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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What would he have to be upset with you for?” asked Benny. “You didn’t do anything to him.” “I didn’t think I had,” Jim said. “But I was standing in the doorway talking to the guy and he wasn’t answering. So I started wondering if I had pissed him off somehow.” Later, when Marcia related the story to us after hearing it from Benny, we thought that that was exactly how insecure Jim Jackers would react. There was Chris Yop, no longer an employee, told to leave the building two days ago under threat of arrest and currently destroying agency property, and still Jim wanted to be his friend.

He asked Yop if he had done something wrong. Yop didn’t even bother to look up from the chair. “You didn’t e-mail me about the changes to the project,” he finally replied. According to Jim, this was said as if Yop were Jim’s boss, and that serious consequences would follow from Jim’s oversight. At the same time, Yop sounded hurt. Jim had to remind himself that he hadn’t done anything wrong and had no reason to feel guilty. “Was I supposed to e-mail you?” he asked. “I asked somebody to,” said Yop. “Do you not remember me asking?” “You mean yesterday at the coffee bar?” “Nobody e-mailed me,” said Yop, who was now working a set of bolts connected to the base of the chair. “Which is okay,” he added. “I am not unaware, Jim, that I have been shitcanned. Everyone thinks I’m unaware of that — I am not unaware. I am not unaware that I’m an old man and that this is a young man’s game.” Jim told him he didn’t think forty-eight was so old, and that he’d probably have a new job in no time. Then he tried to explain to Yop that the change to the project was so bewildering — he was really struggling to arrive at even a single concept — that he wouldn’t have felt confident e-mailing anyone about it. “Hey, Jim,” said Yop, looking at Jim for the first time since he appeared in the doorway, and what Jim saw was the flushed, perspiring, dejected expression of someone trying to conceal the anger that made his voice quiver. “You don’t have to explain to me, okay? It would have been stupid of you to e-mail me. Any of you. You don’t think I know that? Hey,” he added, his hands shaking as he opened his arms wide, “I’m not stupid. I know I’ve been shitcanned. I know no one wants to be caught exchanging e-mails with me. I just didn’t expect to be treated the way I was treated yesterday at the coffee bar.”

Upon hearing that, Benny demanded to know, “How did we treat him yesterday at the coffee bar?” Jim said he couldn’t remember. When he related the story to Marcia, Benny asked her, “Do you remember treating him any particular way yesterday at the coffee bar?” Marcia stood in Benny’s doorway next to the skeleton, hands on her hips, wrists turned inward. “I think I called him insane,” she said.

Jim, standing in the cubicle doorway on fifty-nine, wanted to know from Yop how we had upset him yesterday at the coffee bar. Yop didn’t answer him directly. “I’m not getting paid for being here anymore, Jim,” he said, on his knees in his nice pleated dress slacks and working the wrench. “Do you understand what that means? I’m hanging around of my own free will. I’m here because I want to be here. You think I want to be here? No way I want to be here, Jim. But I hung around for a couple extra hours yesterday, waiting for an e-mail that never came. Not from you, not from Marcia, not from Amber — nobody. At least when I got shitcanned, Lynn Mason gave me severance, you know what I’m saying, Jim? At least the agency said, Chris Yop, we have a parting gift for you. You guys at the coffee bar? You couldn’t even send me an e-mail.”

Yop finished removing the last of the bolts, which allowed him to slide the wheel base off the hydraulic lift bar. He placed the base in the suitcase — now the chair looked like nothing more than a silver pole attached lollipop-style to a seat and backrest. “I heard you,” said Yop, out of the blue, on his knees and glowering at Jim. It startled Jim because he had been watching him remove the base of the chair, and next he knew Yop was pointing a screwdriver at him and staring angrily, and he hadn’t even seen him pick that screwdriver up. “Every one of you,” he added.

“You heard us what?” said Jim.

Yop refused to elaborate. He just replaced the screwdriver for a wrench and went back to the chair.

Marcia moved from the doorway into Benny’s office because the story just got interesting. She sat down across the desk from him. “What did he mean by that,” she asked, “‘I heard you’? That’s a weird thing to say, isn’t it?” “I asked Jim the same thing,” Benny said. “He had no idea what he meant. What could he have meant by it? What did we say that he might have overheard and took offense at?” “‘I heard you,’” said Marcia, sitting back in the chair to better puzzle it out. “‘Every one of you.’ What could that mean?” “Something about him crying, maybe, breaking down in front of Lynn?” “Maybe,” said Marcia.

