Résumé With Monsters (30 page)

The potential new employees—there were five of them besides Philip, three men and two women—were ushered into a conference room with a long, mahogany table and a television and video tape player at one end. Mr. Melrose was there to greet them, smiling and blander than the man Philip remembered.

Melrose's assistant, an extremely round, extremely bald man who ducked his head, smiled even more relentlessly, and reminded Philip of a dog that has been beaten into fawning servility, passed out a variety of forms that required filling out. Everyone bent to this task with stoic energy.

Philip logged his tax status and employment history and education. He puzzled over what sort of benefits package he would prefer. Did he want an HMO or Blue Shield? Did he wish to apply to the credit union? In the event of death on the job, who was his beneficiary? Was he willing to have his urine searched for mind-altering substances?

Melrose's assistant, Bob, explained each form and fielded questions. Philip's mind drifted, as it always did when confronted with a form, and he came back to an awareness of his surroundings just as one of the women was asking what would happen if she got pregnant.

The question hung in the air. Philip reflected that women were forever asking this question and that Bob looked as uncomfortable as most men do on hearing it. Philip hoped that Bob would say the right thing, would say that he would marry her, but the question actually concerned health insurance and maternity leave and Bob answered it appropriately.

When the forms were filled out and gathered by Bob, Melrose took over again, saying how delighted he was to have everyone on board.

He told them that
Pelidyne
was not some overgrown corporate giant, shackled by its size and history, that it was a dynamic, ever-changing corporation that wanted to hear from each and every employee. Melrose asked Bob to dim the lights. Melrose turned on the monitor and started the video.

The video was an overview of
Pelidyne
, beginning with an airplane soaring over blue lakes. The video had been played for countless orientation classes, and its soundtrack (which Philip identified as generic TV newscaster intro music) wobbled some and the image fuzzed at the edges.

The scene changed. A man behind a desk began to talk.

Behind the man a paneled window showed bright skies and cumulus clouds. No monsters patrolled the blue skies, but Philip was certain it was the same gray and silver office where he had first met Melrose.

Melrose was not behind the desk however. A kindly, gray-haired man wearing a blue suit smiled at the camera and spoke as though addressing an old friend. He talked about
Pelidyne's
vision of the world as a better place.

As he talked,
Pelidyne's
diversity was illustrated. People were shown working in labs. People of a more blue-collared aspect were shown welding convoluted metal structures.
Pelidyne's
investment and insurance holdings were illustrated with shots of a bustling office filled with smiling people who exchanged paper documents or pointed at computer screens with delight. The women were all elegantly dressed, tottering on high heels. The men wore conservative suits.

The message of the video was simple: The sooner America was entirely owned by
Pelidyne
and its subsidiaries, the better, since
Pelidyne
was everything good and noble about the American way. At the end of the video, two of the men and one of the women applauded.

In what Philip saw as a particularly shameless bit of toadying, one of the men stood up and shouted, "Bravo! Bravo!"

The next video was an instructional piece, designed to show new employees the proper way to relate to their fellow office workers and supervisors. There was something amateurish about this production. The actors delivered their lines in self-conscious, awkward bursts surrounded by dead air.

Philip did not give the video his complete attention. Each skit boiled down to a simple injunction: Do not gossip. Do not argue with your supervisor. Do not loaf. Do not dress outrageously. Do not waste electricity. Do not steal office supplies.

Philip doodled a cartoon dog on the legal pad he had brought with him. The dog's head was tilted back, its mouth open.

"
Oooooooooooooooooh
," Philip wrote inside the cartoon balloon erupting from the canine's mouth.

Philip looked up when he heard Amelia's voice.

Amelia was in the video!

Philip leaned forward. He hoped he hadn't missed much.

Apparently he hadn't. The narrator's voice- over was saying, "There are times when any job will make additional demands on its employees. Deadlines have to be met, and it is an unfortunate fact of life that sometimes several projects will come due at the same time. At such times, you may be required to make an extra effort."

Amelia was shown holding the phone's receiver to her mouth. "Paul," she said, "I'm just leaving. I'll be at your house in a half hour, and we can go to dinner and that show. I'm really looking forward to it."

At this moment, the actor who played everyone's supervisor came on stage.

"Ms. Smith," he said. "The
Brodkey
project has to be on a plane at eight tomorrow morning. Can you work on it this evening?"

"I'm sorry Mr. Johnson," Amelia said. "I have a date for this evening."

Good for you
, Philip thought—but of course this was the bad scenario, the one demonstrating a poisonous lack of company pride and team spirit.

The makers of this video foresaw the possibility that morons might view it and fail to understand that what was being portrayed was not being condoned. To demonstrate that these first scenes were examples of bad attitude and unacceptable behavior, a frame was frozen and the universal symbol of a circle with a slash was imposed over the still.

Philip was staring at Amelia's face. The narrator's voice-over continued, but Philip could not hear the words.

He was suddenly terrified for Amelia. The stark symbol of negation that overlay her features seemed blatantly threatening, a sort of totalitarian curse, a mark of doom.

