Benny looked down the hall just as Joe was entering his office at the far end, near the elevators.
“Oh my god, oh my god.”
Her panicky, tear-inflected singsong quavered as if she had already been witness to unspeakable violence.
“Larry, Marcia and I are going down to tell Joe,” said Benny, “so it’s up to you to get her to calm down.”
“What do you think I’m trying to do here?” asked Larry. “Amber, are you listening to Benny? You have to calm down. We’re going to take the emergency stairs, okay? Let’s just take the emergency stairs.”
But Amber didn’t want to take the emergency stairs. She didn’t want to take the elevator because he was coming up in the elevator. She didn’t want to go back into her office because he was coming for her in her office. To go anywhere at all she had to walk the hall, and the hall was the worst place of all, exposed and defenseless and easily targeted, so she remained frozen, trying not to collapse, saying over and over, “Oh my god, oh my god,” as copious and automatic tears flowed easily from her eyes and Larry tried to coax her, convince her, wake her, budge her — something, anything, before Tom Mota showed his face.
Benny and Marcia hurried down to Joe’s office. While they had been wasting time with Amber, Joe had left it again.
SMEEJACK LOOKED DOWN at his classic oxford and tie at the place where he had been shot and was astonished by the bright red color and how quickly it had appeared and how smartly he stung beneath it, and randomly it came back to him, the vivid memory of shopping for the shirt at the big-and-tall store in the Fox Valley Mall, the Muzak and burbling fountain, and the popcorn and the hot pretzel he ate, and he couldn’t repress the thought, “My last meal was an egg.” Then out loud he said, “Ow. Fuck.” And a little yolk flew from his mouth.
He called 911 and realized that he couldn’t speak. He spit the egg violently from his mouth. “Please send an ambulance,” he said. Then he began to cry.
By then Tom had moved on.
CARL GARBEDIAN WAS SINGING. Genevieve Latko-Devine was sure of it. Sure that someone was singing, anyway, and from where she sat in her office on sixty-one, she believed it was coming from next door — yes, from Carl’s office. Singing! Really it was more like an atonal mumble, and she hadn’t picked up on it immediately, as all her energy and attention were dedicated to coming up with caffeinated water concepts. But at some point the warble reached the outer limit of her radar, and she thought, “Is Carl singing?” So she got up from her desk and entered the hallway and crept along the few feet of wall separating her doorway from Carl’s, and sure enough, he was singing. He had a mirthless, workaday voice, half the words were unknown to him, and he kept repeating the same stanza over and over again — but it was in fact a song:
“He got himself a homemade special
Something something full of sand
And it feels just like a something
The way it fits into his hand. .”
Carl Garbedian was singing! He was offering hellos in the morning, he was saying good evenings at night, and now at midday, he was singing. And it wasn’t the mad loud caterwauling spontaneously indulged during his whacked-out days of popping Janine Gorjanc’s pills. No, this was regular old passing-the-time, happy-to-be-alive singing. She thought this surprising show of life might have something to do with the possibility that Carl and his wife were reconciling. If Carl had only known how delighted his simple singing made her! She wouldn’t do something so stupid as interrupt and explain — that would only ruin the moment, and make them both feel awkward. But if she could have communicated to him how his singing was a simple reinforcement of something essential, which commonly went missing on a day-to-day basis — that his singing was to her what Marcia’s haircut had been to him — he might have organized a talent show and performed a number from A Chorus Line with gold-spangled top hat and cane.
REALLY THE SONG WAS just stuck in Carl’s head, and the motivation to sing purely mechanical. The work he had before him, this new business, it was just more of the same, really. Not something that would cause him to break out into song. And the recent developments with Marilynn, they were positive, but the two of them had a long way to go — she was still picking up her phone when they were saying good-bye, and he was still living alone in the suburban town house they had been unable to rent for months. The medication was working, no doubt about it, but his life still seemed empty, at least when he compared it to his wife’s, and he still puzzled over how one could be thirty-six and still not know what to do with one’s life. Which is not to say he wasn’t, strictly speaking, in a song-singing mood. Because he did have a little something to fantasize about, as he sat working methodically and joylessly at the tedious, somewhat anxiety-producing task of winning new business.
“Why not quit?” Tom Mota had asked him in an e-mail sent earlier that day. “I’m sure you’ve had this thought a million times, and probably answered yourself with a million good reasons why not. Can I guess at a few? You have no other training. You’ve let too many years go by to start a new profession or return to school. And how could you let your wife be the main breadwinner? Etc etc etc. But have I got the answer for you! (Two weeks after being jerked off by Lynn Mason and I still can’t stop sounding like a goddamn ad.) Anyway, I was thinking the other day, what am I going to do with myself? What do I got? I got no wife. I got no kids. I do have a dead-end, routinized, enervating, obsequious, numbingly dull — oops! Nope, don’t even got a job anymore, do I? A small amount of money left over from the sale of my house — that’s it. When that’s gone, what will I do? Get another job in advertising? First of all, not given the current job climate. Second of all, NO FUCKING WAY, NOT IN THIS LIFETIME! So what am I suggesting? I’ll tell you what I’m suggesting. I’m suggesting starting my own landscaping business. And I want you, Carl, to join me. I think that some communion with nature, even if it is just the goddamn lawns of suburban yokels, and the pathetic green postage stamps in the industrial parks of Hoffman Estates or Elk Grove Village, I think it might be exactly what’s missing in your life, Carl — what you lack without knowing you lack it. Think of it. The sun on the back of your neck. The taste of cold water after you’ve worked up a genuine thirst. The pleasures of a well-groomed lawn. And the sleep you will enjoy when every bone and muscle in your body has been thoroughly exhausted. I plan on being in the office later today to talk to Joe Pope. I’ll stop by your office. THINK ABOUT IT. Peace, Tom.”
ONCE SHE HAD DETERMINED that Carl Garbedian was actually singing, Genevieve snuck away from his door and walked in the direction of the kitchen. In the cupboards we had an endless supply of individually packaged, calorie-free powders that we kept next to the cup-o-soups and the silver bags of coffee grounds, and all you had to do for a fruit punch was add cold water from the cooler. On her way down the hall, she passed a man dressed as a clown. She tried not to look. It was obviously someone hired for a singing telegram or some other professional service and he was probably sick of being stared at in office buildings. “Genevieve,” said the clown as he went by, as if he were tipping his hat to her on a dusty street of the Old West. It startled her, halted her abruptly, turned her around in her tracks. The clown continued on without an explanation or even a backward glance. “Who is that?” she asked. But whoever it was didn’t answer, and entered Carl Garbedian’s office without so much as a knock.