Busy Monsters

by William Giraldi

  “That doesn’t sound like a long list to me,” Father Henry said, clutching his Book to a boob.

  “No, true,” I said, “but it’s an important one.”

  “Ms. O’Connor believed absolutely,” he said. “I scoff at your accusation that she did not.”

  “Tobacco?” Groot said, offering the pouch of peace to both me and the priest.

  “Groot, the only people I’ve seen chewing on that slop are marauders from the world of Sergio Leone.”

  “Them and me,” he said. “Don’t judge, Charlie, lest ye be judged. Besides, I’m starving.”

  “Well said, Mr. Groot. I concur. If you can convince your friend here to stop fooling about, we can all enjoy a delicious meal back at the church. I’m leaving now, Charles. Mend yourself.”

  “Goddamn it,” I said, just Groot and me now at my father’s open grave. “That was supposed to be a big scene.”

  We watched Father’s Henry’s luxury sedan wind its way out of the cemetery and into the street. The license plate said GOWGOD, the W indicating either with or waterboard, depending on how you feel about w’s.

  “Charlie,” he said, “I hope you don’t mind me saying this, but you don’t seem very…aggrievéd.”

  “No, I am. I’m aggrievéd.”

  “Oh, good. Because if you ask me, old buddy, you don’t need a Grand Inquisitor scene right now. You need to come to terms with your father’s death.”

  “What’s that mean, come to terms with?”

  “It means forgive him, stupid. Stop being pissed. He lived the only way he knew how, which is what we do as humanoids. He was such a jackass to you because he couldn’t get close and risk losing another one. See?”

  “Lame.”

  “No, buddy, not lame. The opposite of false.”

  That chewing tobacco was going to create stains dark enough to make Crest cringe.

  “So, what are you saying?” I asked.

  “I’m saying have a scene at this grave, yes, but just you and him.”

  “No way, pal. No talking-to-tombstone scenes. Forget it.”

  Nothing but silence and sunlight for a minute or more.

  “I’m just glad you’re back,” I told him. “I know it’s not yet noon, but if I don’t get inebriated in the next half hour I might dwell on all the bolts and screws that fasten hurly to burly.”

  “Charlie,” he said, “my thoughts precisely. Where’s the beer?”

  “My place. You still have a key?”

  “That I do.”

  “I’ll meet you there in five.”

  “Won’t your mother miss you at the luncheon?”

  Kindhearted Groot: always thinking about moms and dads.

  “She’ll be occupied with the tens of others. Plus I don’t think she’s loving me very much right now. She believes my ram-shackle soul needs a makeover. I should stay out of her path.”

  Groot departed spitting mud-colored gunk onto the grass, and I was finally alone with my father’s body. Over yonder sat the gravedigger on his tractor, pulling slowly on a cigarette, waiting for me to leave so he could commence with his casket-covering duties and maybe use his metal detector to comb the area for dropped jewelry.

  I thought: “Thy soul shall find itself alone / ’Mid dark thoughts of the grey tomb-stone.”

  And then: Cry. Come on, Charles, there’s your father in that coffin—now cry. Cry for him. You can do it. Just remember when you were a boy and he would take you places…but wait, where did he ever take you? Didn’t he take you to Fenway Park for a Red Sox game when you were eight or nine? No, that was Bartholomew he took, just before his diagnosis. Well, then, think about how he would come to your Little League baseball games and take you and Groot out for ice-cream cones to the Dairy Queen on Main Street. Wrong again: that was Groot’s dad. Didn’t he take you fishing or something on the bank of the Millstone River? (Groot’s uncle.) Or maybe hiking across some mountains in New Hampshire? (You and your college roommate.) Well, at least he came to your college graduation, remember? Wrong: he couldn’t find a parking spot near enough to the ceremony and so stayed in the car in a handicap space next to the entrance of the field, arguing with an associate on his car phone. Well, what about the time…

  There weren’t any, none that I could recall. But what I did remember was this: the plenty of times I should have been a more caring son. Nothing causes guilt like a coffin. And we offspring everywhere are a plague upon our makers.

