Then We Came to the End

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LAYOFFS — TOM’S FINAL HOUR — JANINE GORJANC’S TRAGEDY — THE DOWNTURN — DRASTIC MEASURES — THE DEBATE OVER TOM — CREEPY PICTURES — THE STORY OF TOM MOTA’S CHAIR — WALKING SPANISH DOWN THE HALL — SANDERSON — TWO E-MAILS — THE STORY OF TOM MOTA’S CHAIR, PART II — THE PRO BONO FUND-RAISER ADS — LASTIVE ACID — LYNN MASON

LAYOFFS WERE UPON US. They had been rumored for months, but now it was official. If you were lucky, you could sue. If you were black, aged, female, Catholic, Jewish, gay, obese, or physically handicapped, at least you had grounds. At one point or another we have all been deposed. We plan on being deposed for Tom’s suit — we have no doubt there will be one. Though he has no grounds unless asshole has been added to the list. And that’s not just us talking. His ex-wife hates the guy. Restraining order. He can’t see his two young kids without supervision. She moved to Phoenix just to get away from him. We wouldn’t call him an asshole without having reached a very high consensus. Amber Ludwig objects to the specific designation because she has objected to profanity since becoming pregnant, but really there is no other word, and her objection is really just an abstention.

When Tom found out he was being let go, he wanted to throw his computer against his office window. Benny Shassburger was in there with him. Benny wasn’t like a great friend of Tom’s or anything but he was the guy who on occasion would have lunch with Tom and then report back to the rest of us. Word spread fast that Tom had been laid off and naturally Benny was the guy to go down there. He said Tom was pacing in his office like a man recently jailed. He said he could picture what Tom had looked like the night he went to the Naperville house with the aluminum bat and the authorities were called to restrain him. We had never heard that story before. Right there and then we had to stop Benny from telling us the story of Tom’s final hour so he could first tell us the story of the aluminum bat. Benny was shocked we had never heard that story; he was sure we had. No, we never had. “Get out of here,” he said. “You’ve heard that story.” No, we hadn’t. This was always how these conversations went. So Benny told us the story of Tom and the bat and then he told us the story of Tom’s final hour. Both were good stories and together they killed a good hour. Some of us loved killing an hour of the company’s time and others felt guilty for it afterward. But whatever your personal feelings on the matter, you still had to account for the hour, so you billed it to a client. By the end of the fiscal year, our clients had paid us a substantial amount of money to sit around and bullshit, expenses they then passed on to you, the consumer. It was the cost of doing business, but some of us feared it was an indication that the end was near, like the profligacy that preceded the downfall of the Roman Empire. There was so much money involved, and some of it even trickled down to us, a small amount that allowed us to live among the top one-percent of the wealthiest in the world. It was lasting fun, until layoffs came.

Tom wanted to throw his computer against the window, but only if he could guarantee it would break the glass and land on the street below. He was under his desk removing cords. “That’s sixty-two stories, Tom,” Benny said. And Tom agreed it was a bad idea if he couldn’t break the glass. If glass didn’t break they would say Tom Mota couldn’t even fuck up right — he didn’t want to give them the satisfaction of that, the bastards. We were the bastards he was referring to, in part. “But I don’t think it’ll break the glass,” said Benny. Tom stopped tooling around with his computer. “But I gotta do something,” he said, sitting back on his heels.

We lacked that kind of urgency. Our building was on the Magnificent Mile, in downtown Chicago, on a corner a few blocks from Lake Michigan. It had tones of art deco and two gilded revolving doors. We shuffled up the stairs toward the revolving doors slowly, afraid of what awaited us inside. In the beginning, we were let go in large numbers. Then, as the practice was refined, one by one, as they saw fit. We feared ending up on Lower Wacker Drive. Unemployed, we would be unpaid; unpaid, we’d be evicted from our homes; evicted, we would end up on Lower Wacker, sharing space with shopping carts and developing our own winterized and blackened feet. Instead of scrabbling for the addition of “Senior” to our current titles, we would search the alleyways for smokable butts. It was fun, imagining our eventual despair. It was also despairing. We didn’t really believe we would be honked at from the Lexuses of our former colleagues as they drove down Lower Wacker on their way home to the suburbs. We didn’t think we would be forced to wave at them from our lit oil drums. But that we might have to fill out an unemployment form over the Internet was not out of the question. That we might struggle to make rent or a mortgage payment was a real and frightening prospect.

Yet we were still alive, we had to remember that. The sun still shone in as we sat at our desks. Certain days it was enough just to look out at the clouds and at the tops of buildings. We were buoyed by it, momentarily. It made us “happy.” We could even turn uncommonly kind. Take, for instance, the time we smuggled Old Golds into Frank Brizzolera’s hospital room. Or when we attended the funeral of Janine Gorjanc’s little girl, found strangled in an empty lot. It was hard for us to believe something like that could happen to someone we knew. You have never seen someone weep until you have witnessed a mother at the funeral of her murdered child. The girl was nine years old. She was removed at night from an open window. It was all over the papers. First she was missing. Then her body was found. To watch Janine at the funeral, surrounded by pictures of Jessica, her family trying to hold her up — even Tom Mota’s heart broke. We were outside the funeral home afterward, in the parking lot speaking somberly to one another, when Tom began to beat on his ’94 Miata. It didn’t take long before everyone noticed him. He hit the windows with his fists and let out terrible cries of “Fuck!” He kicked the doors and the tires. Finally he collapsed near the trunk, wracked with sobs. It was not unreasonable behavior given the circumstances, but we were a little surprised that Tom appeared the most affected. He was sprawled out on the funeral home parking lot in his suit and tie, sobbing like a child. A few people went over to comfort him. We assumed in part his behavior had something to do with his ex-wife taking his kids to Phoenix. One thing we knew for certain — despite all our certainties, it was very difficult to guess what one individual was thinking at any given moment.

We believed that downturns had been rendered obsolete by the ingenious technology of the new economy. We thought ourselves immune from things like plant closings in Iowa and Nebraska, where remote Americans struggled against falling-in roofs and credit card debt. We watched these blue-collar workers being interviewed on TV. For the length of the segment, it was impossible not to feel the sadness and anxiety they must have felt for themselves and their families. But soon we moved on to weather and sports and by the time we thought about them again, it was a different plant in a different city, and the state was offering dislocated worker programs, readjustment and retraining services, and skills workshops. They’d be fine. Thank god we didn’t have to worry about a misfortune like that. We were corporate citizens, buttressed by advanced degrees and padded by corporate fat. We were above the fickle market forces of overproduction and mismanaged inventory.

What we didn’t consider was that in a downturn, we were the mismanaged inventory, and we were about to be dumped like a glut of imported circuit boards. On the drive home we puzzled over who was next. Scott McMichaels was next. His wife had just had a baby. Sharon Turner was next. She and her husband had just purchased a house. Names — just names to anyone else, but to us they were the individuals who generated our greatest sympathy. The ones who put their things in a box, shook a few hands, and left without complaint. They had no choice in the matter, and they possessed a quiet resignation to their ill-timed fates. As they departed, it almost felt to us like self-sacrifice. They left, so that we might stay. And stay we did, though our hearts went out to them. Then there was Tom Mota, who wanted to throw his computer against the window.

He wore a goatee and was built like a bulldog, stocky, with foreshortened limbs and a rippling succession of necks. He didn’t belong where we were. That’s not condescension so much as an attempt at a charitable truth. He would have been happier elsewhere — felling trees in a forest, or throwing nets for an Alaskan fishery. Instead, he was dressed in khakis, drinking a latte on a sectional sofa, discussing the best way to make our diaper client’s brand synonymous with “more absorbent.” That is, when we still had our diaper client. After deciding not to throw his computer against the window, Tom fixated on his magazines. He said to Benny, “Benny, man, you gotta get my magazines from Jim. That fuck’s had them two months. I’m not leaving here without them — but I can’t go out there. I don’t want to have to see anybody.” When Benny told us that, we felt pity for Tom. Of course Tom would not have wanted that. He would have spit our pity back in our faces. Nobody wants pity. They just want to get the hell out of there, out of sight, to alleviate the sting of ridicule, and then they want to forget about the entire miserable experience. They can’t do that walking the halls to retrieve magazines. Benny returned to Tom’s office ten minutes later with back copies of Car and Driver, Rolling Stone, Guns and Ammo. Tom was sitting on the floor of his office, winding his watch. Benny said, “Tom.” Tom didn’t answer. “Tom?” said Benny. Tom continued to wind his watch. Then he stood, opened a desk drawer, and pulled out one of the corporate polos he used to wear many days in a row. The blue one (Benny’s) and the green one (Jim’s) were also in the desk drawer. Tom took off his button-down and put the red polo on. “They think I’m a clown,” he said to Benny. Benny replied, “No. Nobody thinks you’re a clown, Tom. They got you by the balls, man — everybody knows that.” “Hand me those scissors,” said Tom. Benny said he looked behind him and saw a pair of scissors on Tom’s bookshelf. Benny told us he didn’t want to hand scissors to Tom. “They think I’m a clown,” Tom repeated as he walked over to his bookshelf and grabbed the scissors himself and began to cut into his nice pleated slacks at the knee. “What are you doing, Tom?” asked Benny, with an uneasy chuckle. He was still holding Tom’s old magazines. He watched as Tom cut all the way around with the scissors until the trouser leg fell to his ankle. Then he started working on one sleeve of the polo, on the opposite side to the cut-off trouser leg. “Tom,” said Benny. Tom’s tan-lined arm was soon visible all the way to the shoulder. A tattoo of barbed wire snaked around his biceps. “Tom, seriously — what are you doing?”

“Will you do me a favor,” asked Tom, “and cut a hole from the backside of my shirt?”

“Tom, why are you doing this?”

Sometimes drastic measures were called for. There were occasions when someone needed to get into a car with a package and drive all the way out to Palatine to the FedEx station that had the latest drop-off time in the state just to guarantee the arrival of an overnight delivery. A new client pitch due Monday meant a full week of one o’clock nights and a few hours of sleep on random sofas on Sunday. It was called a fire alarm, and when one came along you had to drop everything. There was no going to the gym. Theater tickets were canceled. You saw no one, not your five-year-old, not your marriage counselor, not your sponsor, not even your dog. We feared the fire alarm. At the same time, we were all in it together, and we could be taken by surprise, after five days of grind, by the transformation of the team. Eating takeout, laughing around a cubicle, putting our minds together to solve something hard — five or six days of that and there was no immunization against the camaraderie. The people we worked with, with all their tics and pieties and limitations — we had to admit it to ourselves, they weren’t all that bad. Where did that come from? Whence this friendliness? “‘The love flooding you for your brother,’” said Hank Neary, quoting something or other. He was always quoting something or other and we hated him for it, unless we were in the middle of a fire alarm, in which case we loved him like a brother. That love would dissipate in a week. But while it lasted, work was a wellspring, a real source of light, the nurture of a beloved community.

Then the downturn came and there were no more fire alarms. No speeding out to Palatine, no one o’clock nights, no love flooding us for our brother.

Benny went down the elevator with Tom. With his clothes cut to shreds, Tom looked like someone washed up on shore after a shipwreck, tattered and clinging to a single plank. His shoes and socks were off, left inside the office with the abandoned magazines, the Kmart portraits of his kids, and the discarded swatches from his trousers and polo.

“What are you going to do?” asked Benny.

“What do you think I’m gonna do?” Tom asked rhetorically, just as they had reached the lobby. “I’m gonna find a new job.”

“No,” said Benny. “I mean right now. What are you doing right now?”

They exited the elevator. Tom had emptied out the pens and pencils from a mug he kept on his desk and that empty mug was now his only possession. Tom stopped in the marble elevator bank and watched for the descent of the other elevators. “You ever read Ralph Waldo Emerson?” Tom asked Benny. Benny didn’t know where to stand. He told us he didn’t know why they had just stopped in the elevator bank. “What are you planning to do, Tom?” “Listen to what Emerson said,” said Tom. Tom began to quote. “‘For all our penny-wisdom,’” he said, “‘for all our soul-destroying slavery to habit, it is not to be doubted that all men have sublime thoughts.’ Did you hear that, Benny? Did you hear it, or you need me to repeat it to you?” “I heard it,” Benny replied. “They never knew me,” Tom said, shaking his head and pointing up at those bastards. “They never did.”

The first elevator arrived, and lunchgoers from the law firm emerged. Tom held his empty mug before them. “Help out the unemployed?” he asked them, shaking the cup. “Hey, help out the jobless?”

“Tom,” said Benny.

“Benny, get the fuck off me! — Help me out, guy, please? I just lost my job today.”

And that was Tom’s final hour.

We heard it from Benny just after he told us the story of how Tom arrived at the Naperville house with an aluminum bat when he knew the children were at the grandmother’s and everything deemed legally “Tom’s” in the divorce settlement, everything that was “Tom’s” and could be smashed or shattered with an aluminum bat, suffered Tom’s swing until the authorities arrived to subdue him.

Amber Ludwig, who had the compact, athletic body of a seal, with very small hands and dark, closely set eyes, said she feared Tom was going to return like you hear on the news and open fire. “No, seriously,” she said. “I think he’s come undone. I don’t think he was ever done to begin with.”

Amber wasn’t showing yet but everyone already knew. She was debating an abortion but, to Larry Novotny’s great disappointment, looked to be leaning against it. Larry would have to decide what to do about his wife, who had just had a child herself not that long ago. We felt sorry for Larry, who worried the curved, finger-smudged bill of his Cubs cap endlessly that spring, but we also thought it was pretty obvious that he should have kept his pecker in his pants. We felt sorry for Amber, too, but as everyone knows, it takes two to tango. We just hoped they weren’t doing it on our desks.

We asked Amber if she really, honestly thought Tom capable of a bloodbath.

“Yes,” she said. “I wouldn’t put anything past him. He’s a madman.”

We tried to convince her that that sort of thing happened only in factories and warehouses, and then only on the South Side. A debate ensued. Was Tom certifiable? Or was he just a clown? What was that at Janine’s little girl’s funeral, when he wept and continued weeping even after we got to the bar? Wasn’t that proof the guy had a heart?

“Okay,” said Amber, “okay, but what do you call standing on the heating vent and mooning the swimmers from his office window? What was that?” she asked.

She was referring to the Holiday Inn rooftop pool Tom’s office looked down on, and Tom’s tendency to get right up to the glass with his butt cheeks. Hijinks! we cried. Fun! That’s not insanity. Amber was outvoted. We knew Tom. We knew Alan Glew, Linda Blanton, Paul Saunier. We knew Neil Hotchkiss and Cora Lee Brower and Harold Oak. They weren’t any of them coming back here with a nightmare in a backpack. They had been let go. They packed their things. They left us for good, never to return.

IT WAS A SURPRISE to everyone when Janine came back. Of course it was understood she could come back whenever she wanted. We just didn’t think, given all she had gone through, that coming back here, resuming the old routine — how could that ease her suffering? But maybe it was exactly what she needed, something to take her mind off it. She looked older, especially in the eyes. Her blouses were all wrinkled. Her brown hair was flat and dry where before she had styled it every day, and some days she smelled bad. Her first day back, she thanked us for the flyers. Lynn Mason had had the idea of printing up flyers when we heard that the girl had gone missing. Genevieve Latko-Devine, arguably the kindest and sweetest among us, drove out to North Aurora, where the Gorjancs lived, to get a photograph of Jessica. She returned to the office by noon with a fourth-grade school portrait. We scanned it, loaded it onto the server, and began to build the ad.

Genevieve was at the computer doing the work. Jessica was a plain girl with fair hair and pale skin and an unfortunately crooked smile. We told Genevieve that Jessica was getting washed out.

“What do you want me to do about that?” she asked.

“Let’s work on her,” said Joe Pope. “Drop her into Photoshop.”

We worked on Macs. Some of us had new Macs, some had high-powered notebooks, and some unfortunate souls had to pedal furiously under their desks to keep a spark running through their extinct models. We made layouts in QuarkXPress; all our image manipulation we did in Photoshop. Genevieve dropped the image of the girl into Photoshop and started playing up the girl’s hair and freckles. We took a look and everyone agreed she was still getting washed out.

“Try making this area here darker,” said Joe, circumscribing the girl’s face with a finger. “God, your screen is filthy,” he added. He removed a tissue from her box and dusted it. He took a new look. “Now she’s more washed out than ever.”

Genevieve tried a few things. We looked at the girl. Joe shook his head. “Now she looks sunburned,” he said. “Bring it back some.”

“I think we’re losing sight of what our ultimate goal is here,” said Genevieve.

But we feared that if she was washed out, people would look right past the flyer.

Genevieve didn’t lack for more suggestions. “Pump ‘MISSING’ up a little,” said Jim Jackers.

“And play up the $10,000 reward,” suggested Tom. “I don’t know how, just. . use a different font or something.”

“And you have some kerning issues,” Benny reminded her from the sidelines.

We all wanted to help. Genevieve worked on it another hour, tweaking this and that, until someone recommended that she fix the little girl’s smile to be less crooked. Jessica would look prettier that way.

“All right,” she concluded, “we’re officially through here.”

That afternoon we ripped color print after color print and scored them in the mount room. Several of us drove out to North Aurora and spent the evening posting them — in the public library, the YMCA, the entrance aisles of the grocery stores, in the Starbucks and movie theaters and in the Toys“ R”Us, and on all the neighborhood telephone poles. Three days later she was found in an empty lot wrapped in plastic sheeting.

We put up bunting and had cake for Janine’s return. Next day Joe Pope found her crying in front of the mirror in the men’s room. She had gotten confused and gone through the wrong door. It was rare to get news by way of Joe Pope, since he didn’t talk to many people, so we probably shouldn’t have known that he found Janine in the men’s room. But he did talk to Genevieve Latko-Devine, and Genevieve talked to Marcia Dwyer, and Marcia talked to Benny Shassburger, and Shassburger talked to Jim and Amber, who talked to Larry and Dan Wisdom and Karen Woo, and Karen never met anybody she didn’t talk to. Sooner or later everyone found out everything, which is how we came to know that Janine was not over her grief, not by a long shot, because she had gotten confused and wandered into the men’s room. We pictured her at the sinks, holding on to the marble ledge for support, her head downcast and her tired eyes shedding momentous tears, oblivious to the urinals in the mirror. After her return, she almost never spoke at lunch.

We talked about Janine wandering into the men’s room. No one thought it should be kept a secret, but we were careful not to ridicule the event or turn it into a joke. A few of us did, but not many. It was obviously a tragic thing. We knew about it, but how could we possibly know the first thing about it? Some of us discussed the matter to break up the routine, but most of us used the information to explain why she was quiet at lunch. Then we filed the incident away. That is, until Janine started bringing pictures of Jessica into the office and placing them on the credenza and the bookshelves and hanging them from the walls. The pictures crowded in, elbowing each other for room. A hundred pictures of her dead daughter in the seventy-five square feet of her office. The three on the wall facing her were the most mournful things we’d ever seen. It was also downright creepy. It got to the point where we tried to avoid entering her office. When we were forced to, for some pressing item of business, we never knew where to rest our eyes.

ON A TUESDAY IN MAY at twelve-fifteen in the afternoon, Lynn Mason scheduled an input meeting. We gathered in her office to be a part of it. Input meetings made us happy because they meant we had work to do. We worked in the creative department developing ads and we considered our ad work creative, but it wasn’t half as creative as the work we’d put in to pad our time sheets every Monday morning since layoffs began. An input meeting meant we’d have actual work that would make our time sheets less intimidating the following week. But some of us didn’t like input meetings when they were scheduled for twelve-fifteen. “That’s when most of us — hello? — go to lunch,” said Karen Woo. Lunch for Karen was a sacrament. “Why not schedule it for eleven-fifteen?” she asked. “Or even one o’clock?” Most of the rest of us just thought, no big deal, so lunch comes an hour late. “But I’m hungry,” said Karen. She didn’t seem to have much sympathy for the fact that Lynn Mason had just found out she had cancer and might have other things on her mind. Besides, Lynn could schedule an input whenever she wanted — she was a partner. “Of course she can schedule an input whenever she wants,” said Karen. “But ought she? That’s the question. Ought she.” Many of us thought Karen should consider herself lucky to still have a job.

While waiting for Lynn to arrive, we killed time listening to Chris Yop tell us the story of Tom Mota’s chair. We loved killing time and had perfected several ways of doing so. We wandered the hallways carrying papers that indicated some mission of business when in reality we were in search of free candy. We refilled our coffee mugs on floors we didn’t belong on. Hank Neary was an avid reader. He arrived early in his brown corduroy coat with a book taken from the library, copied all its pages on the Xerox machine, and sat at his desk reading what looked to passersby like the honest pages of business. He’d make it through a three-hundred-page novel every two or three days. Billy Reiser, who worked on another team and walked with a limp, was a huge Cubs fan. He had a friend who installed satellites. They gained illegal access to the roof, secured a remote satellite in an out-of-the-way place, and situated it so that the signal beamed off the next-door building into Billy’s office. Then Billy’s friend set up a television under his desk, mounted at an angle so if Billy was sitting just a foot back in his chair, he could look down and see the picture. When it was all through, he had two hundred stations and could watch the Cubs even on away games. We gathered down there in limited numbers when Sammy Sosa was going for the home run record. The problem was Billy was worried someone would find out about the satellite, so every time Sammy hit a homer and we cheered like mad, we got kicked out.

Tom Mota had been laid off the week before Chris Yop told us the story of his chair. Yop said he had been cleaning off his desk when he looked up and found the office coordinator standing in his doorway. Our office coordinator smelled of witch hazel and carpet fiber, had a considerable mole on her left cheek, and never said hello to anyone. It was rumored that, like an ant, her back could bear the burden of something several times her body weight. She stood in Yop’s doorway with her arms crossed, leaning against the doorjamb and peering in at Yop’s bookshelves. She asked if they were Tom Mota’s. “So I say to her,” Yop said to us, “‘Tom Mota’s? What, those?’ ‘The bookshelves,’ she says. ‘Are those Tom’s?’ ‘The bookshelves? No,’ I say, ‘those aren’t Tom’s. Those are mine.’ ‘Well, someone took Tom’s bookshelves out of his office,’ she says to me, ‘and I have to get them back.’ At this point, Tom’s been shitcanned, what? a day? This was last Tuesday — I mean, the body’s not even cold yet, and she’s standing in my doorway accusing me of stealing? So I repeat to her, I say, ‘Those aren’t his bookshelves, those are my bookshelves.’ But then she walks into my office, right, get this. She walks into my office and she says, ‘Is that his chair? Is that Tom’s chair you’re sitting on?’ She’s pointing at it, right. She thinks it’s his chair. It’s my chair. Those are his bookshelves, sure. I took them out of his office when he got shitcanned and brought them down to mine. But it’s for damn sure not his chair. It’s my chair! So I say, ‘This? This is my chair. This chair is mine.’ And she says, she walks into my office and stands very close to me, she says, she’s about a foot, maybe two feet from me, she says, pointing at my chair, ‘Do you mind if I look at the serial numbers?’ Now, who knew about this?” he asked us. “Who knew about these serial numbers?” None of us had ever heard anything about serial numbers. “Yeah, serial numbers,” Yop continued. “They keep serial numbers on the back of everything. That way they can track everything, who has what and what office it’s in. Did you know about this?”

We let him go on about the serial numbers because his outrage was typical of the time. Chris was a nervous man, and as he spoke, his whole face seemed to quiver. His animating hands shook a little, as if battling a caffeine dip. He had encouraged us to call him Yop because it made him feel younger, cooler, and more accepted. He kept his graying hair long, so it curled up near the ears, but age had thinned it on top. He was married to a woman named Terry and on weekends he played bad rock songs for a seventies cover band. He was always asking everyone what they were listening to these days. We considered it half-noble, half-pathetic when passing his office to hear some new rap album issuing from his CD player, when everyone knew what he really wanted to be listening to was Blood on the Tracks. We listened to his story about Tom Mota’s chair from various locations in Lynn’s cluttered office. She had a glass-top table and a white leather sofa and we hung in the doorway and leaned against the walls, killing time while waiting for her. Karen Woo kept looking at her watch and sighing because Lynn was running late to her own meeting.

“I was like, ‘Serial numbers?’” Yop continued. “And she says, she’s standing behind me, right, she says, ‘Have a look.’ So I get off my chair, I take a look — serial numbers! On the back of my chair! ‘Where’d these come from?’ I ask her. She doesn’t answer me. Instead she says, ‘Can I borrow a pen?’ She wants to borrow a pen so she can take down the serial numbers! I’m thinking, what sort of fascist organization — ‘Hello?’ I say. ‘This is my chair.’ But she’s not paying any attention to me — she’s taking down the serial numbers! Then she goes over to the buckshelves, she starts taking down the serial numbers on them and she says, ‘And what about these buckshelves?’ Now I’m in a fix, because I lied about the buckshelves, sure, but I’m telling the truth about the chair. I could give a shit about the buckshelves. Take the buckshelves. Just leave me my chair.”

We told Yop he meant to say bookshelves.

“What’d I say?” he asked us.

We told him he was saying buckshelves.

“Buckshelves?”

Right — at first it was bookshelves, but then he started saying buckshelves.

“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 buckshelves.

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.”

Bookshelves! 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.”

Not long after hitting send, Tom was let go, and if not for the paltry severance, we might have been inclined to think that his was not another in a series of layoffs, but an outright firing. But the truth was, Tom was probably in the pipeline already. His e-mail just hastened things along, the way pneumonia can spell doom for a cancer patient.

LYNN MASON WAS STILL running late to the twelve-fifteen meeting on that Tuesday in May, so Chris Yop continued telling us the story of Tom Mota’s chair. That very morning he had looked up from cleaning his desk to find the office coordinator standing in his doorway once again, arms folded. “So she says to me,” he said to us, “‘I see you put Tom’s buckshelves back.’ So I act totally ignorant, I say, ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know what it is you’re talking about,’ and I go back to cleaning my desk, but she’s not leaving, so I look up again and she says, ‘And I see you no longer have his chair, either.’ So I say, ‘I would appreciate you not harassing me anymore. There are rules against that sort of thing in the employee handbook.’ And she says, ‘You think I’m harassing you?’ And I say, ‘Yes. And I don’t appreciate it.’ And she says, ‘Well, maybe we should take it up with Lynn.’ And I say, ‘I would welcome that,’ and she says, ‘What are you doing right now?’ and I say, ‘Well, unlike some people, I’m trying to get some work done. Some people actually generate revenue around here, you handjob.’ I shouldn’t have said that — I was just, you know, pointing out the difference between an office coordinator and a copywriter like me who generates revenue. So she says back to me, ‘Oh, sure, I understand how incredibly important you are, how everything would just crumble all around us without you, but if you wouldn’t mind, will you follow me, please?’ And I say, ‘Follow you? Follow you where?’ And she says, ‘Lynn would like a word.’ ‘What, now?’ I say. And she says, ‘If you can pull yourself away.’ And I say, ‘She wants to see me right now?’ She doesn’t say another word — just motions for me to follow. So I get off my chair, that piece of crap — I mean, my ass is like on Novocain on that thing — and together we head down to Lynn’s office. I mean, what choice do I have? If she’s telling me Lynn wants to see me, what choice do I have?”

We asked Yop how long ago this was.

“Maybe an hour ago,” he said. “So we go down there. I’m not going to lie to you. My heart’s going. I’m forty-eight. This is a young man’s game. Who’s going to hire me if I get shitcanned? I don’t know Photoshop. Some days, I don’t even understand Outlook, okay. You know me and the e-mail. I get shitcanned, who’s going to pay me what I deserve? I’m an old man. I get paid too much. But I gotta go down there. The office coordinator goes in first. I follow her in and close the door. ‘Okay,’ says Lynn. And you know how she can lean forward at her desk and look at you like she’s about to carve your skull out with her laser eyes? She says, ‘Now what’s going on?’ The office coordinator comes right out of the gate — first, I stole Tom’s buckshelves. ‘Where’s the proof?’ I cry out. I mean she’s not letting me talk. ‘Huh? Where’s the proof?’ I ask. She doesn’t answer. Then she tells Lynn I’ve been harassing her. Me harassing her! I can’t believe my ears. But what she doesn’t say a thing about, not one word about — she says not one word about the chair. The whole point is the chair! That’s the reason we’re here! I was trying to protect my chair. So I say, ‘What about the chair?’ And she says, you want to know what she says? She says, ‘What chair?’ What do you mean, what chair, right? So I say, ‘Come on, what chair. The chair. My chair.’ And she says, ‘I don’t know what he’s talking about, this chair.’ To Lynn she says this! She denies there was ever a chair! So I say, I’m so pissed off, I say, ‘COME ON, WHAT CHAIR! You know what chair, goddamn it!’ And there’s silence, and then she says, ‘I’m sorry, Lynn. I don’t know what he’s talking about.’ And I say, ‘YOU GODDAMN WELL KNOW WHAT CHAIR! She knows what chair, Lynn! She tried to take my chair away from me. My legitimate chair.’ So there’s silence, and then Lynn says, ‘Kathy —’ Kathy — did any of you know her name was Kathy? She says, ‘Kathy, can you give Chris and me a minute please?’ So ‘Kathy’ says of course and Lynn says, ‘Can you shut the door, please, Kathy?’ and ‘Kathy’ says, ‘Sure,’ and we hear the door close, and my heart’s going, you know, and Lynn says, ‘Chris, I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to let you go.’”

Yop stopped speaking. He shook his lowered head slowly. There was silence. “I was speechless,” he continued after a while. His voice had dropped. “I asked her if it had something to do with Ernie Kessler’s chair. She says no. She says it has nothing to do with Ernie’s chair. ‘Because I don’t need Ernie’s chair,’ I tell her. ‘Honest — I’ve been sitting on one of the cheap plastic ones for the past week and it’s fine. It’s a fine chair.’ And she says, ‘This has nothing to do with Ernie’s chair.’ I can’t believe it. I can’t believe what she’s telling me. So I say, ‘Is it the mistakes? Because I’m getting better,’ I tell her. ‘It’s how my brain works sometimes,’ I tell her, ‘but I’m getting better. Most of them get caught when we run spell-check anyway. I know it’s not ideal in a copywriter, I appreciate your patience,’ I say to her. ‘But I am getting better.’ And she says, ‘It’s not the mistakes, Chris.’ ‘So what is it then?’ I ask. ‘It’s nothing personal,’ she says to me. ‘It’s just business.’ ‘Is it because I make too much money? Is that it?’ And she says, ‘No, not exactly.’ ‘Can I maybe take a cut in pay?’ I ask. I’m asking her, ‘Can I take a pay cut and stay on?’ ‘It’s not exactly the money, Chris,’ she says. So what the hell is it then, right? ‘Now, listen,’ she says. ‘We’re going to give you a month’s severance, and COBRA will cover your health benefits through the year. It’s really nothing personal,’ she says. She keeps saying that — it’s nothing personal, Chris — so I figure it must be something personal. ‘So what is it then, Lynn?’ I ask her. And maybe my voice cracks a little. ‘If it’s not personal, what is it?’ ‘Chris, please,’ she says. Because by now I’m breaking down. .”

We asked him what he meant by that.

“I started crying,” he said. “It wasn’t just the job,” he added. “It was the whole feeling of being me. Being old. Thinking about Terry. Not having a kid. And now, not having a job.” He and his wife had tried to conceive for years, and by the time they gave up, they were considered too old to adopt by the agencies. “I was thinking about having to go home to Terry and telling her I’d been shitcanned. I didn’t want to cry,” he said, “god knows, I just got overcome. I put my head down, and I lost it for a minute. I just wasn’t in control. So, you know, I had to leave. I never cried in front of someone like that before. I couldn’t stick around. ‘Come on, Chris,’ she says to me. ‘Come back. You’re going to be fine,’ she says. ‘You’re a fine copywriter.’ This is what she’s saying to me while I’m being shitcanned. I haven’t talked to her since.”

We couldn’t blame him for being upset, but it would be just like Yop, tough-acting Yop, to give up the chair he fought so hard for just like that if it would save his ass, and if that didn’t work, it would be just like Yop to beg for a cut in pay, and if that still didn’t save his job, Chris Yop would be the one among us to break down. Tom Mota wanted to throw a computer through the window; Chris Yop threw himself at Lynn’s feet.

Just before Lynn showed up, fifteen minutes late for her own input, we asked Yop what he was still doing here.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t go home, not yet. It doesn’t feel right.”

But should you really be here? we asked him. In Lynn’s office?

“Well, Lynn and me,” he said, “we didn’t get a chance to finish our conversation. I broke down. I left. You guys don’t think I should have to leave leave, do you, when we didn’t get a chance to finish our conversation?”

No one replied — meaning, well, yeah, Yop. You should probably leave.

“I don’t know,” he said, looking around. “This meeting’s been on my calendar for a long time.”

ALL TALK TAPERED OFF when Lynn finally arrived. When the time came to get down to business, we got down to business. We didn’t fuck around in input meetings. We fucked around before them and sometimes we fucked around after them, but during them, there might be the occasional wisecrack, but otherwise we were solemn as churchgoers. Any one of us could be let go at any time, and that fact was continually on our minds.

Lynn Mason was intimidating, mercurial, unapproachable, fashionable, and consummately professional. She was not a big woman — in fact, she was rather petite — but when we thought of her from home at night, she loomed large. When she was in a mood, she didn’t make small talk. She dressed like a Bloomingdale’s model and ate like a Buddhist monk. On the day of the twelve-fifteen she was dressed in an olive-hued skirt suit and a simple ivory blouse. What you really admired about her, though, were her shoes. As aficionados of design, we — the women among us especially — sat in awe of their sleek singularity, exquisite color, and contoured elegance, marveling at them as others might the armrest of a chair by Charles Eames, or the black wing of a Pentagon jetfighter. Each pair — and she must have had fifty of them — deserved their own Plexiglas display case at the Museum of Contemporary Art, next to that polyethylene thing and those neon signs. We had never seen anything so beautiful as those shoes. When someone finally got up the nerve to ask her what brand they were, no one recognized the name, leaving us to conclude that they were made by boutique Italian designers who refused to export their product, but which Lynn’s friends picked up for her on their international travels, because everyone knew Lynn never took vacation.

When she entered, disrupting Chris Yop at his story, she was carrying input documents fresh from the copy machine; a scent of toner trailed behind her. Without a word she set the copies on her desk and began to collate them, moistening her finger and thumb and stapling the sheets together and passing the packet to Joe, who sat immediately to her right. “Stapler on the machine’s broken,” she explained. Joe passed the document to his right, and it wound its way to Karen Woo, who was seated farthest from him. Lynn stapled a few minutes more, then stopped to remove her leather heels. “Why does it feel like I just walked in on a funeral?” she asked, finally looking around at us. No one said a word. “I hope it’s nobody I know,” she added. She went back to collating and stapling.