It took Yop a total of about a half hour to get the chair down to its component parts. The only time he wasted was locating a tool and then making sure the size was right. After that it was just a matter of loosening and turning. “And nobody disturbed you that whole time?” Benny asked Jim. “It’s fifty-nine,” Jim stated plainly. “No one even walked by.” The payroll people and the bathrooms being on the other side of the floor, Benny didn’t doubt it. Yop went steadily and methodically at his work while Jim continued to look on, impressed by Yop’s command of tools and their function. “What’s that thing called,” Jim asked Benny, “where you have several pieces, all different sizes, and you attach them to the main tool depending on which size you need?” “You’re asking me?” said Benny. “I’m no expert with tools.” “I think it’s called an Allen wrench,” said Jim. When Benny told Marcia that nobody was sure what Yop was using to dismantle the chair, Marcia replied, “You guys don’t know what an Allen wrench is?” When Marcia told us that, we knew right away that Benny must have felt a real pang of masculine insufficiency for not knowing his tools in front of Marcia, who could probably take apart a motorcycle blindfolded for all the years she spent on the South Side with her four brothers. “They’re called sockets,” she said, “and that’s a socket wrench, not an Allen wrench. An Allen wrench removes an Allen screw, which has a hole in it that fits the wrench — oh, it’s hard to explain. Haven’t you ever put a table together? Or a bookshelf?” “Once, I did,” said Benny. “In college.”

Unlike Jim or Benny, Yop was very proficient. “Where did you learn to work with your hands?” Jim asked him. Yop wouldn’t say. The one thing he did do was start to whistle a little. Being a bad whistler he soon gave it up. “In all honesty,” he said to Jim, taking small steps on his knees to reposition himself with respect to the chair. “I’m glad nobody e-mailed me. I for one wouldn’t want to work on a team where the other team members don’t have any respect for me, Jim. That’s just me personally. But you, you do what you need to do. Hold this for me, will you?” Yop went into the toolbox and picked up what seemed to Jim like a random tool and held it out before him.

Benny wanted to know if he took it. “Yeah, I took it,” said Jim. “Jim!” cried Benny. “So what if it’s fifty-nine, man! If somebody had walked by and seen you holding a tool while Yop was taking that chair apart, you think they would have understood you were just holding a tool for him?” “I got distracted!” cried Jim. “I didn’t know why he was saying what he was saying. He said he wouldn’t want to work on a team where nobody had any respect for him, but that I needed to do what I needed to do. What did he mean by that, Benny? Do the other people on the team not have any respect for me? Is that what he was trying to tell me? I mean, I know Marcia doesn’t like me —”

Marcia bolted forward in the chair across from Benny. “He said that?” she asked with squeamish alarm. “He said he knows I don’t like him?”

“— but what about all the others?” asked Jim.

At last Yop had finished. He stood up and dusted off his pants. He put his suit coat back on. Then he bent down and placed the rest of the items inside the suitcase — all the nuts and bolts, the armrests, the levers, the lift bar, and the webbed seat. But he had underestimated the size of the backrest, and no matter how he turned it or how hard he pushed, it was always an inch or two too big, preventing him from zipping the luggage closed. “Fuck,” he said, looking up at Jim. So Jim carried it out for him wrapped in packing paper, which we kept in the mount room.

“Jim, what in the hell!” cried Benny. “Why would you help that guy out?”

“I felt bad for how he thought we had mistreated him at the coffee bar,” said Jim.

“Oh my god,” Marcia said to Benny. “I wish you wouldn’t have just told me that.”

Benny wanted to know why it bothered Marcia to hear of Jim’s misplaced goodwill toward Chris Yop. “Because I am so mean to that guy.” “To Yop?” “No,” she replied. “Well, yeah, to Yop, but to Jim especially. I am mean to everybody, Benny — but especially to Jim. And the guy — he just wants to be liked!” “You’re not so mean to him,” Benny tried to reassure her. “Not any meaner than anybody else.” “Yes, I am,” said Marcia. “I’m terrible.” She looked visibly upset. One hand was up by her furrowed brow, as if she were trying to cover her eyes and disappear from her shame. But, boy, thought Benny, did the new haircut make her look good.

“So tell me honestly, Benny, do they have any respect for me or not?” Jim had asked him.

“And how did you answer him?” Marcia wanted to know.

“I danced around it,” said Benny. “I didn’t exactly lie to him, but I didn’t exactly tell him the truth, either.” Marcia told Benny she just wanted him to move on and finish the rest of the story.

Yop walked out of the building rolling his black suitcase along the marble floor. In his suit and tie, he looked like any other businessman headed out to the airport. Nobody at the lobby desk confused him for Hawaiian-shirt-wearing Chris Yop from the creative department. His premeditated sprucing-up revealed a criminal canniness that frankly should have been a little alarming, but this was a more innocent time, and so we weren’t too bothered by it after it came to light. A little later, Jim walked out with the backrest wrapped in brown paper — just a man taking an oversized package to the post office. In fact, he had slapped an address label on it for the sake of appearance.

“Jim,” said Benny, shaking his head sadly.

They met in front of a corner convenience store and Jim followed Yop down to the lake. When the urge overtook Yop, which was often, he turned abruptly on the sidewalk and told Jim what was on his mind. “No more offending them,” he said, the first time he swung around, stopping Jim in his tracks. “Be sure to go back there and tell them that, Jim, that Chris Yop is no longer in the building to offend them with his presence. And I will never return. How pleased they’ll be, I’m sure. Karen Woo. And that fucking Marcia.”

