We Are All Completely Fine

by Darryl Gregory

  Stan’s driver, the bearded young man who seemed about the same age as Martin, said, “You’re staying with him?” He shook his head in disbelief, and when he unlocked the door to the house he chuckled in a low voice that reminded Martin of every cafeteria bully he’d known in middle school. “Enjoy your stay.”

  Martin shut the door behind them. “What an ass-hole.” Then he looked up to see the condition of the room.

  For a long moment he couldn’t think of anything to say.

  Stan suddenly seemed angry. He gestured at the goat path through the mess and said, “Kitchen’s through there.”

  “Got it,” Martin said, and began to push Stan’s chair—slowly, and with many small corrections. His cast made it difficult. And still he couldn’t think what to say about the house. He was appalled but also fascinated. The way through the maze of the front room was like a series of D&D traps, set with hair triggers and hidden pressure plates. Move a broken microwave off a stack of National Geographics and a boulder might burst through the wall and flatten them.

  Martin thought about bugging out as soon as possible, but where else could he go? His checking account was down to gravel and his credit card had been scraped clean by the hospital and pharmacy. He needed to go back to work, to get looking for a new place to live, but the thought exhausted him. The beating had beaten something out of him. What had been lost, however, was a mystery; Stan would have called it gumption, or resilience. To Martin it felt like he’d sloughed off some other, tougher self, leaving behind a fragile pupa. All he wanted to do was sleep.

  But that was looking to be impossible in Stan’s house. There was hardly any space to lie down, and nowhere to even sit safely. They passed a door that was ajar, but behind it was a wall of floor-to-ceiling crap like a dead end in a closed-environment game level. The kitchen was a wreck, full of non-foodrelated junk. Why was there a black safe sitting atop the stove?

  Martin said, “I don’t know, Stan, maybe I should—”

  “Try upstairs,” Stan said. He pointed at twin pillars of boxes. Between them was a narrow opening.

  Martin slipped into the gap and discovered a set of stairs that led to a miracle: three bedrooms and a tiny bathroom, empty except for an appropriate amount of furniture. The rooms were dusty but not dirty; someone, at least in the past couple months, had cleaned them. This was higher ground, saved from the floodwaters of Stan’s compulsion by the lack of a ramp or chair lift.

  Martin returned to the first floor, moving slowly so as not to aggravate his ribs. Stan looked at him expectantly.

  Martin wanted to say, This is the first time I’ve been thankful for lack of handicap accessibility. Instead he said, “This is perfect. Thanks.”

  “You’ll be safe here,” Stan said. “You wouldn’t believe how many guns I have.”

  Greta didn’t show up for the next meeting. She’d sent Jan a text saying that she needed to work on something on her own. The tone, Jan told them, did not seem to rule out an eventual return; but when Jan texted her back, she got no further reply.

  It was left to the group to deal with her departure. It was a rejection, a wound. We spent three weeks talking about it, assessing the damage, assigning blame. Martin thought Greta was a coward. Stan thought she was striking back at them for forcing her to talk. Harrison thought she just needed a break from the group and would be back when she needed them. Barbara, however, refused to take Greta’s exit as a sign of aggression or weakness. “Maybe she got what she needed,” Barbara said. “The group’s job is to patch us up so we’re strong enough to go do what we need to do. We’re not supposed to be here forever.”

  What surprised us—the remaining members, that is, if not Dr. Sayer—was that we were able to talk about it so deeply and so well. Dr. Sayer seemed to do very little; she made comments that would nudge our little boat back into the stream and we would do the rowing ourselves. When we fell back into storytelling—and Stan was still our most frequent offender—one of us would nudge us back into the now. What mattered was what happened between us.

  One week he was talking again about his time with the Weavers, the days he spent in that barn, in the nest of ropes that stretched between the rafters and the poles. He seemed to remember every kindness that the Pest, the smallest Weaver, had done for him, even as he watched his friends die, one by one. “Their mistake was killing the cop. If Bertram Weaver hadn’t had done that, they would never have found me. I would have made my last visit to the smokehouse. But the cops burst in, and Bertram tried to rush them—”

  “Stan, you’ve told this story before,” Barbara said. “When you go on and on like that, it’s like you’re demanding that I tune you out. The more you talk, the less I can hear you.”

