We Are All Completely Fine (6 page)

He asked, “Is there anything the matter?”

Jan told him that Martin had been attacked by several people, just a few blocks from the Elms.

“Holy shit,” Harrison said. “Martin’s been
attacked
?”

“They’re doing more x-rays to look for more broken bones. They already think his hand is broken.”

“That’s terrible,” Harrison said. He sounded genuinely upset. “Tell him I’m thinking of him.” After a pause he said, “
Where
did this happen?” There was a new note in his voice.

“There’s an Irish pub on Fourth. It was right after the meeting tonight. Last night.”

The line was silent for a moment. Then: “That’s why you’re calling.”

“Yes.”

“I was there,” he said. “With Greta.”

“Did you see anything?” Jan asked. “Hear anything?”

But Harrison had seen nothing, even after they left the pub. He asked Jan questions, some of them the same ones as she’d asked Martin, and her answers were just as vague. She didn’t mention Martin’s minion theory.

“I’m looking for Greta,” Jan said, moving on. “I’m not getting an answer on her phone.”

He paused, then said, “Did you text her? Only old people call each other.”

“But you answered.”

“Exactly,” he said. “Listen, I’ll try her too. Is there a message you want me to pass on?”

“Just ask her to call me.”

We followed a strict if unconscious structure in those early meetings: We took turns, giving each a share of time to talk about our lives and deliver our spooky stories. We might as well have been sitting around a campfire.

Dr. Sayer told us this commonly happened in groups. Eventually, she said, the group would stop
telling
, and start
working
. Most of us did not know what that meant, and the rest of us pretended not to know; telling was risky enough. A crisis in the group can speed that process along, like a shock that starts the heart beating.

Martin’s attack was the first of several shocks to hit the group. Barbara learned about it the next day, when Jan sent out an email to the group. Stan, who never checked his AOL account, was the last to know; Jan had left a follow-up message on his answering machine.

Harrison, of course, was the first to know. After Jan called, he hung up and sat on the bed, thinking hard.

“She’s looking for me?”

He turned. Greta was sitting in the armchair across from the bed, her arms around her knees. She was still naked except for the boy’s jockey shorts.

“I think she’s figured out you’re here,” he said. “She’s intuitive like that.”

“So what did she say about the attackers?”

“Nothing much. Martin doesn’t seem to remember, or else he didn’t get a good look while they were beating him.”

“I’m going to have to tell the group about the Sisters,” she said.

“Yes?”

“Like you said, Jan’s intuitive. She’s going to ask me sooner or later. It’s time to tell the story.”

Harrison and Greta’s relationship—their offline, outof-band, extracurricular relationship—started after the second meeting, when she finally accepted his offer to drive her home. They barely spoke during the drive, the silence broken only by Greta’s monosyllabic directions, then a final, awkward “Thanks.” The next week he took her home again, and it became a regular thing. They began to talk, her short questions always aimed at getting him to talk about his childhood, and because he would not talk about that, they talked about the only thing they had in common: the group. Soon their comments became post-meeting debriefs, which became all-out dissections. The drive home became too short; they would sit in his car outside of her apartment building (a grim chunk of poured cement allocated for student use) and perform the weekly autopsy.

Harrison wasn’t sure whose idea it had been to go to the pub their first time. They’d walked out of the meeting to his car and Greta said, “Maybe we could . . . ?” and Harrison said, “I know a place.” And that became their new regular thing. He drank doubles of Kilbeggan. She ordered Sprite.

Greta saw things that he missed entirely. Barbara was clinically depressed, she said; you could tell in the way she talked about her family. “All her stories are about how the boys did this with their father, or did this other thing on their own. She doesn’t seem to be
in
their lives. She’s watching them, like they’re on TV.” And in the next meeting Harrison would surreptitiously study Barbara, and sure enough he would see the deep sadness behind the mask of helpfulness and empathy.

Yet in other ways, Greta was hopelessly naïve, especially when it came to the men. For example, she’d noticed that Stan’s eyes were permanently glued to her chest, but found this to be completely innocent. “He’s an old man,” she said. “With no hands! How does he even masturbate?”

“I’m not sure he has even the basic equipment anymore,” he said. Her eyes went wide; this hadn’t occurred to her. He said, “So how about Martin, then? He’s got the hots for you.”

“What? No. He barely looks at me.”

“Because he doesn’t know what to do with himself. He flushes when you come in.” Later, after Martin told the group what he was seeing through the glasses, Harrison wondered if he was wrong about this.

“How about you?” she asked. “Are you looking at my tits?”

“That’s beside the points.
Point.
See what I did there?”

“Everybody thinks I’m the quiet one,” she said. “But you’re the one who never talks.”

“I do so. I talk all the time.”

“No, you
comment
. What have you shared about yourself? We don’t know you, we just know that guy in the books.” She always turned the conversation back around to the paperbacks. “Jameson Squared,” she said. “Monster Detective.”

“And that is such a misleading title,” he said. “It makes the kid sound like he’s the monster. Like ‘child psychologist.’”

“Child psychologists
are
monsters,” she said.

“No, I mean—”

“I know what you mean. Jesus, Harrison.”

“Now that would be a good series character. Jesus Harrison, Divine Detective.”

“You also deflect through humor,” Greta said.

Every pub session, after they’d finished diagnosing the problems of the other people in the group (including Dr. Sayer), Greta would hound him about the books, trying to nail down what was real, what was made up, what was only exaggerated. She seemed to have memorized the entire series.

The mundane facts—the NPR facts, he called them—were that the town of Dunnsmouth was reduced to kindling by a hurricane. Hundreds dead. It was quite a story for perhaps a week, and then the world moved on. Then, two years after the tragedy, a wife-and-husband team of “paranormal investigators” published a “nonfiction” book about the true, unreported supernatural intrusion that was only
interpreted
as a hurricane. One of the main characters was a teenage boy, the transparently named Jameson Jameson. Harrison had made the very bad mistake of talking to the couple while he was recovering in the hospital. Soon after, he made it a life goal to someday punch the paranormal investigators in their pair of normal faces. The list of punchees later expanded, first to the editors at Macmillan who ginned up a “fictional-but-what-if-it’s-not-eh?” series of adventures featuring a character named Jameson Squared, then to the producers at the Sci-Fi (now SyFy) network who created a homegrown movie he would have called unwatchable if so many people hadn’t told him they’d watched it.

“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—
every
one.
”

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.”