"How awful," Lily said.
Philip looked up, was surprised to see tears in his counselor's eyes, and said, "Too many tranquilizers. She was drinking too. Booze and downers don't mix. Elaine wasn't suicidal, just a kind of negligent, don't-give-a-damn person."
"I'm sorry," Lily said, leaning forward and clutching Philip's hand.
Philip nodded. "After she died, I felt... it was anger. I remember standing in the emergency room lobby thinking, 'This is such a lot of shit.'"
Philip stopped.
Lily waited, nodded her head, waited some more. "Yes. Yes, Philip. It must have been terrible."
Philip exhaled slowly. "This is exhausting, you know. I mean, I don't think it is doing any good. She was dead then. She's dead now."
"Yes," Lily said, with a compassion that Philip found terrifying, "but you aren't, Philip. You aren't dead."
9.
A routine was established. Lily would arrive in the morning, letting herself in with a duplicate key. Sometimes Philip wouldn't even be up yet, would be sleeping soundly, and the smell of frying bacon would wake him.
Philip told Lily about the jobs.
"We are looking," Lily said, "for patterns."
"Are you sure that's a good idea?" Philip asked. "I mean, H. P. Lovecraft would say that the unexamined life is probably the best bet for humans."
The hideous machinations of Cthulhu and his monstrous overlord, Yog-Sothoth were not suited for the daylight of reason.
"I've taken the time to read about your Lovecraft," Lily said. "Face it, the man wasn't in the pink of mental health."
"Exactly," Philip said. "Lovecraft stared too long at the abyss."
"Be that as it may," Lily said, folding her hands in her lap, "examining is my trade. You don't want an old lady to wind up out of work, do you?"
Philip didn't. He talked about the jobs. He talked about the boredom, the boredom that he came to see as the sign of the beast, its sour, suffocating reek.
There was boredom at the community newspaper where Philip pasted down advertisements for pizza parlors and car dealerships (WE WILL BEAT ANY DEAL OR GIVE YOU THE CAR!). There was boredom working at the state agency where Philip corrected addresses on a computer that logged his every keystroke. There was boredom at the insurance company where Philip typed checks and filed forms in huge, gray banks of file cabinets. There was boredom at the several printing companies where Philip typeset brochures and flyers and business cards and waited on customers and encountered what he came to think of as "copy people," humans—often elderly and confused—addicted to photocopying various scraps of paper, recipes, Ann Landers' columns, letters, tax receipts, thousand-page novels. These people were always shocked that a copy cost eight cents—or whatever—and knew of a store, generally in another city, where copies could be obtained for half as much money and the atmosphere was altogether more pleasant. You could always see a copy person coming, spy them through the window as they hobbled across the parking lot. A copy person would be moving very slowly, but with a dread inevitability, clutching boxes filled with copy fodder. Philip's heart would wince when he saw them.
There was boredom in the dozens of jobs obtained through temporary agencies, tasks of such stupefying tedium that the regular employees could not be coerced into performing them even under threat of being fired. "Temp!" the regular employees would scream. "Get a temp!"
And so Philip would stuff envelopes and file unreadable documents, and enter data, row upon row of x's, and white-out zeroes and ones on mountains of government documents bound for warehouses, and sit in rooms with dozens of other temps wearing headphones ("Hello? I'm calling about a new, economical way to ensure your family's financial well-being in the event of sudden death.").
There was boredom in the custom photo lab where eight-by-tens of dogs and squinting children and Washington tourist attractions were generated relentlessly, until the pointlessness of all life was starkly revealed, and the sickbed smell of the processing chemicals followed you into sleep.
And there was the boredom, and worse, of MicroMeg Management Systems.
“I think we are making progress," Lily said.
“I feel a hundred percent better," Philip said. "I think this talking has really done the trick. It has clarified everything. I'm ready to get on with my life."
Lily had frowned then. "Not so fast, buster. We've got a lot of ground left to cover."
#
It was the second week in December before Philip was able to return to work. The cast on his left leg had been replaced by a smaller and lighter model, but Philip still needed crutches in order to get around. Driving would have been out of the question if it had been his right leg that had been broken.
In the interim between being run over and returning to Ralph’s One-Day Résumés, Philip had been fired four times. Ralph Pederson would call, beseeching Philip to come in and help out, and Philip would explain that he was incapable of doing that. Ralph would then say, "I'm sorry, Philip. I am going to have to get someone else. The business can't wait until you feel absolutely tip-top, you understand. This is nothing personal."
Philip would say he understood, and when the conversation ended, Philip would lie back on his pillow with a sense of relief. A few weeks later, Ralph would again call and beg Philip to return; Philip would again decline. Reluctantly, Ralph would let Philip go.
Philip understood that Ralph was having difficulty finding people who could operate the ancient typesetting equipment and Philip sympathized with his employer's plight. Still, he felt that being fired once per job was sufficient, and he resented this repetition of the experience.
