“I wanted to tell her something,” Carl said, biting his upper lip.
“Would you like me to give her a message?” she asked.
“I wanted to sing her a song.”
“You wanted to sing her a song?” said Genevieve.
“I wanted to sing her a song,” said Carl.
Out in the hallway we reported to Carl’s doctor that he’d been saying and doing a number of peculiar things for a matter of weeks. “I have no doubt,” the doctor said. “He was all over the board with those drugs and the dosages were incredibly high.” He turned back to reassure Marilynn that they were getting Carl cleaned out, and that he foresaw no permanent damage. Once Carl was detoxified, they’d put him on the right medication with the right dosage, and he’d be back to his better self.
We thought that was like saying Carl would play the piano again. Did he have a better self to begin with?
Marilynn, also lab-coated and pinned with ID — she was an attractive woman with short blond hair — thanked the doctor by name. He smiled and gently squeezed her shoulder.
After he left, Marilynn turned to Tom Mota and said, “Thank you for your help.”
“I won’t apologize for not helping sooner,” he said. “And I won’t apologize for yelling at you over the phone.” He was like a child in that he wouldn’t look her in the eye as he addressed her. “I can’t apologize for something I don’t feel sorry for.”
“I wasn’t asking for an apology,” Marilynn said, tall enough to look down on him. “I just wanted to thank you.” She started to walk away.
“Do you mind if I ask you a question?” Tom said. She turned back. Tom moved toward her and got, we thought, a little close, cocking his shaved head as he tended to do when exercised. He was wearing a tan trench coat, which he must have thought made him look taller. The loose belt was hanging down. “Just out of curiosity,” he said, and he made that terrible smirk. It was creepy how he insisted on staring only at her neck. “Why is it that he finds it necessary to medicate himself nearly to death? You have an answer for that, as a medical practitioner? What one person does to drive the other person to
poison
himself?” Marilynn was stunned into silence. “Just out of idle curiosity,” he said, lifting his shoulders. Finally he looked her in the eye.
We couldn’t believe how out of line he was. He had hit an all-time low.
“You are . . . extremely rude,” she said at last, her lips trembling, “at a time my husband is very sick —”
“Oh, go fuck yourself,” he said, turning away, dismissing her with both hands.
“— when all I’ve done —” She struggled not to break down. “— is try to help him. I
tried
to help him,” she said.
“Hey, I’m just trying to understand,” he said, turning around and pointing at her, “why you hate us. And why
we
hate you.”
We went in to say a final good-bye to Carl — all except Tom. Lynn Mason arrived. That was surprising. “I didn’t think you did hospitals,” said Benny, in reference to her phobia.
“I don’t do them when I’m the subject under investigation,” Lynn replied. “When it’s somebody else, I do hospitals.” She turned to the man in the bed. “Carl, what the hell? Just what the hell?”
Her words sounded accusatory but her tone was one of tender confusion.
“I fucked up,” Carl said.
He seemed to become more coherent with her arrival. It was a delicate time, given that layoffs were happening all around us, but business appeared to be set aside for the moment, and for ten minutes there we were almost a healthy functioning team again. Someone even said something to that effect — Dan Wisdom, painter of fish, who had positioned himself against the wall so as to be out of people’s way. He said Carl needed to feel better soon because he was a vital member of the team. Lynn looked over at him and shook her head.
“No, let’s not have any of that team-talk bullshit right now,” she said. “Let’s leave team-talk bullshit at the office for now and just talk about the fact that you guys, if you guys are in need of something — whatever it is, I don’t care — Christ, come see me before you do something like this. Carl, for Christ’s sake.”
“I fucked up,” he repeated.
“You gonna get better?”
“Gonna try.”
“I bought you these crummy flowers,” she said. It was in fact a pretty pathetic bouquet. We all thought,
Shit! We forgot flowers!
Lynn turned to Genevieve. “In-house florists at a hospital, and this is all they had.”
After she left, we asked Dan if he was offended by how she had responded to his innocuous remark about the team.
“Are you kidding me?” he said. “I thought that was terrific.”
