Busy Monsters

by William Giraldi

  I tried the knob anyway to see if it would turn, and just like that I was standing inside Marvin’s snug kitchen. Either the boob had neglected to lock the house upon leaving or else he was here napping with dreams of my Gillian.

  I stifled my breath and listened hard, my hand still on the knob. That day-old odor? Cat food, no doubt clumped like mud in a dish somewhere. (Something else I admired about Gillian: unlike so many of my past girlfriends, she did not require cats in her life, and so my furniture and clothes were saved from assault by hair.) A creature meowed somewhere in Marvin’s living room; from my back pocket I pulled a slim flashlight—Groot had instructed me to bring a slim flashlight—and when I aimed it through the doorway…

  There was Marvin, lounged back in an armchair, looking at me with yawning eyes. The gray cat was arched on his shoulder, licking the bullet hole nestled in the side of his skull. I aimed the flashlight at the carpet near the chair and spotted the handgun. On the baby-blue curtains behind him, his blood was splattered better than a Jackson Pollock.

  I had to instruct myself to breathe and then to breathe some more; my ribs groaned and creaked around a ghoulish heart. Marvin sat bare-chested, Gillian’s name tattooed across his pecs. Except now the word FOREVER was blazoned on his mushy abdomen, and as I stepped closer I saw that he had recently carved it there himself with a razor or steak knife. And then I knew: the roses we had received the day before with the message Death were not meant for Gillian or me, but for Marvin himself.

  Witness, all ye nonbelievers, the thunderous power of my lover.

  “Marvin,” I said, giddy. “You shouldn’t have.”

  The place, in fact, was a paragon of filth, stained clothes dropped on the carpet, crusty dishes in every room, crooked framed photos of Gillian grinning from the walls. Outside, I paused there in his dirt driveway to weep.

  “Goodbye, Marvin,” I said through my tears—I cry when I can—“and thank you.”

  Then I remembered the cat. I couldn’t just leave it there to mope and starve, so I retrieved it from behind the door, saying, as you know I did, “Here kitty kitty,” and it was delighted to come with me, no doubt having had its share of one Marvin Gluck. On my lap it sat with love, made cat sounds. At a pay phone in the parking lot of the strip mall, I fanned through the tethered directory for the closest animal shelter, and when I got there twenty minutes later, I said to the T-shirted teenage girl at the front desk, her mouth a mutiny of metal, “Find this feline a loving home. And remember always the difference between s-o-r-e and s-o-a-r.”

  My next stop was the giant squid exhibit off the highway. Yes, it would be a mere twenty feet long and made clumsily of rubber, suspended from the rafters of some lonely farmer’s barn. But he would take a Polaroid photo of me in front of it, and I would smile wide for the camera, and have this photo to give to Gillian upon my return. And I would make a pledge to her, now that we were unencumbered, that I would soon dive to the bottom of the sea and drag back her beloved squid, kicking and screaming, so that she could hold it, and smell it, and measure its abundance, all the days of her life.

  2. WITCHY WOMAN

  GILLIAN LEFT ME in a lurch two months before our wedding and turned me into another lovesick numbskull with a hacked-up heart. I arrived home from the library one immaculate afternoon and as soon as I walked through the door I could smell her absence: dusty and metallic, like a warehouse. In all matters love, the baser senses are heightened; I could sometimes smell her panties tucked away in the top drawer across our bedroom, her athletic socks in the laundry basket downstairs. Bears and wolves know what I mean.

  My eyes were no great help that day; nothing much looked amiss. It was only upon inspecting her closet that I found the spot where her suitcase had been, her favorite pair of leather boots removed, a few choice sweaters, pants, and books missing, too. Teetering was the wire hanger that once held her checkered wool jacket. I might have said, “Hmmm,” and searched about some more and then dialed her cell phone. When she didn’t answer I might have felt my stubbled chin as the confused are known to do. Suddenly, more things were missing: a duffel bag, toiletries, multivitamins, a special notebook. Then I sat at the kitchen table, novocained through the knees, my hands folded as if in prayer. And I stared. For many minutes. And wondered. For many more. And knew. For sure.

