"Maybe not," Philip said.
Sissy stayed at Philip's apartment that night. Philip offered her the bed, but she insisted on sleeping in the ancient sleeping bag he hauled out of the closet.
"I don't want to inconvenience you," she said.
"Not at all," Philip said. "I'm glad you came. I've had a rough day, actually. The temp agency I'm signed up with sent me to the place where my ex-girlfriend works."
"Gosh. Did you see her?"
"No. But I felt pretty weird."
"Sure."
Philip hadn't had a sympathetic ear in a long time. Well, there was Lily, of course, who helped him sort through things and who certainly had his best interests at heart—but that was still a client/counselor relationship. Lily was not apt to say something like, "Amelia doesn't understand you. She is a cold-hearted bitch, and you are better off without her."
Sissy and Philip went out and ate at a cafeteria-style restaurant, Dan's Texas Bar-B-Que, and Sissy had to explain to the cashier about change. The cashier was a dark, hairy man in an apron, and when he handed Sissy her change, a dime fell to the floor and Sissy had to retrieve it. She stood up and leaned across the counter, past the cash register, and caught the man's arm.
"It's not your fault," she said. "A lot of people do it that way. Just because no one told them otherwise. They slap the bills down, and then they pour the change on top, so that it naturally slides right off. They do it over and over again without a clue. They must think they have a lot of clumsy customers, is all. Look, open your hand. Okay. I put the change in first. Then the bills. Not very complicated."
The man blinked at her, holding the money.
She smiled, nodded.
"Change first," she said, presenting her palm.
The man poured the change into her hand and then the bills. He smiled.
"That was easy, wasn't it?"
He laughed. "Sure, lady. I think I could master it with practice."
After they ate their meal, the cashier, who was also the owner and was, in fact, named Dan, came around and offered Sissy a job. He offered it jokingly, but Philip could see that he was also serious.
"I'm just visiting Austin," she said. "I'm on vacation."
That first night, Philip pretended to read a detective novel, but he kept peeking over the top of the book to study Sissy. He could not keep his eyes away from her. Propped up by pillows and wearing a blue nightgown, she was reading.
Philip kept the air conditioning on high. He knew this was an energy-wasting, environmentally unsound practice, and he felt guilty about it but was unable to resist doing so. Sissy was, consequently, snuggled deep in her sleeping bag, and there was nothing about her form, a shapeless, muffled lump, to inspire prurient thoughts. Oh, the circumstances themselves might have inspired such thoughts...a pretty girl in a nightgown; a man pining for a lost lover, celibate for far too long. But it was not sexual yearning that kept Philip darting glances in her direction. He studied her face, the brightness of her eyes, the way her lips formed an almost spoken word. He studied her with breathless intensity.
And if she had suddenly turned, caught him staring, thrown down the loose pages, leapt up and hurled herself into his arms, he would have been hurt. She was reading his manuscript, the rest of The Despicable Quest, and reading it avidly—fascinated beyond passion's reach.
True readers were rarer than lovers.
He fell asleep, and in the morning, when he woke, she was still reading. He brought her a cup of coffee and asked if she wanted breakfast.
"Nah. I'll get something out of the fridge later."
Philip hovered over her.
"Do you like it?" he asked. She didn't respond. She clutched a hefty section of the typewritten manuscript, leaning forward. Her expression was that of a tourist peering into the Grand Canyon. A critical thumbs up, Philip decided.
"I've got to go to Pelidyne," he said. "I hope you can stay. I hope I'll see you this evening."
Sissy looked up. "See you," she said.
Philip's first day at Pelidyne had been uneventful except for the anxiety produced by his proximity to Amelia. His second day was, to describe it succinctly and literally, dreadful.
As on the previous day, a small woman whose gray-black hair resembled an imperfectly sculpted shrub accompanied Philip to the basement, booted his computer up, and showed him the reams of paper, the results of a questionnaire on some new software package and its ease of use.
Since Philip had already mastered the art of transferring the X's and O's to the computer templates, he was spared the previous day's instructions. The woman left him, closing the door after delivering yesterday's injunction, "And please, Mr. Kenan, no smoking." As on the previous day, Philip assured her that he did not smoke, and she smiled and nodded with the air of someone too polite to dispute a bald-faced lie.
Alone, Philip began inputting data. The computer, of course, would log the number of papers entered, so there was no goofing off. On the other hand, it made no sense to move too fast in the morning. The day was long and you had to pace yourself.
At lunch, Philip went down the hall to the snack room and got a meatball sandwich out of the vending machine. He microwaved it into steaming glop. Not bad. He washed it down with a Coke, ate a bag of Fritos to ensure the proper amount of roughage in his diet, and went back to his office.
He had just settled down in the chair when the overhead lights flickered and the screen shivered. Shit.
