Then We Came to the End

  He was accustomed to the men catching sight of her and staring as she walked past. She was magnetic even in blue jeans and a simple cotton brown sweater, walking with her hands tucked deep into her back pockets. She would remove a hand from time to time to resettle a wind-whipped strand of hair.

  They sat at one of the benches and ate their sandwiches. Once they were finished and he had returned from the trash bin, he said, “I looked the word elitist up in the dictionary. Do you think I’m a dork or what?”

  “You’re a copywriter,” she said. “All copywriters are dorks.”

  “‘Resembling someone with the belief —’ . . . how did it go?” he asked himself.

  “You really looked it up?”

  “‘. . . the belief of being a part of a superior or privileged group —’ . . . something like that. ‘Part of a superior or privileged group’ — I know that’s right.”

  “You really looked it up,” she said. She was turned to him with her legs crossed, one hand holding her hair flat while her elbow rested on her knee. The gold tips of her hair wavered in the wind.

  “Well, first you said you thought they had made me into a cynic,” he said. “But I’m not a cynic, and I can prove it. I came back to your office, remember? Twice. I came back to argue it. I was a skeptic — there’s a big difference between that and a cynic. And the difference,” he said, “was you. If it was just them saying she had cancer, I’d be a cynic, you bet. But because you were saying it, too, I was willing to give it some credit. But you have to admit that most of what they say is bullshit, which I try to avoid. And because I avoid it, people think I’m an elitist. I personally never gave any credence to that, but when you said it, I had to wonder. But your definition didn’t sound right to me — that an elitist was somebody who probably didn’t like other people. That’s a misanthrope,” he said.

  “So you looked it up.”

  “Yes, and I’m happy to report back that I’m not an elitist.”

  “It really bothered you.”

  “It did,” he said.

  “Just to clarify,” she said. “I never said you were an elitist. Just that you sounded like one.”

  “Okay, but listen. I’m not an elitist by the definition I just gave you, either, Genevieve, the dictionary one, because I’m not a part of the group. I refuse to be a part of any group.”

  “Everybody’s a part of a group,” she said.

  “In the group photo, maybe. In the Directory of Services. But not in spirit.”

  “So what does that make you?” she asked. “A loner?”

  “That sounds like somebody wandering at night down a highway.”

  “So you’re not a loner. You’re not an elitist, you’re not a cynic. What’s left, Joe? You’re a saint.”

  “Yes, a saint,” he said. “I’m a saint. No, there is no word for it. Okay, listen,” he said, straightening on the bench and looking away from her. “So I have a story for you.”

  She took the lid off her fountain drink and pulled out an ice cube. She put it in her mouth, fastened the lid back on, and, shivering, resumed holding her hair against the wind.

  “How can you eat that?” he asked. “Aren’t you cold?”

  She rattled the cube around in her mouth. “Tell me your story.”

  He paused, looking down at the pigeons pecking nearby, and at people walking past. There was an art exhibit within the Water Tower and groups of two and three kept passing in and out. “So I started running with this clique in high school,” he began. He had turned away again and wasn’t looking at her while he spoke. “I found myself doing a lot of stupid shit. Going along with the flow, you know. I smoked a lot of pot with people who were . . . Christ, they were all fucked up. Did you know I went to high school in Downers Grove?”

  “I thought you were from Maine,” she said.

  “We lived in Maine until my dad got laid off. Then we moved here. I didn’t want to move. Who wants to move when you’re just about to start high school? Starting over again with new people, it sucked. The first couple of years sucked. But by the time I was a junior I had made some friends. Poor fuckers from bad homes. It was actually a great year. More fun than I’d had as a freshman for sure. So the year goes by, school’s about to let out for the summer, and me and my friends are going to kick the shit out of this kid because he’s been calling up this girl who goes out with a friend of ours. Calling her up to ask her out, and bad-mouthing my friend while he’s at it. Bad-mouthing his parents, too, because these people . . .” He trailed off and shook his head. “This friend of ours, his parents were serious drunks. All I remember is going over to his house and all the dogs everywhere, and bottles of whiskey stacked along one wall in the kitchen. Dog shit just lying around the house and nobody ever picked it up. Anyway, it got back to my friend that his parents were being bad-mouthed, and naturally we decided that this little shit had to get his ass kicked. The shit’s name was Henry. Henry Jenkins. Henry Jenkins of Downers Grove North. He had been a friend of ours for like a month, until he annoyed somebody and we got rid of him. Henry was a scrawny little dude, almost looked stunted, like he never got any bigger than eighth grade, even though he was the same year as us. Anybody could kick the shit out of this kid. Our friend didn’t need our help. But we all agreed that because he bad-mouthed his parents and tried to steal his girl that we needed to get in on it, too.”