  Panic lodged itself in my chest and soon I got antsy, pacing a rut in the living room rug, nightmaring from room to room to room. That’s me: calling her phone again and then calling a few more times. Valves began shutting, hoses hissing, and somewhere in my torso a drip-drip-drip. I wanted to find a cushioned seat, but before I could look I was already on the floor, facedown and panting. Men, it’s true, are not made well. Who was it who said that grief feels like fear? Give that bard a plant as a prize for insight.

  Most poets blather on about the darkness and cold, but I tell you, for an entire day all I felt were flame and light. She never called back. My temperature rose and rose. I left an uptight voice message for her vegan cousin, Sheri, something about phosphorus in my arteries, a hootenanny in my head. Malignant, medieval, medication: those were the words that occurred to me. What could I do? Baffled, I dipped pita bread into my hubris and then declared that hummus was the fatal flaw that got Agamemnon stabbed in his bathtub. I thought about carving Gillian’s name across my pecs with a not-sharp steak knife, like Marvin Gluck. So this was what that maniac had been raving about.

  But perhaps this was a misapprehension? Perhaps soon I’d be saying silly me?

  ’Round about nightfall, I began sniffing for clues, as any animal would. Gillian of course had left me nary a note; that would have been too typical, and my lady revolted against the typical. “Uniqueness in every act” could have been her motto. Raiding her desk, it didn’t take me long to discover that the giant squid was at the bottom of this heartwreck. Gillian’s obsession for the elusive fiend was consummate—never before had reliable human eyes ever fixed themselves upon a breathing giant squid—Architeuthis, pronounced, so I gather, Ark-i-tooth-iss. The ugly bastard was a mystery to the scientific community and laymen alike. If you find this obsession goofy, you are not alone.

  Books about the beast lay open and closed in her home office; posters decorated the walls and a little plastic model terrorized the citizens of her fish tank. I recalled that Gillian had been in correspondence with a big-shot squid hunter named Jacob Jacobi, some ocean yahoo affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution and the University of New Hampshire. The guy had his own boat and called it The Kraken, which was what ancient peoples had named the giant squid. Every year Jacobi spent three straight months out at sea in pursuit of the thing. His book: How the Squid Lives, two pounds of obscurantist dross typed in an almost-English academics and scientists seem proud of. The imprudent photo on the back of this book showed a mustache looping over his top lip, dangling from either side like a hawser, as if at any moment a miniature person might appear from his nostril and climb down to safety. And how to describe those eyebrows? Stalinesque.

  Mind you, I’m no beauty fit for TV, but anyone with macroscopic vision could see that I was handsomer than this rollicking jerk-off.

  I ransacked Gillian’s desk to locate the missives and printed emails sure to be there (a sentimentalist and conspiracy theorist regarding Bill Gates, she printed every important email ever received). When I found them beneath binders in the middle drawer, my breathing went wild and then nearly halted. Certain cogs crucial to my existence would not turn; a hailstorm appeared between my ears. My lady had been trading affections with this worm; nothing sexual, I’ll admit, but still the lines were catastrophic to my napalmed heart. They had never met, but with letters, emails, phone calls, and photos, they had developed a fondness for each other. My lady spoke of having a crush, which might sound innocuous to your ears, but my own ears had different ideas.

  Think about how that word now applied to me: our wedding was crushed, my heart crushed, I must crush Jacob Jacobi, perhaps crush him beneath
my car, after which my future would be crushed as I decomposed in prison for the murder of a giant squid hunter respected the world over. My world, over. How could I go back to being alone or dating knuckle-headed post-nymphs? All that noisy steam broke free from my pipes—and I moaned, sprite enough to haunt a house.

  At first Jacobi’s letters were all about the giant squid, but with each new one the monster was mentioned less and less. I was treated to his whole life story: a childhood in Cincinnati, of all places; a brief stint in the Coast Guard; and the fact that—I was near vomiting—he slept in the nude. The thought of this hirsute tug brushing up against the milky smoothness of my Gillian caused my lungs to ignite; somewhere in the center of my sternum lay a fissure leaking acid and bile. All my major organs were now rethinking their purpose and contemplating a strike. The last letter was dated just a week ago. They were to set off on a three-month voyage in search of the kraken in the bottomless waters near New Zealand, and were scheduled to depart from a port in southern Maine in just, horrors, one day—tomorrow.

