Résumé With Monsters (15 page)

Philip studied the
contrasty
newsprint photo.
Merv
Wiggins had worked with Philip in the Graphics Support division of MicroMeg. Old
Merv
.
Merv
with his crisp white shirts, sleeves rolled up, his harried smile, his crew cut, and his dauntless team spirit. "We can do it," he would say. "It would be nice if they had given us some warning before springing this project on us, but we've got the weekend, and if we all make that extra effort, we'll be golden on this one."

"Golden,"
Merv
would say. "Golden."

Philip remembered the retirement party, held at a Ramada Inn. Ronald
Bickwithers
,
Merv's
supervisor, had delivered a rousing testimonial to the man's spirit.

"Old
Merv
,"
Bickwithers
said, squeezing the man's shoulder. “I hate to see him go. If I was to look in the dictionary under 'dedication' I would find the name
Merv
Wiggins written there."

Bickwithers
told the story with real drama. "It was right after the Ellison Naval project that
Merv
went into Fairfax hospital. I remember it like it was yesterday. We were just getting the completed boards out the door, and I look around and there is
Merv
curled up under the drafting table, and I lean under and ask if he is okay, and, you know
Merv
, he says sure he is just fine but if I would call up an ambulance he would greatly appreciate it."

That was the time they took out half of
Merv's
stomach. “I figured we wouldn't see him for six months, but three weeks later he's back. It's two in the morning, and I ring up the office expecting to get one of the younger folks, and it is
Merv
that is there working on a last minute proposal for
BeeSams
. I tell him to go slow, and he says, 'Going slow didn't make us number one.' I guess if you looked up the word 'trooper' you would find
Merv's
name there too."

Later
Merv
had had to have a substantial part of his upper intestines removed. He had been back on the job in less than a month. A number of health problems plagued
Merv
.

Ronald
Bickwithers
spoke at length and with some eloquence on
Merv's
hospitalizations, cataloging, with a pathologist's zeal, the various organs that had been pared down or completely removed from
Merv's
system. Each time some new physical catastrophe would strike the man, office gossip would have it that he was out for the count. But, invariably,
Merv
would return and work the youngest and hardiest of them under the table.

"But he came back!"
Bickwithers
would shout, rising up on the balls of his feet like a preacher full of Good News. "Yes sir, he heard MicroMeg cry out, 'We need your expertise and enthusiasm,' and he didn't turn his back on that cry for help.

You look under 'loyalty' and you'll find the name
Merv
Wiggins written large there too."

Philip remembered the speech, remembered old
Merv
bent over and smiling and saying he just did the best he could. It seemed now that when
Merv
waved his hand in a self-deprecating gesture intended to quell the audience applause, a blue wristband from his last hospitalization was visible next to his watchband, but this may have been one of those details created by a memory more in love with aptness than with accuracy.

In any event, Ronald
Bickwithers
' words proved so inspirational that two members of the graphics staff left that very day, one of them a paste-up artist, a thin, blond woman who said, "Wow. I'm out of here. I'm hanging on to my spleen."

They filled the vacated paste-up position with Amelia Price.

So, think
. When did Amelia get hired? How soon after
Merv
left? Not long, they were dreadfully understaffed and...

The elevator door opened. It made all the usual noises, the fanfare of electrical industry:
Hoooooeeeeeeee
waaaaaaahummmmmmm
. The door opened.

GO ON AHEAD. I'M WAITING FOR SOMEONE.

Philip could translate now. He had found the secret of parsing the roaring sentences of his host. And Philip knew, of course, why this Philip had lied.

You did not get on the elevator when it was already occupied by Fred
Linquest
, more commonly referred to as F.F. (Flatulent Freddie). Freddie was a large, shy young man who worked in the mailroom and who, like certain species of fish in tropic waters, kept potential predators at a distance by secreting various noxious poisons. Being paranoid, Freddie saw
all
his fellow workers as dangerous.

Freddie, dark hair hanging in his face, mail cart in front, nodded grimly and pushed the button, closing the door.

Philip caught the next elevator to the fifth floor.

Amelia
. She was standing in the middle of the workroom, turning slowly as
Bickwithers
spoke in her ear and indicated the various graphics computers and equipment.

This was her first day. Philip had been transported into the past to the very day of Amelia's arrival at MicroMeg.

Philip actually remembered this first day. He remembered her standing there before, just so, a small, heavily made-up girl with a round face and a page-boy cut to her black hair, her chin thrust forward with a certain challenging air (the mustered-up toughness of a shy kid), her small body compactly enclosed in a brown suit, a formidably-sized briefcase in her left hand. And he remembered something else, something so extraordinary, in light of his present circumstances, that he threatened to lose himself in the ramifications of this revelation.

When he had first seen Amelia he had thought,
Her name's Amelia.

He had told her that later, and she had said, "No way. Really?"

A tiny voice had told him her name.

He tried not to think about the mind- boggling notion of such a circle in time. In any event, he was being introduced. PLEASED TO MEET YOU.

