The Last of Philip Banter

by John Franklin Bardin

  Philip had known that something had gone badly wrong with him, and so had everyone. There had been a blank look about the fellow’s face. His eyes had seemed dead and lack-lustre. His movements had been slow and listless. Now Philip wondered if the barber who kept talking such drivel had seen the same things in himself. Was he actually frightened of him? Was this why he kept talking so much, and why he had made no remark when Philip began to shake?

  He waited anxiously for the massage to be over. As soon as he was out of the chair, he darted a quick glance at himself in the mirror. He seemed the same; if anything he looked healthier than usual as his skin was fresh and pink from the hot towels and the massage. But then he would not recognize any change in himself if there were one, would he? Wouldn’t it be a part of the disorder to seem unchanged even as one changed, particularly to oneself? He paid the barber, tipped the man a dollar and walked rapidly from the shop. As he went down the street he felt as if everyone were looking at him. Several times he was on the verge of stopping to turn around and see if he were being followed, but each time he assured himself that he was only nervous and upset from his strange experiences and the disquieting talk with Dr Matthews. Yet he walked from 50th Street and Madison Avenue to Times Square without knowing where he was going or why, and he might have kept walking indefinitely in this aimless fashion if he had not glimpsed out of the tail of his eye a gigantic purplish hand. It had a cluster of huge, misshapen fingers and the thickest, longest finger was pointing directly at him. He stopped dead in his tracks, rigid with terror, unaware-of the other pedestrians who kept pushing and shoving their way past him, too panic-stricken to face the tremendous symbol of guilt that had sought him out.

  Philip first thought that he did not know where he was. He had been walking, thinking about and reconsidering everything that had happened to him in the past two days, wholly unconscious of his surroundings except that he had known that he was out on the streets of midtown Manhattan. Now he was isolated in his terror and acutely conscious of the fact that just behind him – without moving he could see it darkly – a hellish finger designated him, silently accused him – of what? A terrible idea arose in his mind, an idea that was in itself the configuration of evil: had he crossed the threshold that divided the appearances of sanity from the misapprehensions of insanity – had he literally walked into a madman’s world? Was this thing that lurked behind him the first, weird landmark of the distorted landscape which would be his natural environment henceforward? Great waves of fear battered him, his tongue grew dry and felt like cloth in his mouth, his legs threatened to collapse. He seemed to be shrinking, gradually losing weight and stature, dissolving into a mammoth lake of terror. Yet a shred of reason, a grain of scepticism, remained in the welter of his emotions like flotsam adrift in the surf. Before he gave up, before he surrendered entirely, wasn’t he capable of turning around to stand full face with this apparition that had descended upon him? He fought to turn, finding that to perform this simple manoeuvre he had to assert all his strength as if he were defying gravity or forcing his way through an almost impenetrable obstruction; he moved slowly, somnambulistically, until he stared directly at the giant, pointing finger that soundlessly menaced him.

  As he stared, he became aware again of light… of people… of shining chromium… and glittering glass. He saw that the great hand and menacing finger were not flesh and blood, but were papier-mâché and part of a motion picture theatre’s lobby exhibit. A large sign hung above the monster that read: ‘See Man Alone – A Tale of A Man Fighting Against Desperate Odds – And As You See it, Remember, It Could Have Happened To You!’

  Philip walked around the dummy hand, examining it carefully and shaking his head, still doubting his eyes. He must have walked past the theatre front without knowing and have seen this advertising come-on with only the lesser part of his senses: what his eyes had seen communicated itself to his mind, which had been busily debating the question of his sanity – thus the theatre eye-catcher had been neurotically garbled and magnified into evidence of lunacy by his overwrought intelligence. He felt like laughing, like crying aloud his joy at discovering the mistake he had made. He did chuckle, and then grinned, and finally went up to the box-office and bought a ticket to Man Alone. Although he had not planned on seeing a show it was as good a way as any of wasting time and it was also a form of activity that had not been predicted by the ‘Confession’. He was still smiling to himself as he selected a seat in the welcome darkness of the balcony and fastened his eyes on the screen.

  Philip, willingly surrendering his objectivity as he centred his attention on the motion picture, saw first the back of a tall man walking away from him. He was immediately struck by the fact that something about the scene was extremely familiar to him, but he was not allowed time to follow this thought to its conclusion since his mind was registering the images seen and the sounds heard, to extract their meaning. He had entered the theatre after the feature picture had begun, which meant that he did not know what action had transpired before. He saw a man walking down a busy street, a New York street, in fact (he realized this with a shock that was strangely unpleasant), a street he had walked himself only a few minutes ago! Before he could consider the full meaning of this coincidence, something else happened on the screen: a girl, a beautiful, dark-haired girl, stepped out of a doorway and smiled at the man – who still presented only his back to Philip – welcomed him without words. The man stopped walking and his back grew larger until it forced itself, obtruded itself, to the very edges of the screen. All Philip could see were the man’s back and, over his shoulder, the smiling eyes of the girl which, as he watched, ceased smiling and became dull with fright. A scream shrilled in Philip’s ears and the monster’s back and shoulders began to rock to and fro, the eyes dangled and jumped and shook – again the scream shrilled, then formed itself into terror-stricken words: ‘Oh, don’t, Phil, don’t! I never told on you. I swear it. He lied! He lied!’

