Flatulent Freddie waved a hand above his head. "Like stars in the sky," he said. "Seventeen floors of firecrackers. What do you think of that?" F.F. had strewn bombs throughout the building, in vents, taped to concrete pillars, under desks, behind vending machines, resting precariously on the acoustical tiling of ceilings.
"It's all linked through the mainframes. I can go to any computer in this joint, execute the command, and Kablam! the Philistines are dust again, and Jesus is hugging Himself for joy."
JESUS WOULDN'T WANT YOU TO BLOW UP MICROMEG. HE WOULDN'T WANT YOU TO KILL INNOCENT PEOPLE.
F.F.'s eyes grew wide. When he shook his head, his hair danced over his eyes. "You don't know poop about it," the fat boy said. "Jesus ain't happy about it, but He knows you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelet."
YOU CAN'T DO THIS THING.
"Yes I can. I see now that you are one of them. Jesus washed me clean of all ambition and doubt and lusting after power, and said, 'You are the only vessel I got for this job. You are the only one been virginized by the blood of the Lamb. You are a Sword and I am Wrath.'"
Philip hit the fat man in the nose with all his might. He dove forward, pushing Freddie back against a wobbly table that instantly collapsed, envelopes of all sizes leaping in the air.
#
Whup. Dr. Beasley was leaning forward, a look of concern on her noble if unattractive features.
"You are particularly anxious today, Philip."
"I seem to be really bouncing, doctor. One second I'm in MicroMeg with crazy F.F., then I'm back here, in group or, like now, talking to you."
"You may be experiencing some anxiety with the new medication," Dr. Beasley said.
"I'm on new medication?"
"Well, yes, we discussed it before."
Philip sighed. "I think I missed that discussion, doctor. Look, I think it is a bad idea to put me on any—I mean, any—medication right now. That could stop me flat on the wrong side of the tracks. I don't want to get stuck in MicroMeg. Doctor, I can't get stuck in MicroMeg!"
"Philip, please sit down."
#
Whup. Amelia was walking in front of Philip, out into the parking lot. A security guard named Hal Ketch accompanied them. The security guard was a thin, cold man who said he had once worked for the CIA. His uniform was black, immaculately pressed; the creases might have been crimped metal.
He lifted his static-wheezing radio and spoke into it, "I've escorted emps Price and Kenan to lot 9. I'm taking a tour, west through BuSubs. I'll be reentering through CS-One."
The radio coughed an acknowledgment.
The security guard nodded at Amelia and Philip and turned away. They watched him move across the empty parking lot, through pools of weak lamplight.
OUR VERY OWN NAZI.
Amelia laughed.
This is the night, Philip thought. I wouldn't be confused about the night.
They stood by the side of Amelia's Honda. She had a hand on the door.
"I'm exhausted," she said.
FOURTEEN-HOUR DAYS WILL DO THAT TO A PERSON.
"Yes. I guess so. Well, good night."
He walked across the lot to his own car. He got in, turned the key, and drove toward the exit.
Wait. There is a mistake here. This was the night. She was wearing her gray suit, and when she took it off, revealing her white, surprising flesh, Philip felt that he had stumbled to the heart of some extraordinary mystery—like the discovery of hope or renewal. She came out of the bathroom, the makeup washed from her face to reveal a less precise, more generous and wanton woman, and she smiled as though they had both been party to some deception, out there in the faceless, machine-hearted world, and that, having pulled it off, they were free to revel like children.
He pulled up to the exit, fumbled for his encoded card that would open the gate.
You asshole. Look!
The camera of his consciousness shifted. He was staring into the rearview mirror.
Yes.
Amelia's car sat in the desolation of the empty parking lot. Headlights glowed, then dimmed; flared again and sank to weaker, smaller orbs the color of weak tea.
Philip turned and drove back to Amelia.
HI.
"I think the battery is dead," she said. They both listened to the sound the engine made when she turned the key. A sound like a man with rusted lungs, hacking up handfuls of dirty pennies.
The coy sound of sudden romance.
I CAN DROP YOU OFF AT YOUR PLACE. IT IS WAY TOO LATE TO DO ANYTHING ABOUT IT TONIGHT.
"Thank you," Amelia said.
#
"Last night," Philip told Lily Metcalf, "I was back with Amelia the first time we made love."
"That's nice."
"Well, it was a little disturbing, actually."
"Oh." Lily Metcalf struck a match and lit her cigarette. You weren't supposed to smoke in these rooms, but Philip figured the woman had some clout. Her old student was the director, after all.
