Busy Monsters

by William Giraldi

  “By the dog catcher?”

  “And I have marks on my body, Charlie. Inexplicable marks.”

  “I do, too, Sandy. And so does this hobbit over here. And so does the common person out there walking down the sidewalk. Look, there goes one now.”

  “You know not of what you speak,” he said.

  “Aliens don’t exist,” I told him. “And neither do angels or—”

  “But apparently Bigfoot does!” He almost crawled across the table at me.

  “I told you I had a lapse. It lasted a day. I’m guessing yours has lasted a lifetime.”

  Sandy chimed in with, “Casey is a leader in the field of ufology. He’s studied crop circles in the Philippines and all over America.”

  “And I am a man schooled in splotches and what can be done with bleach, plus I am capable of knowing metallurgy and how to sail by stars. I also recite Hamlet. So? Let me repeat: aliens don’t vacation on earth.”

  He squealed, “Then explain the Nazca Lines in Peru, you brute!”

  “Pictures to impress their gods. They frolicked upon them drunken and disorderly much like Bacchus. P.S.—don’t call me brute.”

  “Liar!” he said, his face a storm, a baby fist clunking the tabletop. “They are landing strips for aliens! Hellfire on you!”

  A tense moment, I had to admit. Sandy looked sad. This here was the difference between the smitten and the smote and I had trouble telling who was whom and which was what.

  “People,” I said, as calmly as I could, “listen. If space aliens traveled a gazillion miles across the cosmos, I doubt they would need some rocks in the desert to land their airplane. Remove head from ass. Are we out of chicken here?” and I presented the empty bucket.

  Sandy said, “Well, explain Roswell, then, Charlie. That was no weather balloon. And wait, I’ll get you some more chicken. There’s another bucket in the fridge.”

  “Yes,” Casey said, “explain the Roswell incident, then. Blasphemer! Goddamn!”

  He was like a Filipino leprechaun unleashed. We watched Sandy leave the dining room.

  “Mr. Gonzales,” I told him once Sandy had gone to the kitchen, “I suspect you’ve bamboozled my onetime gal with Bronze Age confabulations. She is clearly brainwashed if not hemlocked. Surrender and withdraw or I’ll expose you for the fraud you know you are. I actually did come across in today’s paper your quote-expert-unquote comments on the Seattle Lights, and you strike me as someone with the logic of Cotton Mather.”

  “There’s nothing going on here. I don’t know what you mean,” and he tried to giggle.

  “What I see before me are definitions one and two of the word diddle. Shall I grab a dictionary?”

  He grew quietly irate over there across the table from me, his little face getting more crimson every five seconds, until he couldn’t help himself anymore and he yapped out, “You won’t win her back. She’s mine. Goddamn!”

  “I need her counsel and some friendly kisses. I’ve been to prison, I warn you. My cellmate there was a knave who believed in the Loch Ness Monster, and you saw how I ridiculed him rightly.”

  “Hellfire!”

  “Also, my moral courage is troubled by this chicanery. You have shifty mind-craft afoot, and that cannot stand. I’ve never seen a brain so altered. A heart, yes. A brain, not at all.”

  “You won’t spoil this for me. Viking! I have an entire year invested in her.”

  “Not my problem. Here she comes.”

  Some of my motives felt BCE, indeed; and I was an individual accomplished in zaniness and the finer points of making messes, true, in addition to being a lothario who could disrupt entire zip codes, but seeing Sandy in that twisted state of worship, every millimeter of her emitting despair of the doctrinal sort—the very wrongdoing which damns that madman Faustus—and this at the hands of some gremlin mercenary for the unearthly—it all inspired in me a great deluge of paternal caring-for. I had to do something; this parasite’s sapping of her mind was unnerving and wrong, and what would become of my Gillian quest without her feminine know-how? Human life unfolds between the covers of a comic book.

  “Sandra,” Casey said when she returned to the table with more chicken, “Charles here was just struggling to explain Roswell. Apparently he cannot.”

  “They’re stories told by drunkards, Sandy, by the mythologically minded. The only thing to find out about Roswell is the bartender’s name who served the booze.”

