Busy Monsters by William Giraldi

Author:William Giraldi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2011-06-20T16:00:00+00:00

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

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