Busy Monsters

by William Giraldi

  Also, there was this: Marvin Gluck’s suicide had put her in touch with mortality, the Reaper Grim most of us spend our lives pretending does not exist or else is too busy to care about certain voters. Round and round goes the clock; if she did not pursue her trophy now, when? A woman does not have an ETA on the Reaper Grim’s coming by her home with his rusted scythe in one hand and a contract in the other. Would she have accomplished her goals? Would she have journeyed and asserted?

  Gillian Lee was not capable of spotting the oddity of her life’s pursuit; she felt remarkably at home pondering the giant mollusk’s gnashing beak and two feeding tentacles; whether it swims headfirst or tailfirst (you can’t tell its head from its ass, which should be a clue as to its intelligence); whether it hunts in packs or in James Dean fashion: she pondered everything about this ammonia-scented outrage (it uses ammonia sacs to remain buoyant), which might or might not change colors in order to communicate with squid brethren. She wondered, What does it munch on? How does it breed? It is ferocious or docile? (Charles Homar had similar questions for certain members of society.) She harbored only some remorse for the asperity of her decision to leave with Jacobi, and for the melancholy and rut she cast upon her fiancé by doing so. A woman must be resolute when it comes to her dream. If she favored an invertebrate over the sometimes-vertebrate called Charles, well, then, she didn’t pick her passion: her passion picked her (this sounded to Charles like hogwash, a whole lot of mystical gibberish). How could she make him understand and see? She feared she couldn’t. This class of passion had chosen but few mortals since the time of Aristotle, who himself had written of the squid and called it “teuthos.” (Did everyone have something to say about this swimming heap of gunk?)

  The morning she set off from the dock in Maine for the oceans of Newfoundland, New Zealand, and Antarctica, the weather rained gray (as Charles himself was well aware; he was there at that very dock trying to sink the ship with a rifle). Gillian whimpered as the vessel pulled from port; she stood on the stern and watched as a police boat fished Charles Homar from the bay he had plunged into for reasons that evaded everyone. But her whimpering was brief; she had a job to do now, preparations to put forth belowdecks, coordinates to check and coffee to make, plus literature to consult: the papers of Frederick Aldrich, giant squid pioneer; the seminal theses of Gilbert Voss from the University of Miami; the singular designs of Professor Japetus Steenstrup, Danish marvel; stories by that kook H. G. Wells, who called the colossal cephalopod Haploteuthis ferox, meaning (Charles thought) one unruly bitch of a squid; the section in Dr. No where Bond, James Bond, battles the multiple arms trying to wring him; and, of course, the Arthur Clarke novel The Deep Range, which was where Jacobi had stolen the idea of bringing a pen aboard his ship to house the giant squid.

  At first the maiden felt an integral part of the team, even though she was but the only female aboard: she manned the sonar and satellite equipment and checked for fathoms and the other data Captain Nemo told her to check for. She was a teuthologist, was she not? True, she had acquired no degrees and published no papers, but she had push and knowledge far exceeding the typical laywoman. The men considered her input as the kibitzers gathered round the computerized map and charted trajectories, possible feeding routes, and anything else chartable. So what if they asked her to make another pot of coffee? Someone had to do it, and heaven knows she herself had become addicted to the bean. In the letters Jacobi had been exchanging with Gillian before their departure (those clandestine letters were still a source of wallop for Charles), he assured her that she would be needed on this hunt, that her contributions would be valued, even above those of his enthusiastic grad students and henchmen who wanted nothing else than to please him.

  Sometime during the end of the first two weeks at sea, the maiden began to suspect that Jacob Jacobi believed in the rights of others to gratify him but in very little else. Once or twice in the kitchen, the back of his hand brushed against her buttocks (the mention of these buttocks caused a torrent of lust to whirl up inside our narrator). During their chats about the migratory patterns of Architeuthis, Gillian caught him peering down into her cleavage (sacred nadir!), or else fixating on her lips, or trying to catch a whiff of her scent, hearing nothing of her own carefully considered ideas. One evening during a medium-level serious storm, while the men were on deck tending to ropes and tarps, to satellite dishes and mechanical winches, some yelling, “Batten the hatches,” Jacobi ordered Gillian below lest her prettiness be fouled. Well, he was a man, wasn’t he? But he had promised equality, goodwill, an absence of distortion, disguise.

