Benny was uploading a finished ad to the server when Jim walked by. “Jim, get in here. I got news for you.”
Jim came into Benny’s office and sat down.
“I’m uploading,” said Benny.
“That’s your news?”
“Brizz named me a beneficiary in his will. Blattner! Get in here, I got news for you.”
Blattner came in and sat down next to Jim across the desk from Benny.
“Listen to this,” said Benny. “Brizz named me a beneficiary in his will.”
“Get out,” said Blattner. “That’s funny because —”
“Marcia!”
Marcia walked past and then reappeared. She stepped inside the doorway and stood next to Buck, the space cowboy skeleton. “Brizz named Benny a beneficiary in his will,” said Jim, craning his neck so he could see Marcia. She came in and sat down on the barstool.
“That’s funny because it sounds just like this screenplay I’m working on,” said Blattner.
“Genevieve!” said Benny.
Genevieve stopped in the doorway.
“Genevieve,” said Blattner, “remember that screenplay I was telling you about? It happened to Benny in real life.”
“What screenplay?” asked Genevieve.
“Just listen,” said Benny. While his computer uploaded, he told us of receiving a letter from a lawyer on the South Side.
Genevieve had second thoughts. “I’m sorry, Benny, I can’t listen right now,” she said, rattling some revisions in her hand. “I have to get these down to Joe.” She abandoned the doorway.
Hank showed up. “What’s going on?” he asked, adjusting his big black eyeglasses.
“Brizz made Benny a beneficiary in his will,” said Marcia.
“And Blattner stole the idea for a screenplay,” said Jim.
“No,” said Blattner. “No, that’s not —”
“Wait until I tell you what he left me,” said Benny.
“Why should he leave you anything?” asked Karen Woo, who had walked in with Hank. “You benefited financially from his death.”
“Karen,” said Benny, for the thousandth time. “Those are the rules of Celebrity Death Watch. What was I supposed to do?”
Benny arrived at a storefront law office on Cicero Avenue for the reading of the will. Brizz’s brother was the only other person in attendance. Benny and Bizarro Brizz recognized each other from the funeral. After handshakes and offers of coffee, the lawyer took a seat behind his big cherrywood desk. “Frank’s will,” said the lawyer, lifting an envelope. He removed the letter and looked down through his bifocals. Then he looked up and explained that the benefactor had written a few preliminary words.
Life had been very good to him, the letter explained. He had been blessed with loving parents, and growing up he had had a wonderful companion in his younger brother, whom he had loved, even if they had drifted a little once they reached adulthood. He had loved his wife, who had given him a delightful seventeen years. The thing he loved about life the most, Brizz had written, was the day-to-day living of it — the Chicago Sun-Times arriving on his front porch in the morning, a hot cup of black coffee and a good cigarette, and being alone in his warm house in winter.
“Brizz was married?” said Marcia.
“Is that the meaning of life?” asked Hank. “Coffee, a newspaper, and a cigarette?”
“And a warm house in winter,” said Blattner. “A Warm House in Winter — god, that’s a good title. Benny, toss me that pen.”
“Just listen,” said Benny. “It gets even better.”
The lawyer began. “‘I, Francis Brizzolera, a resident of Chicago, Illinois, being of sound mind and memory . . .’” The lawyer skipped down silently. “‘To my brother, Philip Brizzolera, I will and bequeath the following property: all my financial holdings present upon my death — including any stocks, bonds, mutual funds, savings and checking accounts, and all contents of my safety deposit box. I also leave to my brother Phil my car —’”
“Let me tell you,” Benny said to us, “how relieved I was to hear that Brizz hadn’t left me his car with all that crap in it.”
“‘— and my house,’” continued the lawyer, “‘along with all of its contents, except that which I bequeath to Benjamin Shassburger.’”
Benny’s computer made a noise indicating his uploading was complete. It was probably time for us to get back to work. We were six months into layoffs at that point, with no end in sight.
“‘To Benny Shassburger,’” said the lawyer, “‘I will and bequeath my totem pole.’”
Benny said he shifted forward in his chair. He leaned an ear into the lawyer. “I’m sorry,” he said. “His what?”