SIX MONTHS LATER,
Carl had recovered from toxic poisoning and was now on a regimen of antidepressants tailored personally to him. None of us could say we had noticed much of a change. Perhaps it was a victory just to see him stable. He wasn’t cleaning other people’s offices during his downtime, or doing laps around the hall. But on the other hand he still wore off-brand blue jeans and bad shoes and spent his lunch hour behind a closed door eating the same meal.
“Sorry to interrupt, Carl,” said Amber. A few of us had come with her, and now we were standing behind her in Carl’s doorway. We had elected Amber as our spokeswoman.
“That’s okay,” he said. “What’s up?”
Amber took a step inside the office. She grabbed the back of a chair and paused. She looked back at us. We were like, “Go on. Go on!”
Finally she told Carl that Karen Woo had informed everyone that he was the source.
Carl wiped his mouth with his napkin. He shrugged. “The source of what?” he replied.
ON THE DAY LYNN MASON
was scheduled for surgery, she showed up at the office.
Karen saw her first. Karen was always the first to know everything. We expected her to know everything first, just as we expected Jim Jackers to be the last to know anything. This time was no different — Lynn Mason was in the office, and Karen had been the first to see her. She had come across her in the women’s room.
Genevieve was next. On her way to Marissa Lopchek’s in HR, she saw Lynn standing at the window in the Michigan Room. “At first I didn’t think it was her,” she said, “because how could it be her? She’s supposed to be in surgery. But on my way back from Marissa’s, she was still at the window. She’d been there for, I don’t know, twenty minutes? She must have felt me staring or something because she turned, and just as she turned I started to walk away real quick because I didn’t want her to catch me staring, but she saw me anyway and said hello, but by then I was halfway down the hall, so I had to go all the way back to the doorway to say hi because I didn’t want to seem rude, but by then she had turned back to the window and — oh, it was
so
awkward. What is she doing here?” she asked.
Dan Wisdom saw Lynn cleaning her office. She and the office coordinator were boxing things up in there. We asked him what kind of things and he started to list them: stock-photo books, outdated computers, long-dead advertising magazines, half-empty soda bottles. . . . It was your right and privilege as a partner to keep as cluttered an office as you wanted, and we had all grown accustomed to shifting things to the floor whenever we went into Lynn’s office for a meeting. “You wouldn’t recognize it,” said Dan. “One of the custodians came up with a cart. He took down . . . I can’t even
tell
you how many boxes full of old crap.” We asked him why she was cleaning. “I have no idea why,” he said. “I thought she was supposed to be in surgery.”
Benny had seen her, too. Certain pockets of office space had been unoccupied for some time, workstations vacated by those who had walked Spanish down the hall. Benny found Lynn at a desk in one of the more fallow clusters of our formerly occupied cubicles.
“You know the place,” he asked us, “on fifty-nine?”
We knew it by heart: all the cubicle walls barren, no radio playing, the printers off-line, and the only hope for corporate revitalization the fact that no one had yet turned off the overhead lights — we, too, had been victimized by the dot-coms. None of us liked it down there; it was too naked a reminder of the times we lived in. But if you needed someplace where you could hear yourself think and weren’t likely to be disturbed, there was no better place than that deserted section of fifty-nine.
“She was sitting on top of one of the cubicle desks,” said Benny, “with her legs hanging down. It was funny to see her like that. What was she doing sitting inside a cubicle? I was so surprised to see someone in there I almost jumped back. But then to look closer and see it was her? Way strange. I would have said something but, man, she was all spaced out. She was just
zonked out.
She had to have heard me, but she didn’t look up. So you know what I did. I got the hell out of there.”
Marcia Dwyer found her at a print station. She was standing against the wall, next to the recycling bin and the stacks of boxes holding copy paper. Marcia was there to photocopy something for the rest of us, a list of interesting facts about breast cancer found on the Internet. She greeted Lynn, and the greeting seemed to wrench the older woman out from underwater.
“What was that?” Lynn asked.
“Oh,” said Marcia, “I was just saying hello.”
“Oh. Hi.”
Marcia advanced toward the copier. Lynn was just standing there against the wall. “Oh, do you need to use this?” Marcia asked suddenly.
Lynn shook her head.
“Oh. Okay.”
She made her copies. “Bye,” said Marcia, when she had finished.
Lynn looked up. “All done?”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever had a more awkward exchange my entire life,” Marcia told us. We were discussing these run-ins in Marcia’s office. “What was she doing just standing there against the wall?”