  And then, alas, one evening during their third week, in the mid-Atlantic en route to England to stop for supplies, after an un-Italian meal of meatballs and pasta, Gillian had overheard this dialogue between Jacobi and one of his more vestigial goons (and for some reason Groot decided to recite the following in a pirate’s brogue):

  “So, Cappin, are ye pokin’ our fair lady? She be a piece, Cappin.”

  “Aye, so yer cappin is, matey. Me own squid plumbs her salty depths.”

  “I knew ye were a-knowin’ her in the biblical way, Cappin. I see the way she looks at ye.”

  “Aye, mate, so ’tis. A feller needs a fair lady ’long for such a voyage so his loins might be eased.”

  “Shiver me timbers!”

  “Aye, matey.”

  “She yaks a bit much, Cappin. You know how they say ’bout women and tykes: seen not h’ard. She be an ornery lass, Cappin. Perhoops she be on her monthly vis’tor.”

  “Aye, but what a pair of teats, matey!”

  “Aye, indeed, Cappin! Arrrr.”

  Jacobi was—shocker—a pervert.

  For Gillian, hearing this conversation was like being jerked back into the Dark Ages; she contemplated mutiny, sensed a miasma rising off the sea to engulf the ship; she wished pain and rankle upon Jacobi, a death slow and malodorous, his body desecrated. Were all men infected with a sexual pestilence of the sort that permitted them to crave nothing else within earshot of a female? (“No in thunder!” Charles shouted.) She had thought only adolescent boys concocted fiction of boning girls in order to impress their fellow jocks on the football field. Apparently not, and this news flash jarred her into a kind of disquiet that made her long to hop overboard and paddle home. How could she have been so delusional, so utterly trusting of someone she knew only through a book and some correspondence (all of it an insult to the lumber industry, Charles thought)?

  Her choices were not many; they would soon be in England—after a squidless trek up and down the real estate of Newfoundland—where she could go AWOL if she wanted, but that seemed an insult to her every squid-related wish. Like any given heroine from a special-effected action movie, she opted to stay and fight, perhaps saying to herself, “Every woman dies, not every woman really lives,” and this in the fake Scottish twang of that twit Mel Gibson in Braveheart. Meanwhile, she pondered the miscellaneous among us, how smart turns to dumb, and valor to some other substance they haven’t named yet. A week or so later they were motoring along the northern coast of New Zealand—the jagged green hills and toothéd white rock in coves like a photo of what you want bliss to be—the ship abuzz with male/female unpleasantness of the sort that has beset us every day since climbing down from our arboreal beds. But Gillian Lee felt convinced that Architeuthis awaited her in those ice-cubed waters of Antarctica, not the temperate tides of where they were. In fact, it was she who suggested to Jacobi that, according to her research, the giant squid was not likely to be caught anywhere along the equator this time of year: they must venture south into the frigid midnight blue. His response: first to guffaw, pat her on the shoulder as if she were a witty youth, and claim that his research indicated New Zealand; and second, to consult some computers, change his mind, and pretend that Antarctica had been his target all along, that he had been merely testing her predatory aptitude and giant squid know-how. What could she do? She must inter this resentment and wrath and stay lighte
d on the goal; all else fell ancillary to Architeuthis, including her pride, self-respect, and the liberties of cerebral women everywhere.

  When Jacobi invited himself to her cabin one night after the others had tucked in, she told him thus: “Come to my cabin and you’ll find scissors in your zipper.” (From his spot on the kitchen floor Charles chanted, “Hurray” and “You go, girl.”) The maiden Gillian shook off the fatigue from weeks of seafaring and dealing with common cretinous male misbehavior. She took up a journal, continued to work the sonar equipment and satellite system; she studied her papers and volumes, brewed coffee for herself and shared none with the others. And yes, yes, she thought often of her separated suitor, her male Penelope waiting, the warm goodness and special center of him, so unlike these gangsters making comments about her menstrual cycle and mammary glands. (The separated suitor ordered Groot to read that part twice more and then he spanked himself across both cheeks to make sure he was not daydreaming. You mean hope? he thought. You mean me?)