  “It began with the crashed saucer,” she said. “I’ve read thousands of pages on this, Charlie. The declassified Air Force documents included. I’m a bit of a Roswell raconteur, holding court with the best of them. Isn’t that right, Casey?”

  “Right you are, my dear. You’re out of your league here, Mr. Homar. Goddamn! Perhaps you should go back to scrawling your little stories of Gillian and her giant squid.”

  “Sandra McDougal,” I said, “first of all, notify this homunculus that if he mentions Gillian’s name to me again, I will do very evil, very bad things to him. Let me repeat: very evil, very bad things. I am a man. Second, I admire your nerve and your skin is divine. But what bit the dust in the desert of New Mexico was a high-altitude spy balloon made to monitor the Russians’ nuclear program. The government couldn’t admit such top-secret tasks and so they let you jokers believe it was a flying saucer. I’ve done some research of my own. Thanks for this chicken, by the way. I’ve always liked it better cold. My father does, too, bless him. Sandy, I quiver for you.”

  “Why, Charlie?”

  “For heaven’s sake, listen to you! Swindled by this palooka. And you have a doctorate!”

  Watery eyes now. “Come with us tonight, Charlie. Come with us if you don’t believe.”

  “Yes,” Casey said. “Come see for yourself. That is, if you aren’t too scared of having your pedestrian preconceptions vanquished.”

  Here’s what I should have done just then, considering that the past six months of my life had been fit for a popup picture book and I really didn’t need a new adventure: I should have risen from the table, bowed like a Renaissance duke, and made my exit trailing thank-yous and good-lucks, so-long-see-you-tomorrows. But no. We human monsters make choices with the minds of worms; good sense lies east, we veer west; trouble sends an invitation, we RSVP the very same day. But—and this is crucial to my development as a higher-thinking primate—I had meant what I said to Gonzales about my morality being rankled by this exploitation, by the taking advantage of a mid-age gal marinating in grievance. Yes, I couldn’t have saved myself if you had given me a life vest and drained all the water from the lake I was drowning in, but I had the rather Christic (read: chivalric) urge to come to a lady’s rescue. I had my conscience, that underrated organ residing somewhere within the ghouls we are. Watch me work.

  So I said, “And where exactly are you going tonight, people?”

  “Casey has information that a sighting will happen just before midnight, beyond Hannibal Gorge. It’s a holy place. They want something there.”

  “When I was a child my mother made me promise never to go near a gorge with the name Hannibal.”

  Casey said, “You see, dear, he doesn’t want to be enlightened,” and he rose from the table just then, hardly a hair taller than when he was seated. I wondered how he operated that mammoth truck outside, if he had a pint-sized pal who controlled the pedals while he himself stood on the seat and steered. It seemed an excellent way to cause traffic calamities.

  He went on, “I won’t be insulted by this homicidal loon. Hellfire! Yes, I’ve been reading your installments for that hopeless weekly. I know you attempted to murder Gillian’s ex-lover, and then all that nonsense at the dock, when you tried to sink the ship she was sailing away on with the giant squid hunter. Goddamn! Plus it’s unspeakable what you did to Romp, left him to be consumed by Sasquatch. Sandra, dear, I think this character is a danger, to himself and to others. He’s hardly credible. I advise caution. Half a million people will be reading about us next week if we’re
not careful. Plus I can tell he harbors prejudice against little people.”

  I muttered the m-word.

  “Damn you!”

  “Gentlemen, please,” said poor Sandy, about to sob.

  “I am not amused by your bigotry,” he said.

  “Sorry, I can’t help it, Casey. You offend my concept of what congruity consists of. When I see a beautiful woman on the arm of an unsightly man it turns me angry, makes me question the justice of the cosmos. I want to see the good rewarded and the not good punished or else made very lonesome. Guess which one you are.”

  “I stopped listening to you several minutes ago,” he said, inch-worming his way around the table toward the door, and when Sandy asked him where he was retreating to, he replied, “Back to my motel. I must prepare for our excursion tonight. When I return to retrieve you I trust you’ll be alone. Mr. Homar,” he said, “you might want to mend your impolite ways.”

  “Imp Gonzales,” I said, “I hope you choke.”