The lawyer looked down again through his bifocals at the will. “It says here totem pole,” he said.
In the backyard of Brizz’s house, a single-family dwelling on the South Side to which Phil had to get both keys and directions from the lawyer, stood an enormous totem pole, roughly twenty-five feet tall. The two men walked around it in silence. All manner of heads had been carved into it — eagles’ heads, scary heads, heads of hybrid creatures. Some heads had pointy ears, some had long snouts. It was intricately carved and painted myriad bright colors. It had been driven into the ground so firmly that when Benny gave it a push — it was his now, after all — he felt no give whatsoever. Benny told us that as a kid, he and his father had participated in the YMCA’s Indian Guides, which he described as the Jew’s alternative to the Boy Scouts. His name was Shooting Star; his father’s name was Shining Star. He was a very dedicated collector of all things Indian back then, including cheap, poorly carved totem poles, which, over time, lost their attraction. But the one he had just inherited, with its rich scarlet luster and deep browns, contained an authentic and magical power that left him in awe. Because of its size and complicated carvings, but also because it was standing in a backyard in an old Irish neighborhood among the telephone wires, the lawn chairs and bird feeders, even a trampoline in the yard across the way. Some little girl had bounced up and down, up and down as Brizz’s totem pole stood impervious and resolute. Men in white tank tops had gone back and forth, back and forth with their lawn mowers, while that mute and primitive object refused to vacate the corners of their eyes. It could be glimpsed between houses driving down the street. Boys probably stopped to stare at it from their bicycles. Neighbors had to pull their barking dogs away. And all the while, the man inside, warm at his kitchen table reading the newspaper with a cigarette burning in a nearby ashtray, was content to know that in the backyard he had staked into the ground the relic, the symbol, the manifestation of his — what?
“What was Brizz doing with a totem pole?” asked Marcia.
“This is nothing like my screenplay, by the way,” Don Blattner announced to the room.
“Come on, Benny,” said Jim. He had his geisha-sized feet up on Benny’s desk in a shiny new pair of Nikes. “A totem pole?”
“There it was before me,” said Benny, standing suddenly and gesturing as if before some wild spectacle, a full moon or an alien. “And there was no denying it. So I asked Phil, I said, ‘Do you know, was your brother an Indian enthusiast?’ ‘Not that I ever knew of,’ Phil said. ‘Then did your family maybe have some Indian blood in it?’ I asked him. He had his arms akimbo, like this,” said Benny, demonstrating, “and he was staring up at the totem pole like this, just staring up at it, and without turning to me he just shook his head slowly, like this, and said, ‘Brizzolera. We’re one hundred percent Italian.’”
Benny followed Bizarro Brizz inside. The kitchen counters were cluttered with various plates and bowls and serving containers, as if on display at a secondhand shop. More cutlery than a single man could use in six months sat in a clean pile on top of a dish towel. Brizz had two toasters lined up back to back, next to a toaster oven. The kitchen walls had been yellowed by cigarette smoke and the linoleum curled up at the edges of the floor. Curiously, in the surfeit of garage-sale-like clutter tha
t defined not just the room they were in but all the rooms, Brizz had only one chair at the kitchen table.
Benny watched Phil open drawers full of utensils, hot mitts, pan lids. “We did more than just drift apart a little,” explained Phil, “or however it was he phrased it. I’d call him every couple of months, you know, but if not for that, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have spoken at all. Not out of malice, just . . . him. Who he was.”
“That’s so strange,” said Benny, “because he was really one of the most pleasant guys to work with.”
“Oh, he was a sweet guy, my brother, you get no argument from me. But he sure was aloof. Hey, tell me about that,” said Phil. “What was it like working with Frank?”
Benny gave the question some thought: what was it like to work with Brizz? “Like I said, he was always just really pleasant,” said Benny. “He wasn’t one of those people you work with and they’re always creating friction, you know?”
That, he thought, was one lame answer to Phil’s question. He wanted to come up with a good story about Brizz that would give him a real sense of his departed brother at work, something he’d done that made us say, That’s good old Brizz for you, which would sink in and become part of Phil’s memory. But Benny couldn’t think of anything.