  9. THE MISSIVE AS MISSILE

  WARPED BEYOND NORMAL civilian standards and needing gentle reprieve from gals and dads and my migrant task of exploring hither and yon, tit for tat, I, Charles Homar, driving home from the cemetery in order to meet Groot and drink beer before noon, imagined said-and-done and doing thus: climbing into bed after so many months of obnoxious muddle and staying asleep for seven days, maybe more. Sweat out diverse toxins of the soul-clobbering sort, eat nothing, dream of Gregorian chants and their peaceful reach, and feel, even in blackout, a recuperation occurring, a restoration hard and right and, I would hope, irreversible. A man—yes, I was a man still; Rich Lombardo and the Twins of Twat, not to mention dead Dad, had done nothing to turn me away from that info—can take only so much pandemonium before the cells get sick and call for nourishment. You can read about Victorian heroines in brick-like novels who suffer similar bedridden stints, usually after witnessing their hoped-for beau kiss the gloved hand of some other dame. The zombie in me would amble to the toilet and sip from the faucet when needed, and would snooze again before my body was back in bed: the bed Gillian and I had shared for what seemed epochs, her scent still rubbed into the sheets but having no ill effect upon my gaping slumber or the unruffled dreams therein. How a person goes from a flipped-out dope to an indifferent slouch would be alchemy I could not speak of, though I’d thank some deities for the emotional nullity that had taken control and made me yawn. Sometimes, folks, sickness is a blessing.

  Then I’d wake after seven days, the mattress wet halfway through, and feel a cannibal’s hunger for meat and bone. In a bathrobe and slippers I’d haunt through my condo in this newly rested state that would be, I imagined, what coma patients experience upon rising from their own drawn-out naps: phantasms with purpose. Maybe such sleep would erase my recently established apathy and I’d wake with commanding Gillian urges undulating inside me. My specter in the mirror would look emaciated, yes, and my hair—I couldn’t think upon it—but I would have flowing inside my torso and limbs a tranquillity known to certain saints or Franciscan friars. I’d never mind the mountain of mail on the counter, all those bills and fan or nonfan letters; never mind, too, the shriveled fruit in the fridge, or the sepulcher silence of those rooms—the sun would shine in scattered lanes through the sliding glass door and make all my chromosomes at ease. I’d feel simply grateful that before she had scrammed, Gillian, with her computer prowess, had set up all of our bills to be automatically deducted each month from my checking account: voilà. Otherwise, I would have arrived home from prison and then from scampering around the nation only to find dead electric and water, gas and phone, my house no better than a hut in Zimbabwe. I’d have practical, citizen-like thoughts just then, my first in heaven knows how long, and this, I reckoned, would speak well for my recovery and possible success as a person.

  And then my transformative shower, the first in ages: I would recline in the tub and let the strong stream cuff me for half an hour at least. This tub and I had seen upset, sure: first on the day Gillian had split and I sat in a frosty pond attempting to control my temp, and then on the evening Romp lathered here with his lizard loose and quizzed me on Bigfoot lore. But that was there, way behind, and here I would be now, peering frontward to…what? Be a Celt, worship rocks? I wouldn’t be able to say or even venture a prudent guess, and it wouldn’t matter all that much because I’d savor the calm that had crept into me and set up camp. Another long nap would be in the cards.

  Here’s what else occurred to me during my several-minute
drive back to my condo, thoughts via my incidents with Sandra McDougal, Morris Hammerstein, and Rich Lombardo: most advice means zilch on this orb, and most men and women stumble along to an internal tune that offers no nexus even to half-thawed logic; we will do what we will do and allow our unwanted saga to play out in whatever way it will, hoping for a conquest without any discernible way to achieve it. You might commune with others for whom this is consummately untrue, those who know how to absorb advice and fuel appetite and then turn it into triumph—the heroes from the history of civilization are cases in point, Shackleton and so forth. But I was me and not them, in this moment and not heroic. We have no answers to the bile boiling in the hearts of others because we have no answers to our own. But we delight in talking and declaring Do that and Do this, when some major circumstances will have their way regardless of what we do or do not do. This sounds like predetermination or something parallel to the funk of fortune, I know, but all I mean to say is that a human being is an oblivious ape in the grip of nonsense, which is exactly what Sandra, Morris, Lombardo, and even Groot imparted to me: nonsense. They should have simply shut up and said good luck over a bowl of soup. There never had been any valid method for me to win back Gillian. Surrender felt so soothing.

