Then We Came to the End (4 page)

We told Yop he meant to say
bookshelves.

“What’d I say?” he asked us.

We told him he was saying
buck
shelves.

“Buckshelves?”

Right — at first it was
book
shelves, but then he started saying
buck
shelves.

“Listen, don’t pay any attention to me,” he said. “That’s just me getting my words wrong. The point is, take the bookshelves. Just leave me my chair. It’s my chair. ‘But are they
yours?
’ she asks me. It’s a moral question for this woman, whose they are. So I say, ‘Yeah, they’re mine, but you take them, okay. I don’t want them anymore.’ I don’t want them anymore? Who wouldn’t want those bookshelves? But I don’t want to lose my chair — my
legitimate
chair, so I say, ‘Go ahead, take ’em.’”

We didn’t want to interrupt him again, but we felt the need to remind him that it was her job, as the office coordinator, to keep track of office furniture and the like.

Yop ignored us. “What is that she has on her wrist?” he asked.

Yop was asking about the office coordinator’s tattoo. It was of a scorpion whose tail wrapped around her left wrist.

“Now why would a woman do that to herself?” he asked. “And why would we hire a woman who would do that to herself?”

It was a good question. We assumed he knew the joke.

“What’s the joke?” he asked.

The scorpion was there to protect her ring finger.

“Let me tell you something,” he said. “That’s funny, but that ring finger doesn’t need any protecting. But okay, whatever — she’s just doing her job. How we
ever
hired a person with a scorpion on her wrist is
far
beyond me, but okay, she’s doing her job. But that’s my legitimate chair. It’s
my
chair. She takes my chair, that’s not her mandate. So she says to me, she says, ‘Why would you offer me your buckshelves if, as you say, they’re really your buckshelves? I don’t want them if they’re yours,’ she says, ‘I only want them if they’re Tom’s. All of Tom’s stuff has disappeared and it’s my job to get it back.’ So I say, trying to act all innocent and unknowing, I say, ‘What all did they take?’ And she says, ‘Well, let’s see. His desk,’ she says. ‘His chair, his buckshelves, his —’”

We apologized for interrupting, but he was doing it again.

“What’s that?” he asked.

Saying
buck
shelves.

Yop raised his arms in the air. He was wearing a ratty Hawaiian shirt — the hair on his arms was going gray. “Will you
listen
to me, please?” he cried. “Will you all just please hear what I’m trying to say? I’m trying to tell you something really important here.
They know everything!
They knew everything we’d taken! So what choice did I have? ‘You can have the buckshelves, okay?’ I say to her.
Just don’t take my chair.
‘But are they
Tom’s?
’ she asks me.
That’s
what’s important to her. She wants to know, ‘Did you take these buckshelves from Tom’s office?’ And that’s when it hits me. I’m going to get shitcanned just because I took Tom’s buckshelves.”

Book
shelves! we cried out.

“Right!” he cried back. “And for something as simple as that I’m going to get shitcanned! Hey, I have a mortgage. I have a wife. I’m a fucking professional. I get shitcanned this late in my career, that’s it for me. It’s a young man’s game. I’m too old. Who’s going to hire me if I get shitcanned? I see no alternative but to come clean, so I say to her, ‘Okay, listen. These buckshelves, right? I’ll get them back down to Tom’s office. I promise. I’m sorry.’ And she says, ‘But you’re not answering my question.
Are
they his?
Did
you take them?’ So you
know
what I’m thinking at this point. I’ve tried to be somewhat honest with her. I’ve tried to tap into something human and feeling in her. But it’s not working. She ain’t nothin’ but a bureaucrat. So what I say is, I say, ‘All I know is, they were here when I came back from lunch.’ And she says, she looks at her watch, she says, ‘It’s ten-fifteen.’ And I say, ‘Yeah?’ ‘Ten-fifteen in the morning,’ she says. ‘You took lunch at, what? Nine-thirty?’ Then she points at the buckshelves and she says, ‘And I guess all these bucks just appeared when you came back from lunch, too, huh? Your nine-thirty lunch?’ And I don’t say anything, and she says, ‘And what about the nice chair you’re sitting on? That suddenly appear out of nowhere, too?’ And I don’t say anything, and she says, ‘I’ll be back after I’ve had a chance to crosscheck your serial numbers. I would suggest that if those are Tom’s buckshelves you have them back in his office pronto. And the same goes for anything else that belongs to Tom.’ And that’s when I say to her, ‘Hey, hold the fuck up, missy. What do you mean,
belongs
to Tom? Nothing belongs to Tom. Tom just worked here. Nothing
ever
belonged to Tom. Nothing belongs to
anyone
here, because they can take it away from you like
that.
’” Yop snapped his fingers. “Listen to how she responds,” he said. “‘Uh, sorry, no,’ she says. ‘I’m afraid all of this belongs to me.’”

