In any event, Ronald Bickwithers' words proved so inspirational that two members of the graphics staff left that very day, one of them a paste-up artist, a thin, blond woman who said, "Wow. I'm out of here. I'm hanging on to my spleen."
They filled the vacated paste-up position with Amelia Price.
So, think. When did Amelia get hired? How soon after Merv left? Not long, they were dreadfully understaffed and...
The elevator door opened. It made all the usual noises, the fanfare of electrical industry: Hoooooeeeeeeee waaaaaaahummmmmmm. The door opened.
GO ON AHEAD. I'M WAITING FOR SOMEONE.
Philip could translate now. He had found the secret of parsing the roaring sentences of his host. And Philip knew, of course, why this Philip had lied.
You did not get on the elevator when it was already occupied by Fred Linquest, more commonly referred to as F.F. (Flatulent Freddie). Freddie was a large, shy young man who worked in the mailroom and who, like certain species of fish in tropic waters, kept potential predators at a distance by secreting various noxious poisons. Being paranoid, Freddie saw all his fellow workers as dangerous.
Freddie, dark hair hanging in his face, mail cart in front, nodded grimly and pushed the button, closing the door.
Philip caught the next elevator to the fifth floor.
Amelia. She was standing in the middle of the workroom, turning slowly as Bickwithers spoke in her ear and indicated the various graphics computers and equipment.
This was her first day. Philip had been transported into the past to the very day of Amelia's arrival at MicroMeg.
Philip actually remembered this first day. He remembered her standing there before, just so, a small, heavily made-up girl with a round face and a page-boy cut to her black hair, her chin thrust forward with a certain challenging air (the mustered-up toughness of a shy kid), her small body compactly enclosed in a brown suit, a formidably-sized briefcase in her left hand. And he remembered something else, something so extraordinary, in light of his present circumstances, that he threatened to lose himself in the ramifications of this revelation.
When he had first seen Amelia he had thought, Her name's Amelia.
He had told her that later, and she had said, "No way. Really?"
A tiny voice had told him her name.
He tried not to think about the mind- boggling notion of such a circle in time. In any event, he was being introduced. PLEASED TO MEET YOU.
God, what a formal asshole. Transmigration to an earlier self could be embarrassing.
Amelia didn't seem to notice this rod-up-the- ass behavior, however. She was, herself, shy and consequently somewhat stiff. She extended a hand and said, "Nice to meet you. I'm Amelia Price."
Philip loved the way her mouth, bright with orange lipstick, formed and expelled words with more animation than the average mouth. There was something tentative about this, as though she were improvising an entirely new language and might, at any minute, be unmasked.
"Those are lovely sounds," someone might sternly declare, "but they aren't words, my sly girl."
She would be flustered then, silenced in mid- sentence, staring at the floor.
And Philip, like hormone-addled Romeo, fell in love with her instantly—in the loutish, superficial manner of all romantics.
Except that now he wondered. That love-at- first-sight that his memory served up might be something quite different. Perhaps he had come to love her slowly over time, to dote not merely on the music of her voice or her exotic use of mascara, but on her soul, which was fearless when encountering injustice and full of quick compassion for the less fortunate.
It was possible that his love had grown solid and deep over time, and that now it was this experience-born lover, this ghost from the future, that influenced their first meeting.
Once again, Philip felt disoriented by all the implications of such influence.
"Let's meet the rest of the team," Bickwithers said, and he led her away. Philip watched as Bickwithers introduced her to a printer named Lonnie Hark, who took his baseball cap off and shook her hand slowly.
Philip went to his own drafting table and began creating another flow chart, box upon box of names and titles, locked in the labyrinth of MicroMeg, one of the world's largest corporations.
He did not see Amelia again that day, and although he would have liked to seek her out, he was not in charge. Quitting time came, and the container of his consciousness crowded into an elevator with other exhausted workers and rode it to the ground floor.
That night in his apartment, he watched as he typed his novel. He did not yet own a computer—although he would buy one soon; he had been saving to do so—and he typed cautiously, slowly, since any error carried with it a sense of failure, and the cumulative effect of botched words or x-ed out sentences could engender an almost suicidal sense of defeat. He would look up sometimes, and Philip would take advantage of these moments. He was not privy to his host's creative ruminations, but the stares into space (although fuzzy thanks to the out-of- kilter focus the muse required) allowed Philip to study the room. His memory was all the resolution he required to identify certain objects.
The apartment, an efficiency, saddened him. It was smaller than his memory's version, and shabbier. Hanging on the wall was a picture of Elaine and him at the beach. They had prevailed upon the man who ran the hot dog concession to snap the picture. Cameras were not that old man's long suit, and he had barely managed to fit them in the frame. So the subject of the picture appeared to be a yellow dog, a mangy stray that growled when Philip tried to pet it.
