The Completionist

by Siobhan Adcock

  Fred forces herself to stop. Fists clenched. Face set and terrible, eyes bright. Even from here I can see that she’s breathing too fast and hard. All this can’t be good for the kid, I’m thinking. Then I slip sideways into the couch cushions and it’s about all I can do to breathe, just breathe, here and now, in and out. Gentle pressure, relentlessly applied.

  “Please don’t give up on the chance to make your problems go away, to live with some real security when you’re going to need it most. Whatever else you may think of the guy. I’m not saying give yourself up—I want you to be selfish. I want you to think about yourself, and your future, and the future you can make for your little one. I can’t—I can’t have you living out the rest of your life in trouble, in poverty, in a hole you’ll never scrape your way clear of, after how hard you’ve worked, your whole life. I just want the kids I have left to me, to be . . . to be . . . to be taken care of. I won’t be around to do it. And I know it’s what your mother would have wanted for you, too.”

  Fred laughs bitterly: Gentle pressure, relentlessly applied. Observe where Gard and I learned it: from the master himself. Still, my heart is lurching and aching and battering itself to pieces inside my chest, and the flowers are thickening. Pop is not just skinny and old, he’s telling us, there’s more, and it’s darker than we know, and if he’s admitting it at all it’s because he’s worse than he’s going to say. And me, I might not make it, either. No one’s going to be around to help you, Fredlet. God help you, you might be on your own with all this. After reading her messages from Gard last night I think I have a somewhat better grasp of what she’s up against—I don’t understand it completely still, maybe I never will. But millions of dollars and Care Hours underwater, with a baby, and unable to work to support it without racking up millions more, with no one to share the burden with, any of the burdens—because how hard it must be, to raise a child, even now, even when every child born is recognized as the precious, infinitely precious asset and resource that it is. Even now, it’s hard, right? Got to be. Always has been. Look how that hard wore on our mother, to the place she couldn’t come back from.

  Still. There’s got to be a better way for Fred than this.

  It takes a moment, but the smell of the antiseptic finally registers. Because the flowers, the flowers are clearing.

  I look down at my arm, the one closest to Pop, and I’m too late to stop it, it’s already happened, I don’t know when, but the antiseptic wrapper and the plastic packet the syringe came in are lying torn open on Pop’s skinny little leg. I can see too clearly. My head is clean; my vision is clean. My heart is slowing its stride and hustle. I can breathe; I can feel.

  And what I feel is that I’m afraid. There’s no way this shit is just an APC.

  “What did you just do?” I croak, although I don’t need him to answer me. I push myself upright. I’m clutching the soft, fine gray plush cushions in my big strained stained mitts. I feel like I could tear one apart.

  Pop is watching me carefully. “How do you feel, son?”

  “You don’t even know,” I growl at him, “what you just put into me. So you do not ask me that.”

  “CQ?” Fred has stopped her pacing.

  “You,” I tell my father, “don’t know what you’re saying. You don’t know what you’re doing. You don’t know how deep in it I am, and you certainly don’t get how deep under she is. You’re sick? You’re dying? I’m sorry. I am. But it’s too late. Don’t prop me up—don’t prop either of us up. Not with that shit, and not with whatever lies you’re telling yourself about Fred’s security, here, in this place—look around you, Pop! Look at what these people have built for themselves! The whole fucking city is dry as the fucking moon, there’s not enough H2.0, there’s nothing to eat but engineered garbage, there’s no sanitation, no services, nothing but drones and choppers and autocabs everywhere—no hospitals, just a big for-profit corporation disguised as the DOH, running history’s biggest health care scam, and you want her to shelter in place? Inside the fucking beast? Since she’s already been swallowed whole by it, I guess it makes a certain kind of sense. But she will not be safe. She will never be safe. Even after they took everything she had, she still owes—what is it, Fred, ten million? Twenty? More? And she owes it to them. Because her husband and his family and their friends are the ones collecting the bills!”

  “Take it easy, CQ.” Fred holds her hands out to me.

  “You want Fred to give herself away. Just like you gave me over to your VA buddy without looking back or thinking twice. Just like you gave away Gard, or gave up on her, or gave her over to Security, I don’t even know which. Which is it, Pop? Did you turn her in? Is that how you know she’s gone for good, is that why you keep telling us to let her go? Did you call Security on Gard when you found out what she did? Did you call them again yesterday when you figured out where her clinic was, when you figured out it’s where I’ve been sitting just about every day I haven’t been rotting my guts out at your fucking neighborhood bar?” Pop’s face is very white, his eyes are dark and black and glittering. “Tell us what you know! Tell us what you did!”

  I don’t know when I rose up over him, and I don’t know when Fred got herself across the room. But I know what I did then. I know I picked him up by the shoulders, this frail old man who’d just told us he couldn’t protect us anymore because he was sick, and I threw him, without seeing or caring where, and I know Fred was there, trying to get a hand on me. What I don’t know is whether I pushed my father into my pregnant sister and together we knocked her down, or whether I did it myself after I’d finished shoving my father away. I just don’t know. I don’t even know if I did it because of the injection. Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe I’m just not harmless, at all. I don’t know.

