Résumé With Monsters

by William Browning Spencer

  "That's some cast," she said. Philip's left leg was entirely wrapped in plaster and surrounded by a sort of wire scaffolding, as though it were under construction by tiny elves. A silver rod pierced the plaster just above the knee, like a magician's trick.

  Lily was holding a large, tropical-looking green plant. "I called your work and they told me what happened. Are you okay?"

  Philip said that he was fine. He did not tell her how much he hated hospitals, how the labored breathing of the air conditioning made him feel as though he were in the lair of Dagon or Cthulhu himself.

  Lily put the plant on the windowsill and turned back to Philip. Just then Amelia came into the room. Philip's heart jumped.

  "Hey Philip," Amelia said. She was wearing a dark suit—no doubt she was out job hunting— and sunglasses.

  "Hey," Philip said.

  "You're Amelia, right," Lily said.

  Don't listen to her stomach, Philip thought, but the fear was unwarranted.

  Lily shook Amelia's hand. "I'm Lily Metcalf. I'm Philip's therapist."

  "Wow," Amelia said. "Good luck."

  Lily told them what she had learned in her call to Philip's office. Monica was still in a coma, and Helga had disappeared, although the police had found her truck at the airport.

  "Your boss asked if you could call," Lily said. "He has hired some temps, but he says they are nothing but slackers and cretins, and that if there were some way you could come in... I guess he hasn't visited you or he would know better."

  Lily looked at her watch. "Hey, I've got to be going," she said. She kissed Philip on the cheek, then turned and hugged Amelia. Still holding Amelia's shoulders, the old woman looked steadily into the girl's eyes. "Well, well," she said. She let go of the girl's shoulders but continued to study her face. "Not what I would have guessed at all."

  "I beg your pardon," Amelia said, flustered by this close scrutiny.

  "You saw something too," the old woman said, and then she turned and walked out the door.

  Amelia frowned at the empty doorway. Then she turned and regarded Philip. "What was that about?"

  "My therapist is very intuitive," Philip said.

  "Great. Sounds like your kind of therapist. Does she read entrails?"

  "Huh?"

  Amelia rolled her eyes. "Forget it. Are you in pain?"

  "I would never call anything pain that brought you to my side," Philip said, surprising himself with the nobility and poetry that flew, with such felicity, from his lips.

  It was that sort of genuine, heightened and faintly stupid moment that only lovers, long parted, know and appreciate.

  "Oh Philip," Amelia said. Twin tears bloomed in her eyes. Her eyeliner, a new, unproven product, bled instantly, giving her a haunted, tragic look.

  She went to Philip's bedside, knelt down and kissed him on the lips. He kissed her back, in the hallucinatory ecstasy of an invalid on strong painkillers.

  Amelia had to leave—she did indeed have an interview—but she promised to return the nextday.

  Philip felt joyous beyond belief. And what a curious, convoluted path toward joy. He wished

  Bingham, that natural philosopher, were here to share the feverish thoughts that filled his head. He fell asleep, fully expecting dreams of unalloyed happiness. Instead, he dreamed of his father.

  #

  "You'll scare the child senseless," his mother said. His father looked up from the tattered copy of Weird Tales and said, "You don't know a thing about it, Marge. It's in a boy's blood to like this kind of story."

  "An older boy," Marge said. "Not a child."

  "Oh, just leave us be," Walter Kenan said, and he turned back to the child propped up by pillows and read, "Then came a noxious rush of noisome, frigid air from that same dreaded direction, followed by a piercing shriek just beside me on that shocking rifted tomb of man and monster. In another instant I was knocked from my gruesome bench by the devilish threshing of some unseen entity of titanic size but undetermined nature..."

  Philip listened to his father read. His father was a great fan of the reclusive New England writer, H. P. Lovecraft, whose horrific tales of loathsome, monstrous entities from beyond the stars had thrilled the teenage Walter Kenan. The stories first appeared in pulp magazines with lurid covers, and the originals were Walter Kenan's most prized possessions. He never lost his love for the tales, and chose them as bedtime reading for his son. Perhaps his wife was right—no doubt, she was—that they were not proper fare for a child of six or seven, but what harm could there be in stories?

  And that was true enough.

  And there was no telling how it happened, how Philip's father descended into the same madness that was the lot of most Lovecraft narrators, and opened the black abyss and let them in, a grotesque, unholy crew, the monstrous Old Ones that waited in eternity at the gates of Sleep and Time—Cthulhu, Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, Dagon, and the ones whose names were lost to time and to their own forgotten languages.

  They were creatures the mind could not quite encompass. Their shapes possessed an unholy geometry that shattered human reason. Often, it was not the monster itself that was perceived, but that truncated section that writhed in the visible world, the rest remaining in shadowy dimensions.