“Why single me out?” asked Marcia. “What I ever do?”

“He’s obviously unhinged,” said Benny. “I wouldn’t take it personally.”

Given the chance, Jim would have responded by saying he didn’t think anybody was offended that Chris was still in the building, just a little unsure why, given that Lynn Mason had let him go two days earlier. But it was clear that Yop wasn’t soliciting replies. He turned quickly and walked on, leaving Jim to catch up. Holding the chair’s backrest before him prevented Jim from seeing the ground and he almost tripped over an irregularity in the sidewalk. The next time Yop turned, it was just as abruptly, and Jim recoiled a little. “Thank god, Jim, thank god for the love of a devoted woman.” Jim thought Yop might try to stab him in the eye with his pointing finger. “It’s the only thing that’s worth a damn. Without Terry,” he concluded, “this whole world would be for shit.”

He turned and marched on. The wheels of his suitcase drummed the sidewalk partitions at regular intervals. He turned a third time, but only to say, “Your so-called friends. What a joke.” Jim anticipated more, but Yop, smiling humorlessly and shaking his head slowly, said nothing. He paused long enough for Jim to reply — it almost seemed he wanted him to — but Jim was at a loss for words. When Yop turned back again he let out a smirking, hostile laugh. Two blocks from the lake, they were caught at a red light and had to stand next to each other as the traffic moved past. “Not even to catch up,” said Yop, turning to him. “You hear that? Be sure you tell them that. Not even to catch up.” “Catch up?” said Jim. “What do you mean, not even to catch up?” “Not that they would care if I keeled over tomorrow,” he added.

“Oh my god, so I tore up his resume and threw it in his face,” said Marcia. “It doesn’t mean I want the man to die.”

“I don’t know,” said Benny, “maybe we should have just e-mailed him.”

At that time of day, the promenade alongside Lake Michigan was fairly empty. Most people didn’t make it all the way down to the southern terminus anyway, where the land doglegged out into the water and the promenade ended at a little beach. Despite the lingering chill, there was plenty of sunlight, and in the distance to their right a few robust bathers were lending the lake its first signs of summer life. Otherwise, it was just Jim and Yop and the occasional elderly speed-walker. Yop brought the suitcase to rest just behind the breaker, unzipped it and took two of the chair wheels from inside, climbed over the breaker, and approached the water. Just as he wound back, a great May wind rose up. Yop flung the first of the wheels into Lake Michigan while his tie fluttered in the opposite direction. On his return to the suitcase the tie was still flung over one shoulder. “You guys think I wanted to cry?” he asked Jim. “I wasn’t crying for me,” he said. “I was crying for Terry. I was crying for Terry and me.” By that point, Jim knew not to respond. He watched as Yop tossed the remainder of the wheels and the armrests out into the water. The armrests floated, as did the webbed seat and backrest — which Yop tossed out Frisbee-style, brown paper and all — but the silver pole sank quickly. He stood over the water shaking the suitcase upside down. Every nut and bolt plopped down into the lake. Then he zipped up the suitcase and returned to where Jim had stood watching him, just on the other side of the breaker. He lifted the suitcase and climbed over the breaker one leg at a time and set the wheels of the suitcase back on the ground and began to walk away, but then stopped and turned back to address Jim. “I would thank you for your help, Jim,” he said, “but I’ve always considered you an idiot.”

Yop’s final remark to Jim Jackers sent Marcia over the edge. She burrowed into her seat, squirming herself into a ball of shame and regret, and cried, “Please tell me he did not!” She vowed never to be mean to Jim again. She vowed never to be mean to anyone again. “How could he say that to him?” she asked. “You said it to him just the other day,” said Benny. “But how could he say it and mean it?” she asked. Marcia was the rare one among us who used the occasion of other people’s cruelty to be reminded of her own, and to feel bad about both. She made a vow like the one she now made to Benny — never to be mean again — every two or three weeks, until something Jim said or did had her sniping again, telling him to shut up and leave her office. What was refreshing about Marcia was that she said these things to his face, but unlike Yop, they weren’t eternal damnations. They were just momentary expressions of her exasperation — things we wanted to say, but we lacked the courage — and they always resulted in mad fits of compunction.

“Jim didn’t seem all that upset about it, believe it or not,” Benny assured her. “He just wanted to know if I thought he was an idiot.”

“And you said no, right?” said Marcia. “Benny, tell me you didn’t dance around that one.”

“I told him of course he was an idiot,” Benny said. “I had to, Marcia. If I had told him he wasn’t an idiot, he would have known I thought he was one.”

“This place is so fucked up,” she said.

We were outraged for Jim, too. The poor guy had gone to great lengths to help Yop seek his revenge against the office coordinator and her system of serial numbers, and then he was left with an insult. We rallied to Jim’s side. We told him not to sweat that remark. Then we tried to understand what Yop could possibly have against us. Why was he directing all his outrage toward us, we asked Jim, when, having dismantled Tom Mota’s chair and having tossed it into the lake, the object of his bitterness was so obviously one specific person, i.e., the office coordinator? Jim didn’t know, except to say that Yop was hurt that we hadn’t e-mailed him with instructions about the changes to the project. But just what was he planning to do once he got those instructions? Salvage his job? We felt maligned.

