Busy Monsters

by William Giraldi

  I knelt at her feet then because it was the humble and affectionate thing to do. I put my hands on the fabric over her knees in a nonsexual, some would say brotherly fashion.

  “Listen, I’m sorry you’ve had a shitty time out here, Sandy. But all this UFO stuff is beneath you. And that guy”—I nodded over my shoulder as if he were still polluting the dining room—“is such an unspeakable muppet. He’s exactly the kind of guy you’re talking about, someone pretending.”

  “You’re wrong about him.”

  I might have commented that he looked a little as if he had crawled out from under a mushroom.

  “Why can’t you open your mind a little? One of the reasons I loved you was that your mind wasn’t in a headlock.”

  Sound check here: check, check.

  “You loved me? When was this?”

  I could see her thinking and see her seeing me knowing I knew she was thinking.

  “I never told you that?”

  “No, you forgot to tell me that, actually. We were dating for only a few months, Sandra. You never even referred to me as your boyfriend.”

  “Oh. Well, they were a special few months for me. And yes, I was in love with you.”

  With I still on my knees and she still in the chair, I felt myself getting tragic. It occurred to me that I hadn’t spoken to my parents in a long time.

  She said, “And then I left and you found Gillian.”

  I told her again that I was sorry because I was—the sorriest hombre this side of the Rio Grande. Or that side. Whichever. She let me wipe a tear with the bottom of her dress.

  “Anyway,” she said, “Casey is a sweet guy. He doesn’t glance at my tits when I look away.”

  “That’s because he isn’t tall enough to see them.”

  “And you can’t say for sure that UFOs haven’t been coming here. You don’t know that for sure. And I feel it, Charlie. It’s like love. I feel it’s true. Pow has vanished. These marks are all over me. I dream of them coming into my room at night. I have flashbacks of being probed. I have missing time. A textbook case.”

  (An aside: Studies have shown—is there a more worthless phrase in all of English?—that females are more prone to supernatural belief than males. Who those pollsters and their mothers were is a question open to inquiry. True, I’ve never seen a male psychic with a tie-dyed doo-rag on his scalp, and also true that women tend to believe in soul mates and wispy guardian angels more than men. However: the studies doing the showing are jury-rigged against womankind, what with their implications that because gals are on average more emotional than guys, they fall for every paranormalist with a Ponzi scheme. Men are more rational than women, the studies show, a conclusion you’d find highly suspect if you were to visit a tailgate party in the parking lot of any American football stadium or, say, the alleyways of Pamplona where the X/Y chromosomal combo enjoys jogging alongside irritated bulls. Ordinary second-graders can see that the stooges in search of Plato’s Atlantis, the abominable snowman and his North American cousin, the Loch Ness Monster, and that thing in Lake Champlain dubbed “Champ,” the not-so-mysterious mysteries of the Bermuda Triangle, the sneaky messages in the “poetry” of a counterfeit called Nostradamus, and the ghosts that go boo in beat-up mansions—these stooges are by and large male stooges. Paul Fuss and Romp and, uhh, me, I suppose, are cases in point. Plus if you were to tune in to one of those Sunday afternoon broadcasts of an evangelical super-church in Colorado Springs, a spectacle just shy of circus folk, you’d see as many men as women waving their arms in the air above their empty heads and wanting to say, Sieg heil. Plus grown boys are the monkeys who make war, not grown girls, and if there is a less rational activity than what happened at the Somme and Antietam, I’ve never heard of it.)

  “Okay, Sandy,” I said after some quiet between us. I got to my feet and took her hand. “I understand. Maybe I should go. It was wrong of me just to barge in on you like this.”

  She sprang up from the armchair as if it had a catapulting contraption hidden in the leather. She held my hand—my left one, if I recall.

  “No,” she said, “I’m glad you came here. It’s great to see you. But come with us tonight to Hannibal Gorge. It’s arrogant to think we have all the answers, Charlie. It’s arrogant to ignore the mysteries or think that there’re no more mysteries left. And, quite frankly, it’s a little boring.”

  Well. How could Charles Homar argue with that, considering where I’d already been? I was nothing if not not boring. Let’s lollygag a little more.

  But first: a nap never hurt anyone.

