Jim returned to the booth and slid into his seat.
“I saw her,” he said.
Karen said, “Is it not the weirdest thing you’ve ever seen?”
“I don’t know,” he said, nodding slowly. “I’m still just trying to believe it.”
The next day Karen and Jim convinced Benny Shassburger to go to the McDonald’s with them. They didn’t tell him why, they just said there was something there that he’d want to see. They all ordered lunch. “So why am I here?” asked Benny when they sat down. “Because Janine Gorjanc —” Jim began, only to be immediately cut off by Karen. “Don’t tell him!” she cried, slapping his hand. “It won’t have the same impact if he hears about it before he sees it.” “What am I seeing?” said Benny. “Okay,” said Karen, “I want you to go to the bathroom, and on your way there, I want you to look through the door to the play area. You know what the play area is, right? Don’t stare, don’t open the door. Just peek through. Got it?” Benny came back and said, “What the hell is it?” “It’s Janine Gorjanc,” said Karen. “Yeah, I know that,” said Benny. “But what is she doing in there?” Jim and Karen shrugged speechlessly. “I gotta see it again,” said Benny, rising again from the booth.
He lingered at the men’s room. Janine sat hunched over the colored balls with her legs submerged. She had hold of a ball and she was tossing it slowly between her hands. She dropped it and picked up another one. Then she scooped up several balls at once and spilled them out upon her lap, and some of them remained caught there as she laced her arms under her thighs and hugged herself.
Benny returned to the booth. “It’s like she’s a five-year-old,” he said.
“Is it not the
weirdest
thing you’ve ever seen?” asked Karen.
On the third day they brought Marcia Dwyer with them. They went through the procedure with Marcia and when Marcia returned from the restroom she said, “Yeah, that is a little strange.” “A
little
strange?” said Karen. “It’s a little more than a little strange, Marcia.” “You dumbasses,” said Marcia, looking around at the collection of morons some random lottery had stuck her with. “She’s
mourning.
” “Mourning?” said Jim. “Yeah, mourning,” said Marcia. “Grieving. Ever hear of it?” “Is that what she’s doing?” asked Jim. “She’s mourning?” “Of
course
she’s mourning,” said Karen. “But who mourns like that?” Marcia replied sensibly that different people mourned in different ways. “Some people don’t even cry,” she said. “Some people can’t stop crying. It all depends.” “Yeah, but you don’t seem to be getting it, Marcia,” said Karen. “She’s in a pool of plastic balls in the middle of a McDonald’s. That’s just fucking weird.”
Jim begged off the next day, and so did Benny, but Karen managed to convince Amber Ludwig to eat at McDonald’s with her, and with Amber came Larry Novotny. When Amber returned to the booth she was in tears. The day after that, Dan Wisdom accompanied Karen to the McDonald’s. Then the weekend passed, and on Monday it was Chris Yop. On Tuesday, Reiser limped over there. No one really wanted to go. It was McDonald’s, after all, and lunch with Karen was always an earful. But she was so persistent, people went just to get her off their backs. Then there was Janine, sitting in the pool of plastic balls, and everyone knew why they had come.
Over the course of the next few weeks, practically everyone made it over to the McDonald’s. If Karen couldn’t go, they went without her. That is to say,
we
went without her. You see, everyone was talking about it. It wasn’t something you could afford to miss. You
had
to go. First you heard about it, then you had to witness it for yourself. You stood in front of the bathroom as if you had every intention of going inside, but instead you stared through the door, through the netting, and spied the unmistakable, hunched figure of Janine Gorjanc — sometimes staring off at nothing, other times addressing the balls in some way, holding them or tossing them or skimming her hands over their undulating surface. You went so that when you got back to the office, you, too, could testify that you had seen it — Janine Gorjanc in the pool of plastic balls — and what a peculiar sight it was.
JOE POPE CAME UP
the elevator with his bicycle and walked it down the hall to his office where he found Mike Boroshansky, dressed in a navy blue suit coat, leaning his butt against the back credenza, and Benny’s friend Roland standing with his back against the wall, waiting for him to arrive. The laptop, which had gone missing the week prior, sat on top of Joe’s uncluttered desk, as did the office curios which had proven thin enough to slip between his wall and bookshelf: green license plates from Vermont, a frame of Burt Lancaster and Frank Sinatra in navy-issued uniforms gathered with others in a bar. People passing by recognized those things because they were accustomed to seeing them in different offices.
“Why don’t you close the door, Joe?” Mike Boroshansky suggested. “Lynn should be down here any minute.”
