Busy Monsters

by William Giraldi

  Is it any wonder she fell for me? Among my more commendable traits are these: a belief in equality across the human tribe and the opinion that gals should be allowed to use the toilet in privacy. This took a lot of getting used to for Gillian during the inaugural months of our love fest: she wondered aloud why I wasn’t suspicious or jealous, probing into her erotic past or inquiring into her whereabouts, where she went and with whom she went there and what clothes she had on in the process, times of arrival and departure and the number of gents in the vicinity. What really tossed her for a loop was the afternoon I handed her a hammer in the garage and asked for help in nailing together a new bookshelf. Apparently Marvin Gluck held the certain knowledge that women shouldn’t handle hammers, for their own safety and the safety of others.

  That afternoon in the garage she asked me, “Why don’t you call me sixteen times a day? And why doesn’t it bother you if I don’t call back right away?”

  “Darling,” I said, “I’ve waited my entire life for you and along the way have learned the patience of Buddha.”

  Gillian no doubt expected to wake one morning soon and see Marvin’s sultan face staring down at her. He’d say something like, “I’ve finally found you; we’ll never be apart again,” right before plunging a Civil War sword between her ribs. And how many times had I witnessed her twitch awake in the center of the night, startled by bad dreams of Pleistocene proportion? I’d clasp her humid body and wipe the tears with my T-shirt, asking her about the dream, knowing full well it was Marvin Gluck the vagrant hounding her through a Southern glade oozing with alligators, and my Gillian, wanting not to alarm me, saying it was simply stress from work. It was on one of these nights, at the black magic hour of three in the morn, that I understood, with every wisp of my brain and groin, that Marvin Gluck must be abolished.

  But I ran into a mental snag a few days before I planned to leave for the South. I went for my yearly dentist appointment and as I sat waiting, I picked up a student’s left-behind tattered copy of Macbeth. It belonged to one Amanda Jove, tenth grade, Alexander Hamilton High School. Her handwriting was exquisite, her name the stuff of chivalrous love songs. The play was familiar to me: once, as a sophomore at Central Connecticut State U, in between bouts of Hegel and some nutter named Marx—neither of whom could write a cogent sentence—I had puzzled through its pages and thoughtfully vandalized them, though Amanda Jove’s made my marginalia look like the feral scratchings of Cro-Magnon’s cousin. I started reading and for some reason could not stop; the thing made my upper lip wet. When that sorry man saw the dagger float before him, leading him down the corridor to his snoring victim, I looked up from the pages and will testify that I, too, there in my dentist’s waiting room decorated like every dentist’s waiting room in North America, saw a dagger before me, though it was actually Groot’s knife. Amanda Jove had written in the margin, Important: guilt madness, and by her mere suggestion I thought I felt a scintilla of my own guilt and madness. She will no doubt go on to be a great scholar, heralded in headlines, heaped upon with medals and awards, glasses lifted in NYC.

  The bard’s story caused a tremor in me: was I really marching pell-mell into my own mess-up? Nothing admirable, it seemed, could come from murderous ambitions, though I realized that my predicament was really a kind of self-defense, a preemptive strike against someone with a talent for menace and rout. Nevertheless, the floating dagger had me doubting my whole personality, which was uncomfortable since I am not the type who changes his mind unless scientific proofs are presented. Resolve is important. That night indigestion forced me to swallow a chalky pink antacid; a low hum of anxiety had infested my guts like a gang of bees. As we lay in bed I continued to feel my gizzard clench from what resembled fright; at one point I caught my hand trembling and my whisper on the verge of prayer.

  Gillian looked up from her new book on the giant squid and asked what was wrong. I said, “Your beauty boondoggles me,” and that pleased her quite a bit.

  “Listen to this,” she said. “The giant squid can weigh as much as two thousand pounds and grow to over seventy feet in length. Seventy feet! It’s the largest of all aquatic invertebrates, and lives at depths of two thousand feet. No wonder we can’t get at him. But I can smell him, Charlie. I know he’s down there.”