  Here’s what I do know: if you are looking for a way to hurt yourself as badly as you possibly can, hurting the only people who love you is a good way to do it. The best way there is.

  That’s why I drink. That’s why I fail. That’s why I’m here.

  FREDERICKA QUINN

  135 PAULINA NORTH, #4B

  NEW CHICAGO 0606030301

  NEW STATES

  PFC C. P. QUINN 2276766

  MCC 167 1ST MAW

  FPO NEW CHICAGO 06040309

  March 8, 10:45 p.m.

  Hey, little brother.

  I have to be honest with you, I try not to watch too much of the news, so I don’t know the latest over there. If you’d message someone in your family SOMETIME and let us know how you’re doing SOMETIME, or if not that, what you’re doing, SOMETIME, well then maybe I would know?

  As it is sometimes I make the mistake of asking Pop if he’s heard from you and what he thinks you’re doing and then I get this, like, super logistical answer that goes on for a half hour, about establishing a new fire base and sending out overnight patrols and blah blah blah. Or sometimes I will ask Gard, and she’ll, like, actually start praying right there, on the spot.

  So. Not good? I guess? You’re doing not so good?

  Fuck, I can’t believe we’re still sending people into this fucking dust-bomb shit show, after all these years. Knowing what we know. About the air there, the chronic diseases, the cancers. There’s something they’re calling Veterans’ Lung.

  Is it possible that you’ve been over there for a couple of years without actually, like, breathing the air? Please tell me that’s somehow possible.

  Anyway. I’m almost done asking for impossible things from you. Just one more and then I’ll go.

  Check in with Pop sometime, okay? He’s retiring today from the VA. Did you know about this? He kind of sprung it on me and Gard; it was sort of a surprise when we found out. We’re not sure what he’s going to do with himself now. I have my suspicions about what all this is about but, well, no one listens to me—I’m just a thirty-year-old self-made female tech millionaire; the fuck do I know?

  Anyway. OK. That’s it for the list of impossible things I needed to ask you. Oh wait, one more. Don’t. Get
. Hurt.

  Love

  Fred

  Dec 20 5:00 PM

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  Dec 20 5:55 PM

  Natalie

  for the love of god

  Dec 20 5:56 PM

  please answer me if you can

  Dec 20 6:00 PM

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  Dec 20 6:00 PM

  what does it mean

  please

  i want to help

  i want to do the right thing

  and i don’t know how

  Dec 20 7:00 PM

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  Dec 20 7:34 PM

  all i know

  is that I just watched my older sister

  marry a greedy little weasel

  because she can’t afford not to

  and i am standing in a reception party

  overlooking the city

  with a drink

  i think you know i drink

  everybody is looking slick

  and to them nothing is wrong here

  this is a miracle

  this is a celebration of life

  instead of the end of almost everything

  she ever wanted

  i have failed

  every person i ever cared about

  i couldn’t stop this from happening to Fred

  in fact i helped to push her into it

  Gard is not here

  my mother is not here

  you are not anywhere

  everyone i’ve ever tried to protect

  is in worse trouble than i could imagine

  Dec 20 8:00 PM

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  Dec 20 8:01 PM

  please

  please

  tell me what it means

  THIRTEEN

  I can’t stop looking at Ken Walker’s teeth. They are powerfully on display, have been for hours. During the ceremony, during the family’s apologies for the delay, during the receiving line, the party, the toasting toasting toasting. He’s been smiling the whole time. Lit up like a candle. Actually and factually over the moon. Sometimes he’ll pause to gaze at Fred like she’s the best present he’s ever unwrapped, then he’ll turn the full-moon-effect of his white face and his white teeth again on whoever’s nearest, and on the room at large. Luckiest man on earth. I am the luckiest. Man on earth. The luckiest.

  The drunkest man on earth, meanwhile, is trying not to embarrass his family even if he finds himself unable, for the time, to be entirely a credit to it. Thanks to the injection, I’m more or less upright, and keeping the corona of darkness and the screen of static and flowers at bay with the help of a massive quantity of intoxicating agents. Pop has been at my elbow on and off all night, realighting like a drifting ash, brushing himself away on mysterious floating errands. The old guy looks sharp in his dress uniform, if skinny. He looks like a vet should look: trim, tall, squared away, sober. He’s keeping an eye on me, wordlessly assuming responsibility for me. Fred, meanwhile, refuses to acknowledge me, and I cannot and will not blame her. We’re all a little shaky, all three of us. After what I pulled.

  I pulled her up from where she’d fallen—been knocked down, say it—and put her on the squashy chair. She said, without looking at me or Pop, Fuck this. Pop, meanwhile, got to his knees, then to his feet, on his own power. Then he sat down again, suddenly, as if his legs had stopped working. My sister and I both stared at him for a second, during which I believe we were both thinking the same thing, some variation of Holy shit, he’s not lying, the old guy is not well. Fred also probably thinking about what a mistake she’d made to rely on me in any way. Which, of course, I was thinking, too. And then Fred stood up and went to the door and got Sophie, and directed her to show me and Pop someplace where we could clean up for the wedding. And by the way, Sophie, get the whole goddamn wedding rolling again.

