Busy Monsters

by William Giraldi

  But now, too wired to let sleep heal and press reset, I dropped to the floor to pump out two minutes of push-ups for my flagging pecs, precisely what Sylvester Stallone would have done prior to some patriotic combat he did not want but would later be rewarded for. Then back on the bed I finally fell asleep in the dark, the fatigue in my flanks and femurs able to anchor a yacht, and in my head an array of Ozian characters irking earnest Dorothy.

  All set to have a dream about something salty, I heard through the darkness those four ghost-hunting comics pitter-pattering outside my door, saying frantically, “It went in here,” just before clanging into my room with green and red lights iridescent left and right.

  “Major readings,” one was saying, and the other said, “There it is, by the bed.”

  I had sat up by this time, not exactly with a jolt but jolty. Career nappers will tell you: few events on earth are as murder-inducing as an interrupted snooze.

  “It’s me by the bed,” I told them. “You waifs. Groot has handguns and flashlights packed in his duffel bag there. Don’t make me unzip it.”

  “The boy-specter is in this room,” the first said. “And that’s not all: he spoke to us out there. He has a name, Mr. Homar. He called himself…Bart. Does that name mean anything to you?”

  Okay, I thought, now it’s personal.

  “Am I on camera right now? Are you filming me? Because I don’t want any documentation of my gunfire, which, as you know, I have attempted to inflict upon other mortals in the past. If you’re trying to hoodwink me by saying my little brother’s name, try again. You got his name from one of my memoirs, you louse.”

  They said, almost in unison, “Nunt-uh” and “No way” and “We would never.”

  “I am sharp now, gentlemen, and have had my fill of randomness, I warn you. I can sniff out heresy like a parson on Inquisition payroll. Gillian’s return has bolstered me with acuity. I suggest you restore the power and cut the central air.”

  I had fished out the flashlight from Groot’s duffel bag and was shining it point-blank in their grizzled mugs. Doors banged shut down the hall and then we heard a vaporous groaning worthy of Béla Lugosi. Soon, no doubt, chains would clank.

  “Explain that,” a ghost hunter said into my flashlight.

  “No doubt Candy putting on a good show.”

  “I’m right here, Mr. Homar,” she said, and my flashlight found her there behind the cameraman.

  This was fracture and interference, not at all what I wanted on hiatus from the harsh. The ghost-boy’s groans amplified to a pestering pitch and I felt in need of an amulet, a crucifix, or maybe just some water mumbled over in Latin by the Pope. Then I remembered: I had a gun, even better. When the Hardy Boys saw me snatch it from Groot’s bag and load the first round into the chamber, one of them insisted poetically that “the dead don’t feel lead.”

  “But I do,” the lighting gal said, “and I’m not getting shot tonight by a trigger-happy memoirist. Either the gun goes or I go.”

  “Excuse me,” I said, “but unless I’m mistaken, demons are trying to abuse us. Have you not seen The Exorcist? A gun would have solved that little fix before your fingers got grimy from the popcorn. You can find comfort in Misters Smith and Wesson. Groot does.”

  More boos and whines on the second floor and the TV crew whizzed out to interview the source of them. Candy followed but not before asking me to remove all handguns from the premises. I accused her of un-American attitudes and she remarked, “I don’t give a flying fuck, get rid of the gun,” more language that did not become her decent prairieland looks. Now I felt bad about not giving her the writing advice she had come seeking from me. She would no doubt fiddle with my bill, charge me for room service I did not receive.

  Just as I was about to follow them down the hall to confront the afterlife, my cell phone lit up in the dark with a ring-a-ling. I unflipped it and said, “Groot, I’m kind of busy here. I’m about to beat some brat’s ghost with either superior invective or else hollow-tipped bullets.”

  “Charlie,” he said, “you’ll have to save that lampoon for another time. We have a situation here.”

  “Define situation please.”

  “Oxford’s?”