The whole thing was cleared up in half an hour. Not long after Lynn entered, Genevieve Latko-Devine was seen knocking at Joe’s door. The usual suspect was brought in — this was several months before Tom was sacked, but he was always riding on thin ice. We could hear his muffled protestations through the paper-thin walls. They were interrupted by Benny Shassburger. To Benny’s credit, he went in there of his own accord. He didn’t have to go in; he could have stayed out of it. Roland never said it was he who had first suggested Joe Pope’s office might be one of interest. Lynn Mason wanted to know who was responsible. “Give me a name, Benny,” she said. Benny deflected her request. “It wasn’t any one person, I don’t think,” he said. “It was more of like a zeitgeist.” “‘Zeitgeist’? What’s that, what’s a ‘zeitgeist,’ Benny?” “You know,” he said. “No, I don’t know,” countered Lynn. “All due respect, Benny, I think art directors should avoid using fancy words. If you have a name for me of who’s responsible for this, I’d like you to say it.” “I don’t have a name for you,” he said. “It was just something going around, a lot of people were talking about it. It was a joke, I thought.” “Sounds like you must have a whole bunch of names for me, then,” replied Lynn. “Yeah, but not one specific name,” said Benny. “Honest — I don’t know whose idea it was, and I don’t know who did it. But I can tell you that it wasn’t Tom.” “I swear to god I’m not guilty of this one,” said Tom. Lynn ignored him. “Next time,” Lynn said, “that you tap into a ‘zeitgeist’ around here, Benny? The first person I’d like you to come talk to is me. Otherwise, I’ll come up with a name myself, and I don’t think you’ll like the name I come up with. Understood?” “I understand,” he said. As he was leaving, he heard her say, “Jesus Christ, these people do the stupidest shit.”
“Nice to have your laptop back, anyway,” said Mike Boroshansky.
“Joe,” she said. “I’m sorry about this.”
Joe waved it away. “What are you going to do?” he asked.
“How about we fire every fucking one of them,” she said.
At noon that day, Benny said to Roland, “Man, I
told
you not to go in there anymore, didn’t I? Didn’t I say he wasn’t your guy?” “You did,” said Roland. “So why’d you have to go in there?” “It gets boring doing a night shift, Benny,” Roland replied defensively. “You ever work a night shift? You do whatever you can to kill time. I didn’t expect to find anything. But there it all was! What was I supposed to do then?” “Yeah, but if you would have just stayed out of there,” said Benny, “none of this would have happened, and I wouldn’t be in trouble with Lynn.” “How was I supposed to know they were setting the guy up, Benny?”
We respected the fact that Benny hadn’t named any names. It was nice to know that if one of
us
did something stupid, he would probably keep that to himself, too.
Later that afternoon we saw Joe Pope walking in the direction of the coffee bar, which is to say, our direction — there were a few of us down there enjoying a break — and we were curious: what would he order? What does the inscrutable Joe Pope have for a pick-me-up? But then he walked past the ordering place and kept coming. He stopped directly in the middle of our conversation, halting it, and we thought, Oh, shit — here it comes. He’d reached a breaking point. Our hearts started beating in our chests. We wondered in a flash — how defensive should we be? How dissembling? It was our custom to dissemble shamelessly to Joe Pope, usually in matters of whose fault this was, or what had gone wrong with that, and then after he’d leave and our sensors relocated their moral north, we’d likely feel a tinge of regret for our dishonesty. Of course he would return soon enough and, born into sin, forgetful and unreformed, we dissembled once more. But maybe we wouldn’t dissemble this time. Maybe in fact we owed him an apology. The guy had been railroaded, after all — he had every reason to be pissed off. And when he began to speak, in a steady quiet voice, looking each of us in the eye, each according to our turn, and for the same length of time — “I have tried my best,” he began, “not to let certain things get to me, and to deal with each of you on an individual basis, as fairly as I know how” — we couldn’t argue with what he said and thought he probably did deserve an apology, though it was still far from certain that he’d get one. We’d already been upbraided by Lynn and made to feel small by Genevieve, who said, as she had on other occasions, that she was done with us forever. “My fairness comes to an end, however,” Joe continued, “the minute you turn Janine Gorjanc into one of your games.”
“Janine Gorjanc?” said Hank Neary, just as surprised as the rest of us to hear Joe speak her name. “Who would do a thing to Janine?”
