The Last of Philip Banter

by John Franklin Bardin

  Philip shut his eyes. He did see the monstrous finger. It was pointing directly at him. But, he told himself, this is only because you are thinking about it, remembering it. Then he saw Brent’s face the way it had looked when she had asked him to leave her apartment. And he heard Dorothy’s voice saying, ‘I’m going to leave you, Philip.’ And Jeremy was saying, ‘Good old Phil, always the life of the party!’ He opened his eyes. The bar room did look unreal, his face in the mirror looked unreal, the soldier’s voice droning on about ‘the stink’ was unreal. Nothing existed.

  He ordered another drink for himself and the soldier. ‘I was in Greenland,’ the soldier said, ‘and then North Africa and Normandy. I was wounded at Caen and invalided home, and then, after a delay in route, they shipped me to the Pacific. We were stationed on an atoll that didn’t have a name, only a number. The war had passed it by; we were guarding ammunition and an airstrip that was never used. A dozen bull-dozers and a couple of excavators were rotting in the sun – we were supposed to keep them in working order. They were covered by canvas and we oiled them regularly, painted their metal, polished, scraped. Every week we’d hack the jungle back, burn the vines, make a little clearing around them.

  ‘The rest of the time we sat around, or, when the C.O. got worried about us, we drilled in the sun. The sun was everywhere. It got inside your skull and beat at your brains. It was like prying fingers inside your skin, always moving, always hot, always tormenting you. We got so we hated each other. One of my buddies would say something to me – something like “Have you got a match?” – or “Hell, ain’t it hot?” – and I’d want to kill him. We all got so we never said an unnecessary word. We just sat around and thought and sweated.

  ‘It was then I thought of home’ – he waved his hand’ of here. I’d shut my eyes and try to see it the way I remembered it, and sometimes I would see it. But most of the time all I could ever see was a dull, red glare – the stinking sun. It got so that even at night, when I shut my eyes, I’d see that red glare – sometimes I’d even see it in my sleep.

  ‘I kept telling myself that the day would come when I’d go home, leave the island for good, and then finally, the day would come when I wouldn’t even remember what it was like. I kept telling myself that the day would come when I’d shut my eyes and try to see the tent and the goddam, stinking sun – and I wouldn’t be able to! If I hadn’t kept telling myself that I’da gone nuts!’

  The soldier talked on and on. Philip bought round after round of drinks and sat with his eyes shut while the soldier talked. He said the same things over and over again. When he had been in the Pacific, he had tried to dream of home and only rarely had he succeeded – home had been distant, unreal, the blinding sun had stood between him and his dream. He had consoled himself with the thought that the time would come when he would not be able to recall the atoll, and the sun would be eternally vanquished. But this had not happened. Now that he was in the United States, he could not believe that the world he saw and the experiences he had were real. All he had to do at any time was to close his eyes, and he was back on the atoll facing the shimmering, relentless sun. He had convinced himself that his reality lay in his mind’s picture of this past experience, that he was dreaming when he saw New York but not dreaming when he saw the high Pacific sun, that the drinks he was having in this bar – even his conversation with Philip – did not exist.

  Philip did not try to shake his conviction. On the contrary, every word the obsessed soldier spoke strengthened a conviction of his own that he was no longer able to discriminate between real and mental images. By now, when he shut his eyes, Philip saw many different scenes. He lived over again all the events of the past day and a half, and he was freshly horrified by their import. He remembered, or thought he did, each word and phrase of the two instalments of the ‘Confession’, and he saw in his mind’s eye each of the scenes depicted in it – including some that had not happened, some that had partly happened and some that had not happened yet. His memory confused these scenes with the actualities of the previous night and that afternoon, just as on the street and in the theatre he had misinterpreted and jumbled together real perceptions and imagined ones. As the soldier’s voice buzzed on, compulsively reiterating his distorted version of reality, Philip grew more and more frenzied. His pulse pounded. His fingers were numb and it became increasingly difficult for him to pick up the jiggers of whisky that followed each other incessantly across the bar. Finally, it seemed to him that he was not sitting at a bar, but rather that he was placed beside an endless conveyor belt that kept moving past him. On the belt were glass after glass of whisky. It was his task to pick up each glass and drain it, and throw a half a dollar after it, before the next one came along. He had been doing this for years, it seemed, and so far he had been able to keep up – but now they were speeding up the belt. He could not continue… he could not…

