Busy Monsters

by William Giraldi

  “People,” I said in the lobby, “I am going up to my room to have quiet time and contemplation before my muse arrives in the morning. Like a shaman before ritual, I must cleanse myself with purity of thought, also a nap. I have toiled untold months for what is coming to me tomorrow. If anyone disturbs me, there shall be some fairly hot hell to pay.”

  “We are demonologists,” one of the ghost hunters said, “and quite at home in hell.”

  So. He wished to draw first blood, eh?

  “Buddy,” I said, “if you woke up this morning feeling brave, I promise that you will go to bed tonight feeling broken. I have no patience for your paranormal eccentricities. Step aside and shut your hole. Ghosts aren’t real.”

  “Mr. Homar,” Candy said, “I think you’ll find your mind a little changed after a night in our hotel.”

  She seemed so serious; I could have pinched her cheek.

  “That’s right,” said the pudgier of the two ghost hunters, the one with the ayatollah cloud of beard poofing down from his chin. “We’ve caught crazy orbs on the infrared camera and voices on the Dictaphone. We have the facts. This place has reported activity for nearly two hundred years.”

  “I as well have reported activity from the brouhaha that is my heart, and the spook’s name there is Gillian. I repeat: shut your hole and stand aside.”

  But he didn’t.

  “This isn’t a joke. We’re professionals. You don’t know the facts, bub. We do. The first owners of this house had a little boy who died suddenly of typhoid fever. He left the world too soon and is still here, not in peace.”

  “Guy,” I began, “my little brother left the world too soon also and was pleased to leave it, never once coming back to say boo. He’s a sluggard in the grave and glad for it. Also, if you call me bub one more time your overweight relatives will be visiting you in traction. I do the manly thing when I can.”

  “That’s funny,” said a ghost hunter, the heretofore silent one, “you had no problem believing in the supernatural when Gillian left. You said that in your second piece, remember, that you were willing to consult witches and magicians to get her back. Am I wrong?”

  See me there thinking for six or eight seconds, a duffel bag still in each hand and five faces wanting my version of an answer.

  “I was in the clutch of rumpus,” I said, “not nearly responsible for my hunch. Must everyone quote my words back to me? Ghosts aren’t real.”

  “Oh, I see,” said a ghost hunter, although I’m not sure which one, since both were bomb sites of acne, split ends, and feral facial hair. “Now that your quest is accomplished, now that you’ve won back Gillian, you can no longer relate to those who still seek, who are still fired by passion.”

  “Number one: please realize, Gillian is not officially attained. Many hijinks can still ensue and cause hoopla with my heart. Number two: my object was always of this world, flesh and the blood beneath it. If you ever thought for one millisecond that you and I were alike, you should sue your doctor for declaring your brain undamaged.”

  An ambulance siren wailed by out front and I thought: Come and get me.

  “Right,” his partner said, “we’ll just conveniently forget that you chased Bigfoot.”

  “Hello,” I said, “Bigfoot is supposedly quite natural; nothing about him defies physics. And if you’ve been reading my yarns, you know that I ridiculed my prison mate for his Loch Ness Monster love affair. Ghosts are for those storytellers too bored with their lives.”

  “Yeah,” he snickered, “ghosts and giant squids.”

  The flesh beneath his chin wobbled, like that thing on a turkey.

  “You know, if you geeks would clean yourselves up and get an exercise program, you might be able to find females who’d be willing to date you, then you wouldn’t have to invest so much energy in fantasies.”

  “I have a girlfriend,” the cameraman declared, his voice too husky for his noodle limbs.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “She doesn’t live here.”

  “Of course she doesn’t. She doesn’t live here. As in, she doesn’t live, does not exist, just like the Caspers you’re running after in this hotel.”

  All of them: “Nunt-uh” and “You’re crazy” and “Cut it out.”

  “Name the parts of female genitalia and how each differs from the other. Go ahead.”

  I waited while they glanced at each other, then at their sneakers, then at their equipment, then at the lone female, poor girl, holding the lamp. She instinctively crossed one leg over the other as if to lock her thighs together. She might have boasted of fleshiness through her hindquarters but she still had curves enough to make any half-man half-want copulation with her. A bottom not unlike my Gillian’s.