Our information had come from reliable sources but it was only the barest details. Her surgery was scheduled for the following day. The tumor had invaded her chest wall. She was going in for a full mastectomy. We had questions for her — was she scared? did she like her doctors? what were her chances of complete recovery? But she had not yet said a word about it to any of us and we knew nothing of her state of mind. We might have wondered why she was at work the day before. She needed to get her priorities straight, we thought. But then none of us ever had our priorities straight. Each and every one of us harbored the illusion that the whole enterprise would go straight to hell without our individual daily contributions. So what was this fantasy about straight priorities, this dream that would never be realized? Besides, what else should she do but carry on? We had to think that by coming into work the day before surgery, she was refusing to let the specter of death distract her from the ordinariness of life that could very well be both a comfort and an armament to someone diagnosed with breast cancer. She was exactly right to come into work the day before. Unless she should have stayed at home and ordered in and played with her cats on the sofa. It was really not for us to say.

Without so much as a word about Chris Yop’s presence among us, the input documents got handed around. Everyone took a copy; Chris Yop took a copy, too. Did he really plan to sit through the entire input meeting though he was no longer an employee? Lynn took her jacket off and flung it over her chair, sat down, and said, “Okay. Let’s get this funeral started.” She began to read from the input document. When we turned the page, Yop turned the page. It was hard to concentrate on anything else. There was Lynn, reading from the input document, and then there was Yop reading from the input document, and the one had just fired the other, but there they both were, carrying on as if nothing at all had happened. Maybe she hadn’t noticed him? Maybe she had other things on her mind?

Our project turned out to be pro bono. The agency had donated our services to a popular breast cancer fund-raising event sponsored by the Alliance Against Breast Cancer. Our job, Lynn explained, reading from the input document, was to raise awareness of the event and to boost donations across the country. We would be doing so by advertising in nationally distributed magazines and on the backs of cereal boxes.

We had to wonder, was this just a bizarre coincidence? We thought she might finally say something to us about her diagnosis. We watched her, but she never wavered from her steady reading of the input document. She gave no indication that this project was different in any way from any other project. We looked around at one another. Then we looked back down at the input document. When she was through, she explained a few extraneous matters, and then she asked us if we had any questions. We told her it sounded like a great project, and we inquired how we happened to get involved. “Oh, I know the committee chair,” she replied. “I’ve been saying no for two years and I just didn’t have the energy to say no anymore.” She shrugged. Noticing something in the corner of her eye, she turned and picked lint off the shoulder of her blouse. “Any other questions?” No one said a word. “Okay,” she said. “Funeral’s over.” And with that, we all got up and left her office. Yop almost made it out into the hall when she called him back in. “Chris,” she said, “can I have a word with you, please? Joe,” she added, “get the door on your way out, will you?” Yop turned back, downcast and hesitant. Lynn got up to draw her blinds. Yop walked back in, the door closed, and that was the last we saw of them.

We set off for our offices and cubicles, immediately leaving them again to gather in small clusters, in doorways and print stations, to discuss the almost surreal pro bono project we had on our hands. During the input she had asked us to envision a loved one being diagnosed with the disease — a wife, a mother — so that we could really sympathize with cancer sufferers and design a more effective communication. Well, she had the disease. If someone could give us insight to sympathize with the sick for a more effective communication, who better than she? And yet not a word. Everyone knew she was a private person. And we had a reputation for gossip. We didn’t expect that she would just come out and announce that she had cancer. But she was also a very dedicated marketer, and in that respect, it was perhaps odd, despite her sense of privacy, that she did not extend herself to help us better understand the horror of a diagnosis, for example, or the misery of treatments, if understanding those things were necessary for coming up with a better ad. We didn’t know if we should believe that she just happened to know some committee chair who had pestered her and pestered her until she agreed to donate our time.

She had a command of business politics like no one we had ever known. In 1997 she quarreled with Roger Highnote. He departed, and our lives improved dramatically. She was an enemy of the lowest common denominator. The cardinal rule of advertising has always been, make your communication dumb enough for an eighth grader to understand. Lynn Mason’s mentor, the fabled Mary Wells, had the fabled Bernbach as mentor, and Bernbach once said, famously, “It’s true that there’s a twelve-year-old mentality in America. Every six-year-old has it.” Like Wells and Bernbach, Lynn respected American intelligence, and a lot of good had come from it: the talking llama campaign, the Cold Sore Guy spots. Sure, she was the one walking everyone Spanish down the hall, but she hadn’t walked any of us Spanish down the hall yet — that was an important distinction.

Lynn Mason was also scrupulous as hell. Once Karen Woo and Jim Jackers were redesigning the packaging for a box of cookies made by a big conglomerate who later broke our hearts when they left us for another agency. The box was standard stuff, overanimated with recognizable cookie characters and catchy little phrases like “Chocolicious!” and “Dunkable!” in colorful arching fonts. These mandatories had to stay; they had become scripture in the client’s thick red binder of branding guidelines. So Karen and Jim’s job was pretty simple — they were just being asked to find some way to play up the cookie’s nutritional value. In an increasingly health-conscious and weight-wary world, every cookie box was doing it. So Karen wrote some copy for one of the panels that spoke to the importance of niacin and folic acid. Then she went down to Jim’s cube and stood over his computer while instructing him to write, in a smallish font near the bottom of the front of the box, “0 g of Lastive Acid.” Jim did as he was instructed.

“What’s lastive acid?” he asked.

“Not something you want in your body,” replied Karen.

They took the box down to Lynn, who looked over the changes. Practically everything was the same except for the copy box on the side panel discussing the good effects of niacin and folic acid, and Lynn was happy with that until she came to the part that read — and here she stopped reading silently and began to recite out loud — “‘And our chocolicious cookies contain zero grams of lastive acid, making them the health-conscious choice for totally dunkable snacking.’ What is lastive acid?” she inquired.

“I thought it was like a, you know,” said Karen, “something unhealthy.”

“But what is it?”

“Sounds terrible, whatever it is,” said Jim.

“It’s probably not something you want in your body,” said Karen, “from the sound of it. Lastive acid. Sounds like it would stay with you longer than the formaldehyde.”

Meanwhile Lynn had gone searching through the input document provided by the accounts people. “I don’t see anything about ‘lastive acid’ in here,” she said, gazing at Karen.

“No, I came up with it,” said Karen.

Lynn’s face, which had aged into the early years of her forties with little modification of her cool detached beauty, was architecturally designed for such outrageous confessions. Her high cheekbones kept her eyes buttressed from the collapse of a disbelieving brow, her nearly crow’s-feet-free eyes never gave way to an off-putting squint, and her mouth, flanked on both sides by a single parenthesis of a gently etched laugh line, remained in perfect equipoise when presented with revelations that would have provoked in lesser professionals fallen jaws of slackened disgust or a steady stream of rebuke. She simply gazed across the desk at Karen and asked soberly, “You just made it up?”

“Well, not the part about there being zero grams.”

“Karen,” she said — and Jim told us later that the only show of irritation she allowed herself was to pull her chair closer to her desk and to place two fingers at her left temple.

“I was trying to think out of the box,” explained Karen.

“I. . myself, Lynn, I didn’t know. .” Jim stammered.

Lynn shifted her focus briefly to address him. “Jim, will you excuse us for a minute, please?”

It was this sort of thing that showed us how Lynn had developed over the years a moral principle that guided her in the practice of advertising, which she abided by with strict authority. We respected her for it and wanted to live up to those high standards. Whenever we did something thoughtless or dull, or when we didn’t perform at the level we had hoped to on one project or another, we would, in our own individual ways, try to hint to her that we were just as disappointed in ourselves as she was while implying that we were making every effort to improve. Failing, perhaps, to pick up on these subtle apologies — not wanting to advertise our shortcomings, we rarely came right out and admitted them — she usually didn’t respond, but when she did, her communiqués were brief, inconclusive, and often bewildering. She might leave us a voice mail that said, “Forget about it,” or drop an e-mail that said only, “Don’t worry so much — Lynn.” We spent hours trying to decode these simple messages. We went into other people’s offices, demanded they stop what they were doing, and conscripted them into the ceaseless political labors of puzzling out her woefully inadequate responses to our pleas for reassurance. “Don’t worry so much?” we asked each other. “Why not at all?” We wanted to ask her directly but no one dared, except Jim Jackers, whose insatiable demand for confirmation that he wasn’t a hopelessly unreformed boob sent him into Lynn’s office with the regularity of therapist appointments. Where she found the time, and why she had a soft spot for Jim, were mysteries on the order of her gnomic e-mails, and someone’s absurd suggestion that she might be just as receptive to any of the rest of us if we only had the nerve to knock at her door was dismissed as sadly out of touch.

So she wasn’t going to say anything to us about her diagnosis. We were disturbed and upset and at a bit of a loss. We wanted her to open up, if only for ten minutes. What were we here for if not, on occasion, that? Just work? We hoped not. Yet we got nothing. Not even for the sake of a better ad. We still had no official word that she would be out of the office while recuperating from surgery. Officially, she’d be in all week, and when the time came, we’d be expected to show her ad concepts for what she had sold to us as a pain-in-the-ass fund-raiser she had been pestered into doing against her will.

2

MORNINGS — BENNY’S CHALLENGE — WHO IS JOE POPE? — CARL GARBEDIAN — THE FIRST INTERRUPTION — KAREN WOO WEIGHS IN — TAKE ME HOME — THE SECOND INTERRUPTION — THE JOE POPE DOLL — A BETTER STORY THAN THIS ONE — BENNY UPLOADS — BRIZZ’S BEQUEST TO BENNY — WALKING BLITHELY PAST BRIZZ — TOM’S GIFT TO CARL–CARL’S CONFESSION — TOM’S “ANGER” — GOD IN THE WORKPLACE — COLD SORE GUY — THE WRITING ON THE WALL

THE BEST TIME WAS always early in the morning. Mornings had going for them the quiet in the hallways, the lights not yet at full capacity, and a forestalled sense of urgency. It was the worst time, too, because of the anticipation of the end of those things.

We liked to gather in Benny’s office. He came back with a full mug and said, “So yesterday —”

We could hardly look at him. “What?” he said. We told him he had something — “Where?” It was on his lip. He went searching. It was on the other side. We hoped to god he would find it soon. Finally he thumbed it off and looked at it. “Cream cheese,” he said. There were bagels? “In the kitchen,” he replied. Benny’s story would have to wait for those of us wanting bagels. Those of us more interested in his story stuck around. “All right, so yesterday,” he resumed, “I wanted to see if I could go the entire day without touching my mouse or my keyboard.” He settled himself with constrained gusto into his chair, careful not to spill. “The whole day without touching my mouse or my keyboard — impossible, right? I mean, how many times a day do we use those two things? If you’re like me and you’re putting an ad together, you’re clicking or keying maybe ten thousand times a day. Twenty thousand. I don’t even know, I never counted. The point is, a lot of times. You start to think your whole life is slowly clicking away. So I decided yesterday, what if I could go the whole day? What do I have to do? I have to click and open, click and drag, click and color, click and align, click and resize, click and drop-shadow —”

He went on and on, using his chubby fingers to count off.

“Then there’s keyboard functions, right? Control-x, control-c, control-v, control-f —”

We told him to get on with it. We liked wasting time, but almost nothing was more annoying than having our wasted time wasted on something not worth wasting it on.

“So listen to how I did it,” said Benny, his dough face smiling wryly.

“You did no work all day long,” said Marcia.

“Not true,” Benny objected, suddenly uncharacteristically solemn. “I had things to give Joe, I had deadlines. I had to use my mouse and my keyboard yesterday. So listen to how I did it.”

So Benny told us the story of how he went the entire day without clicking by teaching Roland how to use Photoshop. Roland said he didn’t think he could learn Photoshop, he had never even been to college. But Benny told him that was crazy talk. What with the right instructor, it wouldn’t take more than a couple hours. Roland worked for security. He stood watch at the front desk in the downstairs lobby, or else he trolled the perimeter of the building in his security guard’s generic navy suit coat. All day long he sat at his lonely lobby post or he went back and forth around the building on his aching feet. To sit in an office with Benny would be a pleasure. The only stipulation he gave Benny was that if he got chirped on the Motorola by Mike Boroshansky, chief of security, he’d probably have to go. We expected so little from security in those days.

“So what I want to know,” Benny had said to him, “is which one of these photos do you think works best for this ad?” Roland looked at Benny’s screen and said, “I don’t know. That one?” and Benny said, “Come on, Roland, man — you have over a thousand photos to choose from up there, and you’ve looked at a total of six. Scroll down, man! Click through.” So Roland ended up clicking through about an hour’s worth of stock photos while Benny sat off to the side mouse-free. It was a pleasure for Roland — good company and a cushioned seat. “No, not that one,” Benny kept saying. “You don’t have much of an artistic intuition, Roland, no offense.” “Hey, Benny,” Roland said defensively, “I didn’t go to school for this or anything, if you don’t mind.” But still he clicked to the next page, and scrolled down, and clicked to the next page and scrolled down. Whenever Roland came across a photo Benny liked, Benny wrote down its reference number on a Post-it. When he had enough reference numbers, he kicked Roland out of his office and called the rep from the stock house and they messengered over the thumbnails for him to choose from. That’s when he went to lunch. Then, when he got back from the Potbelly and it was time to start putting the ad together, he picked up the phone and called down to security and asked for Roland.

When Roland returned to Benny’s office, he was only more than happy to be back there giving his feet a rest. “You know how many miles a day I walk around in this building?” he asked Benny. “How many?” said Benny. “I don’t know,” he said. “I never counted.” “You should get one of those pedometers,” said Benny. Two hours later they had finished the rough layout of an ad Joe Pope needed first thing in the morning. Benny’s moratorium on clicking would be over by the morning, and he could put the finishing touches on the ad then. So that’s how he did it. The whole day and not one click for Benny. Except he ruined it at a quarter to five when he allowed himself to check numbers on fantasy baseball.

“You know,” said Amber Ludwig, “I don’t find this story very amusing. What if Tom Mota comes back here and one of our security guys is inside your office putting an ad together?” she asked. “I’m so sure that makes me feel real safe, Benny.”

“Oh, Amber,” said Benny. “Tom Mota’s not coming back here.”

Suddenly Joe Pope appeared in Benny’s doorway. “Morning,” he said.

“Oh!” Amber shrieked instinctively, gripping her pregnant belly. She wasn’t showing, we shouldn’t have known the first thing about it, but we did because we knew everything. “Oh, Joe,” she cried. “You scared me!”

“Sorry,” said Joe. He stood in the doorway with his right pant leg still cuffed against the threat of grease. Joe Pope rode his bicycle into work on all but the most inclement days. Most mornings he came up the elevator like a courier with his sleek fluorescent helmet and his cuffed leg and his daypack. He walked the bike down to his office and parked it against the wall. Then he locked the front tire to the frame. Inside the office he did that, locked his bicycle, like he was beset on all sides by thieves and barbarians. That bicycle was the only personal item in Joe Pope’s office. He had no posters, postcards, doodads, snow globes, souvenirs, framed pictures, art reproductions, mementos, no humor books on the shelves and nothing to clutter his desk. He had been in that office three years, and it still looked temporary. Every day we had to wonder — who the hell was this Joe Pope, anyway? It wasn’t that we had anything against him. It was just that he was maybe an inch shorter than he should have been. He listened to weird music. We didn’t know what he did on the weekends. What sort of person showed up on Monday and had no interest in sharing what transpired during the two days of the week when one’s real life took place? His weekends were long dark shadows of mystery. In all likelihood, he spent his days off in the office, cultivating his master plan. Mondays we’d come in refreshed and unsuspecting and he would already be there, ready to spring something on us. Maybe he never left. Certainly he never came around with a coffee mug to palaver with us on a Monday morning. We didn’t judge him for that, so long as he didn’t judge us for our custom of easing into a new workweek.

When he did come around, it was only to say things like “Sorry to interrupt, Benny, but did you happen to put that ad together for me yesterday?”

“Got it right here, Joe,” trumpeted Benny, with a sly wink in our direction as he handed over Roland’s handiwork.

Joe’s sudden presence was the dissolving agent, and we picked our individual bodies up and returned to our desks, heavy and yawning. Morning was officially upon us.

Why was it so terrifying, almost like death, one morning of a hundred, to walk back to your own office and pass alone through its doorway? Why was the dread so suffocating? Most days, no problem. Work to be done. A pastry. Storm clouds out the window that looked, in their menace, sublime. But one out of a hundred mornings it was impossible to breathe. Our coffee tasted poisonous. The sight of our familiar chairs oppressed us. The invariable light was deadening.

We fought with depression. One thing or another in our lives hadn’t worked out, and for a long period of time we struggled to overcome it. We took showers sitting down and couldn’t get out of bed on weekends. Finally we consulted HR about the details of seeing a specialist, and the specialist prescribed medication. Marcia Dwyer was on Prozac. Jim Jackers was on Zoloft and something else. Dozens of others took pills all day long, which we struggled to identify, there were so many of them, in so many different colors and sizes. Janine Gorjanc was on a cocktail of several meds, including lithium. After Jessica’s death, Janine and her husband, Frank, divorced. We understood divorce to be a common repercussion of the death of a child. There was no bitterness between them, just a parting of ways. Now they each lived alone with their memories. Pictures of Frank with Jessica also hung in Janine’s office, and, to be honest, it was almost as moving to see pictures of him as it was to see all the ones of the lost girl. Frank with Jessica on his knee, Frank caught in an apron with hot mitts on his hands during some holiday — that man was as gone from the world as Jessica was. The woolly sideburns were gone and the thick black glasses were gone and he no longer had a wife or child. Spend two minutes in Janine’s office looking over those pictures and contemplating the destinies of the happy people involved, and you too would reach for one of the prescription containers scattered about the place.

Yet for all the depression no one ever quit. When someone quit, we couldn’t believe it. “I’m becoming a rafting instructor on the Colorado River,” they said. “I’m touring college towns with my garage band.” We were dumbfounded. It was like they lived on a different planet. Where had they found the derring-do? What would they do about car payments? We got together for going-away drinks on their final day and tried to hide our envy while reminding ourselves that we still had the freedom and luxury to shop indiscriminately. Invariably Tom would get drunk and berate the departing with inappropriate toasts. Invariably Marcia would find hair bands on the jukebox and subject us to their saccharine ballads while recalling the halcyon days of George Washington High. Invariably Janine would silently sip her cranberry juice, looking mournful and motherly, and Jim Jackers would crack dull, tasteless jokes, and Joe would still be at the office, working. “‘Every ship is a romantic object,’” Tom would blather, “‘except that we sail in.’” Concluding, he would stand and lift his glass. “So good luck to you,” he toasted, finishing off his martini, “and fuck you for leaving, you prick.”

WE HAD WIDE HALLWAYS. Some contained offices running along both sides, while others had offices on one side and cubicles on the other. Jim Jackers’ cubicle was unique in that it was set off in a corner. He had a wonderful view because of that location and we questioned whether he deserved it. To get there you had to walk past the toner stain in the carpet on sixty. He shared that prime space with one other person, a woman named Tanya something who worked on a different partner’s team. A retractable wall separated them, made of thick privacy glass, the kind used in shower windows. Behind it, one moved about, it seemed to the other, as if scrubbing and deodorizing, when really they were just filing or inputting.

We were into the first few weeks of layoffs when Benny told us the story of Carl Garbedian saying good-bye to his wife. We were gathered at Jim’s cube for some arbitrary reason — it was a mystery how and why some of us found ourselves gathering at the same place at the same time. Benny’s stories were more frequent in the days before the downturn, when we felt flush and secure. We were less mindful of being caught gathering. Then the downturn hit, our workload disappeared, and, though we had more time than ever to listen to Benny’s stories, we were more conscious of being caught gathering, which was one indication that our workload had disappeared and that layoffs were necessary. We were in a bind — what to do about Benny’s stories? We compromised by continuing to listen, but without enjoying them because we were too worried someone would come by and see us. We would listen with only one ear, and with one eye always over our shoulders, in case we needed to bolt back to our desks and commence the charade that our workload was as strong as ever, because only then would we not be laid off.

Carl Garbedian was in his midthirties. He had a gut like the male equivalent of a second trimester. He wore off-brand, too-tight jeans and generic tennis shoes, which, to us, conveyed the extent to which he’d given up. His wife dropped him at the curb one morning and he refused to get out of the car. Benny had seen much of this himself, but what he couldn’t get firsthand, he got later from Carl, when he prodded it out of him during the lunch hour. Practically everyone shared their thoughts with Benny because everyone loved Benny, which was why some of us hated his guts.

Just before stepping out of the car, right as she should have been kissing Carl good-bye, Marilynn’s cell phone rang. She was an oncologist and always felt obligated to answer the phone in case of emergency. “Hello?” she said. “Go ahead, Susan, I can hear you just fine.”

Carl was immediately annoyed. Benny told us that Carl hated the way his wife always reassured people that she could hear them just fine. He hated how she plugged her finger in her opposite ear, effectively shutting out all other noise. And he hated that her other obligations always preempted him. They were just about to say good-bye, for chrissake. Didn’t it matter, wasn’t it important, their kiss good-bye? The thing he really hated, which he would never admit to her, was how he felt the lesser of the two of them for having no obligation that could compare with hers, which he might use to preempt her. She had people calling about patients who were dying. Let’s face it, there was zero chance one of us would call Carl with a question of mortal urgency. Whatever question we might have for Carl, it could wait until we ran into him in the hall the next day. That made Carl feel that his wife’s job was more meaningful than his own; and, because of his particular way of thinking at the time, that she was therefore more meaningful. Carl’s thoughts were dark, man. It didn’t make for an easy marriage. If only you heard the fragments of phone conversations we sometimes overheard when passing Carl’s office.

Benny told us that when Marilynn answered her cell, Carl considered stepping out of the car and storming off, but instead chose to stay and gaze out the window. He caught sight of the man who panhandled outside our building. He was always there, this man, sitting near one of the revolving doors, lifting and shaking a Dunkin Donuts cup as we entered, while his legs remained outstretched and crossed at the ankles. The sight of him, just the sight of him alone — which five years ago might have inspired Carl to empty his pockets of change — was a mnemonic torture device that now dropped with thundering anguish the whole memory load of innumerable days back upon Carl’s shoulders. They had lifted the night before, for an hour or two. But now, even before entering the building — by god, even before he had the chance to run screaming from another bit of Karen Woo gossip, or see the shine clinging to Chris Yop’s brow — they had reappeared, all the compounded days of Carl’s tenure, with the additional crushing weight of yet another day.

Do something! he had wanted to scream at the bum. He was close to rolling down the window and doing just that. He was offended that the man just sat there for his money. Other bums had positioned themselves. They had brands. “Vietnam Vet with AIDS.” “Unemployed Mother of Three.” “Trying to Get Back to Cleveland.” This guy had nothing — no words on a piece of cardboard, not even a dog or some bongos. For some reason it infuriated Carl. Yeah, there was a time he’d have given whatever was in his pockets; now he’d give the guy half his life savings, if he’d just choose a different building!

Benny had seen the Garbedians idling at the curb and had snuck up from behind and pounded on Carl’s window. Carl irritably waved him off. Benny assumed they were fighting so he left them alone. But Benny being Benny, he loitered around the front entrance where he wasn’t easy to spot, over by the post-office drop box. He had a good view of the car from there.

Inside Marilynn was still on the phone. She was discussing a matter of medical importance in a language Carl envied. He decided to make a call of his own. He took his cell phone out of his jeans pocket, hit speed-dial, and put the phone to his ear. His wife said into her phone, “Can you hold on a minute, Susan? I’m getting another call.” She looked down at the screen and then she looked over at Carl, who was looking straight out the window.

“What are you doing?” she asked him.

He turned to her. “Making a call,” he replied.

“Why are you calling me, Carl?” Marilynn asked with a firm, cautious bemusement.

Mornings had turned tetchy of late between the two Garbedians, sometimes downright traitorous. “Hold on one second,” Carl said to Marilynn, putting a finger up in the air. “I’m just leaving a voice mail. Hi, Marilynn, it’s me, Carl. I’m calling at about” — he lifted his arm and looked at his watch, a formal gesture — “it’s about half-past eight,” he said. “And I know you’re real busy, Sweetie, but if you could do me a favor and call, I’d love to just. . catch up. Chat. You have my number, but in case you don’t, let me give it to you now, it’s —”

Marilynn put her phone back to her ear and said, “Susan, I’m going to have to call you back.”

“Okay, bye-bye, Sweetie,” said Carl.

They both hit end on their cell phones at the same time. At some point, the new-message light on Marilynn’s phone began to blink.

JOE POPE STUCK his head over Jim Jackers’ cubicle just as Benny was coming to the good part in his story. Some of our cube walls were made of particleboard wrapped in a cheap orange or beige fiber and were so flimsy they wobbled from nothing more than the in-house draft. Other cube walls, like Jim’s, had been purchased just before the downturn and could withstand hurricane winds. Benny’s story came to an abrupt halt. Some of us departed Jim’s cube immediately, while the rest of us peered up at Joe nervously. Joe asked Jim if the mock-ups he was working on would be ready for the five o’clock pickup.

Joe had a tendency to interrupt. Sometimes it was a good thing. We could lose ourselves in one of Benny’s stories and the time would fly and then someone more important than Joe might come around and see us and that would be worse. We liked him at first, very early on. Then one day Karen Woo says, “I don’t like Joe Pope,” and she gives us her reasons. She goes on and on about it, for close to a half hour, a very spirited rant, until finally we had to excuse ourselves so we could get back to work. After that there was no doubt in anyone’s mind how Karen Woo felt about Joe Pope, and more than a few people agreed that she had a legitimate gripe — that if in fact the situation was as Karen reported it, Joe was not a likable person at all. It’s tough to say now what that gripe actually was. Let’s see, here. . trying to remember. . nope, not coming. Half the time we couldn’t remember three hours ago. Our memory in that place was not unlike that of goldfish. Goldfish who took a trip every night in a small clear bag of water and then returned in the morning to their bowl. What we recalled was that Karen didn’t let up on the story, day after day for an entire week, and when that week was over, we all had a better idea of Joe than we had gotten in his first three or four months.

Jim Jackers looked up from his computer. “Yeah, Joe, they’ll be ready,” he replied. “I’m putting the final touches on them now.”

Jim’s remark was Joe’s cue to depart, but instead he lingered over the cube wall. This was between the time of his first promotion and his second. “Thanks, Jim,” he said. He looked at us. We held our ground. We didn’t want to be bullied back to our desks by Joe Pope when Benny was in the middle of a good story. “How is everybody?” asked Joe. We looked around. We shrugged. Pretty good, we told him. “Good,” he said. He finally left and we raised our brows at one another.

“That was a disgusting display of power,” said Karen Woo.

We told Jim he had to leave if he was the one attracting Joe Pope’s attention. If he was the reason Joe was on the move in our direction, Jim had to go.

“But this is my cubicle,” said Jim.

“Maybe he was just trying to be friendly,” Genevieve Latko-Devine suggested. Genevieve had blond hair, cobalt eyes, and a tall, gelid grace. Even the women admitted her superior beauty. For Christmas one year, she was given as a gag gift a set of twisted redneck teeth, which she was instructed to wear year-round in an effort to even us all out. But when she put them on, we discovered — the men among us, that is — a desire for rotted teeth we never knew we had. We told Benny to go on with his story.

He picked up where he’d left off. Carl and his wife sat in silence a long time after hanging up their respective cell phones. Finally Marilynn, with tender, firm insistence, turned to him and said, “You need help, Carl.”

Shaking his head resolutely, Carl replied, “I don’t need help.”

“You need medical attention,” said his wife, “and you won’t admit it, and you’re hurting our marriage because of it.”

“I’m not depressed,” said Carl.

“You are a textbook case of depression,” Marilynn persisted, “and you need medication so badly —”

“How would you know?” he asked, cutting her short. He had turned at last to stare at her with an outraged and lonely expression. “You aren’t a psychiatrist, Marilynn, are you? You can’t know every angle of medicine — can you, can you possibly?”

“Cancer patients, Carl,” she said, exasperation rising in her tone, “are not the happiest people, believe it or not. I recommend antidepressants for many, many of my patients. I know a depressed person when I see one, I know the symptoms, I know the damage it can do to families, to. .”

He let Marilynn fade out. Just then, crossing the street on her way to work, was Janine Gorjanc.

Janine looked to Carl perfectly motherlike. Unpretty but not ugly. Hippy but not fat. Puffy about the face but with a youthful cuteness buried somewhere in there that might have caused someone to be crazy about taking her to the high school prom. A child, thought Carl, is not the only result of childbirth. A mother, too, is born. You see them every day — nondescript women with a bulge just above the groin, slightly double-chinned. Perpetually forty. Someone’s mother, you think. There is a child somewhere who has made this woman into a mother, and for the sake of the child she has altered her appearance to better play the part. Insulated from her as he was by the car, he could look without the urge to turn and flee, and it was the first time he had seen her in months, maybe years. “Carl?” Marilynn was saying. “Carl??”

“Marilynn,” he said. “Do you see that woman? That woman there, in the wrinkled blouse. She looks like a mother, doesn’t she?” Marilynn followed his gaze. “That’s Janine Gorjanc,” he said. “That’s the woman, I’ve told you about her,” he said. “Her daughter was killed. You remember? She was abducted. I told you about her. I went to the funeral?”

“I remember,” she said.

“She stinks,” he said.

“She stinks?”

“She emits some kind of smell, I don’t know what it is. It’s not every day. But some days, I think she just lets herself go. She doesn’t shower or something.” He watched her enter the building. Marilynn was looking at her husband, not at Janine. She was listening, trying to understand. “Marilynn,” he said, “I hate the woman for how she smells.”

“Have you ever tried talking to her about it?” she asked.

“But I hate myself even more,” he continued, unbuttoning his oxford, “for hating her. Can you even imagine what she’s been through?”

“Carl,” Marilynn said, “what are you doing?”

“The abduction,” he continued obliviously, “then the waiting, the terrible waiting.”

“What are you doing?” she cried.

“Then finding the body. Imagine finding the body, Marilynn.”

He was naked to his waist by then. He had removed the oxford and flung his undershirt over his head. “I don’t want to go into work today,” he announced, turning to his wife. He was breathing up and down with his paunch exposed, a hair-brushed hillock of pale, glowing belly. When Benny recounted all this to us, he said Carl had told him later he hoped Lynn Mason would walk by right then and see that unattractive feature and walk him Spanish for the sake of aesthetics. “Put your clothes on!” cried Marilynn.

“I don’t want to be the person that hates Janine Gorjanc,” he said. “If I go inside I will be that person because I will smell her. I don’t want to have to smell her. If I smell her I will hate her and I don’t want to be that person. You have to take me home.”

“Have you gone completely out of your mind?” she asked as she watched him yank off his tennis shoes, unzip his jeans and pull them down to his ankles.

He sat up in the front seat in nothing but his underwear. “I’m wearied,” he said, turning to her. “That’s what it is, Marilynn. I’m really very wearied. If you make me go inside, I’m going inside like this.”

“That,” she bellowed, “no —” She shook her head and laughed. “That is no threat to me, Carl.”

“I’m so wearied,” he repeated.

“Carl, put your clothes on,” she said, “and go inside, and by this afternoon, I will have made you an appointment to see a very good psychiatrist.”

“I’m not putting my clothes on until you take me home,” he said.

“Carl,” she cried, “I have to be in surgery in ten minutes! I can’t take you home!”

“Don’t make me get out,” he said. “Please don’t make me get out, Marilynn.”

“Oh, Jim, just one more thing —”

We looked up and saw Joe Pope just as he was peeking his head over Jim Jackers’ cube wall a second time. Benny shut up and Jim swirled around and Amber Ludwig started in fright and Marcia Dwyer took the opportunity to grab her Diet Coke and leave, while the few of us who stuck around listened to Joe inform Jim that he had just come back from Lynn Mason’s office. They had been discussing the mock-ups due out later that day, and they had thrown around some ideas about making changes to this and making changes to that, and when we heard that, one by one we got up and left because we knew what Joe Pope’s changes were all about — more work. It was always more work with that guy. The last of us overheard Joe saying, “I’m sorry to interrupt, Jim — is it an okay time?” and Jim replied, “Sure, sure, Joe, it’s a fine time. Come in and have a seat.”

Later that day it spread like wildfire. Joe Pope had received his second promotion.

He was our new Roger Highnote. He had a unique fashion sense that didn’t exactly fall in line with seasonal approbation and we wondered where he’d picked it up. What magazines was he reading? The following year we were all wearing similarly prestressed denims but by that point it hardly mattered. For an entire year he looked like an idiot. “Good-looking?” we said to Genevieve. “Joe Pope?” No, he was seriously one inch too short. He made our lives a living hell. And he was very awkward. But how to explain it? For it wasn’t the same awkwardness we felt with Jim Jackers. In the hallways Jim greeted everyone by saying, “What up, dawg?” a question he had the temerity to ask even Lynn Mason when passing her by. That was confused behavior. We all went to a party once, and Jim carried around his own box of wine. He also referred openly to his bowels as “Mr. B.” “Excuse me,” he would say, before departing for the restroom. “But Mr. B’s making it happen.”

Jim made us wince with awkwardness, but we winced for his sake. Joe Pope’s awkwardness caused an entirely different brand of wincing and it was hard to put a finger on. “‘He was not only awkwardness in himself,’” declared our own poetaster Hank Neary, “‘but the cause that was awkwardness in other men.’” And like always, we had no earthly clue what Hank was talking about. Unless he meant to say that Joe Pope’s presence made us feel awkward. That was very true. Joe felt no obligation to speak. He would greet and be greeted like a normal human being, but beyond that he remained brazenly, stoically silent. Even in a meeting or a conference call, the man could let long episodes of silence fill the room while he was thinking of what he wanted to say, without hemming and hawing nervously in order to fill the oppressive silence bearing down upon us all. Perhaps that could be called composure, but it made the rest of us uneasy, so much so that Hank, determined to get it right, returned with a second quote pulled from his infinite lode of worthless erudition — “‘He inspired uneasiness. That was it! Uneasiness! Not a definite mistrust — just uneasiness — nothing more.’” — and when that quote went from one of us to the other via e-mail, we congratulated Hank on finally saying something comprehensible. Uneasiness. That was it precisely.

He had a way of coming upon you suddenly. This happened a lot at print stations. One time, Tom Mota was standing at a print station when Joe sidled up next to him and said, “Morning.” Just at that moment, Tom had something awkward coming out of the color printer. Let’s just say it wasn’t exactly work-related. This was before the copy-code policy was implemented as part of the austerity measures, which also prevented Hank Neary from photocopying library books in the morning and reading the Xeroxed pages all day at his desk. Joe’s job no doubt was something official, and it was queued up behind Tom’s. Bad luck for Tom. So Tom said to him, “Are you just going to wait? You’re just going to wait there for your job to come out?” Joe’s response was to remain imperturbably silent. So Tom just came clean. “I have something coming out,” he said, “and be honest with you, Joe, I’d rather you not see it. It’s got some titties in it, and I know who you talk to,” he said. “And why do you always feel the need to rush over to the printer when your job is queued up behind all these other jobs, anyway?” he continued. “Why are you so eager? You do know it takes a while for these jobs to come out if they’re all queued up, don’t you?”

