"How did you feel about that?"
"He gave me thirty dollars on pool days."
"So how did you feel about it?"
"Creepy."
#
That night Philip dreamed he was underwater, down in the green shadow world of old man Bluett's swimming pool. He had gone in to recover a watch. The watch was a waterproof Timex and, if Philip wasn't mistaken, Bluett had been wearing it only twenty minutes earlier.
The cold water enclosed Philip's nakedness, cut out the hot, drumming day as death itself might, and plunged him into this dappled, chill world. The chlorine stung his eyes.
What if his mother were to march briskly, that very instant, through the Odells' yard, across the street, down the little path between the Clarks and the Wardens, across another street and, moving faster now, down the new-mown hill to the swimming pool?
Philip would jump, dripping from the pool and his mother, her gray eyes flashing, would turn to old Bluett and demand an explanation and Bluett would mumble that it was no big deal, but he would not be able to meet her eyes and shame would descend on Philip like hard rain on a tin roof.
Philip concentrated on the thirty dollars. His eyes sought the watch.
He saw, for the first time, that the bottom of the pool was not concrete but a twisting lattice of pipe, pale white tubes that intertwined elaborately. As Philip drew closer, the pipes began to move, flowing like the bodies of thick serpents although never was a head revealed, nor a tail, and perhaps they did not crawl between and around each other but merely gave the illusion of doing so through a wavelike rippling of their flesh.
Philip knew it for what it was, this loathsome, monstrous knot of serpents: Cthulhu, bathed in eldritch green light, sprung from watery R'lyeh.
Philip, numb with revulsion and terror, swam closer yet, powered by the perverse will of the dream.
A hand reached out from between two tuber- like trunks, a white hand, gnarled, its nails bitten. Philip saw the truncated ring finger—cut long ago on a lathe—and tried to turn before he saw any more, but it was too late. His father's face, white and glistening, bloomed like a poisonous mushroom. His father's mouth opened in a scream, and Philip spied a ragged tongue, spotted with barnacles, and the mouth shaped words that were lost in the sound of vast machines laboring.
Philip fled to the surface, fighting the gravity of his fear.
The words his father had spoken followed Philip to the surface, and they broke in oily bubbles as Philip blinked at the sky.
His father's words burst upon Philip in a strangely dispassionate staccato: It's. A. Rigged. Game.
4.
Bingham was staring up at the stars when Philip walked outside on break. Way off in the distance, stuttering light inflated the clouds.
"You ever been struck by lightning?" Bingham asked. "No."
"Me neither," the older man said. "But I knew this guy, guy named Merl Botts. He was from upstate New York, used to drink with my uncle Hark. Anyway, Botts said he had been struck by lightning seventeen times. I figure he was telling the truth. And he had this theory, this idea that God was trying to communicate with him, was trying to get his attention.
"I was just a kid when he told me that, but it made an impression. I mean, think about it. What if God just don't know his own strength, like that cartoon character, what's his name, Baby Huey? 'Look out!' God hollers and a tidal wave destroys a seaport. 'Heads up, Merl!' God roars, and a lightning bolt sends old Merl tumbling down a hillside, the soles of his shoes smoking."
It was, Philip agreed, food for thought.
"I thought about it a lot when I was a kid," Bingham said, "but you lose interest in some of the big mysteries. Yesterday, my son, James, up in Newark calls and says, 'Hey Dad, old Mrs. Grady died; I thought you would want to know.'
'"That's a shame,' I say. Old Mrs. Grady. Course, I don't think of her that way; I see her eighteen years old with her blouse unbuttoned and her mouth half open. There's only two women I ever loved, and I married the other one. Old Mrs. Grady's true name was Helen, Helen Oakley, and I think, 'Helen's dead,' but nothing happens. She's still glowing like neon in my mind and dead or alive that's where I keep her. I haven't seen her in thirty years, and it's when I'm dead that it will leak out, all go in a rush like dishwater down a drain.
"Think about it. We are a lot of containers for each other. We should be careful."
"I know that," Philip said, but by the time he said it, the old printer had gone back inside.
Philip went back in, greatly shaken. The concept of humans as containers was not one he cared to contemplate. He felt hollowed out, decided a candy bar might ease the distress, and walked down the hall. A strange, dank reek of salt and decaying fish filled the corridor, as though some lumbering monster had risen from the ocean floor—Dagon perhaps—and slithered through the building. Philip could almost hear its clotted vocal cries and the ghastly noise it made as it forced its quivering bulk through a narrow doorway. But this was just his imagination.
The vending machine was ancient. Behind its glass window, a wobbly Ferris wheel of candy bars and stale pastries awaited the consumer. You put in change, you pushed a button, and, with a limping, mechanical clunk, the wheel turned. When the object of your desire appeared in the window, you opened the window and retrieved it.
Philip imagined some third-world denizens regarding this machine with awe, uttering a chorus of delighted exclamations each time the wheel lurched forward.