“At least I understand Tom Mota,” Marcia told Benny. “Tom’s just full of frustration for how his life turned out. But Chris Yop? Chris Yop I just don’t get.”

In the end we had to understand that of course Yop would hate us. We were still employed, and he wasn’t. He was working on out-of-date fund-raiser ads while we knew the project had changed. We had been together at the coffee bar, and he was on the outs.

“But Chris Yop wasn’t what I came in here for, was it?” said Marcia.

“I don’t think so,” said Benny.

“What was it?” she asked herself. “Why’d I stop by?”

“I don’t know,” he replied, intrigued, hopeful.

“Oh my god,” she said out of the blue. “Can you believe it’s only three-fifteen?”

SOME DAYS FELT LONGER than other days. Some days felt like two whole days. Unfortunately those days were never weekend days. Our Saturdays and Sundays passed in half the time of a normal workday. In other words, some weeks it felt like we worked ten straight days and had only one day off. We could hardly complain. Time was being added to our lives. But then it wasn’t easy to rejoice, exactly, realizing that time just wasn’t moving fast enough. We had any number of clocks surrounding us, and every one of them at one time or another exhibited a lively sense of humor. We found ourselves wanting to hurry time along, which was not in the long run good for our health. Everybody was trapped in this contradiction but nobody ever dared to articulate it. They just said, “Can you believe it’s only three-fifteen?”

“Can you believe it’s only three-fifteen?” Amber asked Larry Novotny. You bet Larry could believe it was three-fifteen. Larry could believe it was eleven-fifty-nine and the clock was about to strike midnight and the governor had yet to call. Time was seriously running out for Larry. Was she or was she not going to have the abortion? It wasn’t something he could ask every fifteen minutes, certainly not every five minutes, though time moved for him now in five-minute intervals, at the end of which he debated asking her once again if she was going to do it or what. He usually decided against asking her again, having asked only twelve five-minute intervals ago, which, before all this started, was only an hour, but which now felt more like twelve or even fourteen hours. Amber had made it clear that she did not want to be asked every hour if she was going to have an abortion.

“Are they still down there?” she asked Larry. “What do you think they’re doing down there?”

Larry got up and peeked his head down the hall to Lynn Mason’s office where the door remained closed. They had seen Genevieve and Joe enter ten minutes ago, or nearly two hours ago, according to Larry’s new clock, and during those ten minutes Larry had debated seriously with himself, twice, whether or not to bring the matter up again with Amber. On his return he slapped his cap on his jeans three times and then screwed it on his head, nodding in the affirmative. They were still down there.

“What do you think they’re talking about?” she asked.

Larry thought they were probably talking about whether or not Amber should have the abortion. They were probably discussing the misfortune Larry was facing, and how little desired it was that he tell his wife not only that he was having an affair but that the woman was pregnant and intended to keep the baby. There was no way to put a good spin on that, no way of saying cheerfully, “Charlie’s going to have a half brother!”

“How long have they been in there?” asked Amber. “Ten minutes? It feels more like twenty.”

“It feels more like two hours,” said Larry.

It was disappointing and a little irritating that Amber was fixated on a crisis unraveling in some other office when the more significant crisis was taking place right here. “Have you, uh . . .” he began, “thought any more about, uh —”

She had been working the little white lever on a windup toy. It was a kid’s toy from a Happy Meal, a cheeseburger with a sesame seed bun and all the fixings painted on. It also had a pair of enormous white feet. At last the toy could be wound no further and she leaned over in her chair and set the cheeseburger down on the carpeting. Some slight imperfection in the feet made it go in a gradual circle, which it did over and over again until finally it died and the room went silent again.

When she looked him in the eye at last he noticed her eyes had reddened. Oh, no, he thought. Not this again. He removed his cap once more and smoothed back his hair. Then he put the cap back on.

“I go back and forth,” she said.

JIM JACKERS WAS HARD at work on the pro bono ads and had been working on them steadily for a few hours, since his return from helping Chris Yop throw his chair into Lake Michigan. Looking up from the blank page to the blinking clock, he discovered it was only three-fifteen. He decided that today was perhaps the longest day of his life. Not only had he been called an idiot to his face, but he could do nothing to counter that opinion, because he couldn’t come up with even a single funny thing to say about breast cancer.

“WHAT TIME IS IT, JOE?” asked Lynn Mason.

Joe glanced down at his watch. “Three-fifteen,” he answered.

She reached up to set the hands of a grandfather clock. It was standing against the far wall, to the left of the white leather sofa, and it was a testament to how cluttered that office had been before she and the office coordinator cleared everything away that none of us had any memory of a grandfather clock. It had blended into the background along with everything else, or had perhaps been obscured by lawyers’ boxes full of old files. Or perhaps we were just not very perceptive people. But now that the layers of old magazines, dead files, and the like had been removed, it was possible to discern an attempt to make her office look like a proper one. The desk was located farthest from the door, so that when she sat at it, she could see everything before her — the door itself, the glass-top table to the left, the bookshelves and antique armchair against the right wall, and the sofa and the grandfather clock looking back at her from the far wall.

