Then We Came to the End

  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?”

  “Wait a minute, hold on,” said Benny.

  “You don’t want your stuff?” said Roland.

  “Marcia,” said Genevieve.

  “It’s called useless shit, Roland,” said Benny. “And of course she wants it.”

  It was madness to leave without your useless shit. You came in with it, you left with it — that was how it worked. What would you use to clutter a new office with if not your useless shit? We could remember Old Brizz with his box of useless shit, shifting the box from arm to arm as he talked with the building guy. Of course, Old Brizz never had an office again. His useless shit really was useless. He had cause to leave his useless shit behind. But his was a rare case. All things considered, it was better to take your useless shit with you.

  “Marcia, take it with you,” said Benny.

  “I’m happy to drive it over to your house tonight,” said Genevieve.

  “But I don’t want any of it,” said Marcia.

  It was how we knew to feel sorry for them. Before their terminations, we knew them by their tics, their whines, their crap superiorities, and just one day earlier, we thought that if all that were to disappear suddenly, so much the better. Then we saw them carrying a box full of useless shit to the elevator, and they were pitiable and human again.

  But Marcia refused, and after hugs and good-byes walked toward the elevator with Roland, carrying nothing but that denim bag that served as her purse. She probably hadn’t even reached the lobby floor before Jim Jackers began to scavenge the useless shit she had left behind.

  Nobody could believe Benny was just going to let Marcia leave without admitting he had a crush. He had promised himself he would and stupidly spread word of that promise to the rest of us, but every time the timing was right, he had a new excuse. The Monday after Tom’s spree, he was too busy accumulating conflicting versions of events and offering his own to tear himself away. That continued through Tuesday, and on Wednesday he claimed he was too busy working on the new business. On Thursday Joe told us Lynn was in the hospital, and we got wrapped up debating whether or not it was a good idea for us to visit her. But now it was Friday, and suddenly Marcia was leaving forever, and still Benny had said nothing. It was a mystery to us how he could be such a confident and lively raconteur and yet such a bashful lover. Jim came out of Marcia’s office holding the souvenir of the Statue of Liberty Marcia had disparaged on her way out, along with a shot glass and a copy of Vogue.

  “Benny,” he said, “are you really going to let her leave without saying something to her?”

  It happened all the time. Maybe someone had a legitimate gripe that deserved airing. Maybe someone had a compliment that shouldn’t go unspoken. No one said a thing. So long and stay in touch, that’s usually all we said. Take care of yourself, good luck. We said nothing about affection, appreciation, admiration. But neither did we say don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out.

  “She’s coming with us tomorrow to see Lynn, isn’t she?” he asked. “So I’ll see her tomorrow. I’ll say something then. What’s the big deal?”

  But Saturday came and went, we paid our visit, and still he said nothing. The following Monday, Marcia showed up in the building lobby, as if taking a page out of Tom Mota’s book.

  Roland was at the front desk and wouldn’t let her go up, not even as a visitor.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “After the incident, we can’t let former employees back in the building. You’re not even supposed to be in the lobby,” he said.

  She convinced him to call Benny. “Send her up here!” Benny hollered at Roland into the phone. “What’s wrong with you?”

  “I can’t do that, Benny,” Roland said helplessly as Marcia stared at him across the lobby post. “It’s against the new rules.”

  “Well, then tell her to hold on,” Benny replied, standing up. “I’ll come down to her.”

  He fixed up his corkscrew curls in the cloudy brass of the elevator. When he reached the lobby floor he sucked in his gut and stepped out with several others. It was lunchtime. People were coming and going through the revolving doors.

  “Come on, man!” he said as he approached Roland. “Does she look like a threat to you?”

  “It’s the new rules, Benny!”

  “Don’t give him a hard time,” said Marcia. “He’s just doing his job.”

  “What are you doing back here?” Benny asked.

  She had returned, she said, in order to take apart Chris Yop’s chair, that used to be Ernie Kessler’s, so she could toss it piece by piece into the lake.

  “Of course you have,” said Benny. “Let’s go outside and talk.”