  JUST PRIOR TO midnight—why must such shenanigans always unfold at midnight?—we stood at the curb as Casey’s ludicrous truck grumbled down her street to get us. Normal people all along the block were asleep right now in their probably paid-for homes, strangers to disturbance. In the morning they’d have doughnuts and coffee, put the kiddies on a swing set, let the dog dig a hole in lawn groomed by gringos. Wash the Cadillac. Do cannonballs off the diving board.

  Casey was none too happy to find me there, but he donned a pleasant face for Sandy’s sake, and on his stereo played the Bruce Springsteen song “4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy)”—there was the Boss’s gravelly voice belting out the chorus. I could not decide if the move was either very slick or very disturbing or perhaps both. We were going to this puzzling place called Hannibal Gorge and I wondered what would have possessed the founders of the ravine to name it after that Carthaginian lunatic fond of elephants and defeating via the Alps the superior wordsmiths of Rome. It was so inky inside the cab of the truck that I could not ascertain how Gonzales reached the pedals. Our faces—one of which was thoroughly bewildered—glowed with the blue hue from the stereo, and everywhere hung the smog of a ninety-nine-cent air freshener that smelled of toilet cleaner.

  We forged on into that odd darkness for numerous miles until unlit houses gave way to woods and neither us of could think of a sentence that sounded even remotely Anglo. Sandy hummed a show tune I could not identify and Casey Gonzales switched into four-wheel drive at the mouth of a dirt road pockmarked by what felt like shallow graves. The darkness deepened under the canopies and I was quite certain that if I had to, I would not be able to find my way back to civilization and the lunatic tribe who built it. There at a bend stood the pounded-in wooden sign announcing Hannibal Gorge, and beyond the sign, to the right of the actual gorge, lay a wide-open field with nothing but the infinite heavens and their sparkling jewels above us. The day’s oven had died and now the temperature smiled at just under seventy degrees; rappelling down from the truck’s door, I inhaled that pristine air and almost hoped for a spacecraft to come hold a convivium, obliterate the silence between us.

  Casey obliged by saying, “Here is where we will be visited.”

  He carried a duffel bag stuffed with God knows what—UFO detection devices he had ordered through the mail and glued together himself—and an empty five-gallon bucket of the sort ice fishermen perch upon, the present use of which I could not guess.

  “I can feel them here,” Sandy said, her arms out as if she required balance and then a drink to wreck it. “I feel them. They’re close.”

  “Indeed they are, my dear.”

  “Indeed they aren’t,” I said. “I don’t feel a goddamn thing.”

  Nothing but the coolish breeze coming from across the field.

  “Open your mind to it all, Charlie. Be ready to receive them and they will be yours.”

  “Sandy,” I begged, “porcine Republicans are fond of saying that if you open your mind too much, your brain will fall out, and for once, I agree with them. This shrimp is a fraud and nothing will happen here. He’s trying to bed you. It’s the oldest impulse on earth and one I know a thing or two about. I was a teenage boy, remember.”

  Just then, to our left over the gorge, as if on cue to taunt my heretical self, emerged an orange light the size of a Volkswagen bug, circa 1968. It hovered and then glided almost noiselessly toward us, moving rather l
ike a helicopter, I thought, and not a tub of magical tin from the other end of eons or the pages of Ezekiel. I might have said, “Hmmph.”

  Casey began squealing, “You see! You see! They have returned for you, Sandra!”

  I twisted around just then to tell him that the nuts and bolts above us were some kind of prototype helicopter with a mega-light fastened to its belly, and when I did, all I beheld was a crowbar coming to my temple, swung like Reggie Jackson by that errant little scamp. He was standing on the bucket. Even as I fell, in my unconsciousness I somehow had the idea that my search for Gillian was about to be snuffed. This was where love had brought me: head trauma in a far-out field in the Sasquatch state of Washington, cavorting after UFOs with two asylum inmates in a monster truck.

  Oh, Gillian, I thought, slinking further into sleep. I am so far from home, my sweet.

  WHAT SHOULD MY dreams have been that night as I lay slathered in a mix of much-needed sleep and head-bludgeoning black? I neither fled an enemy nor flailed about, but rather rested well in some strong sunlight streaming in through a window I thought was in my college dormitory. And that was my dream: the warmth and calm of a silent sun-filled room, nothing at all for a Freudian to scrutinize and then rehash into a sex-filled mommy/daddy narrative.