Who knows how Joe reacted to that. He was levels above Tom in the hierarchy but he probably suffered the man with more silence, patiently waiting for his job to come out. Maybe he tried to get a glimpse of whatever Tom was printing out, as Tom claimed, or maybe he kept his eyes straight ahead and thought, “Like I could give a good goddamn what this guy’s got printing out.” Either way he was probably inscrutable.

That was the word for him — inscrutable. His inscrutability created a pervasive uneasiness. Why did he have to be such a dull mystery? Nothing on his walls, nothing in his office but a bicycle. Which he locked. We heard it click every morning and tried not to take offense. Our opinion of Joe, he was too young to be inscrutable. If you’re thirty years old, you have interests. You make engagements with the world. Why was this guy always at his desk, surrounded by bare walls? “We have to show you this, this is our Joe Pope doll.” That’s probably how we’d explain Joe Pope to a new person. Not that we’ll ever hire someone new again. But if we did, we’d probably say, “We keep it in Karen Woo’s office. She hates Joe Pope. Come check it out. Now watch, it’s going to do a perfect imitation. Watch. Did you catch it?” “But it just sat there,” the new hire would say. “Exactly!” we’d cry. “Joe’s always at his desk. Now watch as he bends at the knees and pulls his chair in! Watch Joe Pope interrupt us over the cube wall! Pull the string and listen to Joe Pope say nothing! It’s the new Inscrutable-Action Joe Pope doll by Hasbro!”

WE HAD HAD A TOY client, a car client, a long-distance carrier, and a pet store chain. We did TV, print, direct mail, and Internet. We had a business-to-business division. We drank too much on the weekends. We had the great good fortune and shortcomings of character that marked every generation that had never seen war. If we had been recovering from the aftereffects of a significant campaign, we might have been grateful to be where we were. Eager, even. As it was, it was just us and our struggles to move up a notch chairwise. It was counting ceiling tiles in everyone’s office to determine who had the higher tile count. Sean Smith was in the first Gulf War but that hardly impressed us because all he did was drive a tank around a bunch of sand woefully devoid of enemy craft and when pressed, that was the extent of his recall. Frank Brizzolera might have seen World War II, but he died before we could ask him. We had one Vietnam vet but he never spoke of his experiences and quit within a year. Maybe he knew firsthand the blind jungle warfare we had learned about in school, had the sound of pitched battles in his head, and when he looked out his window at that proud parade of flags flying over the bridge across the Chicago River, he thought about particular sacrifices, men with names who had died, and said those names aloud to himself, and felt with palpable gratitude the simple luxury of returning to a chair in a building that was safe. Imagine the stories he might have told! Set in burning villages during darkest night — flares over riverbeds — choppers landing in rice paddies. We were always looking for better stories of more interesting lives unfolding anywhere but within the pages of an Office Depot catalog. But he never spoke of his experiences, and two months after he quit, no one could remember his name.

A better story than ours might be the one of two interoffice competitors, one male, one female, finding true love through rivalry in the workplace, written by our very own Don Blattner. Blattner was all Hollywood by way of Schaumburg, Illinois. He had another screenplay about a disaffected and cynical copywriter suffering ennui in the office setting while dreaming of becoming a famous screenwriter, which he claimed was not autobiographical. He was always talking about potential investors and wouldn’t let us read any of his screenplays unless we signed confidentiality agreements, as if we had positioned ourselves surreptitiously in these cornered lives so as to steal Blattner’s screenplays and whisk them off to Hollywood. Like Jim, he made us wince, especially on those occasions he called Robert De Niro “Bobby.” He studied the weekend box-office grosses very seriously. If a movie failed to perform as the industry expected, Blattner would come into your office on Monday morning carrying his Variety and say, “The boys at Miramax are going to be awfully disappointed by this.” It was such horseshit, yet we felt something had been lost the day he announced he was giving it up. “I gotta face it,” he declared in a resigned and unsentimental voice. “The workshops aren’t helping, the how-to books aren’t helping, and nobody’s optioning any of my shit.” We took back all our ridicule and practically begged the man to continue, but he remained firmly and pathetically committed to his sober-eyed conclusion that he would never be anything but a copywriter. Months passed before one of us experienced the relief of startling him at his desk again as he secretly tried to close out of his screenplay software. Hope had risen like a perennial once again.

There had to be a better story than this one, which was why so many of us spent so much time lost in our own little worlds. Don Blattner was not the only one. Hank Neary, our black writer who wore the same brown corduroy suit coat day after day, so that either he never cleaned the one, or had an entire closet full of the same, was working on a failed novel. He described it as “small and angry.” We all wondered who the hell would buy small and angry? We asked him what it was about. “Work,” he replied. A small, angry book about work. Now there was a guaranteed best seller. There was a fun read on the beach. We suggested alternative topics on subjects that mattered to us. “But those don’t interest me,” he said. “The fact that we spend most of our lives at work, that interests me.” Truly noble, we said to him. Give us a Don Blattner screenplay any day of the week.

Dan Wisdom had gotten encouragement in college from Miles Buford, the painter, who said in his twenty-year teaching career he had never seen a talent like Dan’s. Then Dan graduated and went to work, where he sat behind a Mac manipulating pixels for a sugar-substitute client and wondered if Professor Buford’s flattery was just an attempt to get laid. Dan continued to paint, though, at night and on the weekends, and if his portraits were a little grotesque, we could nevertheless discern a unique vision and a steady line. Maybe it would happen for him. He said no. He said figurative painting was dead. But we liked what he could do with fish.

Deliver us! You could practically hear that plea crying out from the depths of our souls, because none of us wanted to end up like Old Brizz.

Among the very first to be let go, Brizz walked Spanish down the hall like no one before or since. The season of layoffs was interminable, and to give a sense of that, Old Brizz’s termination took place a full year before Tom Mota got the ax. Old Brizz handled it much better than Tom did. He came by all our offices to say farewell. Usually people raced out to escape our gaze. Brizz said he didn’t want to leave without saying good-bye. That was grace under fire, and he carried himself with dignity and pride. He didn’t mind knowing that we knew that they didn’t value him as much as they valued us. Because that’s basically what they said when they walked you Spanish down the hall. He didn’t mind talking to us even after they said that to him in so many words. Or maybe he didn’t even think of it that way. Maybe he wouldn’t have understood our talk of value. “This has nothing to do,” he might have said, “with who’s worth more. Is that what you think? You guys, take it from an old man who’s been in this business a long time. This process has nothing to do with weeding out the worst of us so that the only ones left are the talented and the productive. Come on, don’t fool yourselves. Ha, don’t be foolish. Ha ha, don’t be naive!” We could hear his rattling lungs laughing at us. His coming around to fare us well, so calm, so self-controlled — it was a little unnerving. What did it mean that minutes after walking Spanish down the hall he had the poise to encourage us not to worry about him? He came by each one of our individual offices, he visited the cubicles and the receptionists. We even saw him talking to one of the building guys. They hardly said anything to anyone, the building guys. Just stood on their ladders handing things up and down to one another, speaking in hushed tones. There was never much of an opportunity to get to know them. But Old Brizz was standing at the elevator talking to one building guy in particular for half an hour while holding his box of personal items. One would speak, the other would nod. Then they’d laugh. Who knows what you laugh about with a building guy. But Brizz found it — the funny thing to be shared, even on the day he had been shitcanned. He filed for unemployment right away. A few months later, he still hadn’t found work. He took on a few freelance jobs. Then we didn’t hear from him. Next we knew he was in the hospital. No insurance. He went quick. It was unfortunate, how prescient we were when we said the guy had six months, tops. We visited him — ours seemed his only flowers. We wanted to ask him, Hey, Brizz, man, where’s your family? Instead we snuck him cigarettes, strictly forbidden when one is laid out in the cancer ward. We put one of those smoke-be-gone ashtrays right on his chest, and it caught the exhaust good, so Brizz got in three smokes before the old guy next slot over complained and we were reprimanded by the nurse. When he died, it was hard to believe he was gone. Not just walked Spanish down the hall. Gone gone.

Benny came around to collect. We couldn’t believe it. Benny wasn’t really going to profit from this, was he?

“He was on my list,” he said innocently.

We all shouted, Benny! Come on!

“Come on what?” he cried. “He was at the top of my list! Those are the rules.”

He wasn’t wrong. Those were the rules of Celebrity Death Watch. We all paid him his ten bucks.

At Brizz’s funeral we discovered he had some family after all, a brother with a health-club glow. We called him Bizarro Brizz because he had good skin with a good color. Probably never smoked a cigarette in his life. It was as if jowly, ruddy Brizz had taken off a terrible mask. We offered him our condolences. After preparing ourselves in the pews for a while, some of us braved the front. Brizz in the box looked much healthier than Brizz at his desk. Afterward, at the wake, we tried to recall memories of him. We remembered one thing, the time we stood with him at the parking garage waiting for the bow-tied Hispanics to pull up with our cars. We had our single-dollar tips folded in the palms of our hands. God was it freezing. We were out of the way of the wind under the bright light of the garage, but Chicago in February, if you’ll allow an homage to Brizz, was colder than a witch’s tit in an icebox. He still called a refrigerator an icebox. He sat at his desk once and told us of being a kid and having the ice delivered. “That’s how old I am,” he confided to us in a rare moment. “I remember the ice being delivered.” “Did you used to call Australia ‘Tasmania Land’?” asked Benny. “Not that old,” said Brizz. Just then, Joe Pope arrived at Brizz’s doorway and asked him if he had those headlines ready. That’s what we were talking about with Old Brizz as we waited for our cars in the final freezing February of his tenure as one of us, certain aspects of Joe Pope’s character. We couldn’t pin Old Brizz down, though, try as we might. His car was the first to come out. It was a gray Peugeot, a one-time looker, but rusted around the trim now and dented in places high and low. The real story was the interior. Stuff — crap — accumulated junk — how else to put it? — filled the backseat windows to the roof. Paper mostly, but smashed against the glass we also made out a winter hat, a beer cozy, an unopened package of nude hose — things like that. Along the ledge of the doorframe we noticed scattered coins and green plastic houses from the game of Monopoly. “Brizz,” said Benny. “All these extras come from the dealership?” “Have you guys never seen my car before?” Brizz asked with pride. “Is that what this is?” asked Larry Novotny. “A car?” He bent at his knees and resettled his Cubs cap on his thinning hair while peering through the windows at the trash heap inside. The front passenger seat was hardly any better than the back, but there was a nice niche carved out for the driver behind the wheel. We had to wonder — who keeps a car like that? Was he really one of those people? The car-park man got out and turned the car over to Brizz, but Brizz never tipped. That was another thing about Brizz: he usually stayed in and ate his baloney sandwiches, but when he came out to lunch with us, we had to supplement his share of the tip so as not to screw the waitress, which made us hate him momentarily. “I got a tip for you,” he replied, when someone asked him once why he was so cheap. “Never take no wooden nickels.”

We heard that time and again — “Never take no wooden nickels” — until we wanted to clobber him over the head with a mallet. Except for the surprise of his homeless-man’s car, and his half-hour conversation with the building guy on the day he was terminated, Old Brizz was fatiguing in his predictability. He came in, he proofread in a pair of nineteen-fifties eye frames, he left at ten-fifteen for the day’s first smoke break. Good god, we could still see him standing in the winter freeze outside the building in nothing but a ratty sweater vest, jowls like a hound dog’s, pulling on his pointy cigarette. He came back in smelling like fifty butts in an ashtray. He brought out his baloney sandwiches at quarter past noon and chased them down with a Thermos of black coffee that he made at home because he claimed the stuff down the hall was too gourmet for his taste.

One day not long after Brizz’s death, Benny started calling us into his office. Benny’s office had all the cool stuff in it. A gumball machine, remote-controlled cars. He put an anatomical skeleton against the wall just inside the doorway, so it stared back at him at his desk. Everyone asked where he got the skeleton. His answer was always “Some dead guy.” He duct-taped a Buck Rogers gun to the skeleton’s hand and crowned the smooth skull with a cowboy hat.

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 that 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 —”

“Yeah, I know,” said Carl, cutting him short. “I know all about that, trust me. I’m married to a doctor.”

“Right,” said Tom. “So what I guess I’m asking is, why steal it? Why not have somebody prescribe something that’s right for you?”

“Because I don’t want to have to see a doctor,” said Carl. “I hate doctors.”

“Your wife’s a doctor,” said Tom.

“It’s a problem,” said Carl. “Plus if I did that, it might get back to her somehow, and then she would know that she was right about me being depressed. It’s just easier to go into Janine’s and take it from her. She has a million of these things in there,” he said.

He reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a prescription bottle and handed it to Tom.

“Do you know anything about what’s in here?” asked Tom, shaking the bottle gently and reading the label. It was a three-month supply. “Three hundred milligrams,” he said. “That sounds like a lot.”

“I just follow the instructions on the label,” said Carl.

Tom asked him if he had noticed any change in his mood.

“It’s only been a week,” Carl replied. “It’s probably too early yet.”

There was a knock at the door. In silence Tom handed Janine’s drugs back to Carl and Carl returned the bottle to his desk. When Carl called out, Joe Pope appeared.

“Sorry to interrupt you at your lunch, Carl,” he said.

“That’s okay.”

“I’m actually here for Tom,” said Joe.

Tom turned in his chair and gave Joe a sidewinder gaze.

“I wondered if you wouldn’t mind joining us for an input meeting later this afternoon,” Joe inquired of him.

“Sure,” Tom said. “What time?”

“Three-thirty, Lynn’s office?”

“You bet.”

When that got around — Sure, what time? You bet. — we didn’t know what to make of it. All Tom would say was, “What was I supposed to say — no? Go shove it up your ass, Joe, no input meeting for me? I got child support to pay, man. Believe it or not, I need this job.”

We didn’t doubt that. It was just that we could recall a time in the Michigan Room when Tom Mota was less agreeably disposed toward Joe Pope. All of our conference rooms were named after streets running along the Magnificent Mile, and the view from Michigan was stupendous. The whole city was spread out before our eyes, layer after layer of buildings tall and squat, wide and thin, a giant matrix of architectural variation cut up by taxi-glinting thoroughfares and back alleyways and the snaking Chicago River, and every surface from burnished window to ancient brick was brightening under the August sun. The irony of the view from the Michigan Room was that it drove us mad with desire to be out there, walking the city sidewalks, looking up at the buildings, joining the swell of other people and enjoying the sun, but the only time we ever felt that urgency was when we were stuck at the window in the Michigan Room. Otherwise we left for the night and all we could think about was getting around the goddamn tourists and heading the fuck home.

On the day Tom and Joe really had it out, a month or so before Tom’s gift to Carl, it had evidently gotten back to Joe what was said here and there — at a lunch, before a meeting. Idle speculation, you know. Sometimes material for an honest debate where everyone took sides, but more often just as a joke. It’s what we did, we talked. We weren’t doing anything the Greeks weren’t doing around their shadowy, promiscuous campfires. And neither, apparently, was Joe Pope, because just as we were capping our pens, all our notes taken and questions answered, and now only a half minute’s distance from the restroom or telephone or coffee bar — whatever beckoned loudest — Joe, who was running his own input meetings by then, said to us, “Oh, one last thing.” He paused. “Sorry, just give me one more minute here.” We settled back down. “I feel the need to bring this to our attention,” he said. “Look, I understand the need to talk. Most of the time, that’s a good thing. We talk, we laugh. It makes time go faster. But I’m not sure we’re always aware of some of the things we’re saying. We might not mean anything by them, this or that or the other thing might just be a joke, but it gets around, and sometimes, one person or another hears about it and they get upset. Not everybody. Some people just laugh it off. Look, as an example, I know I’m talked about. No big deal to me. I take no offense. But other people, they hear things, it hits them in a certain way. You can’t blame them. They get bothered, or hurt, or it embarrasses them. I’d prefer those type of things we try to keep to a minimum. I’m not saying don’t talk. I’m just saying, reduce the volume a little, make sure that what you’re saying doesn’t hurt anybody. Okay?”

There was a long, unendurable pause as he looked around at all of us in case we had questions. “Okay, that’s my little speech,” he concluded. “Thanks for indulging me.” At last we were released. We started to get up again. We had no idea Joe carried with him the reformer’s spirit. We had mixed feelings about reformers. Some of us thought they were noble, and likely to change nothing. Others were outright hostile. Who the fuck is he — that sort of response.

“You know, Joe,” Tom Mota said, just as we had started to file out. “There’s really nothing wrong with being gay.”

Joe cocked an ear at him, but managed still to look him firmly in the eye. “With what?” he asked.

“Hank Neary’s gay,” Tom continued, avoiding the direct question. Hank was just then pushing his chair in. He looked startled to be the sudden subject of conversation. “Aren’t you, Hank? And he has no problem with it.”

“Tom,” said Joe. “You must not have heard anything I just said.”

“No, I heard you, Joe. I heard you loud and clear.”

People halfway out the door halted in their tracks.

“Then maybe you didn’t understand,” Joe tried to clarify. “The point was there’s right talk, Tom, and there’s wrong talk, and who’s gay or who isn’t gay, that’s the wrong talk, understand? That kind of talk could be construed as slander.”

“Slander?” said Tom. “Whoa, slander — Joe, that’s an expensive word, slander. Do we need to involve lawyers? I have lawyers, Joe. I have so many fucking lawyers it would be no problem putting them to work on this one.”

“Tom,” said Joe. “Your anger.”

“Excuse me?” said Tom.

“Your anger,” Joe repeated.

“What the fuck does that mean,” said Tom, “‘Your anger’? Is that what you just said, ‘Your anger’?” Joe didn’t reply. “What the fuck does it mean, ‘Your anger’?” Joe left the room. “Does anybody know what the fuck he means by ‘Your anger’?” asked Tom.

We knew what “Your anger” meant because we suffered from the same anger from time to time. We suffered all sorts of ailments — heart conditions, nervous tics, thrown-out backs. We had the mother of all headaches. We were affected by changes in weather conditions, by mood swings and by lingering high school insecurities. We were deeply concerned about who was next, and what criteria for dismissal the partners were operating under. Billy Reiser came in with a broken leg. At first everyone was excited. How did it happen? We gathered down at his office as soon as word spread, as if guided by a voice or a high-pitched frequency. Talk was like the flu: if it started with one, soon it infected all. But unlike the flu, we couldn’t afford to be left out if something was going around. We wanted Billy to tell us how it happened. “Softball,” he explained. That was it? “Bad slide,” he elaborated. We couldn’t help feeling disappointed. We told Billy we hoped he felt better soon and left again for our desks. A reason like that was hardly worth getting up for. Then over the next ten or twelve months, Billy proceeded to hobble around on his crutches, and swear to god you could hear the guy coming from six miles away. Jesus, we said eventually, aren’t you off those things yet? “Complications,” he said. He went through a series of surgeries. There were metal pins involved. Doctors said he might walk forever with a limp, so he was considering a lawsuit. We felt sorry for him, but at the same time, Billy heaving himself across a hallway, the joints of his crutches creaking like a nineteenth-century whaler — it might not sound like much, but day-in day-out, it started to grate. We understood “Your anger” whenever Billy passed by, irrational and unforgiving anger which caused some of us to call him, at one point or another, every derogatory name for a handicapped person in the book — mean and insensitive names like “crip,” “gimp,” and “wobbler” — while others we made up on our own. “The guy’s name is Reiser,” said Larry Novotny, “but he can’t even stand up on his own two legs.” Amber clucked at him for shame and the rest of us for the poverty of the pun but from then on we never called Billy by his first name again. It was always Reiser. Of course we took pains not to let Reiser get wind of our frustrations with him, most days. Most days we let human foibles run right off of us, as Jesus commanded. “Let he that is without sin cast the first stone,” for we had among us our fair share of believers. We had a Bible study group. They met for lunch every Thursday in the cafeteria. A motley crew of condo-board executives, South Siders, recovering anorexics, building people, receptionists. It was an ebb-and-flow crowd, mimicking faith itself. The Word was the source that brought us all together. We drifted in and out of it, trying to make sense of the Word as it applied to us in our personal lives as well as in the corporate setting, but most of us just stayed away. More power to them, we liked to say. What were we missing? we wondered at night. How boring to listen to them go on and on about God, we thought every Thursday around noon. We had to ask, was this really the place for God? The sight of a dozen Bibles open on a cafeteria table and the familiar heads now bowed in a wild transformation of our long-established expectations of who they were shook us a little, as if forcing us to confront the possibility that we knew nothing, absolutely nothing about the inner lives of anyone here. But that soon passed. Our scope was infinite, our reach almighty, our knowledge was complete. Goddamn it, sometimes it felt like we were God. Was it such a blasphemy? We knew everything, we had terrible powers, we would never die. Was it a surprise that most of us did not join in at Bible study?

“I don’t really give a shit if the guy’s a homo or not,” said Tom Mota, a week or so after his encounter with Joe Pope in the Michigan Room. “I just want to know what the fuck he means by ‘Your anger.’” There was an opening between two clusters of cubicles that allowed enough room for a couple of round tables and several chairs where we found ourselves congregating some mornings around a box of Krispy Kremes or a bag of bagels that someone, inspired by the possibility of a brightened day, purchased and brought in and shared with the rest of us. The human spirit shining through against all adversity. We were enjoying our breakfast, drinking our first cups of coffee of the morning, when Joe Pope comes by carrying some ad freshly ripped from the printer and asks who brought in the bagels. “May I have one?” he asked. Genevieve Latko-Devine said of course he could and he thanked her and we expected him to be on his way after that but he lingered to spread some cream cheese and then he sat down among us, thanking Genevieve again. It was all very casual, as if routine, nothing out of the ordinary. We felt it, though, right here — Joe Pope’s unexpected presence. Bonhomie took a holiday.

Things got very quiet, until Joe himself finally broke the ice. “By the way,” he said. “How are you all doing with the cold sore spots?”

We were in the process of coming up with a series of TV spots for one of our clients who manufactured an analgesic to reduce cold sore pain and swelling. We took in Joe’s question kind of slowly, without any immediate response. We might have even exchanged a look or two. This wasn’t long after his second promotion. Doing okay, more or less, we said, in effect. And then we probably nodded, you know, noncommittal half nods. The thing was, his question — “How are you all doing with the cold sore spots?” — didn’t seem a simple question in search of a simple answer. So soon after his promotion, it seemed more like a shrewd, highly evolved assertion of his new entitlement. We didn’t think it was actual concern or curiosity for how we were progressing on the cold sore spots so much as a pretense to prod our asses.

“You do know, Joe,” Karen Woo finally said, “that it’s only nine-thirty in the morning, right? Believe it or not, we are going to get to the cold sore spots today.”

Joe looked genuinely misunderstood. “That’s not why I was asking, Karen,” he said. “I have every confidence you’ll get to it. I was asking because I’ve been having trouble coming up with something myself.”

We remained suspicious. He rarely had a hard time coming up with anything.

“The difficulty I’m having,” he explained, “is that they want us to be funny and irreverent and all that, but at the same time, they don’t want us to offend anybody who suffers from cold sores. It seems to me those two things are mutually exclusive. At least it makes it hard for me to come up with an ad that’s worth a damn.”

By noon, we knew that the son of a bitch was right. It was extremely tough to strike a balance between being funny about the unsightly effects of a cold sore while protecting against offending anyone watching who might suffer the unsightly effects of cold sores. It was one of those impossible, harebrained paradoxes that only a roundtable of corporate marketers smelling of competing aftershaves could have dreamed up — in a different land, in a different era, those tools would have come up with the dynasty’s favorite koans. We had to admit maybe Joe Pope had no other intention in asking his question that morning but to inquire if we were having as hard a time with the cold sore spots as he was, and that our hasty assumptions were the result of a miscommunication. Some of us continued to suspect him, however, and as the fine points faded, on balance the episode probably didn’t go in his favor.

It didn’t improve matters when we gathered down at Lynn Mason’s cluttered office two days later to present to her our concepts for cold sore spots and Joe and Genevieve unveiled Cold Sore Guy. We knew right away that not only would Cold Sore Guy be one of the three concepts we’d send to the client, but that it would be the spot they ran, and ran, and ran, until you and everybody else in America grew intimate with Cold Sore Guy. The fucker nailed it, he and Genevieve, who was the art director of the pair, just fucking nailed the great koan of the cold sore marketers. Door opens on the background of suburbia, and standing in the bright doorway is a pair of attractive young lovebirds. “Hi, Mom!” says the girl. “I’d like you to meet my special someone.” Cold Sore Guy offers Mom his hand. He indeed has an unsightly, somewhat exaggerated cold sore on the right corner of his upper lip. “Hi, I’m Cold Sore Guy.” “Of course you are!” says Mom, taking Cold Sore Guy’s hand. “Come on in!” Cut to Kitchen. Stern-looking Father. “Daddy,” says the girl. “I’d like you to meet Cold Sore Guy.” “Cold Sore Guy,” says Daddy sternly. “It’s nice to finally meet you, sir,” says Cold Sore Guy, giving Daddy’s hand a firm shake and smiling wide as a bell with his egregious cold sore. Cut to Living Room. Alzheimer’s-looking Grandmother. “Grandma?” says the girl, shaking the frail woman vigorously. “Grandma?” Grandma comes to, sits up, looks at Cold Sore Guy and says, “Well, you must be Cold Sore Guy!” “Hi, Grandma,” says Cold Sore Guy. Voice-over explains features and benefits of the product. Tagline: “Don’t let a cold sore interfere with your life.” Final cut to Dining Room. Stern-looking Father: “More mashed potatoes, Cold Sore Guy?” “Oh, love some, sir!” Fade.

We had all this for the first time only on storyboards, but the immediacy was undeniable, and we just knew he’d nailed it, him and Genevieve. The entire family was welcoming. They liked the guy. They shook hands with him. It was funny, but the subject of the fun was embraced. Cold Sore Guy was the hero. Plus, he could eat mashed potatoes. No one eats mashed potatoes with a cold sore like his, but superhero Cold Sore Guy did. And what’s more, it never said we could cure a cold sore. That was always the toughest maneuver we had to make with that particular client. We could say we could treat a cold sore, but we were forbidden from saying that we could cure one. Joe’s spot said nothing about treating or curing — he just managed to make the cold sore sufferer a sympathetic person. The client loved it. And when they cast it with the right actor, the guy looked even more sympathetic and performed it hilariously, and the ad was replayed on the Internet and took home awards and all the rest.

The day following the unveiling of Cold Sore Guy, Joe came into his office with his bicycle as he did every morning and found the word FAG written on the wall with a black Sharpie. It slanted up, in the hand of a child or a man in haste, not unlike what you might see on the back of a stall door in a bar. Now something was on his wall — nothing big, but definitely noticeable. We thought, sure, we’re a dysfunctional office sometimes, but nobody we know could do a thing like that. Maybe it was somebody harboring animosity against Joe in some other realm of his life, who snuck past security one night, found Joe’s office, and Sharpied away his soul. But in the end, that didn’t sound very likely, and we had no choice but to conclude that Joe, in search of some local attention, had put it up there himself before leaving late the night before.

3

MORE LAYOFFS — WHY MEDIA BUYERS SUCK — THE BILLBOARD — YOP AT THE PRINT STATION — THE DOUBLE MEETING — LYNN IN SURGERY — WE KNOW WHAT JOE KNOWS — THE TWO-MARTINI LUNCH — AMBER’S REAL CONCERN — HONEST WORK — SOME GUY TALKS TO BENNY — GENEVIEVE’S ACCUSATION — JANINE GORJANC IN THE POOL OF PLASTIC BALLS — THE SETUP — WE APOLOGIZE — PAINTBALLS

IN THE EARLY WEEKS of 2001, they let go of Kelly Corma, Sandra Hochstadt, and Toby Wise. Toby had a custom-made desk in his office, which he’d commissioned out of a favorite surfboard — he was a great surfing fanatic. The desk took a while to dismantle, extending his period of stay beyond the usual protocol. Then he asked for help carrying the pieces down to the parking garage. We loaded the desk in the back of his new Trailblazer and prepared to say good-bye. This was always the most awkward time. Everyone had to decide — handshake, or hug? We heard Toby shut the tailgate on the Trailblazer and expected him to come around to where we had congregated. Instead he hopped into the driver’s seat and powered down the tinted window. “So I guess I’ll be seeing ya,” he said, with a jolly lack of ceremony. Then he powered up the window again and took off. We felt a little slighted. Was a handshake too much to ask? If he was just bluffing his way out of a bad hand, if that was just his poker face, it sure was an exuberant and bouncy one. He stopped at the curb to look for cars and then pulled out with a little squeal. It was the last we ever saw of him.

In the weeks leading up to Tom Mota’s termination, in the spring of that year, Tom was found departing Janine Gorjanc’s office with great frequency. Hard to say what they were talking about. We loved nothing more than to lay waste to a half hour speculating about office romance, but we could not conceive of a stranger pair. The petulant, high-strung Napoleon exiled to an Elba of his own mind, and the acrid mother in mourning. Love worked in funny ways. We forgot they had things in common — lost children. They consoled each other, perhaps. They shared the long indefatigable nightmare of not knowing what to do with the burden of a materialized love that refused their private requests to wane, to break, to please just go away, and so they found themselves directing that love toward each other. But that was only how we killed time. In fact, there was no love affair. Tom just wanted the billboard to come down.

Our media buyers, like Jane Trimble and Tory Friedman, tended to be small, chipper, well-dressed women who wore strong perfume and had an easy knack for conversation. They kept bags of sweets in their desk drawers and never gained any weight. They spent most of their time on the phone talking with vendors, the deadening prospect of which made us gag, and for their services, they received random gifts and tickets to sporting events, the blatant unfairness of which angered us with a blind and murderous envy. Because they put the orders in and talked with friendly inflections in their voices, they were bribed with largesse, like dirty checkpoint guards, and we thought they deserved a special ring of hell, the ring devoted to corrupt mayors, lobbyists, and media buyers. That was how we felt, anyway, during our time in the system. When one of us walked Spanish and got out of the system, we thought back on those loquacious and smiling media buyers as just some of the nicest people.

Tom’s gripe was with Jane. “He’s got to take that goddamn billboard down,” he said to her after walking into her office without a knock or a greeting. Unfortunately Jane knew just what he was referring to: the vendor with whom she had placed the order. Flyers of the missing girl were not the only effort we had made to help Janine and Frank Gorjanc during the days of their short-lived search for their daughter. Using some of their money, supplemented by hastily raised funds, we had the same image of Jessica from the fourth grade with the word MISSING and a number to call placed on a billboard on I-88 facing westbound traffic. Long after the girl had been found, that billboard was still up there. Jane tried to explain that nobody wanted to see that billboard come down as much as she did, but that these things took time when there was no immediate turnover. “No immediate turnover?” cried Tom. “It’s been six months!” “He promises me he’s working on it,” Jane replied with the courtesy and patience expected of media buyers. “Well that’s not good enough,” Tom barked at her. “At least have him strip it.” “Stripping,” explained Jane sheepishly, knowing how crass she must have sounded, “unfortunately costs money, Tom.”

It was an unpopular space, that was the problem. Far out on I-88, west of the Fox River, metropolitan Chicago effectively came to an end, yielding its industrial parks and suburban tract housing to fields of alfalfa and small towns with single gas stations. Billboards in North Aurora were good for casino boat and cigarette ads, and maybe the occasional AIDS awareness campaign, but little else. The vendor might have taken a hit on the rental fee but to rent it at all was likely a great boon to him, and he probably never had a client complain about continued exposure after the lease expired. Free advertising — who could complain about that?

If there was an opportunity to complain, we complained. The creative team complained about the account team. The account team complained about the client. Everybody complained at one time or another about human resources, and human resources complained among themselves about each and every one of us. About the only people not complaining were the media buyers, because they were showered with bribes of tickets and gifts, but when Janine complained to Tom about the billboard, Tom Mota took that complaint to them. The billboard, he said, advertised Jessica as missing, when Jessica had not been missing for months. Jessica had been found. Jessica had been buried. He complained that Janine had to see that billboard on the side of I-88 every day on her way home from work, had to be reminded of the week she spent waiting in numb and desperate hope that that billboard might help in some way to bring her little girl back, and of her devastation when she learned that it would not. Now that billboard was nothing but a vicious reminder, broadcasting from a great height the girl’s cruel fate. Tom wouldn’t stand for it. He complained about the son-of-a-bitch vendor who moved unconscionably slowly, and about the bright, uncomplaining dispositions of media buyers like Jane Trimble — complained so much that Jane had to get on the phone with the vendor and complain. When she got off the phone with the vendor, Jane called Lynn Mason to complain about Tom Mota — just one more complaint that must have contributed to his eventual termination.

On the morning in May Lynn Mason was scheduled to be in surgery, the day after she let go of Chris Yop, Yop was back in the building, standing at a print station. Marcia Dwyer was startled to find him there. It was early morning. Marcia had come to photocopy the inspiring tale of a cancer survivor featured in an outdated issue of People magazine. When Yop turned and saw her, he gave a start like a cornered animal. “Christ Almighty,” he said. “I thought you were Lynn.”

“Lynn’s in surgery today,” she said, “remember?”

Marcia spoke with a hardcore South Side accent and wore the accompanying tall hair with bangs. Her black curls in back were held in place by some miraculous fixative. If we knew her at all, as she spoke with Yop she probably had one hand on her hip with her wrist turned inward.

“What are you doing back here, Chris?” she asked.

“Working on my resume,” Yop said defensively.

Marcia told us about this encounter a half hour later, when the day officially began. We had congregated by the couches for a double meeting. The day after a meeting with Lynn we usually had a postmeeting meeting conducted by Joe, where the finer points of the project were hammered out without wasting any more of Lynn’s time. Of late, Lynn spent her days in meetings with her fellow partners in an effort to keep us solvent. Not wasting her time had become an imperative.

It was just like us to have two meetings for one project. No one ever wondered if the existence of double meetings might have some bearing on Lynn’s need to have solvency meetings — or if they did, they kept their mouths shut. After all, we liked double meetings. Only in a double meeting could you ask the questions you were reluctant to ask in the first meeting for fear of looking stupid in front of Lynn. We wanted to die looking stupid in front of Lynn, but we didn’t mind it in front of Joe.

One agency we knew about, out in San Francisco, had architects come in to design a floor plan that included live trees, dartboards, flagstones, sun panels, coffee kiosks, and a half-court big enough for a game of three-on-three. Those lucky bastards knew no such thing as a conference room or a frosted-glass door. We had to suffer such insults, but in recompense, we were given mismatching recreational furniture intended to inspire the creative impulse and upon which we were encouraged to lounge. Located in open spaces where the windows lengthened and allowed sunlight to pour in, these little hot spots were a nice break from corridors and cubicles, and where we always went to double meet. Marcia was perched on the edge of one of the recliners, and her hair was particularly tall and sculptural that morning.

