them half-funny.” She turned back to Carl. “Just ignore that idiot,” she said to him. “How are you feeling?” Carl had several big white pillows behind him and he was hooked up to an IV.

  “Everything looks double,” he replied, “and red.”

  We found that exceedingly hard to respond to. Everything looks double and red? Oh, well, that’ll go away, Carl. That’s just a temporary side effect of permanent brain damage.

  “Carl,” said Benny, “you’re going to be back on your feet in no time.”

  “Will I be able to play the piano?” Carl asked tiredly.

  It was a measure of how odd he had been acting, and how strange some of his comments had been, that this old joke did not register, and someone replied in all sincerity, “Oh, of course you will, Carl. Of course you’ll play the piano again.”

  “I was joking,” said Carl, lifting his hands lethargically — an indication, maybe, that those hands didn’t play the piano. “Hey, is Janine here?” he asked.

  Everyone knew by now that Carl had stolen Janine’s drugs.

  “She isn’t here right now, Carl,” said Genevieve, who was standing across the bed from Marcia. “But she wanted me to tell you that she sends you her best.”

  In reality, Janine was back at the office, trying to take stock of just how many bottles Carl had gotten into. It seemed that the three-month supply of whatever he first took had not been enough for Carl, that he had diverted from the instructions on the label, and that over the course of several weeks he had returned to Janine’s desk late at night, taking other drugs, and conducting an incautious and unregulated experiment on himself.

  As you can witness a child who has just banged his head pause before his face slowly transforms into a sad mask of pain, we watched Carl register the news that Janine was not among us, and struggle not to cry.

  “Carl, would you like us to come back later?” Genevieve asked softly. As she was bending down to him, her ear lost its hold on her hair and a strand of it spilled over and she had to put it behind her ear again with that unself-conscious grace she possessed when dealing on an everyday basis with her unearthly hair. “Carl,” she said, “should we come back?”

  “I wanted to tell her something,” Carl said, biting his upper lip.

  “Would you like me to give her a message?” she asked.

  “I wanted to sing her a song.”

  “You wanted to sing her a song?” said Genevieve.

  “I wanted to sing her a song,” said Carl.

  Out in the hallway we reported to Carl’s doctor that he’d been saying and doing a number of peculiar things for a matter of weeks. “I have no doubt,” the doctor said. “He was all over the board with those drugs and the dosages were incredibly high.” He turned back to reassure Marilynn that they were getting Carl cleaned out, and that he foresaw no permanent damage. Once Carl was detoxified, they’d put him on the right medication with the right dosage, and he’d be back to his better self.

  We thought that was like saying Carl would play the piano again. Did he have a better self to begin with?

  Marilynn, also lab-coated and pinned with ID — she was an attractive woman with short blond hair — thanked the doctor by name. He smiled and gently squeezed her shoulder.

  After he left, Marilynn turned to Tom Mota and said, “Thank you for your help.”

  “I won’t apologize for not helping sooner,” he said. “And I won’t apologize for yelling at you over the phone.” He was like a child in that he wouldn’t look her in the eye as he addressed her. “I can’t apologize for something I don’t feel sorry for.”

  “I wasn’t asking for an apology,” Marilynn said, tall enough to look down on him. “I just wanted to thank you.” She started to walk away.

  “Do you mind if I ask you a question?” Tom said. She turned back. Tom moved toward her and got, we thought, a little close, cocking his shaved head as he tended to do when exercised. He was wearing a tan trench coat, which he must have thought made him look taller. The loose belt was hanging down. “Just out of curiosity,” he said, and he made that terrible smirk. It was creepy how he insisted on staring only at her neck. “Why is it that he finds it necessary to medicate himself nearly to death? You have an answer for that, as a medical practitioner? What one person does to drive the other person to poison himself?” Marilynn was stunned into silence. “Just
out of idle curiosity,” he said, lifting his shoulders. Finally he looked her in the eye.

  We couldn’t believe how out of line he was. He had hit an all-time low.

  “You are . . . extremely rude,” she said at last, her lips trembling, “at a time my husband is very sick —”

  “Oh, go fuck yourself,” he said, turning away, dismissing her with both hands.

  “— when all I’ve done —” She struggled not to break down. “— is try to help him. I tried to help him,” she said.

  “Hey, I’m just trying to understand,” he said, turning around and pointing at her, “why you hate us. And why we hate you.”

  We went in to say a final good-bye to Carl — all except Tom. Lynn Mason arrived. That was surprising. “I didn’t think you did hospitals,” said Benny, in reference to her phobia.

  “I don’t do them when I’m the subject under investigation,” Lynn replied. “When it’s somebody else, I do hospitals.” She turned to the man in the bed. “Carl, what the hell? Just what the hell?”

  Her words sounded accusatory but her tone was one of tender confusion.

  “I fucked up,” Carl said.

  He seemed to become more coherent with her arrival. It was a delicate time, given that layoffs were happening all around us, but business appeared to be set aside for the moment, and for ten minutes there we were almost a healthy functioning team again. Someone even said something to that effect — Dan Wisdom, painter of fish, who had positioned himself against the wall so as to be out of people’s way. He said Carl needed to feel better soon because he was a vital member of the team. Lynn looked over at him and shook her head.

  “No, let’s not have any of that team-talk bullshit right now,” she said. “Let’s leave team-talk bullshit at the office for now and just talk about the fact that you guys, if you guys are in need of something — whatever it is, I don’t care — Christ, come see me before you do something like this. Carl, for Christ’s sake.”

  “I fucked up,” he repeated.

  “You gonna get better?”