  I woke to more sunlight on Sandy’s sofa, feeling the ache of where Casey’s crowbar had bashed my skull, but besides that I was in good shape, I thought, recharged and rather well anointed. Sandy was there at my feet looking maternal and worn, though her tiny smile hinted at the indignity that comes with some revisions of mind.

  “You were right,” she said over the length of my bereaved body.

  Grunts and groans that meant, Huh?

  “He was conning me. He nearly killed you. And that thing in the sky was a helicopter of some kind. I’m a fool, Charlie.”

  “Wait. Who was flying the thing?”

  “I don’t know. A friend of his, maybe. All this smoke and mirrors, for what?”

  “Wait. How did we get back home?”

  I was still lying down at this point. And the brave dame told me the account of how, after she witnessed Casey batter me, she in turn battered him, so stunned was she by his violence against an old chum. She wrested the crowbar from his toy hands and smacked him upside the face with it, then collected me into the truck—apparently I was semiconscious and able to move only slightly—and we drove that tank home, leaving Casey there in the field with his manufactured light circling above him. She had sat vigil all night watching me snore, hunting Casey Gonzales on the Internet, revising her version of the past six months, all that flirting with the otherworldly. She had never before beheld with her own eyes one man doing bloodshed upon another—sheltered and naïve darlings: let them run the world—and apparently the shock of it forced a reckoning. The poor bird betrayed the sorrow of the truly disillusioned, so fraught was her want of an alien influence to descend and pulverize the filth on this blue ball.

  And she asked me again, “Why did he do it all, Charlie?”

  I moved upright on the sofa and declared, “For you, Sandra. He and I are not all that different, I suppose. I’ve said it before: a man is not made well. Can I have some Advil?”

  There it was on the coffee table; water, too.

  “By the way,” she said, “I was surfing around last night and came across some information on Gillian. They are set to arrive in Boston by the end of the month. With the living squid.”

  Okay. Process this now, help me: Gillian, Jacobi, giant squid, Boston, end of the month.

  “Sandra,” I said, “if it’s no bother, we must move on from your crisis to mine. What does this mean? What should I do? I no longer trust my own judgment, which tends to lean towards gunfire and Bigfeet, plus puts me in close proximity to trolls and flying saucers.”

  “What do you want to do, Charles? I mean really want to do.”

  The Sandra I knew and half loved had returned. That was her old voice: psychotherapeutic.

  “I spoke to Friend about it back home and he thought going to New Zealand with pleas and roses was out of the question. But now that they’re returning to the land of the brave and the home of the free, or the, you know…What? Meet them there?”

  “Charlie,” she asked, “would this make you your old self again? Because right now you seem a different person to me. All those magazine articles about what you’ve done. And your poor parents, Charlie. Have you thought of them?”

  “I’ve tried, Sandy. I’m possessed or something. You know the feeling.”

  A few sniffles here and also the sensation of being a failure for the ages.

  “You should go to Gillian, I think, but prepare yourself. You have three weeks. No more knives and guns, please. You must prepare yourself to accept her, because it seems to me that therein lies the problem: you never really accepted the giant squid.”

  One more sound check. How could this be right? In my patience and adulation for Gillian I never denied the slop that is the giant squid—although, true, okay, I didn’t exactly embrace the foul tang of it. But then I recalled the Polaroid photo I had taken of myself in Virginia, on my route back from attempting to butcher Gillian’s ex-beau: a photo of me beneath a rubber giant squid suspended from the rafters of some bozo’s barn, a photo I had shot precisely to show my lady that her sea creature was not unimportant to me. When I informed Sandy of this gesture and the impetus behind it, she sighed in a manner half sympathetic and half disappointed, as if I were a toddler learning not to touch hot pots. Didn’t I get it? A woman of ideas needs Support, capital S, and Vigor, capital V. A woman of ambition needs a loyal huckleberry with Fuel, one who knows about Purpose and Will.

