We Are All Completely Fine

by Darryl Gregory

  “You can’t blame people for wanting to tell your story,” Greta said. “You’re a hero.”

  “That’s bullshit,” he said.

  “Not total bullshit,” she said.

  “You’re an optimist. Let’s agree that the glass is half full of shit.”

  “You saved an entire town!”

  “If by ‘saving’ you mean that slightly fewer people died than every single fucking person, sure. Totally saved it.”

  “That’s not what—”

  “Dunnsmouth was a clusterfuck, top to bottom,” he said. “The books don’t tell you how close we came to losing everything. I was seventeen, Greta. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing, and I didn’t know how far out of control the situation was. Everyone should have died. Not just everyone in town—everyone.”

  She stared at him.

  “I’m not being dramatic,” he said. “Okay, maybe a little. I’m sure there would have been a few survivors, somewhere. But not on the eastern seaboard.”

  “But that didn’t happen,” she said. “You must have done something right.”

  “Sometimes fortune favors the stupid.”

  She shook her head. “You keep doing that. Making quips.”

  “‘Quips’? Who says ‘quips’?”

  “Mocking quips is also a quip.” She frowned. “And trust me—I am not an optimist.”

  On the June night Martin was beaten, Harrison and Greta had left the meeting and walked to the pub as usual. They did not notice that Martin was following them. Greta was upset that Martin kept pressuring her for details.

  “He has a point,” Harrison said. “You know what happened to the rest of us. It’s your turn.”

  “I’m not interested in taking turns.”

  She had already told him fragments of her story. She’d grown up on some kind of all-female commune out West; they called themselves the Unveiled Sisters at first, then just the Sisters. She’d been raised by her mother; dad was some variety of asshole who’d not been part of her life since she was very small.

  Greta said, “Martin just wants to know about the scars. And the monster.”

  “I’m assuming they’re related.” He retrieved their drinks. After they’d taken their first sips, he said, “So. The scars.”

  She stared at him.

  He said, “Are you afraid I won’t believe you? Because I can promise you there’s no shit too weird for me.” He put his hand over hers. “Nothing you say can scare me off.”

  Greta seemed to move without moving. He jerked backward, chair legs squealing. For a moment she became, somehow, more real. He felt suddenly naked. Like prey.

  He’d yanked his hand away from her, and he tried to cover by rubbing the back of his neck. He’d experienced flashes like these before, these intimations of the hidden world, but he could never predict when they’d hit, and they never lasted for longer than a second or two. For that he was thankful. Seers like Martin had a shitty time of it.

  “Or,” he said, putting on a smile, “maybe you can.”

  “Drive me home,” she said. Then: “Not my home.”

  Harrison’s apartment was the latest in a string of apartments, and though he had lived there for two years, he’d not finished unpacking. Barely started, actually. He’d set up his laptop and some speakers on the dining room table, but his books were still in boxes. The kitchen cabinets were empty. He had managed to set out a few special items on the shelves in the living room, mementos from his childhood. Photos of his parents. A few hand-carved stone statues from the bottom of Dunnsmouth Bay. A framed copy of his high school diploma, still stained with blotches of black ichor. A skull that looked like a goat’s skull but was not.

  Greta moved around the room, looking at them with undisguised curiosity. She stared for a long time at the picture of his mother and father and the three-year-old Harrison, squinting into the sunlight on a California beach. She ran her hands along the shelves. “Is this gold?” she said, hefting a disc the size of her palm. The edges of it looked as if they’d been chewed, and the thing on its face was no human king or president.

  “It’s harder to spend than you think,” Harrison said. “I suppose I could melt it down.”

  “Right.” She returned it to the shelf, then stood with her back to him. “So you’re squatting here?”

  “Hey!”

  “No sheets on the bed, empty scotch bottles on the counter. Even the carpet smells like liquor.”

  “If you want to leave,” he said. “I can drive you back.”

  “Sit,” she said, and gestured toward the bed. She moved six feet away from him and pulled off her long-sleeved T-shirt. Underneath she wore a thin white wife-beater. She pealed that off as well.

  “Oh,” he said. He hadn’t meant to speak aloud. He didn’t want to spook her. And he thought he’d been prepared for this; she’d shown her arm in one of the earliest meetings. But this . . .

  The scars covered her from the base of her neck and continued past the waistline of her jeans. The swirls and nested blocks he’d seen on her arms were even more closely packed across her chest, more dense than a Mondrian painting, crowded as an Escher maze. Even her breasts—compact runner’s breasts—were covered in ridges and sworls.

  She shook her head at him. He didn’t know what that gesture meant, or even if it was directed at him. Then she unzipped her jeans and stepped out of them. She left on her underwear, small gray boy shorts with a black waistband, and kicked off her Chuck Taylors. There was a moment of awkwardness as she bent to peel off her black athletic socks. Then she stood.

  The scars scrolled down each leg, swarmed her feet, wound through her toes. She weathered his gaze with eyes open.