And granted that Elaine's smile was winsome, there in the corner of the frame, and that Philip himself appeared to be caught in a moment of rare, open-mouthed laughter, still, the question remained: What had possessed him to hang such a picture? Masochism? Hiding a stain perhaps?
That's me. That's my dead wife. A suicide. I have an eight-by-ten of my dead father—another suicide— around here somewhere. It was hanging up for awhile but one night it shattered—inexplicably I think, although I may have actually thrown something at it.
There were the bookcases full of paperback books, and the inexpensive stereo system, the turntable of which had to be given a spin with a forefinger to overcome some mysterious internal inertia. There were several of Elaine's paintings, full of an energy that seemed to hurl the rest of the room into desolate shadow. A sofa, whose missing leg had been replaced by hardback books unworthy of shelf space, looked less welcoming than a sidewalk grate and the end table next to it was flimsy beyond belief.
It didn't take long to exhaust this study, and when his host began typing again, Philip studied the faint, marching characters—a new ribbon was in order—with interest.
He read,
They scaled the side of the bleak mountain, pausing to look back on the abyss.
“What's that? Profes’sor Rodgen asked, pointing to a rock some forty feet below, a rock from which a shadow detached and moved into the sunlight.
“Why, I believe that's Dr. Patterson,” Weaver said.
"I thought he was dead, crushed in that rock slide."
"I could have sworn he was," Weaver said. "But it's him. I can see him clearly now. And he looks none the worse for wear, except for that curious hat and cape."
"He always was a bit of a dandy, " Professor Rodgen said.
"Wait," Weaver said. "That's not wearing apparel at all, that's—"
Wearing apparel? Philip sighed. Forget it, he thought, straining in what he hoped passed for the telepathic equivalent of a shout. You are going to throw this whole scene out anyway.
SHIT.
A hand reached up, tore the page from the typewriter, and tossed it toward the wastebasket. Philip found himself moving away from the typewriter, across the room, into the bathroom. Philip watched himself brush his teeth. Philip saw himself in the mirror. He looked younger and dumber.
Philip felt oddly detached, alienated. Well, why not? It might even be a definition. Ali
enated: Having been transported back in time by aliens.
The bedroom was a tiny room containing a bed, a floor lamp, and a narrow bookcase for paperbacks. Somehow a scruffy dresser had insinuated its way into the room, pathetically pretending to be a legitimate piece of furniture.
Philip watched as a dresser drawer was opened by artful jiggling. A copy of Hustler magazine was extracted.
Great, Philip thought.
Can you be, Philip wondered, your own voyeur?
Clothing flew into a lump on the floor. Underpants were removed.
The slick, shiny pages flicked by. Then paused.
Her? Come on, she's not even our type.
It was over quick enough, foreplay being optional with two-dimensional women.
Philip felt faintly disgusted, and as the portals of his world shut, enclosing him in darkness, he thought of how unpleasant it would be to reside with his younger self for any substantial period of time.
And he thought of Amelia, dear, sweet, large- hearted Amelia.
Look out! he wanted to scream. This guy is a moron.
2.
How did you sleep, Phil?" the woman asked. Her name was Dr. Ann Beasley, and she was a gray-haired, middle-aged woman who managed to look a little like the young Abraham Lincoln.
"I didn't sleep at all," Philip said. "I was back at MicroMeg."
The woman nodded. "You dreamed you were at MicroMeg."
"No, I was at MicroMeg."
"Philip, do you know why you are here?" "Ah—"
"You were standing on the highway. It was late at night. Cars were swerving to avoid hitting you. The police were called. When they got there, your employer, a Mr. Pederson, had taken you to the side of the road. He was trying to calm you down. Do you remember any of this?"
"I'm afraid not," Philip said. He looked around the office. It was small, dominated by the psychiatrist's desk. Various official documents hung on the walls. A small window offered a view of a city street, bright sunlight, traffic.
"You were not coherent," Dr. Beasley continued. "When you were brought in, one of the ward clerks said you were speaking in a foreign language."
"That would be Latin," Philip said. "The corrupt Latin of Olaus Wormius who translated the Necronomicon. There is no extant version in Arabic, you know."
The woman leaned forward across her desk. "You have an explanation then, for your behavior?"
Philip nodded. "I appear to be caught in a reverberating time loop," he said. "It may have something to do with the Great Leap planned by the Old Ones. MicroMeg was to be the nexus for that jump, but that was thwarted by other influences."
"You feel you are caught in some cosmic war, then?" the doctor asked.