She told us Yop seemed offended when she asked him what he was doing at the print station. “It was like he expected me to be a major bitch about it and start hollering for security,” she said, “but I was just asking what he was doing. I mean, just yesterday the guy was laid off, right — and this morning he’s back in the building? What’s that about?”

We couldn’t believe Yop was back in the building.

“I asked him, I says, ‘You shouldn’t be here, right?’ And he says to me, ‘No, I shouldn’t be here.’ So I says, ‘So what happens if somebody catches you?’ and he says, ‘Well, then I’m fucked.’ ‘What’s that mean, you’re fucked?’ I says, and he says, ‘Trespassing!’”

We couldn’t believe that. Trespassing? Would he be arrested?

“Yeah, can you believe that?” Yop asked Marcia. “That’s what I was told right after the input yesterday when Lynn called me back into her office, remember? My presence in the building will be construed as criminal action. I was like, ‘Lynn, you have to be kidding me, right? After all I’ve done for this place, you’re going to have me arrested for trespassing?’ She stops drawing the blinds — she wasn’t even looking at me when she said it! But anyway, she sits down, and you know that look she can give you, where it’s almost like she’s burning your brain out with her laser eyes? She pulls her chair in and she gives me that look and she says, ‘I’m sorry, but you can’t still be here, Chris. You’ve been terminated.’ So I say to her, ‘Yeah, I know that, Lynn, but when we were having our conversation earlier and I couldn’t keep it together, remember? and I had to leave your office? I didn’t think I would have to leave leave until we had a chance to finish our conversation, like how we’re doing now. Because I still have one important thing to say before I go.’ So she says to me, ‘Chris, tell me whatever it is you have to tell me, but then you need to leave. Understand? I can’t take any chances with you in the building.’ What the fuck, right? She can’t take any chances with me in the building? What am I going to do, steal Ernie’s chair? Maybe I could get down the hall with it into the freight elevator. I’d still have to walk it past security. How am I going to get out of the building with Ernie’s chair? ‘So go ahead,’ Lynn says to me. ‘What do you have to say?’ ‘Okay, I just want to know one thing,’ I tell her. ‘Do you know or have you ever known anything about serial numbers?’ This is what I ask her. ‘Does the phrase serial numbers mean anything to you personally?’ How does she respond? She says, ‘Serial numbers?’ Yeah, she looks at me like I’m crazy. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Chris,’ she says to me, ‘serial numbers.’ You see — I KNEW IT!” Yop howled in a frantic whisper, flinging a furtive glance in the direction of the print-station doorway. And in a softer voice, “I fucking knew it! That office coordinator made the whole thing up! It’s her own personal system. There’s nothing official whatsoever about the serial numbers! She has a punch gun. You know what I’m talking about, with the wheel? That’s where they come from! The serial numbers! Lynn didn’t even know about them! She was like, ‘Serial numbers?’ So I tell her everything about the serial numbers, about how the office coordinator made them up, keeping tabs on everything like Big Brother or something. But so anyway, she listens, very politely, but then she says, ‘Is that it?’ And I’m like, ‘Well, yeah, but —’ I thought at the very least she would call the office coordinator back in and we’d start over and this time I’d get a fair shake. But it was obvious there was no chance she was going to give me my job back. So that’s when she tells me that if she finds me in the building again, she’s going to have to report me to security, who will call the police, who will arrest me for trespassing. Can you believe that?” Yop’s tumid, rheumy eyes bulged out at Marcia. He really wasn’t in the best of health. “After all my time here,” he continued. “So that’s when I thought, ‘Oh, yeah? Well, watch me come back here tomorrow and print out my resume using your machines. You know what they charge at Kinko’s for printing like this? No way I’m spending my last paycheck at Kinko’s. I’ve given a lot to this place, and I think I should be allowed to save a few bucks on printing. By the way,” he said. “Would you proofread it for me?”

“So I says to him, ‘Proofread what?’” Marcia said to us just before the double meeting began. “He wanted me to proofread his resume! I couldn’t believe it. I was like, ‘Chris, I’m an art director. You’re the copywriter. You do the proofing, remember?’ I mean, honestly, I spell like a person in an institution. But still he says, ‘Yeah, I know, but I really need another pair of eyes on it.’ And then he stands there holding out a pen. A red pen! He wants me to do it right there in the print station!”

So Marcia stood at the copier proofreading Yop’s resume, stealing glances at the door now and again because she didn’t want to be seen with somebody who could be arrested for trespassing. As she worked, he engaged her in conversation. He asked if she wanted to know the twisted thing about being terminated. “The really sick and twisted thing,” he said. “You wanna know what it is?”

“I was trying to concentrate on his resume,” she said to us, “and I was also watching the door because I didn’t want anyone to walk in and see me with the guy. I already knew the sick and twisted thing: that sorry drip was back in the building. But I didn’t say that, because I was trying to be nice.”

“The sick and twisted thing,” Yop confessed, “is that I want to work. Can you believe that? I want to work. Isn’t that sick? You understand what I’m saying here, Karen? I’ve just been terminated, and inside my head I’m still working!”

“Oh my god,” said Marcia, looking up from his resume. “My name is Marcia.”

“At that point,” Marcia said to us, “I was through. He doesn’t even know my name?”

“What did I say?” said Yop.

“You just called me Karen,” replied Marcia.

“Karen?” Yop looked away and shook his head. “Did I? I said Karen? I’m sorry,” he said. “I know you’re not Karen, you’re Marcia, I know that. You and me worked together a long time, I know who you are. You’re Marcia, you’re from Berwyn.”

“Bridgeport.”

“I know who you are,” said Yop. “Karen’s someone else. Karen’s the Chinese girl.”

“Korean.”

“My mind is just totally fried this morning, that’s all,” he said. “I hope you forgive me. Anyway, the point I was trying to make. .”

“WHAT?” Marcia cried at us from her perch on the recliner. “WHAT is the point you’re trying to make, you stuttering jackass? Berwyn? I could not believe that the guy got my name wrong.”

“The point I was trying to make,” Yop continued, “is that I find myself thinking about the fund-raiser. Can you believe that?”

“What fund-raiser?” asked Marcia.

“The fund-raiser,” Yop replied. “The fund-raiser we have to come up with ads for.”

“Oh, for breast cancer,” said Marcia, nodding. “The pro bono project.” She was reminded that in a few minutes she had a double meeting to attend.

“But then I thought, he doesn’t!” cried Marcia. “I just wanted to say to him, ‘Oh my god, Chris — you don’t work here anymore. Give the fund-raiser ads up. Leave the building. Proofread your own frickin’ resume! But my god,” she said, “he wouldn’t stop talking. He says to me, ‘Can you believe I can’t stop working in my head? I keep working and working and working — isn’t that sick and twisted?’ Well, yeah. Yeah it’s sick and twisted. You don’t work here anymore! But I didn’t say that. I was trying to be nice. I do try to be nice sometimes. So even though he didn’t know my name I went on proofreading his stupid resume, which had so many mistakes. How did we ever hire that guy to be a copywriter? I’m pointing them out to him, all these misspellings and typos and things, when he says, totally out of the blue — I mean, I have no idea where this comes from. I know something’s wrong, though, because he’s not talking talking talking, he’s just looking at me, so I look up from his resume and I says, ‘What?’ and he says, ‘It’ll happen to you, too, you know. Don’t think it won’t.’ And I says, ‘What will happen to me?’ ‘Getting fired,’ he says. ‘It’ll happen to you just like it’s happened to everyone else, and then you won’t be above everybody like how you act now.’ I could not believe what I was hearing,” she said to us. “I was proofreading the fucking guy’s resume — me! — making improvements on the thing, and he tells me that I’m going to get laid off? And not just that, but also that I hold myself above everybody else? Just because I hold myself above that sorry drip doesn’t mean I hold myself above everybody. I was trying to help him get a new job, for god’s sake! Wasn’t that nice of me? I mean, what an ass crack! Isn’t he a total ass crack,” she asked us, “to say to me, ‘Oh, and by the way, this bad thing that just happened to me? It’s going to happen to you, too.’ What if Brizz had done that? What if Brizz had said, ‘Thanks for visiting me in the hospital, guys, but just so you know, one day you’ll all be dying, too, and when that day comes, you won’t be able to breathe, either, you’ll be in such pain and misery, and then you’ll die. So good luck, you jerks.’ So I ripped his resume up into little pieces and threw them in his face, and one little piece stuck on his forehead, he was sweating so much. And I said something really mean to him. I couldn’t help it, I says, ‘You sweat so gross it makes me sick.’ I shouldn’t have said that. But I loved saying it, because it is gross when he sweats. What a fucking jerk! Telling me I’m going to get laid off. You guys have to remember,” she said. “You have to understand. I’ve been on eggshells since the input yesterday.”

We asked Marcia why she should be on eggshells. She looked around conspiratorially, unusual for her, because she typically didn’t give a damn who heard her say what. Marcia was never on eggshells. She was born and raised in Bridgeport, she changed her own oil, she listened to Mötley Crüe.

“Because I’m the one who took Tom Mota’s chair,” she confessed. “You understand? Tom’s chair is in my office. It’s always been the rule that when someone leaves, if you get in there first you can take their chair. I got in there first, I took Tom’s chair. I didn’t know anything about serial numbers. Not until that tool started jabber-assing about them yesterday at the input. Since then I’ve been on eggshells. It’s made me crazy. I want to get rid of it, but because he took Ernie’s chair down to Tom’s office, trying to pretend it was really Tom’s and not Ernie’s, I can’t take Tom’s real chair down there because then Tom would have two chairs. Isn’t that going to look suspicious? But if they look and see I have the chair with Tom’s serial numbers on it — don’t you see, I have the chair with the serial numbers! What should I do? Who knew about these serial numbers? I didn’t. Did you?”

She was as breathless and worked up as Yop himself. We told her to get ahold of herself. Chris Yop was not let go just because he was caught with Tom Mota’s buckshelves. He was let go because he can’t even draw up his own resume without filling it with typos. Lynn Mason and the other partners couldn’t trust million-dollar ad campaigns to sloppy copywriters — that is, if we ever had million-dollar ad campaigns again. That’s why Chris Yop was let go.

All the same, we thought it would be prudent of her to go into Tom’s office and swap Ernie’s chair with Tom’s. It was a delicate time, and in delicate times it made sense to take every precaution. Better to be caught with Ernie’s chair than with Tom’s. And just as we said that, we caught ourselves talking about such things as which chair Marcia would be better off being caught with, and we realized then how far we had fallen.

JOE SHOWED UP TO the double meeting carrying his day planner, which was predictable and annoying. We were irked by the steadfast familiarity of that goddamn day planner. Sometimes we almost thought we could like Joe if just one time out of ten he left that leather-bound diary behind at his desk. But no. The couch and the two loveseats and the leather recliners were all taken so Joe had to sit on the floor.

At a double meeting a couple things always happened. Joe split us up into teams, one art director for every copywriter. Ideally, after the double meeting, each team would get together and brainstorm ideas. How it worked in practice was always a little different, however. The copywriter went off on his own and the art director did the same, generating ideas independently of one another. Then they got together to battle it out. Who was wittier, who had more savvy, who had sailed it out of the park. We all had the same prayer: please let it be me. Regardless of who that me was, he or she tried to be very discreet about it, but there was no denying it, they reigned victorious for a day while the rest of us returned to our desks to chew silently on our own spines. We had lost, and our dimwittedness made us vulnerable to low opinion, whispered denigrations, and the dread prospect of being next.

So imagine our surprise, and our chagrin, when we sat down at the couches with our coffees to double meet — during which time we only refined details, we only requested clarifications — and Karen Woo announced that she already had ad concepts. She had an entire campaign. “You know what, I’m sick of seeing attractive sixtyish-type women smiling into the camera and saying, ‘Look at me, I’m a survivor. I defeated breast cancer.’ That’s bullshit,” she said. “This industry needs to cut through the happy-smiley clutter and get nasty with some truth.”

We looked at her with our chins floating in our coffee cups. Hold up! we wanted to shout. You can’t have concepts. We haven’t even double met yet!

“What’s your idea?” asked Joe.

Her idea? We’ll tell you her idea, Joe. To slaughter. Nobody talks about it, nobody says a word, but the real engine running the place is the primal desire to kill. To be the best ad person in the building, to inspire jealousy, to defeat all the rest. The threat of layoffs just made it a more efficient machine.

“It surprises me that you have concepts already, Karen,” said Larry Novotny. Karen and Larry didn’t get on so well. “It really surprises me.”

“Initiative,” Karen said smugly.

“I don’t want to speak for anybody else,” Larry added, “but to be honest, it really surprises the hell out of all of us.”

Karen leaned forward on the sofa and turned to Larry in his recliner, his eyes hard to see under the arced canopy of his Cubs cap. He was wearing one of his boring flannel shirts. They had a stare-down. Karen and Larry didn’t get on because Larry was an Art Director and Karen a Senior Art Director and titles meant everything. Every AD wanted to be a SAD. If you were a SAD you had your eyes on becoming an Acker. Acker was our phonetic translation of Associate Creative Director. Ackers wanted to be Creetors (Creative Directors), and every Creetor envied the Eveeps. You could either be a Creveep (Creative Executive Vice President) or an Ackveep (Account Services Executive Vice President), but both species hoped equally to be invited one day into partnership. What the partners dreamed of was the stuff of Magellan, da Gama, Columbus, et al.

The point was we took this shit very seriously. They had taken away our flowers, our summer days, and our bonuses, we were on a wage freeze and a hiring freeze, and people were flying out the door like so many dismantled dummies. We had one thing still going for us: the prospect of a promotion. A new title: true, it came with no money, the power was almost always illusory, the bestowal a cheap shrewd device concocted by management to keep us from mutiny, but when word circulated that one of us had jumped up an acronym, that person was just a little quieter that day, took a longer lunch than usual, came back with shopping bags, spent the afternoon speaking softly into the telephone, and left whenever they wanted that night, while the rest of us sent e-mails flying back and forth on the lofty topics of Injustice and Uncertainty.

“Karen,” said Joe. “What’s your idea?”

Karen broke off from Larry and turned to Joe.

“Take a look,” said Karen. She unveiled three polished concepts she called the “Loved Ones” campaign. From the stock houses she had secured close-ups of individual faces, all male. The first was a black boy, the second an Asian man, the last an older white gentleman. They looked directly at the camera without expression. We all thought, she’s been on Photonica’s website for the past eighteen hours looking for these gems. The headlines were an exercise in simplicity and the art of the tease. Each was a quote. With some work in Photoshop, Karen had the black boy holding a white placard that read, “My Aunt.” The Asian man’s placard said, “My Mother.” The old white guy’s said, “My Wife.” That was it, the images and the headlines. They were arresting enough, Karen believed, that anyone coming across them would be prompted to read the body copy, where a first-person testimonial explained the anguish of losing a loved one to breast cancer and the dire need for a cure.

“Bit of a downer,” suggested Larry, “don’t you think?”

“No, Larry. I don’t think. It’s gripping and honest and motivating, is what it is.”

“Not very palatable.”

“It is too palatable, Larry!”

“It’s like seeing African kids starve on the TV, Karen. Maybe we can get Sally Struthers involved.”

“Joe,” said Karen.

“Larry,” said Joe.

“I’m just saying, Joe,” said Larry.

We hated Karen Woo. We hated hating Karen Woo because we feared we might be racists. The white guys especially. But it wasn’t just the white guys. Benny, who was Jewish, and Hank, who was black, hated Karen too. Maybe we hated Karen not because she was Korean but because she was a woman with strong opinions in a male-dominated world. But it wasn’t just the men; Marcia couldn’t stand her and she was a woman. And Marcia loved Donald Sato, so she couldn’t be a racist. Donald wasn’t Korean but he was Asian of some kind, and everybody liked him as much as Marcia did even though he didn’t say a whole lot. One time, Donald did say, as he turned away from his computer for a brief moment, toward a group of four or five of us, “My grandpa has this weird collection of Chinese ears.” We had been discussing something, it wasn’t like it just came out of nowhere. But at the same time, it wasn’t unusual for an entire day to go by where Donald said only, “Uh, maybe,” like four or five times, half of them without even directing his attention away from his computer, and then five o’clock hit and no more Donald. Now he’s telling us about his grandpa’s — “What do you mean, a collection of ears?” asked Benny. “Are you talking real ears, like real ears?” “Ears from the heads of Chinese people, yes,” Donald assented, having turned back to his computer screen. “A whole sack of them.” The mystery deepened. “A sack? What kind of a sack?” Sam Ludd, who smoked a lot of pot and frequently smelled like Funyuns, turned to Benny to communicate something to him in the secret language of laughter. “But seriously,” Benny persisted, pivoting on the window ledge to look at Donald straight on, “what the fuck are you talking about, Don?” “And what would constitute a nonweird collection of Chinese ears?” asked Sam, who lasted about two and a half seconds after layoffs began. “They’re from the war,” Don told the screen. “He doesn’t like to talk about it.” “But you’ve seen it?” said Benny. “There’s more than just one,” said Don. “No, the sack, the sack,” said Benny. Don looked at him and nodded. “Yeah.” “Well did he, like, cut them off himself? did he buy them? were they given to him as a gift? Don, talk to me.” “I don’t really know much more. I know he was in the war. Maybe he cut them off, I don’t know. That’s not something you can really ask your grandpa.” “Okay, but. .” Benny was flustered, “you shouldn’t bring it up then, man, if you don’t have more information.” “I think you’re wrong, Don,” said Sam. “I think you can ask a grandpa if he cut the ears off Chinese people.” “What did they look like?” asked Benny. “Can you tell me that?” Don told the screen he didn’t really know what they looked like. They looked like ears. Dead old shriveled ears. And the sack was just a felt thing with a drawstring. Benny nodded and bit his cheek.

Anyway, Karen Woo. Did we dislike her because we were racists, because we were misogynists, because her “initiative” rankled and her ambition was so bald, because she wore her senior title like a flamboyant ring, or because she was who she was and we were forced by fate to be around her all the time? Our diversity pretty much guaranteed it was a combination of all of the above.

“I think the problem I’m having with this project, Joe,” said Benny, astraddle a sofa arm, “is knowing the fundamental approach we should be taking here. Is this just a benign reminder that breast cancer research needs money, or do we want to kick some ass à la Karen’s dead relatives there and get people to send checks overnight?”

“Maybe somewhere in between,” Joe answered, after a moment’s thought. “That’s not to rule these out, Karen. I like them. Let’s just have some of us go in one direction and the rest of us go in the other.”

We discussed print dates, who the project services people would be, and then we broke into teams. Joe was the first to stand. Just before leaving he announced that we would not be showing finished concepts to Lynn; we would be showing them to him.

We all wanted to know how come. Joe replied that it was because Lynn would be out of the office for the rest of the week.

“The rest of the week?” said Benny. “Is she on vacation?”

“I don’t know,” said Joe.

But he did know. He knew just as we knew that she was in surgery that day and would be in recovery when the concepts were due — the difference being that he probably got his information straight from Lynn, whereas we had to get ours from other sources. We never disliked Joe more than when he had information that we had, too, which he then refused to tell us.

“CAN WE PLEASE STOP talking about Joe Pope for two minutes?” asked Amber Ludwig when Joe had left the couches after the double meeting. We had stuck around to discuss the fact that we knew what he didn’t think we knew and how annoying that was.

“What should we be talking about, Amber?” asked Larry. “Karen’s dead people?”

“They’re called Loved Ones, Larry.”

Amber was, we all knew, preoccupied by something that had come to light just last week, when Lynn Mason received a call from Tom Mota’s ex-wife informing her that Tom had apparently dropped out of sight.

Barbara, the ex-wife, had received some curious communications — voice mails, e-mails, handwritten letters — full of quotations from various sources: the Bible, Emerson, Karl Marx, The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm, but also, disconcertingly, The Anarchist’s Philosophy, a McLenox publication. Amber looked on the McLenox website and discovered they brought out such titles as Hiding Places Both Underwater and Underground and How to Make a Fake Birth Certificate on Your Home Computer.

Tom’s messages to his wife were oddly lucid arguments for correcting the awful predicament of an individual who found himself stuck in a rut, with many allusions to love, compassion, tenderness, humility, and honesty, along with some not-so-lucid references to doing something that would “shock the world,” as he put it, that would make his name go down in history. “‘All history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons,’” quoted Tom in an e-mail that had, by three o’clock the previous Friday afternoon, been forwarded to everyone in the office. “Barbara,” it concluded, “you laugh, but I intend to be one of those persons.”

Barbara called Lynn to find out if anyone else had heard from Tom. “And I guess to sort of warn you,” Barbara added. “I hate to put it that way, because I never used to think of him like that. But then he shows up at the house with a baseball bat and destroys everything in sight, which causes you to think, maybe I never really knew this person. I didn’t know him then and I don’t know what he’s capable of now, and I don’t really want to stick around to find out.”

“I can’t say I blame you,” Lynn replied.

“So I’m calling just to say that I’ve been trying to get in touch with him, just to make sure. . you know. But. . and I don’t want you to think he’s going to do anything. . unexpected. I just thought I should let you know I can’t find him.”

“I appreciate the call,” said Lynn.

She got off the phone and called Mike Boroshansky, the South Side Pole in charge of building security. Mike let everyone on security detail know about the possible situation. They taped a picture of Tom to the security desk in the lobby, and during the day, Benny’s friend Roland compared it with visitors coming in through the revolving doors, and at night, the other security guard did the same.

We alone had perspective. Tom Mota was not going to do anything crazy. He was crazy, but he wasn’t crazy. We couldn’t believe how worried they were. Posting a picture of Tom? Everyone knew that was nuts.

Everyone except Amber Ludwig, who could remember with characteristic anxiety Tom Mota after he’d had two martinis at lunch. How rare it was for anyone to have a martini at lunch anymore. To watch Tom have two, it was a pure delight. “What has happened to America,” he would ask, and then stop himself. “Hey, I’m talking here.” We had to halt our conversations and pay attention to him. “What has happened to America,” he continued, “that the two-martini lunch has been replaced by this, this. .” He gazed at us with disdainful shakes of his bulldog’s head. “. . this boothful of pansies, all dressed up in your khakis and sipping the same iced tea? Huh?” he said. “What has happened?” He genuinely wanted to know. “Didn’t General Motors,” he continued, lifting the new martini in the air delicately, so as not to spill, “IBM, and Madison Avenue establish postwar American might upon the two-martini lunch?”

It was only the beginning of the vodka talking in him. “Cheers,” he said. “Here’s to your Dockers and your Windbreakers.” He reached out for the glass with his full, flushed lips while trying to hold the stem steady in his hand.

After returning to the office on those days, in the dull hours from two to five, we never knew what to expect from him. Sometimes he would nap in a stall in the men’s room. Sometimes he would stand on his desk in his socks and remove the panels of fluorescent lighting from his ceiling. Passing by, we’d inquire just what he was doing up there. “Why don’t you go fuck your own asshole?” he’d suggest. That was always lovely. But it wasn’t the behavior of a madman, in our opinion. He was someone inconsolably trapped and going stir-crazy, aggressive and in need of release, which was, after all, the reason for the two-martini lunch. We spent a lot of time talking about how the job and the divorce were turning Tom Mota into an alcoholic.

Who was an alcoholic, whether early onset, functional, or fall-down drunk — that was always a topic of conversation. Who was fucking who, that was another. It was no secret that Amber Ludwig was fucking Larry Novotny. Amber would like us to stop talking about that now. But was it not true? If not true, not another word on the subject. Well? Amber? Unresponsive. Okay — what, then? If not the subject of fucking Larry, and if you’ve just asked that we stop talking about Joe Pope, what should we talk about? After all, the democratic principle underpins this madness. The floor is yours. Argue, once again, that you don’t feel safe here anymore, that Tom Mota always gave you the creeps, and that what we call antics and low comedy you call homicidal insanity. Amber?

“Last night I tried to sleep,” she said, “but I couldn’t stop worrying.”

We tried telling her for the fiftieth time that he was not coming back. She gazed around as if she were Marcia, as if she had Marcia’s power to reduce us with a single withering glance to small and ridiculous beings. But when Amber did it, the gaze turned inward and revealed something about her, that she felt misunderstood and therefore hurt.

“What are you talking about?” she asked. “Are you guys talking about Tom Mota again? How can you be talking about Tom Mota at a time like this?”

Who was she talking about?

“Who else?” she said. “Who could I possibly be talking about right now?”

By then it was certainly time for us to get up, return to our desks, and try to catch Karen in the pursuit of the best fund-raiser concept, but for some reason nobody moved. “Can you believe she might be in surgery right now?” Amber asked us. “I mean this very minute. Does anybody know what time it was scheduled for?”

“I don’t think anybody knows that,” said Genevieve.

“Last night,” continued Amber, “I don’t know why, but I was wondering if she had a boyfriend.”

“Oh, I actually know something about this,” Genevieve announced.

Amber was startled. “What, what do you know?”

“That she was dating a lawyer.”

“How do you know that? She told you?”

“Oh, no. I saw them at a restaurant with my husband. He knew the guy. They were opposing counsel on a case.”

“You saw them at a restaurant?” said Amber. “What did he look like?”

“Kind of heavyset, if I remember. But not fat. Sexy, I thought. I thought they made a good-looking couple.”

“So what happened? Are they still together?”

“Oh, I don’t know that,” said Genevieve. “I only saw them once at a restaurant.”

There was silence. It seemed pretty clear we were all wondering what Lynn Mason did at night when she went home. Did she watch TV, or did she think TV was a waste of time? What hobbies did she have? Or had she sacrificed hobby-having to professional ambition? Did she exercise? Was her diet particularly bad? Did she have a history of cancer in the family? Who was her family? Who were her friends? What had happened between her and the lawyer? And how did she feel, being in her forties, never having married?

“I wanted to call her last night and offer to drive her to the hospital,” said Amber. “Can you imagine that? She’d have been like, ‘Amber, please don’t call me at home at eleven o’clock at night.’ Click.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Genevieve. “She might have been touched. Remember her birthday?” We had made an infomercial for her on her birthday, editing together testimonials from everyone about how great she was. “She was very touched,” said Genevieve. “I don’t think we give her enough credit for being human.”

“It’s hard,” said Benny. “She’s scary.”

“I can’t picture her on a date,” said Larry.

There was more silence, until Genevieve asked, “Do you really think she needed a ride to the hospital?”

WE BROKE APART, climbing down to fifty-nine and up to sixty-three and to the floors in between. If something was on the radio we kept it low. The weather outside, telling from our windows, was overcast but not cold. Spring had finally arrived. We settled down to the fund-raiser ads. We opened a new Quark document, or took out our pencils. Every once in a while a nicely sharpened pencil would crack on the page upon impact and we’d have to go in search of the one electric pencil sharpener. That was annoying. Back in our chairs we drummed the eraser between our teeth. If a stray paper clip happened to be lying around we were likely to bend it out of shape. Some of us knew how to turn a misshapen paper clip into a projectile that could hit the ceiling. If our attention was drawn to the ceiling, we usually recounted our tiles. When we returned to our computer screens, we erased whatever false starts we found there, suddenly embarrassed by them. We had the feeling that our bad ideas were probably worse than the bad ideas of others. Those of us who worked on sketch pads were engaged by that point in the great unsung pastime of American corporate life, the wadded paper toss. This, more than anything, was what “billable hour” implied. It was always annoying when an eyelid started to twitch. We did some drag-and-drop. What was missing was an interesting color palette, so we leaned back in our chairs and gave it some thought. What Pantone would be perfect for a fund-raising event? No one ever admitted to it publicly, but there were days of extreme sexual frustration. The phone would ring. It was nothing. We checked our e-mail. We clicked back into Quark and established new snap-to guides. Sometimes our computers froze and we would have to call down to IT. Or we needed something from the supply room. Lately inventory in the supply room seemed half of what it used to be, and the woefully bereft shelves recalled to mind TV programs that documented seasons of drought and low crop production in the history of a foregone people. But usually we needed nothing from the supply room. We took out our bags of snacks from our desk drawers, or we chewed our fingernails. Suddenly a blinding flash of the obvious would strike, and a flurry of keyboard noise filtered out into the hall. We thought, “This is not a half-bad idea.” That was all we needed, one little insight. Soon the roughest look, the crudest message, started to shape itself into coherence. Inevitably when we reached that point, we stopped to use the restroom.

What was the likelihood, if we were being honest, that this one fund-raiser, one of a thousand, no matter how many donations it might receive, would really get us any closer to a cure for breast cancer? Who knows, maybe it would. None of us understood how advances in medical science worked. Maybe they needed only one more dollar and our solicitations would put them over the top.

We also saw our work that day as doing a personal favor for Lynn, even if we couldn’t help feeling that, by choosing not to tell us that she had cancer, she had cheated us of one of our most dearly held illusions — namely, that we were not present strictly for the money, but could also be concerned about the well-being of those around us.

MAYBE THIS WAS why she didn’t tell us:

Not long after layoffs began, things started going missing from our workstations. Marcia Dwyer’s handcuffs, Jim Jackers’ Mardi Gras beads. At first we thought we must have misplaced these things. We had loaned them out, or maybe they’d fallen behind a bookshelf. Don Blattner ran framed movie stills around his walls, with a particular emphasis on scenes from The Lost Boys and From Here to Eternity. Larry Novotny had a collection of World Series pennants dating back to 1984. Who could say why we felt the need to display such things in our offices? For some it helped to say, Hello, this is me. Others just liked having their useless shit around in the place where they spent most of their time. When that useless shit began to disappear, we got angry.

We never suspected the cleaning crew. Those quiet souls weren’t likely to risk their legal status for a paperweight and a few plastic wind-up toys. It was a marvel — never a CD Walkman, never a wallet left by accident on a desk overnight. Instead, Karen’s snow globe of Hawaii. Chris Yop’s gold-plated nameplate. Pictures in cheap frames of our fat parents on vacation. Things of sentimental or practical value to no one but us.

Benny’s friend Roland from security worked an occasional night shift. One Friday morning during this time, Benny asked him, “So what’d you find in there?”

“Well, I looked,” said Roland. “The filing cabinets first off. Nothing in them. I even looked through the file folders themselves. I looked through the bookshelves next, but there aren’t a whole many books there on his bookshelf.”

He was talking about Joe Pope’s bookshelf. Some people had convinced Benny to have a talk with Roland, if just to see what would come of it, and Roland had taken Benny seriously.

“And I looked through his desk drawers, too,” Roland continued. “There wasn’t nothing there, either, except this lucky rabbit’s foot.”

“A rabbit’s foot?” said Benny. “Let me see it.”

Roland handed over a keychain attached to a rabbit’s foot. Before the day was through Benny had shown it to everyone and we all said no, none of our useless shit had ever included a rabbit’s foot keychain.

“Must belong to the prior occupant,” Roland concluded when Benny handed it back to him.

After that, somebody who shall remain anonymous went into Benny’s office; he said he had something he wanted to float by Benny. Benny got a chuckle out of it. Then the guy said, “But hold on, Benny — we’re not joking. We’re serious.” And Benny, still chuckling, said, “Yeah, it’s funny, it’s clever.” The guy cut him off. Benny wasn’t listening, Benny wasn’t hearing him. “We’re dead serious,” the guy said. Now Benny could see the guy wasn’t kidding. “Are you serious?” said Benny. “Are you listening to me or not, Benny?” the guy asked. “We are dead, dead, dead serious.” “Oh,” said Benny. “I thought you were just joking.” “No, we’re not joking,” he said. “We are not joking.” “Who’s ‘we’?” asked Benny. “Benny,” said the guy, “don’t be so fucking dense. What do you say, are you in or not?” “You’re talking about deliberately setting him up,” Benny said. “As a joke!” the guy cried. “Just as a stupid practical joke!” “That doesn’t sound right to me,” said Benny. “Why not?” “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just not something I think I want to do.” The guy could only clap his hands on his knees and stand up. “Okay,” he said. “Suit yourself.”

After the guy left, Benny called down to security. “What can I do you for, Benjamin?” asked Roland. “Look,” said Benny. “I think you should stop making inspections of Joe’s office. How many times have you been in there now?” Roland told him that he stopped by there every time he worked a night shift, so every Thursday night. “And have you ever found anything?” “Nothing,” said Roland, “except that lucky rabbit’s foot.” “Listen,” Benny said, “we were just kidding around one day, saying he could be the one because he’s really the only guy who stays here until nine or ten at night. He makes us feel like we’re not working hard enough because we don’t stay here half as long as he does. But it was just a joke, Roland. He’s not your guy. He doesn’t want our knickknacks.” “So if it’s not him,” said Roland, “who is it?” “Hey, Roland, you’re the security man here. You should be telling me that.” “But I thought you said you knew who it was.” “It was a joke!” cried Benny. “A joke! It’s not him!” “Well, I won’t go in there anymore, then, if you’re telling me I should be looking elsewheres.” “I’m telling you,” said Benny. “You’re not going to find anything if you go in there.”

A day or two after this conversation, Joe Pope went in search of a woman named Paulette Singletary. Paulette was a sweet black woman of forty or so with hair parted in the middle almost exactly like a thatched roof. She had a greeting for everyone. It might not sound like much to have a greeting for everyone, but in an office as big as ours, we saw people every day whose faces we knew better than our own mothers’, yet we’d never been introduced to them. Maybe we’d sat together in a meeting or seen them at an all-agency function, but because we’d never been introduced, we averted our eyes as we passed them down the hall. Paulette Singletary was the only one among us who would stop someone and say, “You and I haven’t met yet, I don’t think. My name’s Paulette.” It might have been a southern thing. Paulette came from Georgia and retained an accent you could hear ever so faintly. With a greeting for everyone, a warm smile, and an easy laugh, Paulette was everyone’s favorite. It was a challenge finding someone so universally approved, unless it was Benny Shassburger, and even Benny had his detractors.

Joe went in search of Paulette, but not finding her at her workstation he took the liberty of replacing the small piece of stained glass in his hand — an angel of blue and russet — which he knew belonged on Paulette’s cube wall, because he had seen it there over a succession of weeks and months. From the minute he saw the glass glinting unexpectedly from the corner of his office, Joe knew where it belonged.

The following day, one of the new high-powered laptops went missing.

“You all are up to something,” Genevieve Latko-Devine said, sweeping her finger across a good number of us, “and I think you should knock it off.”

This was maybe a day or two after the stolen computer. Tough to recall if her remark — an accusation, really, a broad and mostly unfair one — came before an input, at lunch, or at the coffee bar, or maybe in an off-moment when several of us were gathered around some workstation before returning to our desks. Joe had told her how puzzled he’d been to find Paulette Singletary’s stained glass in his office. He wouldn’t have noticed if the door had remained open at that hour of the afternoon, but he had closed it to get some work done and there it was, catching sunlight in the corner.

Most of us honestly had no idea what Genevieve was talking about. “Oh? Was that also the case,” she asked us, “when someone Sharpied FAG on his wall?”

“That was Joe who did that,” said Karen Woo.

“Oh, give me a break, Karen. That’s ridiculous and you know it.”

