The Last Day Is Better Than The First 

 

Arnheim stood in front of the small packing box on his desk, peering down into it with vacant, unseeing eyes. It hadn’t taken him long to pack up his cubicle. He was not one of those people who made their offices over into little museums of personal history. Cubicle curators! People like that annoyed him. It had always been his staunch belief, a moral imperative even, that an office was a reflection of the man or it was nothing. In his office, the only exhibit on display was him, a one-man show whose complete oeuvre was himself. 

After six years on the job, he had finally been moved into this office. It was not large but it did have a door. Of course, the door was a large glass panel set in a metal frame. Even the wall onto the corridor was made of glass. He had asked for an office because he wanted more privacy, more separation, more recognition. And then when it had happened, he had thought to himself, “Finally, somebody around here appreciates my value.” But when Phil, that pathetic excuse for an office manager who spent all day chatting up Gina, their completely inept receptionist, when Phil told him which office he’d been assigned, Arnheim realized they had tricked him. There was no other way to think about it. 

With his back to the glass, he could feel his co-workers passing outside, glancing uncomfortably at his hunched-over figure, trying to divine in the foggy necromantic way people do, whether his fate might somehow be linked to theirs. To him they were little more than ghosts. Shades. Pitiable spirits of an underworld he had once inhabited. If they tip-toed now outside his office, like little children past a dark closet, all a-tingle with terrified anticipation that he might turn at any moment to face them, it was only what they deserved. Through the glass, he could sense how his presence discomfitted them. He enjoyed the sensation.

But oh, the raging insecurity of the common everyday office drone! Was it possible, he wondered, that he had lived and worked amongst them for six years? That he had danced at Christmas parties with them, gone on company picnics with them, joked and fooled around with them, gone to lunch with them, gone to bars with them after work, that he had sat around the conference room table in meetings with them, as if he were just like them, indistinguishably one of them? Him! Allen Arnheim! However, that was all in the past. Today, he could even smile about it. And, in fact, a smile did break across his face just then, a wild angry squiggle of a smile like a child’s crayon drawing of an angry man smiling. 

He smiled because he felt like it was time now to leave, to walk out through the glass door into the corridor, across the floor of cubicles to the elevator and out of the building. Deliberately, as if there were some world-historical meaning to it, he pulled his last remaining personal item—a Beretta 92 semi-automatic pistol—out from where he had secured it earlier beneath his belt, between his shirt and his trousers, and placed it gently on top of the stack of books and files. Before closing the flaps on the packing box, he thought how his life would be different from now on, and how, back on his first day, he could not have dreamed of the portents and possibilities he possessed today. People sure did change, Arnheim thought to himself, that was true. What was truer, though, was that people sure did change people. For that insight, he grudgingly admitted, he had his co-workers to thank. You can learn from anyone, I guess. But he only half-believed it. It seemed a dismaying thought. A glint from the Beretta’s oily black metal frame caught his eye, and the thought died. Once again life’s potentialities overwhelmed him, rushed up at him as if shot out of a gun. His heart raced as he folded over the four flaps on the box, locking the first into the space created by the other three. How different his last day of work was from his first! How strange and wonderful and complex, how packed deep and tight with meaning! He lifted the box off the desk and turned. Sammy Chin was frozen there in the corridor. 

“Chinny-chin-chin.” Arnheim knew he hated that nickname. He smiled his jagged smile and tilted his head up so Sammy could feel the corrosive force of it. 

“You know I hate that.”

“Yes.”

Sammy was half a foot taller and three sizes wider than Arnheim. On any other day, he would have stiff-armed him into a cubicle wall and blown on by. But not today.

“You’re a piece of work.” Sammy shook his big shaggy head like a frustrated grizzly come late to the salmon run. “You really are.” 

Roughly, Arnheim brushed past him, unafraid.

“I deserved it.”

Arnheim turned. 

“What?”

“Everything. All of it. The way you look at me. What you think of me. I just wanted you to know I don’t blame you at all. You’ve taught me a valuable lesson. I know now what an awful person I am. Thanks to you, Arnheim.”    

Kim, the staff designer, came up behind him.