  The gist: it was my fault that Gillian discarded me for Jacobi, because he shared her Passion and I simply Didn’t. Leave it to a psychoanalyst to blame the fiasco and its ensuing escapades on the victim, the maltreated one, he who had been incarcerated by the penal system and nearly cremated by pain. But—and this is a massive but, not at all like Sandy’s—I do recall my father saying when I was an adolescent: Charlie, he said, Pay attention to your girl, Charlie, or someone else surely will. Apparently all the attention I had been paying was the erroneous kind, not conducive to the perennial coupling of two snazzy hearts. And so.

  When it was time for me to depart that day after more badinage and bowls of Cheerios, Sandra M. gave me the contact info of someone she wanted me to consult during my cross-country drive back East—I had decided to commandeer Romp’s SUV for a little while longer; he wouldn’t be needing it in the digestive tract of Sasquatch—since Sandy herself was rusty on all issues amorous. This man was an academic astronomer, she said, an old colleague in Boulder, Colorado, my fellow marquis who knew how to worship a woman and make it count. He could enlighten me, she said, teach me tricks.

  “Sandra, right now I could use all the enlightenment of the eighteenth century and then some. I am indebted to you,” I said, though I thought: Well, just a little; the epiphany you handed me was miniature and lacking, like all epiphanies. But it would have to do for now; I was an exiled oaf on diseased soil.

  We embraced under the hot morning bulb, me with a Band-Aid on my head where I had bled a little, she in pajamas that looked huggable, and then we both blinked out some minor tears. I thanked her profusely.

  “Thank you,” she said. “Are you sure you don’t want to stay here awhile? Move in with me? Give us another shot?”

  My face gave the answer.

  “I know,” she said. “It’s ridiculous. Gillian is out there waiting for you. But if the bitch doesn’t come to her senses, give me a call. We’ll have a perfect life.”

  Utopias are always hells.

  “What are you going to do?” I asked. “What about a job?”

  “I’ll think about all that later. I’m not worried about it right now. I’m worried about you, Charlie. Stay away from people who want to harm you.”

  And I refrained from telling her that such a thing was not possible in ou
r world. Take a glance around. See the harm? Hear it calling you? Father Hopkins said it best: “There is your world within. There rid the dragons, root out there the sin.”

  Ahh, the dragons and the sin. Good luck with all that.

  6. HELP ME WANDA

  TWO SURPRISES FOR Morris Hammerstein, prince astronomer, the day I arrived one week after leaving Sandra McDougal’s place (it shouldn’t have taken a whole week to lope down to Boulder from Seattle but about halfway there I found a Best Western and slept for three days straight—avoiding moxie and the wanton—then spent another three days meeting a deadline for my uptight editor).

  Surprise 1: Charles Homar showed up on his doorstep slipshod and bugged out (three days of sleep had done zero to calm the hound dog I had become, barely bipedal).

  And Surprise 2: a lesbian named Jo decided she was in love with his wife, Wanda, and I mean hard-core in love, the kind that straddles destructive lust and causes all the chemicals in the body to swoon, swoon.

  I knew that sort of love, and so did he; it was how he felt exactly, even after a decade of marriage. A white man in round glasses, a stick figure with the athletic ability of an amputee, Hebrew, no less (though nonaffiliated), should thank the spirits daily for his being married to a chocolate champion—his term—like Wanda, and not just for all the lovely stereotypical characteristics of a black woman—the lips, the bust, the butt, lovemaking that is really the rumba or boogaloo—but for the way she called him Honey Ham and rubbed his bony back after a not-so-difficult day teaching astronomy to college freshmen fragrant with what Coors makes. He told me this. We’ll get to the Babylonian lesbo in a moment.

  So. It was for reasons of chocolate love and female veneration of the general type, and his much-practiced expertise in both, that I arrived at his home at the suggestion of Sandra McDougal, with whom he still exchanged weekly emails on topics ranging from a modern frog named Michel Foucault and his visions of human hanky-panky, to all the dark matter in the universe and how it holds the galaxies in place like God’s good magnets. He had heard of me, he said, had read my “irreligious tales” of Gillian and the giant squid—“all that I-obsessive memoirist trash so in fashion, self-expression without self-assertion”—and only because a colleague had given him a subscription to New Nation Weekly last Hanukkah. The slick one hundred pages—of political assessments, persnickety film reviews, poems as space filler, fiction by the same six people, some fine cartoons, and, of course, the fanatical personal pieces penned by me—arrived in his miniature barn mailbox every Tuesday to harass him.