Ten minutes earlier, Genevieve and Joe’s knock had interrupted her at her cleaning. Most of the work had been done the day before, but that afternoon she had been called away by meetings with the other partners to discuss strategy for the two upcoming new business pitches. Now she was putting the final touches on what was essentially a brand-new office. She answered the knock on the door by calling out and Joe put his head in. “I’m here with Genevieve,” he said. “Do you have a minute?” She motioned them inside with a quick whip of a dirty rag. When Genevieve walked in behind Joe, she said, “Hi, Lynn.” “Come in,” said Lynn, “have a seat.” How odd to see Lynn Mason with a can of polish and a rag, bending in her skirt and buffing the wood to the side of her desk. They did as they were told and sat down in the twin chairs placed directly in front of her desk. Immediately they had to turn to their left as she moved on to polish the bookshelves and then the wood inlays on her antique armchair. While she worked, she told Joe that she had asked Mike Boroshansky to dedicate one of his guys full-time to their five floors.

“A security guy?” said Joe. “How come?”

“Because we just can’t take any chances,” she replied.

Genevieve thought she dusted the way she did everything else, with great gusto and command. It was the first time she had ever been intimidated by someone else’s dusting. She sat quietly.

“But Lynn,” he said, “there are only one or two people who genuinely believe he poses a threat. Most of it is just idle chatter.”

“It’s not just me, Joe. It’s the other partners,” she said.

She moved from the armchair over to the leather sofa behind them and began to wipe that down as well. Joe twisted in the chair to keep her in his sights and talked to her over the backrest. Genevieve chose to keep staring straight ahead.

“These recent e-mails to Benny and Jim,” Lynn was saying, “the way he left this place, his behavior toward his wife — the man destroyed all his belongings with a baseball bat. Now, I’m not saying I definitely think he’s on his way back here,” she said, looking at Joe during a brief interlude in her dusting, “but when he’s swept up in something, he doesn’t act right, not like a normal person, and I don’t think we can take the chance.”

She returned her attention to the sofa. “But how is one guy from security going to stop him if he does come back?” asked Joe. Genevieve was surprised by his contrariness, and had new insight into the openness of dialogue that passed between them when the rest of the team was out of the room.

But that wasn’t the real news. The real news was that Lynn Mason now entertained the notion of Tom Mota planning a return. That point of view had had only one serious spokesperson until then — Amber Ludwig, who worried about everything. Security had posted his picture at the lobby desk, but they were screwball comedies down there. Lynn Mason’s concern legitimized the idea. That was a new and uncomfortable development.

“We’re working on getting an order keeping him from the premises,” she said, “but in the meantime, Mike’s giving us a guy, and we’re putting him outside your office.”

“Why my office?” Joe asked.

“Because your office looks directly onto the elevators, and if he comes back here, this is the floor I think he’d visit first, and to be honest with you, Joe, I think the biggest grudge he has might be against you. With maybe me being the exception.”

“I disagree,” said Joe. “It’s true he didn’t care for me in the beginning, but by the time he left, for whatever reason, I think I’d earned his respect. And to be honest with you, Lynn, I think we’re blowing this whole thing way out of proportion.”

“Well,” she said, with her back to him. “There’s still going to be a man outside your office.”

Through with her cleaning at last, she opened the door to the grandfather clock. When Joe informed her of the time, she set the hands accordingly and wound the clock with a key. She set the brass pendulum in motion and then shut the door and watched it swing. In the intervening silence Genevieve glanced back to see what she was doing, found her standing before the clock, and once again realized how small she was in real life. Joe could probably lift her off the ground. He was no muscleman but he was no slouch, either, and he could probably take her by her two arms and lift her, maybe all the way until his own arms were extended, and at the very thought of Joe holding Lynn Mason up in the air like that, like a child, and with a little extra effort, even spinning her around, Genevieve had to choke back the laughter rising in her throat, because Lynn was just then coming around to her desk and pulling her chair out to have a seat. All at once she loomed larger and more intimidating than ever before.

“Now,” she said, “what did you want to talk about?”

“NOW I REMEMBER WHAT IT WAS!” cried Marcia.

It had finally come to her. She had heard Benny was selling the totem pole and she wanted to stop him. “Who told you I was doing that?” he asked. It was making the rounds — the rise in rental rates and his reluctance to pay the difference. “But who ever said I was selling it?” he asked. “Don’t do it,” Marcia pleaded. “Please, Benny. Do you want to see them win?” “Who’s ‘they’?” he asked cautiously. “Every single one of those motherfuckers,” she replied. She had momentarily forgotten her vow never to be mean again. “If you sell it, Benny, you will be handing a victory to every ignorant motherfucker on the payroll. You don’t want to do that, Benny, you don’t. And I don’t want to see it happen.” “What I want to do,” he said with sincerity, “is I want to stop giving three hundred bucks a month that I don’t have to that storage place — that’s what I really want.” “I’ll pay the difference,” she said. “You’ll do what?” “The difference between what you’re paying right now and the rise in rates,” she said. “What is it? I’ll pay it. I’ll write you a check every month.” “Why would you do that?” he asked.