Ralph continued to call, however, and one day Philip surprised himself by saying, “I could come in next Monday."
The day of Philip's return was a day of freezing rain. Negotiating the parking lot on crutches was a perilous venture, and Philip was certain he would fall, but he made it in the door without doing himself injury.
In the lobby a Christmas tree (decorated with business cards) reminded Philip that the holiday season was upon him.
Ralph Pederson came running up. He looked thinner than when Philip had last seen him, and more disheveled. "Philip, Philip," he said. "Come on back, I'll introduce you to everyone."
Had they forgotten him already? True, he had always arrived at the end of the day, when everyone was leaving. And he was not, he knew, the sort of person who made a lasting impression. He was quiet, of average height and features, and he was inclined to utter the stock phrases of social commerce.
Still, he had only been gone a few months, and his leavetaking was, in itself, spectacular enough to keep his memory alive.
On entering the long room, Philip realized that he did not know anyone. All the employees he had worked with were gone, replaced by a new crew. Later that evening, when Philip was alone with his thoughts, he remembered Ralph saying that morale had been low for awhile, but that recently it was much higher.
Philip had attributed this elevation in morale to particularly eloquent motivational pamphlets or a decrease in the workload, but now Philip understood that morale had been improved by the simple but effective measure of firing all the low-morale types (i.e. everyone) and hiring new blood.
The new crew was obviously frightened, displaying the large, wild eyes of headlight- hunted deer, but their adrenaline reserves had not yet been depleted, and so they were not sullen or apathetic.
Monica was not there, although Ralph said she would be back next week. Surprisingly, Al Bingham had survived the purge.
The old printer walked into where Philip was typesetting at about eight in the evening.
"Yeah," he said, when Philip expressed his delight in seeing him, "I'm an old-timer here now. Don't take long to get seniority at this joint, does it?"
Philip agreed that it didn't, but his surprise at seeing Bingham was obvious, and the old man read his expression and answered the question there.
"Ralph don't fire me because he can't smell
the fear," Bingham said. "I'm invisible. He is always coming up, ready to give me the boot, but then he falters, gets this baffled look, and I know he can't see me. He wonders what he was about to do and marches off to ream some poor Mexican working in the bindery."
Philip called Amelia at nine in the evening. His inability to destroy his novel—or even to lie and say he had destroyed it—had set their relationship back to one rationed phone call a week. Philip knew that Amelia was waiting for him to make the next move, but he couldn't find the internal resources to act.
"I'm back at work," he told her.
"I've found a job myself," Amelia said, excitement in her voice. "I start next week."
"Oh." Philip felt a flutter of panic. "Well."
"Hey, congratulate me." Amelia giggled with good spirits.
"Hey, congratulations."
Oh, be careful, Amelia. I know you don't want to remember, but please, please be careful.
They talked briefly. Amelia said she had to get up early the next day, some sort of orientation thing in preparation for her first day of work, and she hung up.
That night, Philip dreamed the dream of his father's death in the coils of the System.
This is how it went, as it always went, a dream as unvarying as a documentary unwinding:
The kitchen is silent and cool and Philip, who has just come home from school, walking through one of spring's first truly hot days, goes to the refrigerator and finds a carton of milk and drinks the cold, headache-inducing milk standing in the light of the open door which sheds the green-tinged light that aliens use to immobilize teenagers making out in cars. The refrigerator hum is, of course, the hovering spacecraft.
Today the refrigerator is louder than normal, and when Philip closes the door, he discovers that a second sound pulses behind the familiar drone of the fridge. The sound comes from the door to the garage, and, as Philip opens the door, he realizes that it is the sound of the car engine, the muttering machine-speak of his father's souped-up black Chevy.
Philip does not want to encounter his father. Just yesterday they had fought. ("My God, Philip's bleeding!" his mother screamed. "It's just a scratch, Marge. He's got to learn what he's got to learn. Baby him now, he'll bruise easy later.")
Philip pushes the garage door open and the sound blooms—rumble, blat, rumble, rumble, blat! The garage is dark, smelling of oil and earth and metal. A coiled garden hose hangs from a hook like a sleeping snake. Tools and engine parts and cans of paint and boxes bursting with old newspapers lean against shadows.
Ordinarily, the bare overhead bulb would be on, throwing everything into cold, dirty fact, and it is this darkness that draws Philip, this mystery. He approaches the car, his sneakers sliding over the dirty concrete, a scraping, zombie-hiss of a sound.
He peers in the window of the car, which is shaking slightly, like some black, armored monster in a sleep of fevers. No one is behind the steering wheel. No one is in the car, he thinks, but then presses his face up against the window and sees him. His father is sprawled in the front seat, flat on his back, a dark brown bottle cradled against his chest. His white T-shirt is stained with the whiskey, and his face lies pressed against the back of the seat, his mouth open. His legs are bent, and his brown suit pants are pulled up to reveal bare ankles gliding into ceramic-shiny black shoes. The bare ankles frighten Philip, suggesting strange and unpredictable thought processes.
