Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris Page A

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