The screen returned to normal, blanked, and began to flash the all-caps message: experiencing power fluctuation/ failure problems. all operators are advised to save files immediately .
The lights went out, plunging the windowless room into darkness. Philip stood up and stuck his arms out in front of him and groped his way to the door. He found the doorknob and opened the door. Lights were out in the hall, but the darkness wasn't absolute; some of the day's light was seeping in through narrow slits high in the wall at the end of the corridor.
"Hello," Philip shouted. "Hello."
Philip was used to power failures, and he was disinclined to look for a stairway and seek out someone who might direct him to some other busywork that did not require the empowerment of electricity. If his services were really needed, they knew where to find him.
He made his way back to the chair in his office. As soon as he entered the room, the darkness folded around him again. He turned back to the door and propped it open with a heavy cardboard box, allowing the feeble light from the hall to enter. The room was still dark, and if he looked away from the door, toward the back of the room, he studied a wall of night.
He stared at this darkness, waiting to see if eventually it would lighten, if his pupils could dilate more or those light-gathering rods critical to night vision could muster up new enthusiasm for perception. As a long-term temp and employee at many menial jobs, Philip's mind was adept at discovering games and methods for making a stationary, near-vegetable existence more endurable.
He may have fallen asleep briefly. Or he may have simply been taking a breather from thinking. In any event, a scraping noise commanded his attention, and he discerned, simultaneously, a slow, white blur in the darkness.
He was staring at the back wall where the vaguest sort of half-light had folded itself around several metal cabinets and a collection of wall shelves.
Something over one of the metal cabinets was moving, a rectangle, like a piece of typing paper shifting from the horizontal to the vertical. The scraping noise accompanied the motion.
At first Philip could make no sense of this pale moving square and then, through powers of deduction more than observation, he realized that he was looking at some sort of air vent grill or grate. And it was being moved, pried open, by something on the other side.
He would have left then. MicroMeg—not to mention Ralph’s One-Day Résumés—had exhausted his store of curiosity. But he could not move. The paralysis that overtook him was, it seemed, produced by a strange odor, something betw
een dead fish rotting on a beach and cloying, lavender perfume. This stench seemed to strike at his volition, so that his arms and legs were divorced from his will.
Surely this was some sort of dark, unpleasant dream that had ambushed him when his senses were not fully employed.
And in the next instant, he knew it was not a dream, because his subconscious was not capable of conjuring what he saw.
A bald, grotesque head appeared, accompanied by a single knobby, bare shoulder. Like some insect crawling from its larval shell, the creature flexed and emerged, tumbling onto the top of the metal cabinet with an unholy, leathery thump.
Philip stared at the creature, which was, in fact, a pale old man, simian-featured, shrunken and misshapen, but undoubtedly human. His flesh was faintly luminous, and when he grinned, his teeth showed pink and pointed in a round, lipless mouth.
He had seen Philip, for he nodded in Philip's direction and stretched a hand toward him. It contained some flickering square of paper, a white moth in the gloom.
The man was bare-chested, the bones of his rib cage like the legs of giant spiders or crabs. He wore dirty gray trousers and black, pointed shoes that were surprisingly shiny, like polished coal.
He spoke, leaning forward suddenly, expelling the word like a cat coughing up a dead lizard. "Team," he rasped. "Team." Then, more chilling yet, he said, "Dagon."
A single dirty piece of cloth was knotted around his thin neck, and Philip recognized it for the remnants of a tie.
The man turned and began to climb down the metal cabinet.
Philip's consciousness tried desperately to rally his arms and legs, but those appendages had abandoned him. The bone-penetrating reek had bound him to his chair.
The small man, his hunched and knobby back facing Philip, made shrill, wheezing noises as he clambered slowly down the cabinet.
He reached the floor and turned.
He came quickly, with a crablike scuttle, to Philip's side.
At this point, Philip thought he might have blacked out, a final evasive action on the part of his reason. But if he blacked out, the respite was brief. He woke, felt the creature rummaging through his pockets, and watched as it extracted a pencil.
"Ah," it sighed, turning the pencil in front of its round, delighted eyes.
As Philip watched, the ghoul thrust the pencil through one of its cheeks and out the other. It laughed then, and Philip could see the yellow shaft of the pencil above a greenish tongue. "Huh huh," the creature wheezed.
It waved a piece of paper in front of Philip, reached out, and tucked it into the pocket of Philip's shirt. A flat, rubbery hand patted Philip's chest. "Team," the creature said again.
Light flickered overhead. A generator made a sound, a whunk, and Philip felt as though a metal drawer were suddenly slammed shut within his chest.
"Eeee," the thing shrieked, cowering away from the burst of overhead light. The room dove into darkness again.
One burst of light had been enough to rob Philip of his hard-won night vision. All was darkness now, as Philip listened to the scrambling and animal coughs, a final scraping sound, and then silence.