“Maybe all this happened yesterday,” someone suggested.
It wasn’t as absurd a notion as it might sound. Some days, time passed way too slowly here, other days far too quickly, so that what happened in the morning could seem like eons ago while what took place six months earlier was as fresh in our minds as if an hour had yet to pass. It was only natural that on occasion we confused the two.
“No, it was this morning,” Karen assured us. “Trust me. I saw her. Lynn’s in.”
“What probably happened,” Amber suggested, “was that she stopped by the office to finish up some last-minute business, and then she walked over to the hospital. So she’s not
in
in. She just stopped by on her way.”
“Cleaning her office?” said Larry. “Standing in the Michigan Room for half an hour? That’s last-minute business?”
“Maybe.”
“Or maybe,” said Larry, “there never was an operation.”
“What do you mean, there never was an operation? Of course there was an operation.”
“Because,” Larry continued, “she doesn’t have cancer.”
“How can you say that, Larry? Of course she has cancer.”
“How do you know it’s not just a rumor, Amber?”
“Because I just
know.
”
“Anyway,” said Karen, “her operation was scheduled for nine. She couldn’t have recovered in that time, so she must have missed it.”
“It was scheduled for nine?” said Genevieve. “I thought nobody knew when it was scheduled for. Where are you getting nine from, Karen?”
“I always get my information directly from the source,” Karen said.
WE DIDN’T HAVE
much else to do, you see. We had the pro bono fund-raiser ads, sure — but what were they when compared to our workload of yore? We had already made headway on them; they would be finished in no time. The more pressing matter that morning seemed to be discovering why Lynn had chosen to come into work instead of dealing with a life-threatening illness. And so when Karen Woo told us who her source was, naturally we went in search of answers.
“I’m not the source of that information,” said Carl in front of his
penne alla vodka.
He denied knowing anything about Lynn Mason going into surgery at nine. And if he had known, he wouldn’t have said anything — certainly not to Karen Woo.
“But Lynn did receive a diagnosis of cancer, did she not?” asked Amber, inside his office.
“As far as I know she did,” he said. “But I’m not the source of that information, either, and I don’t know why Karen’s saying I am — unless it’s because Marilynn’s an oncologist at Northwestern. But what Karen doesn’t know is that I moved out six weeks ago, and besides, Marilynn wouldn’t tell me anything — not if Lynn were a patient.”
It was the first we had heard of Carl and Marilynn’s separation. We didn’t inquire further because we didn’t care to pry. We asked in the most general way how he was holding up, and he replied clinically that it was the best decision for both parties. We deduced from that that Carl had probably not been the prime mover.
“I don’t mean to change the subject,” said Amber.
“Please do,” said Carl.
“But then so you’re not the source.”
“The source of what?” he repeated, a little edgier this time.
“Of the fact that she has cancer.”
Carl shook his head. “I first heard that from Sandy Green,” he said.
SOME OF US THOUGHT
Sandy Green in payroll was the second coming, others the devil incarnate — it all depended on what you were getting paid. Her office was a firetrap of put-off filing. Sandy had gray hair and wore one of those ribbed finger condoms that gives one speed in the sport of accounting. Off a remote corridor at the far end of sixty-one, her windowless office was known as the Bat Cave for its general darkness and inaccessibility. “I talked to Carl a couple days ago for about five minutes about FICA withholdings,” said Sandy. “I doubt very seriously that in five minutes I would have said something to him about Lynn’s cancer.”
“Okay,” said Genevieve, “but what we’re trying to determine is if Lynn even has cancer, and if you happen to be the one who knows that for a fact.”
Sandy looked genuinely perplexed — then suddenly her face ironed out and she raised her plastic finger in the air and gave it a three-time shake. “I remember now,” she said. “I said something to him like, ‘I would take this issue up with Lynn,’ and he said, ‘Okay, I’ll talk to Lynn about it,’ and I said, ‘But you had better do it today, because . . .’ But I didn’t say anything more. I waited for
him
to say something. And he did, he said, ‘Oh, right, I’ll do it today, right.’ So
that’s
when I said, ‘Poor Lynn,’ and he said, ‘Yes, it’s too bad.’ So he already knew. He got his information from someone else.”