Busy Monsters

by William Giraldi

  Those words vacuumed all the air out of me; I could feel my face go white, my tongue like sawdust. Next to the Coke machine across from us someone had tacked up a “Welcome to Maine” calendar; in the photo two impossibly beautiful lovers were water-skiing on a blue lake, a snowcapped mountain behind them. I went to it slowly, weedy through the knees, and examined the tiny square for May 11. How could such a small space on paper be responsible for this magnitude of shatter? How could I have forgotten? And what could those two lovers on water skis be thinking behind their smiles? I had not been keeping track of the days and weeks; Fuss and I had agreed not to hang a calendar in the room, convinced it would make our time lug along. During one of our initial meetings, Deidre must have asked me about the wedding date, and the trap in her head had held on to the info these many weeks. Behind me I could hear her saying, “Well, that’s a good thing you didn’t remember, right? It means you’re over her and the whole thing. Right?”

  But I couldn’t speak just then, couldn’t turn around to look at her. The door to the hallway was right there to my left, and in another few seconds, with vision slightly blurred and the breath still smacked out of me, I opened it and moped away back to my cell—my legs moving I knew not how—leaving Deidre Jenkins open-thighed and astonished on the couch in her orange dress.

  I’d spend the next twelve hours curled on my bed, abandonable.

  ONE MORNING ABOUT two-thirds into my sentence, Grandpa came into our cell to nap on Fuss’s bed, and I asked him why my cellmate hadn’t returned from the library the night before.

  He said, “Fuss walked into town and got lost coming back. The fella went for a Snickers bar candy. Snowball took his bicycle to go find him.”

  “Grandpa,” I asked, “are you saying that the front door to this place is unlocked?”

  “Well, not exactly, but sometimes,” he said, pondering the lights overhead. “Ain’t no man gonna run away, Charlie. Most of you don’t have homes to run back to. And Dinner has lobster here, though only on occasion, as you know. That man can cook.”

  I was at my desk trying to write sentences not altogether debauched.

  He said, “I’ve been thinking about that fine little gal in the orange dress. She ain’t been back to visit you, though, Charlie. What’d you do wrong?”

  “The same thing men have been doing wrong since those cave paintings at Lascaux: emotional mendacity in service of a pitiful ego.”

  “Not sure what that means,” he said, his bulbous eyes closed now. “Just say you’re sorry. An orange dress like that don’t come around twice in a lifetime.”

  Indeed I had mailed Deidre Jenkins a handwritten apology in the sanest, most Presbyterian English I could muster, but she never replied. I expected to hear from her exactly never again, which was just as I deserved. Some of us need to dig the wax from our ears before that message will come through: we get what we deserve in this world.

  “What’s your next plan to win back Gillian? Trying to sink that boat didn’t work out too well for ya,” and he giggled through his Santa beard.

  He lay on Fuss’s bed backward, his black Kmart sneakers smashed into the pillow. With me in my chair and Grandpa there on the bed, we looked like Sigmund and his subject.

  “Well, Grandpa,” I said, “I don’t actually have a new plan as of yet. I’m kind of just waiting for an idea to fall through the top of my skull,” and for some reason I pointed to my head.

  “Well, my wife’s a fan of your little stories and wants to see you young folks reunite. She has a pool going with her lady friends. Everyone else in her bridge club thinks you’ll fail big time and maybe get dismembered, but my wife believes you’ll get back together, and so does one other lady, too, Mrs. Kellog. She’s ninety-eight years old, has had dementia for a decade. She’s pulling for you, Charlie.”

  “Grandpa,” I said, “you tell your lovely wife and Mrs. Kellog that Charles Homar treasures their support. If either of them has a plan for winning back Gillian that doesn’t involve firearms or prison time, I’d be glad to hear it.”

  “They’re eager for a new story. This detention has halted your narration, Charlie. You can’t very well write anything exciting about sitting in this room with Paul Fuss. Unless you write about that sweet girl in the orange dress.”

  Grandpa cracked open his swollen eyes and turned to me. “Maybe a prison break would spice things up. A great escape. You know, like Steve McQueen.”

  “Yeah,” I said, and spun in my swivel chair, “or I was thinking of creating a prison-wide uprising of some sort. That could be interesting to write about. Right?”