God, what a formal asshole.
Transmigration to an earlier self could be embarrassing.

Amelia didn't seem to notice this rod-up-the- ass behavior, however. She was, herself, shy and consequently somewhat stiff. She extended a hand and said, "Nice to meet you. I'm Amelia Price."

Philip loved the way her mouth, bright with orange lipstick, formed and expelled words with more animation than the average mouth. There was something tentative about this, as though she were improvising an entirely new language and might, at any minute, be unmasked.

"Those are lovely sounds," someone might sternly declare, "but they aren't words, my sly girl."

She would be flustered then, silenced in mid- sentence, staring at the floor.

And Philip, like hormone-addled Romeo, fell in love with her instantly—in the loutish, superficial manner of all romantics.

Except that now he wondered. That love-at- first-sight that his memory served up might be something quite different. Perhaps he had come to love her slowly over time, to dote not merely on the music of her voice or her exotic use of mascara, but on her soul, which was fearless when encountering injustice and full of quick compassion for the less fortunate.

It was possible that his love had grown solid and deep over time, and that now it was this experience-born lover, this ghost from the future, that influenced their first meeting.

Once again, Philip felt disoriented by all the implications of such influence.

"Let's meet the rest of the team,"
Bickwithers
said, and he led her away. Philip watched as
Bickwithers
introduced her to a printer named Lonnie Hark, who took his baseball cap off and shook her hand slowly.

Philip went to his own drafting table and began creating another flow chart, box upon box of names and titles, locked in the labyrinth of MicroMeg, one of the world's largest corporations.

He did not see Amelia again that day, and although he would have liked to seek her out, he was not in charge. Quitting time came, and the container of his consciousness crowded into an elevator with other exhausted workers and rode it to the ground floor.

That night in his apartment, he watched as he typed his novel. He did not yet own a computer—although he would buy one soon; he had been saving to do so—and he typed cautiously, slowly, since any error carried with it a sense of failure, and the cumulative effect of botched words or x-ed out sentences could engender an almost suicidal sense of defeat. He would look up sometimes, and Philip would take advantage of these moments. He was not privy to his host's creative ruminations, but the stares into space (although fuzzy thanks to the out-of- kilter focus the muse required) allowed Philip to study the room. His memory was all the resolution he required to identify certain objects.

The apartment, an efficiency, saddened him. It was smaller than his memory's version, and shabbier. Hanging on the wall was a picture of Elaine and him at the beach. They had prevailed upon the man who ran the hot dog concession to snap the picture. Cameras were not that old man's long suit, and he had barely managed to fit them in the frame. So the subject of the picture appeared to be a yellow dog, a mangy stray that growled when Philip tried to pet it.

And granted that Elaine's smile was winsome, there in the corner of the frame, and that Philip himself appeared to be caught in a moment of rare, open-mouthed laughter, still, the question remained: What had possessed him to hang such a picture? Masochism? Hiding a stain perhaps?

That's me. That's my dead wife. A suicide. I have an eight-by-ten of my dead father—another suicide— around here somewhere. It was hanging up for awhile but one night it shattered—inexplicably I think, although I may have actually thrown something at it.

There were the bookcases full of paperback books, and the inexpensive stereo system, the turntable of which had to be given a spin with a forefinger to overcome some mysterious internal inertia. There were several of Elaine's paintings, full of an energy that seemed to hurl the rest of the room into desolate shadow. A sofa, whose missing leg had been replaced by hardback books unworthy of shelf space, looked less welcoming than a sidewalk grate and the end table next to it was flimsy beyond belief.

It didn't take long to exhaust this study, and when his host began typing again, Philip studied the faint, marching characters—a new ribbon was in order—with interest.

He read,

They scaled the side of the bleak mountain, pausing to look back on the abyss.

“What's that?
Profes’sor
Rodgen
asked, pointing to a rock some forty feet below, a rock from which a shadow detached and moved into the sunlight.

“Why, I believe that's Dr. Patterson,” Weaver said.

"I thought he was dead, crushed in that rock slide."

"I could have sworn he was," Weaver said. "But it's him. I can see him clearly now. And he looks none the worse for wear, except for that curious hat and cape."

"He always was a bit of a dandy, " Professor
Rodgen
said.

"Wait," Weaver said. "That's not wearing apparel at all, that's—"

Wearing apparel?
Philip sighed.
Forget it
, he thought, straining in what he hoped passed for the telepathic equivalent of a shout.
You are going to throw this whole scene out anyway.

SHIT.

A hand reached up, tore the page from the typewriter, and tossed it toward the wastebasket. Philip found himself moving away from the typewriter, across the room, into the bathroom. Philip watched himself brush his teeth. Philip saw himself in the mirror. He looked younger and dumber.

Philip felt oddly detached, alienated. Well, why not?
It might even be a definition.
Alienated: Having been transported back in time by aliens.

The bedroom was a tiny room containing a bed, a floor lamp, and a narrow bookcase for paperbacks. Somehow a scruffy dresser had insinuated its way into the room, pathetically pretending to be a legitimate piece of furniture.