  Perhaps the drinking did it, or perhaps the drinking came after. In any event, a bitterness descended on Walter Kenan and he grew angry and violent. He would sit at the kitchen table drinking. He would be leaning forward, all his weight on his forearms, his straight dark hair falling over his eyes, hiding their haunted intensity. The hum of the refrigerator would fill the room. He would still be in his office clothes, his tie loosened, his white shirt wrinkled, the sleeves rolled past his elbows. He would talk to himself or turn and shout into the living room where Philip's mother was ironing.

  "It's the System," he would mutter. "The goddam, dog-pissed System." He would stand up suddenly, the frail kitchen chair falling and clattering behind him, and he would lurch to the refrigerator and wrench the door open and shout into it. "You goddam sons of bitches! You whoring, lying, cheating bastards."

  He would spy Philip, standing silent by the backdoor and he would shout, "You don't know shit about it. You think the System ain't gonna get you. It'll hold you down same as the rest. I don't see no wings sprouting from your backside."

  When not drunk—and sometimes, rarely, he was sober in these nightmares—Philip's father would be full of sadness and weariness. He would put an arm around Philip and say, "Don't lose your dreams, boy. Don't let any bastard steal your dreams, or trick you out of them with a pension and a promise. Don't let the System eat your soul."

  #

  The System. The Old Ones, crouched at the beginning of time, malevolent and patient. They thwarted all aspiration, all true and noble yearning. Ironically, the System bound Lovecraft himself to a life of poverty—so Philip's father raved, in drunken, lunatic eloquence—forcing the reclusive New Englander to eke out a near- starvation existence revising the dreadful scribblings of lesser writers and finally killing him with a cancer in the guts.

  The System was ubiquitous and merciless. Its minions were everywhere, from the President of the United States to the clerk at the hardware store to Claude Miller, who was Walter Kenan's supervisor at the office where Walter worked in the accounting department. The System's creatures were fellow office workers, mysteriously generated regulations, numbers, signs on the walls, one-way streets, radio announcers, movies. These were the puppets of the Dark Gods. The distinguishing feature of a creature of the System was this: It bore Walter Kenan malice and worked diligently to confuse, demoralize, and destroy Walter Kenan.

  Had it not been for the System, Philip's father would have been Somebody. The System had weakened Walter Kenan, had driven him to daily drinking, had saddled him with a shrill, ungrateful wife and a whining momma's boy for a son. Walter Kenan, who could have had a major league baseball career if the System hadn't set him up, would clutch tiny Philip's shoulders and lift him up and thum
p him against the wall, and say, "Are you listening to me? Look at me. I am trying to tell you the way it is. I am trying to prepare you."

  After his father's attempts at education, Philip would lie in bed and his mother would come in and put her hand on her son's forehead and tell him that his father was a good man who was under a lot of stress.

  One day things would be different, she said. She was a small woman with a round face and sad eyes—and it was only years later, when he found a photo of her in her high school yearbook, that Philip realized those eyes might have been capable of reflecting something other than pain.

  Sometimes Walter Kenan would hit his wife. Philip understood that the System was responsible for this. Once Philip had seen his mother on her knees on the kitchen floor, her hair in her face, her body shaking with sobs, a garish splash of red on the floor—which proved to be tomato soup but lay forever in Philip's mind in the terror of spilled blood. His father, reeling over his kneeling wife, had looked up at Philip and said, "Damn woman can't even cook soup."

  That night Philip's mother had again reassured her son that Walter Kenan was a good man and that one day things would be different. They were just having bad luck.

  "The System," her son said. Philip was nine years old.

  His mother smiled down at him.

  "I wish—" Philip said. And he stopped. He was not sure what he wished. And then it came to him: “I wish the System would kill him."

  "Oh Philip," his mother said. She leaned over and hugged him, and he could hear her labored breathing and smell the perfume she wore and feel the scratchy fabric of her waitress uniform. "You don't really mean that."

  But he had meant it. "Now I lay me down to sleep..." he prayed in the darkened room. But when he had finished his petition to his mother's invisible god, he turned to the one of power. He prayed to the System. "Kill him," he hissed. "Please." He prayed to Yog-Sothoth and ancient Cthulhu.

  #

  After Philip had been in the hospital a week, AL Bingham came to visit.

  “I don't like hospitals," Bingham said. He was wearing a hat, something a gangster in a forties film would have coveted, and a brown rumpled suit. No tie. "My wife went into a hospital for a routine check-up once, and that was the last of her. Doctor calls and says the test is positive, and I say, well that's a relief and he says no, positive isn't good. Negative is good. Positive means they shrink you with chemicals until you are small enough to bury in a shoe box."

  "I'm sorry," Philip said.

  Bingham waved a hand. "That was a long time ago. I just came to cheer you up. Was that your girlfriend I saw coming out of here?"

  Philip said that indeed it was, and that it looked like they might get back together again.

  "Hey, congratulations," Bingham said. "It's always good to see young folks resolve their differences. Life is short, et cetera."