  And I found these facts perplexing; I could not fathom two thousand feet or, at that moment, two steps. Facts about the giant squid make my lover damp—I encouraged her pre-bed reading—and we indulged in each other’s bodies for nearly an hour. Twice I thought I would hyperventilate or else have cardiac arrest.

  My dreams that night were made by Lovecraft. I woke disturbed and canceled my writing work for the day. After pacing through our apartment all morning, I called on a priest at my boyhood church, Christ the King, because, let’s face it, no man can outpace his childhood, how he was harangued by those in positions of authority. A lapsed Catholic is the most devout Catholic of all; you have to experience this virus for yourself really to get my gist, though in the meantime just trust me. A Gothic-looking structure of brownstone, Christ the King Church is flanked by wide rectangles of green lawn and canopied by olden oak trees. As a kid I always wondered who cut the grass; as an adult I know it’s a kiss-ass congregant volunteering to push a mower in hope of earning a bed in heaven. It was noon this day, not the usual time for sinners to divulge their crimes, but I told the priest I wouldn’t speak unless we were in that confessional booth, the crimson velvet curtain like a blanket between us. This priest had NBA limbs; something about him looked tubercular. His face was pockmarked, his dimples deep enough to hide marbles.

  “What troubles your soul?” he said.

  “Well, Father, you might not get this, but I have a burning love for my lady.”

  “My child, I as well have a burning love for Christ our Lord.”

  “Right,” I said. “So you know what I mean.”

  “I do.”

  “Good. And when a man has this burning love, nothing at all can keep him from it.”

  “Not all the demons in Satan’s service,” he said.

  “Right, all the demons in Satan’s service. Exactly. A man has the right to defend his happiness.”

  “To defend his faith.”

  “Yes, his faith in his happiness, and in his love, his lady.”

  “His Lord.”

  I said, “That, too, sure.”

  “Then go, my child, and defend your happiness. Be a soldier.”

  “Really?” I asked.

  “Really,” he said.

  “Precisely, then. I shall. Thank you.”

  We both left the confessional booth at the same time, standing there eyeball to eyeball. He had half a sandwich in one hand and an entertainment magazine in the other—at least it wasn’t porn—the cover of which advertised the sexual abandon of some Beverly Hills starlet eighteen seconds to anorexia. Bits of tuna fish, I believe, were tucked into the corners of his mouth. We shrugged in confused unison, and then I left.

  Or attempted to leave. On my way out I brushed coats with Father Henry, the pastor-in-chief of Christ the King, he who had pestered me with constant pleas to become an altar boy, to forsake bombast and ballyhoo, to tinkle more substantive change in the offering basket each Sunday, and other spiritual what-have-you. I had thought or tried to think that he had perished or retired decades ago, perhaps been arrested and incarcerated for what you see on the news, but there he was now, in stargazing eyeglasses, pumping my arm up and down like he was trying to get well water to spring from my throat.

  “Charles,” he said, “what a pleasant surprise.”

  “Hello, Father Henry,” I said. “Nice to see you.”

  “What brings you here today? It’s been years. But I’ve been reading your memoirs every week in that magazine. Not so Christian, I must say. Especially the one about how your routine rectal exam prompted you to investigate the origins of Catamites in ancient Greece.”

  “I know, Father. I apologize.”

  “B
ut you have a certain, uhh, certain, strained way with words, Charles. It gets dizzy.”

  “I’ve been dizzy since I was a teen, Father.”

  “Still, I admire your…is it success you have?”

  He had shrunk a few feet since I’d last seen him, sometime during my senior year of high school. The cancer stamp on his blanched scalp looked a little like Siberia.

  “Thank you, Father. I’m sorry about the Catamites. But I came today because I was seeking some spiritual counsel. I saw that other fellow there, the tall one. I didn’t know you were still here.”

  “Spiritual counsel, I see. What is the problem, Charles?”