  Grandpa seemed to consider this a moment. “Well, nah,” he said. “You better just wait to be released next month.”

  And so I waited: the days and weeks of being surrounded by all that menacing male folly, yearning for Gillian’s flesh and the salty spot inside it, hour after hour of reading and day-tripping, contemplating all the bad news a man can bear, wondering what my next design should be, sleeping much in hope of dreaming, feeling awful about Deidre Jenkins, and trying to stay, stay the fingernails from screeching down the blackboard in my brain.

  Grandpa had given me a cell phone to use during my three-month incarceration but I had been too mortified to dial my parents or Groot or anyone else who might have resembled a friend. But during my last week locked up, while Fuss was in either the library or the computer room, I called my folks hoping to get my mother on the line.

  “Charlie,” my father said, “Jesus, why haven’t you called?”

  “How are you, Dad?”

  “How am I, how are you?”

  His voice wheezed, emphysemic and scuffed by a youth among cigarettes.

  “I’m good,” I said. “I’m fine.”

  “You’re good, you’re fine? You’re in prison. We read about you in the paper, Charlie. And your story in that magazine, about going to shoot the boat. Your mother bawled her eyes out all night.”

  “I’m sorry about this, Dad.”

  My mother was in the background, asking questions and no doubt trying to wrench the phone from him.

  “Jesus, Charlie,” he said, “it’s been months. When are you being released?”

  “This week,” I said.

  “We would have bailed you out, but…”

  “It’s fine, Dad. I know you guys aren’t rich.”

  “We’re not rich, Charlie. And to be honest, I told your mother a little prison time would do you good. I hope you’ll listen to me now. That Groot is a no-good bastard. They should have arrested him for giving you that gun.”

  “Is Mom there, Dad? Can I talk to her?”

  Both my mother and I began weeping then—we’re a weepy outfit—she for raising a cuckold and dolt, I for disappointing her—again.

  “How is it there?” she asked.

  “It’s fine, Mom. I leave this week.”

  I had no tissues to wipe my snot with—Fuss had used a whole box in the creation of his miniature Loch Ness Monsters—so I used the bottom of my T-shirt.

  “I’ve been sending you packages. I got the address from your lawyer up there. Did you get my packages?”

  “Yes, thanks, Mom,” I told her, even though I hadn’t received a single thing: not a card, not a cookie. “How Dad’s health?” I asked.

  “He’s okay. He’s fine. Don’t worry about us.”

  “Good. That’s good.”

  A long, strange pause here, as awkward as a first date, and then I said, “Day and night I think about what she told me at the harbor. She said she never loved me more than she loved the squid. Day and night: I just can’t figure it out. How can that be, Ma? It defies everything I know to be true.”

  “Oh, Charlie,” she said.

  Yes, oh, Charlie indeed.

  “I’ve got to go now, Mom. I’ll see you soon.”

  “But Charlie,” she said. “Promise me something. No more of this. No more of this madness.”

  4. SASQUATCH LOVE SONG

  UPON MY RELE
ASE from three months of concrete ennui, it took me half a day just to free my car from the impound lot. Then, bestirred to action, I flipped open a national newspaper in a coffee shop called Java Man and felt the bolts and belts in me shiver and snap. Gillian and Jacobi had fished out their giant squid in the dark-deep Antarctic Ocean—alive. The adult female mass of slime and stink measured forty-five feet and weighed nearly a ton; there was its picture beneath a headline boasting, “World’s Largest Invertebrate Captured.” Gillian grinned, as if at me, from the photograph; her eyes said satisfaction and sated. My kidneys were making a noise like chunk-chunk-chunk but I read on: they had trawled for the squid with deep sea lines two thousand meters long, each one equipped with some ten thousand baited hooks. Belowdecks sat a hulking tank designed to house the beast till landfall. A hatted henchman wielded a pump-action twelve-gauge in case the monster began snatching seamen and flinging them toward its snapping beak.

  The species of giant squid, I learned, remains so rare it wasn’t identified till 1925, though Jules Verne, effeminate Frenchman, had much to say about the goo and gas it is. Zealous experts the world over, especially some squid humper from the Earth and Oceanic Research Institute at the Auckland University of Technology, were right now in the process of hailing Jacobi and my Gillian as heroes akin to Achilles or perhaps Indiana Jones. Breakthrough for science. Words like wonder and imagine and deification. I was, I think, sweating blood.

