Somewhere Out There - Excerpt - Philip

Philip lived on the edge of town.

We pulled up to his house tucked back in the trees after bumping down a long gravel road in my dad’s Geo Prizm,.

“Need help getting inside, Philip?” my dad asked.

Philip rocked back and forth in the passenger seat, clutching a paper bag filled with books and magazines. He nodded his unkempt gray head in answer to my father and grasped at the door handle.

I was 12 and Philip was maybe 60. I couldn’t wait for him to get out of our car. I thought he was crazy, he made weird noises, and he stank.

“Come on, Chris,” my dad said.

I looked through the car window at the ivy and mold threatening to consume Philip’s home. There was no way we were going to make it out of that house without falling through the floor or being attacked by rats. I sighed and crawled out of the car. Dad was already helping Philip up the front porch steps.

Philip suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. He was also a savant—like Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man. Philip stumbled into our lives a few weeks earlier when he walked into the sanctuary of our small Baptist church in the middle of my dad’s sermon. The congregation turned and watched this unkempt man shuffle to the very front pew, sit down, rock back and forth, and begin to loudly grind his teeth.

After a few minutes of teeth grinding, Philip raised his hand. “Excuse me, preacher.”

My dad paused and looked at Philip from the pulpit. My jaw dropped—this was the most exciting thing I had ever seen happen during church.

“Yes sir?” my dad said.

Philip then launched into what would be the first of many meandering mid-sermon questions over the coming weeks and months. Philip didn’t get in trouble, my dad just asked him if they could talk after the service. My mom even smiled at him from the choir! Nobody else in the congregation seemed disturbed by this. I was baffled. I would have totally gotten in trouble if I had done something like that during church.

Philip fascinated me. Who was this man?

Each week, Philip hitched a ride into Glenwood. He bought a few cans of soup from Wright’s Grocery Store, filled a paper bag with books and magazines from the town library, and returned home. Over the next several days he read his stack of books, ate his soup, and came back for another round.

Before long, Philip read through all the shelves of the Glenwood Public Library. He then moved to the libraries of all the churches in town. Philip’s quest for books was endless.

One Saturday we awoke to a pounding on our door. It was Philip. And it was six in the morning. He needed books. For the next few weeks, our house became a stop on his routine. My dad opened the door and Philip bustled past and went into my room. He swept all my Goosebumps and Animorph books into his paper bag, mumbled that he would bring them back next week, and headed for the door.

“Do you need a ride Philip?” my dad asked before the door could slam.

“Yes, please.”

“Okay, Chris get your shoes. We are taking Philip home.”??

I was used to this kind of thing. My mom and dad often spent time with people like Philip. Hospitals, nursing homes, and funeral parlors were regular after-school stops for us. So I got in the car and sighed knowing my plans for X-Men and other Saturday morning cartoons had just been wrecked.

Once we arrived at Philip’s home, I climbed out of the car and followed Philip and my dad up the steps into Philip’s home. The inside was worse than the outside. Stacks of books and magazines hid the furniture in the living room. Empty soup cans and trash littered the small kitchen.

Philip hadn’t always been like this.

Decades earlier, he became obsessed with the space race between the United States and the Soviet Union. When the Soviets launched the world’s first artificial satellite “Sputnik” into orbit, Philip grew convinced the USSR would use Sputnik to launch nuclear missiles from space—leading to nuclear war and global annihilation. So Philip armed himself with knowledge. He read and read and read as much as he could about nuclear fusion, nuclear fission, the arms race, geopolitics, and Russian history.

The more he learned, the more frightened he became.

Soon this obsession became an insatiable hunger for knowledge and Philip devoured as many books he was able to get his hands on. He withdrew further and further into an inner realm. Coming up for air every now and then long enough to get into town and get more books. Things became dark for Philip. He told us voices tormented him.

Mental illness is complex.

My dad made sure Philip had enough to eat, got him settled, and we walked to our car. As we bounced back down that gravel road, I looked back at Philip’s old house, covered in vines, with curtains drawn tight.

Philip’s story seems odd until I take a step back.

Here was a person who lived on the edges of a community, but never really stepped into it. A person who constantly devoured information. A person who perceived a credible threat to life as we know it and became consumed by it.

I wonder what Philip’s life would have been like with an iPhone. If he had had an endless supply of podcasts, Netflix, newsfeeds, and social media—along with a food delivery app—he might never have had to hitchhike into town. We might never have met Philip.

Philip passed away a few years ago. As far as I know, he wasn’t “cured” of his mental illness.

I imagine that out in the woods down a long gravel road, Philip’s house is still there—covered in vines with the curtains drawn tight. I am sure there are empty soup and dust-covered stacks of books about Sputnik strewn about inside. I suspect that one Goosebumps book I never got back is in there somewhere too.

I sometimes think about Philip when I listen to just one more podcast episode, when I complete my Goodreads book-reading challenge, or when I mindlessly scroll through news articles and social media. I think about Philip when I become fearful about the various threats to life as we know it.

I think about Philip and the courage it must have taken him to step out his front door and make the long journey into town where he encountered other living, breathing people. I think about how, for a time, Philip sat in a pew among a community of people who didn’t glare at him for grinding his teeth, smelling funny, or asking weird questions. I think about the interactions Philip had with the kind people of our small town.

I think about how, for a time, not all the voices speaking to Philip were in his head.