"Well, there was a voyeur quality; I wasn't really participating, of course. There were no physical sensations, so... I don't know."
He didn't really know just how to explain it.
Suffused with sadness.
Amelia had moved under him, her mouth a surprised, delighted O. She had reached a hand toward his face, touching his forehead as though checking for a fever.
He watched his own hand glide up her ribs and come to rest on her breast, more voluptuous and slightly larger than he had imagined it—and yes, he had been imagining it for fourteen months—and his other hand sought the black, clipped tangle of her hair, still wet from the shower.
She opened her mouth and spoke. "Amelia," she said.
He leaned forward; her marvelous eyes bloomed, full of dark intensity. Again, this time speaking each syllable slowly, she said, "A... meel... e.... ya."
Say it, you idiot. She wants you to say her name. She is here with you and she wants you to say her name, to tell her it is her and not blind sex that animates you.
AMELIA.
"Yes. Philip."
AMELIA. AMELIA.
The sadness came like a descent of locusts. He watched as the wildness grew, saw her shoulders glisten.
AMELIA.
I will win you back, he vowed. I will save you.
#
Whup. Olivia, their counselor in group, was a morning person. That is, she was aggressively cheerful in the morning, her voice containing a lilt that made Philip wince.
"Well," she said, slapping her hands on her blue-jeaned thighs, "This is Mr. Hatfield's last day. Would anyone like to say anything to him?"
Mr. Hatfield was a small, weary man who had never said anything in group. He was in the hospital for depression, and if appearances counted for anything, he was as depressed as he had been on the first day, his thick lips jutting out in an exaggerated pout, his eyes sunk into folds of despair. His reserve and misery were so great that even Olivia was incapable of calling him by his first name.
"Hang in there, Mr. Hatfield," the bald man said. "It's always darkest before the dawn."
"Lighten up," Sammy Phelam said.
"Find Jesus," Michael Jackson advised.
Flatulent Freddie had found Jesus, and Jesus had said, "MicroMeg is a satanic cult. You must tear it asunder. I will tell you how."
Jesus had revealed his plan to the devout mail clerk, who then constructed dozens of explosive devices. How often, when Philip had spied F.F. in an elevator, had that young man been busy doing the Lord's bidding? How often had polished engines of destruction resided at the bottom of the ubiquitous mail cart?
#
Whup. Flatulent Freddie had surprising strength. He came off the floor with a rush and lifted Philip off the ground. The room tilted, spun. Philip got up and lunged.
F.F. backed away, laughing. "Jesus is sharper than that," he said. "You can't sucker punch the Son of God."
JESUS DOESN'T WANT YOU TO DO THIS THING.
F.F. laughed again,
shaking his head. "I can be fooled. I'm mortal and frail. I thought you might be okay, cause you don't have the mark, and I've never spied you at their vile worship. But you are one of them, sure enough."
The mail clerk backed against a file cabinet, dragged open a drawer, and pulled out a revolver. The gun seemed almost comically large, a steel- blue, long barreled weapon.
THOU SHALT NOT KILL.
"That don't apply to Satan's Spawn," F.F. said. "Good try, though."
The room exploded.
Even knowing what was coming, the sound made the time-transported Philip jump, as though his soul might bang the roof of his mind.
The fat man's head flew back, spraying blood, hair, skull fragments.
Someone shoved past Philip to stand over the sprawled form of Flatulent Freddie. The uniformed man looked down at the corpse and spoke.
"Son of a bitch," the man said. "Thought you'd make me look bad, did you? Look who is looking bad now."
Hal Ketch turned and grinned at Philip. He blew on the end of his revolver, winked. "Guess he thought I was beating off in the furnace room."
Ketch put his gun back in his holster and walked over to Philip. He put an arm around Philip's shoulder. "Let's get out of here," he said.
In the hall, he leaned into Philip. "Look in my eyes," he said. Although Philip could not feel or smell, he knew that their noses were touching, and that the security guard's breath smelled of Listerine. He remembered.
"What do you see?" Hal Ketch asked.
I DON'T KNOW.
"What you see is a man who wants things to run smoothly. A man who was hired to do that, and who is doing it. Smoothly. This incident is closed. This incident didn't happen. You don't even talk about this to your girlfriend. You don't say, just making conversation, 'Guess who got his head shot off today?' You don't do it because you don't want anything to happen to her. Do you understand all that?"
Philip understood.
#
Whup. Lily Metcalf and Philip were outside, walking on the grounds. The sky was bright. A cool breeze rippled the leaves of the live oaks. The light under the trees skittered like a school of fish being chummed.