“I don’t think it’s so ridiculous,” said Tom.

“You guys are sick in the head,” said Genevieve.

“Prove it,” replied Tom.

“Okay,” said Genevieve. “What about the time you decorated his office in biohazard tape?”

A few people earlier that year had gotten their hands on a roll of yellow plastic biohazard tape and given Joe’s office a good dressing. Whether he ever figured out the insinuations being made by that particular tape — that as a “fag,” he was a carrier of unpleasant disease — was unknown. In fact he never discussed the event. He just removed the tape from his doorway and his chair and, after parking and locking his bicycle, carried on as though nothing had happened. He didn’t seek names or run to Lynn Mason. He just placed the tape in his wastebasket.

“Or,” continued Genevieve, “what about the time — and this is one of my personal favorites — you locked him out of the server?”

Because all of our jobs were located on one central server, if one person had a job open on his or her computer, nobody else could open that job. It was a matter of protocol — only one person working on any one job at any given time. That way we eliminated redundancies and things of that nature. Word spread that Joe was on deadline on a project and needed access to a specific document. All it took to lock him out of that document was one person pulling it up on-screen. When Joe discovered he was locked out, he sent one e-mail, and then another, and then a third asking whoever had the document open to please close it, he was on deadline. Nobody replied. He was forced to walk around looking at everyone’s computer. When he found it at last the computer’s owner apologized to him, closed out of the job, then called someone else on a different floor on a faraway computer who would then open the job before Joe even got back to his desk, locking him out again. He’d return to the first guy, who would plead innocent, a half hour later he’d find the second guy, who would apologize, close out, and call someone new, starting the cycle over again. According to them, the idea was, if Joe Pope likes a late night, let’s give him a late night.

“Sick in the head,” said Genevieve.

First of all, we told her, we had nothing to do with Paulette Singletary’s stained glass ending up in Joe Pope’s office. And the whole FAG incident? Mike Boroshansky investigated and personally cleared every one of us of responsibility, and that included Tom Mota. Was it really so crazy, we asked Genevieve, to suggest that Joe had done it himself? Maybe he was seeking attention, or had a persecution complex. Besides, we continued in our defense, we weren’t trying to excuse anyone’s behavior, but Joe Pope wasn’t the most social guy in the world. After-work drinks for Joe Pope? No chance. Joe, you want to grab some lunch? Forget about it.

“When was the last time,” Genevieve asked us, before shaking her head and walking away, “that any of you asked Joe to lunch?”

GENEVIEVE MADE HER ACCUSATION around the same time that Karen Woo stopped by Jim Jackers’ cubicle one afternoon and made her infamous announcement.

“I’ve just come back,” she said, “from McDonald’s.”

It was like some kind of revelation, the way she said it. Jim looked up from whatever preoccupied Jim when he was at his desk. “Oh my god,” said Karen, moving closer, taking a seat in the plastic chair beside his desk, “I have just come back —” she paused for effect “— from McDonald’s.”

“What’s at McDonald’s?” asked Jim.

In Jim’s defense, it was impossible not to engage Karen when she stopped by your workstation. Her voice was a force of nature, her conversation a fast-moving rapid full of deadly churning eddies. She was like Hitler without the anti-Semitism, MLK without the compassion or noble cause. At the same time, Jim was an easy mark. He’d stop whatever he was doing and listen to just about anyone.

“Okay, I never go to McDonald’s,” said Karen. “I haven’t been to a McDonald’s probably since college. I wake up this morning, I have the biggest jones for a Filet-O-Fish.” “That’s weird,” said Jim. “Isn’t it?” said Karen. “So random. It’s seven in the morning, and I have the biggest jones. So, okay, I have to wait till lunch. I make it to eleven-thirty. But it’s still only eleven-thirty! I can’t go over to McDonald’s at eleven-thirty and order a Filet-O-Fish. That’s gross.” “Is it really called Filet-O-Fish?” asked Jim. “What, you think it’s Fish-O-Filet?” “No, I thought it was McFilet,” said Jim. “No it’s not McFilet, Jim,” said Karen. “That’s dumb. That’s seriously dumb. It’s not McFilet. Will you just listen to my story? So I wait an extra half hour, it kills me, but I wait. I go over there. They’re fucking out of Filet-O-Fishes. I’m standing at the counter, I’m like, uh. . uh. . and then I basically just fall over and die.” “So what’d you order?” “No, Jim, that’s not my point. I ordered nothing. I hate McDonald’s. I’m not ordering any cow product from McDonald’s, that’s disgusting. I wanted a Filet-O-Fish.” “So where’d you end up going?” Karen rolled her eyes and threw her head back in a display of monumental exasperation. “Jim,” she said, “you’re just not getting it. That’s not my point. Will you please just listen to my story? I had to pee real bad,” she continued, “so I went through the dining area to the back, and you’ve been to that McDonald’s, right? You know that to the left is the bathrooms, and to the right is the play area. You know what I mean by the play area, right? With the McFry guys, and the cheeseburger merry-go-round and all that?” “The PlayStation,” said Jim. “PlayStation, whatever,” said Karen. “No, PlayStation is the videogame,” said Jim. “PlayPlace!” “PlayStation, PlayPlace — whatever, Jim. You know what I’m talking about, right?” Jim nodded. “Okay, in the PlayPlace, they have one of those netted-off areas with all the plastic balls inside. You know what I’m talking about?” “Sure,” said Jim. “The pool of plastic balls.” “You know it?” asked Karen. “I know it,” said Jim. “So I go to the bathroom, I come out, I happen to look through the door to the PlayPlace — something catches my eye. I stop, I look. It’s Janine Gorjanc.” “What do you mean, it’s Janine?” said Jim. “In the pool of plastic balls,” said Karen. “What do you mean, in it?” “She’s inside with the balls,” said Karen. “Just sitting inside it. The balls up to here.” “What are you saying,” said Jim, “she’s sitting inside the pool of plastic balls?” “Inside it,” said Karen, “yes, with the balls up to here.” “What was she doing in there?” “Sitting.” “Right, but why?” “You’re asking me?” said Karen. “How should I know?” “Are you sure it was her?” “It was Janine Gorjanc,” said Karen. “She was sitting inside the pool of plastic balls.”

The following day Karen convinced Jim to follow her to McDonald’s. They ordered lunch — Karen finally got her fish sandwich — and then had a seat at a booth toward the front. Before even taking a bite, Karen said, “Be right back.” When she returned, she said, “Go look.”

“Is she in there?”

“Go look,” said Karen.

When Jim got to the bathroom, he stared through the door to the PlayPlace but saw nothing. Nervous, he rushed inside the men’s room. When he came out, however, he realized that he had all the time in the world. He stared through the door and then through the loose black netting into the darkened space where ordinarily one found children flopping around, tossing balls at one another, and grabbing hold of the netting for balance as they stalked along the ever-shifting surface of hundreds of balls. But all that wild activity had been replaced by the still, mournful presence of Janine, the same heavy and muted presence she carried with her everywhere around in the office. Jim felt it palpably even through the glass door. Not one ball stirred. Not one happy child banged about. She was not submerged, as Karen had described it for him the day before. Her legs, to the knee, were merely lost beneath the balls. It looked as if she were resting poolside, which she was, in a manner of speaking, though her motionless slump revealed none of the delight or relaxation that phrase conjured. Her elbows rested on her knees as her downcast head and rounded shoulders bent forlornly into the collection of balls gathered around her, and her grim expression made it seem that she was spilling jewel-colored tears. Jim guessed she had taken off her shoes before going in because a small black pair of women’s pumps sat in front of the child-sized stairs leading up to the pool.

Jim returned to the booth and slid into his seat.

“I saw her,” he said.

Karen said, “Is it not the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen?”

“I don’t know,” he said, nodding slowly. “I’m still just trying to believe it.”

The next day Karen and Jim convinced Benny Shassburger to go to the McDonald’s with them. They didn’t tell him why, they just said there was something there that he’d want to see. They all ordered lunch. “So why am I here?” asked Benny when they sat down. “Because Janine Gorjanc —” Jim began, only to be immediately cut off by Karen. “Don’t tell him!” she cried, slapping his hand. “It won’t have the same impact if he hears about it before he sees it.” “What am I seeing?” said Benny. “Okay,” said Karen, “I want you to go to the bathroom, and on your way there, I want you to look through the door to the play area. You know what the play area is, right? Don’t stare, don’t open the door. Just peek through. Got it?” Benny came back and said, “What the hell is it?” “It’s Janine Gorjanc,” said Karen. “Yeah, I know that,” said Benny. “But what is she doing in there?” Jim and Karen shrugged speechlessly. “I gotta see it again,” said Benny, rising again from the booth.

He lingered at the men’s room. Janine sat hunched over the colored balls with her legs submerged. She had hold of a ball and she was tossing it slowly between her hands. She dropped it and picked up another one. Then she scooped up several balls at once and spilled them out upon her lap, and some of them remained caught there as she laced her arms under her thighs and hugged herself.

Benny returned to the booth. “It’s like she’s a five-year-old,” he said.

“Is it not the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen?” asked Karen.

On the third day they brought Marcia Dwyer with them. They went through the procedure with Marcia and when Marcia returned from the restroom she said, “Yeah, that is a little strange.” “A little strange?” said Karen. “It’s a little more than a little strange, Marcia.” “You dumbasses,” said Marcia, looking around at the collection of morons some random lottery had stuck her with. “She’s mourning.” “Mourning?” said Jim. “Yeah, mourning,” said Marcia. “Grieving. Ever hear of it?” “Is that what she’s doing?” asked Jim. “She’s mourning?” “Of course she’s mourning,” said Karen. “But who mourns like that?” Marcia replied sensibly that different people mourned in different ways. “Some people don’t even cry,” she said. “Some people can’t stop crying. It all depends.” “Yeah, but you don’t seem to be getting it, Marcia,” said Karen. “She’s in a pool of plastic balls in the middle of a McDonald’s. That’s just fucking weird.”

Jim begged off the next day, and so did Benny, but Karen managed to convince Amber Ludwig to eat at McDonald’s with her, and with Amber came Larry Novotny. When Amber returned to the booth she was in tears. The day after that, Dan Wisdom accompanied Karen to the McDonald’s. Then the weekend passed, and on Monday it was Chris Yop. On Tuesday, Reiser limped over there. No one really wanted to go. It was McDonald’s, after all, and lunch with Karen was always an earful. But she was so persistent, people went just to get her off their backs. Then there was Janine, sitting in the pool of plastic balls, and everyone knew why they had come.

Over the course of the next few weeks, practically everyone made it over to the McDonald’s. If Karen couldn’t go, they went without her. That is to say, we went without her. You see, everyone was talking about it. It wasn’t something you could afford to miss. You had to go. First you heard about it, then you had to witness it for yourself. You stood in front of the bathroom as if you had every intention of going inside, but instead you stared through the door, through the netting, and spied the unmistakable, hunched figure of Janine Gorjanc — sometimes staring off at nothing, other times addressing the balls in some way, holding them or tossing them or skimming her hands over their undulating surface. You went so that when you got back to the office, you, too, could testify that you had seen it — Janine Gorjanc in the pool of plastic balls — and what a peculiar sight it was.

JOE POPE CAME UP the elevator with his bicycle and walked it down the hall to his office where he found Mike Boroshansky, dressed in a navy blue suit coat, leaning his butt against the back credenza, and Benny’s friend Roland standing with his back against the wall, waiting for him to arrive. The laptop, which had gone missing the week prior, sat on top of Joe’s uncluttered desk, as did the office curios which had proven thin enough to slip between his wall and bookshelf: green license plates from Vermont, a frame of Burt Lancaster and Frank Sinatra in navy-issued uniforms gathered with others in a bar. People passing by recognized those things because they were accustomed to seeing them in different offices.

“Why don’t you close the door, Joe?” Mike Boroshansky suggested. “Lynn should be down here any minute.”

The whole thing was cleared up in half an hour. Not long after Lynn entered, Genevieve Latko-Devine was seen knocking at Joe’s door. The usual suspect was brought in — this was several months before Tom was sacked, but he was always riding on thin ice. We could hear his muffled protestations through the paper-thin walls. They were interrupted by Benny Shassburger. To Benny’s credit, he went in there of his own accord. He didn’t have to go in; he could have stayed out of it. Roland never said it was he who had first suggested Joe Pope’s office might be one of interest. Lynn Mason wanted to know who was responsible. “Give me a name, Benny,” she said. Benny deflected her request. “It wasn’t any one person, I don’t think,” he said. “It was more of like a zeitgeist.” “‘Zeitgeist’? What’s that, what’s a ‘zeitgeist,’ Benny?” “You know,” he said. “No, I don’t know,” countered Lynn. “All due respect, Benny, I think art directors should avoid using fancy words. If you have a name for me of who’s responsible for this, I’d like you to say it.” “I don’t have a name for you,” he said. “It was just something going around, a lot of people were talking about it. It was a joke, I thought.” “Sounds like you must have a whole bunch of names for me, then,” replied Lynn. “Yeah, but not one specific name,” said Benny. “Honest — I don’t know whose idea it was, and I don’t know who did it. But I can tell you that it wasn’t Tom.” “I swear to god I’m not guilty of this one,” said Tom. Lynn ignored him. “Next time,” Lynn said, “that you tap into a ‘zeitgeist’ around here, Benny? The first person I’d like you to come talk to is me. Otherwise, I’ll come up with a name myself, and I don’t think you’ll like the name I come up with. Understood?” “I understand,” he said. As he was leaving, he heard her say, “Jesus Christ, these people do the stupidest shit.”

“Nice to have your laptop back, anyway,” said Mike Boroshansky.

“Joe,” she said. “I’m sorry about this.”

Joe waved it away. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

“How about we fire every fucking one of them,” she said.

At noon that day, Benny said to Roland, “Man, I told you not to go in there anymore, didn’t I? Didn’t I say he wasn’t your guy?” “You did,” said Roland. “So why’d you have to go in there?” “It gets boring doing a night shift, Benny,” Roland replied defensively. “You ever work a night shift? You do whatever you can to kill time. I didn’t expect to find anything. But there it all was! What was I supposed to do then?” “Yeah, but if you would have just stayed out of there,” said Benny, “none of this would have happened, and I wouldn’t be in trouble with Lynn.” “How was I supposed to know they were setting the guy up, Benny?”

We respected the fact that Benny hadn’t named any names. It was nice to know that if one of us did something stupid, he would probably keep that to himself, too.

Later that afternoon we saw Joe Pope walking in the direction of the coffee bar, which is to say, our direction — there were a few of us down there enjoying a break — and we were curious: what would he order? What does the inscrutable Joe Pope have for a pick-me-up? But then he walked past the ordering place and kept coming. He stopped directly in the middle of our conversation, halting it, and we thought, Oh, shit — here it comes. He’d reached a breaking point. Our hearts started beating in our chests. We wondered in a flash — how defensive should we be? How dissembling? It was our custom to dissemble shamelessly to Joe Pope, usually in matters of whose fault this was, or what had gone wrong with that, and then after he’d leave and our sensors relocated their moral north, we’d likely feel a tinge of regret for our dishonesty. Of course he would return soon enough and, born into sin, forgetful and unreformed, we dissembled once more. But maybe we wouldn’t dissemble this time. Maybe in fact we owed him an apology. The guy had been railroaded, after all — he had every reason to be pissed off. And when he began to speak, in a steady quiet voice, looking each of us in the eye, each according to our turn, and for the same length of time — “I have tried my best,” he began, “not to let certain things get to me, and to deal with each of you on an individual basis, as fairly as I know how” — we couldn’t argue with what he said and thought he probably did deserve an apology, though it was still far from certain that he’d get one. We’d already been upbraided by Lynn and made to feel small by Genevieve, who said, as she had on other occasions, that she was done with us forever. “My fairness comes to an end, however,” Joe continued, “the minute you turn Janine Gorjanc into one of your games.”

“Janine Gorjanc?” said Hank Neary, just as surprised as the rest of us to hear Joe speak her name. “Who would do a thing to Janine?”

Joe just stood there with the prepossessing silence that made us monumentally uneasy. He didn’t look an inch too short just then. He didn’t offer an explanation or make any threats. He wasn’t there to seek redress for the wrong done to him. He just said: “No more. Don’t bother her on her lunch hour. Don’t stand in front of the bathroom so you can gawk. Just let the woman be.”

Tom Mota had gone to Joe and told him what we were up to at the McDonald’s. Tom Mota, of all people! We couldn’t believe it. Then we heard that he’d gone to Janine and told her too. After that, we had to file in there one after the other in order to apologize. Amber Ludwig, Larry Novotny, Benny and Jim. Don Blattner said something to her at a print station. Genevieve Latko-Devine called her at home. Monday came around again, and we apologized on Monday, too.

“It is odd,” Janine admitted to us.

We told Janine that she didn’t need to explain a single thing to any of us.

“No, it is,” she insisted. “I know it’s odd. But it was one of her places. She was only nine, you know. She had her places. I still go to the Toys‘R’Us, and the Gymboree. They think I’m crazy there, too. The McDonald’s people think I’m just nuts. But those are my places now, too. They became my places. I was with her when she was in those places. And I just don’t know how to give them up yet. I would be there anyway, right, had she lived?”

We felt like hell. We apologized some more. We had made a spectacle of Janine’s life, and of her grief, and we made a solemn vow — most of us did, anyway — that there would be no new spectacles.

TOM CLIMBED THE ROTTING RUNGS, keeping careful hold of the wooden pole’s rusted handrails. The ladder’s disrepair was one sign of the inattention the billboard had suffered in its remote, abandoned location so far west, where the traffic lanes narrowed from eight to four and the distance between exits stretched out to miles. But it would have been a mistake to attribute the shoddy decrepitude of the element-battered billboard to location alone. Other billboards that far west, especially those advertising the casino boats, were sturdy new metal constructions without a speck of chipped paint, some lit by twenty-four-hour spotlights. It was the goddamn vendor who deserved a lot of the blame for letting the thing go, and as he climbed, Tom puzzled over the mystery of why more wasn’t made of the space. Some hustle could always be found. That Jessica Gorjanc’s fourth-grade picture blown up to inhuman dimensions had been left to languish long after her actual body was put underground wasn’t just cruel disregard for human suffering. It was bad business practice.

Dawn hadn’t broken when he nosed his aging Miata deep into the off-road recess where a small woods grew up a hundred yards from the highway. His climb up the ladder was slow and cumbersome owing to all the supplies he carried in his backpack, including, importantly, a Thermos half-full of martinis which he had shaken briefly with ice cubes before closing the trunk and following his flashlight’s lead. Crickets chirped in the sleepy dark. Survivalist tactics had taught him a nifty trick: masking tape on the base of the powerful yet compact light allowed him to hold the thing comfortably between his front teeth while he climbed, illuminating the path above him while freeing up his hands, one of which he needed to hold on to the roller. This he placed first on the scaffold once he reached the top. He lifted himself up and removed the capacious hiker’s pack from his shoulders and set it next to the roller. Passing the light down the length of the scaffold, he saw the thing for what it was: three graying wooden planks affording him no more room than what was given a window washer hanging outside his window on sixty-two. Before the first pink in the sky, he unscrewed the Thermos and poured himself a drink, his bartending aided immeasurably by the Maglite in his mouth. He removed the light and took a sip.

He unpacked his supplies — two cans of white house paint, a deep-well roller tray, two roller heads, and a telescoping extension pole. He sipped from the Thermos lid as he mixed and poured out the paint and the fumes rose up to greet him. The faint sun barely touched on him as he walked the length of the scaffold, running the roller up and down the face of the billboard, working efficiently and thoroughly to cover the girl’s fading image. It had been up there a number of months, all through the bad midwestern winter and the start of the spring rains, puckered in places, bubbles of paint cracked in half. Thanks to the extension pole, he covered more than he thought he would, but he still had a good bit to go yet, so he set the roller down and finished the martini and took out a paintball gun from the backpack. He poured a second martini and then loaded the gun. From his position on the scaffold, he could see the girl’s face only at a steep angle, which prevented him from knowing exactly how to aim. But he had brought with him plenty of white pellets which he had chosen to match the house paint, and as he sipped the second martini and the sky announced the beginning of another empty, interminable weekend, he walked back and forth along the planks loading and shooting, covering over the dead girl’s image one bitter blot at a time, because his complaints to Jane Trimble had gotten him nowhere — and because in conversation the previous morning, Janine said she couldn’t bear to look at it one day longer.

4

CARL’S EXTRACURRICULAR ACTIVITIES — AN ADMISSION TO LYNN — TOM’S CALL GETS RETURNED QUICKLY — DOUBLE AND RED — A NEW LOW — TEAM-TALK BULLSHIT — THE SOURCE — A CONVERSATION WITH CARL–LYNN IN — A CONVERSATION WITH SANDY — DEIRDRE’S NEW DOOR — LEAVE ROBBIE STOKES OUT OF IT — WILL MARCIA PLEASE JUST CALL? — KNOCK IT OFF

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?”

“Gonna try.”

“I bought you these crummy flowers,” she said. It was in fact a pretty pathetic bouquet. We all thought, Shit! We forgot flowers! Lynn turned to Genevieve. “In-house florists at a hospital, and this is all they had.”

After she left, we asked Dan if he was offended by how she had responded to his innocuous remark about the team.

“Are you kidding me?” he said. “I thought that was terrific.”

SIX MONTHS LATER, Carl had recovered from toxic poisoning and was now on a regimen of antidepressants tailored personally to him. None of us could say we had noticed much of a change. Perhaps it was a victory just to see him stable. He wasn’t cleaning other people’s offices during his downtime, or doing laps around the hall. But on the other hand he still wore off-brand blue jeans and bad shoes and spent his lunch hour behind a closed door eating the same meal.

“Sorry to interrupt, Carl,” said Amber. A few of us had come with her, and now we were standing behind her in Carl’s doorway. We had elected Amber as our spokeswoman.

“That’s okay,” he said. “What’s up?”

Amber took a step inside the office. She grabbed the back of a chair and paused. She looked back at us. We were like, “Go on. Go on!”

Finally she told Carl that Karen Woo had informed everyone that he was the source.

Carl wiped his mouth with his napkin. He shrugged. “The source of what?” he replied.

ON THE DAY LYNN MASON was scheduled for surgery, she showed up at the office.

Karen saw her first. Karen was always the first to know everything. We expected her to know everything first, just as we expected Jim Jackers to be the last to know anything. This time was no different — Lynn Mason was in the office, and Karen had been the first to see her. She had come across her in the women’s room.

Genevieve was next. On her way to Marissa Lopchek’s in HR, she saw Lynn standing at the window in the Michigan Room. “At first I didn’t think it was her,” she said, “because how could it be her? She’s supposed to be in surgery. But on my way back from Marissa’s, she was still at the window. She’d been there for, I don’t know, twenty minutes? She must have felt me staring or something because she turned, and just as she turned I started to walk away real quick because I didn’t want her to catch me staring, but she saw me anyway and said hello, but by then I was halfway down the hall, so I had to go all the way back to the doorway to say hi because I didn’t want to seem rude, but by then she had turned back to the window and — oh, it was so awkward. What is she doing here?” she asked.

Dan Wisdom saw Lynn cleaning her office. She and the office coordinator were boxing things up in there. We asked him what kind of things and he started to list them: stock-photo books, outdated computers, long-dead advertising magazines, half-empty soda bottles. . It was your right and privilege as a partner to keep as cluttered an office as you wanted, and we had all grown accustomed to shifting things to the floor whenever we went into Lynn’s office for a meeting. “You wouldn’t recognize it,” said Dan. “One of the custodians came up with a cart. He took down. . I can’t even tell you how many boxes full of old crap.” We asked him why she was cleaning. “I have no idea why,” he said. “I thought she was supposed to be in surgery.”

Benny had seen her, too. Certain pockets of office space had been unoccupied for some time, workstations vacated by those who had walked Spanish down the hall. Benny found Lynn at a desk in one of the more fallow clusters of our formerly occupied cubicles.

“You know the place,” he asked us, “on fifty-nine?”

We knew it by heart: all the cubicle walls barren, no radio playing, the printers off-line, and the only hope for corporate revitalization the fact that no one had yet turned off the overhead lights — we, too, had been victimized by the dot-coms. None of us liked it down there; it was too naked a reminder of the times we lived in. But if you needed someplace where you could hear yourself think and weren’t likely to be disturbed, there was no better place than that deserted section of fifty-nine.

“She was sitting on top of one of the cubicle desks,” said Benny, “with her legs hanging down. It was funny to see her like that. What was she doing sitting inside a cubicle? I was so surprised to see someone in there I almost jumped back. But then to look closer and see it was her? Way strange. I would have said something but, man, she was all spaced out. She was just zonked out. She had to have heard me, but she didn’t look up. So you know what I did. I got the hell out of there.”

Marcia Dwyer found her at a print station. She was standing against the wall, next to the recycling bin and the stacks of boxes holding copy paper. Marcia was there to photocopy something for the rest of us, a list of interesting facts about breast cancer found on the Internet. She greeted Lynn, and the greeting seemed to wrench the older woman out from underwater.

“What was that?” Lynn asked.

“Oh,” said Marcia, “I was just saying hello.”

“Oh. Hi.”

Marcia advanced toward the copier. Lynn was just standing there against the wall. “Oh, do you need to use this?” Marcia asked suddenly.

Lynn shook her head.

“Oh. Okay.”

She made her copies. “Bye,” said Marcia, when she had finished.

Lynn looked up. “All done?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a more awkward exchange my entire life,” Marcia told us. We were discussing these run-ins in Marcia’s office. “What was she doing just standing there against the wall?”

“Maybe all this happened yesterday,” someone suggested.

It wasn’t as absurd a notion as it might sound. Some days, time passed way too slowly here, other days far too quickly, so that what happened in the morning could seem like eons ago while what took place six months earlier was as fresh in our minds as if an hour had yet to pass. It was only natural that on occasion we confused the two.

“No, it was this morning,” Karen assured us. “Trust me. I saw her. Lynn’s in.”

“What probably happened,” Amber suggested, “was that she stopped by the office to finish up some last-minute business, and then she walked over to the hospital. So she’s not in in. She just stopped by on her way.”

“Cleaning her office?” said Larry. “Standing in the Michigan Room for half an hour? That’s last-minute business?”

“Maybe.”

“Or maybe,” said Larry, “there never was an operation.”

“What do you mean, there never was an operation? Of course there was an operation.”

“Because,” Larry continued, “she doesn’t have cancer.”

“How can you say that, Larry? Of course she has cancer.”

“How do you know it’s not just a rumor, Amber?”

“Because I just know.”

“Anyway,” said Karen, “her operation was scheduled for nine. She couldn’t have recovered in that time, so she must have missed it.”

“It was scheduled for nine?” said Genevieve. “I thought nobody knew when it was scheduled for. Where are you getting nine from, Karen?”

“I always get my information directly from the source,” Karen said.

WE DIDN’T HAVE much else to do, you see. We had the pro bono fund-raiser ads, sure — but what were they when compared to our workload of yore? We had already made headway on them; they would be finished in no time. The more pressing matter that morning seemed to be discovering why Lynn had chosen to come into work instead of dealing with a life-threatening illness. And so when Karen Woo told us who her source was, naturally we went in search of answers.

“I’m not the source of that information,” said Carl in front of his penne alla vodka. He denied knowing anything about Lynn Mason going into surgery at nine. And if he had known, he wouldn’t have said anything — certainly not to Karen Woo.

“But Lynn did receive a diagnosis of cancer, did she not?” asked Amber, inside his office.

“As far as I know she did,” he said. “But I’m not the source of that information, either, and I don’t know why Karen’s saying I am — unless it’s because Marilynn’s an oncologist at Northwestern. But what Karen doesn’t know is that I moved out six weeks ago, and besides, Marilynn wouldn’t tell me anything — not if Lynn were a patient.”

It was the first we had heard of Carl and Marilynn’s separation. We didn’t inquire further because we didn’t care to pry. We asked in the most general way how he was holding up, and he replied clinically that it was the best decision for both parties. We deduced from that that Carl had probably not been the prime mover.

“I don’t mean to change the subject,” said Amber.

“Please do,” said Carl.

“But then so you’re not the source.”

“The source of what?” he repeated, a little edgier this time.

“Of the fact that she has cancer.”

Carl shook his head. “I first heard that from Sandy Green,” he said.

SOME OF US THOUGHT Sandy Green in payroll was the second coming, others the devil incarnate — it all depended on what you were getting paid. Her office was a firetrap of put-off filing. Sandy had gray hair and wore one of those ribbed finger condoms that gives one speed in the sport of accounting. Off a remote corridor at the far end of sixty-one, her windowless office was known as the Bat Cave for its general darkness and inaccessibility. “I talked to Carl a couple days ago for about five minutes about FICA withholdings,” said Sandy. “I doubt very seriously that in five minutes I would have said something to him about Lynn’s cancer.”

“Okay,” said Genevieve, “but what we’re trying to determine is if Lynn even has cancer, and if you happen to be the one who knows that for a fact.”

Sandy looked genuinely perplexed — then suddenly her face ironed out and she raised her plastic finger in the air and gave it a three-time shake. “I remember now,” she said. “I said something to him like, ‘I would take this issue up with Lynn,’ and he said, ‘Okay, I’ll talk to Lynn about it,’ and I said, ‘But you had better do it today, because. .’ But I didn’t say anything more. I waited for him to say something. And he did, he said, ‘Oh, right, I’ll do it today, right.’ So that’s when I said, ‘Poor Lynn,’ and he said, ‘Yes, it’s too bad.’ So he already knew. He got his information from someone else.”

“But how did you get your information?” asked Genevieve.

“How did I get my information?”

“Yes, that’s what we’re trying to find out.”

Sandy put her elbow on her desk, and her cheek in her palm, and there was silence as she tried to remember. “Hold on,” she said. She picked up the phone. “Deirdre, was it you who told me about Lynn’s cancer? Or did Michelle tell the two of us, I can’t remember. Are you sure? All right, honey.” There was a long pause. Sandy startled us with a wicked cackle. “Leave your mirror at home next time, honey! Okay, bye-bye.” She hung up the phone and turned to us. “Deirdre tells me she told me.”

DEIRDRE INFORMED US that she received her information about Lynn’s cancer from Account Executive Robbie Stokes. “Oh, good,” said Deirdre, “my new door’s here.”

With that, the building guys came in with her new door and everyone got out of their way.

ROBBIE STOKES’ office was empty. He was in Account Management, and, strange for any account person, he had hung something non-Monet on the wall: a neon Yuengling sign, intended for a bar window. It hummed and flickered in the deafening silence.

Someone from inside a cubicle cried out, “Bring me the world!”

ON THEIR WAY OUT of the building, Amber and Larry ran into Robbie. “I hear you guys have been looking for me,” he said. “I didn’t start that rumor. I got that rumor from Doug Dion.”

Larry assured Robbie that nobody was saying he started anything. We were just trying to get to the bottom of it.

“Well, just do me a favor,” said Robbie, “and don’t say I started it, okay? Because I don’t want this to get me into trouble with Lynn.”

Amber assured him we were being discreet.

“No, just leave me out of it,” he demanded. “Don’t even say the name Robbie Stokes.”

SOME OF US RETURNED to Marcia’s office and explained what we thought she needed to do.

“Are you out,” she said, “of your fucking minds?”

Benny happened to fall by.

“Benny,” said Marcia, “listen to what these yahoos want me to do.”

Dan Wisdom, painter of fish, showed up and insisted on interrupting. He said he had come across Chris Yop at a print station and told him that Lynn Mason was in fact in the office that day.

“We were just standing there,” said Dan, “and he’s got about fifty resumes coming out on the heavy bonded stuff, you know, the really good stuff, when I tell him that Lynn’s not in surgery after all. And immediately he’s like, ‘But I been walking the halls this whole time!’ You should have seen his face. So I ask him, ‘Weren’t you at least afraid security would see you?’ And he says, ‘Security? Security’s a joke. Security never comes up here.’ He makes a good point.”

We all agreed he did.

“But now that he knows that Lynn’s in? You should have seen how scared he was leaving the print station. Checking both ways down the hall like he was in some parody of a spy movie. It was the funniest thing I’ve ever seen.”

“Have you ever seen Top Secret, with Val Kilmer?” Don Blattner asked. “Now that’s funny.”

“Hank,” Marcia called out. She rolled to the side of her desk in the chair that once belonged to Tom Mota, to better see into the hallway. “Hank!”

Hank reversed in his tracks to stand just outside Marcia’s office. He straightened his bulky glasses, a nervous tic of his, and they fell right back down his nose.

“Listen to what these yahoos want me to do, Hank,” she said. “They want me to call the hospital, right — listen to this — and pretend that I’m Lynn, and say, ‘Oh, I’m a little confused — something — blah blah blah — and I was wondering, was I scheduled to be in surgery today?’ Yeah, I’m supposed to call up and impersonate my boss while, excuse me, we’re not just going through layoffs — and I happen to have the wrong chair — but this is a woman who might be really sick. And they want me to call up and say, ‘Oh, can you tell me, do you happen to know if I have cancer?’”

“That sounds like a bad idea,” said Hank.

We tried to explain to him why it was really our only option, if we were going to know one way or another with absolute certainty.

“Under normal circumstances,” said Amber, who had returned with Larry to the office and was now eating a Cobb salad from her lap, “I wouldn’t think it’s such a good idea, either. But if she had an appointment this morning and she didn’t go, don’t you think we should be worried about her?”

“Well, then, you make the call,” said Marcia.

“I don’t think —” said Hank.

“It wasn’t my —” said Amber.

“No way that would —” said Don.

“. . be trafficking in rumors,” said Larry. “And you’d be doing everyone a big —”

“STOP IT,” said Joe Pope.

He was standing right behind Hank in Marcia’s doorway and no one had noticed. Everyone turned and some got to their feet as he moved to stand just inside the office and the room went cold. “I can hear you guys from inside the elevator,” he said. There was a new command in his tone and his brow was menaced with possible disdain. “Now, please,” he said. “Just knock it off.”

5

THE UNBELIEVABLE REPORT — ON NOT KNOWING SOMETHING — CHAIRS — FURTHER DEBATE — BENNY’S OPTIONS — THINKING ABOUT BRIZZ — THE U-STOR-IT — THE YOPANWOO INDIANS — THE TRIPLE MEETING — CHANGES TO THE PROJECT — JIM ALWAYS THE LAST TO KNOW — TOM’S MOTHER DIES — SCREWY ASSIGNMENT — UNCLE MAX — JIM TAPPED — YOP’S REQUEST — WE STAND UP TO KAREN

SOMEONE PASSED AROUND a link once to a news article posted on a reputable website that we all read and talked about for days. A man working at an office much like ours had a heart attack at his desk, and for the rest of the day people passing by his workstation failed to notice. That wasn’t the newsworthy bit — there are, what, a hundred and fifty million of us in the workplace? It was bound to happen to somebody. What we couldn’t wrap our heads around, what made this man’s commonplace death national news, was the unlikely information provided in the first sentence of the dispatch: “A man working in an Arlington, Virginia, insurance firm died of a heart attack at his desk recently and wasn’t discovered until four days later, when coworkers complained of a bad-fruit smell.”