  He turned around to ask the soldier to help him, but the boy was no longer there. He looked around him. There was no one in the place (as he stared groggily, the room gradually assumed normal proportions, although it kept wavering and fading before his eyes), except for a man in a long, white apron who was doing something to the door. Now, the man was beckoning to him, saying something to him in a loud, harsh voice that was wholly incoherent. He stood unsteadily and walked towards the man and the door. As he reached them, he put his hand out to support himself (he felt as if the room were listing badly, as if the floor were slipping out from under his feet). But his hand met with no substance; the lights about him dulled and went out. His hand groped forward, still expecting to find a door, and he followed it, uncertainly, slowly, with exaggerated care. And then he saw a street lamp shining on a green and yellow taxi – was it real? – and he guessed that the scene had changed again.

  The cab-driver saw a well-dressed drunk stagger out of the bar. He opened the door to his cab and the drunk stumbled into it – ‘as if there’d been a magnet in there that drew him to it,’ as the cabby explained to a friend later. He knocked down the flag on his meter, eyed his customer for a moment – he wasn’t a bad-looking fellow – and asked him where he wanted to go.

  ‘Home to Dorothy,’ said Philip. ‘Home to my lovin’ lil’ wife.’ And he gave an address on Jones Street.

  5

  Tom Jamison and Alice Grey had been to a movie and now they were sitting in the Times Square Child’s. Jamison’s face was especially glum and Alice, while she ate her sandwich, kept glancing at him. He paid no attention.

  ‘You haven’t said a word in ten minutes, Tom,’ she said.

  He looked at her and smiled slightly.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘You lied to me this afternoon.’

  Her face flushed. ‘But, Tom, I didn’t.’

  ‘Do you have to lie again?’

  She laid her sandwich down. ‘Tom, what did I say that you thought was untrue? Tell me, Tom! I want to know.’

  ‘You said you didn’t meet anyone the other night when I was late in calling you.’

  She looked at him defiantly. ‘Well, what if I did? What’s wrong in meeting someone else?’

  He stared at her, then dropped his eyes. ‘It was a man, wasn’t it?’ His voice was cold.

  ‘What if it was?’

  ‘Who was he?’ Anger made his voice squeak.

  ‘Why should I tell you that? I don’t have to.’

  Tom was silent. He took a cigarette from his pocket and lighted it without offering her one. ‘No, you don’t have to tell,’ he said.

  ‘It was an accident.’

  He did not speak.

  ‘I just happened to meet him. He came into the bar while I was having a drink. He spoke to me and I had to speak to him. I couldn’t ignore him. He asked me to have a drink with him. I was angry with you and I did. It was awful. He told me the story of his life. He’s so queer, Tom.’

  Jamison was now paying close attention. ‘Who are you talking about?’ he ask
ed quietly.

  ‘Philip Banter,’ she said. ‘I met him in the bar. He sat and talked to me for an hour or more. He told me about his wife and how he was unfaithful to her. He told me about his mother and how he had never obeyed her – though what that had to do with his wife, I don’t know. He kept telling me there was evil in him and he knew it. I tried to kid him out of it, but he got awfully excited. Then he did the strangest thing!’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me this before?’

  ‘I was afraid to tell you. But let me tell you what he did –’

  Jamison shrugged his shoulders. ‘Go ahead.’