Ten minutes later, before Philip's eyes had rekindled any images, the overhead lights went on. Philip found that he could stand. The odor had abated. Overhead, the grate was back in place.
The computer screen, blinking green, was uttering the codes of its rebooting routines. Philip went to it and turned it off.
He left the room and walked quickly down the hall.
"Mr. Kenan," the woman said, intercepting him at the end of the corridor, "are you leaving?"
"I'm afraid so," he said. "I'm not feeling well."
Outside the cause of the power failure was evident. Another rainstorm shook the city, sheets of rain jiggling the disabled stoplights. Rainstorms had not done well by Philip in Austin, and he drove slowly, tensed for disaster. But nothing untoward occurred, and aside from getting drenched in his dash up the wooden steps, he reached his door unscathed. Sissy opened the door as he was about to insert his key into the lock and—having completely forgotten about her—Philip screamed.
4.
Rough day?" Sissy asked.
Philip had recovered himself and was lying on the bed, his tie loosened, a pillow propped up behind his head. He didn't trust himself to talk; he nodded grimly.
"It is a crime that you should have to work at a stupid office anyway," Sissy said. "You are a genius. You should be spending all your time writing. The Despicable Quest is the greatest book in the world."
"Thank you," Philip said, grateful for the praise.
"Sure." Sissy brought Philip a beer and sat on the bed next to him. "Some of it is pretty scary though. Like when Daphne goes into Blackwater Mountain during the Festival of the Blood Leech. I had to close my eyes during parts of that. Does it scare you too? I mean, when you write it, does it scare you?"
Philip drank the beer. "Yes. It scares me sometimes."
He frowned as a thought surfaced, one that looked like truth as he spoke it although he had never fashioned it before. "But I thought if I wrote them inside a story, they would stay there. The world would be safe."
"Didn't work, huh?"
Philip sighed. "Amelia thinks it just made it worse. She thinks I made up a lot of monsters. So does my therapist."
"It's cold in here," Sissy said. "You really like to crank the air conditioning up, don't you?"
"I guess I do. Texas is pretty hot, you know."
"It's not hot in here; it's cold. We should get under these covers."
#
They lay under the covers, staring at the ceiling with its assortment of pipes. Sissy apparently found nothing remarkable about this solution to the leaks.
"This was called bundling in colonial times," Philip said. "People would lie under the covers in bed, fully-clothed, perfect strangers."
"I feel like I've known you forever," Sissy said.
"Today, at work, the power went off and while it was dark, this creature crawled out of an air vent, this horrible little ghoullike old man. I couldn't move. I was paralyzed by some sort of nerve gas coming from the vent. I was terrified."
Sissy was silent.
"Well?" Philip asked. "What do you think?"
"Lying in bed with all your clothes on is kind of sexy, you know. Stupid, but sexy."
"Do you think I'm crazy? Do you think I was suffering from some sort of hallucination?"
Sissy pushed her face across the pillow so that it was an inch from Philip's. She had freckles on her nose and on her cheeks, small orange constellations that could, with study and time, be given names and legends. She smiled wickedly and said, "Do you ever screw your therapist?"
"No. Of course not," Philip said, hearing a certain huffiness in his voice.
"I didn't think you did."
Philip smiled, a polite but baffled smile.
"Well I'm not your therapist. I wouldn't want you to mistake me for your therapist."
Sissy reached out and tapped Philip's nose with a silver-dollar-sized foil-wrapped package. "I'm a modern girl," she said. "And this is modern bundling."
#
Sissy made love wordlessly and athletically. Her body was generous and warm and more finely modeled than her midday Polaroid declared. She slid amid the sheets with happy, dolphin grace and got up occasionally to change a CD on Philip's player. She was very particular about lovemaking music and found Philip's collection lacking ("Bob Dylan and Lou Reed may be great artists and everything but they are cold water on naked romance. Oh hey, you've got k.d. lang. Now that's more like it".)
#
In the morning, Philip woke early and lay on his side studying the sweet, eloquent and beautifully wanton curve of Sissy's body. She lay curled on her side, facing away from him, revealing the golden arc of her hip, her glorious, confident bottom, and her bright, declarative thighs that flowed into youthful calves and on into feet that were exclamations of delight... the poet in Philip soared, then caught it
s fleshy feet on a glimpse of the red tuft of hair that flared between her thighs. He snuggled next to her, stiff now, a blind, all-business cock pressing a pliant buttock. He snatched another condom from the end table; rolled it on with clumsy haste, finding something wildly erotic in this under-the-sheets furtiveness.
"Hmmmmm," Sissy murmured, as Philip's hand traveled the warm country road of her spine. She thrust back against him. He entered her.
Résumé With Monsters Page 18