  “Boys,” she said.

  “No, I wouldn’t call us boys,” he said, shaking his head. “Some of those guys were already big pituitary dudes. Not boys. And I remember thinking, nobody needs anybody’s help kicking Henry’s ass. Henry could walk past a shoe store and be bruised for weeks. So the day it’s supposed to happen, after school, I have terrible butterflies in my stomach, because I’m nervous — was I really going to do this thing? There are six of us, right, six — and then little scrawny Henry. It’s not my fight. I know I should step away. But even that isn’t enough — that’s just cowardly. What I really need to do is object. To my friends. What, am I crazy, right? They’re my friends. You only have so many friends in high school, and I had gone a long time without any. You don’t object. You do what they do. So when I tell them it isn’t my fight —”

  “So you did object?”

  “Eventually. I said I wouldn’t do it, and even went so far as to say it wasn’t their fight, either. They looked at me like I was worse than Henry, because at least Henry wasn’t a friend. I was a friend. So they tell me, go home then, if that’s how it is with me. Leave, you pussy, go home. But I couldn’t leave. They were my friends. And I was scared for Henry, too, and I figured it would be better for him that I stay in case . . . I don’t know what. If it got out of hand, there’d be somebody to step in and help him. So what do you think I ended up doing? I ended up watching while they held Henry down and took these garden hoses — we’d planned all this out, you know. We had wonderful imaginations. We had stolen some garden hoses from the neighborhood, and my friends wrapped Henry up in them real tight, using them like rope. And when his hands and legs were bound with garden hose — trust me, he couldn’t move. Then they stuffed his mouth with somebody’s shirt so nobody could hear him cry. He was squirming around on the lawn of his backyard, his eyes real big, you know, and everybody was laughing. They stood him up, and then they started kicking him. Kick, and he’d tip over. They’d stand him up again and — kick. He’d fall, but without his arms to catch him. They did that over and over again. Lift him up, kick him, watch him fall down. Lift him up, kick him over. Every time he hit with a thud. He was crying like hell. And I just watched. I couldn’t stop them, but I couldn’t leave, either, in case they wanted to do something like toss rocks on his head, which they debated for a while. But they didn’t do that. Eventually they left him for his parents to find in the backyard — we left him, I mean. I ran away with everybody else. And when the police came to my door and showed my parents the Polaroids of Henry’s bruises, there was no way I could say, Oh, but I wasn’t really a part of th
at, I was just watching, or, I was really there just to protect Henry. Because that was as much of a lie as it was the truth, and for my participation I was sent to juvenile court, and I spent my last year in high school at one miserable fucking place.”

  “You never told me this,” she said.

  “I never tell anybody,” he said. “And not because I’m ashamed. I am ashamed, trust me. But that’s not why I never tell it. It’s over, it’s done, it’s history. I spent a year in hell, and then I went to college. I never joined a fraternity. I didn’t want a thing to do with fraternities. But I’ll tell you what else I never did. I never joined that loose association of counterfraternities, either. That was every bit as much of a club. I never bad-mouthed the frat boys because I knew guys in fraternities and I liked those guys, individually, some of them I liked very well, and if I was ever tempted to bad-mouth them, I could feel it coming over me again. Joining the club, losing control. Losing my convictions. That’s what I’m guilty of, Genevieve. Believing I’m better than the group. No better than anyone individually. Worse, because I stood by and watched Henry get wrapped up in garden hose and kicked over. There is no word for me. Someone better, smarter, more humane than any group. The opposite of an elitist, in a way. But that’s not to say,” he added, “that I’m not good and fucked up. And full of shame.”