The article went on to explain that Friday had passed, and then the weekend, and no one had discovered this man fallen in his cubicle. Not a coworker, not a building guy, not someone collecting the trash. Then we were supposed to believe that Monday came around, Monday with its meetings and returned phone calls, its resumption of routine and reinstatement of duty, Monday came and went, and they didn’t find him then, either. It wasn’t until Tuesday, Tuesday afternoon, when they all went in search of a rotten banana, that they saw one of their own dead on the floor by his desk, obscured by his chair. We kept asking ourselves how could that be possible? Surely someone had to come by with a request for a meeting. Someone had to come by to inquire why a meeting was missed. But no — this poor jerk was the subject of not so much as a morning greeting from one of his cube neighbors. We didn’t know how that could happen.

We hated not knowing something. We hated not knowing who was next to walk Spanish down the hall. How would our bills get paid? And where would we find new work? We knew the power of the credit card companies and the collection agencies and the consequences of bankruptcy. Those institutions were without appeal. They put your name into a system, and from that point forward vital parts of the American dream were foreclosed upon. A backyard swimming pool. A long weekend in Vegas. A low-end BMW. These were not Jeffersonian ideals, perhaps, on par with life and liberty, but at this advanced stage, with the West won and the Cold War over, they, too, seemed among our inalienable rights. This was just before the fall of the dollar, before the stormy debate about corporate outsourcing, and the specter of a juggernaut of Chinese and Indian youths overtaking our advantages in broadband.

Marcia hated not knowing what might come of being caught with Tom Mota’s chair, with its serial numbers that would not match up with the office coordinator’s master list. So she swapped Tom’s chair for Ernie’s and left Tom’s in Tom’s old office. Even so, she was still scared that the office coordinator would look for Ernie’s chair in Ernie’s old office — from which Chris Yop had taken it, swapping it with his own lesser chair when Ernie retired — and discover not Ernie’s serial numbers but Chris Yop’s, and upon that discovery, go in search of Ernie’s chair, which Marcia was presently sitting on. Sooner or later, Marcia feared, the office coordinator was bound to find out what she had done. So she felt the need to get her original chair back from Karen Woo, who had received it some months prior when Marcia took Reiser’s chair when Reiser offered it to her after taking Sean Smith’s chair after Sean got canned. She went to Karen to ask for her chair back, but Karen didn’t want to part with her chair, which she claimed wasn’t the one Marcia had given her at all, but was Bob Yagley’s chair, which she had swapped with Marcia’s late one night after gentle, soft-spoken Bob was let go. Bob’s old office was currently occupied by a woman named Dana Rettig who had made the leap from cubicle to office less by virtue of merit than by management’s perception that so many vacated offices looked bad to potential visitors. When Dana made that leap, she brought along her own chair, which had once belonged to someone in Account Management and was a better chair than Bob’s, which was really Marcia’s. “What was wrong with my chair?” Marcia asked her. Dana replied that nothing was wrong with it per se; she had just gotten attached to the Account Management person’s chair. “So where is my chair, then?” asked Marcia. Dana told her it was probably in the same place she left it, Dana’s old cubicle, but when she and Marcia walked down to that particular workstation, they found some production person fresh out of college — he looked all of fifteen — where Dana used to sit, who told them that somebody a few months back had passed down the hall only to return, pull rank, and take his chair, which was replaced by the cheap plastic thing he had been sitting on ever since. All attempts to get the fresh-faced peon to pony up a little information on who had strong-armed him out of his chair were for naught until Marcia asked him point-blank how he expected to get out of production hell and make it to Assistant Art Director if he couldn’t even sketch a face on a legal pad. So the production kid made a rough sketch from memory of the man who took his chair, and when he was through filling in the hair and putting the final touches on the eyes, Marcia and Dana examined it and determined it was a dead ringer for Chris Yop. Was it possible that Yop had grown bored with Ernie Kessler’s chair, walked past a chair he liked better and bullied it out from under a production nobody, and walked away with Marcia’s chair, which he sat on until the office coordinator came around giving him heat and he found himself without any alternative but to take it down to Tom’s office and pretend it was Tom’s, so that when Marcia went in to swap Tom’s real chair with Ernie Kessler’s, it wasn’t Ernie’s chair at all but Marcia’s original one that she took back with her? Did Marcia have her own chair again? “Are you absolutely sure that this is the guy who took your chair?” she asked the production peon. The production peon said no, he wasn’t sure of that at all. Marcia had no idea whose chair she had. It might have been hers, it might have been Ernie Kessler’s, or it might have been the chair of some indeterminate third party. The only person who knew for certain was the office coordinator, who owned the master list. Marcia returned to her office beset by the high anxiety typical of the time.

Larry Novotny hated not knowing if Amber Ludwig could be convinced that it was in both of their best interests for her to have the abortion, because he hated not knowing what his wife might do to him if the affair came to light, while Amber hated not knowing what God would do to her if she were to go through with it. Amber was a Catholic who hated not knowing a lot of the mysterious ways in which God worked. Was it possible, for instance, that God could send Tom Mota back into the office with all of God’s wrath to rectify the sins Amber had committed there on desks we hoped to god were not ours?

We, too, hated not knowing the specifics of Tom’s intentions to change history. Most of us thought Tom Mota was not a psychopath, and that if he had wanted to return he would have done it a day or two after being let go. He had had time to cool off now and collect his wits. But some of us remembered the way he treated Marilynn Garbedian in the hospital the day her husband was admitted for a serious illness, remembered how he smirked in his trench coat and stared at her neck, as if he were about to land a blow in that delicate place, and couldn’t help thinking that that was perfectly psychopathic behavior. But to others that was just good old-fashioned misogyny. Tom was just confusing Marilynn Garbedian for Barb Mota, his ex-wife, and was taking out on Marilynn what he wanted to take out on Barb. But if that were the case, some of us argued, who was he going to take it out on next? Tom subscribed to Guns and Ammo. He had a sizable collection of firearms in his possession. Most of those guns, however, were collectors’ items and probably couldn’t even fire anymore. Well, some of us thought, what’s stopping Tom from going out and buying new guns? How easy it was to visit a gun show and three days later find yourself in possession of the assault weapons ideal for a situation like the one we were envisioning. We had to remind ourselves that because of Barb’s restraining order, he’d probably have to wait more like ninety days. Besides, he was on record saying those items were unsportsmanlike. “Automatic rifles, man — where’s the sport in that?” he used to say. That was little relief to some. It would be unsportsmanlike to kill us with anything more than old-fashioned handguns, therefore Tom won’t kill us? That was not a winning argument. Tom could have easily had a change of heart with respect to those heavier items, owing to the more recent setbacks of his failed life, and after some less-than-truthful data entry, using a shady Internet dealer, he might be taking possession of those unsportsmanlike items from a UPS man even as our debate raged. Some of us said that was absurd. Tom was not coming back. Tom was trying to move on. But others pointed out that we had had the very same conviction that Lynn Mason wouldn’t show up for work on the day she was scheduled for surgery, and look how that turned out.

We hated not knowing what Lynn Mason was doing showing up for work on the day she was scheduled for surgery.

JIM JACKERS SPENT his lunch hour in the waiting room of the oncology ward at Rush-Presbyterian surrounded by some very sick people. Present also were a number of robust family members, either staring off into the distance with their arms folded, or retrieving water for their loved ones. Jim waited and waited for the doctor with whom his father had put him in touch. Jim’s father sold medical equipment, and when Jim told him of his recent project, he contacted an oncologist on his son’s behalf and told Jim the doctor was willing to speak with him. Jim wanted to talk to the doctor in the hopes of gaining the insight necessary to arrive at the winning concept for the fund-raiser, but at that particular hour the doctor proved too busy to spare any time, so Jim thanked the nurse and returned to the office.

He was taking the elevator up to sixty, where his cubicle was located, when at fifty-nine the elevator came to a stop and Lynn Mason got on. They greeted each other and talked briefly about Jim’s shirt, which Lynn said she liked. Jim turned around and showed her his favorite feature, the hula dancer stitched on back. The dress code of any creative department will always be casual; they may reserve the right to take our jobs away, but never our Hawaiian shirts, our jean jackets, our flip-flops. Lynn said she liked the hula dancer’s skirt, which Jim could make shimmy back and forth by moving his shoulders up and down. He turned around once again and demonstrated.

“I used to be a hula girl,” said Lynn. “In college.”

Jim turned back to her. “Serious?” he said.

Lynn smiled at him and shook her head. “Kidding.”

“Oh.” Jim smiled. “I thought you were serious.”

“From time to time I do kid, Jim.”

The elevator bell rang and Jim stepped off. He walked down the hall to his cubicle, thinking how stupid it was to ask Lynn if she had really been a hula girl.

When he got back to his desk, he began to stress out about his lack of insight into the fund-raiser ads. He was disappointed he hadn’t been able to speak to the oncologist, whom he hoped would give him inspiration. He sat down but didn’t know where to start. He checked his e-mail, he got up and ate a stale cookie from a communal plate in the kitchen. He came back and there it was, the same ogle-eyed computer screen. There was a quotation pinned to Jim’s cube wall that read, “The Blank Page Fears Me.” Everyone knew it had been mounted up there out of insecurity and self-doubt, and that there was nothing more true than that statement’s opposite. But whenever Jim found himself in the position he was currently in, staring helplessly at the blank page with a deadline and a complete lack of inspiration, he looked up and read that quotation and took comfort. The blank page fears me, he thought. Then he thought, What was Lynn Mason doing in the elevator with me on the day she was scheduled for surgery?

He went down to Benny Shassburger’s office. Benny was the first guy Jim went to when he had something. We all had someone like that, someone we took our best stuff to, who then typically took that information somewhere else. Benny was on the phone. Jim went in and sat down and started listening to Benny’s end of the conversation. Benny was saying something about renegotiated prices — he was trying to get the person on the other end to come down a little. He said over and over again he couldn’t afford it. Jim wondered momentarily what that was all about, but then he returned to the fact that he had just shared the elevator with Lynn Mason on the day she was scheduled — and it wasn’t just surgery, was it? A mastectomy, that wasn’t like an outpatient sort of thing, thought Jim, where you go in in the morning and they patch you up and you’re back at work by one. An operation like that takes days to recover from. He didn’t know much about breast cancer but he knew that much. He wanted Benny off the phone. We accumulated days and days in other people’s offices, waiting for them to get off the phone.

“That was the U-Stor-It,” said Benny once he was off. “They’re jacking up my fees.”

“Oh, man,” said Jim. “To what?”

Jim’s red eyes bugged out when Benny told him the price. “Steep, huh?” said Benny. “But I don’t know what else to do, man. I gotta keep it somewhere.”

When we found out Benny had received a totem pole from Old Brizz, we told him he had a few easy options. Leave it for the future owners of Brizz’s house to deal with — that would probably be the easiest. Or he could find a collector and they’d probably come and take it away for free. Chris Yop suggested he leave it on the corner of Clark and Addison and watch until one of the homeless carried it away in a shopping cart. Karen Woo said he should hire a stump-grinding company to go over to Brizz’s and turn that totem pole into multicolored wood chips. Tom Mota liked the idea of sawing it into pieces and giving each one of us a head to decorate our offices with in remembrance of Brizz.

“Are you guys not in the least curious why Brizz had it in his backyard to begin with?” Benny asked.

Sure we were curious. But there was probably a simple explanation for it. Brizz himself had inherited the thing from those who sold him the house, or something along those lines.

“So why did he leave it to me in his will,” asked Benny, “if he just found it in his backyard when he bought the place? Why deliberately leave it to me?”

One night we had drinks after work at this nearby underground sports bar. We brought together several checkerboard-cloth tables and talked around pitchers of beer in various stages of consumption. We were getting buzzed on that airless bunker’s dank fumes more powerfully than on the watered-down swill they served, when Karen Woo asked if we knew what Benny was doing with his totem pole. We ran through Benny’s options for her. “No,” she insisted, “no, that’s not what I’m asking. I’m asking if you know what he’s actually doing with it.”

We did not.

“He’s visiting it,” she said.

We asked her what she meant by that.

“He’s going down to Brizz’s,” she said, “and spending time with it.”

There were several plausible answers for why Benny would do a thing like that. It was a novelty item, and Benny got a kick out of owning a novelty item. Or he was measuring it for removal. Or he was meeting with someone to appraise it. Maybe it was worth some money.

“No, you guys don’t understand,” Karen said, “this isn’t a onetime deal. He’s been down there. . Jim,” she said, just as Jim returned to his seat after tending to some business with Mr. B. “Tell them how many times Benny’s been down there to see that totem pole.”

“I don’t know,” said Jim, shrugging his shoulders.

“You do too know, Jim — how many times?” Jim was reluctant to give up his friend. “Ten times!” cried Karen. “In a month! Isn’t that right, Jim?”

We asked Jim what Benny was doing down there.

“He’s just looking at it,” said Jim. “It’s something to look at. I got goosebumps the first time I saw it.”

“The Art Institute has things in it that’ll give you goosebumps, too,” Karen replied. “Not many people go there ten times a month, Jim.”

The following day we asked Benny if he was really going down to Brizz’s to visit the totem pole. If so, we asked, why? We said Jim Jackers mentioned he’d been down there ten times in the past month. Was that true?

“I don’t know, I don’t count,” Benny said. “What’s with the third degree?”

We asked if he was going down there to meet with someone to appraise it because maybe it was worth money. Or if he was measuring it for its eventual removal. Or if he got a kick out of owning a novelty item.

“What does it matter?” he replied. “I go down there. What’s the big deal?”

We didn’t understand, that was the big deal. Because soon we found out that he wasn’t just going down there. He was leaving direct from work. In other words, he was driving down there during rush hour. We asked him why he would brave traffic just to look at a totem pole. He mumbled something evasive and wouldn’t commit to an answer. Had he given any more thought, we asked him, to what he was going to do with it when Bizarro Brizz put Old Brizz’s house on the market? The sensible thing was to leave it for the future owners. Benny replied he didn’t think he would do that. In that case, we wondered, what were his plans for it? Somebody mentioned there might be some real Indians out there who’d like to have their totem pole back, who would know what to do with it better than he would. Benny’s response?

“Brizz gave that totem pole to me,” he said. “He didn’t give it to a real Indian.”

That was the stupidest thing we ever heard. A month earlier, there had been no totem pole. The idea of owning a totem pole would have probably seemed totally absurd to Benny. Then Brizz leaves him a totem pole, and he’s braving traffic to go visit the thing. We just wanted to know why.

“You guys need to get a life,” he said.

We asked a favor of Dan Wisdom. He lived in Brizz’s neighborhood. We asked Dan to take a few hours off one night from his fish paintings, drive by Old Brizz’s, and find out what Benny was doing — you know, how he spent his time.

“He told us how he spends his time,” said Dan. “He looks at the thing.”

Yes, but it had to be more complicated than that. Get out of the car, we told Dan, and look at it with him, and then ask him what’s going through his head.

“Who knows what’s going through his head?” said Dan. “What’s going through his head is his own business. Besides,” he added, “I don’t really live in Brizz’s neighborhood. I do live on the South Side, but the South Side, you know, it’s a big place.”

We told Marcia Dwyer that Benny had had a crush on her for a long time. Just ask to go down there with him, we urged her. Tell him you want to see it. He would be thrilled to have you join him. Then ask him why he’s become so obsessed with the thing.

“Okay, first of all,” Marcia said, “you guys are losers. And second of all, I don’t really care what he’s doing down there. Maybe he’s finding out something about himself. Maybe — and I know, this sounds crazy to you guys — but maybe he’s looking for something. A signal from Brizz. Some sort of sign.”

We had forgotten that Marcia was into Buddhism in a big, sloppy way — reincarnation, the laws of karma. Religious fancies she probably didn’t know the first authentic thing about.

“And third,” she said, “Benny Shassburger has a crush on me?”

We’re not sure what you may or may not know, we said one day when, happily, we stumbled upon Benny’s father, waiting for Benny in the main lobby. Some of us recognized him from the picture in Benny’s office, an imposing man with beard and skullcap. But about a month ago, we said to him, his son was given an odd little bequest by a guy who used to work here. Did he know what we were referring to?

“The totem pole?” his father asked.

Yes, the totem pole. And did he also know that during the past six weeks, Benny had gone to the guy’s house a dozen or more times? After work, when he had to sit in traffic, he went all the way down to 115th Street to look at the totem pole. We asked him if he was aware of that.

“I knew he went down there.” His father nodded. “I didn’t know it was that many times, but I knew he went down there, sure. I’ve been down there with him.”

He had been down there with him?

“Sure.”

And what did the two of them do while down there?

“We looked at it,” said Benny’s father.

That was it? All the two of them did was look at it?

“Well, then we put on our headdresses and prayed for corn. Is that what you’re looking for?”

No doubt we had the right man. That was a response that would have come from Benny Shassburger’s own mouth in the days before he clammed up and refused to say a word about why the totem pole had such a hold on him and drove us crazy with his secrecy. We asked Benny’s father if he was at all curious about why someone Jewish like Benny would become obsessed with a pagan artifact like a totem pole.

“If you’re asking me, does my son pray to it,” his father replied, with a change in tone, “I don’t think he prays to it. I just think he likes it.”

Yes, we said to Benny the next day, we had a conversation with his father. No, we never asked him if Benny prayed to it. We didn’t mean to offend anybody. We just want to know, we said to Benny, honestly, we just want to know why you go down there to look at the totem pole so often, and what you’re thinking about when you’re down there.

“I go down there,” he replied simply, “to think about Brizz.”

So it was funny. While Benny was thinking about Brizz, we were thinking about Benny. What could Benny be doing down there in Brizz’s backyard, what is he thinking about standing in front of the totem pole — that’s what we were wondering. And Benny, he was wondering — well, what, exactly? What was there to think about with respect to Brizz? His cigarettes, his sweater vest, his conversation with the building guy, and all the unmemorable days he spent in our company. That takes about ten seconds. Where do you go after that? What more was there to think about?

“Look,” said Benny, reaching the limits of his patience. “I didn’t purchase the thing. I didn’t put it in my backyard. I’m just visiting it. What would you have done to Brizz if you’d found out he had a totem pole in his backyard, and when you asked him why, he refused to tell you?”

Hound him, threaten him, torture him, kill him. Whatever it took.

But the point wasn’t Brizz. We weren’t going to get any answers from Brizz. Brizz was gone. Benny, on the other hand, was still alive. Benny could tell us what we wanted to know.

“I’ll never tell you,” he said. “It’s a secret I share with Brizz and you scumbags can’t know about it.”

“Has Benny gone insane?” Karen asked Jim.

Inexplicably Benny gave us all ten dollars. He went from office to office, cube to cube, handing out ten-dollar bills. What’s this for? we asked him.

“A refund,” he said. “I don’t want your blood money.”

Turns out he was returning the ten bucks he’d won from each of us when he put Brizz on his Celebrity Death Watch.

“He’s gone insane,” said Jim.

Bizarro Brizz finally put Brizz’s house on the market, and now the situation, we thought, had to change. There would be no backyard for Benny to visit anymore. There was no — what would you call it? — memorial site, or whatever, to spend time at, and to reflect upon the recently departed, and all the mysteries Brizz left behind, or whatever else Benny was chewing on down there. Naturally we thought he would give it up. He would either leave it for the future owners, or give it away, or have it appraised, or hire a stump-grinding company to dispose of it. Instead, he hired a moving company to transfer it out of the backyard into the largest unit available at the U-Stor-It facility at North and Clybourn, where he kept it in bubble wrap horizontally upon the cement floor, because it was too big to fit inside his apartment.

When we heard Benny was not getting rid of the totem pole but had chosen to keep it, even going so far as to store it at great personal expense, we kept asking him why. Why, Benny? Why? Benny, why? When he continued to refuse to tell us — or perhaps he just found himself unable to explain his reasons even to himself — we let the full force of our dissatisfaction be known. We did not like not knowing something. We could not abide being left in the dark. And we thought it was the height of hypocrisy for Benny, who was always telling everyone about everyone else, to try and keep a secret from us. So we took up squawking at him. We did mockeries of ceremonial dances in his doorway. The worst thing we did was take scissors to this old toupee Chris Yop had in his basement, and put the mangled thing on Benny’s desk, which Karen Woo doused with a bottle of fake blood she kept in her office, so that what lay on the desk looked like a fresh scalping. Someone suggested we find a yarmulke to put on top, but we all sort of agreed that to marry those two atrocities together would be stepping over a line.

In our defense, it was Chris Yop and Karen Woo’s idea, the fake scalping, and they were really the ones who went in and executed it. Hank Neary said it best when he said, “Yeah, that was really just a Yop and Woo production.” We picked up on that, and afterward, it became the name of the tribe Benny belonged to, the Yopanwoo tribe. We said, Hey, Benny, how do you and the Yopanwoo stay warm in the winter? Have you and the Yopanwoo received restitution from the U.S. government, Benny? Your fellow tribesmen, Benny, do they consume firewater to excess? Benny just smiled at these jibes and nodded his head amiably and returned to his desk, and without a word of explanation, continued to store Brizz’s totem pole for three hundred and nineteen dollars a month.

On the afternoon Lynn Mason should have been recovering from surgery, Benny discovered they were raising the price of his storage unit by thirty bucks. That in and of itself was not outrageous, but compounded with the rest, he was shelling out a preposterous monthly sum.

“It’s time I get rid of it,” he said to Jim. “It’s not doing anything except sitting in there.”

Jim was chomping at the bit to tell Benny his news of riding the elevator with Lynn Mason when she should have been at the hospital. But he was surprised to hear that Benny was thinking of giving up the totem pole.

“You’ve always said that Brizz gave that totem pole to you for a reason,” he said. “Now you’re talking about giving it up?”

“What choice do I have?” Benny replied. “I can’t spend three hundred and fifty bucks a month on a totem pole. That’s insane.”

“It wasn’t insane at three-nineteen?”

“No, it was insane then, too,” said Benny. “By the way, you want to know how much it’s worth? I had an appraiser look at it. On the antiques market, this guy tells me, it could sell for as much as sixty thousand dollars.”

Jim’s jaw dropped. He let out a few choked grunts of disbelief.

“Oh, and here’s another thing,” said Benny. “Lynn Mason’s in the office today.”

Jim’s expression turned from incredulity over the worth of the totem pole to disappointment at hearing from Benny the very news he had been waiting patiently to reveal himself.

“Aw, man!” he cried. “I wanted to tell you that!”

Joe Pope suddenly appeared in Benny’s doorway carrying his leather day planner.

“Guys,” he said, “we’re meeting down at the couches in ten minutes.”

A TRIPLE MEETING was bad news. Especially if it came so quickly on the heels of a double meeting. The announcement of a triple meeting could only mean the project had been canceled or postponed, or changed. We had ten minutes to ruminate on which was the worst fate. If canceled or postponed, our only project went away, and with it, all hope of looking busy. Looking busy was essential to our feeling vital to the agency, to mention nothing of being perceived as such by the partners, who would conclude by our labors that it was impossible to lay us off. (No need to look too closely here at the underlying fact that our sole project was pro bono, and so something we weren’t getting paid for.) If the project was changed, the work we had put in so far on our concepts would all be for naught. That was always a pain in the ass. As much as we loved a double meeting, we always approached a triple meeting with trepidation and discomfort.

And for good reason this time. After detours to the restroom, to the coffee bar for a pick-me-up, to the cafeteria for a can of pop, we shuffled down to the couches to hear the bad news. We were no longer developing ads for a fund-raiser.

Joe sat on a sofa and tried to explain. “Okay, here’s the thing,” he said. “It’s not really an ad for anything anymore.” He immediately retracted that and said of course it was an ad for something. Or rather it was an ad for someone. But no, in the traditional sense of an ad, it wasn’t really an ad. Of course it was an ad, but more in the spirit of a public service announcement.

“I’m not doing a very good job of explaining this,” he said. “Let me start over. What the client wants from us now is an ad specifically targeted to the person diagnosed with breast cancer. We’re no longer reaching out to the potential donor with a request for money. We’re talking directly to the sick person. And our objective,” he said, “is to make them laugh.”

“Make them laugh?” said Benny. “I don’t understand.”

“Neither do I,” said Jim, from the floor.

“You come up with an ad,” said Joe, “that makes the cancer patient laugh. It’s that simple.”

“What are we selling?”

“We’re not selling anything.”

“So what’s the point?”

“Think of it — okay,” he said, sitting forward and putting his elbows on his knees. “Think of it as an awareness campaign, okay? Only you’re not making the target audience aware of anything, you’re just making them laugh.” When that still made little sense, he added, “Okay, if we’re selling something, we’re selling comfort and hope to the cancer patient through the power of laughter. How’s that?”

“That’s an unusual product,” Genevieve remarked.

“It is an unusual product,” he agreed. “We have no product. We have no features or benefits, we have no call-to-action, we have no competition in the marketplace. We also have no guidelines on design, format, color, type styles, images, or copy.”

“What do we have?” she asked.

“We have a target audience — women suffering from breast cancer — and an objective — to make them laugh.”

“Why did the project change?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Lynn just forwarded me the e-mail with the changes and asked me to pass them on to you.”

“Who’s paying for the ad now that it’s no longer for a fund-raiser?” asked Dan Wisdom.

“Good question. Same people, I think. The Alliance Against Breast Cancer.”

“Joe,” said Karen, “how come I can’t find any presence for this ‘Alliance Against Breast Cancer’ on the Internet?”

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Can’t you?”

Karen shook her head. “There are charities, institutes, research centers, and about a thousand alliances, but none with the name ‘Alliance Against Breast Cancer.’”

Joe suggested that Alliance Against Breast Cancer might be some kind of umbrella group of regional organizations, each of which had their own website.

“So what are we supposed to do now with the fund-raiser concepts that we already have?”

“Shelve them.”

“Well, that blows,” said Karen.

“It’s not like we had anything good anyway,” said Larry.

“We did, too, Larry. We had ‘Loved Ones,’ okay? Joe, when did this change occur?”

“Like I said, Lynn just forwarded me the e-mail.”

“I thought Lynn was off today.”

“Change of plans, I guess.”

“So everybody knows that Lynn’s in today?” said Jim, looking around at us. “How come I was the last to know?”

“Because you’re an idiot,” said Marcia.

“Okay, guys,” said Joe. “Let’s get to work.”

HEADING BACK FROM the couches, knowing we had to toss out our ad concepts for the fund-raiser and start over again in the disagreeable hours of the afternoon — which tended to stretch on and on — we felt a little fatigued. All that work for nothing. And if we happened to cast back, in search of edification, to days past and jobs completed — oh, what a bad idea, for what had all that amounted to? And anticipating future work just made the present moment even more miserable. There was so much unpleasantness in the workaday world. The last thing you ever wanted to do at night was go home and do the dishes. And just the idea that part of the weekend had to be dedicated to getting the oil changed and doing the laundry was enough to make those of us still full from lunch want to lie down in the hallway and force anyone dumb enough to remain committed to walk around us. It might not be so bad. They could drop food down to us, or if that was not possible, crumbs from their PowerBars and bags of microwave popcorn would surely end up within an arm’s length sooner or later. The cleaning crews, needing to vacuum, would inevitably turn us on our sides, preventing bedsores, and we could make little toys out of runs in the carpet, which, in moments of extreme regression, we might suck on for comfort.

But enough daydreaming. Our desks were waiting, we had work to do. And work was everything. We liked to think it was family, it was God, it was following football on Sundays, it was shopping with the girls or a strong drink on Saturday night, that it was love, that it was sex, that it was keeping our eye on retirement. But at two in the afternoon with bills to pay and layoffs hovering over us, it was all about the work.

YET SOMETHING HAPPENED that afternoon that made it hard to concentrate. Benny Shassburger called Joe into his office to inform him he had received an e-mail from Tom Mota. The subject line read, “Jim tells me you’re doing some pro bono cancer ad.”

“So he’s been in touch with Jim, too?” asked Joe, taking a seat across the desk.

“Apparently. Like I said, I only got this a few minutes ago.”

“Read it to me.”

Benny turned to his computer. “It’s kinda long.”

“That’s okay. Read it.”

“Okay. He starts off, ‘So Jim tells me you’re doing some pro bono cancer ad over there. YEEE-HOOO! I’m free!!! But as you aren’t, for what it’s worth, I thought I’d tell you the story of my mother’s cancer, and you can use it if you want. My mother was one mean bitch. When she wasn’t being a mean bitch, she was being deaf and mute. And when she wasn’t being deaf and mute, she was crying in the bathtub. And when she wasn’t crying in the bathtub, she was sharing a bottle with Mr. Hughes. Let me tell you, that there was one slimy glass-eyed fuck, Mr. Hughes. Anyway, those are my four memories of my mom. She looked like Rosie the Riveter — you know the woman I’m talking about, who wears the bandana and says “We Can Do It!”? It was the unsmiling face they shared. But that’s where the similarity stopped because my mom couldn’t do anything and she had Xs over her eyes like in a cartoon of someone dead. I never bought her a Mother’s Day card but I’m sure they never wrote one for her either. Can you imagine? “Happy Depressive’s Day, Ma. Love, Tommy.” But then she started to die. None of us wanted a THING to do with her. I got one brother on a ranch in Omaha, he didn’t want her. I got another brother in Newport Beach in Orange County, California — they only want their red convertibles and their yachts out that way, rich fucks. Anyway, my sister, she was doing my mom one better in the Tenderloin. That’s a little piece of paradise full of whores and drunks in San Francisco. No way SHE could have taken the old lady in. (My sister’s a whole different story. I’ll tell you about her sometime.) So anyway, my mom was still in the same apartment we grew up in — imagine living your whole goddamn life in the same two rooms in Romeoville. Me being about six miles from there, I had to be the one to go pick her up and bring her over to the house. BUT NOT THOSE FUCKING CATS! NO WAY. NO CATS. Barb couldn’t believe that my mom was on her deathbed and I didn’t want a thing to do with her. But that’s because she never knew the woman when she was throwing dishes at the wall in her goddamn robe. The point I’m trying to make here is that it was Barb who convinced me to go over there and get her, and man, just between you and me, Benny, I REALLY, REALLY fucked things up, to be honest with you. With Barb, I mean. Don’t you think you and I should get together and have a beer? I miss her and I’d like to talk about it. Anyway, we put my mom up in the attic until she died and eventually she did die and it was even painful to watch. She absolutely refused to go to the hospital and then she refused to sit up for the home nurse we hired. But then, I couldn’t believe THIS. She asked for a priest. I had no idea she had a religious bone in her body. So we brought in a priest and if I could only tell you what it was like to watch my mom hold a priest’s hand. She was pretty out of it by then, without her dentures and looking like HELL. I felt sorry for whatever Higher Power was about to receive her but I also have to admit that I felt some envy for how God or whatever could convince her to hold the hand of His servant when I couldn’t even recall the last time she’d held MY hand, if ever. And that’s because she was a mean bitch, but also because her father was a drunk and an abusive son-of-a-bitch and all of THAT daytime talk-show psychology. Anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself, because before she asked for the priest, between the time I picked her up in Romeoville (WITHOUT CATS) and the time she lay dying in the attic, I sat with her after I got home from work and we would watch Wheel of Fortune together. And while we were silent and just watching TV, it was more than I remember us ever doing together when I was a kid. We’d watch Wheel of Fortune while Barb made dinner downstairs, and over four or five months I saw how no matter what kind of a mean bitch you have for a mother, it’s tough to watch her die, because ovarian cancer is a much meaner bitch than any bitch it ever consumes. It just WASTED her, Benny. I did not even recognize her. She looked more like the skeleton in your office than my mom. Man did I cry when she died. I kept asking Barbara WHY, WHY was I crying? And she kept saying, of course you’re crying, she’s your mom. But WHY? I hadn’t talked to her in ten years. And I didn’t give one fuck about her. But then you see someone just WASTE like that. And if there is ONE THING I wish I could take back, ONE THING in my entire life I wish I could do differently, it would be when we were going through all that shit during the divorce when I REALLY lost it one time and I just screamed at Barb, I HOPE OVARIAN CANCER EATS YOUR CUNT! I didn’t mean it. I’m ashamed of it now. No, that doesn’t even half describe it. You’re the only one I’ve told that to. Can you tell me WHAT THE FUCK I WAS THINKING? Man oh man oh man. Anyway. Use any of this in your ads if you want, and hello to all those fucks. Tom.’”

That e-mail got forwarded around pretty quickly, and some of us felt vindicated. He was talking about having a beer with Benny, and how he regretted the awful thing he had said to Barb. Those weren’t the ravings of an imminently homicidal former employee seeking to even a score. Even Amber, though horrified by practically everything he had written, reluctantly agreed that it might have indicated a more stable person than the one she had imagined moving in and out of Tinley Park gun stores since the day he walked Spanish. One thing she couldn’t let go of, however, was wanting to know just exactly what Tom had done with his mother’s cats.

“Did he just leave them behind when he went to pick her up?” she asked. “He didn’t just leave the cats in the apartment, did he?” She wanted Benny to e-mail him back to inquire about the fate of the abandoned animals, but nobody else thought that was a good idea. “But what happened to them?” she persisted.

“Oh, will you just shut the fuck up about the goddamn cats, Amber?” said Larry.

We knew there was some domestic tension between the two, owing to the ongoing abortion debate, but nothing on the order of that. Trouble in paradise, folks. Those of us in Amber’s office at the time departed it hastily.

JOE WENT DOWN TO Jim’s cubicle to ask what he’d heard from Tom. “Building security asked us to relay to them any communications that we might get from Tom,” he told Jim.

“I didn’t know that,” said Jim. “Nobody told me that.”

“Don’t sweat it. Just be sure to forward the message to Mike Boroshansky.”

“Why am I always the last person to know anything around here?” he asked Joe. Joe didn’t have an answer for him. Jim squared himself to his computer and opened Tom’s e-mail. “You really want me to read this to you?”

“Please,” said Joe. “First tell me what the subject line says.”

“The subject line,” said Jim. “It says, ‘I Need a Wetter Mare.’”

“I’m sorry. It says what?”

“That’s what he wrote. ‘I Need a Wetter Mare.’”

“Is that some private thing between you and Tom?”

“‘I Need a Wetter Mare’? No, I don’t know what the hell that means. What could that mean? How the hell should I know?”

“Jim, relax. Go ahead and read me the e-mail,” said Joe.

“‘Smalls — remember when we shot that laundry detergent commercial? I’m talking about the one of all the guys playing a game of football, and bringing home their grass-stained clothes to their loving wives? Well, they weren’t really landing on the grass when they were tackled, were they? They were actors. We laid mattresses down for them. They were landing on mattresses! Gotcha, TV America! But anyway, my question to YOU, JIMBO, is this: when Captain Murdoch throws his grenades at the BAD GUYS, and the BAD GUYS go leaping up, do those BAD GUYS have mattresses, too? Wouldn’t it hurt, JIMBO, to have a grenade explode and to be NOWHERE NEAR a mattress?’”

