The Last of Philip Banter

by John Franklin Bardin

  Philip stared at his empty glass and slowly shook his head. He knew that Jeremy was not there and that the apparition was due to his nervous tension. He had been thinking about Jeremy, arguing with himself about Jeremy – and suddenly his imagination let him see Jeremy, argue with Jeremy. It was all in his own mind.

  But what about the argument? All the things ‘Jeremy’ said were true, and yet they weren’t motivation enough for him to have written the ‘Confession’. Philip raised his finger and summoned the waiter and ordered another double scotch. And then ‘Jeremy’ seemed to speak again.

  ‘What about the women, Phil boy? What about the women? I not only refused to compete with you when it came to campus politics, but I let you take my women, too. I guess I just liked being a sucker – but does anyone really like being made a fool of, Phil? I knew you excelled me at all my own specialities. I even tried my hand at one of yours. Do you remember the chapter of a novel of mine – that’s about as far as it got, one chapter – I read to you, Philip? Do you remember what you said, Philip? Now was that kind? After I had listened so patiently to the sections you read me of your novel, too. Oh, I could have written the “Confession”, if that’s what you’re wondering.’

  Philip smiled to himself and averted his eyes to avoid looking at the apparition. He felt a little good now that the scotch was taking hold. He had been a different man in those days; his face had been as long then as it was now, but the line had been firmer, his jaw had been less heavy, his hair had been… thicker. And then he thought he heard Jeremy’s voice again.

  ‘You were quite a boy with the girls, weren’t you, Phil? You had had several affairs by the time you were a senior. You seemed to like taking your friends’ best sweethearts away from them. Why were you so successful with the women, Philip? Was it your eyes, that way you had of looking that left no one up in the air as to what you wanted? And what you wanted was usually someone else’s woman, wasn’t it? Sometimes it seemed to me that you made a point of ignoring the beauty of a woman until some other fellow, whose taste you respected – myself, for example – had selected her for his own!’

  Philip let the glass slip out of his hand as he laughed loudly. Now he knew what he had been evading. Now he knew why it must be Jeremy who was writing the ‘Confession’. Dorothy had been Jeremy’s girl. He had not fallen in love with her when he first met. He might never have fallen in love with her if Jeremy had not mentioned that her father was the head of one of New York’s largest advertising agencies.

  Philip rolled his glass back and forth under his hand as he looked up for the waiter. Oh, he was a realist about his own motives. He knew how large an element of profit there had been in his choice of Dorothy for a wife. But she had been attractive to him, too. He had loved her…

  He pointed his finger at the apparition. ‘You never did like the idea of Dorothy loving me more than she did you, did you?’ he demanded. ‘I saw you change, Jeremy. At first you were pleased that Dorothy and I liked each other. Then you were miffed when Dorothy and I had dates on nights when you wanted to be alone with Dorothy. Finally you were angry when you realized that you no longer rated with Dorothy. There was the night I proposed to her. I took her for a long drive in the country and asked her to marry me – we stayed out quite late. When I came home, I found you, Jeremy, waiting up for me. “By God, Phil!” you said. “I’ve had enough of this! If you want to marry her, marry her. But if you won’t, then leave her alone. If you make a slut of her, I’ll kill you!” Do you remember what you did next, Jerry? You started swinging wildly and I had to hit you – to knock you out. I didn’t get the chance to tell you that Dorothy was going to marry me until morning. Then you insisted on being a gentleman and buying me a drink. Do you remember all that, too, Jeremy?’

  But, as Philip watched, Jeremy disappeared. He faded away all at once, blending into the dark wood of the booth. Philip had known all along that he was not actually there. But now that he could no longer see him, he felt relieved.