  BUT OH, CHARLES, you, speak not too soon or consign to stone any hasty worldview…I’ve prattled of Providence before: the animal that he or she or it is had some more to say to already beleaguered me, altering my calm and dumping in front of me some more mud to wade through. Pulling into my driveway, I saw Groot on the front porch, and on his lap a yellow package with, I saw as I advanced, transcontinental stickers slapped about it diagonally. The organ in my skull went hmm and err, and when I reached out to retrieve the rectangular heft he was handing, I saw the addressee it was intended for—yours truly—and the terra from which it had traveled: New Zealand. Yes, that terra and my new terror, the very place where Gillian and Jacobi had hit land with the first-ever living giant squid. Lord above. Groot: flabbergasted. Me: vexed. The both of us looked absurd in our funeral duds.

  Try to grasp what my inner middle parts were up to during that minute or more I held the package as if it were a meteorite with a message for me: think of the clicks and clacks a broken machine makes. How long had it been sitting there on the porch? Throughout my father’s viewing and funeral? During my exploits with the Hammersteins and Lombardo? As I chased flying saucers with Sandy or Sasquatch with Romp? What data did it contain, and how did that data relate to my new decision to be inactive, Benedictine? I much preferred to ask these questions rather than tear into the package and glimpse my new fate, whatever it was, whence-ever it came. It also occurred to me that this could be the scam of some rapscallion intent on raking up the bottom of me, alarming my quiet and causing fret. I was accustomed to getting missives and emails from readers of all stripes both pissed and pleased—had some lunatic been reading my chronicles of Gillian and the squid and, in his or her evilness, decided to disrupt the new-fangled me who wanted to be left in peace? Say it isn’t so.

  And say, maybe, that this in my mortal grip wasn’t actually a package from Gillian Lee, notifying me of the life-altering and astral. Where would my ninny self find the mettle to slash it open and examine its contents?

  “Groot,” I said, “I am holding a package, as you can see, possibly from Gillian. Fear and other uncouth emotions prevent me from reading it. Once again, please advise.”

  “I guess we’re not getting drunk now,” and he spit tobacco into my mulch.

  “Affirmative,” I said.

  The sunshine was on his buzz cut and I saw the silver grays here and there throughout his blond, indication that the two of us were not curlicued lads anymore. But hadn’t we been nine-year-old boys just the other day, biking all over town, bubble gum and SuperBalls in the cave of Ali Baba, fishing poles down by the river, snow forts in winter and such? Where lived the Gorgon who snatched it from us so suddenly, and who paid her to pilfer?

  “Charlie, I’ve been a failure with advice, an inadequate pal. Only a prostitute could cheer us up, preferably a Samoan tart accomplished in maternal coddling.”

  “Groot,” I told him, “you’ve been a damned fine buddy. Don’t torment yourself over my staggering. We have a new mission upon us and I need your input.”

  Me, the doofus: I kept feeling the package in my hands as if I could determine its weight and thereby its meaning.

  “We don’t have to open it, Charlie. We can just drop it in the trash and get drunk like planned. We don’t have to describe this part of the day at all. Leave it out of your memoirs.”

  (An aside: Readers had been chiding me over email to describe more, to be more responsive to stimuli and thus more exact in my written descriptions of how phenomena look and sound and smell. They seem to think that shoe size and ear shape matter; but honestly, I’d rather omit the uselessly precise details and just tell what happened action-wise. I don’t believe shrewd old Sophocles ever reveals Oedipus’s brand of toga or the Aegean green of his eyeballs.)

  For many minutes we two sat and stood there on my front porch in benumbed quiet, looking over each other’s shoes and waiting, I think, for cerebral something-or-other.

  “Well,” he said, “let me see again said package. Is anything inside ticking?”

  “A bomb?” I asked.

  “I rule out nothing. If I’m not thorough in the field, it could mean my ass and the asses of those in my charge. God is thorough, too, from what I hear, although evidence for that is scant.”

  “Nothing is ticking,” I said, and finally led him inside to the kitchen table—our third such meeting at this table—and to think, when I ordered the thing on sale years ago from an IKEA catalogue—just prior to Gillian’s moving in to turn my emptiness full—I did not imagine that dialogues so distressed and dour would take place around it. Who does?

  “There it sits,” said I, and pointed to the manila beige of the package giving off vibes from the tabletop.

  “Are you serious? You really want to open this package?”

  He looked over to the fridge, wanting beer and not this thing we were doing.