  When they reached the Antarctic Ocean, Jacobi’s draft called for reinforced nylon nets once the sonar revealed an organism of proper girth swimming at the known knots. Gillian assured him that this was asinine, an idea straight out of prehistory: dragging nets once a signal was found would only scoop up every piece of ocean riffraff they were not looking for. Did she have a better idea? he wondered. Yes, in fact she did: they must trawl with deep sea lines, maybe two thousand meters long or longer, each one outfitted with thousands of baited hooks. They had come prepared with such equipment and bait, why not use it now? For the love of Christ.

  “I’ll call the shots on this ship, little lady. You just sit pretty and make sure we can see your thong panties sticking out of your pants.”

  Gillian Lee had never gone Joe Frazier on another person before, but once she began left-jabbing and right-hooking, she found it quite natural indeed: Jacobi’s potbelly and overall fire-hydrant physique prevented him from even raising his hands in time to fend off her waylay. Little lady? As she punched his face overmuch, his eyes went startled and starved like those you see on vagabond Afghan herders in the pages of Smithsonian magazine. He collapsed to the deck bleeding from both lips and nostrils, whimpering promises of better conduct, Christian and commendable. Soon his eye sockets would swell and he’d need six ounces of raw mackerel just to see again. The ruffians standing sentry on the tower did not cheer, but neither did they rush to Jacobi’s rescue; Gillian pointed at them as if to say, You’re next, scum. If you don’t watch it, you’re next. And then, in the most phallic moment she had ever known, she grabbed the twelve-gauge pistol-grip shotgun from the top of a nearby crate, pumped a shell into the chamber, and fired a shot into the air above them. Jacobi whimpered as if in Pampers; the ruffians on the tower ducked as people tend to do around gunfire. The look just then in Jacobi’s swelling eyes declared his astonishment that a woman would resort first to fisticuffs and then to wielding a firearm with intent to rend.

  “You think you buckaroos are the only ones who know how to use a gun? You forget I was raised in Virginia? My daddy taught me to shoot, and I will shoot the next bastard who disrespects me, who thinks I’ll model some thong.”

  (Charles cheered from his spot on the floor.)

  Jacobi corrected his crooked conduct and began deferring to Gillian as if she were a bonneted big sister. Two weeks later, they spotted the signal they were searching for, in Antarctica’s Ross Sea—an endless expanse of ice sheets over blue water, air gelid enough to rearrange your particles—and at the precise longitude/latitude that Gillian had predicted it would come. The baited lines were lowered and trawling began; a medium-level electric hum permeated the boat and Gillian felt it down to her toenails. (Charles wondered aloud if she still painted them a pinkish orange in homage to Architeuthis.) They trawled for days like that, tense with expectancy and hope, until finally the computers went beep, the underwater cameras went flash, the trawl poles bowed, and the ship buckled…and when they raised the lines it emerged from the black morning water writhing and pissed, eyes like black gym balls, forty-five feet of piscatorial grandeur, nearly a ton of tentacles and body glistening in the faintest reaches of the rising sun, much redder than she had ever thought possible, yes, devil-red, the odor a crushing ammonia wakeup, and, God in heaven, how Gillian Lee stared and cried as the creature splashed on the surface and snapped its massive beak. Birth was like that, people; our maiden had given birth and the chemicals free in her blood now were the chemicals of love. She knew it, she knew it, knew it would be here in these icy pits of ocean, mating in the comfortable cold, hiding from its archenemy the sperm whale, feeding on smaller species of squid and damn near anything else it saw. Jacobi had wanted to priss about unproductively in the waters of southern New Zealand; they’d still be there now, scratching their asses, devoid of this glory.

  And what a glory it was! They swung the crane and lowered the giant squid onto the deck, where it slipped and wriggled and slipped some more, and they battled to disentangle it from the hooks and lines, careful not to get snagged by a suction-cupped apparatus and become shredded breakfast wagging in the razor beak of this beauty. The length and heft of it—Gillian simply could not believe her eyes blinking fast in the mist and spray. She would have been ecstatic with a specimen half this weight; the body alone was the size of a Cadillac, the pimp-preferred kind from the seventies. Secured now with nylon ropes around its arms and enormous helmet of a tail, the squid lay placid and panting. The coral sun had floated up well past the horizon and the grad students began clicking photos in celebration. Someone called for champagne, another for caviar. Jacobi took to the controls and the trapdoor on which Architeuthis lay slowly parted under either side of the deck until the prize finally splashed down into the oversized holding tank and everybody cheered Ahhh. Gillian bellowed through tears by herself.

