Free Résumé With Monsters by William Browning Spencer Page A

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