When that got forwarded, we just thought Tom was having a good time with his old friend Smalls. Convincing Amber of that, of course, was impossible. It sent us right back to square one with her. She even pressed and pressed until we were forced to agree that at the very least, the variance in tone between the two e-mails indicated that Tom Mota had his bad hours along with his good.

AFTER LEARNING OF THE CHANGE to the project, Genevieve stepped out of the office and walked down Michigan Avenue to the Borders near the Water Tower, where she purchased a few books. She came back to the office and started reading. Halfway through a breast cancer survivor’s memoir, she was interrupted by Joe. “Hey,” he said, knocking on her open door.

“Oh, this stuff is just way too emotional,” she said. “Oh, I have to stop reading it.” She put the book down. She stretched her face out and ran her fingers under her eyes to dry them. “Oh,” she said. She took a deep breath and sighed.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Yes. I’m okay.”

“I just stopped by to make sure you were clear on what we’re doing.”

They were a team, Joe and Genevieve, copywriter and art director, and they worked together in greater harmony than the majority of other teams. “I guess so,” she said finally. “Although to be honest, I can’t imagine coming up with anything.”

He moved inside and sat down across from her. “Why not?”

“So I’m reading this memoir, right?” she said, lifting the book off her desk and setting it down again. “And basically it’s all sadness. It’s panic, fear, anguish, a lot of bravery. There’s some crying. Everyone in the family is wonderful. The woman’s brother quits his job to take care of his sister. He’s a saint. The woman is a hero. Because there’s nothing but bad news for her, and then more bad news. But every once in a while there’s a little dollop of humor. Without it, trust me, you’d kill yourself reading it. Like the brother comes in, right. The woman has just found out like two pages earlier that her cancer’s not responding to the treatments. Then the brother comes in — he’s shaved his head so she won’t be the only one who’s bald. He comes in wearing a big, bushy blond wig, and the woman just dies laughing for how ridiculous he looks. And you die, too, it’s such a relief. But of course midway through laughing, she breaks down into tears for how much she loves him, how good he is to her — I mean, he’s just her brother, for god’s sake. He isn’t required to, to. . oh, and here I go again,” said Genevieve, returning her fingers to just below her eyes. She let out a long sigh. “The point I’m trying to make,” she said, grabbing a tissue forcefully from a box on the desk, “is that there is really very little humor in a diagnosis of cancer. And what humor there is, is humorous only in the context of a whole lot of sadness. Now, how can we be expected to do that with a stock photo and a ten-word headline?”

Joe sat back in the chair. “Yeah,” he said. “I agree.”

“You do?”

No one ever expected Joe Pope to say something was hard because, when it came to thinking up ads, the guy was something of a savant.

“Make the cancer patient laugh,” he said, and his voice got quiet. “Isn’t this assignment a little screwy?”

THE IMPORTANT THING was that it was our screwy assignment, and it was all we had. By late afternoon Genevieve had finished her memoir, while Hank Neary, combing carefully through Internet sites, could soon pass himself off as a practicing oncologist. Benny Shassburger took the opposite approach. He found a stock photo of a beautiful woman draping herself across the red felt of a pool table. He doctored it in Photoshop by covering her breasts with surgical masks. That, he thought, was a brilliant image. The cancer patient would really laugh once he had the right headline in place. Two hours went by before he condemned the brilliant image to the dustbin of bad ideas and moved himself down to the coffee bar for a late-afternoon latte.

Jim Jackers got on the phone and started calling people. With no inspiration and frightened by the blank page, his only recourse was the imaginations of other people. He caught his mother, a librarian, at the checkout desk of the Woodridge Public Library.

“Let’s say you have breast cancer,” he began.

“Oh, Jim,” she whispered, “please let’s not even think about it.”

She quickly changed subjects, asking him what he wanted for dinner. His mother was a sensitive and superstitious woman who believed even the most casual mention of disease was a morbid flirtation with death that conjured bad luck and evil spirits and should be avoided at all costs. He should have known better than to call her first.

“Let’s say you have breast cancer,” he said next to his father. “What’s funny about it? How do you want to be cheered up?”

His father gave it a second’s thought. “Call me up with a scenario where I have breast cancer and you ask what’s funny about it,” he replied. “That should do the trick.”

“I’m serious, Dad,” Jim urged him. “What’s funny about breast cancer?”

“What’s funny about it? Son,” he said. “Very little.”

He tried to explain the assignment to his father but his description was a muddled briefing of the morphing project, and it ended with Jim saying he’d have to get back to him with certain details. “Sounds to me like you need to figure out what the hell’s going on over there,” said his father.

“Well, it’s a confusing assignment.”

“Talk to your great-uncle about this,” his father suggested. “I imagine he’d be a good resource.”

Everyone knew that Jim’s creative coup d’état came from a suggestion from his great-uncle Max, who lived on a farm in Iowa. According to Jim, his uncle had Mexicans running the farm while his days were spent in the farmhouse basement reconstructing a real train car from scratch, which was the only thing he had shown any interest in since the passing of his wife. He traveled to old train yards collecting the parts. When someone asked him at a family function why he was doing it, his answer was so that no one could remove the train car from the basement after he died. When it was pointed out to him that the boxcar could be removed by dismantling it, reversing the process by which he had constructed it, Jim’s great-uncle replied that no Jackers alive was willing to work that hard at anything. Picturing this ornery farmer at his lunatic task, lost in the rural delusions of grief and old age, we probably laughed a little too hard, spurring Jim to defend his uncle’s singular hobby.

“What?” he said. “It’s like Legos, but for adults.”

That only made us laugh harder.

“The man lost his wife,” he said.

Jim was so desperate one day to come up with inspiration for an ad, he exhausted his traditional list of people, broke down, and called his uncle Max. “You know how when you buy a new car,” he began — and immediately Max interrupted him.

“I haven’t bought a new car in thirty-five years,” said Max.

Jim suspected then that this was probably not a man with his finger on the pulse of the buying public. Patiently he tried explaining his assignment. When people buy a new car, he said, they usually have an image of themselves that corresponds to the car they buy. Jim wanted to know from Max how Max would want to perceive himself when purchasing a new ink cartridge.

“Ink cartridge?”

“Yeah,” said Jim. “You know, for your printer.”

“Uh-huh,” said Max.

We had a client at the time whose marketing objective was to make their customers feel like heroes when purchasing one of their ink cartridges. Our charge in every communication was to inspire the potential buyer with the heroic possibilities of man-using-ink-cartridge.

“I want to see myself as Shakespeare,” Max said. “What’s this for, anyway?”

Shakespeare, thought Jim. Shakespeare. That’s not bad.

“It’s for a client of ours,” he said. “They make printers and ink cartridges and that sort of thing. I’m trying to come up with an ad that makes you want to buy our specific ink cartridge after you see our ad because it inspires you and makes you feel like a hero. Will you tell me more about wanting to feel like Shakespeare?”

“So you’re trying to sell ink cartridges?”

“That’s right.”

Another long pause. “Do you have a pen?” his uncle asked. He began to quote: “‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity. .’”

Finally Jim reached out for a pen. He tried to keep up with him. At a certain point, Max stopped quoting and told Jim the lines should start to fade out, gradually at first, eventually disappearing altogether. Then he suggested the headline: “A Great Writer Needs a Great Ink Cartridge.” The small print could explain how, if ink cartridges had been used throughout time, the history of literature might have been at stake using a cheap ink cartridge.

Not only was Jim startled that his uncle could quote what he thought was Shakespeare seemingly off the top of his head; he was floored by the speed and ingenuity of his advertising abilities. Who was a greater hero than Shakespeare? And the person encountering the ad that his uncle had just pulled out of his ass could immediately put himself in Shakespeare’s shoes. Max had just made a million Americans feel exactly like Shakespeare. He told Max he’d missed his calling. “You should have been a creative,” he said.

“A creative?” said Max.

Jim explained that in the advertising industry, art directors and copywriters alike were called creatives.

“That’s the stupidest use of an English word I ever encountered,” said Max.

Jim also told him that the advertising product, whether it was a TV commercial, a print ad, a billboard, or a radio spot, was called the creative. Before he hung up Jim asked Max for two more examples of great pieces of literature, suspecting that an entire campaign could be generated from Max’s concept. He went down to Hank Neary’s office — Hank was just then engrossed in a printer manual. “‘The best of times, the worst of times,’” he said. “That’s Shakespeare, right?”

“Dickens,” said Hank. “A Tale of Two Cities.”

“And what about ‘To be or not to be’? Shakespeare?”

“Shakespeare,” said Hank. “Hamlet.”

“That’s what I thought,” said Jim.

Sometime later that afternoon, Max Jackers surprised Jim by calling him back. “You folks over there,” said Max, “you say you call yourselves creatives, is that what you’re telling me? And the work you do, you call that the creative, is that what you said?” Jim said that was correct. “And I suppose you think of yourselves as pretty creative over there, I bet.”

“I suppose so,” said Jim, wondering what Max was driving at.

“And the work you do, you probably think that’s pretty creative work.”

“What are you asking me, Uncle Max?”

“Well, if all that’s true,” said the old man, “that would make you creative creatives creating creative creative.” There was silence as Max allowed Jim to take this in. “And that right there,” he concluded, “is why I didn’t miss my calling. That’s a use of the English language just too absurd to even contemplate.”

With that, Max hung up.

JIM TOOK HIS FATHER’S advice and called Max about the breast cancer ads. When Max picked up, Jim asked him to imagine that he was a woman recently diagnosed with the disease. As the words “breast cancer” escaped his mouth, Jim had the conviction once again that he’d called the wrong man. Max had come through for him in the past, but what did a man who’d spent his entire life working a farm in rural Iowa know about a predominantly female disease? Still Jim persevered while Max remained silent on the other end. He wanted to know what Max, as a woman with breast cancer, might find funny if he were, say, flipping through a magazine at a doctor’s office. Still more silence from Max, so Jim explained further that this woman was probably impatient for her name to be called, her mind was probably half on other things, but when she came across the ad, she stopped and read it and it made her laugh. “What we’re looking for is what’s funny about it,” he said. Then he stopped talking and put the ball in Max’s court.

“What’s funny about what?” Max finally said.

“What’s funny about breast cancer,” said Jim. “Not breast cancer per se, you know, but what’s funny to somebody with breast cancer flipping through a magazine.”

Max cleared his throat. “Jim,” he said, “do you recall a sweet old gal, just the salt of the earth, probably the sweetest woman you ever met in your life, by the name of Edna?”

“Edna,” said Jim. “Edna. . Edna. . No, I don’t think so, Uncle Max.”

“You don’t remember your aunt Edna?”

“Oh, Aunt Edna. Of course I remember Aunt Edna, Uncle Max.”

“Edna died of breast cancer,” said Max.

“She did? Aunt Edna?”

Now Jim realized why his dad had suggested he call Max. It wasn’t because of Max’s marketing wit. It was because Max’s wife had died of the disease. Suddenly Jim realized he should have approached things differently. His phrasing might have been a little cavalier. “Uncle Max, I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I didn’t remember how Aunt Edna died.”

“It sounds to me,” said Max, “that you don’t know much of anything on the subject.”

“I remember the funeral,” said Jim. “I was seventeen.”

“They don’t typically sit in the waiting room flipping through magazines,” said Max. “Their minds aren’t half on something else.”

“You see, we’re. . we’re doing this, uh, a pro bono campaign,” Jim stuttered.

“But there ain’t nothing funny about it,” said Max, “that I ever saw.”

“And what we’re trying to do is, we’re just trying to lift their spirits a little.”

“And there ain’t nothing left to say in this conversation.”

“WELL, I’M TAPPED,” said Jim, when he made it down to the coffee bar.

“It’s an impossible assignment,” Benny agreed, pulling a stool out for him.

“I got a few ideas,” said Marcia, taking possession of a chai latte from the barista. “Thanks,” she said, handing off a dollar. “But they’re all tired and stale.”

“I have one thing that’s funny,” said Larry. “One thing. But I think it’s funny only if you’re already dead.”

“There are two things you just can’t advertise,” said Hank matter-of-factly. “Fat people and dead people.”

“Is that a quote, Hank?”

“They’re not dead, Hank,” said Amber. “They’re just sick.”

“Fat people and dying people, then.”

“Suicides are tough,” added Larry.

Chris Yop showed up looking furtive and unwell, vigilant despite familiar surroundings, carrying some rough layouts on sketch paper. Significant sweat blots under the arms of his Hawaiian shirt indicated a higher level of vascular dysfunction than we were accustomed to. He had evidently been hard at work. “I need someone to take these in to Lynn,” he announced, setting his layouts on the coffee bar. We asked him what they were. “My concepts for the fund-raiser ads,” he said. “I think they’re pretty good.”

“Humbly you submit,” said Larry, picking them off the coffee bar.

It was obviously just plain wrong that the man was still in the building a full day after being laid off. But to have concepts, too? Some nerve system crucial to an understanding of the agreement one enters into when engaging in the capitalist system had obviously gone haywire in him, along with the rest of his ailing networks.

“The problem I’m having,” he said, glancing back as if spooked, “is I can’t get credit for them because, well, you know, officially. .”

“You’re insane?” said Marcia.

“No, Marcia,” he said, “not because I’m insane. Because officially I don’t work here anymore.”

“Oh, right,” said Marcia, taking a sip of her latte. “Forgot that detail. But I wouldn’t worry, Chris. I’ve seen your resume. They’re going to scoop you right up.”

“Why are you being mean to me, Marcia?”

“Because you called me Karen!”

“Chris,” said Benny, “listen. The project’s changed.”

Yop’s attention was suddenly focused on the opening elevator doors.

“Chris? Are you listening to me?”

“Sorry,” said Yop, snapping back. “Benny, is Lynn really in today? Or was Dan Wisdom just fucking with me?”

“Chris, listen. It’s no longer an ad for the fund-raiser. It’s this other thing now.”

“What other thing?”

“The project’s changed,” he repeated.

“But I’ve been working on fund-raiser ads,” said Yop. “I was hoping you guys could take these in to Lynn and, you know, let it slip I came up with them.”

“I don’t think you want credit for these,” said Larry, setting the ads back down on the coffee bar.

“Now you’re telling me the project’s changed? — Go screw, Larry. — Benny, I spent a lot of time on these. I worked hard, man. I’m trying to get my job back here.”

He paused to order a decaf from the barista.

“Chris,” said Benny. “Shouldn’t you go home? Shouldn’t you stop worrying about these ads and go home and talk to your wife?”

Yop looked away, distant and pensive. He removed a napkin from the dispenser on the coffee bar and wiped sweat from his brow. Then he set his head down on the bar, losing it inside his arms. He stayed that way for a while. When he looked up again, nudged by the barista holding his coffee out to him, his eyes were bloodshot and veiny. “Thanks,” he said, taking the cup. He handed off his dollar. “Will somebody do me a favor, please,” he asked. “Will somebody please e-mail me with details on how the job has changed? Will someone do that for me, please?”

Before departing, he turned back to Marcia. “I’m sorry I called you Karen this morning,” he said. “I know you’re Marcia. My brain is fried, I just got confused.”

He hurried off down the hall, staying close to the walls.

“‘Tomorrow morning there’ll be laundry,’” said Hank. “‘But he’ll be somewhere else to hear the call.’”

Karen Woo came toward us from the opposite direction.

“Everybody come with me,” she said.

She reversed in her tracks and headed back to her office.

When we got down there she was sitting behind her desk holding the phone to her ear. She said to the person on the other end that she wished to speak with a nurse in the oncology department. As she waited to be transferred, no one spoke. We couldn’t believe it — she was making the call. Her cool composure was astounding, preternatural, and somewhat sinister. When the nurse came on, she remained confident and in character. We held her in awe.

But as we waited, it was almost as if something swept the room and a collective epiphany dawned upon all of us at once and we knew for certain how wrong we had been about everything. No one would just miss a crucial operation. A crucial operation must have never been scheduled. Why had we not bowed to the eminently more reasonable likelihood that there was no cancer? That it was just a rumor, as Larry had suggested. Or if Lynn did have cancer and an operation had been scheduled, there were a thousand very simple explanations for why she might have missed it. Some scheduling conflict with the doctor, some clarification was needed in the diagnosis, more tests had to be taken, blood drawn, the doctor was sick, the hospital had lost power. All today’s intrigue was just cheap talk to better dramatize our lives. Why had we not seen it before Karen got on the phone with the nurse? Oh, to be seduced by that meddling, insensitive woman! To play along in her deception just to have our craven tabloid hysterias confirmed or denied. It was despicable. We were despicable. We should have stood up immediately, denounced her actions with one voice, and demanded that she —

She hung up the phone. “Her operation was scheduled for nine,” she said. “The doctor was prepped and waiting. They called her at home, they called her at work. The nurse sounded irritated. She wanted to know when I wanted to reschedule.”

The Thing to Do and the Place to Be

THE NIGHT BEFORE THE OPERATION she has no association dinners to go to, no awards ceremonies, no networking functions. A plan comes to her impromptu in the back of the cab as she steps in and instructs the driver to take the Inner Drive. She envisions her sofa, her two cats, something good ordered in, and a bottle of wine she’s been saving. They ask you not to eat anything twelve hours before, but honestly, that’s unreasonable, isn’t it — your last chance at a normal meal for how long?

She brought no work home with her, not tonight, because work would not be an appropriate way to spend the evening. Yet whenever she’s without it, even for the duration of a cab ride, she starts to feel anxious. Luckily it’s a short ride. She pays the cabbie and steps out in front of some serious real estate. She lives in the top-floor condo overlooking the winding coastal edge of Lake Michigan.

The doorman stands at his post in the lobby; they exchange greetings and she heads up the elevator. Inside the condominium, she slips off one heel while hanging her keys on the hook. She slips off the other one, and with two heels in one hand, walks down the hall to where her pajamas await. Getting into pajamas — now that’s appropriate. Here is a good place to be, she tells herself, right here in this apartment, and getting into her pink hospital scrubs and jersey zip-up — that’s the right thing to be doing.

At the kitchen table she pours herself a glass of wine. She reflects on the day, it can’t be helped. Chris Yop broke down when she delivered the news. If Martin were here, she’d say to him, A grown man crying! Would you do that? Of course you wouldn’t! Let me tell you something, I think I’ve grown immune to the emotion involved. His crying? It didn’t faze me one bit. You want to know when I feel something? It’s the person who says to me, Lynn, you’ve been terrific to work for, and I understand you’re just doing what you have to do — that’s who I feel sorry for. Those people kill me. A grown man crying? Uh, no. And listen to this! An hour later, he shows up for a meeting. I come in, he’s sitting in my office. I just fired him, he’s sitting in my office. I said to him, Chris, you have to leave. God knows I can’t have them sticking around!

Wait — did she just say that last part out loud? A hazard of living alone. One of the cats is looking at her from the floor. Or is it just a look of hunger? She reminds herself — Martin’s not actually here, Lynn. “But you are, aren’t you, Friday,” she says, bending to scruff up the cat’s black coat. The cat bow-backs and asks for more. “Yes, you are,” she says, “and so am I, and so who needs him?” She straightens up and takes another sip of wine. Look at all of the chairs! A total of four chairs at the kitchen table! Why do I need four chairs? It’s important that she not second-guess anything, now that she’s home. She’s home, she’s in for good. Stop thinking, stop thinking, stop thinking.

She wonders where Martin is. Is he at work? What time is it? Six-forty-five, of course he’s at work. Stop thinking. He’ll be at work for hours. Stop it. Lynn Mason, on the other hand, knocked off early today. Two very important new business pitches, absolutely crucial to the agency’s future, and strategies for both still need to be worked out with the account people, but Lynn left the office at a reasonable hour, to come home to her cats, to spend the evening before her operation in a relaxing manner, unwinding with a little television, going to bed early and getting a good night’s sleep. What could be better, more desirable than that? Don’t think about Martin. And if she’s tempted, remember — it’s Martin at work. Just a man at his desk, grumpy, nasty with the day’s odors, engaged in some dull legal matter. Consider how undesirable his company would be right now. How could she want that, with all she’s got going on right here — the Chinese food on its way, and so many chairs to choose from.

The doorman calls up from the lobby. Her delivery has arrived. Thank god, send him up. If he’s cute, she’s going to seduce him. No joke. It’s done, it’s decided. Think she has time to play games tonight? No, if he’s in the least way cute, she’s going down on him in the hallway. Well, not in the hallway. Why don’t you come inside? Will you shut the door for me, please? Delivery boys must dream of this. Maybe choose different pajamas? The pink scrubs and zip-up — not very mistress-of-the-night. She needs a robe, nothing underneath. Because it all sounds like a joke until you understand that someone has to be the last one to hold her breast in his mouth — tonight’s it — and she’d really rather it not be Martin.

But he comes and goes. Young Asian, has his charms, but she loses the nerve. She takes the food over to the couch. The initial comfort of a seat on the sofa — yes, this is the right place to be, right here, and turning on the TV the right thing to be doing. She eats her dinner and drinks her wine while watching an episode of The Simpsons, and a half hour later her conviction is still nearly intact.

On her third glass of wine, she repeats it to herself: Here is a good place to be, right here, and this thing the right thing to be. . wonder what Martin’s doing? He’s working. Lynn, you know this. He’ll be there for hours. Think about something else. Wonder. . wonder what movies are playing. She likes to see a movie when she has the time. Always better to see them with someone, though. Alone, there is that awkward ten minutes between the time you arrive and the time they dim the lights for the previews when against all reason you believe everyone in the theater is staring at you because you are a woman alone at the movies. It’s probably a good thing she’s here on the sofa, rather than waiting self-consciously for a movie to begin. This is the right place to be. Unless the alternative was a movie theater with Martin.

Television isn’t working out. She turns it off, gets up, makes the cold transition from carpet to tile — but what is there in the kitchen for someone looking to indulge? No food for twelve hours my ass. This could be it. Let’s see — some freezer-burned ice cream. What’s in the cupboard? A third of a bag of mini marshmallows. For the life of her she can’t remember buying those. She’s not interested in any of it — though when she turns her attention to cleaning the bedroom closet, she does take the ice cream with her. It’s a spoon-bender. What compels her to do that, to clean? She stabs at the tub after every new pile of mess she drags from the closet out into the tidy room. It will be nice, she thinks, to have a nice clean closet during my recovery.

Fifteen minutes later she does not want to be cleaning the closet. On this night of all nights, cleaning the closet? Does she have such a deficient imagination, that’s all she can come up with? Imagine if one night in a lifetime were looked upon as a scientist might look upon it, or some other life form studying our species, and from that one night, the worth of the entire life were derived. Well, she’d rather hers not be evaluated by the TV she’s watched or the closet she hasn’t cleaned. Besides, that goddamn ice cream requires a pickax. Abandoning everything, she returns to the kitchen and finishes the bottle of wine.

MARTIN IS FORTY-FIVE and has never been married. His parents divorced when he was young and he never forgave the institution for any of its false comforts. He goes on and on about it, until finally she tells him, “Okay, I got it the first eight hundred times, you’re not the marrying type.” Still, he needed someone to go to Maui with. His firm kept a luxury box at Wrigley, there wasn’t a restaurant in the city he couldn’t afford — he wasn’t about to sit in them alone. He needed companionship, he needed sex. But perhaps that paints too one-sided a portrait of Martin. He could have dated only younger women, girls practically, paralegals and secretaries without a brain in their heads, attracted to his partnership, his money, the broad chest under his starched shirts. Instead he was with her, someone his own age, someone whose professional achievements he respected. And last August, he spent a week in Florida, an entire week in Cocoa Beach, taking her old dad around. Eating at five-thirty, speaking loud so he could hear — the whole routine. He never complained. That was something, wasn’t it — giving of his vacation time, meeting her family? And once in a while, he would show up with flowers, he would come up behind her and kiss her neck, and that would be enough to look past the birthday he forgot, or the dates he’d have to cancer because of work.

Cancel. The word she wants is cancel.

But what would commonly happen was that he would call at the last possible minute. “Deposition. . judge moved up the court date. . important conference.” Whatever it was would leave her alone, looking down the long double-barrel of Saturday and Sunday when it should have been three bottles of Merlot on Mackinaw Island and bedsheets warm with body heat. “Oh, fuck, Martin, not again.” “Hey, I’m sorry,” he’d offer. “But this is work, Lynn. This is what I do.” “Yeah, but you know what? Fuck you, because this was planned. We planned this thing, you and me — and what, I’m going to call Sherry now? I’m going to call Diane and say, Martin stood me up again, the asshole, want to rent a movie?” “Does it even count,” he’d ask, “does it even matter that I’m sorry?” The sorry part was how well she knew that Sherry, with twin ten-year-olds, was not in a position just to drop things and listen to another Martin story, and the other sorry part was how loathsome it sounded, renting a movie with sad, fat Diane. Sometimes she almost wished Martin were married and that she were fucking another woman’s husband so it could all be simpler — easier to deal with a cliché than Martin’s overriding obsessions. He wasn’t just not the marrying type. He was pathologically noncommittal. “I can’t do this,” she’d say. And there was silence on the other end. “Can’t do what?” “This,” she’d say. And that was it, they were off again.

Then a night would come along — hey, not unlike this one — when enough time had passed that the specifics of their last conversation grew vague, when Lynn discovered that in the intervening days her anger at Martin had shifted toward understanding, which had spilled over, that night, into regret for how she had reacted when he canceled their plans. It had always been an understanding we share, the thought went, how important work is, and when we get together it’s what we talk about — this frustration of mine, that fascinating case of his, how we’re succeeding and failing and working hard. She would reflect back and think how selfish she had been, and slightly childish, too — and she would call. Or a few days would pass and he would call. “You were right, I fucked up, we had it planned,” he’d say. “Can we do it this weekend?” How good it was to have her hands on his chest again, how good to trip over his shoes again on the way to the bathroom.

But not this night — no calling him this night. Not after their last conversation. No way to shift any of that emotional content. That back-and-forth is frozen like a mastodon in ice, and the rider on top, with his spear and animal urges, he is their year together, suspended forever with his mouth gaping wide, his whoop and howl finally silenced.

WHOA — SUDDENLY it’s like something in a science fiction movie: how’d she get here? Just a second ago, she was sitting on the sofa with the cats, eating Chinese. There was television, and the last of the ice cream. Next she knows, she’s dressed and sitting in a public place, seeing and being seen. A delicately lit wood-paneled wine bar new in the neighborhood. She feels on display for being the only one actually sitting at the bar. The crowd’s in back. What was that she kept repeating to herself? Here is the right place to be, alone at this bar, and this thing I’m doing, having my, what, fourth? my fourth or fifth glass of wine for the night, what a wise and prudent thing to be doing. Not any more convincing here than it was back home. She can’t even work up a conversation with the bartender, who seems fixated on the contents of his wallet. Jeez, don’t let me distract you. No need for a little conversation, what they used to call the human touch. By all means, keep looking through your ATM receipts. She’ll just content herself with mulling it over again: the fact that there is some place — she’s absolutely certain of it — one place that is the right place to be tonight, and one thing that is the right thing to be doing. Is it really sitting in Martin’s office, under very familiar fluorescent lights, amid all those oppressive document boxes, watching Martin read Westlaw downloads, just so she can be in the presence of Martin? No, goddamn it, no — that is bullshit. There is something else, something that is Lynn Mason’s, that belongs to her and to her alone and is not contingent upon the existence of Martin Grant. But what? Only thing she can say for sure, it’s probably not here. Amazing how quickly a glass of wine goes when you’re the only one at the bar. Ladies and gentlemen, I’ll be saying good night now, you won’t be seeing me tomorrow. “Another one?” asks the bartender. “Just the tab,” she says.

One day she said to him — they were on again — “Hey, come here, will you, and feel this for me?” She was in the shower. It was a workday, one of the rare occasions Martin slept over during the week. He came to the shower door. “Hey, I’m going now,” he said. “Have to get home to shower.” He was standing behind the opaque glass. “Did you not just hear me?” she asked him. “What?” he said. “I asked you to feel something.” He didn’t move. “What is it? I’ll get wet.” And instantly, she had a thought. More like a suspicion. It was when he said, “I’ll get wet” — what sort of thing was that to say? Roll up your fucking sleeve then, you jerk! It led her to believe he had heard her, heard her all too well. It can’t be helped, when a woman is in the shower and says, come here and feel this, that a tone creeps in. Not fear, not just yet. Concern, and she’s looking to unburden some of it. She’s looking for somebody to say, that feels to me like it’s nothing. But Martin, Martin was quick. Martin would immediately grasp the implications of a request like come here and feel this, and he would pick up on the tone, too — and knowing what that tone implied, all it might lead to and all it might require of him, he came to the shower door with his own agenda. Have to go home, have to shower. Was it true, or was it just her suspicious mind? “What is it, Lynn?” he said. “What is it you want me to feel?” “Never mind,” she said. “No, what is it?” he said, with an impatience intended now to make her believe that he was eager for it, really wanting the opportunity. “It’s nothing, forget it, get out of here,” she said. He opened the shower door, startling her. She slammed it shut. “Get out of here! Go home and shower.” He already had his keys in his hand. They jangled as he spun them around on his finger. “Okay,” he said — and that was the extent of his protest. She hated the disappointment she felt when, with the water off, she heard the front door slam.

He spent the next month in California on a case. He left messages but she didn’t return them, and then he stopped calling. It was two weeks after his return that they next saw each other, and they should have been thick in a fight before even taking a step inside the restaurant — about the calls put in and not returned, the monthlong silence, the insult of the two additional weeks. But being across from him again was where she wanted to be. She had missed his conversation. God — had she not realized how much? It was always the same thing — pissed-off judges and incompetent prosecutors and legal issues she needed explained. But the way he talked, his mannerisms, his inimitable masculine mannerisms — she had missed them. And he had missed her company, too, it seemed. He listened to her talk about the difficulties the agency was facing and the miserable experience of laying people off. Later that night they went back to her place and it was even better having him inside her than it was having him across the table from her. She had to interrupt it briefly to tell him not to touch there, not the left breast, to spend his attention on the right breast but not to touch the other one, and he guessed appropriately that it would not be the time to ask, “How come?” and so said nothing.

But at breakfast the next morning, at a place in the neighborhood where they sat in a courtyard on a wrought-iron table under the new spring sun, he surprised her. “I’m putting two and two together,” he said, “and it may come to equal five, but I thought I might ask. How are you feeling, healthwise?” “Why are you asking me that?” she said. “Because last time we were together you asked me to feel something. And this time you tell me not to feel something. Is it just a monthly. . a matter of bad timing? Or is there something else going on?”

Martin, who cared only to talk about the law. And when it wasn’t the law it was jazz — the history of jazz, how to listen to jazz, this one particular recording that changed jazz forever. “Everybody would disagree with me, but it was Louis Armstrong’s ‘St. Louis Blues.’ There had never been anything like it.” She knew it by heart by now. Oh, god — had she misread him? Had her decision not to return his phone calls when he went to California been based on a presumption that when he came to the shower door, he thought, Reach in, and I’m doomed. Two minutes of sexless inspection of the thing he lavished his attention upon at certain convenient hours and he was in it for months, maybe years. He was in for meeting the doctors and learning the terminology and driving her back and forth and holding her head as she retched. If he wasn’t likely to commit to something that included security, love, protection, how eager was he for a commitment like that? But was it possible he had in fact simply not heard her? “I have a lump in my breast,” she said. “I found a lump.” He raised his eyebrows. “A lump,” he said, looking down, suddenly toying with an empty cream container. “What’s. . what’s a lump?” What’s a lump? He hadn’t expected that answer, had he, even if it was the obvious one — not here, not at breakfast in the sun. “Why don’t you just forget about it?” she said. “No, I mean, of course I know what a lump is,” he said. “But what have you done about it? That’s what I mean to ask. What do the doctors say?” “I’m doing fine,” she said. “Is that what they say?” “Martin,” she said, “I’m fine.” “Were you ever going to tell me?” “I told you last night,” she said. On a dime he turned into the litigator. “No, you didn’t tell me last night. You told me not to touch last night. You didn’t tell me you found a lump.” “Why don’t you not worry about it, Martin — because I think you’d rather not worry about it than worry about it.” “I brought it up, didn’t I? Wasn’t I the one who brought it up?” Well, she thought — wasn’t he? Just where did Martin stand? Who was this man she had been fucking for the past year really, and how would he react with his back up against the wall? Let’s find out. “Okay,” she said, “go to the doctor’s with me.” He returned to futzing with the creamer. He didn’t look up for some time. “So you haven’t seen a doctor?” “I just asked you to go with me,” she said. “So obviously I haven’t.” “Why not?” he asked. “Because I need someone to go with me,” she said. He returned his attention to the creamer. “Sure,” he said, not looking at her. “I’ll go with you. Of course.” She smiled at him. He looked up. “What?” he said. “I’m fine,” she said.

BETTER THAN BEFORE, anyway, because here is a good place to be, not a half-bad place, anyway, and this thing she’s doing may be a little uninspired, but certainly better than getting blotto at a wine bar. She parks in the underground garage and goes up by elevator and steps lightly into the bright and soothing atmosphere. Home, then bar, and now, a half hour before closing time, a department store — not a very fertile imagination on me, she concludes. She wishes to god she could think of the thing she knows is right. It probably isn’t shopping, but as she told herself on the way over, shopping’s not a bad interlude. And would you look at all the shoes? She wanders around the displays. Pumps, heels, sneakers, sandals — you know (thinking back on all those shoes she pulled from her closet when eons ago it sounded like a good idea to be cleaning), I don’t really need any more shoes. She doesn’t really need any more anything. But will you just look at all the hard work these good folks have put in to make you feel like nothing could ever be wrong when there’s so many pairs of shoes to buy! She hasn’t even gone into the main body of the store yet, it’s all so lovely and pleasant already.

And all of it soured by the lack of the one thing she wants: not likely to find Martin here in the women’s shoe department, is she? In any department of Nordstrom or anywhere else at this hour of the night. Nine-thirty — right now Martin’s walking the hallway toward some associate’s office. Is she really longing to be a part of that? She would replace these bright and open spaces full of the world’s best footwear, fashions, perfumes, and accessories — and for everything else, there’s MasterCard — just to join Martin in a hallway of bare walls and ugly carpet as he moves toward an associate’s office on some inconsequential item of business? Come on, be reasonable. So it is Martin, it is Martin’s body — he’s still standing in some boring jerk’s doorway talking about document production and privileged materials. Shop, for god’s sake! Buy something! Make this night memorable in shopping’s extremely cheap way. What she has in mind is something extravagant, something outrageously expensive. You wear it once and put it away forever. No, not that, not a wedding gown. She doesn’t want to marry Martin, believe it or not. She just wants to follow him around the corridors of his office, stepping into the supply closet with him to pick up some file tabs, or whatever. That’s a far cry from vows. It’s not not having Martin forever that makes her momentarily wacko for Martin; it’s not having him tonight.