  Really, none of this was pleasant. If only I would have taken the time actually to contemplate my direction and decisions in life instead of rushing haphazard and headlong into the unknown, prompted by passions much older than the Middle Ages. Just stop and breathe and think. But of course not. What now?

  WELL, IT COULD have been worse. After telling me that I didn’t have to be such a discourteous know-it-all out to besmirch, Sandy insisted on stripping off her summer dress near the lamp in the living room—it fell from her speckled shoulders, she stepped out of its pile in no bra or panties at all—on account of the heat, of course—and further insisted that I inspect her dairy skin for marks of the green or gray invaders. Whole districts inside me went asunder by the sight of her; that body couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old, so taut and mostly hairless in the Penthouse fashion of our day, not to mention her height, hardly five feet tall, which only added to the nymphet formula stalked by Humberts everywhere. Folks? Folks, Charles Homar felt blotto on the longing loose throughout his many nether regions, and I thought, WWRD?: What Would Romp Do?

  “Sandra,” I said, “heaven must be a lonely place without you. All the angels stand erect.”

  “Look,” she said. “Look where they have probed me.”

  And indeed I did look, dropping to my knees before her Venus-ness, my nose scanning the surface of her lotioned skin, each strawberry freckle a miracle of nature. The marks I discovered were the quotidian sort of any person not mummified in gauze: a scratch here, a pimple there, a tiny red bump I diagnosed as an ingrown hair. See me now on my knees before this shrine: I had her backside cupped in my happy hands and my nose pressed into the dank mound of lips at the center of her. My visions of cunnilingus and copulation were only moderately interrupted by remembrance of Gillian: would some section of me experience the remorse of an infidel? All I had to do was whisper, Open sesame, and then delve face-long into her peachy center and then lap, lap myself to health. Technically, it wouldn’t have been cheating because, as you know, it was I who had been ambushed by abandonment. Couldn’t I have made my home here, she my Circe bringing closure to a quest for Penelope? We’d be so cheerful, stay basic, use baby talk in bed.

  Upon us: the perfect example of how quickly fond leads to fondle.

  Nose-deep in the center of her, a finger slipping in backside, my erection hard enough to crack glass—a first in God knows how long—I fluttered tongue and lips against tentacle-like labia as Sandy parted thighs for better entry. Her creamy moans! My own! The clean-animal scent of her. The id-driven beasts we are as civilians. Both of her hands in my head of hair, squeezing and pressing. How are you, human person, possibly going to fight off that moment?

  And yet, and yet: this was injury to my Gillian quest—if I could locate succor between the thighs of another—but those thighs!—why then my chase? Besides, a gentleman doesn’t take advantage of a mixed-up gal recently harpooned by the blarney of a con man. I stopped myself because I once read about gentlemanly manners in an Austen tome. Think, for a moment, how nearly impossible that must have been, what with the lava in me ready to leak.

  So, I said to me, Stand, Charles, and look into the pools of this woman who needs you more than you need her. So I did, and when I saw the several tears marking mascara paths over her cheekbones, I said, “Sandra, this has got to stop. You aren’t being abducted by aliens. That guy has performed feats of malarkey on you. How he has done it I don’t know, but I’m certain it’s against the law.”

  She reached down and pulled up her dress, saying, “I thought you’d understand. Maybe you will tonight. Tonight you’ll see I’m not mad,” and she fell back into the sofa.

  “Sandy, listen,” I said, and sat myself next to her. “I’m sorry about this. I’m sorry. But I’m your friend, you know that, and I don’t want to see you tricked like this. What’s going on with you? If you’re depressed or dejected or whatever, believe me, I’ve been there.”

  That all sounded very reasonable to me.

  “We broke up kind of abruptly, you know.”

  She shielded her eyes with a heavily braceleted wrist and I could not see if teardrops had begun their dropping.

  “You got a tenured teaching job out here, Sandy. You told me one day and were gone almost the next. It seemed that way to me, anyway.”

  “I’m not blaming you. I’m just saying. It was abrupt for me. And reading about you and Gillian—I mean, I was happy for you and all—but it was hard for me. Everything has been hard for me since coming out here.”