"You saw this mail clerk get killed, and you couldn't tell Amelia. That created a strain in the relationship."
"That was certainly part of it."
Lily came to a concrete bench and sat down.
"Well, that would be enough, I would think. What else?"
"Amelia really hated my novel."
#
Whup. Amelia's voice called down the hall. "Philip. Philip. What are you doing? Come to bed."
JUST A MINUTE, HONEY. I'M FINISHING THIS CHAPTER.
Philip watched the green letters appear, glowing, on the computer screen.
Thank you, God, for inventing the word processor during my lifetime. I know you might have used the same time to alleviate poverty, or end war and disease, but I personally applaud your priorities here. I am, after all, a writer. Thank you.
They were living together now, the both of them working long hours at MicroMeg, and time away from the office was at a premium.
The letters formed words, the words, a paragraph:
A kind of green-grayish mold dripped from the walls and covered all the furniture, like kudzu on a hillside.
Professor Rodgen swung his flashlight in a slow arc. A damp, dismal miasma choked him.
"There!" Weaver exclaimed.
Something shaped vaguely like a man sat at the gray, feathered desk. What were once hands floated upward, shielding the hollows where eyes might lie from the glare of the flashlight.
"Approach no further," the creature said, each word laboriously expelled as though breaking flesh and tooth and bone in its effort to come free from the rotting body.
"If you value your sanity, professor, come no closer. We were colleagues once. I was your intellectual superior, and I outran you, and this is the prize I won."
Something in the ruined voice was familiar. Professor Rodgen, with misgivings, edged forward.
“Dr. Armitridge? Is that you?"
Amelia came up behind Philip and put her arms around his neck. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.
"Come to bed, Philip," she said.
FIVE MINUTES, he said. He reached back and touched her shoulder.
"Right now. I know your five minutes," she said.
OKAY. I'M COMING.
He saved what he had written, exited the program, turned the monitor off.
Philip watched their lovemaking which took place in the country of fatigue amid the small, tiny betrayals of living together and the slow, crafted affection of their daily intertwining.
And the sadness assailed him again.
5.
Amelia woke him in the morning, and he had a moment of disorientation when he saw her there, dressed in her tan suit, poised for workday battle. "Why didn't you wake me?" he muttered. Amelia always arose without an alarm clock, took the first shower, and then woke him. They drove to work together, although their jobs had
diverged and they no longer worked on the same floor of MicroMeg.
He came fully out of sleep and saw the room, its fraudulent brightness, its air of brief, transitory inhabitation by this Philip Kenan and his small store of identity-confirming possessions: the books, the Cezanne poster, the picture of Amelia feeding seagulls at the beach.
"I apologize for waking you up," she said. "Last night when I went by your place to get your mail, there was this. It's from your agent. I figured you'd want to see it." Amelia extended her hand with the bulky envelope. "I thought I would swing by here before going to work. I didn't know what time I'd be getting off work."
"Thank you," Philip said. He felt sleepy and at a disadvantage, a middle-aged man awakened in a psych ward by his ex-girlfriend. He had become what Lovecraft would call a "decayed" member of the Kenan tribe, his hair sticking out in unfortunate clumps, his face in the mirror pale and slack-jawed and stupefied, like a drugged killer rousted out of sleep by the cops.
"Agent?" he said, blinking at the letter. He said it much the way a muddled felon might have said, "Murder?"
He read the return address, "James Pierce Literary Agency." He remembered then, surprised himself with the memory. He had written to one of the agents Wingate House had suggested when the editor there sent along the contract. "Oh yes."
He put the envelope on the end table. He smiled at Amelia.
"How's Pelidyne ?"
Amelia smiled. "Busy. Really crazy. I've been
working a lot of overtime."
#
Whup. An entirely different set of colored pencils were used to chart overtime on the mandatory TAT form.
Overtime was charted with the complement of the color used to chart normal time. Should one forget the color scheme for overtime, a simple look at a color wheel could set one straight (provided, of course, that one could remember the regular scheme). It was a bit complicated at first, but it was ingenious.
Philip sat on the low bed and colored in three TAT forms. He'd gotten behind. He had been working a lot of overtime recently. So much so that he had adopted the Quality Domicile incentive program, spending his nights in one of the minimal converted living quarters which constituted the entire fourteenth floor and part of the fifteenth and sixteenth.
Amelia had also been closeted in the building for the last couple of weeks. Philip had not seen her, although he had talked to her on the phone. The fourteenth floor was a male dorm, closed to women.
Résumé With Monsters Page 13