  “Well,” I continued, “tell me if the clitoris is at the top of the vulva or at the bottom. Tell me if the labia are on the inside of the vagina or on the outside. Go ahead, tell me.”

  “How do we know Gillian exists?” one said. “She could be a figment of your imagination, all fiction,” and the others helpfully added, “Yeah” and “That’s right.”

  “Lord in heaven,” I said, dropping the bags, “please send help,” and I plunked myself down on the first step, too besieged to ascend the staircase.

  I believed I looked as if I might weep again. The day had begun with the ghost of my father at his funeral and wanted to end with more apparitions. Why was no one offering me a glass of Cambridge tap water? And where was my mother just then? I studied my watch and guessed that she was back home by now, the after-funeral feast long finished, just her and a bath and Kenny Rogers on the radio.

  No one wanted to speak now. Candy leaned against the desk in the lobby that seemed delighted to announce CONCIERGE; one specter-stalking ass wandered into the sitting room to touch a sofa that looked older than Adam; and down the hall I could see the kitchen, the cupboards of which no doubt contained cobwebs in place of comestibles.

  “Okay, look,” I said to everyone. “I apologize for being so…what’s the word…”

  “Unkind?” the lighting gal offered. “Rude?”

  “Yes, unkind and rude, I’m sorry. But please understand that I am under loads of pressure here. It’s the ninth inning with bases loaded and I’m at the plate.”

  “What’s the score?” she said.

  That’s me with the corkscrew face, asking her what in the world she could mean by such a question.

  “The amount of stress you would feel in your baseball analogy would depend upon the score. Unless your team is down by four runs or less, you wouldn’t be under any pressure at the plate, depending of course how late in the ninth inning we are talking here. If you’re down by four you can tie the game with a home run. If you’re down by three or less you can win. Anything other than those scenarios and you have no real pressure to speak of.”

  She leaned on her tripod lamp as if it bestowed upon her powers of win and sway.

  “Even the girls are baseball fanatics in this city? What is wrong with you people?”

  Candy said, “Mr. Homar, if I may change the subject for a second. Just so you know, visitors here have photographed ghosts, and also reported feeling faint, almost to the point of dizziness. Also inexplicable cool drafts. These have been documented since the 1800s.”

  “Candy,” I said, “you are really too sweet for my foulness right now, so forgive me, for am I agitated and excited both, more nervous than a newborn. Ghosts on film: the film is faulty and what you’re seeing is an effect of light. As for dizziness: check the radon and carbon monoxide levels in your basement. As for inexplicable cool drafts: these ancient mansions were oddly constructed with poor insulators. Replace the windows and your drafts will vanish. As I am about to do right now. Excuse me, please.”

  She handed me the key and pointed up the circular staircase to the second floor where room number 13 awaited me. Room 13, I thought, the rascals—but to prove that I had no investment in bunk, I said nothing about it, only grinned and bo
wed the bow of a tuxedoed gentleman, all the while noticing those work-of-art brows arching over her eyes. Candy returned behind the concierge’s counter and I started up those cavernous stairs, whereupon reaching the first landing I heard this exchange between a ghost hunter and Candy:

  “Can we begin setting up our equipment on the second level?” he asked.

  “Sure,” she said, “let me just make sure the rooms are ready for Mr. Lombardo and Mr. Romp.”

  Put yourself in my skin at that moment. Can you feel it stretching over my bones and tissue like cellophane?

  I hurled myself back down the stairs saying, “Excuse me, pardon me, what did you just say?”

  Candy repeated her sentence and I said, “Lombardo and Romp? They’re coming here? How? Why? What?”

  “Mr. Groot reserved a suite for each of them and said they would arrive later this evening.”

  “But I don’t have room for them here!”

  “We have plenty of room, Mr. Homar. We have no other tenants tonight, except for the TV crew.”

  “No, I mean I have no room in the finale of my narrative. They’ll crowd my reunion. My life is no longer about bedlam, only the blithe. Have you forgotten I’m meeting Gillian tomorrow? I need contemplation time. A shave and a haircut wouldn’t hurt, either.”

