“‘It came into him, life,’” Tom declaimed to the fleeing backside of Doug Dion, “‘it went out from him, truth.’” He shot Doug in the back and Doug went down, bringing several of us out into the halls with his cries of traumatic certainty. Like Andy Smeejack before him, Doug confused a sting for the real thing. Tom merely needed to turn to find a new target. “‘It came to him, business,’” he trumpeted preposterously before shooting someone new, “‘it went from him, poetry.’” And also, “‘The day is always his, who works in it with serenity and great aims.’” And with a smile, he let go of another round.
They actually believed he could shoot at someone and intend them harm. That’s how little those fucks ever really knew him. He stopped midhallway to load more pellets into the gun.
We behaved as you might expect. We recoiled, hovering under our timberstick desks, collecting under conference room tables like game hens in a shooting gallery, and generally scampering for our lives. Amber Ludwig in the server closet heard shrieking from outside and went into overdrive trembling and hyperventilating, just as Larry, who had abandoned her there, disgusted by his revelation that Amber planned to carry the baby to term and convinced that her crying was baseless, backed away from the door he was tempted to open. He made no attempt to reattach himself to her. She wouldn’t have had him anyway. Instead, he took position behind the nearest of the metal shelves and prepared to push it over on Tom and beat him with wired hardware should he enter the server closet.
Benny found Jim exactly where he had predicted he would, listening to music through headphones and working on the new business. The two men tried to avoid the shrill and fearsome noises coming from unseen parts of their familiar floor by heading in the opposite direction. They had just rounded the corner past the potted tree nearest Joe Pope’s office when they ran into Genevieve, who had been frantically searching for Joe ever since the clown’s spooky greeting sent her back to Carl’s doorway and she overheard Tom telling Carl that he wasn’t going to shoot him. She worried that Joe was an obvious target and wanted to warn him, but when she couldn’t find him and people started screaming she turned distraught and now she was in tears.
“Shh, calm down,” Benny told her.
“Let’s take the elevator,” said Jim, since they were right there.
“No, we can’t,” Benny replied. “We have to take the emergency stairs.”
“Why?”
“Because Mike Boroshansky said so.”
So the three of them started off in the direction of the other potted tree and the emergency stairs on that side of the hallway, and had almost reached Benny’s office at the midway point when Tom’s voice rose up behind them in the hall and Jim suddenly went down.
“‘I content myself with the fact that the general system of our trade —’” Tom thundered, as he advanced toward them at a steady though not particularly fast pace down the hall.
“I’ve been shot!” cried Jim. “I’ve been shot!”
Benny pulled Genevieve into his office and pushed her behind the desk.
“‘— is a system of selfishness —’”
“It hurts!” cried Jim, writhing on his back. “Oh, it hurts!”
Hovering low in his doorway, Benny reached out to grab one of Jim’s hands to pull him inside the office.
“‘— is not dictated by the high sentiments of human nature —’”
Tom’s stentorian, little big man voice was growing closer. Benny pulled Jim in further as Tom shot him twice more, once in the torso and once in the leg. The skeleton with the Buck Rogers gun looked on helplessly from inside Benny’s office.
“Ow!” cried Jim. “Oh!” His eyes were as wide and fearful as a wounded dog’s.
“‘— much less by the sentiments of love and heroism —’”
Benny paused to get a closer look. That wasn’t blood. That was —
“‘— but is a system of distrust —’”
Benny stood up and entered the hallway. “Tom,” he said, “are those just fucking paintballs?”
“‘— not of giving, but of taking advantage,’” concluded Tom, standing but two feet from Benny and taking aim at his chest.
Just at that moment, Lynn and Joe stepped off the elevator and stopped abruptly in front of Joe’s office, peering down the hall. Seeing the clown with the gun, Lynn shouted, “What’s going on? Hey — what do you think you’re doing down there?”
Tom swiveled around to face them.
“Joe,” he said, resting the gun at his side. “I’ve come to take you to lunch.”
It was too late. A shirtless, shrieking Andy Smeejack had rounded the opposite corner, barreling down the hallway with bouncing man breasts and a belly white as a whale’s, leaping over Jim just as Benny turned to make room for him, and landing with crushing severity upon Tom’s absurdly festooned smallness. Both men careened into the wall and bounced off, landing with hard, nearly soundless thuds on the carpet, Smeejack on top, pinning with his tub of guts Tom’s body to the floor while pummeling him madly with sidewinders and haymakers until Joe and Benny pried him from his determination to kill the bastard with his bitter, fat, paint-flecked hands, and then the police swarmed in.
4
THE AMERICAN DREAM AND WHY WE DESERVE IT — WHO SHOULD BE DEAD — “GARBEDIAN AND SON” — USELESS SHIT — THE END OF AN ERA — WE URGE BENNY TO SAY SOMETHING — ROLAND TRICKED — A NOTE TO JIM — D.O.C. — JOE AND WHERE HE’S AT (“UP HERE”) — TOM IN LOVE — A VISIT TO THE HOSPITAL — DERIVATIVE CONCEPTS — DEPARTURES
WE BOUNCED BACK. Or we quit. Or we took a vacation. For two or three weeks there we had a tough time resisting the urge to replay events. Everyone had a version. Conflicting accounts never diminished one side or the other, they only made the matter richer. We were blowing the whole thing way out of proportion, because nobody had died, but we talked about it as if death imagined were as good as real. We stayed later than normal to talk about it or we took days off or else we called it quits. Someone from Project Services sued us, citing negligence. It was a little awkward because we still had to work with her. She approached us at the coffeemaker and the microwave to make sure we knew it was nothing personal. She was suing the building, too, along with Tom Mota and the paintball gun manufacturer. She was out of the building and two blocks down when the shooting began, but who were we to say what damages this individual or that deserved? That would be up to a jury of our peers. We had all been deposed before and would likely be deposed for this. In the meantime we had our conflicting accounts to perfect and our insatiable appetite to revisit them.
The bottled water and the running shoe were no competition against Tom Mota’s shenanigans. Something as exciting as this had not struck us since the premiere season of The Sopranos. Before that, we had to stretch back to the Clinton impeachment and the summer of Monica. But those things couldn’t hold a candle. This happened to us. And the great thing was, we could talk and talk without any of the casualties or long-term psychological damage of a Columbine or an Oklahoma City. We pretended to know something about what they had gone through. Maybe we did, who knows. Probably not.
All that week and the week following we played at the game of corporate win-win-win but our real occupation was replaying events and reflecting on the consequences of still being alive. India reentered our horizons. Again we took stock of our ultimate purpose. The idea of self-sacrifice, of unsung dedication and of dying a noble death, again reached the innermost sanctum where ordinarily resided our bank account numbers and retirement summaries. Maybe there was an alternative to wealth and success as the fulfillment of the American dream. Or maybe that was the dream of a different nation, in some future world order, and we were stuck in the dark ages of luxury and comfort. How could we be expected to break out of it, we who were overpaid, well insured, and bonanza’d with credit, we who were untrained in the enlightened practice of putting ourselves second? As Tom Mota was taking aim at our lives, we felt for a split second the ambiguous, foreign, confounding certainty that maybe we were getting what we deserved. Luckily that feeling soon passed, and when we rose up alive and returned to our desks and, later, to our lofts and condos and suburban sprawls, the feeling was that of course we deserved all that we had, we had worked long, hard hours for it all, and how dare that fucker even pretend to take it away? How grateful we were to be around to enjoy everything we deserved.