  I’ve pretty much been sitting under the fake dieffenbachia all night. Every time someone comes by with a drink I take one.

  Dec 20 9:00 PM

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  Pop drifts into my orbit and manages to look me over for signs of imminent collapse without necessarily catching my eye, then his attention is pocketed by some well-wisher from the Walker side and I’m alone again.

  This is what family does, I guess. This is what it means. Whatever stupid shit you pull, they will find a way not to erase you from their lives, until one day you finally cross the line that can’t be uncrossed. I would have thought I had crossed that line long ago—shit, if Gard managed to, how I somehow kept myself on the other side of that line is beyond me. Whatever Gard may have been up to, she wasn’t using biological weapons on people, shooting people, living life as a walking trigger, shoving and punching and knocking down the people in her own family unlucky enough to love her. But here’s the other thing about family, the big secret: the rules work differently for her than for me. What an accomplished, smart sister could never be forgiven for, a fuckup little brother could do every day for three years without fault. No one ever said family was fair. But it will hollow you right the fuck out. What do I have to do, how low do I have to get, before I’m finally written off as a bad case, the way Pop has apparently done with Gardner? I don’t even know half of what I’ve done wrong over the past three years, but shouldn’t what I’ve done in the last three weeks be enough? The past three hours?

  Yes, sir, I would like another, thank you.

  I’m sitting on the plush bench where I sat with Sophie a couple of nights ago, my back straight against the wall, my feet firmly planted. From here I can catch the occasional glimpse of the lovely Sophie skirting the edges of the party, working her white magic. She’s all business tonight; there will be no catching her eye and luring her into another semiprivate, twinkling-eyed moment under the fronds. But earlier, when she came to deliver me to the fragrant warm tropical mists of the most religious sani I’ve ever had in my life, she’d talked my ear off—nervous about being alone with me, I think, but also irrepressibly elated about the way her day had ended up turning itself around. All thanks to you and your father. The Walkers’ bathroom, you can imagine, was equipped with the kind of sani that the average renter in a New City rehabbed zone never sees in person, only hears about in technology news on the portals, so Sophie had to explain it to me, how somehow the foam is particle-ized and reformed into warm fluidlike streams not unlike the real water showers they used to have, down to the mist that clouds the mirrors. She left my suit and tie and the shoe box and clean pressed underwear and socks, God knows where she got them, in a little antechamber that let off from the sani, where there was also shaving gear, a mirror, a few other needfuls like a stick of antiperspirant that probably cost more than I spent on ’neered beers today. The guest wing, she said. Everything’s here. Everything you could need. Then she ghosted.

  Now, across the room, weaving her way through, she’s in brief conversation with Mrs. Walker, confirming something, then pointing the way for a guest who needs some kind of service, then leaning toward a server who needs some kind of direction, then putting heads together with the lead bartender who has a question for her—all of these exchanges are handled so efficiently I’m telling myself I’m just keeping an eye on her because she’s like a precision instrument, and it’s a pleasure to
see anything so finely calibrated go about its work, but it’s not true, or only half true. I’m really just some drunk asshole shamelessly ogling a pretty woman who’s doing her job. I am harmless. I am harmless. I swear to God. I just happen to be a fucking failure. I’m unable to keep myself from hurting the girls I love, or at any rate I don’t try hard enough not to.

  My sisters, both of them, are just as capable and highly trained as Sophie, right? Yes. And all they wanted was—what? can it be this simple?—to be set free, allowed to do what they did well. To work. To work their rooms of influence, just like Sophie’s working hers right now. And all I wanted was to save them, somehow. But what am I, anyway? Just some guy, some dumb grunt. That’s all I’ll ever be.

  I could be imagining it (I’m sure I’m imagining it), but I think I see Sophie look my way once, her face cool and composed, expressing nothing. Then she goes back to ignoring me. I’m pretty much just a zit on her otherwise flawlessly executed party. Sorry, Sophie.

  Yeeeeeeeees, sure, I’ll have another. I sure appreciate it, sir. I am drunk. I am drunk and maudlin, sleepless and beat-up and throbbing and miserable, and someone should get me out of this place before I bring any further shame on myself. Before there’s no stopping it.

  That someone’s going to have to be me, I’m afraid. Gard’s not here. Fred’s traveling away from me at light speed. Pop’s just trying to hold himself up. My mother’s not here. Natalie, no, I don’t have the right to call on her for help, even if I could. So it’s just me.

  Up, Marine. I’m not sure exactly what my plan is, either right now in this moment or for the rest of my life, but I think it’s something like this: make it to the elevator, get to the street, autocab back to Pop’s, or better yet to Gard’s (the key, it was in my pocket all morning, and I’m keeping it with me; I made sure of it). Curl up in my middle sister’s dusty chair and plug myself into my oldest sister’s dangerous machine and just let it spool out every message between them, every beloved sentence and fragment, until my arm catches fire or I pass out. Good plan. God knows no one here will miss me.