  It was late and the room was growing hazy – with smoke? Philip sat staring at his empty glass. Only a few stragglers were left at the bar in the front of the room; a fat blonde leaned on the juke box next to the booth where Philip sat and crooned the words of the tune the machine was playing. Her voice was raw and beery. After a time, she came over and sat down next to Philip without asking for an invitation. She put her arm around him automatically and hugged him to her. Philip’s thoughts had been in the past and he was only partly conscious of her presence until she ventured intimacy, then he was too startled to take any action for a moment. ‘Would’ja like to meet a nice girl, dearie?’ the blonde whispered in his ear. He pushed her away from him, stood up and went to the bar and paid the bartender. He did not look back although he could hear her cursing him drunkenly. Outside it was drizzling and a low-hanging fog partially obscured the street lights. He began to walk uptown, looking for a taxi.

  ‘… if you make a slut of her, I’ll kill you!’ Those words of Jeremy’s, spoken many years ago, still rang in his ears. Jeremy had meant them at that time, but did he still mean them? After all those years did Jeremy still love Dorothy enough to conspire against her husband? If he did, then it was probably he who was writing the ‘Confession’.

  Philip shivered, only partly because of the cold, clinging fog. His eyes searched the misted streets for a taxi. He wished the mist would blow away. It made everything loom dim and vague, made him fear that he was about to hear the voice again. Very few automobiles were about, mostly early trucks. He kept walking uptown.

  What he could not understand was what Jeremy, if he were writing the ‘Confession’, hoped to gain by it. Did he think that a reading of it would reform Philip and make him faithful to Dorothy? That was laughable. Did he hope to drive Philip into some action that would make him a fool in Dorothy’s eyes? If that was his objective, Philip had to admit that he had already come close to succeeding. But there was another possibility that Philip considered even more disturbing: suppose Jeremy was not writing the manuscript, suppose he was writing it himself – and then forgetting he had written it! This was what he might have been doing the night before, what he had been trying to remember all day.

  And it was not impossible. He had thought so at first, but now he was not sure. Who else, besides himself, could have written it? No one else knew his mind that well, but even if someone did, how could this person have forced him to make love to Brent? No, he had made love to Brent because he desired to, not because the ‘Confession’ had predicted that he would – to think differently was madness.

  He had a theory – it might not seem sensible in the light of day when he was cold sober, but he could see no holes in it now. He was afraid that he had written the ‘Confession’ out of some latent, autobiographical urge, and then suffered a kind of amnesia about it. Later, he discovered it again, but then it seemed new to him and the work of someone else. He had some reason for thinking this since once before he had had a similar experience. This had happened back in his college days when he was still rooming with Jeremy and while he was working on the novel he never finished. One day, he had gone to his desk to resume writing only to discover a newly-completed chapter that he must have written himself – but which he could not remember writing. His first impulse had been that Jeremy had written it as an ill-humoured joke. He had sat and stared at the totally unfamiliar pages until Jeremy had come into the room; but when he had told Jeremy about them, Jeremy had been able to solve the mystery. ‘You wrote them last night,’ he had said. ‘I remember waking in the middle of the night. I heard the sound of your typewriter. I got up and slammed the door of my room in hopes that you would take the hint and stop disturbing my sleep. But you went on typing until dawn.’

  Last night, drunk as he must have been, he might have decided to go to his office and write. Then he might have gone back home after he finished, gone to bed and, when he awakened the next morning, have forgotten about it. The flaw in this reasoning �
�� if there was a flaw – lay in the time sequence. How could he predict that he would meet and make love to a woman he did not know? And yet, who was better equipped to make such a prediction?

  But then there was the disturbing fact that not all the events foretold in the ‘Confession’ had come true. He had not slept with Brent. This he still found hard to believe. He had never before been rejected so ignominiously – why, the woman had lured him on, teased him, led him to expect an easy conquest by her every action, only to refuse him coldly. If he had written the ‘Confession’ he would have been certain that he would be successful with Brent. Did this mean that he had written the ‘Confession’?