He is dead, Philip thinks, but then his father stirs, as though rocked on a sea of drunkenness.
The whiskey bottle rolls and a thin trickle of the dark liquid bleeds a new stain on his father's pale, soiled T-shirt.
Philip backs away from the car window.
He is aware suddenly that the room is full of writhing shapes, monstrous, coiled bodies that drop from the ceiling and begin to move. A black serpent crawls from the car's exhaust pipe to a window on the passenger side. And there are other, thicker serpents, some brown, some mottled as though by mold, moving rhythmically.
Yog Sothoth!
Philip runs out of the garage, slamming the door behind him. He runs through the bright, sunlit kitchen and up to his room.
He lies on his bed, heart beating wildly.
The Old Ones, he thinks.
He lies in bed, staring at the ceiling. His heart does not slow at all, and the bed seems to be lifting in the air.
He wakes, not from real sleep, but from the sleep of the dream, and he hears voices, and he walks down the stairs. The front door is open, and the sky is darkening, and the red lights of an ambulance wash over his neighbors, fat Mrs. Odell, and Mr. Warden in a suit, and the Clarks' German shepherd, Ripley, and the skinny Bausch twins, and Mrs. Odell looks up and sees him and jumps like a roach has run up her leg and hollers something into the crowd, and a lot of people stumble back and his mother comes running toward him, her arms outstretched.
She is crying and she hugs him and he is suddenly full of terror, because she is going to know, but instead she says, "Philip. Oh Philip. I was so afraid..." and he realizes that her fear is for him.
"I am all right, Momma," he whispers.
He wants to say, "I didn't mean it," but he doesn't, because he did mean it, and he knows what happened and he knows that his father is dead. His father is dead because his father's son, yes, Philip Kenan, has prayed to the System that it be so.
#
The next day, Philip told Lily about the dream.
"These monsters have been around a long time," his therapist said.
"Eons," Philip said. "They arrived on earth six hundred million years ago, but of course that tells us nothing about how ancient, as a race, they actually are."
Lily ate a brownie, sipping tea to wash it down. She raised one eyebrow and offered a wry smile. "I meant these monsters have been around a long time in your personal history."
"Ah. Well, yes, I suppose so."
Lily said, "You can't live with a child's guilt forever. You didn't kill your father, he killed himself."
"I wanted him to die," Philip said. "That's where the awfulness is. I wanted him to leave my mother and me alone. If he had to die to do that, that was okay."
"Oh," Lily said, "we all think a lot of dark thoughts. And from what you've told me, it's not even clear you knew what he was doing."
"I knew," Philip said. "Maybe I didn't know about carbon monoxide poisoning, maybe it wasn't clear what he was doing, but I knew he was dying. I went upstairs and went to sleep. I didn't try to get help."
#
It was a payday at work, and the motivational pamphlet that came with the check was entitled "You Matter!" and Philip effectively resisted reading it at work, but when he returned home and was emptying out his pockets, he saw it and read it while standing up, and it was every bit as bad as he suspected.
It began, "Successful people are people who always give one hundred percent, who understand that a company's success depends on an individual's determination to excel. You may say to yourself, 'I am an insignificant person in this big company. I could be laid off tomorrow along with five hundred of my fellow workers, and no one would care.' The truth is, what you do is important to people who are important. While you may, indeed, be one of many, your labor can benefit someone who is, in fact, genuinely important. You can..."
Philip put the motivational pamphlet down. The writer had gone too far this time, Philip thought.
#
On the weekend, Philip did his Christmas shopping. The stores were crowded, and Philip found his spirit buckling as he moved through scenes of gaudiness and decay. Bikini-clad elves touted a lingerie store. Coming out of a bookstore on Sixth Street, Philip saw two Santa-suited men brawling, rolling on the sidewalk.
"Mutherfucker, mutherfucker, mutherfucker," they yelled, as a crowd gathered.
Philip hurried along as fast as his crutches would permit, refusing to look back. He bought his mother a knick-knack to add to the vast collection of knick-knacks that he had been giving her—dutifully—since childhood. He
thought perhaps he had given her this piece before, but he knew she wouldn't mind. He bought Amelia a Cowboy Junkies album. That group's female vocalist had eyebrows similar to Amelia's, which made the purchase somehow inevitable, although it did not ensure Amelia's delight.
Philip bought books for his few friends in Virginia. The books he bought as gifts were novels he loved, and he was fairly certain they would go unread. He thought of all the unread novels sitting on shelves or packed in cardboard boxes, and he was assaulted by something like grief. He was certainly wobbly these days, both emotionally and mentally.
Résumé With Monsters Page 6
