Résumé With Monsters (9 page)

Philip pushes the garage door open and the sound blooms—
rumble, blat, rumble, rumble, blat!
The garage is dark, smelling of oil and earth and metal. A coiled garden hose hangs from a hook like a sleeping snake. Tools and engine parts and cans of paint and boxes bursting with old newspapers lean against shadows.

Ordinarily, the bare overhead bulb would be on, throwing everything into cold, dirty fact, and it is this darkness that draws Philip, this mystery. He approaches the car, his sneakers sliding over the dirty concrete, a scraping, zombie-hiss of a sound.

He peers in the window of the car, which is shaking slightly, like some black, armored monster in a sleep of fevers. No one is behind the steering wheel. No one is in the car, he thinks, but then presses his face up against the window and sees him. His father is sprawled in the front seat, flat on his back, a dark brown bottle cradled against his chest. His white T-shirt is stained with the whiskey, and his face lies pressed against the back of the seat, his mouth open. His legs are bent, and his brown suit pants are pulled up to reveal bare ankles gliding into ceramic-shiny black shoes. The bare ankles frighten Philip, suggesting strange and unpredictable thought processes.

He is dead
, Philip thinks, but then his father stirs, as though rocked on a sea of drunkenness.

The whiskey bottle rolls and a thin trickle of the dark liquid bleeds a new stain on his father's pale, soiled T-shirt.

Philip backs away from the car window.

He is aware suddenly that the room is full of writhing shapes, monstrous, coiled bodies that drop from the ceiling and begin to move. A black serpent crawls from the car's exhaust pipe to a window on the passenger side. And there are other, thicker serpents, some brown, some mottled as though by mold, moving rhythmically.

Yog
Sothoth
!

Philip runs out of the garage, slamming the door behind him. He runs through the bright, sunlit kitchen and up to his room.

He lies on his bed, heart beating wildly.

The Old Ones
, he thinks.

He lies in bed, staring at the ceiling. His heart does not slow at all, and the bed seems to be lifting in the air.

He wakes, not from real sleep, but from the sleep of the dream, and he hears voices, and he walks down the stairs. The front door is open, and the sky is darkening, and the red lights of an ambulance wash over his neighbors, fat Mrs. Odell, and Mr. Warden in a suit, and the Clarks' German shepherd, Ripley, and the skinny Bausch twins, and Mrs. Odell looks up and sees him and jumps like a roach has run up her leg and hollers something into the crowd, and a lot of people stumble back and his mother comes running toward him, her arms outstretched.

She is crying and she hugs him and he is suddenly full of terror, because she is going to know, but instead she says, "Philip. Oh Philip. I was so afraid..." and he realizes that her fear is for him.

"I am all right, Momma," he whispers.

He wants to say, "I didn't mean it," but he doesn't, because he did mean it, and he knows what happened and he knows that his father is dead. His father is dead because his father's son, yes, Philip
Kenan
, has prayed to the System that it be so.

#

The next day, Philip told Lily about the dream.

"These monsters have been around a long time," his therapist said.

"Eons," Philip said. "They arrived on earth six hundred million years ago, but of course that tells us nothing about how ancient, as a race, they actually are."

Lily ate a brownie, sipping tea to wash it down. She raised one eyebrow and offered a wry smile. "I meant these monsters have been around a long time in your personal history."

"Ah. Well, yes, I suppose so."

Lily said, "You can't live with a child's guilt forever. You didn't kill your father, he killed himself."

"I wanted him to die," Philip said. "That's where the awfulness is. I wanted him to leave my mother and me alone. If he had to die to do that, that was okay."

"Oh," Lily said, "we all think a lot of dark thoughts. And from what you've told me, it's not even clear you knew what he was doing."

"I knew," Philip said. "Maybe I didn't know about carbon monoxide poisoning, maybe it wasn't clear what he was doing, but I knew he was dying. I went upstairs and went to sleep. I didn't try to get help."

#

It was a payday at work, and the motivational pamphlet that came with the check was entitled "You Matter!" and Philip effectively resisted reading it at work, but when he returned home and was emptying out his pockets, he saw it and read it while standing up, and it was every bit as bad as he suspected.

It began, "Successful people are people who always give one hundred percent, who understand that a company's success depends on an individual's determination to excel. You may say to yourself, 'I am an insignificant person in this big company. I could be laid off tomorrow along with five hundred of my fellow workers, and no one would care.' The truth is, what you do is important to people who are important. While you may, indeed, be one of many, your labor can benefit someone who is, in fact, genuinely important. You can..."

Philip put the motivational pamphlet down. The writer had gone too far this time, Philip thought.

#

On the weekend, Philip did his Christmas shopping. The stores were crowded, and Philip found his spirit buckling as he moved through scenes of gaudiness and decay. Bikini-clad elves touted a lingerie store. Coming out of a bookstore on Sixth Street, Philip saw two Santa-suited men brawling, rolling on the sidewalk.

"
Mutherfucker
,
mutherfucker
,
mutherfucker
," they yelled, as a crowd gathered.

Philip hurried along as fast as his crutches would permit, refusing to look back. He bought his mother a knick-knack to add to the vast collection of knick-knacks that he had been giving her—dutifully—since childhood. He thought perhaps he had given her this piece before, but he knew she wouldn't mind. He bought Amelia a Cowboy Junkies album. That group's female vocalist had eyebrows similar to Amelia's, which made the purchase somehow inevitable, although it did not ensure Amelia's delight.