  GOOD THING WE NEVER invited Joe Pope to join the agency softball team. Didn’t like groups — well, what did he think he was doing working at an advertising agency? We had news for him. He was one of us whether he liked it or not. He came in at the same time every morning, he was expected at the same meetings, he had the same deadlines as the rest of us. And what an odd profession for him, advertising, where the whole point was to seduce a better portion of the people into buying your product, wearing your brand, driving your car, joining your group. Talk about a guy who just didn’t get it.

  We took it personally, his reluctance to speak on our behalf. That old joke by Groucho Marx had been inverted: he’d never want to belong to a club that would have us as members. Well, if that wasn’t arrogance, if that wasn’t elitism, we didn’t know what was. And what did that attitude leave him with? Probably a very boring existence. He could attend civilized concert recitals though never himself join a quartet. He was allowed to read novels so long as he didn’t participate in any book club. He could walk his dog but his dog was forbidden from entering a dog park where he might be forced to commingle with other pet owners. He didn’t engage in political debate. That would demand he join in. No religion, either, for what was religion but one group seeking a richer dividend than the others? His was a joyless, lonely, principled life. Was it any wonder none of us ever asked him to lunch?

  Well, there was nothing more we could do about it. Although we didn’t know what Genevieve was waiting for, since she had agreed to speak with Lynn without him, if it came to it. Really, we didn’t have much time. But when we pressed her to act, she said she was waiting. We asked her what for? “He’s still debating it,” she replied. We told her to give up. Joe Pope was a lost cause.

  He came in and sat down across the desk from her. “They’re very convincing people,” he said finally. “That’s the whole problem, of course. They can convince you of anything.”

  “Are you convinced?”

  He took a moment to respond. “From the moment I came in here yesterday,” he said, “and said to you, what a screwy assignment — you remember? I was more or less convinced. It’s how convincing they are that gives me pause. Convinced and convincing,” he added. “They’re two different things.”

  She waited, sensing a tip in the scales, not wanting to say anything for fear the least word might carry some counterweight.

  “But then she might actually be sick,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “And then I wouldn’t be doing it for them, would I?”

  “No,” she said.

  “My duty isn’t to them.”

  “Not to them,” she said. “No.”

  He bent forward, closed his eyes, and held his steepled hands at his forehead. He stayed in that position for a long time before looking up again.

  “Well, then,” he said. “No time like the present.”

  2

  PROOF OF LIFE — THE STORY OF TOM MOTA’S CHAIR, PART III — THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN A SOCKET WRENCH AND AN ALLEN WRENCH — ON THE WAY TO THE LAKE — THE IDIOT — MARCIA HAS A PANG OF CONSCIENCE — THREE-FIFTEEN — THE TOY CHEESEBURGER — THE GRANDFATHER CLOCK — AN UNCOMFORTABLE DEVELOPMENT — THE REAL YOPANWOO INDIANS — AN UNINTENTIONAL INSULT — KAREN PASSES BENNY — JOE KEEPS AT IT — GENEVIEVE’S E-MAIL — HOW IT WORKS, HERE AND ELSEWHERE

  FIFTY-NINE WAS A GHOST TOWN. We needed to gather up the payroll staff still occupying a quarter of that floor and find room for them among the rest of us and close down fifty-nine, seal it off like a contamination site. Odds were we were contractually bound to pay rent on that floor through the year, shelling out cash we didn’t have for real estate we didn’t need. But who knows — maybe we were keeping those abandoned cubicles and offices in hopes of a turnaround. It wasn’t always about ledger work at the corporate level. Sometimes, like with real people, it was about faith, hope, and delusion.

  While Genevieve and Joe were debating approaching Lynn Mason about her missed appointment, Jim Jackers went down to fifty-nine to find the inspiration eluding him at his desk. Sometimes it was necessary to physically relocate if nothing was coming. Jim left everything behind, including the blank page that feared him, and went down to fifty-nine just to think. What was funny about cancer? What was funny about it?