“Arnheim! Oh, Arnheim! Don’t I look cute today?”

“Very cute.”

“For you.” And she twirled around. “It’s your last day. I wanted to look special. This morning, you know, I was getting into the shower? And I look down and see a cockroach ohmygod! But apparently my cat had gotten hold of it first? And its ugly little legs were scattered all over the tub, can you imagine? This revolting cockroach body and these little, like, hairs everywhere? Yuck. And I thought of you.”

“That’s touching,” Sammy Chin said.

“Isn’t it? I mean, it was a crisis! A goddam motherfucking crisis, and who comes into my mind? Arnheim. Why you? Why today? I don’t fucking know! But all I wanted to do, I wanted to rush in here and throw myself at your feet and say sorry-sorry-sorry, Arnheim. It shouldn’t have taken a legless cockroach to make me see how awful I’ve been to you. And now here you are, walking out with a box. Sad.” 

“Now that’s a crisis,” Sammy Chin said.

“Fuckin’-A,” Kim agreed.

Arnheim shifted the box onto his right hip and waded into the cubicle pen. It did his heart good to see all those heads turned toward him, as if he were the big full moon and they were the helplessly attracted tides of small, unmapped streams. Arnheim smiled his angry, crooked, self-satisfied smile. The heads all smiled and nodded in response. 

“Good luck, Arnheim.”

“I’ll miss you, Arnheim.”

“Call me sometime, Arnheim.”

“The place won’t be the same without you, Arnheim.”

“Hey Arnheim! Don’t be a stranger.”

The commotion he caused in transit was something of a novelty in the small office. It was generally a quiet and reserved place. So Arnheim was not surprised that it attracted the attention of the president, whose office was on the far side of the room. He spotted him, tall, thin and, as always, encased in his black cashmere turtleneck, emerging from his office. 

“I’m sorry it had to come to this, Arnheim. You were the best employee we ever had. I realize that now. I can’t imagine how I could have been so blind all these years. Promoting Elliot over you. What was I thinking? And…and that office. A nasty, nasty trick.”

“Forget about it,” Arnheim said.

“I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to forget about it, but thank you, Arnheim. Thank you.”

Arnheim took one last slow look around. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw movement over by the copier. It was Eddie, the mailroom guy. He’d been watching Arnheim, fearfully, sheepishly, like he always did. Never meeting his eye. Never speaking above a whisper. Never offering any kind of greeting as he timidly dropped the day’s mail on Arnheim’s desk. 

Arnheim walked through the double doors to the elevators. He was at peace. There was no more anger in him. It had been pumped out of him like bullets out of a gun and now his chamber was empty.

What was anger? He didn’t know. He could no longer define it or understand it, because he no longer felt it. He was unable to imagine a time or a place that could cause him to feel anger, or summon up the face of a single person who could reignite in him that strange and unfamiliar emotion. His new life had begun. He could feel that.

When the elevator doors opened in the lobby, it was as if the whole world had come to celebrate with him. A great gathering of well-wishers, anxious to receive him into their society. With outstretched arms and loud acclaim, they called to him, and their voices reverberated throughout the glass and marble expanse. A large number rushed to greet him while others kneeled in every corner, looking up at him in adoration. Two of them relieved him of his packing box while two others in their excitement took him roughly by the arms, lifting him off the floor, as if in his ecstasy he needed any help to float! 

“Doesn’t look the type, does he?” the one on his right said to the one on his left.

“They never do.”

“They find the gun?”

“Right there in the box with his stuff.”

“That mailroom guy was lucky, that’s all I gotta say.”

“Call the precinct.”

Arnheim let their adulation wash over him, the force of their love carry him. For the first time in his life, he experienced that fountain of gratitude which wells up inside those who have been saved from the pit, redeemed against all hope. His words spilled out of him in a gush of uncontrollable joy.

“The last day is better than the first!”

The one on his right looked at him with surprise. Arnheim desperately wanted to embrace him.

“For you maybe, pal” he said. “Not for them eight dead people upstairs.”

To Arnheim, at that moment, those were the most beautiful words he had ever heard.