  Stan lifted the oxygen mask, inhaled deeply. We’d seen this delaying tactic before. Often it ended any meaningful interaction with the old man. But this time he lowered the mask and said, “Then you’ve trapped me. If I talk you don’t listen, and if I don’t talk . . . what am I supposed to do?”

  “Tell us something you’ve never told before,” Barbara said. “Something real. How do you feel, right now?”

  “I feel sorry,” Stan said. “I don’t mean to bore you. I don’t know why I do that. I just . . . fill the room.”

  “I’m more concerned about what you’re not saying,” Barbara said.

  “Are there things you’re not telling us?” Martin asked.

  “Of course there are,” Harrison said. “We all have secrets left.”

  “Whenever you’re ready, Harrison,” Barbara said.

  Harrison laughed. “I’ll let you know.”

  Despite Greta’s absence, a lightness seemed to have entered the meetings. The gloom around Barbara (which only Jan and Greta had noticed) had lifted. Martin seemed to be healing. He was still living with Stan, but he’d gone back to work, thanks to a phone call and earnest letter from Dr. Sayer. He told the group he was adjusting to life without the frames. He knew the dwellers were lurking just out of sight, and he never forgot that, but he could function as if there were no dwellers. “I just tell myself to act like they’re not there,” Martin said one week. “And sometimes I can fool even myself.”

  “Amen,” Harrison said. “That’s my primary maintenance strategy.”

  “How so?” Jan asked.

  “You know. Act normal. Pretend we don’t know what we know. But it’s so . . . tiring. I start to hate people for their ignorance. Their complacency. Sometimes I see a couple people sitting around laughing and I think, What the fuck do you think is so funny?”

  The rest of us were nodding. Even Jan.

  “I want to be like them. But I can’t. We’re not safe. There are things on the other side that want in—the dwellers, the Hidden Ones. And scarier shit.”

  “They whisper,” Martin said.

  “Yes,” Harrison said. “Always trying to get someone to open the door.”

  “Like Aunty Siddra,” Barbara said.

  “And the Weavers,” Stan said.

  “Well, the Weavers were just psychos, right?” Harrison said. “Nothing like the thing that burned down Greta’s farm.”

  Stan said, “I do not agree with that.”

  “I’m not saying they weren’t scary,” Harrison said. “But they didn’t bring over monsters.”

  “They wanted to become the monsters,” Jan said. She sounded almost angry.

  Harrison looked at the others, seeing if they’d noticed her tone.

  “And they got halfway there,” Jan said. She looked up. “Stan, tell them about the Spidermother.”

  Stan flinched as if he’d been slapped. Tears filled his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak, then closed it.

  “It’s okay, dear,” Barbara said. “What is it?”

  But Stan was staring at Dr. Sayer. “How do you know about that?”

  “It was in the police reports.”

  “Back up,” Martin said. “Spidermother?”

  “That’s what her boys called her.”
Stan rubbed at his eyes with his sleeve. “Mrs. Weaver. That’s who they were feeding.”

  “Fuck,” Harrison said.

  “They kept her in the smokehouse,” Stan said. “They were afraid of her, but they loved her too. She looked . . . pregnant. Or like those starving kids in Africa, with the big distended bellies? The rest of her, her arms and legs, were like sticks. And filthy. But the worst part was her eyes. There was something wrong with her eyes. She had too many of them.”

  Martin bent forward in his chair. “What?!”

  “Inside her sockets. She had two in each socket. Small, shiny black . . . spider eyes.”

  “Another fucking hybrid,” Harrison said. The rest of us looked at him. “If something’s made it across, it can taint people. And their children. You get things that shouldn’t exist.”

  “The Scrimshander,” Barbara said. “Half dweller, half human.”

  “Yeah, him,” Harrison said. “And others.”