  "It's not absolutely for sure yet," Philip said.

  She wants me to throw out my novel. She wants me to chuck 2000 pages. She wants me to rip my heart out and feed it to the paper shredder.

  "I'm sure it will work out," Bingham said. Like many old people, the tone of his voice seemed to add that it would not matter in the long run.

  "I got to get back to work," Bingham said. "Old Ralph is losing it. He keeps telling everyone that the typesetting broad will be back next week, when the way I hear it she is still unconscious. Eddie Shanks says our boss is just being optimistic, but I say he is losing it big time. He fired two printers last night, and this morning he hired some guy who doesn't speak

  English and spends three-fourths of his time in the bathroom."

  The old printer left, and Philip drifted back into fitful sleep.

  Well? Amelia had asked.

  I don't know. I don't know if I can do it.

  7.

  Ralph Pederson always said, "Insurance is / a racket," and, since he did not want his workers to appear to be gullible fools, he did not offer them health insurance until they had been with him two years. Consequently, Ralph's One-Day Résumés had very few employees who actually were insured. Philip, a new employee, was most definitely not insured.

  The hospital administration, running a cool

  eye over Philip's physical and financial health, decided the former was far better than the latter, and they had Philip on crutches and out the door in five days.

  Amelia drove Philip back to his apartment. She drove a small, maroon Honda, zipping through traffic with her usual flat-out, solemn concentration.

  The day was overcast with occasional tremors of rain. In Philip's apartment, the pots and pans were full of water and the air had a thick, mildewed flavor of defeat. Fortunately, Philip's stay in the hospital had coincided with mostly clear skies and good weather, the rain arriving late last night. Had it been otherwise, the carpet would have required more than Amelia's industry with towels and a hair dryer.

  Amelia helped him up the steps and into bed, a wobbly enterprise. His cast had been cut to mid-thigh, but it was still a huge, ungainly weight and Philip was weak and dizzy from the days of lying in bed.

  Amelia started setting the apartment to rights immediately. She found cans of soup in the cupboard.

  "You're welcome," she said, handing Philip a hot mug of chicken and rice soup. She went out the door and came back minutes later with the hospital plant. She put it down next to the sliding glass doors that led to the small deck and a view of the highway.

  "This is a nice place," she said. "Sort of basic. I think the plant helps. I see you've got a new computer."

  "Yes," Philip said, turning his head to look at the desk and the computer and printer that dominated it. "It really helps with the writing."

  Amelia looked at him with her X-ray eyes. "I guess so," she said finally, turning away. "Well, I better be going," she said. A hand on the door, she turned back to him. "Are you going to be all right here without anyone?" she asked. "I don't feel right about leaving you."

  "I'll be fine," Philip said. "Lily, my therapist, you met her, said she would come by. And I've got a phone, after all. The world is at my fingertips."

  "Okay. Call."

  And she was gone. No kiss this time. She had issued an. ultimatum in the hospital, and he had not replied. They were in limbo now, waiting. Philip waited himself, waited to see what he would do.

  "Throw that awful novel out," Amelia had said, "and I'll come back."

  The suspense was killing Philip. Would he do it? Could he?

  Philip could not sleep. The pain increased, and he had to struggle out of bed, balancing awkwardly with his crutches, and hobble into the kitchen to fill a glass with tap water and swallow the two yellow pills. By the time he was once again in bed and had elevated his leg with pillows, he was exhausted. Life was going to be an ordeal until the cast came off.

  The next morning Philip was awakened by a telephone call from Ralph Pederson.

  "They told me you were out of the hospital," Ralph said. He was shouting, no doubt in order to hear himself over the din of the presses. "I'm glad to hear it. That Helga was sure nuts. I would have called earlier, but I figured you could use some rest. I can tell you we could use you down here."

  Philip explained why he could not come into the office.

  "I won't lie to you," Ralph said. "I'm disappointed. I know you are probably not one hundred percent, but I was hoping you could manage at least a few hours down here. That's the mark of a real trooper, that willingness to go the extra mile, to make a few sacrifices when the business is in a jam."

  Ralph went on at some length, pausing only to shout orders to others in the shop.

  "I can't make it," Philip said. "Sorry." He hung up.

  Philip had just finished the elaborate business of washing himself without getting his cast wet, when Lily knocked on the door.

  "Just a minute," he shouted. He dressed and let her in.

  "I got some groceries," she said.

  Lily fixed breakfast: eggs and bacon and grapefruit and toast an
d cereal and coffee and juice. Philip did not tell her that he never ate breakfast. Eating breakfast always made him feel the way he imagined a python must feel after devouring a rabbit.

  "Okay," Lily said.

  Philip knew what was coming.

  "Counseling time," Lily said.

  #

  Philip hated talking about his life. It was not a good story, full of loose ends and implausibly motivated characters. There seemed to be no unifying theme, although perhaps that was the point of the whole exercise—to discover such a thing.