Part of it, she explained, was to help rectify every despicable, hateful thing she had done since that happy day she had been hired. It was an effort to restore the balance, to reclaim her right to raise her head and stand up proudly. Benny did not need reminding that Marcia was a dabbler in Asian religions. In fact he had been reading up on them. He had been studying the Four Sights, the Eightfold Path, and the Ten Perfections in the hope that one of them might come up in conversation. He was slipping allusions to the Bo tree into many of the stories he told. Marcia hadn’t responded to any of them as he had hoped she would, either because she wasn’t paying attention, or because the allusions meant nothing to her. We said nothing because Benny was Jewish, and we assumed he, as a Jew, knew more about religion than the rest of us. But in fact he had mistakenly been studying Buddhism, while Marcia considered herself more of a student of the Hindu religion. The only thing he got right was a copy of the Bhagavad Gita sitting on his desk, on top of some papers, with the spine facing conspicuously in her direction.

“So let me see if I get it,” he said. “You want to help your karma.”

“Yes,” she said.

“From good must come good,” he said, “and from evil, evil. Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes!” she cried. “That’s exactly what I’m saying. How’d you even know that?”

“I’ve been reading about it lately,” he said.

But it was not as simple as cutting him a check, she explained to the novice. Karma did not take if an offer was made only in the anticipation of a return. A genuine and pure impulse had to precede the selfless act. “So what’s your impulse?” he asked. “Not to see those bastards win,” she replied simply. Benny said he was just hazarding a guess here, but that didn’t sound very pure to him. Marcia reminded him of the Yopanwoo Indians. The Yopanwoo Indians had made a mockery of every real Native American tribe ever to suffer an injustice. The practical joking had turned a tragedy into a farce. She promised Benny it was as pure as they came. “I’m from Bridgeport, I never met an Indian in my life,” she said. “But I was still offended. And I thought what you were doing with it — with Brizz’s totem pole, I mean. To be honest, I didn’t know what you were doing with it, but I thought whatever it was was . . . was —” “Weird?” he said. “No,” she said, shaking her head and its all-too-lovely new contoured hair. “No, not weird. Noble.” “Noble?” he said. “You thought it was noble?” He wondered briefly where she had been with this talk of nobility when they were hooting at him from the hallway and bloodying that skinned toupee on his desk — though he said nothing about that and took the compliment with pleasure. Her good opinion was well worth three-nineteen a month — though that wasn’t why he had done it. “So to stick up for the Indians,” she said, “and to see that those bastards don’t win, and to help you do whatever it is you think you need to do with Old Brizz’s totem pole, you tell me the difference and I’ll write you a check.” There was a fourth reason, too, of course, which was that it might help Marcia improve her karma, but she left that off the litany.

“Marcia,” he said, “that won’t be necessary.”

“I know it’s not necessary,” she said. “I want to do it.”

“I’m afraid I’ve already gotten rid of it,” he said.

The appraiser who had come out to the U-Stor-It had informed Benny not only of the totem pole’s market value but also a thing or two of its origins. He believed it to be the work of a tribe whose descendants were still living in southeastern Arizona. Their onetime woodworking skills were unsurpassed, producing some of the most virtuosic and dazzling Indian art in the world — that is, until the number of tribesmen declined and survival became more difficult and their craftsmanship suffered. That morning, Benny had received a call from the appraiser, who had sent snapshots of the totem pole taken at the storage facility to members of the tribe in Arizona. He informed Benny that the chief of the tribe had confirmed with near-absolute certainty that the pole was theirs. “And there are like . . . ten of these Indians left in the world,” said Benny. “I’m exaggerating, but just barely. And they can’t make these things anymore — not like how they used to. Which explains the hefty price tag. It’s irreplaceable.” “How on earth,” said Marcia, “did Brizz ever get ahold of it?” “The sixty-thousand-dollar question,” replied Benny. “Or why didn’t he sell it when he needed the money? I have no idea — and I have no idea why he gave it to me and not somebody else. So not knowing why, I hung on to it. But now, I don’t see I have much of a choice but to give it back to them, knowing how few of them there are left.” “Maybe that’s why he gave it to you, Benny — because he knew you’d find the right guys to give it to.” “Maybe,” said Benny. “But one thing I told those Indians, I’m not paying the shipping and handling. That’s up to you guys.” “You spoke to them?” “On the phone,” he said. “By the way, I meant to tell you. I like your new haircut.”

Immediately she turned away from him and her hand rose up to greet her hair in a tentative and self-conscious manner, as if she were trying to hide it from him. “Don’t talk about my hair right now,” she said.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s stupid. We’re talking about something else.”

