Résumé With Monsters (17 page)

I hate this
, Philip thought.

#

Lily Metcalf came to see him that evening. She came into his room and sat on his bed.

"Flipped out, did you?" she said.

"That's not a very professional diagnosis," Philip said, huffily.

"You're right. I apologize." She studied her hands as they knotted together in her lap. She was wearing a large, bulky gray dress and a straw hat. Strands of dry, gray hair drifted across her ravaged cheeks.

My therapist is ancient
, Philip thought.

Lily looked up. "I get glib when I'm worried. I knew you would be a heartbreaking client."

"I'm sorry," Philip said.

Lily waved away his apology. "I only put that ad in the paper one day. I was retired, and I thought, maybe just a few clients wouldn't hurt. You are my only client, you know."

"I'm sorry."

"Dr. Metcalf?"

Lily turned. Dr. Ann Beasley was standing in the doorway.

Lily smiled. "Hi, Ann."

Dr. Beasley came into the room and hugged the older woman. “I was just walking down the hall and I saw you. Obviously, you've met Mr.
Kenan
."

"He's my client."

"Oh." She looked at Philip with new interest. "He didn't mention you."

"He's probably ashamed of me," Lily said.

The younger woman laughed. "Dr. Metcalf was one of my professors at UT," she said. "She's the best."

Philip smiled, pleased. Frankly, he had thought of his therapist as an economy measure, the best he could do on a budget, and, while he liked her, he had not suspected she had any real professional standing. And yet here was the director of his present psychiatric abode saying that Lily Metcalf was the best.

Amelia called later. She sounded better, more controlled. She talked about her job at
Pelidyne
.

"I'm time allotment manager this week," she told him; he did not ask her to elaborate, although he was concerned. It was always a bad sign when an employee began speaking of job
arcana
as though it had life and relevance outside its System. Nowadays, Philip always looked for the incision or the plug-in module when he encountered someone who said something like, "We are having a hell of a problem distributing the T jags on the Nimbus net." It was symptomatic of zombies to believe that everyone shared the same information lines, that everyone was on the team.

#

Time allotment
. Perhaps the time ricochet was governed by free association links. Philip was sitting at a long table with Amelia, explaining
MicroMeg's
time accountability table, referred to by all employees—most of whom had long ago forgotten what the acronym actually stood for— as a "tat."

YOU GET A NEW TAT ON THURSDAYS.

Philip studied the side of Amelia's face. She was listening to the instructions with the focused attention of an A student. Her straight black hair drifted forward slightly; her mouth was pursed in a small, pink bow of concentration. He longed to push one errant strand of dark hair back into place, and he could even remember wanting to do so before—
again and again this strange overlapping of the then and the now
.

EACH BLOCK REPRESENTS A SIX- MINUTE PERIOD.

Philip watched himself describe what each color stood for, picking up the colored pencil and filling in a block. The idea was to account for every six-minute period of time by coloring in a block with a color that indicated the nature of the task.

"Is there a color for the time required to fill in this form every day?" Amelia asked. Everyone asked this.

No, there was not, but management applied a formula to the number of colors used on any line, determining an average time for the filling out of that line, and subtracted that amount from the totals per line.

Amelia asked another question.

JUST LIE, was the answer.

"Lie?"

CERTAINLY.

Amelia had wanted to know how this rather complicated time accounting worked under the pressure of deadlines. How could she keep such a precise account while racing to complete a job before deadline?

An employee's familiarity with the business world could be judged by the response Philip's answer (LIE) engendered. People who had been employed by a corporation simply nodded their heads—or, more often, didn't even ask such a question.

Amelia was obviously new to the world of corporate employment and, consequently, dismayed by Philip's answer. Randomly filling in blocks with whatever colored pencil came to hand would render the data worthless, wouldn't it?

WELL, YES. IN A WAY.

Philip was saddened to see the look of reproach in his true love's eyes. Time and experience would, of course, soften that expression, but that didn't make it any less painful.

Philip listened to himself explain. It was a dismal business, this explaining. The truth could sometimes seem like the worst sort of cynicism when that was not what it was at all.

The data acquired wasn't exactly worthless. True, it was not accurate, but it was more important to have data than to have accurate data. If you did not have data, you could not manipulate it, you could not determine how efficient people were in January as opposed to July or what percentage of in-house jobs took time from outside clients or whether instructional,
unbillable
time was up or down. Without data,
MicroMeg's
entire Quality team would have nothing to do, would look like irrelevant staff, would be fired. We were talking here of human beings with families to support.

Amelia told Philip that she intended to be as accurate in her accounting as humanly possible. She raised her chin in a challenging manner as she said this.

The course of true love never runs smooth.

After work, Philip visited his friend Todd
Tillick
. Todd lived in a small house in Sterling, Virginia, a twenty minute drive from Fairfax.

