Résumé With Monsters (16 page)

Philip watched as a dresser drawer was opened by artful jiggling. A copy of
Hustler
magazine was extracted.

Great
, Philip thought.

Can you be
, Philip wondered,
your own voyeur?

Clothing flew into a lump on the floor. Underpants were removed.

The slick, shiny pages flicked by. Then paused.

Her? Come on, she's not even our type.

It was over quick enough, foreplay being optional with two-dimensional women.

Philip felt faintly disgusted, and as the portals of his world shut, enclosing him in darkness, he thought of how unpleasant it would be to reside with his younger self for any substantial period of time.

And he thought of Amelia, dear, sweet, large- hearted Amelia.

Look out!
he wanted to scream.
This guy is a moron.

2.

How did you sleep, Phil?" the woman asked. Her name was Dr. Ann Beasley, and she was a gray-haired, middle-aged woman who managed to look a little like the young Abraham Lincoln.

"I didn't sleep at all," Philip said. "I was back at MicroMeg."

The woman nodded. "You dreamed you were at MicroMeg."

"No, I was at MicroMeg."

"Philip, do you know why you are here?" "Ah—"

"You were standing on the highway. It was late at night. Cars were swerving to avoid hitting you. The police were called. When they got there, your employer, a Mr. Pederson, had taken you to the side of the road. He was trying to calm you down. Do you remember any of this?"

"I'm afraid not," Philip said. He looked around the office. It was small, dominated by the psychiatrist's desk. Various official documents hung on the walls. A small window offered a view of a city street, bright sunlight, traffic.

"You were not coherent," Dr. Beasley continued. "When you were brought in, one of the ward clerks said you were speaking in a foreign language."

"That would be Latin," Philip said. "The corrupt Latin of
Olaus
Wormius
who translated the
Necronomicon
. There is no extant version in Arabic, you know."

The woman leaned forward across her desk. "You have an explanation then, for your behavior?"

Philip nodded. "I appear to be caught in a reverberating time loop," he said. "It may have something to do with the Great Leap planned by the Old Ones. MicroMeg was to be the nexus for that jump, but that was thwarted by other influences."

"You feel you are caught in some cosmic war, then?" the doctor asked.

Philip sensed that she wasn't entirely with him on this, but then it wasn't an easy concept to get your mind around. His own mind did not embrace it willingly.

"It's not a war exactly," Philip said. "The Old Ones are taking a telepathic leap from pre- Pleistocene times. The
Pnakotic
manuscripts suggested that they would leap beyond the reign of man, into sentient
crustaceanlike
beings, the next dominant life form on the planet. I think
Lovecraft
was mistaken on this. I think they are coming into our world, what you could loosely call 'now.' My own involvement is peripheral. I was just in the wrong continuum at the wrong time. I got pulled along. I'm nothing to them."

Dr. Beasley nodded her head.

Good
, Philip thought,
I'm getting through.

But this was not, in fact, the case. Dr. Beasley said that she had talked, by phone, to Philip's friend Amelia Price who was quite concerned.

And Amelia's interpretation of events was, alas, dismally skewed.

"She tells me," the doctor said, "that you have written a very long book about these monsters."

"It's a novel," Philip said. "I hadn't intended it to be so long; it just got away."

"Got away," the doctor mused, tilting her head backward for a second. "Your choice of words is in keeping with your friend's belief that the years you have worked on this book may have caused some blurring of the boundary between fact and fiction. There are clinical conditions, forms of schizophrenia, that operate in this fashion. She says you have taken medications for such conditions in the past. Let's see." The doctor flipped the page on a legal pad. "Yes. You were hospitalized at Northern Virginia Mental Health in 1982."

Philip sighed. This interview wasn't going at all well. That morning when he had awakened and determined that he was in a psychiatric hospital, he had rejoiced. To live in that past, to haunt the
armageddon
halls of MicroMeg, would have been more than he could have borne.

But now he saw that he was not out of the woods, not yet a free man.

He would try a reasoned approach. "Mental health," he said, "is a relative term. I think I have come through pretty well, considering. Do you mind if I quote
Lovecraft
? He says"—here Philip leaned back and studied the ceiling, to give his mind a clear screen for the scrolling of internal words—
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

Dr. Beasley smiled. Philip felt a sense of triumph. It was always satisfying to see logic triumph.

"We'd like you to stay with us for a little while," she said. "There is often a physiological basis for this sort of thing, and it can be controlled by medication."

Philip sighed.
Be philosophical
, he counseled himself. You can't expect someone who has never gazed on the naked visage of
Yog-Sothoth
to understand the mind's essential fragility.

That afternoon, Philip found himself in a circle with other crazy people. The group was led by a pretty, dark-haired woman who insisted that people call her Olivia.

