Résumé With Monsters (8 page)

Mr.
Grodinov
left early that day, and
Mrs.Walston
, scowling after his departure, said, "Well, the old fool's drunk."

Mr.
Grodinov's
wife called the next day. This in itself was extraordinary. "The way he talked," Mrs.
Walston
said, "I thought he was a widower."

Mrs.
Grodinov
had less English than her husband. "No come," she said. "Dead." She had broken into sobs then, and Mrs.
Walston
had had to wait until the old woman collected herself again. "Stuck," the woman said. "Stuck dead."

Mrs.
Walston
got the hospital's name and was able to confirm that the old man was dead of a stroke.

"Mark my words," Mrs.
Walston
told Philip, "they'll close this office."

And she had been right.

"And you think that, somehow, the Old Ones killed your boss," Lily said.

Philip nodded. "Yes."

After Philip lost his job, he did not seek another one. And when the rent came due and they could not pay it, Elaine said, "I am moving in with Susan." Susan was an old college roommate, and she had never approved of Philip.

Philip nodded. "Fine." He moved back to his mother's house, and he slept in the bed he had slept in as a child, waking with a start when he thought he heard his father's footstep on the stairs.

One day Susan called. "Elaine's in the hospital," she screamed. "You son of a bitch." She had hung up then, and it was only when Philip arrived at the hospital that he learned his wife was dead, that she had died of an overdose several hours before her arrival at the emergency room.

"How awful," Lily said.

Philip looked up, was surprised to see tears in his counselor's eyes, and said, "Too many tranquilizers. She was drinking too. Booze and downers don't mix. Elaine wasn't suicidal, just a kind of negligent, don't-give-a-damn person."

"I'm sorry," Lily said, leaning forward and clutching Philip's hand.

Philip nodded. "After she died, I felt... it was anger. I remember standing in the emergency room lobby thinking, 'This is such a lot of shit.'"

Philip stopped.

Lily waited, nodded her head, waited some more. "Yes. Yes, Philip. It must have been terrible."

Philip exhaled slowly. "This is exhausting, you know. I mean, I don't think it is doing any good. She was dead then. She's dead now."

"Yes," Lily said, with a compassion that Philip found terrifying, "but you aren't, Philip. You aren't dead."

9.

A routine was established. Lily would arrive in the morning, letting herself in with a duplicate key. Sometimes Philip wouldn't even be up yet, would be sleeping soundly, and the smell of frying bacon would wake him.

Philip told Lily about the jobs.

"We are looking," Lily said, "for patterns."

"Are you sure that's a good idea?" Philip asked. "I mean, H. P.
Lovecraft
would say that the unexamined life is probably the best bet for humans."

The hideous machinations of
Cthulhu
and his monstrous overlord,
Yog-Sothoth
were not suited for the daylight of reason.

"I've taken the time to read about your
Lovecraft
," Lily said. "Face it, the man wasn't in the pink of mental health."

"Exactly," Philip said. "
Lovecraft
stared too long at the abyss."

"Be that as it may," Lily said, folding her hands in her lap, "examining is my trade. You don't want an old lady to wind up out of work, do you?"

Philip didn't. He talked about the jobs. He talked about the boredom, the boredom that he came to see as the sign of the beast, its sour, suffocating reek.

There was boredom at the community newspaper where Philip pasted down advertisements for pizza parlors and car dealerships (WE WILL BEAT ANY DEAL OR GIVE YOU THE CAR!). There was boredom working at the state agency where Philip corrected addresses on a computer that logged his every keystroke. There was boredom at the insurance company where Philip typed checks and filed forms in huge, gray banks of file cabinets. There was boredom at the several printing companies where Philip typeset brochures and flyers and business cards and waited on customers and encountered what he came to think of as "copy people," humans—often elderly and confused—addicted to photocopying various scraps of paper, recipes, Ann Landers' columns, letters, tax receipts, thousand-page novels. These people were always shocked that a copy cost eight cents—or whatever—and knew of a store, generally in another city, where copies could be obtained for half as much money and the atmosphere was altogether more pleasant. You could always see a copy person coming, spy them through the window as they hobbled across the parking lot. A copy person would be moving very slowly, but with a dread inevitability, clutching boxes filled with copy fodder. Philip's heart would wince when he saw them.

There was boredom in the dozens of jobs obtained through temporary agencies, tasks of such stupefying tedium that the regular employees could not be coerced into performing them even under threat of being fired. "Temp!" the regular employees would scream. "Get a temp!"

And so Philip would stuff envelopes and file unreadable documents, and enter data, row upon row of
x's
, and white-out zeroes and ones on mountains of government documents bound for warehouses, and sit in rooms with dozens of other temps wearing headphones
("Hello? I'm calling about a new, economical way to ensure your family's financial well-being in the event of sudden death.").

There was boredom in the custom photo lab where eight-by-tens of dogs and squinting children and Washington tourist attractions were generated relentlessly, until the pointlessness of all life was starkly revealed, and the sickbed smell of the processing chemicals followed you into sleep.

And there was the boredom, and worse, of MicroMeg Management Systems.

“I think we are making progress," Lily said.