Todd was just recuperating from an unrequited love affair with a topless dancer named Doris, and he was cynical about male/ female relationships. He wasn't optimistic about Philip's chances of winning Amelia's heart.

"Women don't want to do anything but dance naked and drink beer," he said. "You should forget about that bimbo and concentrate on your art."

It was chilly in the house, and Todd was wearing several sweaters and a stocking cap. The floor of the room was covered with paperback books, magazines, beer cans, record albums, and unrecognizable, gutted electronic equipment.

I LOVE HER, Philip said.

Todd sucked on a beer and glowered. "It's your funeral," he said.

#

Whup
. He was in group. The topic was relationships. The time jumps really might be thematic, flying across the years to a kindred idea. If so... if so, could he control them?

"Philip," the group leader Olivia asked, "are you with us today?"

"Yes," Philip said. "I'm right here." He had a flitting, disheartening thought. When he wasn't here, who was? Was his physical body inhabited by one of the Old Ones? Did impossibly ancient eyes study these surroundings, gaze coldly at his companions? And, if so, did his fellow patients notice anything different?

A woman in her late twenties was talking about her abusive boyfriend.

"He doesn't mean it," she said. "He's just passionate in every way. It's a tradeoff."

He had tied her to a bed, poured gasoline over her, and threatened to set her on fire, striking matches and blowing them out when they were inches from her nose.

"He was just trying to get a rise out of me," she said. "I know him."

The woman who was Michael Jackson interrupted. "My hair caught on fire once," she said.

Several people shouted at her to shut up.

The bald man, who seemed to have a penchant for platitudes which covered a deep, solid craziness that probably trumped the insanity of everyone else in group, said, "I cried for not having shoes, until I saw a man who had no feet."

AL Bingham came by in the evening. He brought a card signed by everyone in the office, including Monica and Ralph Pederson, both of whom were just fine.

"Stress," Bingham said. "You were just under too much stress. I read an article about stress once. It's a
mutherfucker
. It's a matter of concentration. You got to focus on a very narrow band, you know. Otherwise, there is too much stuff to look at and think about, like being fired or your car breaking down or getting cancer or losing your mind—whoops—or being called up for jury duty or being arrested for socially unacceptable behavior. Thinking is a dead end.

Look at mice. What if a mouse was always thinking, 'Jesus God, I am on everyone's food chain. Owls, foxes, cats, snakes, you name it. What was that!'? The thing is, you can't dwell on your situation."

"Monica is dead," Philip said.

"She is setting a lot of type for a dead person," Bingham said. "Her fingers are flying."

"She may be productive," Philip said, "but she isn't alive. I should know. I killed her. It was an accident, but that doesn't make her any less dead."

Lily Metcalf arrived while Bingham was still there. She introduced herself.

"I've never met a psychiatrist," Bingham said.

"You still haven't," Lily said. "I'm a psychologist."

Bingham seemed very impressed with the woman. He stayed while Lily asked Philip how he was doing.

"I'm okay," Philip said. He leaned past her and said, "It was nice of you to come by, Al."

The old printer smiled.

"Your friend doesn't have to leave," Lily said. "I can only stay a minute. I just wanted to check in. How are you feeling?"

"I keep being flung back to MicroMeg."

Lily nodded. "Got to stop that," she said. "Maybe I can haul you back permanently with some hypnosis. But not today, I've got to run."

Bingham followed her out.

Philip could hear Bingham speaking as they moved off down the hall.

"You think I'm too old for therapy?" Bingham was asking.

"You are never too old for therapy," Lily answered.

4.

The basement. He was in the basement.

He had run out of eight-inch photo paper for the typesetting machine, and he had come down to the basement, but the supply room wasn't where he remembered it. He had peered into two ill-lit rooms full of mop buckets, floor
waxers
, drums of chemicals. Now this third room... another clutter.

He knew what was going to happen. He remembered.

He was in the seventh year of MicroMeg. Amelia and he were living together now, fighting about the time his book consumed, wrestling with the nature of commitment. They owned a cat named Speedo. They had purchased a car together. The car was not running very well.

He pushed open the door. At the end of the room a figure hunched over a table. On the table itself, an oscilloscope's screen displayed an undulating snake of green. A rubble of machinery extended spiky wires. The figure stood up, silhouetted against the bright ceiling lights, and moved swiftly toward Philip.

WHO'S THAT?

You know. F.F. Flatulent Freddie.

His black hair hanging down in his face, sweat rolling off his cheeks, eyes rolling, F.F. stood in front of Philip.

"You shouldn't be in here," he said.

I'M LOOKING FOR THE STOCKROOM FOR GRAPHICS.

F.F. reached forward suddenly and grabbed Philip's right hand, tugging it forward. He turned the hand palm up and studied the wrist. He grunted.