  They radioed the Earth and Oceanic Research Institute at the Auckland University of Technology, and Jacobi told his colleagues there to burn the record books and perhaps have a sirloin ready when he arrived, medium rare, mashed potatoes, too. Gillian spent all her time now belowdecks in front of the pen’s glass face, watching in wonder, in an awe unfelt since the Old Testament: the Battle of Jericho, say. She tapped on the glass and tried communicating with it—no, with her—and then she dumped buckets of live fish in through the tank’s top and watched it nosh, the whip-like swiftness of those two feeding tentacles, what a divine exhibit of evolution. Her shaky hand scratched scores of notes, numbers, and diagrams into her tear-dotted journal.

  At port, The Kraken received a regal greeting: scientists and professors, newspaper reporters and TV anchors, politicians and police-folk alike; and almost immediately Gillian witnessed what was going to happen in the next several weeks of media zeal and scientific nudging-into: Jacobi would take credit for all of it. Her photo would appear in some articles, yes, but not her name, and not the truth that it was she who had located it, her study and wisdom, her love. An identical tragedy of justice happened to that unlucky woman—see, we can’t even remember her name—who had codiscovered the double helix of DNA and then got trampled into obscurity as those two felons, Watson and Crick, took all the bows. The most unforgivable fact of Gillian’s sad story: once they moved Architeuthis from the holding pen of the ship to a more suitable tank of study at the institute, she was not permitted anywhere near the observatory. Someone had implemented Pentagon-like security around the maiden’s squid and then treated her as an interfering bystander. Jacobi would not pick up his cell phone when she dialed him from her hotel room.

  And that was where Gillian Lee sat now: in her hotel room, penning this telltale missive to her divided suitor in hope of finding Christic forgiveness and devotion not extinguished by the foam of offense and time. Jacobi had fled with the squid and without Gillian to the New England Aquarium in Boston a week before the writing of this letter; he had numerous million-dollar deals in motion—with the aquarium, with the Discovery Channel, with a New York
publisher, with well-endowed universities. After a week holed up in her hotel room, Gillian Lee herself had hatched a plan two-thirds vengeance, one-third virtue. Would Charles Homar meet her in Boston to help bring to fruition this necessary revenge? Would he pardon her passion-fueled desertion and know that she had never allowed another male near her tender center? Would he?

  Some verbatim from the last two pages of Gillian’s letter:

  I DON’T KNOW how you can possibly forgive me, Charlie. I’ll have to fight to forgive myself. As I’ve sat here in this hotel room for the past week I’ve been flooded with guilt, feeling stupid. I know I’ve made a goddamn fool of myself. I’ve tried to explain in this letter how I brought myself to do what I did, but there might not be any adequate explanation. I would have called or emailed but I needed to sit down and write it all out longhand, the whole sordid story, in the hope that I might reveal something to myself. I told you at the dock before I left that I didn’t want to turn into my mother, give up an obsession in order to be domesticated, and I still feel that: I don’t ever want to be my mother. Who does? What causes me the greatest sorrow is that I didn’t include you in my dream, that I didn’t consider doing this together, inviting you along. Part of me has always felt that you thought my passion for the squid was ridiculous. In fact, you hinted at this a few times in your memoirs. I’m not blaming you, Charlie. I’m just trying to say that in my mind I had very firm reasons for doing what I did, and doing it without you. I see now that those reasons were wrong. I could have had our life together and the quest for the squid. But when Jacobi came along I was so overcome by the possibility of realizing this dream that I suppose I wasn’t thinking with my brain. I’m asking you to join me in Boston to help me regain what is rightfully mine, the creature I found, the acclaim I earned. I know I have no right to ask you this, but I’m asking anyway because I don’t have anyone else. I never stopped loving you, Charlie. Believe that.