  Philip was charged with anger. He leaned forward until his chin rested on the seat in front of him – he did not feel the prickle of the upholstery since it was apart of the reality he rejected when he looked at the screen. His fingers clenched and closed spasmodically as the scene changed: now he, Philip (or was it the shadow-Philip?), found himself in a night club. The place was dark except for a single spotlight that picked out the figure of a girl, a beautiful blonde, who was singing a blues song into a chromium-plated microphone. As she sang, she bobbed and minced in time to the thud-ting, thud-ting of the hidden orchestra. Philip picked his way to a table. When her number was finished and the lights went up to show a large, circular room with a dance floor of black plastic that shone like a mirror, she saw his inquiring eyes and came to his table and sat opposite him. Philip questioned her in low, threatening tones spoken out of the corner of his mouth, and when she refused to answer he clamped his fingers on her wrist and began to turn it slowly, torturously until she cried in pain. Then he slapped her face and walked out of the night club…

  It was a grade-B movie he had stumbled on, and one that was in no way distinguished except that its principal character happened to be named Philip. Philip had often seen plays or movies where he shared his name with one of the characters involved in the drama. But this time, coming in when he did as the murderer was strangling his first victim, the familiar magic worked too well. The narrative continued on the screen – as the man who had escaped from prison killed his first victim and went on to kill another and another, all the time searching for the man who ‘sent him up’ – and each time Philip performed, partly in his mind and partly in elaborate, unconscious pantomime, each of the killer’s actions. In the climactic moments of the movie, the detective, who had been following the murderer from city to city and murder to murder, at last caught up with him and killed him just as he had found and was about to kill the man for whom he had been searching.

  Philip had long since lost all track of reality. The action on the screen was hi
s action, he was the murderer – and each time the girl who was murdered was Brent. He killed her again and again, every time a different way: by slow strangulation, by poison, by shooting and once by pushing her from a high window. He was a hunted man, even though his actions were not his actions but the fictional acts of the shadow he watched – still they were real to him to a greater extent than the giant finger had been real to him, and they carried with them a sense of guilt that was overwhelming. The sounds and shadows which he watched, the shape and darkness of the theatre, the actual sensations of breathing and contact with the material world, all became merged into an amorphous, phantasmagoric delusion. Philip killed, felt remorse, anger, jealousy, lust; he drank, ran, strangled, sweated, feared; he heard jazz bands, saw the other shadows as he had seen Brent and confused them with her, enacted crimes with the ease of any of a hundred odd actions in his normal life. The climax of the picture left him hysterical. He sat and sobbed through the news-reel, the Mickey Mouse and the Coming Attractions. These short subjects, instead of breaking the continuity of his delusion, served to confuse him more than ever so that the second time he saw Man Alone his experience was even more terrible.

  About six o’clock the balcony began to fill up. A woman sat next to Philip for a little while and then went to an usher and complained. ‘There’s a man up there who keeps grunting and tearing at his seat like an animal. I won’t sit beside him!’ The usher investigated. He had to shake Philip to bring him to his senses, and he insisted that Philip must leave.

  Not until he reached the street – as he groped his way down the stairs and walked through the ornate lobby, he still felt he had done some heinous wrong for which he was being pursued – did Philip begin to understand how extraordinarily he had acted in the theatre.

  Then he went across the street to a bar and had a drink.

  The bar was small and unpretentious, and it was not crowded. This was the kind of bar Philip liked. He usually drank at a table – he would find the table or booth farthest from the door, the one least exposed to view, and then sit at it in the most inconspicuous position. There was no conscious reason behind this habit; in fact he was not aware of his preference for privacy when drinking. Today, however, he sat at the bar. He wanted to be near people and he was eager to start a conversation. If he could talk to someone, he thought he might get his mind off his fear.

  He drank three double bourbons in rapid succession and felt much better immediately. He had been acting the fool’s part all along – he saw that now. Yesterday, when he had read the first instalment of the ‘Confession’, he should have made no secret of it. He should have questioned Miss Grey thoroughly, as well as every other person in the office who might have had the least thing to do with it. He should have told his wife about the ‘Confession’, too, if for no other reason than to judge her reaction. During the evening with Jeremy and Brent, he might have joked about it. Certainly one of these persons, Miss Grey or Dorothy or Brent, had written it. Or himself.

  He had made another mistake at the same time. He had allowed himself to forget about the manuscript from the time he had first read it until Dorothy told him that they were having friends for dinner. As a result he was unprepared for the shock of having the ‘Confession’s’ predictions come true. He had grown nervous and withdrawn, and he had either thought too much or not at all about every word he said, everything he did. If someone had written the strange prophecy with an aim to get him to follow a particular course of action, he could not have done more to help this person’s plans or to hurt himself. He had walked into every trap that had been set for him – if, indeed, traps had been set for him at all. Now, what he should have done…

  ‘Have a drink on me?’