  “Well, half serious anyway. I find that being half of anything is often sufficient. Let us proceed.”

  He said, “Shit. All right,” and loosened his tie. “It’s from New Zealand for sure,” bending over the table to inspect it. “And it’s surely addressed to you. There’s your name, see?”

  “Yes, thank you, Groot.”

  I stood behind him, peering over his shoulder, just in case the package emotion-exploded and got me messy—messier.

  “It’s a manuscript of some kind,” he said. “What about the beer?”

  “Please focus. I’m coiled in anticipation here.”

  With that, Groot whipped out a butterfly knife from his jacket pocket, flapped it about swiftly, and with the alacrity of a TV chef he sliced into the manila to reveal a rubber-banded mass of pages. I could see immediately that they were written on in Gillian’s exquisite cursive, handwriting in ink that could have won awards; it was as recognizable to me as her teeth and wide tuft of pubic hair. If you gave me six hundred English words on a scroll of papyrus, each one handwritten by a different human or dexterous chimp, I could tell you in thirty seconds or less which word was penned by Gillian.

  That, people, is the definition of love. Try it sometime.

  Groot had the document in hand at the table; I stood several yards from him, my nucleus all jolt and jounce, and after some breathing I was able to ask him the contents of what he held before him.

  “A letter,” he said, “of length and ardent.”

  Gasp. “A letter?” Gulp. “About?”

  “Well,” he said, fanning through the pages, “it looks…as if…it’s a register of what occurred on the squid-hunting voyage. Assiduously detailed, from what I can tell. Divine penmanship. Narration, exposition, dialogue. Melvillean through and through.”

  Melvillean. Oh, no. I was privy to those potboilers
.

  I asked, “What’s this mean? Where am I?” and began taking slow steps backward.

  “On a threshold, apparently. This may be a speedy analysis, but from what I know of the world, the female of our species doesn’t indulge in a journal this voluminous, and then share said journal with her estranged lover, unless that female intends to come together with that lover.”

  My face must have uttered My God because Groot said, “Yes. My God, indeed. It’ll take you two hours to read this thing.”

  The bottom half of my body decided to sit at this point, right there on the hardwood floor, in an avenue of sunlight cutting in from the sliding glass door. Think of how far that sunlight had traveled to find me there in the kitchen. Something concussed from the region around my spleen.

  “I cannot read that record, Groot. Moses came down from Mount Sinai aged about sixty years. Look at my limbs: they are each a-tremor.”

  “Yes, I see your point. Then I shall read it to you. I read to a group of Iraqi schoolchildren last month in Baghdad. They seemed to think me a talented rhymester.”

  “That’s touching,” I said, and watched Groot sit at the infamous kitchen table and ready himself with throat-clearing and seat-shifting for some oration of the Arabian variety.

  And so prepare now, people, for my summary of Gillian’s mesmeric account of high-seas rollicking and scientific stratagem, as told to me by my friend Groot (formerly-known-as-Friend-formerly-known-as-Groot), as told to him by Gillian Lee (formerly-known-as-the-about-to-be-Gillian-Homar), in her own steady hand. After this you, too, will be thinking thoughts celestial and unsullied, most of which have to do with reunification, some of which with the sempiternal. Brace yourself.

  ONCE UPON A time, about four months earlier (not too long after Charles had returned from Virginia on a murder mission), a fair and at times not-so-fair maiden named Gillian Lee set sail aboard a vessel called The Kraken in order to become the only individual ever to detain a living giant squid, a magisterial (although some would say abysmal) cephalopod dubbed in Latin Architeuthis (pronounced, remember, Ark-i-tooth-iss), forty feet of slippery skin cruising in the unreachable depths of its oceanic home. The maiden felt electrified and nearly ablaze by this possibility; a decade of want and wish had materialized in the form of Jacob Jacobi, celebrated squid hunter who had appeared on PBS television and fielded questions from Charlie Rose and his civilized hair. As everyone knows, this means he was an expert. The maiden Gillian could not pinpoint the precise moment she became so enamored of the obdurate cephalopod, but guesses that her life’s dream to capture it has its origin in her father’s reading aloud to her Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea when she was five years old. Of course: her father; big surprise (even though this maiden’s suitor had published in an essay the “fact” that the maiden had no grave Big Daddy issues; the jackass should have known that every maiden on earth has grave Big Daddy issues).