“I feel a hundred percent better," Philip said. "I think this talking has really done the trick. It has clarified everything. I'm ready to get on with my life."

Lily had frowned then. "Not so fast, buster. We've got a lot of ground left to cover."

#

It was the second week in December before Philip was able to return to work. The cast on his left leg had been replaced by a smaller and lighter model, but Philip still needed crutches in order to get around. Driving would have been out of the question if it had been his right leg that had been broken.

In the interim between being run over and returning to Ralph’s One-Day Résumés, Philip had been fired four times. Ralph Pederson would call, beseeching Philip to come in and help out, and Philip would explain that he was incapable of doing that. Ralph would then say, "I'm sorry, Philip. I am going to have to get someone else. The business can't wait until you feel absolutely tip-top, you understand. This is nothing personal."

Philip would say he understood, and when the conversation ended, Philip would lie back on his pillow with a sense of relief. A few weeks later, Ralph would again call and beg Philip to return; Philip would again decline. Reluctantly, Ralph would let Philip go.

Philip understood that Ralph was having difficulty finding people who could operate the ancient typesetting equipment and Philip sympathized with his employer's plight. Still, he felt that being fired once per job was sufficient, and he resented this repetition of the experience.

Ralph continued to call, however, and one day Philip surprised himself by saying, “I could come in next Monday."

The day of Philip's return was a day of freezing rain. Negotiating the parking lot on crutches was a perilous venture, and Philip was certain he would fall, but he made it in the door without doing himself injury.

In the lobby a Christmas tree (decorated with business cards) reminded Philip that the holiday season was upon him.

Ralph Pederson came running up. He looked thinner than when Philip had last seen him, and more disheveled. "Philip, Philip," he said. "Come on back, I'll introduce you to everyone."

Had they forgotten him already? True, he had always arrived at the end of the day, when everyone was leaving. And he was not, he knew, the sort of person who made a lasting impression. He was quiet, of average height and features, and he was inclined to utter the stock phrases of social commerce.

Still, he had only been gone a few months, and his
leavetaking
was, in itself, spectacular enough to keep his memory alive.

On entering the long room, Philip realized that he did not know anyone. All the employees he had worked with were gone, replaced by a new crew. Later that evening, when Philip was alone with his thoughts, he remembered Ralph saying that morale had been low for awhile, but that recently it was much higher.

Philip had attributed this elevation in morale to particularly eloquent motivational pamphlets or a decrease in the workload, but now Philip understood that morale had been improved by the simple but effective measure of firing all the low-morale types (i.e. everyone) and hiring new blood.

The new crew was obviously frightened, displaying the large, wild eyes of headlight- hunted deer, but their adrenaline reserves had not yet been depleted, and so they were not sullen or apathetic.

Monica was not there, although Ralph said she would be back next week. Surprisingly, Al Bingham had survived the purge.

The old printer walked into where Philip was typesetting at about eight in the evening.

"Yeah," he said, when Philip expressed his delight in seeing him, "I'm an old-timer here now. Don't take long to get seniority at this joint, does it?"

Philip agreed that it didn't, but his surprise at seeing Bingham was obvious, and the old man read his expression and answered the question there.

"Ralph don't fire me because he can't smell the fear," Bingham said. "I'm invisible. He is always coming up, ready to give me the boot, but then he falters, gets this baffled look, and I know he can't see me. He wonders what he was about to do and marches off to ream some poor Mexican working in the bindery."

Philip called Amelia at nine in the evening. His inability to destroy his novel—or even to lie and say he had destroyed it—had set their relationship back to one rationed phone call a week. Philip knew that Amelia was waiting for him to make the next move, but he couldn't find the internal resources to act.

"I'm back at work," he told her.

"I've found a job myself," Amelia said, excitement in her voice. "I start next week."

"Oh." Philip felt a flutter of panic. "Well."

"Hey, congratulate me." Amelia giggled with good spirits.

"Hey, congratulations."

Oh, be careful, Amelia. I know you don't want to remember, but please, please be careful.

They talked briefly. Amelia said she had to get up early the next day, some sort of orientation thing in preparation for her first day of work, and she hung up.

That night, Philip dreamed the dream of his father's death in the coils of the System.

This is how it went, as it always went, a dream as unvarying as a documentary unwinding:

The kitchen is silent and cool and Philip, who has just come home from school, walking through one of spring's first truly hot days, goes to the refrigerator and finds a carton of milk and drinks the cold, headache-inducing milk standing in the light of the open door which sheds the green-tinged light that aliens use to immobilize teenagers making out in cars. The refrigerator hum is, of course, the hovering spacecraft.

Today the refrigerator is louder than normal, and when Philip closes the door, he discovers that a second sound pulses behind the familiar drone of the fridge. The sound comes from the door to the garage, and, as Philip opens the door, he realizes that it is the sound of the car engine, the muttering machine-speak of his father's
souped
-up black Chevy.

Philip does not want to encounter his father. Just yesterday they had fought.
("My God, Philip's bleeding!" his mother screamed. "It's just a scratch, Marge. He's got to learn what he's got to learn. Baby him now, he'll bruise easy later.")