Last Laugh
by Jim Kendrall
When the clock on the office wall gave up its hands to twelve, Fred, a stuttering little bookkeeper who for forty-four years had never been good enough to be promoted nor bad enough to be fired, gave up too. Buttoning up his obviously unaffordable Armani coat and adjusting the brim on his newly acquired Borsalino fedora, Fiff-Freddy, as they mock-stutter called him, appeared to be going off to lunch, when in fact, he was heading for the stairwell. Taking the stairs step by step, floor by floor, with sweat soaking through the band of his Borsalino, Fred climbed forty-four floors, one floor for each year of his employment. Resting every so often, sitting on a step, he neatly penciled a word on the white wall of the stairwell, words that when put together amounted to a forty-four-floor-long suicide limerick:
I am a book-keeper named Fred
Who wears a nice hat on his head
As I climb these stairs
Like a man with no cares
To that big step— then Fred’d be dead.
For forty-four years he’d been on the receiving end of his office’s laughter: “Hey Fiff-Freddy, when you write down t-two do you write 22?” And amongst themselves, but still loud enough for him to hear: “Forty-some years as a stuttering bookkeeper? Is he fucking retarded or something?”
Fred hadn’t minded being the butt of everyone’s jokes; it somehow made him feel he was needed; it was all he had. And if feeling needed is all you’ve got, it can be reason enough to go on living. But that was before he helped himself to the Armani and the Borsalino. Now, with time running out, Fred wanted just two small things: one was to conjure an epitaph to his many years of faithful employment; the other was to make the office laugh one last time. So he picked the forty-fourth floor destination as both an allusion to his years of service as well as an instigation to make the office laugh. He wasn’t sure they would get the allusion (they weren’t very bright people), but he was mildly sure that “Freddy”, “forty-fourth”, and “floor” together in almost any context would make the simple-minded amongst them laugh. After all, being able to understand and predict the behavior of people is a skill developed by those, who by circumstance or choice, stand in the periphery of life and observe it. People like Fred, and people like writers. Of course Fred wouldn’t be around to see if his prediction worked.
The time had come to do it. From the final stairwell he walked into the corridor of the forty-fourth floor towards the north side of the building that jutted over the lake. He strolled around until he found what he was looking for: an open door to an empty office that had an outside balcony.
Soon after it happened, and just as Fred had envisioned it, the Office Boss gathered the staff and with his bug-eyed solemn face announced in a deeply reverent tone, “Freddy fell from the forty-fourth floor.” Sure enough they laughed. Not intentional, laugh-out-loud laughs but little snickers of a laugh, puerile responses to the word play of alliteration and the need to laugh when it’s forbidden.
The news got around quickly. Someone had seen something or someone fall from the building. They found the Armani snagged on a rock, but they never found the body; the lake always had the swiftest of currents. Lying on the lake’s edge was the Borsalino, the headband still wet from Fred’s sweat. They found the motivation for his apparent suicide: $2000 clumsily charged to office supplies to pay for the Armani and the Borsalino. “What a stupid-ass thing to try,” they said. “Did you hear the crazy fucker wrote a suicide rhyme all the way up the steps?” they said. But they did what most people do when they’ve been cruel; they just walked away from it as if their job was done. Why do people turn on their weakest? Is it a throwback to natural selection? Or is it Schadenfreude, a human taking pleasure in another human’s misfortune. They quickly hired another bookkeeper and went on about their business. Case closed. They never looked back. So they would never know that, little by little, step by step, over the past forty-four years, $440,000 had been neatly and patiently moved to the Swiss Volksbank in Berne and it was just sitting there waiting for Fred.