  During one of our balmy postcoital nights now so long ago, Gillian told me that most of what was known about the giant squid had been learned from the cavernous bellies of sperm whales beached off the coast of New Zealand. Or from the ludicrous tales of ancient mariners too long above liquid. No more. Now Gillian had video footage of the one-ton kraken writhing in the foamy waves just off the stern of Jacobi’s vessel. Pinkish red and gelatinous, the squid and my heart: we were the both of us just calamari for Gillian and the other predators of earth. I swiped the newspaper aside and thought of Yeshua from Nazareth; I heard this shepherd, too, was crucified for love. My coffee tasted like copper.

  The slow and lonely drive home on Interstate 95 south—what was my hurry exactly?—a philosopheress on the radio singing about her hang-around ex-beau who wouldn’t beat it, the sunshine mocking my inner nor’easter. Mom had been keeping some watch over my townhouse during my imprisonment, and I returned home to find operating utilities, a barrel of mail, and fish that were not dead. Gillian’s absence pummeled me this way and that; she had left in a hurry to join Jacobi, so our place was pungent with her aroma, her doodads and knickknacks placed left, right, and center. Womanless, formerly incarcerated for unwise discharge of an automatic weapon, I sat in the foyer of our townhouse for perhaps seven hours, unable to move, staring at my knuckles, thinking about the derivation of melancholic. Somebody Greek had known my name.

  I snoozed on the sofa that night because entering our bedroom would have forced a multitude of tears, each one an icicle. My dreams were callous, squid-filled; the fiend had me in his jelly grip, trying to choke the breath from my ribs. A bikinied Gillian had the thing in a bridle and was riding it like a rodeo steed, wearing cowgirl hat and boots, with spurs, I believe. If I had clicked on the TV and scrolled to CNN I would have no doubt seen Gillian and Jacobi at the other end of Anderson Cooper, and this I could not abide. Indecisive, I sat in the sun out back for hours and tried to will the beams into a healing heat, Vitamin D and whatnot. The grass needed mowing but mowing was just then beyond my abilities. Then I called my friend, you know who, the Navy SEAL whose name I can no longer declare in my yarns—he says it’s bad for his military career.

  “Friend,” I said, after the opening whys and wheretofores, “I am released, and in need of further counsel.”

  “Christ, Charlie, more trouble?”

  “Christ indeed. Trouble for sure.”

  He told me my essay “Them Prison Blues” was short on emotion, didn’t delve into how I was really feeling, and then accused me of retreating from emotion in all of my work. I think I held the phone away from my ear and looked at it. Everyone a critic.

  He said, “Paul Fuss sounds like a talented pain in the ass. I would have gotten another prison term for dispatching that bastard henceforth.”

  “Friend,” I said, “that’s in the past. Our concern is the future. When can you come over?”

  “Give me five minutes flat,” and he was there in four and a half.

  We perched at the kitchen table for many minutes in silence—he no doubt wondering how I had gone from the semi-standard boy he once knew to the blotch now before him; I wondering the name of the witch doctor he had consulted in order to ward off aging—and then he wanted to know what went wrong when I took his rifle to the dock. He admitted that my memoirs “Witchy Woman” and “Them Prison Blues” were cheap on details, not nearly as thorough as they could have been were I blessed with quote Jamesian interiority and the plotting proficiency of Wilkie Collins unquote. Plus he added that rock star über-ego Don Henley wouldn’t be tickled if he knew I stole his title “Witchy Woman,” even though the Eagles were “the dullest band ever to cause a musical note.” Furthermore, my prose was just then “making Misters Fowler and Waugh scoff in their graves.” Groot uses his English degree whenever he is able, especially when it has zero bearing upon the matter at hand. His life was almost about books until the U.S. Navy rang his bell with offers of killing certain desert-dwelling Arabs who boast ill-gotten Kalashnikovs.

  “Well, I’m a little fuzzy,” I said, tasting the bad breath I had from lack of sanitary care. “I tried to perform as you advised, but once I arrived there and found them about to shove off in that boat, I think I just started shooting what was in front of me.”