  “Why? You’re so successful. I don’t get it.”

  “Successful, yes,” she said, and seemed to think a moment. “Come with me,” she said, and got up to lead me into her study, a handsome mahogany library where all the real books were shelved—she clicked on the lamp and I saw Kleist to the left of me, Jaspers to the right, some Pushkin dead ahead—and to the wall above her desk, adorned with her various advanced degrees, she waved her arm as if to say, Ta da! There hung her PhD from UConn, which was where I had met her when I traveled there one dismal day to give a lecture—to a group of English undergrads with no oomph—called “How to Sound Like You’re Mostly Telling the Truth in Your Memoirs”—no one believed me. I met Sandy afterward, had decaffeinated coffee with her, felt hunky-dory and not so doggéd despite some sophomore still with acne having called me “a make-pretend Gay Talese,” whatever that meant.

  I looked at her degrees, then at her, then back at them, and said, “What?”

  “You know what these have done for me? Nothing. Not a gosh darn thing, Charlie.”

  “I don’t see how that’s true, Sandy.”

  She stood with her arms crossed, not eight inches from my own crossed arms, one eye wandering as it was given to do, the other laser-beamed into one of my own.

  “I spent eighteen years in college because I wanted to be a scholar and taken seriously. And I came out here for this job, all the way out here, far from my family and friends, where the college promised me a dozen things they didn’t deliver.”

  I asked the whats and whys of one in my position.

  “How about the respect and regard that I worked so hard to earn, Charles? How about the piggish male faculty—and they’re all male; I was the only female in the entire psychology department—how about them not glancing at my tits when they talked to me, or turning around to see my ass when I passed them? They think that because my right eye wanders I can’t see clearly?”

  Oh, boy.

  “You said was? What do you mean, was?”

  She said, “I quit a few weeks ago.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought you meant.”

  She kicked around her leather swivel armchair and plunked herself down into it as I stood staring at her degrees and attempting to think of a sentence related to helpful. Goethe’s name eyeballed me from the undusted spine of a slip-cased Collected Poems. German sage: be with me now.

  “My career has gone nowhere, Charlie. I haven’t been able to publish my disser
tation, the journals have been turning down my excerpts. The editors are all men. You have such egos, I swear. Is a giant ego a necessary side effect of having a penis?”

  I told her I’d need to look that one up.

  “And you know how hard it is to find a guy out here who isn’t a jerk?”

  “Pretty hard, I’m guessing.”

  “These people on the West Coast: It’s like an earthquake rattled their brains. So, yeah, I miss home and I’m sorry I came out here.”

  “But you’re a powerful and modern woman, Sandra. You can do—”

  “Charlie, please spare me the Betty Friedan speech. We can hardly vote. All that crap about how far we’ve come since the fifties—well, that’s just what it is: crap. I’m tits and ass to most men and women, too, now with all these lesbians. Let’s face it. And you know what? I’m fine with that. Just don’t pretend that education and political reform have made us equal. Don’t have me move across the country as an equal if I’m not. I’d have more respect for those assholes at the college if they admitted that I was just tits and ass to them instead of their pretending that I’m not but treating me that way in secret.”

  I’m not at all certain what my face was doing at this juncture, so I cannot describe what must have been the riddled look of it.

  She said, “I’d like to be banged.”

  “Pardon?” and I glanced around in hope of seeing a Q-tip that might mop away the crud from my eardrums.

  “I want a guy with the guts to tell me he wants to bang me.”

  At the bottom of my throat was something in the neighborhood of gulp. I had never known her to give such shining endorsements of Hugh Hefner and his mansion. I might have been panting.

  “Sandy, please,” I said. “My narratives are PG-rated.”

  “And that’s what’s wrong with them, Charles Homar. You should have listened to Romp.”

  The noises that came from me then were the dopey kind of the lobotomized everywhere: huh and hmm and err and umm.

  “Sandra McDougal,” I scolded finally, “we are Democrats from Connecticut and I will not have you speak that way. We believe in suffrage, pro-choice, and penicillin, and you, my friend, are a powerful, dignified woman. You just met some jerks at a bad campus, that’s all.”