“What should I have told the man?” Benny asked us, long after his uploading was complete, and all we could agree on was the sight of Brizz smoking outside the building in winter in nothing to keep him warm but his sweater vest. That was a story Brizz owned, but was it a story? Or we might have told him about the talk with the building guy, but that wasn’t much of a story either. To be honest, what we remembered most about Brizz was his participation, along with the rest of us, in the mundane protocols of making a deadline — Brizz’s nicotine stink in a conference call listening to a client’s change in directions, Brizz sitting behind his desk with his reading glasses, carefully and methodically proofreading copy before an ad went to print. Hard to build an anecdote out of that. Good god, why had nobody stopped him? Why had we never, not one of us, stopped, turned around, and said, Knock knock. Sorry to interrupt you when you’re proofreading, Brizz. Why had we not gone in, sat down? Yeah, you smoke Old Golds, you keep a messy car — but what else, Brizz, what else? Would closing the door help? What fucked you up as a kid and what woman changed your life and what is the thing you will never forgive yourself for? What, man, what? Please! We walked past. Brizz never looked up. How many times did we end up down at our own offices, doing pretty much the same thing, preparing for some deadline now come and gone, while Brizz lived and breathed with all the answers a hundred feet down the hall?
“He ate two baloney sandwiches for lunch almost every day,” Benny said to Phil. “That’s what I remember about your brother the most.”
Genevieve reappeared in the doorway after having handed off her revisions to Joe.
“What’d I miss?” she asked.
SOME OF US WENT out for lunch to a new place every day and made lunch an event. Others, like Old Brizz, stayed in and had the same thing, day after day. Sometimes it was to save money. Other times it was to avoid the company of people who, from nine to noon and from one to six, we had to give ourselves over to unconditionally. For an hour in between, time reverted back to us, and sometimes we took advantage of that hour by closing our doors and eating alone.
Carl Garbedian shut his door every day and ate a Styrofoam clamshell of penne alla vodka from the Italian joint a block away and never went out to lunch with us unless it was a free team event. The free team event was a thing of the past, and so it had been months since we’d last seen Carl sliding into a booth, opening a menu, and considering his options.
Six months before being sacked, Tom Mota knocked on Carl’s door. This was only a few days or so after Benny told us the story of Carl undressing in his car. Tom apologized to Carl for interrupting his lunch and asked if he had a minute. Carl invited him in and Tom took a seat. “So I heard from Benny some things about how you were feeling lately,” Tom began, “that when I heard them, I found I could relate, so I bought you something.” Tom handed Carl a book across the desk. “Don’t be mad at Benny, you know how he likes to talk. And that,” he added, indicating the book, “that’s nothing. That’s just something everybody should have on their shelves. Do you know this guy at all?” he asked.
Gazing down upon the book — the complete essays and poems of Ralph Waldo Emerson — Carl shook his head.
“Nobody does anymore,” said Tom. “But everybody should. And I know that sounds like a bunch of pretentious bullshit, but it’s bullshit I believe in.”
Carl inspected the book and then looked up at Tom as if he needed an explanation of how to use the thing.
“And I know it’s maybe a little funny, me buying you a book,” Tom continued. “We don’t buy each other books around here. But I was listening to Benny and he said you weren’t feeling yourself lately, and when I asked him why and he tried to explain, I thought that what might help you was a little guidance from this guy here.”
“Thanks, Tom,” said Carl.
Tom shook his head dismissively. “Please don’t thank me, it’s a six-dollar book. Odds are you won’t even read it. It’ll sit on your bookshelf and every once in a while you’ll come across it and think, now why’d that fuck ever buy me this book for? I know what it’s like to get a random book,” he said, “trust me, but listen — let me read you a few things so you see better where I’m coming from maybe. Can I do that?”
“If you’d like,” said Carl. He handed the book back to him.
Tom paused. “Unless maybe you’d rather me just leave you to your lunch,” he said.
Carl removed the napkin from his lap and wiped his hands. “It’s fine if you want to read some of it, Tom,” he said.