  A taxi came into view. Philip hailed it and ran into the street to meet it in his eagerness to climb inside. He gave the driver the address of his office building. He intended to find out if his mind was playing tricks on him again. By going to his office now, and staying there all night – he planned to sit at his desk and await the culprit if the second manuscript were not already there – he would either catch the author or frustrate him. He expected that there would be another instalment as the first manuscript had been titled ‘Confession I’. Of course, if he were the author…

  The building lobby was deserted. One elevator was open and the light was on inside, but the operator was not to be seen. Philip rang the night bell several times, listening to its metallic clangour resound in the vaulted lobby. After about five minutes, the night operator appeared – an old man who limped as he walked. Philip strode impatiently into the elevator.

  ‘Aren’t you supposed to be on duty at all times?’ he demanded. It was insufferable to have to wait so long for an elevator in a building that advertised twenty-four-hour service!

  The car started its flight upwards with an unseemly jerk. ‘I ain’t got no relief from twelve to six. It ain’t human to ask a man to stay in one spot all that time,’ the operator complained.

  ‘It’s your job, isn’t it?’ Philip demanded.

  ‘Mister,’ said the old elevator operator, turning around as the doors opened at Philip’s floor, ‘there’s always the stairs.’

  Philip walked down the hall towards the frosted doors of Brown and Foster. He was angry at the old man’s impertinence as he fitted the key in the lock. Philip had never seen the office after hours and its dark emptiness dismayed him. He could not find the switch to the bank of lights that illuminated the corridor leading to his office. Never before had he had an occasion to turn on those lights since it was always done for him. He gave up trying to locate the switch and groped his way down the hall, striking matches until he found his own name on one of the doors. He stood looking at it long enough for the flickering flame to burn down to his fingers, remembering the brief, calamitous interview with Steven Foster. Then he pushed the door open and went in, turning the light on in Miss Grey’s office and looking around carefully before he went into his own.

  It seemed as though the light dimmed as he went through the door to the inner office. A bell started ringing somewhere, a faint tinkling. He felt as if he were falling forward as he groped across the room to his desk. A scream began in his mind, but stifled in his throat. And then he was swimming in furious circles in a pool of blackness that lapped over him and swallowed him until all was deafeningly quiet.

  Out of that quiet came a voice – the simpering voice – speaking clearly and distinctly. ‘Oh, Philip,’ it wailed, ‘you aren’t going to forget again, are you? Please, Philip, try hard not to forget…’

  The Second Instalment

  1

  Brent, Jeremy and Dorothy stood in a circle about him, pointing their fingers at him, chanting words he could not distinguish, although he sensed their meaning was shameful. An overpoweringly bright light, originating he knew not where, shone in his eyes and dimmed his vision so that when he shut his eyelids he could not escape the haunting, blue after-images of his friends ringed about him, pointing accusing fingers. Then Brent stepped forward, seized his shoulders and began to shake him, shouting more words at him that he could not understand. His head swelled with a pain that throbbed like the motor of a relentless engine, coming and going with piston-like regularity. Once again he dared to open his eyes and this time they were dazzled by bright sunlight. He felt hands – Brent’s hands? – release his shoulders. He twisted his neck to see who it was who had been shaking him, and again his head was possessed by spinning pain. Brent, Jeremy and Dorothy had disappeared. He realized that he was alone in his own office. But, if he were alone, who had been shaking him? Again he tried to turn around, this time more slowly, and this time he succeeded despite the persistent pain in his head. Miss Grey was standing beside him, her blotchy face sympathetic and solicitous. ‘Are you all right, Mr Banter? You gave me such a turn when I came in and found you slumped over your desk!’

  Philip stood up. His whole body felt cramped and his muscles ached. How had he gotten here? He searched his memory in an attempt to recall the events of the night before. A number of scenes and jumbled incidents jostled for precedence: he had been in a bar, he had looked for a taxi, Jeremy’s words – had they been spoken last night? – ‘If you make a slut of her, I’ll kill you!’, Brent’s face at dinner, slowly smiling so that her teeth were bared, the elevator man telling him, ‘There’s always the stairs.’