Joe just stood there with the prepossessing silence that made us monumentally uneasy. He didn’t look an inch too short just then. He didn’t offer an explanation or make any threats. He wasn’t there to seek redress for the wrong done to him. He just said: “No more. Don’t bother her on her lunch hour. Don’t stand in front of the bathroom so you can gawk. Just let the woman be.”
Tom Mota had gone to Joe and told him what we were up to at the McDonald’s. Tom Mota, of all people! We couldn’t believe it. Then we heard that he’d gone to Janine and told her too. After that, we had to file in there one after the other in order to apologize. Amber Ludwig, Larry Novotny, Benny and Jim. Don Blattner said something to her at a print station. Genevieve Latko-Devine called her at home. Monday came around again, and we apologized on Monday, too.
“It
is
odd,” Janine admitted to us.
We told Janine that she didn’t need to explain a single thing to any of us.
“No, it
is,
” she insisted. “I know it’s odd. But it was one of her places. She was only nine, you know. She had her places. I still go to the Toys‘R’Us, and the Gymboree. They think I’m crazy there, too. The McDonald’s people think I’m just nuts. But those are my places now, too. They became my places. I was with her when she was in those places. And I just don’t know how to give them up yet. I would be there anyway, right, had she lived?”
We felt like hell. We apologized some more. We had made a spectacle of Janine’s life, and of her grief, and we made a solemn vow — most of us did, anyway — that there would be no new spectacles.
TOM CLIMBED THE ROTTING RUNGS,
keeping careful hold of the wooden pole’s rusted handrails. The ladder’s disrepair was one sign of the inattention the billboard had suffered in its remote, abandoned location so far west, where the traffic lanes narrowed from eight to four and the distance between exits stretched out to miles. But it would have been a mistake to attribute the shoddy decrepitude of the element-battered billboard to location alone. Other billboards that far west, especially those advertising the casino boats, were sturdy new metal constructions without a speck of chipped paint, some lit by twenty-four-hour spotlights. It was the goddamn vendor who deserved a lot of the blame for letting the thing go, and as he climbed, Tom puzzled over the mystery of why more wasn’t made of the space. Some hustle could always be found. That Jessica Gorjanc’s fourth-grade picture blown up to inhuman dimensions had been left to languish long after her actual body was put underground wasn’t just cruel disregard for human suffering. It was bad business practice.
Dawn hadn’t broken when he nosed his aging Miata deep into the off-road recess where a small woods grew up a hundred yards from the highway. His climb up the ladder was slow and cumbersome owing to all the supplies he carried in his backpack, including, importantly, a Thermos half-full of martinis which he had shaken briefly with ice cubes before closing the trunk and following his flashlight’s lead. Crickets chirped in the sleepy dark. Survivalist tactics had taught him a nifty trick: masking tape on the base of the powerful yet compact light allowed him to hold the thing comfortably between his front teeth while he climbed, illuminating the path above him while freeing up his hands, one of which he needed to hold on to the roller. This he placed first on the scaffold once he reached the top. He lifted himself up and removed the capacious hiker’s pack from his shoulders and set it next to the roller. Passing the light down the length of the scaffold, he saw the thing for what it was: three graying wooden planks affording him no more room than what was given a window washer hanging outside his window on sixty-two. Before the first pink in the sky, he unscrewed the Thermos and poured himself a drink, his bartending aided immeasurably by the Maglite in his mouth. He removed the light and took a sip.
He unpacked his supplies — two cans of white house paint, a deep-well roller tray, two roller heads, and a telescoping extension pole. He sipped from the Thermos lid as he mixed and poured out the paint and the fumes rose up to greet him. The faint sun barely touched on him as he walked the length of the scaffold, running the roller up and down the face of the billboard, working efficiently and thoroughly to cover the girl’s fading image. It had been up there a number of months, all through the bad midwestern winter and the start of the spring rains, puckered in places, bubbles of paint cracked in half. Thanks to the extension pole, he covered more than he thought he would, but he still had a good bit to go yet, so he set the roller down and finished the martini and took out a paintball gun from the backpack. He poured a second martini and then loaded the gun. From his position on the scaffold, he could see the girl’s face only at a steep angle, which prevented him from knowing exactly how to aim. But he had brought with him plenty of white pellets which he had chosen to match the house paint, and as he sipped the second martini and the sky announced the beginning of another empty, interminable weekend, he walked back and forth along the planks loading and shooting, covering over the dead girl’s image one bitter blot at a time, because his complaints to Jane Trimble had gotten him nowhere — and because in conversation the previous morning, Janine said she couldn’t bear to look at it one day longer.