Philip pushed the window open on a Milky Way. As he reached in, the window snapped shut on his hand and the wheel turned. Philip reacted quickly, jerking his hand away before his wrist could be broken.
Nursing his scraped hand, he retreated to his computer. He fished in the pile of résumés, and pulled one up that contained the following instructions:
"Please make this resumes most excellent as I am desirous extremely of a good job."
5.
I couldn't write a novel," Lily said. "I don't have the imagination and even if I did, I lack the concentration. I know my limitations. I don't have the detachment either. I wouldn't let anything bad happen to the people I made up. If one of them got sick, I'd stick her right in bed and fill her up with chicken soup and have her back on her feet in no time.
If someone had cancer, I'd find a cure. I wouldn't let anyone be unhappy or in danger or unloved. Marriages would never end. I wouldn't let a dog get run over by a car, and I wouldn't let misunderstandings lead to tragedy. I just couldn't do that. The way I see it, if I am going to make a thing up, why make it up bad?"
"Sometimes it just is bad," Philip said. "There's no way around it."
"Spoken like a pathological party pooper," Lily said. She got up and shuffled into the kitchen. She was wearing a ratty yellow bathrobe and floppy, blue slippers. She looked older than usual. When Philip had come to the door that day she had said, "I believe I am dying. You'll have to get another therapist. Just as well. You're one of those heartbreaker clients, I can tell." But she let him in. She drank some tea, and appeared to rally, launching into her speech about novel writing.
Now she shouted from the kitchen, "Tell me about Amelia."
"Amelia's beautiful," Philip said. "She's sort of hard to describe, because she likes to experiment with cosmetics, and she can look different on different days, but she has got this really wonderful heart. I mean—"
Lily came back into the room and lay full length on the couch. She interrupted with a wave of her hand. "Tell me about your father."
"What's to tell?" Philip said, suddenly wary and listening for the footfalls of some monstrous beast. "He killed himself."
Lily sat up. Her sharp, blue eyes studied Philip. "That's something to tell," she said.
Philip felt queasy. His insides had turned to hot, prickly flannel.
"Excuse me," he said. He got up and walked down the tiny hall to the bathroom. He ran cold water and splashed it on his face. His image in the mirror looked a little like his father, if only
in the fatalism written there, the way the brown eyes held caution and disbelief, the way the mouth turned ruefully upward.
"Philip, are you okay?" Lily shouted through the door.
"I'm okay," Philip shouted back. The bathroom was as full of sunlight as the rest of the house, with more old-fashioned prints on the walls and a shelf full of organic shampoos and soaps and a peeling Happy Face sticker on the mirror. A copy of Prevention magazine lay on the sink. The magazine had fallen into water—the tub, no doubt—and was now swollen and curled. Philip absently turned its pages, encountered an article about the health benefits of zinc and read it while standing up. "Philip?"
Philip finished the article and came out. "I was feeling sort of sick," he said. "I'm okay now.
Gosh. Look at the time. I've got to run."
#
He canceled his next appointment with Lily. He said he would get back with her to schedule a new one. He didn't call back. When she called, he let the answering machine catch her no- nonsense voice, although he was in the room on the bed, feverish from reading the long sentences of Henry James.
She called twice more that week. Both times Philip was there, and the second time he almost answered the phone when she said, “I know you are there," but he was still reading James, and so he moved in a twilight lethargy, hobbled by fine delineations of thought. By the time he reached the phone, she had uttered the last of her message, "What if I really am dying. How would you feel if I died and you hadn't said good-bye?"
Pretty cheap for a therapist, Philip thought.
#
Ralph's One-Day Résumés was a circus—worse than usual. Typesetter Monica was wearing a soft collar, one of those bulky, neck-brace things that whiplash victims wear prior to litigation. A paste-up artist named Helga had attempted to throttle Monica over a disagreement on the kerning of a typeface.
Helga, a silent, gloomy employee with no friends and uncertain mental health, had been fired immediately, but she was still an ominous presence. She would drive into the parking lot where Philip could see her through the lobby's plate-glass window. She would rev the engine of her old Ford pickup and glower at the building. She would stare for half an hour or so and then abruptly accelerate in a scream of tortured rubber and race, heedless of traffic, back onto the highway. Her behavior was unpleasantly similar to accounts Philip read in those follow-up articles to tragedies (TWELVE GUNNED DOWN BY IRATE POSTAL EMPLOYEE, for instance). These articles would always begin with a survivor saying something like, “I guess we should have seen it coming when..."
Ralph Pederson did not wish to call the police, however. Perhaps he saw Helga as a potential customer. His thoughts were hidden to Philip.
Philip thought that the soft collar suited Monica, adding physical inflexibility to her already formidable air of self-righteousness and endowing her with a regal bearing.
She would turn her entire body in order to regard Philip. "If she thinks she is going to scare me, she has another think coming," she would say. "I will not be intimidated by a crazy woman."
