“No, seriously,” said Benny. “Did you go visit him?”
“I did.”
“How come?”
Joe sat down and scooted in. “I was curious,” he said.
“Curious about what?”
Joe looked around the room. We were quiet. “Do you remember what he said to me?” he asked us. “He was standing in the hallway, holding the gun, which I thought was real at the time. And he says, remember what he said? He said, ‘Joe, I came to take you to lunch.’”
Some of us recalled hearing Tom say that and some of us were hearing it for the first time. What we remembered most clearly was Tom unfurling some lunatic gibberish as he wheeled and aimed and pulled the trigger — crazy talk that announced we were in the hands of a madman.
“No, after all that,” said Joe. “The last thing he said before Andy tackled him.”
“I don’t remember him saying he wanted to take you to lunch,” said Larry Novotny.
“Maybe because at the time, Larry,” said Karen Woo, “you were cowering with Amber in the server closet.”
According to Joe, Tom said it so calmly and matter-of-factly that it was almost as shocking as finding him there at all. Or rather, it was the juxtaposition between what he said — “I’ve come to take you to lunch” — and what he was doing — dressed as a clown and holding a gun — that was so odd. What did it mean? he wondered. Was it a euphemism? Did Tom actually intend to kill him and that was his clever way of saying it? If so, why did he point the gun at the ground just as he said it? Joe did not yet know it was a paintball gun. When he found that out, it seemed Tom might have legitimately wanted to take him to lunch.
“Where do you think he wanted to take you?” asked Jim Jackers.
“The Sherwin-Williams café,” quipped Benny.
“Jim,” said Karen, shaking her head across the table at him, “where he wanted to take him is not the point.”
“After he was arrested,” Joe continued, “Carl came to my office and showed me an e-mail Tom had sent him. It said that Tom was stopping by the office that day because he wanted to talk to me. I went to see him because I was curious. What did he want to talk about?”
“And what was it?” asked Benny.
“Ralph Waldo Emerson,” said Joe.
“Ralph Waldo Emerson?”
“Is he the guy with the pond?” asked Jim.
“You’re thinking of Henry David Thoreau,” said Hank.
“Jim is thinking of the Budweiser frogs,” said Karen.
We recalled the book Tom had purchased for Carl Garbedian, and what he had said to Benny on the day he was terminated. Tom Mota, ladies and gentlemen — martini addict, gonzo e-mailer, sometime wielder of an aluminum bat, great garden enthusiast, paintball terrorist, and our own in-house Emerson scholar. He had the annoying tic during his time with us of pinning aphorisms to the wall. We liked nothing less than people quoting at us from their corkboards. Hank Neary was the only one who could quote at us with impunity because he rarely made any sense, so we knew the quotation must add up somehow and we marveled at the obscurity. Quotations that tried to instruct us or rehabilitate our ways, like those Tom favored — we didn’t like those quotations. We were especially put off by Tom’s because it seemed a great irony that Tom Mota was trying to reveal to us a better way to live, when just look at the guy! What a fuckup. His quotations were never allowed to stay pinned up for very long. It would take him days to notice and then he would holler out into the hall, in his inimitable and eloquent manner, “Who the fuck’s been stealing my quotes?”
He and Joe were sequestered in a small, windowless room. We expected something different: a booth, some bulletproof glass, a pair of red phones. But according to Joe it was a room no bigger than the average office on sixty. It was almost possible to imagine their unlikely conversation unfolding where conversations always unfolded for us, only this time, the door locked from the inside, and Tom wasn’t allowed any thumbtacks with which to pin up his ludicrous and heartfelt quotations. Joe was sitting at the table when Tom was escorted in by two guards. He was wearing a tan jumpsuit with D.O.C. stenciled on the back, and he was shackled with handcuffs. The guards told them they had fifteen minutes.
“Being treated okay, Tom?”
“How are those fucks?” asked Tom. “Recovering?”
Joe gave Tom the general rundown of events after he was arrested. Tom said he was happy we got Friday afternoon off. They talked about Tom’s situation, what his lawyers were saying they could do for him if he pled guilty and acted penitent. Then Joe asked him what he had come there to ask him.
“I just said, ‘What did you want to talk to me about that day, Tom?’” Joe said to us. “And finally he admitted that he was the one who had Sharpied FAG on my wall.”
“No shit,” said Benny.
“I thought you did that to yourself,” said Jim Jackers.
“No,” said Joe.
“Jim, think about it,” said Karen. “Why would Joe do that to his own office? God.”
“I can’t tell you how many times I asked him, Joe,” said Benny. “I said, ‘Tom, come on, man, tell me the truth. Did you do that to Joe’s wall?’ Every time he denied it.”
Tom tried to explain himself. “I refused to conform,” he said to Joe. “When somebody said something stupid, everybody smiled and simpered and shook their heads. But me, I told them it was stupid. Everyone listened to the same goddamn radio station. Fuck that. I stayed late and went by everybody’s desk and spun the dial. I wore three polos on top of each other for a month, Joe, because I wasn’t being fooled and I wanted people to know it. I learned all that from reading Emerson. To conform is to lose your soul. So I dissented every chance I got and I told them fuck you and eventually they fired me for it, but I thought, Ralph Waldo Emerson would be proud of Tom Mota.”
Genevieve spoke up from down the conference room table. “He’s pleased with himself?”
“No, he’s not pleased with himself,” said Joe. “Hang on.”
“But what I didn’t know for a long time, Joe,” Tom had continued, “was that I was down here.” Joe demonstrated in order to explain what Tom meant. Tom had rattled his handcuffs in a sudden vortex whipped up by his spinning hands, which hovered just above the table. “Down here, resenting everything. The rut I was in. My never-enough salary. The people. I stormed around. I poked my nose into everyone’s business. When there was an insult to be made, I made it. When I could disparage someone, I took the opportunity. I Sharpied FAG on your wall. And I thought, it’s because I refuse to conform. If they don’t like it, they can fire me, because I can’t live like everybody else. But then you walked in and found what I’d written, Joe, and what did you do? Do you remember?”
“I couldn’t remember exactly,” Joe said to us. “I remember I called Mike Boroshansky and told him that someone had vandalized my office. But that wasn’t what Tom meant. After that, he said. After the official notification and all that. Did I remember what I did then? And I told him I couldn’t remember specifically.”
“You left it up there,” said Tom. “You left it up there. The building people and the office coordinator, who knows what those fucks had going on, but whatever it was, it must have had them by the balls, because it wasn’t until the following day — don’t you remember? — that they got around to removing it.”
We asked Joe if that was right. Did it really take them until the following day to remove FAG from his wall?
“Maybe,” he replied. “I remember it took them a while. But to be honest, I’m just going on what Tom told me.”
“I’m telling you,” said Tom, “it wasn’t until the next day. Whenever I’d walk by, the first thing I’d do is look in at you. I expected to see you all up in arms, screaming into the phone at someone about why it was still up there. But what did I find you doing instead? You were working. You were. . I don’t know what. If it had been me, I’d have been hollering at someone every five minutes until they came with a goddamn can of paint and covered over that fucker, because who likes to be called a fag? But you? You didn’t care. It couldn’t touch you. Because you’re up here, Joe,” said Tom.