So Tom opened the book. “It might help, I don’t know,” he said. He thumbed nervously through the pages for the passage he wanted. It was probably a fraught moment for both men, a self-conscious and brittle silence as Tom prepared to read. When he finally located the passage he wanted, he began quoting but immediately cut himself off again. “And listen,” he qualified himself, thrusting forward in his chair with abrupt eagerness, “I know it’s maybe a little funny, here’s me talking to you about how you can improve your life with this book and look at me, I’m a total fuckup. This last year has been . . . let’s just say I see the error of my ways. But what it is with me, it’s funny. I see the error of my ways, but I can’t seem to get my head out of my ass, basically, is the basic fact of my life since my wife left me. So, please, forgive the hypocrisy of the unconverted sitting here preaching to you, but I do find that when I read Emerson, at the very least it calms me down.”
“Tom,” said Carl, “I appreciate the gesture.”
Tom waved him off. “‘Let a man then know his worth,’” he read, “‘and keep things under his feet.’” Tom reading out loud to Carl — the self-consciousness in that room must have been palpable. “‘Let him not peep or steal, or skulk up or down with the air of a charity-boy, a bastard, or an interloper, in the world which exists for him. But the man in the street, finding no worth in himself . . .’ I’m just going to skip down a little ways here,” said Tom. “Okay, this is the part. ‘That popular fable of the sot,’” he continued, “‘who was picked up dead drunk in the street, carried to the duke’s house, washed and dressed and laid in the duke’s bed, and, on his waking, treated with all obsequious ceremony like the duke, and assured that he had been insane, owes its popularity to the fact, that it symbolizes so well the state of man, who is in the world a sort of sot, but now and then wakes up, exercises his reason, and finds himself a true prince.’” Tom ended his quotation there and shut the book.
“Well,” he said. “Anyway. I think he has a lot of good things to say. ‘Finds himself a true prince.’ That’s hard to keep in mind here, you know? But he tries to remind us, Carl, you and me both — everybody, really — that underneath it all, if we exercise our reason, we’
re princes. I know I lose sight of that myself half the time when all I want to do is open fire on these bastards. You see, the problem with reading this guy,” he continued, “is the same problem you have reading Walt Whitman. You read him at all? Those two fucks wouldn’t have lasted two minutes in this place. Somehow they were exempt from office life. It was a different time, back then. And they were geniuses. But when I read them I start to wonder why I have to be here. It almost makes it harder to come in, be honest with you.” Tom handed the book back across the desk. He added with a huffy, defeated chuckle, “That’s a ringing endorsement, huh? Anyway, I’ll let you get back to your lunch.”
When Tom had nearly reached the door, Carl called out to him. “Can I tell you something in confidence, Tom?” he asked. Carl gestured for Tom to return to the chair.
Tom sat, and Carl looked at him for a long time before speaking. Earlier in the week, he confided, he had slipped quietly into Janine Gorjanc’s office after everyone else had gone home for the night and taken a bottle of antidepressants from her desk drawer. Since that time, he told Tom, he had been taking a pill a day.
“Is that wise?” Tom asked.
“Probably not,” said Carl. “But the last thing I want is for her to know that I’m depressed.”
“You don’t want Janine to know that you’re depressed?”
“No, not Janine. My wife. Marilynn. I don’t want Marilynn to know I’m depressed.”
“Oh,” said Tom. “Why’s that?”
“Because she thinks I’m depressed.”
“Oh,” said Tom. “You aren’t depressed?”
“No, I am depressed. It’s just that I don’t want her knowing that I’m depressed. She knows I’m depressed. I just don’t want her knowing that she’s right that I’m depressed. She’s right too much of the time as it is, you see.”
“So this is a matter of pride,” said Tom.
Carl shrugged. “I guess so. If that’s how you care to phrase it.”
Tom shifted in his chair. “Well, you know, Carl, I understand that, man. I can understand that perfectly well, being married for a number of years to a woman who was always goddamn right about everything herself. But man, if you’re taking a drug that hasn’t been prescribed for you specifically —”