Résumé With Monsters by William Browning Spencer Page B

depressing.
     
    When Philip climbed back in his car and shut the door, he said, "I love you Amelia Price." There was no comfort in the statement, which was, in truth, only an acknowledgment of the increasing scope of his dread.
     

11.
     

     
    Philip found Pelidyne's address in the phone book and drove by the building on his way to work. It was a shiny black building, windowed with cold black glass suggesting hostile takeovers, a towering, five- sided, arrogantly modern structure on San Jacinto. The sides of the building were not of equal length, and this added to its sinister aspect. Was this the loathsome, non-Euclidean geometry of ancient R'lyeh , that reason-defying, accursed city where dread Cthulhu waited to be reborn?
     
    Philip didn't have time to stop and examine the building's interior. He was already late for work.
     
    The job was uneventful that night. Monica worked throughout Philip's shift and was still there when Philip left. She did not look very good; there were dark circles under her eyes and her brown hair had lost what lustre it once had. She had, if Philip wasn't mistaken, worn the same black jeans and tie-dyed T-shirt for a week now. Philip was not surprised. Zombies, of course, take no pride in their appearance.
     
    "Moving right along," she said to Philip when he first sat down. It was the only thing she said directly to Philip during the course of his shift.
     
    Ralph came into the room several times, snatched illegible orders from an ancient fax machine, and handed them to Monica without a word.
     
    After work, Philip picked up his mail from the P.O. box at the apartment complex's main office.
     
    Philip lay in bed and opened his mail. There was an advertisement for cut-rate computer software, a bill for utilities, and a package from his mother. She had sent a belated Christmas present.
     
    "I hope you are well," his mother wrote, "and that all your self-destructive behavior is behind you."
     
    The present, wrapped in cartoon cats, was a thin, hard-backed book whose title Philip had seen on recent bestseller lists. The book was entitled A Wind Through My Heart , and it was about a free-spirited woman (Leslie) who travels the Midwest selling cosmetics door-to-door. She meets a man (Mark) whose wife, a wealthy businesswoman, is away on a business trip. Mark and Leslie have a brief affair, making wild love, quoting the poetry of Rod McKuen , and recreating each other with eyeliner and lipstick. In the course of their affair, they utter lethal amounts of bad poetry. Leslie, breathless with lovemaking, says, "I am the wisp and the willow and all the perfumes and all the nostrils in the rain and the sun."
     
    Mark replies, "And I am old movies and the popcorn you don't eat for fear of getting fat and wet, mushy kisses in the rain."
     
    Their love is doomed, however. Mark's wife is about to return. He can't leave her; the whole town would say that he only married her for her money. That is, in fact, why he married her, but it would be cruel to make it known, and Mark is nothing if not sensitive.
     
    So they part, Mark and Leslie, never to see each other again. They both drift about in post- romantic swoons until Leslie dies in her late seventies. Mark dies soon afterward, and his children discover that he has kept a diary, reeking strongly of perfume, and a picture of himself dressed as Marlene Dietrich. In the diary, he analyzes his old lover's poetry at great length and urges his children to make his love affair known to the world. The children, having as little sense of decorum as their father, do just this.
     
    Philip closed the book. He felt dazed, disoriented. It was a thin book, perhaps thirty- five thousand words.
     
    His mother had written, "It is good to see that literature is still being written in these cynical times. I'm sure you will enjoy this as much as I did."
     
    Philip had enjoyed the book. He had laughed heartily, startled into outloud guffaws by certain inflated