Free Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris Page A

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