Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris Page B

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