Monica maintained that she could have taken Helga in a fair fight. “I was off balance," Monica exclaimed. “I didn't see it coming."
With a paste-up artist gone and Monica physically impaired and a sudden surge in the demand for résumés and business cards, Philip was asked to come in early. He hated arriving early, when the battle raged on all fronts.
Ralph Pederson grew more overwrought as his employees worked longer hours, accruing dreaded overtime. "Dear Jesus," he would say to a harried employee, "are you still here? No, no, keep working, but couldn't you work just a little faster?"
Distraught, Pederson would rush into the back room and fire a printer in an attempt to vent his frustration. Philip kept expecting
Bingham to get the axe—his attitude was bad— but Ralph Pederson seemed not to see the man, his eye instead alighting on some younger printer just in the act of taking a personal phone call or botching a three-color job.
The Texas heat stretched into September and then violent thunderstorms vandalized the city. Philip's ceiling sprung half a dozen leaks, and management sent a maintenance man with a large desperado's mustache who regarded the dripping water sadly and said, "She rains inside," and left without offering hope. Philip covered the floor with pots and pans and grew accustomed to the syncopated plops and dings.
"I feel like I'm underwater," he told Amelia. The phone had a bad connection, and Amelia replied in a rush of static. "What?" Philip said.
"Like your monsters," Amelia shouted back. "They live under the ocean, right? So that the other monsters from outer space can't get them easily."
Philip didn't answer. Amelia began to cry.
"Aw," Philip said.
"What?"
"Don't cry."
Amelia sniffed. "I'm sorry," she said. "That was mean—about your monsters. It's just that I didn't get another job, and I really need a job." Amelia sobbed, regained control quickly, and said, "I hate this weather. I better talk to you some other time." And she hung up. Philip started to call back, thought better of it, and dialed his therapist instead.
Lily listened until Philip got to the end of it.
"She loves you," Lily said. "Poor dimwitted girl." There was a pause. "Good hearing from you. Come by sometime." She hung up the phone.
Philip continued to read Henry James, medicating himself against the frenzy of Ralph’s One-Day Résumés and the rebuffs of his ex-lover, but even the soporific tones of the Master could not quiet the rising anxiety. Philip longed to go to Amelia's door, to stand there in the rain until she took pity on him and let him in. He did not do this, primarily because he felt that something dire was about to happen, and he did not want to bring his true love into the sphere of this evil event. The past was mustering grim forces. He could feel it. The past was a dark, black pit, and if he peered into it, something could turn its baleful eye upward and spy him there, frozen against the light. Then it would come rushing up to greet him with a mouthful of dirty razor teeth and malice on its black breath.
6.
When it came it was no real surprise, so Philip was able to lie there in the parking lot and stare at the overcast sky and console himself with the thought that the universe did follow certain laws of cause and effect.
This is how it happened. He had just gotten out of his car and was walking across the parking lot when he heard a scream and saw Monica running toward him. Her arms were stretched out in front of her. Her soft collar did not in any way impede her progress, and she was traveling at a good speed, her short brown hair jumping on her head. A stout, low-to-the-ground woman in slacks, she crossed the slick asphalt gracelessly but with surprising dispatch. She saw Philip at the last minute, acknowledging his presence with a widening of her eyes and a quick, sideways leap.
The pickup truck was right behind her, and Philip saw Helga's round, oddly placid countenance behind the windshield. Philip jumped, but the car's right fender caught him and he was thrown, spinning, in the air. His mind clutched at scraps of the known world: an upside- down tree, parked cars, two karate students in their white pajamalike uniforms turning to look his way, their expressions unreadable but no doubt critical of his floundering passage through the air.
His left leg broke when he hit the ground, a cold, ungainly sound echoing in his teeth, and he did not pass out or even scream, but watched with his head sideways to the wet pavement as the pickup roared on in pursuit of the fleeing Monica.
Monica would have made the curb and the safety of an alley formed by two warehouses, but she fell and as she scrambled to her feet, the truck was upon her and sent her hurtling into the air. Not an aerodynamically sound woman, Monica nonetheless moved with some grace, holding her arms stiffly out from her body and appearing, indeed, to fly. Philip, fresh from his own scrambling, ungainly dive, felt something like admiration and, to his shame, envy.
Monica hit the pavement with the flat smack of a sack of feed hurled from a barn's loft. She did
not move.
The Ford turned sharply with a squeal of tires and roared back onto the highway and the young men in their karate garb raced toward the immobile Monica.
As the young men fretted and flapped over the body, they seemed to multiply, becoming a crowd of luminous angels, and then Philip lost interest, overwhelmed by a kind of philosophical calm and disinterest. He heard a long, thin siren wail and wondered, as he always did, what strangers were in jeopardy, what tragedy elicited that plaintive cry.
#
Lily visited Philip in the hospital. For a moment, Philip did not recognize her. She was disguised as someone's grandmother, in a blue-print dress and one of those small, black hats with tiny pink flowers.
Résumé With Monsters Page 3