  How to relay the upset tearing through me?

  When I was a child of ten, I flipped over my handlebars on Brooks Boulevard and flew headfirst into the plate-glass window of Kline’s Liquor Store. This was a time before parents got sued for not outfitting their kids in bicycle helmets and other regalia, and the impact knocked me just this side of Saturn or a ring thereof, all stars and diaphanous clouds and other deep-space holy-moly I could not name. And then the dark, and I was gone, dropping through unconsciousness until, long seconds or minutes later, Christ-loving pedestrians shook and petted me back to the light.

  I’ve never forgotten the heaviness in my tiny body, the distant sound of adult voices not one foot from my face, the world blurred and drained of color, a sepia shot of who-knows-what in God-knows-where. A sirenless ambulance arrived, bulbs twirling on top in shocked silence. Where had it come from so quickly? White-clad rescue workers, man and woman, floated over to me not as angels descending from paradise, but as two practiced in sorcery, prepared to mend or mash, I couldn’t tell which. They lifted me onto a gurney and strapped me down, and through my fogbound vision I tried to spot my mother and father rushing to my side to quash this theft of me. Being taken by these strangers felt like being zapped up to a flying saucer by smut-fed aliens.

  My parents didn’t come, not for many hours. I lay in a hospital bed with more heebie-jeebies than I could control, concussed and crying, and when I saw them come through the door, my trickling tears turned to weeping, and not because I was grateful that they had finally shown up to save me, but because I knew that they had betrayed me by setting me loose and reckless on a bicycle and then not arriving before I could be stolen by stranger-medics in an ambulance.

  I had lost a whole day being nearly incinerated by surprise; Gillian and Jacobi’s departure date was the next morning. Gillian must have wanted to arrive in Maine early in order to—hmm, what? Oh, gods on Olympus, if you’re there, save my mind from fancies of lust and lubricity! Aside from some innocent flirting with Jesus, I had never placed much stock in the supernatural, but now was the time. I was prepared to consult witches and magicians, or any lunatic on the street with a vacant stare. These being in short supply, I again called on Groot; his instructions on how to rub out Marvin Gluck had been miracles of imagination.

  When I got him on his cell phone after a dozen rings he said, “I read ‘Antihero Agonistes’ a few weeks ago in New Nation Weekly. You said you weren’t going to write about it.”

  “But did you like it?”

  “You’ve always dabbled in hyperbole, Charlie. I just hope the cops don’t show up at your door.”

  “People think all memoir is fiction. Plus cops don’t read. But Groot,” I said, “listen. I am afflicted again.”

  I told him the sordid details of my dilemma, the tussle and upsurge of it. Hearing myself give the details, it all sounded so Seussian. A red-and-white-striped top hat would not have looked that absurd on me.

  He said, “Giant squid hunter, eh?”

  “Correct.”

  “Is liquidation in order?”

  “You mean more murder?”

  “That I do.”

  “I don’t know what’s in order, Groot. I’m trembling here. Where are you now?”

  And—luck—he told me he was home, reclining on his parents’ sofa, summoned by his mother to celebrate his father’s sixtieth birthday.

  “About this giant squid hunter,” he said, chewing something squishy. “He could be, more than Marvin, a formidable opponent.”

  “I’m going to get Gillian back. I need to know how to proceed.”

  “Are you armed?”

  “With impulsiveness and grief only.”

  “Useful as they are, they will not do now. He probably has a big harpoon. I’ll be there momentarily with a plan. Stand by.”

  I studied Gillian’s prismatic poster of the giant squid and puzzled over its lidless eyes, dead-black and bigger than hub-caps; the underside of its eight rubbery arms outfitted with razor-like sucking circles; the two long whippy tentacles employed to entangle its hapless prey; a pointed tail Satan must envy; and a creepy bird-like beak that nature had placed in an unlikely spot: between its arms. The son of a bitch doesn’t have a head; it’s a mess of engineering, unintelligently designed, unsightly and wrong. My lady loved it.