  ‘Philip kept saying there was a devil in him – that he was possessed with evil. I told him that I did not believe in devils, that it was childish for a grown man like him to talk like that. Then he got awfully excited. He said there were things he did that were so terrible that he could not even remember doing them. His eyes grew wild and crazy-looking. He said that he could tell when he was going to do evil. He said the lights grew dim; he said that he heard a tiny bell tinkling in his ear and a voice – his own voice, he said – would speak to him. That was when he was going to do something bad.’ Miss Grey had been speaking rapidly and quietly. Now her voice was suddenly louder. ‘Then he did the craziest thing, Tom! He stood up and reached across the table at me – we had left the bar and were sitting at a table in the rear – he started to claw at me. I don’t know if he meant any harm, but he scared me. I picked up a seltzer bottle and hit at him. The bottle broke on his wrist – it cut him badly. When I saw the blood, I ran. I ran right out of the bar and I didn’t stop until I climbed on a bus!’

  Jamison shook his head. ‘Do you mean that after all this had happened the night before, you were foolish enough to take that money the next morning – and put that thing on his desk?’

  ‘Yes. I was mad at him.’

  ‘But hasn’t he ever referred to what happened?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Not a word. He had a bandage on his wrist though. I saw him looking at it.’

  Jamison leaned forward and spoke earnestly. ‘Look, Alice, you’re getting deeper and deeper in this. If you don’t watch out, something will happen and you’ll be blamed for it. The best thing for you to do is to tell him you’re quitting. If he ever remembers what he told you that night, he’ll fire you anyway.’

  ‘I had thought of that. But, Tom, I don’t want to give up my job. We need the money.’

  He held her hand in his. ‘You can get another job – maybe a better one. You know as well as I do that something very queer is going on in that office. And you’ve had a hand in it. If you get out now, you won’t be implicated. But if you hang around, you’ll only be courting trouble.’

  ‘When do you think I should give notice?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning. The first thing. Don’t lose any time doing it.’

  ‘All right, Tom, if you say so. But I don’t see why you’re so alarmed.’ Alice Grey smiled. She would like telling Philip Banter that she would not work for him any longer. It would be satisfying.

  At about the same time, in her apartment on Jones Street, Brent had nearly finished the writing she had been doing all afternoon. After Jeremy had left her to keep his appointment with Dorothy, she had returned to her apartment. She had written the rest of the afternoon and evening and now it was close to midnight. Her eyes were tired from the continued effort and her back ached in that inconvenient place under the shoulders which she could never reach to rub or soothe. As she completed the last page of what she was typing, she ripped the sheet of paper from the platen of her typewriter and let the lid fall on the portable with a triumphant bang. She pushed her chair back, stood up – her hand pressed to her forehead, her manner dejected. Wearily, she crossed the small room to the telephone and slumped down beside it on the sofa. She stared at the instrument several minutes before she began to dial.

  She was calling Jeremy’s place again. Since six o’clock she had been trying to get him, but the only response had been the familiar sound of persistent ringing. He had said that he was not working that night, still she had called the studio once just to see if he might have changed his mind. But he was not there and the night operator could not tell her whether he had been there at all that day. Brent had doubted him when he had told her that morning that he was going to work; there had been something about the way he said this, a hesitancy, perhaps, that had informed her that he lied. She suspected that the telephone call he had received had been from Dorothy, and that he had left to meet her. He was probably with Dorothy now.