Philip bought books for his few friends in Virginia. The books he bought as gifts were novels he loved, and he was fairly certain they would go unread. He thought of all the unread novels sitting on shelves or packed in cardboard boxes, and he was assaulted by something like grief. He was certainly wobbly these days, both emotionally and mentally.

Of course, it could be that all this was simply a sign of advancing age. Brain cells, like time bombs arriving at their appointed hour, were being sprung; various creatures of remorse and despair were crawling from their blown cells.

Philip spent all of Sunday lying in bed and thinking about old friends and acquaintances, wrong turns taken and opportunities missed and words uttered in the heat of anger. He missed Amelia, missed her with fierce longing. He closed his eyes and conjured her image. He saw her black, clipped hair, her smooth, intelligent forehead, her mouth, orange or red or purple, her dark eyes outlined boldly. She loved make-up, indeed, she would occasionally get so carried away with the application of face powder and eyeliner that strangers would be startled when she spoke, mistaking her for a mime. Amelia had been a graphic artist at MicroMeg. That's where they met.

Philip thought about old Ronald
Bickwithers
, his immediate supervisor at MicroMeg.
Bickwithers
, always poised to go with the corporate flow, no more trustworthy than a Hollywood agent, a sly glad-hander, dodging and ducking like a long-abused dog when a superior entered the room. But even
Bickwithers
didn't deserve the fate that came to him.

Philip thought about Ronald
Bickwithers
' wig, which was unabashedly false, and which abandoned
Bickwithers
in death, leaping from the man's smooth pate to the floor where it lay curled on its back like some small mammal smacked by a fast-moving Greyhound.

Philip thought about his friend, Todd
Tillick
, who worked for three years on a full-size statue of J. D. Salinger, a statue made entirely from silver gum wrappers and superglue. During that time, Todd had only left his house to purchase fast food and rent horror videos.

Todd once told Philip that he had enough money in a trust fund to live at his current rate until he was sixty-two. If his genius was still unrecognized by then, he would kill himself. He had already purchased the shotgun he would use for self-destruction. He didn't want to be caught short of cash on the day of reckoning. He calculated that he would have to kill himself on August second of two thousand and fifteen.

He wasn't worried. The last time Philip had seen Todd, his friend was doing some sketches for his Thomas
Pynchon
project, and was composing a letter to ex-underage porn star Traci Lords, speaking of his admiration for her work in Roger
Corman
films and inviting her to his exhibition,
Writers Who Shun the Limelight
, which was tentatively scheduled for July 12, 1998.

Todd was the happiest man Philip knew, and Philip often surprised himself with mean-spirited envy.

Philip lay in bed and thought about the people he had met at various jobs, malcontents like angry John Miller, a born-again Christian who hated those Christians who had only been born once, and old Mrs. Meadows who believed that her coworker, an equally ancient woman, plotted against her and slept with the boss; workers like Edith
Profitt
, a mannish woman in tweeds who worked in accounting and played an easy listening station at heavy metal volume, and Honey Gee, a young receptionist at Blink-Of- An-Eye Placards and Signs who was always on the phone to her boyfriend and laughing helplessly at his wit. She would interrupt these conversations to wait on customers, and she would remain cheerful, while making it clear, the way a mother might instruct an importunate child, that she was being inconvenienced.

Workers were not all miserable and driven by economic necessity. "I like getting out of the house and meeting folks," a coworker would confide (at a sweatshop too frenzied for even the most perfunctory sort of social commerce).

There were workers who insisted they would continue working if they had a million dollars. Philip doubted the truth of these statements. But, he reflected, even the horror of war had its addictive side.

Offices were not tribes, sharing common rituals and beliefs. Offices were random collections of people, washed aground on islands of limited resources, battling for sustenance. Philip had seen grown men wrestle over a stapler. He had watched a dowdy, elderly woman scavenge paper clips and candy bars from a rival's drawer. If Eloise took an overlong lunch break, Glenda ran to their boss with the news. Nick
Petigrew
deleted Mel Tucker's customer list from the computer's hard disk after a dispute over a commission.

Philip thought about Meg Jensen, who he had kissed once in elementary school. Meg had been a sleepy-voiced, wonderfully vague girl who had moved to Atlanta halfway through the school year. Her mouth had been slightly open when they kissed. Philip's tongue had licked her small, perfect teeth, and it was under "teeth" that his memory filed her, so that television toothpaste commercials would unlock a vision of her and while some announcer droned on about plaque and statistical studies, Philip would see her gray eyes and the blond curve of her neck and hear her say, in a voice from some exaggerated, fantasy South, "Philip
Kenan
,
whuhut
kind of girl do you think ah am?"

Philip's thoughts came full circle to Amelia again. He would destroy his burdensome novel and marry her. No. He couldn't.

Could he? He wished he were a more decisive human being. Although, of course, so much was preordained.

Philip, a tortured realist, longed not for free will but for the illusion of free will.

10

Monica returned to work.

“I see they fired all the slackers," she said, smiling savagely. Her grin was a little ragged; she had lost a couple of teeth, others were chipped, and her jaw had been reconstructed with a new truculent thrust.

Because the workload had increased, Monica stayed on into Philip's shift. He could see she had changed, but he could not, at first, identify the precise nature of the change. She still worked with a frenzied intensity, screamed imperially at paste-up artists and talked loudly to herself ("Look at this! They want a whole Webster's dictionary on this card!").