  In the anonymous cubicle where he ended up, the carpet was gray and the ceiling was white. The fabric walls were orange, and there was a desk with no chair. One edge of the desk was chipped, or whittled — it almost looked gnawed — revealing the cheap permaboard inside. Otherwise there was nothing else to it — and nothing to do but figure out how cancer was funny. The room hummed with a canny stillness, which should have aided his concentration, but instead distracted him. Maybe it was the sound of the overhead lights. It was as if the blank page had followed him and morphed through a miracle of physics into a pure sound. All fifty-nine was a blank page, separated by cubicle partitions. The floor’s lonesome eeriness surrounded him in its silence and blankness like an all-consuming void, and once he was sucked in, he would lose not only his job, but his mind as well. To distance himself from these bleak thoughts, he started to ruminate on more pleasant matters, like what he would have for lunch. He was pleased to find a Styrofoam coffee cup on the floor under the desk, a cigarette butt curled at the bottom like a dead tequila worm. Proof of life! Nothing funny coming to him, he shook the coffee cup and watched the butt bounce around until that activity brought out stale and unpleasant fumes, which reminded him of Old Brizz. Could it have been, he wondered, Brizz’s own snuffed cigarette? Had one winter day been simply too much for him, so that he snuck down to fifty-nine, where he enjoyed three or four illicit puffs in the climate-controlled comfort of the indoors? Jim thought how grand it would be if the butt was Brizz’s — a memento mori from a moment’s stolen pleasure, perhaps all that was necessary to validate an entire lifetime. But the find also got him thinking again: Brizz had died of cancer. How could anything be funny about dying a miserable death and leaving nothing behind but a cigarette butt? Not proof of life — proof of death. Jim was further afield than ever. Suddenly the silence on fifty-nine felt less like the blank page and more like the silence of catacombs. Each of the empty cubicles was a chamber waiting for its coffin.

  A tinkling sound distracted him. What a great relief. He pricked up his ears. Silence. Enduring silence. Then — clink clink — clink. Clink. “Urfff,” someone said. Thank god — proof of life. He got up and entered the hallway. He looked in both directions, waiting. More silence. Then the dull sound of something heavy hitting carpet — thump. It seemed to come from further down — that honeycomb of cubicles over there, nearest the windows. Then
, the cacophony of many tools being stirred about. That led him the rest of the way. He came to the doorway of a cubicle where he found Chris Yop on his knees taking a wrench to an upended chair.

  When Yop looked up and saw Jim standing in the cubicle doorway, he said nothing. He simply went back to work. “Yop,” said Jim, “what’s that you’re doing down there?” Yop didn’t reply. The base of the chair consisted of six spokes, each of which ordinarily had a wheel attached to its end. The spokes were facing in Jim’s direction, and looked like the dangling legs of an upturned bug. Yop was kneeling at one side of the chair and removing the sixth and final wheel. Done with that, he placed the wheel in with the others. He had with him a large black suitcase — the kind one rolls through airports — which lay next to Reiser’s toolbox in the crowded little workstation. Everyone knew Reiser kept tools in his office, and Yop had evidently borrowed them. He had tucked his tie between the two middle buttons of his dress shirt, so it wouldn’t hang down and interfere. Jim said he looked like a copy-machine technician, but a confused one, operating on a chair. “Whose chair is that, Chris?” Jim asked. Again Yop didn’t reply.

  We got this story from Marcia Dwyer, who heard it from Benny. When Jim first related it to Benny, inside Benny’s office, Benny asked him, “Weren’t you worried about being seen with him, doing what he was doing?” Predictably, Jim said he hadn’t even thought about it. “From the minute I saw him, I knew what he was up to,” he said to Benny, “but I didn’t think I’d get in trouble for it. Besides, it was something to watch. You ever seen a chair get taken apart like that?” At one point, after several minutes of continuous work, Yop stood and took his suit coat off, folding it neatly over a cube wall. Then he unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves and wiped his brow with the backs of his hairy wrists. “How come you’re so dressed up, Chris?” Jim asked him. Again, no reply. Not so much as a glance in Jim’s direction. Strange behavior coming from Chris Yop, who yammered on and on about whatever the fuck. It made standing there awkward for Jim. It occurred to him for the first time that the silence might be deliberate, that Yop was upset with him for some reason.