  “Not a bad strategy: when in doubt, start shooting. Where’s my gun?”

  “They took it when they arrested me.”

  “No matter. They can’t trace it. Sorry your mission failed. I feel shitty about all this. Especially since your father hates my guts. I’ve always known it, I guess, but to read it in your essay and know for sure was a little upsetting to me.”

  Sensitive Friend.

  “Don’t think twice about my father,” I said. “We need a new mission. One that does not involve fury or frazzle and the possibility of further imprisonment. By the way, why do you have a beard? I haven’t seen a beard on you since we were in high school and you were trying to look like John the Baptist for some reason.”

  “The beard is because I’m off to Afghanistan this week. Undercover shit. Don’t ask.”

  “I won’t ask,” I said, and felt weepable.

  Friend examined his fingernails—they looked manicured by Korean expertise—and said, “I saw her on the news. The both of them. They’re still in New Zealand, displaying the sloppy beast for the excited and prying eyes of science.”

  “Yes. That’s what I was going to ask you. Do you think I should go there?”

  “To New Zealand? And then what? Coerce her back with poetic lines and perhaps a daffodil? Negative. You need a vacation, Charlie.”

  A vacation? Huh?

  “How can I holiday with this bile loose in my sternum? Here, feel my hand. It’s putty. The rest of me, too.”

  Friend sighed in either irritation or empathy, I couldn’t tell which.

  “I’m off to Kabul this week, Charlie. I don’t know when I’ll be back. My wisdom to you now is vacation.”

  “But where do I vacation? How? You really don’t want me to get Gillian back, do you?”

  He rolled his eyes in that way he does, the way that means I’m a hopeless jackass for thinking such rubbish, and then I could see him pondering, staring at the wall as if a non-English sentence were scribbled there and he the linguist who would decipher it. Then he rose and sauntered down the hall to the latrine while I looked bleary-eyed at my meaty fingers, all of them marvels of movement.

  When Friend returned he said, “Charlie, what do you know of the legendary Sasquatch?”

  “Friend,”
I said, “I appreciate the sentiment, but this is no time for a woman’s genitalia. Plus I’m hurt internally.”

  “You boob, Sasquatch is Bigfoot,” he said, and sat, taking up notepad and pencil. “Half man, half ape. Eight feet tall, six hundred pounds. Undiscovered primate in the Pacific Northwest, Washington State.”

  His drawing was a blur of hair that didn’t have anatomy.

  I said, “Washington State. An old girlfriend of mine relocated to Seattle or thereabouts. Sandy McDougal. Very nice gal.”

  “Charlie,” he said, scratching his new beard, “please stay focused.”

  “In that case, Friend, I do not follow.”

  And so he described: Before he was called to arms earlier in the week by the U.S. Navy, he had planned an excursion to the state of Washington with a compatriot called Romp—the unimprovable tag would soon make sense—in order to uproot all varieties of flora and fauna and bag a Bigfoot. It was his idea of vacation: the purity of unhurt wilderness along with the possibility of shooting a primate unknown to science. As I listened to him pour forth about Gigantopithecus—the extinct thing Bigfoot supposedly is—I wondered how much aspirin and whiskey were stowed away in the kitchen cabinets, and how much of them I would need to consume in order to know what life was like in Andromeda.

  When he stopped I said, “Pray tell, Friend, why would I want to fly to the West Coast to hunt a Sasquatch? Especially after I recently mocked a man with a soft spot for the monster of Loch Ness.”

  “Charlie,” he said, “you are dull, made of links rusted and out of date. Why? Because if you nab an unknown primate you, too, will be a hero to science and civilization alike, perhaps noteworthy to a folklorist or fabulist, and, more important, once again in the affections of Miss Gillian. The capture of a giant human-like monkey will dwarf by many yards the capture of that giant squid. CNN will summon you. Plus it makes for a good story. See now?”

  His language was for me just then akin to what apish Homo erectus felt on the African savanna when he tamed the first fire, the flame hip-hopping at the end of a log. After a stretched moment of my thoughts lining up in both alphabetical and chronological order, I said slowly, “Indeed I do,” and felt the soda-like fizzing of thrill move up my guts, all those tubes and pipes rotted by loss. This here was possibility for a poo-bah like me. Providence was once again proclaiming: Move.