“Don’t you like it?” he asked.

She turned to the opposite wall, as if expecting a mirror there, something reflective to see herself in. “I don’t know,” she said. “Let’s not talk about it.”

“I think it’s a great update,” he said.

She turned back to him. “Update?” she said. “What the hell does that mean?”

“No, I just meant —”

“That’s a pretty shitty thing to say,” she said.

“No —”

“I have no idea what the hell it means,” she said, “but it sounds pretty shitty.”

“No, I was just saying I liked it.”

“Update,” she said. “You don’t say ‘update,’ Benny. That’s the wrong word.”

No! NO! He had tried to say it just right! He had considered other options, alternative phrases, but he thought what he had settled on was perfect. He had rehearsed it over and over again, practicing a nonchalance in his voice, then waited for the exact right moment — and still he flubbed it! He probably should have run it by a copywriter.

Even with the best of intentions, it was impossible not to offend one another. We fretted over the many insignificant exchanges we found ourselves in from day to day. We weren’t thinking, words just flew from our mouths — unfettered, un-thought-out — and next we knew, we had offended someone with an offhand and innocent remark. We might have implied someone was fat, or intellectually simple, or hideously ugly. Most of the time we probably felt it was true. We worked with some fat, simple people, and the hideously ugly walked among us as well. But by god we wanted to keep quiet about it. If in large part we were concerned only with making it through another day without getting laid off, there was a smaller part just hoping to leave for the night without contributing to someone’s lifetime of hurt. And then there were those, like Marcia, who had the ability to turn even a compliment into an insult, bringing us (Benny especially) to our knees so that the only way to win was to remain silent, absolutely silent — unless, of course, the opportunity presented itself to bloody a scalp and leave it on Benny’s desk.

“I’m sorry if I offended you,” said Benny. “I was just trying to say it looked nice.”

“No, I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t take compliments very well. Was I mean to you just then?”

“No, no, not at all,” he assured her.

Suddenly Genevieve was standing in his doorway. Benny went quiet. Marcia saw his attention diverted and turned and saw Genevieve, too.

“Marcia, can I talk to you?”

Like that, Genevieve was gone. Marcia looked back at Benny. “Sure,” she called out after her, rising quickly. Benny had never seen Marcia’s eyes so wide.

“Benny,” she whispered.

“Go,” he said.

When Marcia left, Benny called Jim to tell him the news but Jim wasn’t picking up. He stood and walked out into the hallway. Things were quiet. He went back inside and put another call in to Jim. Again no answer. He went back out into the hallway. Everything was calm and empty. The large fake plants stood unstirred at both ends of the hall, and on the walls between the doorways hung all of the agency’s past advertising awards, collecting dust. He returned and called Jim a third time. Then he e-mailed him to tell him to listen to his voice mails. He spent two minutes waiting for a reply at his desk before deciding to hunt Jim down. He went back out into the hallway, but he stopped when he saw Karen Woo approaching. He had no desire to be the one to let Karen know that Genevieve had emerged from Lynn’s office. She would only spread the news around. So he casually lifted his arms and grabbed ahold of the top of the doorway, as if he were just hanging out, having a stretch. Karen grew closer, and he thought they might just greet each other and nothing more. And in fact, she seemed to have no intention of stopping and chatting, which was a relief. She just said, “Turns out Lynn doesn’t have cancer after all,” and then she passed by and disappeared down the hall.

MARCIA STOOD WITH HER BACK against the closed door of Genevieve’s office while Genevieve paced behind her desk, occasionally stopping to grab the back of her chair, as if to throttle it.

It was very simple. Lynn sat down at her desk and the question of where to start, how to broach the subject, eluded Genevieve entirely. Luckily, Joe began to speak. She couldn’t remember what he said, exactly, but he was very direct. Genevieve was nervous. She had to keep reminding herself of why she was there. This person who could so thoroughly dominate every other aspect of life — who dusted with domination — was really very sick inside, and weak, and in need of intervention, even if that intervention came from a cowed underling sitting mutely beside Joe. If she had not kept that in mind, she would have had to excuse herself for being so nervous. Joe said, basically, that a rumor had emerged, he did not know from where, that she had been diagnosed with cancer. Normally he didn’t put much stock in rumors, but he hoped she would understand why he’d give second thought to one that claimed she wasn’t well. There was the conviction among certain individuals that an important operation had been scheduled for yesterday, but that she had missed it. Perhaps deliberately. Her aversion to hospitals — something of a well-known fact — might explain why. He was there — and then he remembered Genevieve and turned to her. “The two of us are here,” he said, turning back to Lynn, “to let you know that these rumors are out there, they’re floating around, I don’t know to what degree of truth, but if there is something we can do for you, if we can help you in any way —”

“Joe, have they suckered you into it at last?” she asked him.

It? What was she referring to specifically, Genevieve wondered. While Joe was speaking, the tricky smile Lynn sometimes wore to express disbelief or bemusement appeared on her face. Joe must have seen it, too. Yet he persevered. Genevieve didn’t know where he found the will to continue with Lynn Mason looking at him like that. He stopped briefly when she interrupted to ask if he’d been suckered in, but then something truly remarkable happened. He kept at it.