Yop threw out his hands in supplication and his eyes bulged out. He expected us to be outraged that the office coordinator would say a thing like that, but the truth was, it didn’t surprise us at all. In a way, it did belong to her. She wasn’t going to be laid off. Everyone needs an office coordinator.

“Oh, I was so fucking irate,” he said. “
Nothing
gets me more than the petty-minded people around here who have just
this
much power, and then they wield it and they wield it until they have TOTAL control over you. And now she’s going to check her serial numbers and find out that I have Ernie Kessler’s old chair.”

Wait a minute. It wasn’t his chair?

“From when he retired,” Yop said, in a calmer voice. “Last year.”

We couldn’t believe it wasn’t his chair.

“It is now. It
was
Ernie’s chair. From when he retired.”

We felt deceived. He had given us the impression that at the very least it was his chair.

“It
is
my chair,” he said. “He rolled it down to me. Ernie did. I asked him for it and he rolled it down to me and he rolled my chair away and put it in his office. When he retired. We just swapped chairs. We didn’t know about the serial numbers. Now that I know about the serial numbers, I’m thinking, That’s it for me. This office coordinator, she’s going to tell Lynn I took Tom’s buckshelves — and that I took Ernie Kessler’s chair, too, even though he gave it to me. So what choice do I have? If I want to keep my job I have to pretend it
is
Tom’s chair and roll it down to his office! It’s not his chair — somebody else has Tom’s chair — but last week, that’s exactly what I did. I rolled Ernie Kessler’s chair down to Tom Mota’s office after everyone had gone home. I had to pretend it was Tom’s chair, and for a week now I’ve gone on pretending, while I’ve had to sit on this other chair, this little piece-of-crap chair, just so I can avoid getting shitcanned. That was my
legitimate
chair,” he said, his fists quivering in anguish before him.

We didn’t blame him for being upset. His chair was a wonderful chair — adjustable, with webbed seating, giving just a little when you first sat down.

THE AUSTERITY MEASURES BEGAN
in the lobby, with the flowers and bowls of candy. Benny liked to smell the flowers. “I miss the nice flowers,” he said. Then we got an officewide memo taking away our summer days. “I miss my summer days even more than the flowers,” he remarked. At an all-agency meeting the following month, they announced a hiring freeze. Next thing we knew, no one was receiving a bonus. “I couldn’t give a damn about summer days,” he said, “but my bonus now, too?” Finally, layoffs began. “Flowers, summer days, bonuses — fine by me,” said Benny. “Just leave me my job.”

At first we called it what you would expect — getting laid off, being let go. Then we got creative. We said he’d gotten the ax, she’d been sacked, they’d all been shitcanned. Lately, a new phrase had appeared and really taken off. “Walking Spanish down the hall.” Somebody had picked it up from a Tom Waits song, but it was an old, old expression, as we learned from our
Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins.
“In the days of piracy on the Spanish Main,” Morris writes, “a favorite trick of pirates was to lift their captives by the scruff of the neck and make them walk with their toes barely touching the deck.” That sounded about right to us. In the song, Tom Waits sings about walking toward an execution, and that sounded right, too. We’d watch the singled-out walk the long carpeted hallway with the office coordinator leading the way, and then he or she would disappear behind Lynn Mason’s door, and a few minutes later we’d see the lights dim from the voltage drop and we’d hear the electricity sizzle and the smell of cooked flesh would waft out into the insulated spaces.

We would turn at our desks and watch the planes descend into O’Hare. We would put our headphones on. We would lean our heads back and close our eyes. We all had the same thought:
thank god it wasn’t me.

Jim knocked at Benny’s doorway. “You seen Sanderson around lately, Benny?”

“Who?”

“Sanderson. Will Sanderson.”

Benny still didn’t know who Jim was talking about.

“Come on, Benny. Sanderson. With the mustache.”

“Oh, right,” said Benny. “Bill Sanderson? I thought his name was Bill.”

“His name is Will,” said Jim.

“I haven’t seen that guy around for . . . weeks.”

“Weeks? You don’t think . . .”

They were quiet.

“Sanderson,” said Benny. “Man oh man,” he said. “They got Will Sanderson.”

A FUN THING TO DO
to let off steam after layoffs began was to go into someone’s office and send an e-mail from their computer addressed to the entire agency. It might say something simple like “My name is Shaw-NEE! You are captured, Ha! I poopie I poopie I poopie.” People came in in the morning and read that and the reactions were so varied.