"Why don't we all begin by telling something about ourselves," Olivia asked. She said she would start, and she talked about her cats and how she went to school and got a Ph.D. but still didn't feel like a grown-up.

When it was Philip's turn to share, he said, "I'm forty-five years old, and I came to Austin to win back my girlfriend. She refuses to believe that an ancient, super-intelligent race of cone- shaped beings inhabiting pre-Pleistocene times are responsible for the breakup. I've got to convince her; I've got to recover her love." He admitted that he didn't feel adequate to the task.

Although it was difficult to tell—Philip had very little experience reading crazy people—the group seemed to accept this without shock or incredulity. Indeed, it was the next person to share, a middle-aged white woman, who elicited some argument and anger.

"I'm Michael Jackson," she said. "You all know who I am already. I'm depressed because everybody is always after me."

"You done betrayed your people," shouted a large black man in a blue tank top.

"See there!" she screamed. "See there! Just like I said. Everybody is after me."

"I'm not sharing in no room with a traitor," the man said, folding his arms and glaring at the ceiling.

That evening after dinner, Philip went to his room and lay down on the bed. One of the residents knocked on the door and told him he had a phone call.

It was Amelia. She asked how he was doing.

"I'm fine," he said.

Amelia began to cry then. Philip hated that. He stood there in the hall, cradling the phone's receiver to his chest and rocking it. Her sobs penetrated his rib cage and battered his heart. He lifted the phone again and spoke into it.

"Amelia," he said. "It's not hopeless. I promise you it is not hopeless. I won't let anything happen to you."

But she just cried louder at that, and finally, when she began to wind down, she said, "I've got to go, Philip. I'll talk to you later." She hung up.

Philip went back to his room, heartsick, and lay on the bed. He closed his eyes, and when he opened them he was at MicroMeg again. He wasn't even surprised.

FREELANCE.

Philip stared out from behind his eyes at a large, broad-shouldered man with a very smooth face and rudimentary features. Philip could not remember the man's name—the man had been fired shortly after hiring Philip—but he remembered the day.

I WORKED FREELANCE DURING THAT PERIOD.

Actually
, Philip thought
, I was in a mental health facility, going to group, reading paperback books, forming a long-term game plan
.

The man was nodding his head, smiling. "Self-motivated," he said, and he checked a box on a piece of paper.

This was the day of the interview. The second interview. The first interview had been with a mousy woman in Personnel who had said, "This is just a screening interview. There are a lot of candidates for this job, so what we are looking for here is anything that might eliminate candidates right off. Can you think of anything, offhand, that would be a really good reason for not hiring you?" She had laughed brightly. "Joke," she had said and winked.

They had called him for a second interview. Here he was. He would get the job, of course. No suspense there.

"This company believes in keeping the workplace drug-free," the man was saying. "Would you be willing..."

No. Tell him no.

"... would you be willing to be stripped naked, sodomized, and videotaped during the procedure? We would want you to sign something authorizing us..."

OF COURSE.

Was this an alternate universe? He did not remember those precise words. But then, he had been nervous, and much of what the man had said slid past him. He had been broke and desperate.

Even now he was drifting away, following his thoughts to the unhappy precipice of despair. He had been transported further back this time, to the very beginning of his MicroMeg career. He had worked for MicroMeg for eight years. Eight. If he were left here, he would have to slog through eight long years, eight years in which he would note every sign, every tremor of the approaching horror.

Trapped in his ignorant, younger self he would see the dread significance in each event, see the inevitable darkness thicken, and be powerless to act.

No. God, don't let this happen.

He was standing up, shaking the hand of the thick, smiling man in the dark suit.

"Thanks for coming in," the man was saying.

"We'll get back to you the end of this week."

#

The next morning, in group, Philip said, "Yes, I think I can talk about fear. I think I can share on that one. I'm bouncing back and forth in Time. I figure it will have to slow down. There is probably some law of inertia for Time, too. Right now I'm ping-
ponging
back and forth, but I think the energy will go out of it. And then, then I'll be stuck... either here or in the past depending upon exactly when this ricochet effect exhausts itself. If I'm stuck in the past... I can tell you, the thought of getting stuck at MicroMeg again scares me to death."

"Thank you Philip," Olivia said. "Would anyone else like to share on fear?"

Bob, a thin, timid man wearing a jump suit and tennis shoes without socks, said he was afraid of snakes.

"Shit," grumbled the balding man next to Bob, "you missed the point entirely. You can't share any better than that, you should get out of this group. You
ain't
no asset to this group if all you can say is, 'I'm
skeered
of snakes.' That's bullshit sharing."

Bob began to cry, his shoulders shaking inside his jumpsuit. The man next to him hugged him. "Hey, I didn't mean anything," he said.