Philip sensed that she wasn't entirely with him on this, but then it wasn't an easy concept to get your mind around. His own mind did not embrace it willingly.
"It's not a war exactly," Philip said. "The Old Ones are taking a telepathic leap from pre- Pleistocene times. The Pnakotic manuscripts suggested that they would leap beyond the reign of man, into sentient crustaceanlike beings, the next dominant life form on the planet. I think Lovecraft was mistaken on this. I think they are coming into our world, what you could loosely call 'now.' My own involvement is peripheral. I was just in the wrong continuum at the wrong time. I got pulled along. I'm nothing to them."
Dr. Beasley nodded her head.
Good, Philip thought, I'm getting through.
But this was not, in fact, the case. Dr. Beasley said that she had talked, by phone, to Philip's friend Amelia Price who was quite concerned.
And Amelia's interpretation of events was, alas, dismally skewed.
"She tells me," the doctor said, "that you have written a very long book about these monsters."
"It's a novel," Philip said. "I hadn't intended it to be so long; it just got away."
"Got away," the doctor mused, tilting her head backward for a second. "Your choice of words is in keeping with your friend's belief that the years you have worked on this book may have caused some blurring of the boundary between fact and fiction. There are clinical conditions, forms of schizophrenia, that operate in this fashion. She says you have taken medications for such conditions in the past. Let's see." The doctor flipped the page on a legal pad. "Yes. You were hospitalized at Northern Virginia Mental Health in 1982."
Philip sighed. This interview wasn't going at all well. That morning when he had awakened and determined that he was in a psychiatric hospital, he had rejoiced. To live in that past, to haunt the armageddon halls of MicroMeg, would have been more than he could have borne.
But now he saw that he was not out of the woods, not yet a free man.
He would try a reasoned approach. "Mental health," he said, "is a relative term. I think I have come through pretty well, considering. Do you mind if I quote Lovecraft? He says"—here Philip leaned back and studied the ceiling, to give his mind a clear screen for the scrolling of internal words— "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
Dr. Beasley smiled. Philip felt a sense of triumph. It was always satisfying to see logic triumph.
"We'd like you to stay with us for a little while," she said. "There is often a physiological basis for this sort of thing, and it can be controlled by medication."
Philip sighed. Be philosophical, he counseled himself. You can't expect someone who has never gazed on the naked visage of Yog-Sothoth to understand the mind's essential fragility.
That afternoon, Philip found himself in a circle with other crazy people. The group was led by a pretty, dark-haired woman who insisted that people call her Olivia.
"Why don't we all begin by telling something about ourselves," Olivia asked. She said she would start, and she talked about her cats and how she went to school and got a Ph.D. but still didn't feel like a grown-up.
When it was Philip's turn to share, he said, "I'm forty-five years old, and I came to Austin to win back my girlfriend. She refuses to believe that an ancient, super-intelligent race of cone- shaped beings inhabiting pre-Pleistocene times are responsible for the breakup. I've got to convince her; I've got to recover her love." He admitted that he didn't feel adequate to the task.
Although it was difficult to tell—Philip had very little experience reading crazy people—the group seemed to accept this without shock or incredulity. Indeed, it was the next person to share, a middle-aged white woman, who elicited some argument and anger.
"I'm Michael Jackson," she said. "You all know who I am already. I'm depressed because everybody is always after me."
"You done betrayed your people," shouted a large black man in a blue tank top.
"See there!" she screamed. "See there! Just like I said. Everybody is after me."
"I'm not sharing in no room with a traitor," the man said, folding his arms and glaring at the ceiling.
That evening after dinner, Philip went to his room and lay down on the bed. One of the residents knocked on the door and told him he had a phone call.
It was Amelia. She asked how he was doing.
"I'm fine," he said.
Amelia began to cry then. Philip hated that. He stood there in the hall, cradling the phone's receiver to his chest and rocking it. Her sobs penetrated his rib cage and battered his heart. He lifted the phone again and spoke into it.
"Amelia," he said. "It's not hopeless. I promise you it is not hopeless. I won't let anything happen to you."
But she just cried louder at that, and finally, when she began to wind down, she said, "I
've got to go, Philip. I'll talk to you later." She hung up.
Philip went back to his room, heartsick, and lay on the bed. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them he was at MicroMeg again. He wasn't even surprised.
FREELANCE.
Philip stared out from behind his eyes at a large, broad-shouldered man with a very smooth face and rudimentary features. Philip could not remember the man's name—the man had been fired shortly after hiring Philip—but he remembered the day.
I WORKED FREELANCE DURING THAT PERIOD.
Résumé With Monsters Page 11