Jim Jackers read it and immediately sent out an e-mail that read, “Obviously someone came into my office last night and composed an e-mail in my name and sent it out to everyone. I apologize for any inconvenience or offense, although it wasn’t my fault, and I would appreciate from whoever did this a public apology. I have read that e-mail five times now and I still don’t even understand it.”

We knew who did it. There was never an apology. Jim knew who did it because he was one of us, and Jim confronted Tom Mota about it. This was some months before Tom walked Spanish. What do you think Tom did? Tom told Benny about the encounter at lunch, about how Jim’s fury was off the charts, and how Tom egged Smalls on to hit him. “Smalls” was Tom’s nickname for Jim, though both men were about the same height. “Come on, Smalls, you little fucker,
please
hit me,” Tom told Benny he told Jim, and how funny it all was. We were only into our third month of layoffs then. Jim never left the office again without closing out of his e-mail program.

Tom’s e-mails were not always antic provocations — sometimes they were earnest and came from his own computer. We were amused by his sincere tone and his talk of man’s infinite worthiness. These heartfelt, long-winded missives, of sentiment wildly clashing with Tom’s real-life behavior, were laughably inappropriate, schizophrenic in tone and content, and always welcome respites in an otherwise ordinary day. He was written up for their profanities and for composing them on company time, because he had the balls to send them not only to all of us, including Lynn Mason, but to the other partners as well — always organizing the send-to list according to seniority, an unspoken rule. He also cc’d the accounts people, the media buyers, project services, human resources, the support staff, and the barista manning the coffee bar. “I passed a bad night last night,” his final e-mail in this vein began. The subject line read, “I Consign You and Your Golf Shoes to Lower Wacker Drive.” “The tomatoes in my garden are not coming out,” he continued. “Maybe because I only have the weekend to work the garden, or maybe because the garden keeps getting mowed over by the goddamn Hispanics who tend to the grounds of the apartment complex I’ve been living in since the state forced me to sell my house in Naperville and Barbara took the kids to Phoenix to live with Pilot Bob. Do I have an actual garden? The answer to that is a big fat no, because the goddamn woman in the property office won’t listen to reason. She keeps insisting that this is a
rental
property,
not
your backyard. Flower borders, that’s all we want, she says. So the goddamn Hispanics go out and tend the marigolds along the borders. But do you understand, I’m talking about fat, ripe, juicy, delicious red tomatoes that I want to grow with my own two hands through the bountiful mystery and generosity of nature! That dream ended when Barb started sleeping with Pilot Bob and we gave up Naperville. Anyway, would I like a garden? YES. Matter of fact I would like a farm. But at the present moment I’m afraid all I have is apartment 4H at Bell Harbor Manor, which is neither a harbor nor a manor and contains NOT ONE SINGLE BELL. Which one of you wit-wizards came up with the name ‘Bell Harbor Manor’? May your clever tongues be ripped from their cushy red linings and left to dry on pikes under the native sun of a cannibal land. Ha! I will be called into the office for that one but I’m leaving it, because what I’m trying to get at here is that I’M NOT SURE ANY OF US KNOWS just how far we have removed ourselves not only from nature but from the natural conditions of life that have prevailed for centuries and have forced men to the extreme limits of their physical capacity in order simply to feed, clothe and otherwise provide for their families, sending them every night to a sweet, exhausted, restorative, unstirred, deserved sleep such as we will never know again. Now there’s Phoenix, and airplanes to get you there, and Pilot Bob who can take care of EVERYTHING, though he probably doesn’t even know how to mow his own lawn. But don’t forget, Bob, and all you Bobs out there, that ‘Manual labor is the study of the external world.’ I believe that to be true. Now, the question you’re all probably asking yourselves is, what is he doing then, Tom Mota? Why is Tom wasting his days in a carpeted office trying to hide the coffee stain on his khakis? How is he any better than Pilot Bob? Unfortunately, I don’t think I am any better. I’m not studying the external world. What I’m doing is trying to generate a buck for a client so as to generate a quarter for us so that I can generate a nickel for me and have a penny left over after Barbara gets what the court demands. For that reason I love my job and never want to lose it, so I hope no one reading this finds me smug or ungrateful. I’m only trying to suggest that as we find ourselves in this particularly unfortunate, misconstrued, ungodly juncture of civilization, let’s not lose sight of the nobler manifestations of man and of the greater half of his character, which consists not of taglines and bottom lines but of love, heroism, reciprocity, ecstasy, kindness and truth. What a bloated bunch of horseshit, you will say. And good for you. I welcome you to shoot me up close in the head. Peace, Tom.”