  He guided me a few feet backward and we sat in the last pew, precisely where I had hidden as a youth so as not to be noticed dozing or else thumbing through the pages of an X-rated periodical. You’d think a gruesome seven-foot crucifix hanging behind the altar—an aggravated Christ with his head up and back in the why-hast-thou-forsaken-me pose, plenty of blood leaking from beneath that crown of thorns and the spear wound in his rib—not to mention a fifty-foot cathedral ceiling with skylights to let in lanes of God’s spy-shine—would be sufficient to dissuade me from photos of girls with such handsomely haired genitalia. But what youth is not visited by hullabaloo, cyclonic inside him? Exactly.

  “Father,” I said, “I’ve made a mondo decision and I was just looking for some advice that might indicate that I’ve chosen correctly.”

  “Ah, yes, your parents tell me you’re getting married. Many congratulations, Charles. I hope Christ the King will be conducting the ceremony.”

  “That’s kind of you, but Gillian is Jewish, Father.”

  “I see. Well…that’s okay. Our Savior was a Jew, as well, remember. She can always convert, though. No one would have to know about her…past. Perhaps talk to her about that. Now, about this dilemma of yours.”

  I asked if I had his confidence, if he was cloud-bound by the Lord to stay mute about whatever I spilled to him, and when he confirmed, I belched out the Marvin Gluck saga front to back.

  When I finished, he felt the blubber above a collar cranked too tight and said, “Sounds like an atheist, this Marvin. Strychnine in society.”

  Ahh, strychnine in society: so he was a fan of my verbiage after all.

  “Father,” I said, “he’s an atheist through and through. I hear he has a sculpture of Percy Shelley and Bertrand Russell doing a French kiss and ball-sack grab.”

  “Scandalous. All these atheists everywhere all of a sudden. Writing books—bestsellers!—giving interviews on television, having conferences. Call themselves the New Atheism. Nothing new about devil worship, Charles, believe me. I’ve been around quite a while.”

  I nodded emphatically, dunce-like.

  “And so you say you’ll murder him, Charles?”

  “Well, I think so. I mean, that’s what I’ve been telling people. You know, pump up my image as a man’s man.”

  “I see,” he said. “Makes a good story, murder. Murder sells.”

  “Right. Agatha Christie and so forth.”

  “Charles,” he said, “you have my blessing,” and he patted my forearm and breathed heavily to his feet. “Society could use one less atheist. Don’t get caught.”

  I stood, too, and we shook hands in the back pew. “Many thanks, Father. I knew you’d understand. What with the Church’s history of conspiracy and gore.”

  “And see about conversion for Gillian,” he said, hobbling down the red-rugged center aisle of the church, like Yoda.

  ON A FRIDAY afternoon Gillian left work and went to visit her vegan cousin, Sheri, in Vermont for the weekend while I went online and got detailed directions right to Marvin’s awful doorstep. Just the day before we had received another menacing package from him; it was a bundle of blackish, withered roses with a greeting tag that read simply, Death. Gillian pretended not to be bothered but I could see that she was shaken right through to her spine. After she left, Groot called me from deep in South America, where he said he was liquidating cocaine growers and setting fire to their crops. He had been thinking about my “mission” and had some further tips for me:

  “Wait till he’s asleep so there’s no struggle. Wear gloves, naturally. A state trooper is bound to have security on his house, so don’t break in, don’t risk an alarm. Hide behind a tree or something, wait for him to get home, and when he goes to take the garbage out, try to sneak in. Park a mile away, at least, so no one sees your ride at the scene. Wear shoes one size too big, in case you leave a footprint. Remember, pull up on the serrated end of the blade. Enter through the bottom of the windpipe, drag up to the chin, and then over the jugular. That way, if he doesn’t die right away at least he can’t scream and wake up the neighbors.”

  All this I appreciated. But I wouldn’t have to worry about sneaking in after Marvin got home because Gillian had a key to his house. And I wasn’t much concerned with an alarm because I figured a guy who owns an arsenal of firearms would feel protected aplenty.