  Which is how it came to pass that we saw them conversing outside the building on our way to lunch. We spent that hour speculating on what Marcia was doing back at the office and what the two of them were discussing. Perhaps she liked him. Perhaps Roland, at his post in the lobby, was wondering the same thing, because despite the hard time Benny gave him about keeping Marcia in the lobby according to the new rules, we knew the two men were friends, and that Benny had talked to him just as he talked to the rest of us about his paralyzing and unrequited crush. “So what are you going to do about it, Benny?” he’d ask. “I’m going to tell her,” Benny annou
nced at last, after Tom’s spree. “I promised myself I would and I will.” Maybe, thought Roland, that confession was happening right now, right outside the building. He returned his attention to his small amount of daily paperwork. When he looked up again ten minutes later to see how things were progressing, Benny and Marcia were gone.

  ROLAND HAD APPEARED TO LOOK right at them as they walked past, but they were sheltered within a group of incoming lawyers from the firm below us and eventually he looked away again. They passed by freely, and after stepping off the elevator on sixty, walked together in the direction of Jim’s cubicle.

  Marcia wanted Benny’s reassurance that Jim wasn’t there. Benny explained that he had sent Jim out to pick up sandwiches at the Potbelly, where the line was always atrocious.

  “I’m telling you,” he said. “He won’t be back for hours.”

  “If you tell anybody about this,” said Marcia, with a familiar, scolding, clawing tone. How he loved that tone!

  “I wouldn’t be threatening me right now if I were you,” he said to her. “One call down to Roland and I could have you arrested.”

  They made it down to Jim’s cube and Marcia set the envelope upright between two rows of keys on his keyboard before noticing the souvenir she had purchased during a visit with her family to the Statue of Liberty. “Hey, what’s this doing here?” she asked. Then she noticed that Jim also had her Fighting Illini shot glass, several magazines, and her Scorpio keychain, which listed the attributes of her personality. After his initial pillaging, he’d gone back for more. “What the fuck?” she said.

  “Well,” replied Benny, sheepishly. “You did leave them behind.”

  Jim wasn’t the only one with Marcia’s things. If she had stayed and scoured more workstations, she would have found them divvied up among us and scattered across the office. The only items we left behind were her unused tampons and marketing textbooks. Within two hours of her departure, her boxes had been picked clean. Don Blattner took her radio. Karen Woo swept down on her bookends. Someone of remarkable stealth stole in and took Chris Yop’s chair, which used to be Ernie’s, which Marcia had replaced with Tom Mota’s, which Chris Yop had tossed in the lake. Now someone else had the burden of possessing the wrong serial numbers but the pleasures of an ergonomic masterpiece.

  “I don’t even feel like giving it to him now,” she said, reaching for the envelope.

  “Don’t do that,” said Benny.

  She left the envelope where it was.

  Those of us who didn’t go to lunch that day saw them talking by the elevators. That was most of us, because of the pressing demands of the new business. We wondered the same thing those of us who’d gone to lunch wondered. After Marcia slipped past Roland on her way out — coming off a full elevator, ingeniously disguised as one of us — we all went down to Benny’s office and asked him what they had been talking about. He refused to say. “Never mind,” he said, dismissing us outright. We had to think that could only forebode bad news. Someone as loquacious as Benny Shassburger reduced to “Never mind”? No doubt that meant he had been rejected. We asked him a second time and a third. We came back fifteen minutes later and asked the same question in a different way. We sent him e-mails. “Never mind,” he wrote back. Not wanting to rub it in, we let it drop.

  When he returned to his cube, after dropping Benny’s sandwich off, Jim puzzled over the white envelope on his keyboard. On the cover of the card, a cheap generic Hallmark item made of recycled paper, a hound dog’s fat snout and heavy ears rested on a pair of crisscrossed paws, while his blubbery furry body floated in a background of blue. Above his cocked and woeful head, a cumulus-shaped thought bubble announced, “I feel so blue . . .” And on the inside, “For the way I treated you.” There was no note, no revisiting specific slights. Only her name to inform him who had left it. Marcia. It was scrawled reluctantly. He pinned the card to his cube wall.

  TOM WAS BEING HELD TEMPORARILY in a central holding cell near the city courthouse. At his initial hearing, his bail was set at twenty thousand dollars, which some of us thought was a little much, and others considered much too little. In the end it didn’t matter because no one would post it for him, and he didn’t want to part with any of the little money he had saved from the sale of his Naperville house. Or so he told Joe Pope, who went to visit him. Tom labored under idiosyncratic and stubborn notions, but even he must have known that the court costs, lawyers’ fees, and criminal fines that he’d have to pay for pulling his little stunt were going to tap him dry forever. We had no doubt that his inclination to stick around the jail cell was influenced by the fact that he had been processed on a Friday, and that by posting bail, he’d have nothing but another aimless weekend to muddle his way through, getting drunk and harassing the groundskeepers of his apartment complex, and composing e-mails to people who never wrote him back. So he decided to stick around and have a few hot meals on the state until his arraignment, when he would be charged with five counts of aggravated assault and battery, destruction of private property, and trespassing.

