Résumé With Monsters (5 page)

"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.

"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
.