  “But you killed it, right?” Martin asked.

  Harrison shrugged. “Probably. Other people thought they killed it too. It’s hundreds of years old. It may not be killable.”

  “What are you saying?” Stan said. He was frantic. “The Spidermother may still be alive? They burned her out. The whole place went down. I heard her scream. You can’t tell me that she’s still out there.”

  “I’m sure she’s not,” Harrison said.

  “Don’t coddle me!” Stan said.

  “I’m sorry,” Harrison said. He surprised himself by sounding as sincere as he felt, or perhaps the reverse. “I shouldn’t have said that. I just . . . I don’t know if any of these things obey the same rules we do.”

  “But that’s what you’re here for,” Martin said. “You’re the official dragon slayer.”

  “I’m here, in this group, because I used to think that was my job.”

  “Maybe it’s all of your jobs,” Jan said. “Each of you is on the hero’s journey.”

  “Oh no,” Harrison said. “Leave Joseph Campbell out of it.”

  “The Mormon guy?” Stan asked.

  “Joseph Campbell,” Martin said. “The monomyth? Star Wars? Damn it, Stan, read a book.”

  “It’s a pattern you see in many myths,” Jan said. “A hero leaves the everyday world, and crosses over into the world of the supernatural. He gains magical helpers, faces great trials, fights strange forces, and wins a great battle. Then he comes back to the normal world with a boon—a gift. A reward.”

  “That’s not my story,” Harrison said.

  “Well I crossed over,” Stan said. “And what reward did I get?”

  “Knowledge,” Barbara said. “We get to find out things that no one else knows. We get the gift of understanding.”

  “Screw that,” Stan said. “I want my hands back.”

  Harrison was the first to leave the building, but he stood for a while, scanning the sidewalks. Barbara caught him loitering. “Can’t fool me,” she said. “You still want to rescue the damsel.”

  “But who’s going to rescue me?” he asked.

  She laughed, and said goodnight. After a few steps she turned and said, “I always meant to ask you, did you see the portraits it carved?”

  “The Scrimshander?”

  “I’ve seen photographs of some of the bone carvings,” she said. “But I’ve never seen a piece in person.”

  “I found its lair once,” Harrison said. “A cave set in a cliff. Half the time it was underwater, but we crawled in there once at low tide. He’d made driftwood shelves to hold them. It looked like a hobo art gallery.”

  “What were they like?” she asked. “The scrimshaw.”

  “Horrible,” he said. “And beautiful. Every bone came from someone he’d killed, but the portraits themselves . . . Somehow he made these people seem more than lifelike. They were just lines etched in the bone, some crosshatching, not even any color. But still. You know how they say an artist can capture someone?”

  She tilted her head, thinking this over. “Take care of yourself, Harrison.”

  Later, we would hear how Barbara spent her night. She had supper with husband and sons, and washed the dishes while the boys tussled in the yard. It stayed light so long in the summer. After a while she rounded up her sons and kissed them on the tops of their heads. Then she kissed her husband goodbye. “Don’t forget their soccer jerseys are in the dryer,” she said.

  After that, details were sketchy. We know she arrived at her apartment and locked the door behind her. She filled the big clawfoot tub with hot water, and arranged the mirror over it. A chair was pushed close to the tub to act as a side table for her tools and supplies: the straight razor; the rolls of medical tape; the bottle of Vicodin. There were still plenty of pills left when they found her. She wasn’t trying to knock herself out, just dampen the pain enough to let her finish the job.

  It was time to claim the gift. To finally know. She removed her clothes and climbed into the bath.

  Chapter 9

  We. Such a slippery little pronoun. Who is in and who is out? If we say, “we lost one of us,” the number included in the pronoun changes in midsentence. To Martin the word was like a variable in a computer program, a running counter that had a different value depending on when you looked at it. But the problem was more difficult than that; the definition depended on who was doing the counting.

