Then We Came to the End by Joshua Ferris Page A

corners of their eyes. It could be glimpsed between houses driving down the street. Boys probably stopped to stare at it from their bicycles. Neighbors had to pull their barking dogs away. And all the while, the man inside, warm at his kitchen table reading the newspaper with a cigarette burning in a nearby ashtray, was content to know that in the backyard he had staked into the ground the relic, the symbol, the manifestation of his — what?
    “What was Brizz doing with a totem pole?” asked Marcia.
    “This is nothing like my screenplay, by the way,” Don Blattner announced to the room.
    “Come on, Benny,” said Jim. He had his geisha-sized feet up on Benny’s desk in a shiny new pair of Nikes. “A totem pole?”
    “There it was before me,” said Benny, standing suddenly and gesturing as if before some wild spectacle, a full moon or an alien. “And there was no denying it. So I asked Phil, I said, ‘Do you know, was your brother an Indian enthusiast?’ ‘Not that I ever knew of,’ Phil said. ‘Then did your family maybe have some Indian blood in it?’ I asked him. He had his arms akimbo, like this,” said Benny, demonstrating, “and he was staring up at the totem pole like this, just staring up at it, and without turning to me he just shook his head slowly, like this, and said, ‘Brizzolera. We’re one hundred percent Italian.’”
    Benny followed Bizarro Brizz inside. The kitchen counters were cluttered with various plates and bowls and serving containers, as if on display at a secondhand shop. More cutlery than a single man could use in six months sat in a clean pile on top of a dish towel. Brizz had two toasters lined up back to back, next to a toaster oven. The kitchen walls had been yellowed by cigarette smoke and the linoleum curled up at the edges of the floor. Curiously, in the surfeit of garage-sale-like clutter that defined not just the room they were in but all the rooms, Brizz had only one chair at the kitchen table.
    Benny watched Phil open drawers full of utensils, hot mitts, pan lids. “We did more than just drift apart a little,” explained Phil, “or however it was he phrased it. I’d call him every couple of months, you know, but if not for that, I’m pretty sure we wouldn’t have spoken at all. Not out of malice, just . . . him. Who he was.”
    “That’s so strange,” said Benny, “because he was really one of the most pleasant guys to work with.”
    “Oh, he was a sweet guy, my brother, you get no argument from me. But he sure was aloof. Hey, tell me about that,” said Phil. “What was it like working with Frank?”
    Benny gave the question some thought: what was it like to work with Brizz? “Like I said, he was always just really pleasant,” said Benny. “He wasn’t one of those people you work with and they’re always creating friction, you know?”
    That, he thought, was one lame answer to Phil’s question. He wanted to come up with a good story about Brizz that would give him a real sense of his departed brother at work, something he’d done that made us say, That’s good old Brizz for you, which would sink in and become part of Phil’s memory. But Benny couldn’t think of anything.
    “What should I have told the man?” Benny asked us, long after his uploading was complete, and all we could agree on was the sight of Brizz smoking outside the building in winter in nothing to keep him warm but his sweater vest. That was a story Brizz
owned,
but was it a story? Or we might have told him about the talk with the building guy, but that wasn’t much of a story either. To be honest, what we remembered most about Brizz was his participation, along with the rest of us, in the mundane protocols of making a deadline — Brizz’s nicotine stink in a conference call listening to a client’s change in directions, Brizz sitting behind his desk with his reading glasses, carefully and methodically proofreading copy before an ad went to print. Hard to build an anecdote