  A deeply tanned face was looking into his, a young man’s face. But this face, though still recognizably young, was fleshed so tightly that the cheekbones seemed drumheads and the thin, smiling lips were as worn and polished as an old coin. He was a soldier and the service ribbons of three theatres of war were displayed on his breast. Apparently, Philip did not answer him as quickly as he expected, for the smile left his lips and the eyelids closed down on his dun-coloured eyes. He no longer seemed friendly, only lonely, and disheartened and grim. ‘Yes, thank you,’ said Philip, and he added quickly, ‘if you’ll have one on me.’

  The boy – for Philip saw he was very young despite his grizzled look – whistled at the bartender and ordered drinks. He ducked his head in Philip’s direction. ‘I’m celebrating my release.’

  ‘Have you been in the Army a long time?’

  ‘Four years.’

  ‘That is a long time.’

  ‘It’s all my life.’

  Philip did not understand. The drinks came and he reached for and fingered his glass. He wanted to ask the youth what he meant by his remark, but he desisted.

  ‘Do you like it here?’ the soldier asked.

  Philip glanced around him. ‘It’s all right as these places go. I’ve been in worse.’

  The soldier shook his head. ‘Not here,’ he said. He made a wide, sweeping motion with his hand, an all-embracing gesture. ‘I mean all around.’

  Philip felt put off by his terse way of talking. ‘Do you mean New York?’ he asked.

  The boy grimaced. ‘New York, Chicago, ‘Frisco, all the places I’ve been State-side.’

  ‘I like New York,’ Philip said.

  The soldier looked him unblinkingly in the face. He might stare at me like this if he wanted to start a fight, Philip thought. But he is not belligerent. What is wrong?

  ‘Does it seem real to you?’ the soldier asked.

  ‘New York?’

  ‘Yeah. New York, Chicago, any place here.’

  ‘Of course it seems real to me. It is real.’ Then he remembered his bewildering afternoon. ‘Although, at times, it can seem very unreal.’

  The soldier’s eyelids unshuttered his eyes and a thin smile lurked on his die-cast lips. His next question was put forward eagerly. ‘Does it sometimes seem to you like this’ – he waved his hand again – ‘is not here, that you are not here, that you are only dreaming it?’

  Philip did not answer. Yet, because he did not want to seem unfriendly, he smiled.

  The boy had not noticed that Philip had failed to understand him. ‘It’s like that all the time with me. I look at a building, I crane my neck up at it and I laugh. It ain’t real, and I know it ain’t real. It stretches way up to there’ – and he pointed upwards with his hand, causing Philip to look up with him – ‘and down to here’ – and he pointed downwards, Philip’s eyes following – ‘and yet it isn’t. If I weren’t looking at it, it wouldn’t be.’

  Philip nodded his head. Now he thought he understood what the boy was driving at and he became interested. Had he read Plato or had he thought this all out for himself?

  ‘You mean,’ Philip said, ‘that you doubt the verifiability of the existence of things. You can only be sure of their appearance, the way they seem to you. Is that what you are saying?’

  ‘Here,’ said the soldier.

  ‘Here? What do you mean by “here”?’

  ‘Things ain’t real here. Chicago, New York, all the places I’ve been here, ain’t real.’

  ‘Are they any more real anywhere else?’

  This question had an effect on the young soldier. He began to glower, his face was torturously twisted and a tic developed in his cheek. ‘All I have to do is shut my eyes and’ – he waved his hand – ‘all this crumbles.’

  Philip threw his drink down his throat. His entire, system had by now been invaded by the fire set by the liquor and he felt well and strong. But he did not like what his companion was saying. It horrified him.

  The soldier had shut his eyes to test and prove his statement. ‘The sun is everywhere. It glimmers and shakes in front of me. The canvas of my tent stinks. The water I am drinking stinks. The coke and beer I get at the P.X. stinks. I call it the sun stink. Can’t you smell it
?’

  ‘No,’ said Philip.

  ‘I can. That’s real. That won’t crumble. It’ll always be here.’ He opened his eyes and tapped his forehead. Philip saw that two of the fingers of his right hand were gone, and in their place was a badly healed scar. The soldier saw him looking at it. ‘That’s real, too,’ he said. ‘Jungle rot got in it. That won’t crumble.’

  ‘I don’t understand you,’ Philip said slowly. ‘I thought I did at first, but now I’m not sure I do. Do you mean that you think you’re not in New York?’

  ‘It don’t matter what you call it,’ the boy said roughly. ‘It ain’t real. It will crumble.’

  Philip was fascinated. He decided to tell his companion about what had happened to him that afternoon. He wanted to see what would happen when he told it. Before he told anyone else, he wanted to try it out on someone he did not know. He began at the barber-shop and told him about the giant finger that he had thought had been following him and pointing at him. He told him about his fear of losing his mind and of the queer, dream-like incoherence of his experience at the movie. When he had finished he was at once afraid that he had gone too far. He ordered another round of drinks for himself and the soldier.

  ‘Does it come back to you when you shut your eyes?’ the soldier asked. ‘Can you shut your eyes and step right into it? Then it’s real. Then you see the same thing I do. The stink – ain’t it hell? – the stinking sun!’