  But each time Brent came to this conclusion, she rejected it. She did not want to believe that Jeremy had lied to her about Dorothy, especially since she had no evidence to support her suspicion. You resent Dorothy only because she knew him first and because he loved her before he loved you, she told herself. You are insecure in your relationship with him as you have been insecure in your relationship with all men since your childhood. You never let yourself forget your father, his glib tongue and his dark negligence-do you? You can always remember, without half an effort, that first night alone after your mother’s death, when your father had gone out saying he would return, and he did not – can’t you? That loneliness, that horror of moving shadows and unexplained sounds, that shriek that has been caught and held and never uttered in all these years – they are always there waiting for the unguarded moment, the flickering instant when restraint is loosened and the walls of reason crumble-aren’t they? This implacable, childish terror (it has grown strong despite its fetters) was swallowed when your father at last returned, after a day and night of your vigil, somehow shrunken and dishevelled by his absence, swaying on his feet, clutching at you avidly while you eluded his drunken advances and shut your ears to his mutterings – it was swallowed then, but never digested – wasn’t it? ‘Yes,’ she said aloud, as if hearing her own voice speak the words would render their truth harmless, ‘it has remained a part of me, yet apart from me. It arises again and again and I re-swallow it as I might my heart’s bile. I must continue to try to reclaim that which I can never assimilate.’ (Except by wild rationalizations, by catch-as-catch-can plausibilities, by the butterfly nets of reason, her conscience added.)

  Each time she had beaten back her suspicion in this way, had paced the floor and wrung her hands, had argued back and forth with herself, and each time she had returned to the typewriter to lose herself and her fear of losing Jeremy in her work. But now work was done for the night. The stream of words was stopped, the complex of thoughts and fingers, of words and ribboned ink and metal keys, was inaccessible to her. She was written out, and she would have to sleep another night and live another day before that escape would be possible again. Yet she knew that she could not sleep, that there was no use in lying down or trying to invite it in any of the usual ways for it would not come to her until she had heard Jeremy’s voice and listened to him excuse his absence. If this did not happen, dawn would find her still alone with the ghost of her childhood…

  The doorbell jangle broke in upon her self-torment. She stood stock still and listened to its dying vibrations. Was it Jeremy? She made no move to answer. It rang again, this time a prolonged signal that forced her to press the buzzer button in response. Then, her weight thrown against the door as if to ward off the visitor, she listened for the footfalls on the stairs. When they came they were heavy… hesitant… not Jeremy’s.

  Suddenly, she was a child again, the same child that had listened and waited for her father. The room became the hall-bedroom of a St Louis boarding-house – she could feel the brush of pig-tails on her back and her hand felt spontaneously for the golden locket, that had clasped a strand of her mother’s hair, which she had always used to wear about her neck. The empty yearning that belongs to children was hers again, and with it the fear of the unknown – the yet to be – which as an adult she had learned to forget. She fought against the foolish dread that accompanied this throwback to the past, chided herself for h
arbouring such a silly fear. Yet the hammering on her heart prevailed against all reassurances, insisting that her senses were right: that the lumbering footsteps she heard were her father’s… even though she knew him long since dead!

  The sound of a large man walking uncertainly continued up to her door. There was a silence, and then a fumbling and scratching – as if whoever it was was trying to fit a key into the keyhole – and a belched curse.

  Brent pushed as hard as she could against the door. Her body was shaking with fright and her mouth was open and moaning. She wanted to cry out, to scream and end this nightmare (for one distraught moment she managed to convince herself that it was not happening, that she was only dreaming and, if she fought a little more desperately, she would succeed in awakening) – but the same thing in her that had held back any cry of protest as a girl, forced her to bite her lip and quiet her whimpering now. The scratching continued and with it the sound of harsh, whistling breaths.

  Then she heard a tinkle, followed by another curse. He’s dropped his key just as he used to do! she thought. But then something even more terrible happened. There was a heavy, slumping thud – a scrambling sound of cloth and leather on polished wood. And then a gurgling retching…

  When Brent finally dared to open the door, she did not find her father there. Philip’s limp body sprawled in upon her feet. He was not dead, only very drunk. And he had been sick in the hallway.

  The Third Instalment

  1

  It had come to pass. Philip awakened with this conviction – he knew where he was, in the moment before he opened his eyes, even if he did not know how he happened to be there. He was in Brent’s apartment and in Brent’s bed. Somehow, in some way, he had betrayed himself. The ‘Confession’ had triumphed again.