  “Groot,” I said, “please tell me that you did not, through some tremendously good luck, overhear Jacobi and a museum lackey talking about their plan and are thus privy to important information that can affect the plotting in our favor. That’s so nineteenth century.”

  “Negative. I’m standing at the harbor with Gillian, Romp, and Richie. Her plane landed this evening, not tomorrow morning. We screwed up the timing, which isn’t all that surprising, seeing as how the timing in this whole narrative is screwball at best.”

  I guessed I wasn’t responding effectively, because he said, “Do you copy, Charlie? Are you there?”

  More reticence on my part. And some breathing that sounded wrong.

  “Do you read me?” he shouted.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “can you please repeat that sentence with Gillian’s name in it?”

  “She’s here. Right now. With me. At the harbor by the aquarium. Operation Payback begins tonight. Romp and Richie are ready; they just arrived from the airport. Red Team is a go. We need Blue Team here pronto. Get the bags and hail a cab.”

  Why was I the Blue Team? For several long seconds I held out the lighted phone at arm’s length as if I were a Clovis hunter who had just stumbled upon it during an unsuccessful mastodon raid. My bladder and sweat glands declared their primacy; some bones in my shoulders and feet vibrated and, I think, spoke. In my midintestinal section howled a din the damned have described as central to mayhem.

  I stood there several weeks apart from the person I was just a minute ago. Gillian one day early? Romp and Richie already at the pier? And my name was what? What about my zip code? Did it have five numbers like all other zip codes in America? My telephone number, too. Who chose those digits? Why did physicists have such difficulty bringing together the quantum and the cosmic, creating the Unified Theory that even Einstein could not crack? I had other questions at that instant, all of which had to do with the embryo I once was and the left-right-left that turned it into the six-foot contemplative lug I now was. I had half an urge to click on the tube, find a documentary, see how freighters and planes go down in the Bermuda Triangle, watch the contest between PhDs who blame rogue waves or methane gas and pot smokers who blame a portal to different dimensions.

  But, negative. In the next instant I was scramming through the dark, down the stairs, with both bags in hand, saying, “Stand clear” and “Step aside,” to the TV crew and Candy. They were half Kabuki, half befuddlement trying to detain an invisible spirit who, I imagined, was cackling cruelly, maybe mooning them.

  Now that’s me there, out in the midsummer night, the stars winking at heroes worthy of the wink, in the middle of the road trying to seize a cab and not being able to do so for five blocks or more. Once in the backseat I said to the cannabis-addled Rastafarian behind the wheel, “Brother, I have a one-hundred-dollar bill on me that would be mighty pleased if you broke laws to deliver me upon the aquarium’s steps in a hurry. This, as you can see, is serious. I believe I’m about to be married.”

  “I be married, too, mun. Me have one wife on Pluto and another be on Mars.”

  “Brother,” I said, “you speak my tongue. Now drive.”

  WHAT MORE WAS there for me to ruminate on? Very little, right? Action only now, and a few choice words for my fellow actors. The Rastafarian with multiple wives somewhere in the solar system had broken not only laws but also a world record for taxicab speed and its resultant property damage. I hurried around to the left side of the aquarium—out of breath already, vision a little blurred from ecstasy and expectation—and stopped short when I spotted the four of them on the pier, the water, boats, and various nighttime twinkles their backdrop. This next bit might have happened in Gone with the Wind but certainly in some other saccharine shows; in any case,
you’ll recognize it: the lovers behold each other from afar for the first time in too long; they let go what they’re holding—I Groot’s duffel bag, Gillian her backpack—and wide-eyed they begin to step closer. The steps become a jog and soon the jog a sprint, ending midway in a kissing crash—crashing kiss?—replete with snivels, the music a crescendo of violins and other tools at John Williams’s disposal.

