The Last Days of GumCo

It took him about a week to figure out that, if he stuck his arm all the way through the space where the tall, skinny window used to be, and flicked his wrist just right, he could make an orange on the end of a string land on what used to be Miss Tinley's buzzer, and let himself in the building.

That whole week while he tried to buzz himself in—Ms. Tinley having vanished along with everyone else—he drew no salary. It wouldn't have been right, getting paid for loafing all day, one arm jammed into the place where those tall, skinny windows used to be outside the entrance to GumCo. When he finally coaxed the orange onto the buzzer—he had really gotten quite good at it, rather like throwing a football or pitching a baseball, only it was an orange far past eating—the latch on the main door clicked open, and he laughed.

He hadn't felt that much relief since closing the Sweet Mart account. (No one—not even he—believed a retail chain stocking nothing but candies and gums would succeed, but until it folded, it would be stocking GumCo gums exclusively! He had whooped with joy, right there on the fourth floor!) And this, this modest little click, was just as powerful.

He didn't dare rig the buzzer (what if trespassers discovered they had free access, night or day to the GumCo building?), but he had acquired a real knack for the somewhat athletic technique of long-distance buzzer buzzing. He tried to carry on, amid the quiet and the emptiness. Day after day, he was the only person there. And that's no exaggeration. A few years ago, when an outbreak of flu and a four-day holiday weekend conspired to thin out the ranks of GumCo employees on the premises, he had called Muriel and told her—morbidly, she said when he got home that night—that it had been a graveyard in there. That was nothing. Now, from 8:50 until 5:00, he was the only person at GumCo. Phones rang and appointments came and went, unacknowledged. He tried to carry on.