  When we heard Joe Pope went to visit him, we were beside ourselves with disbelief. We were surprised, confused, angry, curious, tickled, and dumbfounded. It took everything in us not to dismiss the rumor as an absurd invention. But no, it was true, Joe himself admitted it before commencing a meeting in the Michigan Room. We were there to discuss details of the caffeinated bottled water, and everyone was fearful of a long night. Comparing conflicting accounts and trying to win the new business at the same time was taking it out of us. It would only prolong things to talk about anything but the work, but we couldn’t help ourselves, and someone asked Joe as he walked in if it was really true. Had he become Tom Mota’s prison wife?

  Joe smiled. He set down his leather day planner and pulled out a seat at the head of the conference room table.

  “No, seriously,” said Benny. “Did you go visit him?”

  “I did.”

  “How come?”

  Joe sat down and scooted in. “I was curious,” he said.

  “Curious about what?”

  Joe looked around the room. We were quiet. “Do you remember what he said to me?” he asked us. “He was standing in the hallway, holding the gun, which I thought was real at the time. And he says, remember what he said? He said, ‘Joe, I came to take you to lunch.’”

  Some of us recalled hearing Tom say that and some of us were hearing it for the first time. What we remembered most clearly was Tom unfurling some lunatic gibberish as he wheeled and aimed and pulled the trigger — crazy talk that announced we were in the hands of a madman.

  “No, after all that,” said Joe. “The last thing he said before Andy tackled him.”

  “I don’t remember him saying he wanted to take you to lunch,” said Larry Novotny.

  “Maybe because at the time, Larry,” said Karen Woo, “you were cowering with Amber in the server closet.”

  According to Joe, Tom said it so calmly and matter-of-factly that it was almost as shocking as finding him there at all. Or rather, it was the juxtaposition between what he said — “I’ve come to take you to lunch” — and what he was doing — dressed as a clown and holding a gun — that was so odd. What did it mean? he wondered. Was it a euphemism? Did Tom actually intend to kill him and that was his clever way of saying it? If so, why did he point the gun at the ground just as he said it? Joe did not yet know it was a paintball gun. When he found that out, it seemed Tom might have legitimately wanted to take him to lunch.

  “Where do you think he wanted to take you?” asked Jim Jackers.

  “The Sherwin-Williams café,” quipped Benny.

  “Jim,” said Karen, shaking her head across the table at him, “where he wanted to take him is not the point.”

  “After he was arrested,” Joe continued, “Carl came to my office and showed me an e-mail Tom had sent him. It said that Tom was stopping by the office that day because he wanted to talk to me. I went to see him because I was curious. What did he want
to talk about?”

  “And what was it?” asked Benny.

  “Ralph Waldo Emerson,” said Joe.

  “Ralph Waldo Emerson?”

  “Is he the guy with the pond?” asked Jim.

  “You’re thinking of Henry David Thoreau,” said Hank.

  “Jim is thinking of the Budweiser frogs,” said Karen.

  We recalled the book Tom had purchased for Carl Garbedian, and what he had said to Benny on the day he was terminated. Tom Mota, ladies and gentlemen — martini addict, gonzo e-mailer, sometime wielder of an aluminum bat, great garden enthusiast, paintball terrorist, and our own in-house Emerson scholar. He had the annoying tic during his time with us of pinning aphorisms to the wall. We liked nothing less than people quoting at us from their corkboards. Hank Neary was the only one who could quote at us with impunity because he rarely made any sense, so we knew the quotation must add up somehow and we marveled at the obscurity. Quotations that tried to instruct us or rehabilitate our ways, like those Tom favored — we didn’t like those quotations. We were especially put off by Tom’s because it seemed a great irony that Tom Mota was trying to reveal to us a better way to live, when just look at the guy! What a fuckup. His quotations were never allowed to stay pinned up for very long. It would take him days to notice and then he would holler out into the hall, in his inimitable and eloquent manner, “Who the fuck’s been stealing my quotes?”

  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.