  Gillian’s familiar scent stabbed through my numbness and turned the faucet on full blast. Our embrace was like being mashed by the giant squid itself: we had trouble with our lungs. The clearing away of tears, the penetrating gaze into each other’s eyeballs, her avowal of “my husband,” mine of “my wife,” apologies and forgiveness all around. Her hair was chopped off nearly to the root; I understand women do this when undergoing upheaval. I ran my hands over it and cupped her face, a face that had launched only a single ship, sure, but one that sent the juices gushing down to my lap in a blast.

  It’s one of the world’s unjust gags: to wait for a darling someone for a spate of time, and when that someone is finally in your squeeze, life goes wavy, gets surreal, so that you can’t adequately ascertain the second-by-second unfolding—you’re a goldfish trying to lip-read the idiot tapping on the glass.

  “Charlie,” she said, sobbing.

  “If only you knew where I’ve been, Gill. I’ve had quite the time. Please pinch me. Here,” I said, holding out my arm, “give a pinch.”

  “Groot told me about your dad. I’m sorry, Charlie. I’m so sorry,” and she wept some more onto my polo shirt.

  After the weeping she mashed my mouth again furiously with hers, my hands wrapping around her back to cup first one gluteus and then the other, the buns I had for so long gone without, those objects of my dirty dreams I half enjoyed the horror of. More eye gazing and lip adhesion; more sentences with words like progress and righteousness, plus the phrase never again. Behind us: Groot, Romp, and Richie applauding, Richie swiping at his cheeks with a T-shirt sleeve.

  We were the motliest five in Massachusetts.

  Groot ended this well-known scene with reminders of our mission, Operation Payback, Red Team, Blue Team, all that. I didn’t even have to hear the proposal; I knew what Gillian wanted: for us to release Architeuthis back into the wild, thus depriving Jacobi of his fortune while granting the creature its freedom. The squid was still in the holding tank belowdecks on The Kraken, just down to our right, in clear sight. The aquarium bigwigs were scrambling through bank accounts and the reddish tape in order to secure for the animal permanent digs inside the building. Now was the time to attack, to cause jailbreak and plunder. Something similar had happened in the Hollywood kids’ flick Free Willy, remember, when the intrepid young protagonist risks it all to return that unsightly killer whale back to the sea. Also, Mickey Rourke liberated all the animals from the pet store at the end of Rumble Fish. Gillian and I had watched those films together and gone through a box of tissues doing it, so I had known since reading her letter that she wanted this release and not, as Groot had thought, to nuke the aquarium and everyone in it.

  “Come hither all,” I said. “Groot, please take off the Lone Ranger mask. You look ludicrous. Romp, it’s good to see you. Glad Bigfoot did not have you for supper. How’re the Canadian Negroes treating you?”

  “I’m a French Cathar cleric: I do the diggy with my flock. They call me confessor.”

  “All righty then. Richie, good to see you, too. Very pleased to know you left the twins, Mimi and Mimi, ensnared in each other’s legs at home. Now, I appreciate your coming here to help execute Operation Payback, but there won’t be an operation tonight or any other night.”

  Huhs and Whats and How comes, the kind you hear in a stadium crowd when the running back fumbles.

  Gillian said, “What do you mean, Charlie?”

  A sweat-cooling Christian breeze rose off the water and up my shorts, where it brushed my gonads.

  “People? This is how I develop here, people: by taking charge of this situation in a sensible fashion, by choosing order over chaos, by pushing instead of being pulled. I’m asserting my will.”

  “Oh, no,” Romp said, “that dude has got to pay. I’ve come armed with the sacraments and I’m ready to climb aboard that ship. The African in me knows a thing or two about hegemony, not to mention theodicy.”

  “And I planned to jump into the tank naked and swim around with the squid,” Richie said. “I’ll throw some henchmen overboard. Blacken some eyes. It’ll make an awesome scene.”

  “And Groot?” I asked. “I suppose you planned to snipe those people on the deck of the ship and then perhaps plant explosives? You wanted to kill some sons of bitches? Does that sound sane to you?”

  My sweetheart said, “Jacobi can’t get away with what he did to me.”