  Candy suggested that I talk over this tantrum with Groot and so I found my phone, stepped out onto the wraparound porch, and got him on the line.

  “Groot,” I said, “we are moving beyond the absurd and into the slapstick. This cannot stand.”

  “First of all,” he said, “God is a slapstick artist. Take a look around. Also, how is chasing Sasquatch through the jungle not slapstick? Second, if Gillian has in mind what I think she does, we will need Romp’s cunning and Richie’s creature strength. I’m doing this for you, Charlie. Besides, your readers miss Romp and Richie. Some have told me so.”

  “We can’t just reintroduce characters because my readers miss them. And I’m not so sure they do. More important: I don’t miss them. Characters must propel the narrative forward to its conclusion or else they’re merely set pieces. I have to be concerned with my own development at this point, and those two nimrods have nothing more to add.”

  Rainbowed pedestrians passed on the sidewalk: what were their lives like?

  “None of us really develops in life, Charlie. We only pretend to while every day satisfying our animal needs, going from want to hurt to want. I’m at the waterfront now, behind enemy lines. Work needs doing. Hasta la bye-bye.”

  If he hadn’t hung up so suddenly I would have injured him with name-calling: Nincompoop and slut. Maoist, maybe. Now that darkness had dropped, the four-member ghost-hunting crew was at turns giddy with excitement and firm with a faux-seriousness. I passed them in the second-floor hallway in front of my room and reminded them that I would be meditating in preparation for Gillian, to bollix me not, the hellish payment and the rest that would ensue. I’d be sitting cross-leggéd and straight-backed, perhaps my palms upward in case clues or pennies fell from heaven. Candy dashed around being meticulous and I asked her if she had any haircutting skills.

  “I don’t know about skills,” she said, “but I used to cut my boyfriend’s hair in college. Of course, that was with an electric trimmer. He was on the swim team.”

  “That will have to do. I can’t meet Gillian tomorrow looking like this.”

  “I like the Jesus Christ/Charles Manson look on you,” she said, her face suddenly fierce with a heat I could not account for. “Shoulder-length hair and a beard. It’s sexy. Of course, you know Christ was one sexy motherfucker. He protects me in this place.”

  I had been making a habit of cleaning out my ears with my pinkies, and now was another time. Candy then let fly with a broadside of foul language that would have been welcome at any full-court game of Harlem basketball: F’n Jesus this, and Mother-f’n Moses that, and blank-sucking Paul, and blank-licking Mary Magdalene. Was she ill? It was like watching a rose wilt on time-lapse photography.

  “Okay, then, Candy, thank you, dear, I’ll be retiring to my room now.”

  Her fingers found my elbow.

  “But Mr. Homar, I wanted to ask you, if you don’t mind. I really am a big fan of your memoirs, and I’ve always wanted to write a book myself.”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  “What?”

  The lighting gal wedged herself between us, in a hurry, and I pretended to be interested in her jean shorts.

  “What?” Candy asked again. “Why did you say, Oh, Lord?”

  “I said that out loud?”

  I did, she confirmed.

  “Candy, look, it’s like this: I’ve always wanted to be a fighter pilot but that doesn’t mean I’ll buy a plane.”

  Usually that fighter pilot line sends them packing. Not sweet Candy.

  “No, seriously,” she said. “I have this book in mind, a novel, about a young woman who runs a haunted hotel and how she befriends the ghosts that live there.”

  “Precious,” I said, “there are too many stories in America. The world doesn’t need another book. And you really don’t want to be a writer. Trust me.”

  The door to my room was right there: I could’ve reached over to touch it. I dangled the key between two fingers to show her how close I was to some much-needed sloth.

  “But I do,” she said. “I do want to be a writer.”

  “No, no, choose something else. I hear basket weaving is a hoot, also badminton.”

  “But you chose writing, why can’t I?”

  Those eyes like lozenges looked ready to water; freckles began disappearing beneath a blush.

  “You think I chose this? To sit alone in a room, pounding keys for a pittance? You think I like to write? Darling, I didn’t choose this. If it hadn’t chosen me when I wasn’t paying attention I would have preferred a life in the rodeo or else a race car. Anything but this time-consuming and head-scratching nuisance full of rejection and debt.”

  “But it’s art, Mr. Homar.”