  After a time she turned to show him her back. No space larger than a couple of inches had been left unfilled. She was a Torah, a labyrinth.

  “The Sisters gave me my first brand when I was seven years old,” she said. She turned again, and showed him a tiny square on her left bicep. “This. It was my birthday. I was so happy.”

  “Happy,” he said skeptically.

  “My mother had already decorated herself with beautiful designs,” Greta said. “They were tattoos, not scars, and nothing . . . mystical. But so full of color. I remember tracing them, my nose so close to her skin, staring at the pictures so hard I thought I’d fall in. On her left arm was a tattoo of an ivy-covered gate. I thought that if I looked close enough between the bars I could see to the other side. God, I loved them. She added to her collection pretty frequently. Sometimes she let me come with. This was before we joined the Sisters, before we left my dad, when I was little. I remember the hum of the needles, the tiny pinpricks of blood. Once I asked if it hurt, and she said, Of course it does, honey. Everything beautiful hurts.”

  “That’s kind of fucked up,” Harrison said.

  “Tell me it’s not true,” she said. Without waiting for a response she said, “This one they gave me a few days later.”

  Over the next hour she guided him through a tour of her body, though she never let him come closer than a few feet to her. Her skin was both the map and the territory: She told him how and when she acquired each brand, and how much she loved the Sisters. “This one took weeks to heal,” she said. “It felt like the whole summer.”

  She was talking about a jagged design near her navel. Looking at it made him queasy. “I know that symbol,” he said.

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “And that one, on your leg. And there was another on your back—two, I think. Related.”

  “How?” she asked. “Where have you seen them?”

  “The other side.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “That I was over there?” he asked.

  “That they’re on me.”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  Harrison’s cell phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen—not many people had this number—and then picked it up. A few minutes later he hung up and told Greta that she would have to tell them abou
t the Sisters. “The doctor and Martin, at least.”

  “Might as well be the whole group,” Greta said.

  “Yeah,” he said heavily. Then: “You can probably keep your clothes on, though.”

  He said it jokingly, but suddenly she was embarrassed. She came out of the chair and started scooping up her clothes.

  “Where are you going?” he asked. “Are you leaving?”

  She wouldn’t answer him. He said, “What happened to the Sisters, Greta? Are they still out there?”

  “They’re dead.” She pulled on one of her shoes. “All dead. Whoosh.”

  She finished dressing, then stared at him, hands on hips.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I still need a ride,” she said.

  Chapter 7

  At the next meeting we were all shocked by Martin’s appearance, in both senses of the word “appearance”: shocked at the bruises and bandages, and shocked that he had come to the group at all. He looked like a zombie from his video game: his face misshapen by the beating, still swollen in yellow and purple. One arm was in a cast from wrist to elbow, and the fingers themselves were wrapped, making it look like one of Stan’s stumps.

  Jan had tried to tell him that he did not need to come to the meeting, and she’d understand if he wanted to drop out entirely. She would see him in solo therapy if that’s what he wanted. But no, Martin was determined to attend. He needed to see the others, and he needed to be seen.

  “God damn, kid!” Stan said. “God damn!”

  Martin put down his bulging backpack and took his seat next to Barbara. She touched his shoulder and said, “I’m so sorry. How are you holding up?”

  He didn’t know how to answer that question. He was upright, so was that holding up? His body ached. His bones felt as shaky as Tinkertoys. Even under this blanket of Vicodin—he was still taking four a day—spikes of pain would shoot up his spine with no warning. When he turned his head too fast, his vision swam.

  Oh, and the world without frames. It was so strange to see without filters—to see this group without protection. The only advantage was that he could almost forget that Greta was a monster.

  “I also need to find a new place to crash,” Martin said.

  “Why’s that?” Harrison asked.

  “I got kicked out,” Martin said, which was not a lie. He kept the explanation vague, making it seem like a problem about money and roommates. Only Jan knew the whole story.

  Stan, though, was still outraged on Martin’s behalf. “You can’t kick a man out of his home!”

  “Where are you going to live?” Barbara asked.

  “I’ll think of something,” he said.

  Harrison said, “If you need some help—”

  “From you?” Martin said.

  Harrison started to say something, then seemed to think better of it. He glanced at Jan as if asking her permission to proceed. “Dr. Sayer told me that Martin was attacked right outside the bar where Greta and I were talking. We’d met there several times. After almost every meeting, actually.”

  Stan raised his eyebrows.

  “To talk,” Harrison said.

  “Uh huh,” Stan said.

  “I—we should have told the group. I apologize for that. If we’d been more open, then maybe—”

  “Maybe I wouldn’t have stalked you,” Martin said.

  “You really did that?” Barbara asked him.

  “She left wakes,” Martin said. “Ripples in the air.”

  “Really?” Stan said.

  “Yup.”

  Barbara said to Martin, “Do you want to talk about the attack?”

  “No,” Martin said. He looked at Greta: straight on, from beneath eyelids puffy from the beating. “I want her to talk about it.”