  “If we rescue and release the squid it’ll be a loss for Jacobi, yes, but also for science, Gill. You know it needs to be studied. I’m putting an end to chaos and walking away from here, hand in hand with you.”

  “That’s anticlimactic,” Groot said.

  “Yeah, babe,” Richie said, “just a bit.”

  “Exquisitely gimp,” Romp added.

  “We should vote on it,” Groot said. “Charlie dotes over democracy, is a fan of Pericles. Everyone in favor of chaos and vengeance, raise a hand.”

  They three raised their hands but Gillian and I did not.

  Groot said, “Three to two in favor of carnage. The ayes have it. Carnage it is.”

  A minute of silence here while we five studied each other as if meeting for the first time. And in a way it was the first time, because this moment would wipe away much of what had come before and alter almost all of what would come after.

  “So,” Groot said, “carnage, then? We’re all ready for the finale.”

  “No, I think Charlie’s right,” Gillian said. “She needs to be studied,” and she held my waist ever so tight.

  An awkward silence and contorted, disappointed faces in every direction for another minute or more.

  “Well, can’t we at least kill Jacobi?” Romp said. “Leave the squid, but kill that knave? I flew all the way here from Canada for this scene.”

  “That’s an idea,” Groot said. “Richie can tear his arms out from their sockets.”

  “Gentlemen,” I said, “do what you will. But I and my wife-to-be are heading back to the hotel. We have some catching up to do, copulation among ghosts. Let’s rendezvous there later so we can make merry with abundant booze.”

  “Sounds wonderful,” she said, and I could see in her eyes that she was drained, had aged while enduring her ordeal.

  We indeed went back to our haunted bedroom then and feasted on each other for hours, her body steak for a starving man. Everything within me was newly born, tears dangling from my nose tip as I thrust in and out, gently here, fiercely there, lapping her up from toe to ear with a lengthy sojourn between her thighs, the ghosts of the hotel commingling above the bed, grinning down upon us, recalling that life-affirming glee and wanting it to last. Gillian sobbed some more over the death of my father and the heartache her wrongheadedness had battered me with. She felt better after an hour’s nap.

  Groot, Romp, and Richie returned to the haunted hotel, Candy broke out the beer and bottles of booze, the ghost hunters joined us at the table and chairs out back, and we all of us imbibed in the summer eve until jolly and forgetful. After Gillian and I had left the aquarium earlier, the three guys remained and loitered about, an itch within them that needed ointment, and when they spotted Jacobi emerging from the aquarium offices Groot seized him, got him in a headlock, and passed him over to Richie, who then shoulder-pressed the fat bastard clean above his head before tossing him over the railing into seaweeded water. We all raised our glasses and cheered after Groot relayed this wonderful story.

  “How did you know it was him?” Gillian asked. “You had never seen him before.”

  “Your lover has superior powers of description,” Groot said, “I remembered that
mustachio from one of Charlie’s memoirs. Plus that sinister, smug look on his mouth meant it could be only him,” and we all laughed the laugh of contented creatures.

  And then back to our bedroom for more lovemaking, inebriated and reckless. Our son, I’m proud to confess in these very pages, was conceived that night; perhaps we were abetted by those spirits, maybe even Bartholomew among them—our son does resemble my little brother. Our wedding would have to wait but one more week, in our own humble Connecticut town. What couldn’t wait, however, were our plans, the blueprint for our future, every diagram of which included Architeuthis. Jacobi’s specimen he stole from Gillian would die in captivity within a month after our night at the harbor, and although its death caused Gillian a monsoon of mucus and tears, I convinced her that this was her new opportunity to catch an even larger beast. It would be hers alone, with no headline-filching fraud to dampen her glory. Soon we’d trade our condo, our cars, and our life savings for a ship and equipment, and spend our seasons out there among immense blue, with our son named Archy suntanned at the stern, we three a story to share, one of us sutured and saved, those monsters still alive, yes, but in memory, memory alone.