  Groot arrived and declined my offer of a beer, choosing instead a glass of iced tea, and looking as he had always looked, sans cowboy hat and boots, thank God: tallish and lean with that Navy buzz cut and face that defied aging. After a whole day in my skivvies, I was now fully dressed, Nikes and all, tapping my fingers on the kitchen table. Groot wouldn’t talk until he had finished the entire glass of tea. I whistled and kept glancing at the digital time on the microwave oven.

  “Charlie,” he said, “Miss Gillian is an awful lot of trouble for you.”

  What was the meaning of that statement? My face didn’t know what to do.

  He said, “Have you ever thought about just getting a new girlfriend? Maybe?”

  “Groot,” I told him, “that would be like having the greatest name in history, Cassius Clay, and then changing it to some common abomination.”

  A moment of facial expressions from the both of us.

  “I see,” he said, but clearly he did not.

  “How is this helpful right now, Groot?”

  “I’m just saying, Charlie. If she left you, she left you. Have you ever tried to change a woman’s mind? You need abracadabra to do it.”

  “The plan, Groot. Please get out of practical mode and get into military killer mode. Please?”

  But the truth was that he had never cared for Gillian. Too much of a gentleman and pal ever to say anything, he nevertheless had made it known over the years with the subtlest facial tics and changes of tone. Something inside him had detected something afoul inside her. Although, true, the only human female Groot thought incapable of double-cross was his Latvian mama, plump and proud of her single boy. She still wears his diaper pin as a brooch, and I mean every day, on every outfit.

  Deep inhale, deep exhale. The rolling of his eyes. And then: “Time,” he said, “is of the essence. My data tells me they depart tomorrow morning from a port in Maine. I estimate the target will have four to five henchmen. Three months at sea is a perilous task for just a man and his new lover.”

  “Ouch, don’t say lover, Groot. Christ, man.”

  “Sorry,” he said, and flipped open a notepad on the kitchen table, licked a pencil, and began drawing diagrams. “Option One A: you lay in wait at the vessel and once the adversaries board, you eliminate with either pistol or blade or close-quarters assault rifle, at which point you may retrieve your bride. Option One B: you lay in wait on a rooftop with an adequate rifle and snipe the enemy as they board, at which point you descend to retrieve your bride. Option One C: you rig the vessel with explosives and once the enemy boards you blow them all to hell, in which case you will not retrieve
your bride.”

  His artwork consisted of preschool scrapings that were supposed to be a boat, a knife, a rifle, and a mushroom cloud. He spun the notepad around for me to see. The boat, for some reason, had oars.

  “Groot,” I said, “your bloody mind is a beauty, but I really just need to get Gillian back. The less dismemberment the better.”

  “Okay, then,” and he spun the notepad back around. “Option Two: you find the pair and talk to them of decency and creed, convincing your gal that she has erred in judgment. Then you convince the squid hunter that he really doesn’t want to covet your bride. Your gal gives up her lifelong passion for the giant squid and her unique opportunity to capture it. The hunter goes his way, you and your bride go yours. Perhaps there’s a handshake.”

  This diagram tried to show two hands shaking, except they looked more like claws than hands. One had on a wedding ring.

  I said, “Hmm. I see. About those firearms and explosives.”

  “Precisely. Let’s convene at the trunk of my car. I’ve come prepared for such possibilities.”

  “Perfect,” I said, and we rose from the kitchen table like Boy Scouts about to get filthy. But then Groot stopped me in the foyer to add an aside, asking me if I was certain that Gillian had never read “Antihero Agonistes.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so. When that week’s issue of New Nation Weekly hit the stands I went to Food World in town and bought up every copy so Gillian wouldn’t see it when she went shopping.”

  “She could have seen it online.”

  “They don’t post my memoirs online, Groot. Only excerpts.”

  “Someone could have told her about it, then.”