  Did Barbara consider herself one of us, those last few weeks, that last meeting? Perhaps she was already watching us from the outside, a soldier spending her last night in the trenches, or a terminal patient sitting through her final Thanksgiving meal. We who remained didn’t know what to think. How had we missed the signs? She seemed to be getting happier. Finally letting go of the damage the Scrimshander had done to her. Only in retrospect did we realize that it was the opposite. She was ready to embrace what he’d done to her.

  Martin first understood this at the wake, when Harrison leaned in and said quietly, “Of course she was feeling better. She’d finally come to a decision.” They were in line to greet the family, and Martin was pushing Stan in his chair. It was a very long line. Nothing brought out the crowds like an untimely death.

  Barbara’s husband and her two sons stood at the end of the line, greeting each visitor. The husband, a trim, balding man, seemed distracted. When someone was directly in front of him he would look baffled for a moment, and then automatically shake hands and try to say something. His attention, however, always flickered back to his son. The older boy stood beside him, the younger sat on a high wooden stool. They followed their father’s example and shook each hand dutifully.

  Behind the family was the pearl gray casket. Martin thought, Thank God it’s closed.

  After they made it through the line, Harrison started to say goodbye to them, and Stan said, “We’ll sit over there.” He pointed toward Dr. Sayer, who sat on a half-empty pew. Harrison exchanged a look with Martin, but followed them.

  Martin parked Stan at the end of the pew. The doctor moved over to make room for them, and seemed grateful that they’d come. She clutched a clump of tissues and didn’t seem to be done crying. Martin was shocked at this, then ashamed by his shock. Why was he surprised that she was human? Somehow he’d placed her in another category, the way little kids put teachers and pastors in a special category.

  Yet, he still didn’t know what to say. In desperation he said, “Is Greta coming?”

  “I don’t know,” Jan said. “I tried to text her with the details, but . . .” She shrugged.

  Martin looked at the doctor’s long-fingered hands, which didn’t seem to match her squat torso. She wore no wedding or engagement ring. It seemed that she’d come alone. There was so much he didn’t know about her. Was it hard to run a therapy group without being able to talk about yourself, or was it a relief?

  Stan said something that Martin didn’t catch. “She shouldn’t have listened to the whispers,” Stan repeated. “You’re not supposed to listen.” He seemed to be offering this as advice
to himself. Shit, Martin thought. Forty years and he’s still not over it. And now Barbara, giving in some twenty years after her attack. Martin had been hoping that someday he’d stop imagining what the Dog Man had done to his roommates. That he’d forget that there were creatures that right now were clinging outside these stained-glass windows.

  He’d told the group that he was adjusting to life without the frames, and some days he actually believed that. Mostly he ached to have them back. Therapy was about facing reality, and with the frames he saw more reality, and that was exactly what was driving him crazy. Pretending to be normal made life so difficult. So far he had not given in and bought a new pair of frames (it helped that he was broke). But what if he could never adjust?

  He was fucked, that’s what.

  Greta appeared at the other end of the pew. She was dressed as always in black on black, but at least that was appropriate here. She sat down next to Harrison, and Martin thought, so that’s back on. Or maybe not: Greta stared straight ahead, not talking. Harrison glanced at her, then seemed to give up. Despite the expensive midnight blue suit, he looked like he hadn’t slept.

  What a group. Sitting together at the funeral like a wing of the family. The psychiatric wing.

  No, I’m not fucked, Martin thought. We all are.

  Jan had decided not to follow the family out to the burial at the cemetery, and so had the rest of the group. They stood outside the funeral home making awkward small talk until Martin managed to load Stan into the transport. As they pulled away, Dr. Sayer said to Harrison, “I would like to ask a favor, but you must feel perfectly free to say no.”

  Jan had debated with herself about the ethics of even asking Harrison for help. His primary issue—besides the sense of deep alienation from humanity that every member of the group shared—was his self-image as a doomed captain. He felt responsible for others’ lives, even as he was certain he’d fail them. Barbara’s death was one more damning piece of evidence.

  Harrison, however, was an expert in his field. And she needed his advice.

  “What is it?” he asked Jan. He frowned. “Is it about Barbara?”