“No, I don’t think I’ve been suckered into anything,” he replied. “I’m not here on their behalf. I’m here for myself — and Genevieve — because I believe there might be something wrong with you.”

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” she said simply, drawing into her hands a silver letter opener in the shape of a stiletto.

“That maybe you’re sick,” he continued — Genevieve did not know how or why and wanted him to stop — “but because of your fear, you aren’t letting yourself get looked after properly.”

“There is nothing wrong with me,” she repeated.

Joe was silent. Genevieve was ready to leave. Okay, Joe, she’s okay — let’s go. “A person with a genuine fear,” he continued, slowly, not apprehensively but patiently, as if trying to coax something out of her, “somebody incapacitated by fear, would say she wasn’t sick, if it meant she could continue with her life and not face that fear.”

Lynn offered a grudging, humorless chuckle. “I’m sorry, Joe,” she said. “Do you have access to my medical file?”

“No.”

“No,” she said, “no, I didn’t think so.”

“No, this is pure speculation, Lynn,” he continued, and by then, Genevieve felt the definite need to distance herself from Joe somehow. Not sick, Joe! Please stop talking! “Speculation that is probably not justifiable,” he continued. “But if you are sick, and scared, and keeping yourself from medical attention —”

“It was a mole,” she said.

All look of disbelief drained from her face. Now she wore a deadpan, ice-cold, corporate expression that said, simply, this is none of your business. “It was a mole they feared was cancerous, and I had the appointment rescheduled, if you must know, because of the urgency of the new business pitches. Genevieve,” she said, glancing down at the letter opener which she had been fingering while Joe spoke, “will you excuse Joe and me, please?” When she looked up at Genevieve, Genevieve said of course and left the silent office and closed the door behind her.

“A mole?” said Marcia. “This whole time it was only a mole?”

After Marcia left we heard Genevieve talking on the phone to her husband, screaming at him, though he had done nothing, poor guy. But that someone somewhere had done something terribly wrong, she was dead certain. She knew she was angry. She knew something had to be done to someone. She just didn’t know exactly what.

“Who was it?” she demanded of us. “Who was the first to say it was cancer?” We tried to tell her, Genevieve, no one knows who. No one will probably ever know who. “Well, who spread it then?” she hollered. “Who was responsible for spreading it?” She was with us yesterday when we tried figuring that one out, we reminded her, and she knew as well as we did that it was almost impossible to say who spread it. “Then whose idea was it to send Joe in there?” she asked. “Was this just some elaborate hoax to get Joe?” Well, that was just crazy talk, and we told her so — delicately, and not in so many words, because by then she had worked herself up into a fury. “Why did I get involved?” she asked. “How could I have let myself get wrapped up in this?” Now she was addressing herself, and we had no answers for her. She threw up her hands and left our offices.

We thought Joe Pope handled the whole thing with equanimity. At one point, Jim Jackers called out as Joe passed by his cube. They didn’t say a word about Lynn Mason. Jim just wanted to know if it was true that the ads for the breast cancer patient were now running in Spanish. “Does that mean we should be gearing our message toward a Latino market?” he asked.

“That’s the first I’ve heard of that,” replied Joe. “I would be very surprised if that were true. Who gave you that information?”

“I think they’re playing a joke on me,” said Jim.

“I would have to assume it’s a joke,” Joe said. It was just about the funniest joke ever.

Late in the afternoon, Genevieve sent us a group e-mail — the address list was a foot long — that denounced our “tactics,” our “sham sentiments.” We were “pathetic” and “dumb.” We had been “led by the nose” to “set Joe up.” That was ridiculous — for who would we have allowed to take us by the nose? What an elaborate and fainthearted conspiracy she envisioned. She never used the word, but it was hard not to read between the lines. How could it be a conspiracy? Was someone — say, Karen Woo — so diabolical, so shrewd, so capable of manipulating circumstance, that she could pull off with such delicacy the very subtlest of conspiracies, by spreading an outlandish yet eminently believable rumor, and then distorting the conversation she had had on the phone with the nurse at Northwestern to seal the veracity of her lies and set the fall guy up? Wasn’t that a little far-fetched, even if none of us had actually heard what the nurse had said — or could confirm that there was even a nurse on the other end? And what real damage could she have hoped to achieve? This was not, as only Hank could put it, “the sweaty Moor’s murder of Desdemona.” No way, we thought, no way it was Karen Woo. If she really wanted to stick it to Joe, we gave her enough credit to bleed the fucker dry. Besides, Genevieve had to face facts. A conspiracy was an impossible thing to prove. The most anyone could say was that this was how these things worked, here and elsewhere. Mistakes were made. Accountability got lost.

“I am DONE,” she concluded in her e-mail, and went on to list all the things she would no longer be doing with us in the future. Lunch and after-work drinks, mainly. We had heard it before. We wondered how long it would last this time.