  “The cut was very small,” Greta said. “Maybe an inch long.”

  Her voice was so quiet. Martin leaned forward, thinking, Finally.

  “The razor was so sharp I didn’t feel it.”

  Barbara made a noise, a tiny intake of breath, and Martin looked up. The woman’s eyes shone with unshed tears. What was going on with her? he wondered. In the first meetings Barbara had been so composed, knees together and voice calm, as polished as a Nordstrom’s saleslady.

  Greta said, “All I remember was the ice cube the Sisters rubbed over my arm first. Then one of the other elders distracted me, making faces, and when I looked down they were placing a thin piece of gauze in the wound.”

  “In the wound?” Barbara asked.

  “You twist the gauze, like you’re rolling a joint, then you lay it in there. They have to keep open. The skin has to raise before scarring. You cut the skin of a child, you have to be careful or they’ll heal up without a trace.” She said this matter-of-factly. “Every successful brand comes from delayed healing.”

  Greta described how the cuttings proceeded, from tiny incisions to longer, more intricate designs. They concentrated at first on her arms, then legs, so that she could see them. “The Sisters wanted me to love them as much as they did.”

  “The sisters, the sisters,” Stan said. “What the hell kind of sister would do this?”

  Martin almost laughed. Stan was the king of outrage.

  “The Sisters,” Greta said, and then Stan heard it the way they did: a proper noun, capitalization required.

  “I was related to only one of them,” she said. “My mother. It was kind of a commune.”

  “In the what—the nineties? Who the hell still lives on a commune?”

  “It was Oregon,” Greta said.

  But Stan was steamrolling now. “Well where the hell were your teachers? Your neighbors? Didn’t anybody notice they were cutting up a little kid? You weren’t in God damn Africa.”

  “I was homeschooled,” Greta said evenly. “All the daughters were. The Sisters were self-sufficient. Everything we needed was on the farm, and the only time I saw outsiders was when I helped set up our stand at the farmers’ market, or when the fuel-oil truck came.”

  “That’s terrible,” Barbara said.

  “No! I loved it there,” Greta said. “And the Sisters loved me. More than they did the other girls.”

  Stan said, “You’re telling us this commune was all women?”

  The old man’s voice had a strange tone to it. You old perv, Martin thought.

  “She’s telling us that she was in a cult,” Harrison said.

  “It’s more complicated than that,” Greta said.

  “It always seems that way,” Martin said. “From the inside.”

  Greta jerked in her seat. Martin saw the monster erupt in her, flashing white-orange like the mouth of a blast furnace. He grunted in pain. The light had brought tears to his eyes.

  He didn’t understand what had happened. He wasn’t wearing the frames.

  Greta said, “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Martin held up a hand. He was still seeing spots. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . .” When he looked up, Harrison was staring at him, his eyes narrowed as if measuring the space between them.

  “You okay, Martin?” Harrison asked.

  “I’m fine,” Martin said.

  “So are you still in it?” Stan asked Greta. “This cult?”

  Jan said, “I don’t think it’s helpful to keep using that word.”

  “It’s over,” Greta said. “When I was sixteen, there was a fire. An old bus was parked too close the main house. The bus caught fire, and that spread . . .” She shook her head. “Everything fell apart after that. There were news stories. The survivors turned on each other. The whole community disbanded.” She grimaced. “I know the farm wasn’t perfect, but I still miss it.”

  “Wasn’t perfect?” Stan said sarcastically. “They cut you!”

  Jan said, “Greta, you said the Sisters loved you more than the other girls. How so?”

  “All the daughters were marked on their seventh birthday. Then again every month, just tiny little cuts. We were all trying to get our first squa
re. But I wanted more. I asked for more. The other girls dropped out one by one. But I kept going.”

  The designs became more elaborate, the cuts deeper. By the time she was thirteen, she told the group, all the other girls had dropped out, and Greta was the sole object of the elders’ attention. The scars covered her arms and legs. She ached constantly. Her skin wept blood. Some mornings after a ritual she woke to find herself glued to the bed, skin and bandages and T-shirt and sheet transformed into one thing, cemented by blood. But still she wouldn’t stop.

  She had her first period while laid out on a table, naked from the waist up. The elder women were carving the next ring of a spiraling symbol into her stomach, and they cried with joy when they saw the spots in her underwear. They stopped early that day, but the remaining sessions were longer. She was a woman now.

  “I could take the pain,” she said. “I was the queen of pain. I got so I could breathe through any session, two hours, three. Sometimes I felt like I was floating above the table. I felt like I was opening myself to something greater.”

  Greta paused, and Martin risked a glance at her. She was smiling shyly. She said, “They told me I would be worshiped.”

  “And you believed them?” Stan asked.

  “They were already worshiping me,” Greta said. “Every time they put the knife to my skin it was like . . .” She shook her head. “I don’t know.”

  “A prayer,” Barbara said.

  “Yes,” Greta said. “Like that.”