"Amelia!" Philip shouted, and he stood up, moving toward the screen.

The figures on the screen were animate again, unwinding in a positive example of workplace solidarity and loyalty.

Philip placed his palms flat on the screen, preparing to topple it over, already anticipating the satisfying explosion of the picture tube. The confusion around him was considerable: shouts, a chair tumbling over, the blur of bodies in motion.

His chest was encircled by unforgiving, powerful bonds. A deathly cold enclosed his heart. He was yanked backward.

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the creature slide from beneath the conference table. It seemed to move in several directions at once, and yet Philip was certain it was a single entity, its chaos possessing logic in a different dimension.

A fleshy hand slapped at his face, slid to cover his mouth and silence his screams. Philip bit down on the flesh between thumb and forefinger and was rewarded with the cause-and-effect of a scream that had a train-going-into-a-tunnel quality as the room darkened and came to an abrupt, black standstill.

When Philip awoke it was night outside. He went to the window and looked out at the parking lot.

Here I am again.

He would tell Sissy to go home, go back to r £ s un £ with monsters

Florida. He would elicit Lily's help in sending her away.

"I'm afraid Philip is not getting better," Lily could tell Sissy. "I'm afraid he's out there on the open sea, about as far as you can get from solid land."

Philip hoped, of course, that Sissy would protest. "Philip is an artist," she would say. "He is coming to terms with his art."

Lily would be eloquent, though: "The terms are insanity, honey. Philip is bug-house, cock- waving, sheer-slobbering Insane. Not to put it too bluntly."

Philip found his clothes and put them on. He walked out into the
rec
room and turned the television on. He was beginning to feel at home here, a frequent flyer in his hometown airport. He watched an old Charlie Chan movie, seeking some clue to his plight in the broken-English wisdom of the Chinese detective. Nothing profound came to him, and he drifted back to his room and lay on the bed.

Something crackled in his pocket, and he reached in and pulled out the check, unfolded it and stared at the line of zeroes.

Well.

In the morning he filled out one of the two crumpled deposit slips he kept in his wallet, bummed an envelope and a stamp from a nurse, addressed the envelope to his bank, and asked the ward clerk if she would mail it on her lunch break.

She assured him she would. He ate breakfast and went to group.

8.

Routine is a drug, Philip thought, filling the mind with lethargy, turning the extraordinary events of life into so many telephone poles whipping by as you drive down a flat west Texas highway.

Routine kicked in quicker than the psychotropic drugs. Every morning there was group. A fat teenager complained about how his teachers hated him (which, Philip expected, was true), and an elderly man talked about how he had suddenly become frightened by his penis, and a woman named Martha kept trying to get everyone to pray. She was tireless in this endeavor, keeping after the group the way a teenage boy will hammer away at his girlfriend's sexual reservations. "We could get down on our knees. Just for a minute. Jesus don't need no long
drawed
out story. We could just say hello to Jesus and..."

Philip said he was recovering from another attack by ancient monsters from out of space and time. No one commented on this, although a gloomy, dark-skinned man nodded his head sadly.

In the afternoons, Philip would talk to Dr. Beasley or Lily. AL Bingham would sometimes visit. Sissy came every day.

Bingham came in one day at around six in the evening just as Sissy was leaving. He watched her go.

"That's a fine-looking woman," he said.

Philip sat in the bed, his lap filled with mail she had brought from the apartment.

"That's Sissy," Philip said.

"A redheaded woman is good luck," Bingham said. He sat in a chair and lit a cigarette.

"I don't think you are supposed to smoke in these rooms," Philip said.

Bingham closed his eyes and let the smoke snake through his nostrils and mouth. "Probably not. Probably not supposed to jerk off either." Bingham chuckled. "How long you been here now?"

"I don't know."

"Well I know. Three weeks yesterday. Lily says they want to keep you long-term this time. Like six months, a year."

"Yes."

"What do you think about that?"

"Well, I don't know. They are the professionals. I guess I am pretty sick."

"What does that redheaded woman think about all of it?"

"I don't know."

Bingham stood up and crossed the room to stare out the window. "You are in a state of high ignorance, aren't you, Philip?"

Philip felt a blaze of anger beneath the apathy. "I am trying to do what people tell me. My behavior does suggest that I should not follow my own impulses."

Bingham turned around and went back to the chair. He sat down and leaned forward. "I love my wife," he said. "But she is dead wrong if she thinks you should hunker down in this drool factory till Judgment comes. How long do you think that redheaded woman is going to wait for you to get upright again?"

"Sissy," Philip said, feeling the anger jump now. "Her name is Sissy."

Bingham nodded cheerily. "Sissy. A fine- looking woman. But redheads
ain't
noted for patience, Philip. They can tolerate a certain amount of moaning, pissing, and flat-on-your- back self-pity from their men—a lot of them are Irish after all—but when they get a craw full they take action. They leave. They don't look back."

The anger went out of Philip, and he felt himself flattening on the bed as the self- righteousness evaporated. "I guess she will leave. I guess it is for the best."