  Philip tried to pretend to Miss Grey that his conduct was in no way unusual. But, even as he straightened up and smiled, he knew from the wondering expression on her face that she was aware that something had happened and that he did not know what it was. Still he had to make the best of it he could. He said, ‘I came back to the office after you left last night. I had some work to do and I kept at it until late. I must have fallen asleep.’

  Miss Grey began to walk towards the door. ‘I didn’t know what to think when I saw you there like that. I guess you scared me. Did I hurt you shaking you? It seemed the thing to do at the time.’

  Philip managed another smile, another attempt to put the girl at ease. She was not a bad sort, if she would only do something about that complexion. ‘Thank you for waking me,’ he said. ‘I’ll just wash up and then go out for some breakfast.’

  Miss Grey answered his smile with an embarrassed grimace of her own and then left the room, closing the door behind herself. Philip sat down again and ran his hands through his hair. What had happened to him? He still could not think very clearly. He could remember coming to the office building, waiting an unbearable length of time for the elevator, unlocking the door to the office and searching for the light switch – but after that his mind was a blank. Why had he come to the office at such an odd hour? He thought for a moment about this and then remembered that it had had something to do with the ‘Confession’. That was it! He had come back to the office to see if another instalment of the manuscript would be awaiting him, possibly to have the good luck of catching the author in the act of writing it. But what had he found? He could not remember.

  He looked down at his desk. Only then did he realize that his typewriter was open as it had been the day before – when he awakened he must have been lying on it, but only now did he see it – and there was a sheet of paper in the machine also as before. Beside the typewriter was a second neat pile of manuscript that bore his name on the upper left-hand corner of the first page!

  This must mean that he was writing the damned thing himself! How could he reason otherwise? He remembered coming into the office after midnight, turning on the light… no, he did not remember turning it on, he just remembered reaching for it… and nothing else. His amnesia must have set in as he began to write. But why should he want to torture himself in this devious fashion? That was yet another question to which he had no answer. He sighed and picked up the first page of the new manuscript. He might as well read it to see what he had dreamed up for himself this time…

  Philip Banter

  21 East 68th St

  New York, N.Y.

  CONFESSION

  2
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  My head aches today; I feel ten years older overnight. I cannot blame it all on the liquor. I was drunk enough last night, but not too drunk to know what I was doing. Have I lost all control over my impulses? I know I cannot experience many nights like last night and survive.

  But didn’t I make much the same sort of vow yesterday? I seem to have a store of good resolutions…

  I must be losing my mind. Certainly there is something badly wrong with me if I don’t learn a lesson from last night.

  Philip laid the first page aside. He stood up and walked to the window and looked down on Madison Avenue. The street below him swarmed with people, all types of human beings, leading all kinds of lives. Why had this happened to him? Why not to one of them? He inserted his finger between his collar and his neck and ran it nervously along the starched edge. The ‘Confession’ was positively uncanny! Reading it this morning was almost like hearing his own unspoken thoughts declaimed in an echoing, resounding room. Certain sentences, phrases, were still reverberating in his ears: ‘my head aches today’ – his head did ache; ‘have I lost all control over my impulses?’ – well, had he? – his actions left the matter open to serious question; ‘I must be losing my mind…’ Philip pulled the cord that controlled the Venetian blind, jerked at it, shuttered the view of hurrying pedestrians from his sight. Was he losing his mind? His fists clenched his temples – he could feel the blood pounding in his ears. He stood like that for several minutes, cataleptically rigid, a panic-stricken statue. Then his fists relaxed, his arms drooped and his hands, now open, dangled at his sides. He turned slowly around and stared at the pile of manuscript beside the typewriter. For a moment longer he resisted it, a tense moment during which he felt as if he were about to collapse; but instead of collapsing he sat down again at the desk and seized the second page…