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bitterness descended on Walter Kenan and he grew angry and violent. He would sit at the kitchen table drinking. He would be leaning forward, all his weight on his forearms, his straight dark hair falling over his eyes, hiding their haunted intensity. The hum of the refrigerator would fill the room. He would still be in his office clothes, his tie loosened, his white shirt wrinkled, the sleeves rolled past his elbows. He would talk to himself or turn and shout into the living room where Philip's mother was ironing.
     
    "It's the System," he would mutter. "The goddam , dog-pissed System." He would stand up suddenly, the frail kitchen chair falling and clattering behind him, and he would lurch to the refrigerator and wrench the door open and shout into it. "You goddam sons of bitches! You whoring, lying, cheating bastards."
     
    He would spy Philip, standing silent by the backdoor and he would shout, "You don't know shit about it. You think the System ain't gonna get you. It'll hold you down same as the rest. I don't see no wings sprouting from your backside."
     
    When not drunk—and sometimes, rarely, he was sober in these nightmares—Philip's father would be full of sadness and weariness. He would put an arm around Philip and say, "Don't lose your dreams, boy. Don't let any bastard steal your dreams, or trick you out of them with a pension and a promise. Don't let the System eat your soul."
     

     
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    The System. The Old Ones, crouched at the beginning of time, malevolent and patient. They thwarted all aspiration, all true and noble yearning. Ironically, the System bound Lovecraft himself to a life of poverty—so Philip's father raved, in drunken, lunatic eloquence—forcing the reclusive New Englander to eke out a near- starvation existence revising the dreadful scribblings of lesser writers and finally killing him with a cancer in the guts.
     
    The System was ubiquitous and merciless. Its minions were everywhere, from the President of the United States to the clerk at the hardware store to Claude Miller, who was Walter Kenan's supervisor at the office where Walter worked in the accounting department. The System's creatures were fellow office workers, mysteriously generated regulations, numbers, signs on the walls, one-way streets, radio announcers, movies. These were the puppets of the Dark Gods. The distinguishing feature of a creature of the System was this: It bore Walter Kenan malice and worked diligently to confuse, demoralize, and destroy Walter Kenan .
     
    Had it not been for the System, Philip's father would have been Somebody. The System had weakened Walter Kenan , had driven him to daily drinking, had saddled him with a shrill, ungrateful wife and a whining momma's boy for a son. Walter Kenan , who could have had a major league baseball career if the System hadn't set him up, would clutch tiny Philip's shoulders and lift him up and thump him against the wall, and say, "Are you listening to me? Look at me. I am trying to tell you the way it is. I am trying to prepare you."
     
    After his father's attempts at education, Philip would lie in bed and his mother would come in and put her hand on her son's forehead and tell him that his father was a good man who was under a lot of stress.
     
    One day things would be different, she said. She was a small woman with a round face and sad eyes—and it was only years later, when he found a photo of her in her high school yearbook, that Philip realized those eyes might have been capable of reflecting something other than pain.
     
    Sometimes Walter Kenan would hit his wife. Philip understood that the System was responsible for this. Once Philip had seen his mother on her knees on the kitchen floor, her hair in her face, her body shaking with sobs, a garish splash of red on the floor—which proved to be tomato soup but lay forever in Philip's mind in the terror of spilled blood. His father, reeling over his kneeling wife, had looked up at Philip and said,