  “It’s what?” I asked.

  “Art.”

  “What is that?”

  Her expression just then hollered animus and letdown.

  “Mr. Homar,” she said, “you’re influenza.”

  And me, the moron, I replied with thank you because I thought she might have said influential.

  SAFE BEHIND THE door of my antique-scented bedroom—the paintings and lamps of which were the spooky kitsch from Scooby-Doo!—I plunked onto an unyielding bed and attempted purification, although, truth be told, I had little idea what that meant. All I knew was that I felt donned in a snowsuit and lobster claws, a clumsy outlaw with a lot of back-and-forth to account for, a friend to human strength and weakness both, petrified of love and odium and doubting the Big Bang because it had the discourtesy to blow before I was born. She was flying back to me now, yes—right at that moment she sat buckled in an airliner over an Atlantic Ocean that had given birth to the giant squid and swallowed many a man without a burp—but would she leave me again, sometime and somehow? And was there any system in place to prevent it? Should your Charles Homar trust the damsel, walk on eggshells and risk more coronary cataclysm? Or shuck such worry of possible rupture and lunge back in, a high-diver undeterred? Yes, I was having a moment here, one of hesitation and ambivalence I’ve heard some heroes are prone to, and one essential to the development I lay pondering. I quantum, she cosmic.

  Also, how was I going to allow this drama to conclude? Because, despite my perky nerves, I was feeling emboldened, capable of taking over and dictating the outcome, never mind what Gillian, Groot, and those caddish colossi, Romp and Richie, envisioned. Could I allow a Wild Bunch shoot-out at the dock, holes in boats and heads? Could I stand by and watch revenge and revolt get their due? Really, now, hadn’t we seen our fair share of high blood sugar? It was my responsibility to facilitate an ending both realistic and not too unlawful, which I knew might prove difficult in my off-kilter condition. She loves me, she loves me
not. She needs me, she needs me not. She won’t do it again, she will do it again. Would I day in, day out be walking on eggshells?

  There I lay on the bed for several hours, searching my innermost groves for something that could be called a solution, while those spirit-chasing dimwits banged about in the hallway trying to set up their spooky green cameras in order to film the dust they would later dub the ghost. The yawns came but not the sleep. This was iron deficiency or else chronic fatigue syndrome. What a morose sight: a traveler trying to nap and chastising himself for failure at it. Sometime during my indelicate teen years I had picked up the notion that sleep equals health, that sleep can fend off disease and debacle. People often told me I did not look my thirty-odd years; this youthfulness and brown hair-shine I attributed to a lifetime of naps and a solid nine hours every night. That regimen had gone kaput ever since Gillian left, and many times since then I expected a cancer to come clobber me about the cells. Bartholomew had never slept well, not before he got sick, not after.

  Always a little depressive, “always a little in love with death,” as Eugene O’Neill has it—(always the playwrights and poets who go loopy; memoirists and novelists are a saner set)—I began taking ambitious naps around the time of Bart’s diagnosis. After eventful and uneventful high school days: a nap. Before stomping boozily through town with Groot on a Friday night: a nap. Saturday and Sunday mornings: a nap not long after waking. Half of my college years and adulthood: napped away. About sleep I was a fascist, though lacking a flag. Even the lightest snowfall could produce in me an urge for hibernation only a grizzly could appreciate the might of. If New England’s temperature sank into single digits, as it is glad to do each winter—forget it: you wouldn’t see me for a week. Windy rain or sleet? Good night. Some people, I know, call this depression. I call it exasperation. The nation seemed less full of outburst after a midday slumber. Certain problems had a way of correcting themselves while a body lay unconscious. Either that or you can wake with the requisite restfulness in order to tackle sideways whatever trouble had come. Going to jail had panicked me not because of the dropped-soap sodomy you hear so much about, but because of the noisiness you don’t. My father, naturally, called me derelict and bum, but by the time those insults started in high school I had stopped hearing most of what left his mouth. When I discovered that Gillian, too, was a napper, I knew I had a booty Blackbeard himself would boat the globe for. Among what I missed the most: ashen afternoons bandaged in goose-down, flanneled limbs entwined, frost on the windows, and the world far away.