  The whole way down to Virginia, I listened to Nina Simone to comfort the shebang inside me. If I were a man given to the depth of philosophy, this would have been the time: more than eight hours in my cushioned car, a killer’s knife tucked into my boot, on my way to commit a capital crime, all for the love of a woman and, sure, an uninterrupted existence. Of course I considered the law and my soul, but neither seemed very vital just then. I had thought about sad Macbeth and his dagger since I had spoken with the priest, but the story had stopped spooking me. Actually, I remembered some of the lines Amanda Jove had highlighted; the demented king was actually allowing me some courage:

  “I have supped full with horrors. Direness, familiar to my slaughterous thoughts, cannot once start me.”

  Indeed.

  “I am in blood stepped so far.”

  What a boast.

  “Things bad begun make strong themselves by ill.”

  Couldn’t have said it better myself.

  Still, my palms would not stop sweating; I had to slip on leather gloves just to grip the steering wheel. Then, an hour or so from Marvin’s house, I spotted a billboard off the highway: SEE THE GIANT SQUID. I slowed and made a mental note of the exit: 43. There was a painting of the red beast that made it look profligate, guilty of crimes greater than mine. Gillian would not have approved of this artistic rendition. The giant squid exhibit was a sign—right?—but of what I could not say. I don’t make my way in the world in accordance with signs, though I’m sure the deities sometimes function that way, just not with me. One needs to be a pretty special person to receive a sign from on high, and despite some scant evidence to the contrary, Charles Homar is just not that special.

  Darkness started and I did as Groot had instructed: drove a mile from the mailbox, parked at the far end of a recently built strip mall with the requisite drugstore, pizza place, and Chinese food joint. The frosty March night showed my breath to me; the emotions at my center were an assortment of the reptilian and numinous: you know, fear of the practical combined with spiritual certainty. What would a man like me think about walking a mile on that empty stretch of wilderness road, going to do the dastardly deed I had in mind? I tell you, insofar as it is possible for a person’s cranium to be a void, mine was. There’s no telling what the noises were in the empty cockpit of my mind. If I quivered, it was not solely from the chill of that strange Virginia gloaming, trees everywhere thick and spooky.

  But I was not confused. Another man walking that isolated road might have paused to wonder how he had arrived there; he might have contemplated the various factors that had added up to this moment, perhaps regretful that his circumstances were not different, that he was not living on a different dome, by the light of some other ordinary star. The most sensible of men might even have had the good humor to laugh at his own cocksure silliness, unfurled ad absurdum, and excused himself from this John Wayne drama. But that man would not have had Gillian and the gut-tingling pleasure of her. Plus: a morsel in me still har
bored the dullest hope that I could somehow talk some sense into this monstrosity, Marvin Gluck.

  His one-story house was not impressive—a shack, really—renovations were in order, cleanup was needed, though I was relieved that the massive pine trees allowed ample cover from the road and any Confederate-flagged vigilante looking to upset a Yankee. A new Ford pickup was parked around back by the single-car garage; no lamps shone in the rooms. I crept in the wooded darkness for some minutes, in between the pines, feeling the brass key in my pocket. Having punished my bladder for the past half an hour, I pissed furiously onto the pine needles, wondering if this would be the way I was apprehended: DNA samples from my urine, collected by some savvy officer of the peace. I was glad I had not recently eaten because vomit felt possible. Again I crept in the darkness, waiting for an orange lamp to light up the kitchen that probably had no modern appliances. And then it occurred to me, a bit tardily, true: this mission might be knavery and not its rhyme. But just consider how close tardy is to retarded and you’ll start to get an idea about who you’re dealing with here.

  No lamp ever switched on inside and I guessed that Marvin was not home. Perhaps a reject-sibling had picked him up for a meal; perhaps he was in his police cruiser, foisting tickets unto the workingman who could ill afford them. At the front door I searched for signs of an alarm system, a colorful sticker on the glass meant to inform the dubious likes of me. I tried the key in the deadbolt and the knob; when it would not fit in either I experienced light-headedness and then drudgery; air moved noisily in my stomach. To have made it this far. Why would he have changed the locks on his door? I stood gawking at it as if I could, by psychokinesis or Christian incantation, make the thing swing open.