She passes the man at the piano. What’s he playing? Can’t name it. She drifts around the perfume and makeup counters, fending off the lab-coated jackals that want to spray her and paint her and make her look her best. Just looking, thanks. Which is what she’s been doing, for twenty years more or less, with respect to men. She doesn’t mind finding herself unmarried, it’s just how things turned out, and she’s not eager to marry just to marry. Only those with the most dull and conventional pieties, looking in at her from the outside, would suspect or pity her for being forty-three and still unmarried. Would they pity a man? They would envy the man. She heads up the escalators. That’s not to say that when she sees her friends marry, she doesn’t have moments of, not jealousy, but envy, though not envy of the friend for getting married but rather of that conviction both the bride and bridegroom seem to share that, well, this thing they’re doing is the right thing. Where does that come from? She did think for a time that she and Douglas would marry, and when instead it went in the opposite direction, because Douglas was not, in the end, what she wanted, she woke up one morning and thought, not unlike finding herself all of a sudden in that wine bar, “Whoa, I’m thirty-eight! Who’s playing tricks on me here?” And for a moment she thought along the conventional line herself, reflecting on what a loss it might be if she never married, and if she did, how old would she be by then — no younger than forty, if she got lucky — and so maybe too old to have children, and what a loss that might be, too. But do let it be known — what floor is she on? — let it be known in Women’s Apparel, at nine-thirty-five PM — dinner is probably being delivered to his office about now — on the night before she’s scheduled for major surgery and at the age of forty-three, that her marital status has not been, for whatever reason — because she is “cerebral,” because she is “cold,” because she is “ambitious” — it has not been the focus of her life. If she had spent a tenth of the energy finding the right man as she has building the agency she started with the other partners, she would be living in Oak Park right now putting dinner plates into the dishwasher. Have you finished with your homework? Should I take the car in tomorrow? With some circumspection, with some healthy amount of doubt, she can say that right here is a better place to be, in Nordstrom, and this thing she’s doing a better thing than loading up the dishwasher in Oak Park. And those people who think, Oh woman, oh sister, oh girl you have no idea what you’re missing out on, we just have to part ways, me and them, because I have made a good life for myself. I know what to do with my life. I just don’t know what to do with this one night.

SHE ENDS UP in the lingerie section. If it’s invasive, and they think it is, and if a couple of other factors are in play, she’s agreed to have a mastectomy. Basically they put it to her this way: if we go in there and we find this and we find that, we don’t see how you have much of a choice. And if she’s going to have a mastectomy, she needs to start thinking about breast reconstruction. They’re going to save as much as they can, and they’ve asked that she come in tomorrow with a favorite bra, which they will use to measure where the incision line should be. They will cut just inside the bra line so that the plastic surgeon can do his thing after she has completed her six months of chemo and radiation, should they be necessary, which they likely will be. There’s nothing but bad news for her, and then there’s more bad news. So come in, they told her, with a special bra, and with that in mind, she gravitates toward Intimate Apparel. Her choices are endless — slinky, padded, sheer, cotton, rhinestoned, patterned, leopard-printed, silky, hot pink. This is what makes the country great, isn’t it? And it’s what’s made her life in advertising possible, the opportunity afforded by this glut to market one particular offering in a way that allows it to stand alone as the leader in the marketplace. She would know exactly what to do with any one of these brands, if they were fortunate enough to win that account. But marketing one for her particular needs tonight? Picking the one bra in this haystack of bras that will define where they make the incision and that will, somehow, when all this is over, make her feel sexy again — even she admits there’s not likely to be one bra here that can fill an order like that. She takes one off the rack. Maybe this one. Another one — maybe. Soon she has ten bras in her hands, she has twelve, fifteen. She takes them to the fitting room and despite the pain caused by the chafing tries a few of them on. She looks at herself in the mirror. The idea is to look sexy again. And for whom exactly? Yourself, of course. Yes, well, that’s all wonderfully self-affirming and very strong-minded as any decent woman should be these days, but let’s just face facts here and say that when a woman — no, when a person is thinking about feeling sexy, it is always with the idea of someone else in mind. Someone in the back of the mind who says, “I can’t believe how sexy you look in that.” And just who is that person for her? Unfortunately the timing is such that it can’t be anybody other than you-know-fucking-well-who, and that is not an option. Sexiness with Martin in mind is no longer an option. And sexiness after Martin? That’s where it gets complicated, because first she’ll have the stitches. Those will scar up quickly, and for six months, while the post-op treatments are doing their tricks, she’ll wear the prosthesis. Then the plastic surgeon does the breast reconstruction in stages — who knows how long that takes. So what is she looking at here? A year, a year and a half? How is she going to feel sexy during any of that? Who’s going to look at her scars, at her prosthesis, and say, “I can’t believe how sexy you look in that.” You see, there is no man after Martin, not for a long, long time, and before she can help it, she’s screaming. She’s in the tiny dressing room with a thousand bras screaming as loud as she can. It sounds like AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRRRHHHHHHHH!!! When she stops she feels the pulse of her blood pumping in that part of her breast that is sore to the touch, and a rawness in her throat. She has a terrible head rush from the wine and the scream. She sits down on the bench. Salesclerks come running. “WHAT’S WRONG IN THERE? DO YOU NEED SECURITY?” She will not cry. No. She stands up and starts handing bras over the door. “I don’t want these!” she says. “Take them!” At first she offers a few at a time, then she scoops them up and tosses them all over. “I don’t want any of them! I just want out of here!” What a stupid place to be, this dressing room, and trying on bras, trying to look sexy, what a ridiculous thing to be doing.

AFTER HE FOUND OUT, he left long voice mails for her at work. Who knows what effect he intended by them. Typically she picked up the phone and listened to them thirty seconds after he had left them, and carried on a dialogue with his recorded voice. “What I don’t understand,” he said in an early one, “is how an intelligent, reasonable person could possibly wait, despite knowing that something was wrong, feeling sick, and still refuse to see a doctor. I don’t get that, I don’t understand that behavior coming from an intelligent person.” “That’s because,” she said into the phone, as the message unfurled, “intelligent people are not always guided by their intelligence. Sometimes, Martin, something called fear is a little more powerful.” He would know that basic fact of human psychology, she thought, if he were in marketing, but as a practitioner of the law, he believed that the decision that was most rational, or at least most shrewd, would always triumph if it determined one’s own self-survival. “Yes, I should have shown an interest earlier,” he said in a later voice mail. “I was wrapped up in my work, I wasn’t paying attention. But now,” he said, “now that I know, I can’t not know anymore, Lynn, I can’t just unlearn it, and now that I know and can’t not know, I feel. . you know. . a certain obligation. .” “Obligation?” she said out loud. “. . concern for you, Lynn, and your well-being. .” “Oh, Martin, be still my beating heart.” “. . that I can’t just — well, what is it you want me to do exactly, huh?” he asked. “Just forget about it? Is it one of those things, you know — we do this together, we do that, but this is one of those things we just don’t talk about, it’s off-limits, when frankly, Lynn, you could be very, very — uh, yeah, I’ll be with you in a minute, okay?” he said to someone who must have just shown up in his doorway. Returning to the message, he continued, “. . that you should, uh. .” He had lost his train of thought. “Look, the point is, you have to see a doctor,” he said. “Okay? Look, I have to go. I should have said all of this to you in person but you won’t pick up your goddamn phone. Please call me back.”

In one of the last messages he said, “There’s something I’ve been thinking about and wondering about and I’m very curious: am I the only one who knows? Have you told your father, or any of your friends? Because if you haven’t, and I’m the only one, you can see how I might feel a great deal of responsibility. In fact you could see how it’s just a little unfair of you, even. .” “Oh?” she said. “I’m curious to see how this works.” “. . because now I know,” he continued, “and you won’t take my advice to see a doctor, and that leaves me to worry about you. .” “Oh, poor Martin!” “. . but without any recourse to remedy that worry. Now that’s unfair, Lynn. .” Then you should have kept your fucking hands off me! she thought. You shouldn’t have crawled into my bed and tried to bite my nipple! “. . I’m not complaining about it, I don’t want you to think I’m complaining. I’m just trying to plead my case here, that you should go to the doctor. If you don’t want to do it for yourself, for fuck’s sake, Lynn, do it for me.”

He convinced her at last, or she simply yielded — after a week’s time it was tough to determine if she agreed because she had found some reserve of strength, or because she was hopelessly weak and he had worn her down with his voice mails. He would go with her, that was the condition. In the car on the way to her appointment, she tried putting into words her fear of doctors, hospitals, procedures — but there was no articulating it. “I spent a lot of time in hospitals when my mother was dying,” she said. “I was just a kid. Maybe that’s when it started.”

“What did she die of?”

“Give you one guess,” she said.

There was silence. Then he talked in general about the amazing advances they’d made in medicine over the years, with the same optimism that marked every conversation of its type, and she could only think how naive he was to think she would be responsive when she had always been immune to that sort of hopefulness. Technology would never advance past primal fear. It would never trump human instinct.

He parked in the hospital parking lot and for a half hour tried to coax her from the car. She wanted him inside the room during the exam, would that be okay? He said it would be. She didn’t want him to leave her side, was that understood? He said he had understood that from the first time she had asked, and the second time, and the third. “Why are you stalling?” he asked. When had Martin become so. . committed? Had she misjudged him from the beginning? Or was this what was required for that commitment to take hold, that she be sent to hell and back? For she was in hell, in that car in the hospital parking lot, and not one cold hand had yet been laid upon her. After three or four attempts to articulate her fear on the ride over she had finally given up, but now she said to him, “I think I can finally explain it,” she said. “It comes down to this. And it’s so simple, Martin, I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before.” “Well,” he said, “so tell me.” “I cannot physically enter that building,” she said. “I cannot get out of this car and enter that building. See that building? I can’t. I won’t.” There was silence. Then he said, “Well, sounds like fear to me.” But he said he still didn’t understand. “What is it fear of, exactly?” he said. “Fear of death? No, you tell me that’s not it. You don’t fear death. Is it that they might tell you something’s wrong? You know something’s wrong. It’s not that either. So what is it? Most people, Lynn, they feel something ain’t right, they get scared. That’s natural. But the next step is getting it fixed. They’re eager to get it fixed. You,” he said, “you have all that reversed. You know something’s wrong — that doesn’t scare you. You go weeks letting it get worse! The idea of getting it fixed? That’s what scares you. Am I right? Isn’t that how it works with you?” That’s why he made partner, she thought. Good insight, good reasoning skills. “Yes,” she said. “I never thought about how fucked up it is until you put it like that, but yes, that’s it.” There was silence. “Do you think there’s a word for that?” she asked. “I could think of a few choice words,” he said. A moment of levity. After that he stared through the windshield, thinking. “Look,” he said, turning to her. “I’ll be right back. You stay here, okay?” “Where are you going?” she asked. “You said you wouldn’t leave me.” “Once we got inside,” he said. “We’re still in the parking lot.” He reached out and took her hand. “Trust me,” he said. So she let him go and he went inside the building. Ten minutes later he came out again and told her that her appointment had been rescheduled. The wave of relief that came crashing over her quickly receded again into a sea’s depth of despair when he said it was only rescheduled for later that day. “What time?” she asked. “Don’t worry about what time,” he said. “Just put this on.” “What is it?” “What’s it look like?” he asked. “It’s a handkerchief.” “But how am I supposed to ‘put it on’?” He started the car and placed it in reverse. “Like you’re a pirate’s captive,” he said, “and you’ve just been told to walk the plank.”

SHE WALKED INTO THE FIRST BUILDING holding his hand. They took an elevator that made her ears pop. She felt ridiculous because the elevator was full and what the hell was she doing in this blindfold? At one point she heard Martin say, “Stop staring.” “I’m not,” she said. “How could I be?” “I wasn’t talking to you,” he said. After what seemed like an eternity the elevator stopped and everyone got off. He led her by the hand. When he brought her to a halt he undid the blindfold and she knew instantly where she was: on the viewing deck of the John Hancock building, overlooking the city. She was surprised and delighted. “What is it you’re up to, Martin?” she asked, cocking an eye at him. He shrugged innocently and gestured at the view. “I’m showing you the city,” he said. There was the Sears Tower ahead of them and Lake Michigan to the left and to the right the grand and gaudy suburbs. They pointed out where they worked and where they lived and identified the buildings they knew by name. They put money into the viewfinder and looked out at Wrigley Field. They cast their eyes west as far as they would go and they still couldn’t exhaust that endless metropolis. When they were through, Martin put the blindfold back on her. They took the elevator down, walked back to the car, and climbed in again. They drove. Again he parked and led her by the hand. This time they walked up some stairs and she knew there were no stairs in a hospital entrance and so they had to be some other place, and when he held the door open for her and guided her in, she couldn’t see a thing but she could still smell, and she knew right away where they were. She heard a man say, “Two?” “Two,” replied Martin, who made her walk all the way to their table in the blindfold. “All right, take it off,” he said. “I knew it!” she cried out. “I knew just where we were!” They waited twenty minutes for a deep-dish pizza in a back booth under the dim light of Gino’s East, where the black planks above them made them feel as if they were eating under the main deck of a creaky old pirate ship. Those planks had been mercilessly graffitied and dollar bills had been stapled to them. When they stepped out again into the bright shock of daylight, he put the blindfold back on her. She wondered now if her luck had run out.

But they drove what she thought was too short a distance to be back at the hospital and when he took the blindfold off again, she said, “I should have known.” They were at the Jazz Record Mart on East Illinois. “Yes,” he said, full of an irony she loved, “an aficionado like you deserves to be indulged on a day like today.” “Please,” she said, “here’s my credit card, buy what you want — just take your time.” He spent almost twenty minutes looking through the dusty bins for his obscure recordings. “Not long enough,” she said, when he was through. Then it was back to the blindfold and the car, parking the car and being led by the hand. Stairs again, and not just six or seven of them — three long flights, almost enough to make her winded. She couldn’t believe what he was doing, holding her hand and guiding her along, devising this scheme so uncharacteristic of him, or at least uncharacteristic of that understanding she had arrived at long ago of the living breathing man — a Martin who was without whim or fancy, who drove home only the nail of hard truth, or chose to avoid the issue altogether. What the day had proven more than anything, she thought, was her haste to judge, and the rigidity of those judgments once made. They were inside now — the place had an airy, echoic atmosphere, rumbling low with hushed voices, and footsteps on marble stairs she could pick out one by one. He took the blindfold off and they spent an hour guiding themselves through all the highlights of the Art Institute. “I thought you weren’t an art fan, Martin,” she said. “I’m not a fan of any of the bullshit,” he replied, “but at this level, there are things I enjoy.” “Is that right?” “Sure,” he said. “Point one out to me,” she said skeptically, “when we come upon it, will you?” “This one here, for instance,” he said. “This one?” “Yes, this is a fine piece,” he said. “Care to argue?” They were standing in front of Georges Seurat’s giant Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grand Jatte. “No,” she said. She didn’t care to argue.

It was three in the afternoon by the time they left and she knew now, getting out of the car, walking with him, that her luck had finally run out. “Don’t take it off,” he said. “Martin,” she said, and her voice trembled. They were walking across a parking lot that was unmistakably the parking lot of a hospital. “Lynn,” he said, “do not take it off.” Her hands began to shake as they had in the car earlier in the day. “Just keep walking,” he said. And she managed to because she could trick herself: maybe not, maybe not just yet.. . But there were no stairs, and when he opened the door and the slightly warmer air from inside hit her and the light coming in above the blindfold got lighter, more fluorescent, she knew for an absolute fact where they were and she was terrified. “Just keep walking,” he said. He brought her to a stop and made her sit, and the chair beneath her was hard and plastic like a chair in a hospital waiting room, and she was terrified. “I’m not leaving your side,” he said. “I’m just going about ten feet away for a couple of seconds to talk to someone, then I’ll be back.” He returned. “I’m right here,” he said. They sat there a long time. After a while, he said, “Why don’t you take the blindfold off now.” “No way,” she said. “Trust me,” he said. “Take it off.” “I’d really rather not,” she said. “Come on,” he said, “you can do it.” She did as she was told, squinting a little as she looked around. Clerks stood behind glass. There were digitized numbers on the walls. “The DMV?” she said. “You bastard!” She swung at him with the blindfold. “You see!” he cried. “You can do the hard part!” She sighed with relief. “But now you might as well resign yourself,” he said. “You’ll never know when we’re actually there.”

THIS IS PROBABLY not the right place to be, probably the wrong place, actually. Matter of fact, if the wrong place could be identified on a map — “You Are Here” — this would probably be it. And this thing she might do, enter the building and have the night guard call up and inform him who he had waiting for him in the lobby? Not the right thing to be doing. But she’s been driving around for half a gas tank now and lo and behold she ends up here. The street where his firm’s office is located is one block east of Michigan Avenue. The Mag Mile is deserted like always this time of night. She’s parked illegally, but the only vehicle to drive past in twenty minutes is a cabbie with his light off. Going home, probably. That’s the wise choice, cabbie — big day tomorrow, take yourself home and rest your weary bones. Why can’t she have a cabbie’s good sense? Lynn Mason in her Saab outside Martin Grant’s office building doesn’t feel forty-three so much as fourteen, unhinged by strong affections. “Wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait wait!” she says out loud, pounding the steering wheel and grabbing onto it, shaking it. She can’t actually be where she is! How did the night, starting at the top of the mountain with Chinese and TV, run like a landslide of shit down to this low ravine here? Does she really want to go up there and just be in an office? There is no mystery, no attraction, no reward, no surprise in the empty corridors of an office at ten at night — she knows from firsthand experience. Spending her last night in an office, that’s insane. But the thing is, in that office up there? There is Martin. There is Martin. And the universal truth is, it matters not where he is, if he is drowning in the ocean or burning in a fire — that’s where his lover wants to be. So it doesn’t matter if he’s an unshowered, crabby, gaseous, overworked, eye-twitching, mind-dulled man under the purgatorial light, walking the barren halls with their unringing phones and bad art. She wants to be up there. How could she help but find herself parked here, regardless of what she told herself earlier in the evening — that there would be no calling Martin tonight, no talking to Martin? A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and at this hour, she has thrown all consistency to the wind.

And yet, something stops her from going in. She sits in the car for twenty minutes and doesn’t move. If you’re the night guardsman, and you’re listening carefully, after a while through the glass you can even hear the car start up again. She drew your attention because she just sat out there for twenty minutes. Then you saw her bang really hard on the steering wheel, she looked like a crazy! You had to ask yourself, What’s she up to? And then to just leave! Almost a peel-out. Sit in your car twenty minutes, just to leave again? Wonder what that was all about.

It was about coming to your goddamn senses, she thinks, driving off. And here’s why: Martin has made it clear to her what the terms are, and she can’t accept the terms. It’s as simple as that. He did all those wonderful things — he took her to the top of the Hancock building, to Gino’s, to the Art Institute, and then when the time came he took her back to the hospital, and she thought she knew they had arrived but because of his canards she was able to think but maybe it’s another DMV, which was all she needed, that and the blindfold, to follow him in and sit next to him and deal with being in the hell she was in. And he didn’t leave her. And when the doctor said, in essence, things are bad, by using words like “advanced,” “aggressive,” “better for chances of recovery,” Martin was the one, because she was too stunned, to ask the questions. He was good to her, she had reason to be parked outside his building. But he had also done something terribly, terribly unexpected, something truly surprising, revealing of his true character — something terribly honest.

The doctor’s visit was on a Friday, and after the trauma of it, the night followed in a deep funk, and it was a godsend to have Martin next to her in her bed. Saturday she woke up and found the funk replaced by a burning need to know a thousand things. All the questions she would have asked the doctor, had she had the power to the day before, came to her all at once. Martin had to remind her of many of the things the doctor had said. He practically took her through the entire prognosis again, the options that were available and the consequences that followed from them. But his expertise was limited, so midmorning, he went out for breakfast and stopped at a local bookstore, where he picked up a book that took a breast cancer patient step by step from discovery and diagnosis all the way through remission. He returned with it and together they ate and they read and they debated, and they came to conclusions: the goal was to do whatever gave her the best chance of a complete recovery. It would not be without its consequences.

“You think I should have the mastectomy,” she said.

“No, I think you have to wait until the doctors get in there,” he said, “and let them decide that, but yeah, I think you should give them permission beforehand, that if they think they should do it, they do it.”

“And what do I do without my breasts,” she said, “such as they are?”

“You. . I don’t know,” he said. “You don’t do any nursing for a while.”

He must have seen it on her face. Don’t do any nursing? Was he not aware that the prospect of having children was becoming dimmer and dimmer, and was he so insensitive that he didn’t think in advance that she might be bothered by that? Not that she was bothered — she was fine with it — but to be reminded like that? What was wrong with him?

“No, that was a bad joke,” he said quickly. “That was a terrible joke. I’m sorry I said that. I was trying for a little humor.”

“I think you should stick to reasoning,” she said.

What she had wanted him to say, of course, was, What do you do without breasts? I don’t know. I won’t mind. But they weren’t talking about the two of them at the moment. They were talking only about her, getting her to a place where she could admit these difficult circumstances to herself so she could make the right decisions. Somehow, by the end of Saturday night, they had gotten there, more or less. She looked past the bad humor. She thanked him many times. He went home. She wanted it that way. It had been an exhausting two days.

It wasn’t until Sunday — or three days before the scheduled operation — that they got around to talking about the two of them. He came over early and was standing in his spring overcoat and wouldn’t sit down. She came out from the kitchen and said, “Why are you still standing?” “I’ve been thinking about something,” he said, “and I think you should know what it is.” She knew not to like the sound of that. For all the things she had had to worry about since her diagnosis, she had not forgotten that a busy man, a workaholic, a sworn bachelor would probably not find it in his best interest to play nursemaid to a sometime girlfriend. He had acquitted himself the past two days like a gentleman — a king, really — but it was going to happen sooner or later, something like this: I wish you the very best of luck, Lynn, but I’m not equipped for it. I do hope you call me when all of this is through. “Will you at least take your coat off?” she asked. “Of course,” he said. When that was done, she handed him his cup of coffee. “Let’s take this over by the sofa,” she said.

And there he laid it all out for her: he was hers. Entirely. Whatever she needed from him, she had it. He would take days off work. He would be by her side at every appointment. He would see her through the entire thing. “From start to finish,” he said. “If you’d rather have Sherry or Diane or whoever, that’s fine. I’m just making myself available.” “Thank you, Martin,” she said. She was stunned again, speechless — what a surprise. “I’m touched,” she said. “I won’t know what I’m doing,” he said, “but I’m willing to try — whatever it takes.” “I’m pleased,” she said. “Really, I’m very touched.” “But there’s one thing I have to make clear,” he said. “It’s a condition, I guess. And I know it’s terrible timing, but I can’t. . you see, I watched you, the past couple of days, Lynn. You surprised me — especially yesterday. Yesterday, it was like you came alive. You wanted to know everything. And you dealt with these hard. . these goddamn hard facts. I was so impressed. And that got me thinking last night, when I went home, got me thinking that you could handle anything. Anything.”

“Why don’t you tell me what it is you have to tell me,” she said.

He set his coffee down on the table and took her hands. “It’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while now. It predates all. . this,” he said. “And it is bad timing, but it’s not the time to be dishonest. Not now. And so I’ll just say it — I’ve been thinking for a while now that you and I are not right for each other. In the long term, I mean. And I would hate to go through this with you and the whole time you’re thinking. . well, I don’t know what — that I’m doing it because I’m in for the long haul. I am in for the long haul to make you better, but not because —”

“Yeah, I get it, I know!” she cried, cutting him short. “You’re not the marrying type, I get it!”

“No, it’s not just that,” he said. “It’s that, you and I. . I’m just being honest here. I am totally committed to seeing you through this. But as a friend,” he said. “Only as a friend.”

Well, wasn’t that something? Martin Grant was honest. He was an honest man. Of course he had had to give her a swift kick in the ass before she could realize it. He had had to knock the wind out of her to show her just how honest he was. Tending to her, nursing her — he’d take that. Breast cancer, that part was fine. It was the sum of her parts that was not, in the end, what he wanted. She told him she couldn’t do it that way, impose on him that way if he. . and he tried to object by saying. . but she said I’m sorry, I just can’t. . and he said will you think it over. . and she said no. He left soon after. She spent a sad Sunday afternoon alone.

And now, maybe she should ease off the gas a little. Doing ninety down Lake Shore Drive — that’s a suicide mission, which can sometimes be a dream of rescue. They don’t fix the potholes this far south. There are longer spells between working streetlights, too, when the black sky descends through the open sunroof, blotting her out again — until, first hood, then dash, then her hand on the wheel, she is lit all too brightly once more. She’s avoiding her face in the mirror and all the lachrymose self-pity etched there. Fuck that. And for those of you who think Lynn Mason in addition to cancer suffers from the disease the talk shows diagnose as Needing the Man, if you think that’s why she was parked outside Martin’s office building, then you haven’t yet understood the special circumstances of this Tuesday night, the forces at play that make her desperate and wanting in a way that is wholly unlike her. She has never — or not often — suffered from Needing the Man. Self-sufficiency has always been her first and last commandment. And not because she was of a generation of girls taught to reject the dependency suffered by their mothers and grandmothers. It wasn’t a man she was afraid of losing herself to. It was a person, another person. It wasn’t political, this headstrong determination to answer to no one, to achieve, to be the boss, to earn and sock it away, to use foul language whenever she goddamn well pleased, to eat rich, to fuck who she wanted to fuck and to fire who needed to be fired even if they broke into tears. It was personal. She did not care to hitch her wagon to anyone else, because she knew truth, happiness, success, all of what was deep and holy, was already present in the car with her. She just didn’t have access to any of it tonight and wanted someone with her in the passenger seat.

Because fear of death, boy, that has a way of menacing your convictions and making you feel lonely. Death has a way of ruining your plans and sending you on a tailspin on what should be a work night. Really, Lynn, better slow down, she tells herself. If not for your life, at least for the price of a ticket. She looks at the clock in the dash: midnight. She loves the Saab. What will happen to the Saab if she does, in fact, die? Better question: just where is she headed in the Saab at midnight at ninety miles an hour down Lake Shore Drive? Well, it’s probably not the ideal place to be, this club she knows on the South Side — this club Martin introduced her to, where they spent some time together, called the Velvet Lounge. And the thing she plans on doing, catching the midnight set — is not something she’s doing out of a genuine love of jazz, she admits that. She’s going there for Martin, to remember Martin, to mourn Martin. She’s going for nostalgia’s sake. So isn’t it just perfectly appropriate that the Velvet Lounge should be closed on Tuesdays? She sits in her car outside the bar, listening to “St. Louis Blues” on a CD Martin had left behind. Got the St. Louis Blues! / Blue as I can be! / Man’s got a heart like a rock cast in the sea! Appropriately, it’s a very short song. These stupid enduring artifacts — a bar, a song — that stick around after the lover has cast his heart into the sea, they are solace and agony both. She is drawn toward them for the promise of renewal, but the main experience is a deepening of the woe.

It’s past midnight. She’s miles from him. Home. The word she wants is home. She doesn’t believe she will have the strength to submit herself to the doctors tomorrow without him. In a moment of clarity, she asks herself, is she really in love with Martin, with Martin, or is her broken heart circumstantial? Would she feel such emotion for him if she were not going into the hospital tomorrow, if he hadn’t arranged her first trip to the doctor with such compassion, if he were not the last man to know her body intimately before it would be grievously altered? And then the answer comes to her: all broken hearts are circumstantial. Every lovelorn jerk is the victim of bad timing, good intentions, and someone else’s poor decision making. She might as well admit it — yes, she’s in love with Martin, and she’s discovered it at the worst possible time, after he’s broken her heart. In a sudden reversal of all that conviction she had when peeling away from the curb that Martin’s office was the worst place to be, and contacting Martin the worst thing she could do, she goes in search of a pay phone. She has her cell phone, but if she calls on the cell she won’t have the option of hanging up at the last minute without Caller ID informing him who was calling.

She calls from the pay phone of a closed gas station. It isn’t unreasonable to expect to catch him at his desk. In fact, despite the late hour, it doesn’t even cross her mind that he could be anywhere else. The familiar ring, the familiar voice mail — speak now or forever hold on to your self-respect. She hangs up. Wise choice. She calls back. “Martin, I’m at this number, it’s —” She gives him the number. “Can you call me here when you get back to your desk, please? It’s urgent.” She peers about as she waits. There is a dark orange light cast above the gas pumps that is almost supernatural in its hazy Halloween glow, illuminating, though that’s not the right word — animating the pumps and the oil stains and the pockmarks and the overflowing garbage pails into something ugly and vaguely menacing, and when a man pushing a shopping cart rattles his way across the pavement in the dark, the noise unnerves her, and she looks around. Great, now she’s frightened of being attacked, too, of rapists and murderers and of all men lurking this late at night. Talk about a landslide of shit. At this eerie-ass gas station at the witching hour, folks, she has officially been buried in it. All she needs now is the start of rain, the motor failing to turn over, a car with tinted windows to stop at an uncomfortable distance, and a plague of locusts. Wouldn’t that make the night complete? A football field’s distance away the highway looms. She hears the faint whir of whizzing cars. Has it been two minutes, or four hours, since she called? She tries again. “Martin,” she says. “I need to talk, please call me back.” “Martin,” she says, on her third try. “Are you at home?”

He is at home, sleeping. “What time is it?” he says, after the sixth ring. Oh, no — how long has he been at home? Why is he home? How could he be home? Now in the time before her reply, the entire evening requires rethinking. She envisioned him in familiar surroundings — refilling his coffee and pulling out a file and popping aspirin and readjusting his trousers after sitting down. She took comfort knowing where he was, even if she wasn’t with him. Finding him at home, however, waking him up, she realizes she knows nothing of where he might have been or what he was doing, and that’s very, very unsettling. She thinks the worst — a drink with someone new, fresh conversation, the beginning of what he does want. She’s lost him. “What are you doing home?” she asks. “What am I doing?” he says. “I’m sleeping.” “When did you leave work?” she asks. “I don’t know,” he says. “Seven?” Seven? She doesn’t say it aloud but inside it’s a scream as loud as that in the dressing room. Seven? She’s been picturing him for five hours in a place she thought she knew and now she knows nothing. What she badly needs is a step-by-step explanation of everything he’s done tonight. But she can’t ask for that. Better come to the business at hand before she says something pathetic. Too late: “What have you been doing at home since seven?” she asks. “I mean, isn’t it unlike you, to go home at seven?” “I was tired,” he explains. “I wanted to come home.” “So you went home at seven?” “Yes, Lynn,” he says. “I came home at seven. I ordered food, I watched TV — what’s going on?” So nothing out of the ordinary, she thinks. Nothing social. No dates. He’s honest with her, she knows that by now — at last, tell the man why you’re calling.

“I’ve changed my mind,” she says. “I need you to go with me. I don’t know what I was thinking. I won’t be able to do it without you.”

There’s silence on his end. “But I thought. .” he begins. “Okay,” he resumes, a second later. “I’ll go with you.”

“You don’t have to worry,” she says. “I understand the conditions. I fully accept the conditions.”

“Okay, but. . what’s changed? Because on Sunday you said —”

“I’m scared,” she says simply. He doesn’t reply. “It’s just that I’m scared.”

“Okay,” he says. “What time do you need me to pick you up?”

HEADING BACK ON LAKE SHORE DRIVE, she is calm as a dove in a cage. No music, just the wind coming in from the sunroof and the Saab’s faithful trill. To her right is the quiet lake. She remembers the time the car went kapooey. As she drove along someone might have been strapped to the underbelly banging on it with a monkey wrench. It jerked and tottered, and the strange movement and the clanking filled her with anxiety, as if she were the extension of consciousness of the machine she loved. She took it in and when she got it back three days later, all had been returned — the familiar purr of the motor, the smooth palpable glide of the tires on the street. She feels like that now: steady, quiet, functioning, recovered. No longer gadding, flitting like a pinball. Those hours are behind her, and only now can she see it: at twelve-forty-eight AM enveloped by the sturdy Saab and moving north at a reasonable speed she knows exactly where it is, the right place that has eluded her all evening, and what she should have been doing all along. The night’s drama had muddled her, obscuring her rightful destination, and within fifteen minutes she arrives. She enters the building and greets the man who watches over it at night. He knows her by name. “Surprised to see you here this late!” he says, and with these words she knows instantly that her biggest mistake was ever leaving to begin with. It was climbing into that cab and heading home. She takes the elevator to sixty and walks down to her office. Has anyone but her yet recognized the critical importance to the agency’s future of these two new business pitches? And the strategies haven’t even been worked out yet! They have two weeks until presentation. It’s insane to think she even has a moment to spare. She sits down at her desk. Here is a good place to be, right here, thinking, What must be done? What must I do first? Amazing how energized she feels, given these last few months of everyday fatigue. No different than waking up after a long night’s rest, and she is ready to start the morning. She reaches out to her mouse, disrupting the screensaver. The clock says it’s just after one. Just a very early morning, that’s all. She works until six.

She’s exhausted. She rises off her chair and goes to the window. Just now the sun is coming up, the city dot-matrixing into life again, one dark spot at a time turning into light, brightening the buildings and the streets and distant highways. The stippling reminds her of the giant Seurat painting in the Art Institute, the one Martin liked. Not that Chicago, with its hard charm and gray surfaces — practically still with inactivity at this hour — is anything like Seurat’s colorful sprawling picnic. But watching the sky open at her window, it is magnificent, especially after all the work she’s put in, and a minor epiphany hits. We’ve got it all wrong. Normal business hours should be from nine p.m. to five A.M. so that we’re greeted by the sun when work is through. All that was despairing and hopeless the night before has evaporated, and all that talk about the transformative power of the light of day has come true for her. She is strong again, on firm ground again. She has done things as best as she could imagine doing them, and if her imagination is an impoverished one, if it lacks in some fundamental way and the result has been a default to working harder, working longer, her life defaulted to the American dream — hasn’t it been a pursuit of happiness all the same? Her pursuit of happiness. And no one, not Martin, not anyone, can take that away from her. It can be taken away only by death. And because of these new business opportunities, death, she’s afraid, will have to wait.

She picks up the phone. She just wants to let him know that last night she went a little crazy — who knows why. But with the light of day, her senses have returned, and she doesn’t need him to take her to the hospital after all.

“What are you talking about?” he says. “I was just about to leave to pick you up.”

“No,” she says. “That’s not necessary.”

“Lynn,” he says, “I’m picking you up.”

“Martin, I’m already at work. I’m a block away from the hospital. I don’t need to be picked up.”

“Lynn, why are you doing this?”

She promises to call when she’s out of surgery. He protests again, but she insists. She hangs up and staggers over to the white leather sofa. It’s cluttered with free samples of former client products — cans of motor oil, boxes of lightbulbs — and accordion file folders full of documents. Moving all this to the floor she lies down and, just before falling asleep, resolves that when she wakes up, the first thing she will do tomorrow — today — is clean this shameful office, and make a new start of things.