Dweller

by Jeff Strand

  They’d put the wrong letter in his envelope.

  Holy shit.

  He quickly hurried into the kitchen and picked up the telephone. He dialed the number on the letterhead and chewed on his fingernails—a habit he just now acquired—while he waited for the receptionist to put him through to the secretary who could answer his question.

  The secretary’s intern answered, and apologetically explained that the secretary had left early today and that he wasn’t sure how to research the issue, but that she’d be back tomorrow—no, wait, she’d be back the day after tomorrow, and if Toby called then, she’d happily answer his question.

  Toby led Owen a few miles into the forest, and his friend joined him in several minutes of the loudest frustrated bellowing that Toby had ever engaged in.

  He felt better when they were done.

  The secretary apologized—she had indeed put the wrong letter in Toby’s envelope, and his letter had gone to the creator of Mom & Runts.

  Toby’s letter was also a rejection, but without the offer to review future projects.

  1982

  Toby ‘n’ Owen, a wacky strip about two aliens stranded on Earth, fared no better.

  1983

  “You believe in me, right?”

  Yes.

  1984

  When Toby checked the mail, there was a self-addressed stamped envelope inside.

  The Blender, a small-press magazine, had bought one of his comic strips for five bucks.

  He practically danced the entire way to Owen’s shelter.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  1985. 40 years old.

  The woman in turquoise, who said her name was Sarah Habley, looked at the linoleum floor and shifted uncomfortably in her seat as she spoke. “It’s been almost four years, and I still cry at weird times, just out of nowhere. I feel like I should be over it by now. Not missing him, but crying over him like that. And that part I can deal with, I guess, but sometimes I can only remember him the way he was at the end, not the way he used to be. I can look right at our wedding pictures and still only remember those last few months.”

  She didn’t cry now, though she held a Kleenex and twisted it between her fingers. “Tom was able to joke about it. ‘I’ve got stomach cancer? Gee, I guess I shouldn’t have eaten so much cancer.’ If he knew that I was still crying and dwelling on the bad times, he’d be devastated. That’s all I have to say, I guess. I’m glad to be here.”

  The other people in the circle nodded sympathetically. The leader, a middle-aged man, looked at Toby and gave him a kind smile. “Your turn.”

  “Oh, I pass.”

  “At least tell us your name.”

  “Toby.”

  “And, Toby, how long were you married?”

  “I wasn’t. I—I’m in the wrong room. I came for the artists’ meeting.”

  “That’s in 301.”

  “Yeah, I think my flier had the wrong number. I just thought it would be kind of—you know, terrible to walk out on people sharing cancer stories. I’m sorry. Please skip me.”

  The leader gave him a very strange look. “Uh, you don’t have to stay.”

  “I’m fine.” The only way Toby thought he could feel more awkward was to get up and have all of these people watch him sheepishly slink toward the door. He’d actually figured out that he was in the wrong room before the group had started speaking, but he’d been transfixed by Sarah, who’d seemed to be silently trying to talk herself out of bolting for the exit.

  When he got called on, he momentarily considered making up a story about how his wife died of cancer, just to avoid admitting that he was in the wrong room. But if he were found out, then they’d think he was the kind of sicko who got his cheap thrills by attending meetings of people whose spouses succumbed to cancer and pretending to be one of them, which was a pretty bizarre thing to do.

  The leader mercifully moved on to the next person. Toby sat there for the rest of the meeting, trying not to fidget and trying not to stare.

  He thought maybe he was in love with her.

  He wouldn’t share this information with her, of course. There weren’t many better ways to terminate a potential romance than by walking up to her and saying, “I think I’m in love with you.” Just feeling that way probably made him kind of creepy.

  Still, he’d never seen anybody who captivated him in quite that way. Was it her sadness? He didn’t think so. He could walk into any bar and see a lot of sad women.

  Toby sat there for the rest of the meeting, trying to listen in a caring manner to the other participants. The stories were even more depressing than he would have expected, given the subject matter, and more than once he had to wipe away an embarrassed tear.

  “Okay, we’ll see you next week,” said the leader. “Thank you all for coming.”

  Everybody stood up. Toby had to go over and talk to her. He just had to. This was unquestionably one of those “do this, or regret it for the rest of your life” moments. As she slung her purse over her shoulder, he walked across the room and offered up a feeble smile.

  “Hi,” he said.

  Sarah looked wary. “Hi.”

  “I just wanted to say I’m sorry. You know, about what happened to your husband.”

  “Oh. Thank you. I appreciate that.”

  “I’m not trying to hit on you,” he clarified. “This would be the most inappropriate place ever for that kind of thing.”

  “I appreciate that, too.” She smiled, just a bit. “The funeral would probably be worse, though.”

  “Yeah.”

  Say something better than “Yeah,” moron! Be witty! Be charming! Be clever!

  Toby said nothing else.

  “So you’re an artist?”

  “Yeah. I apologize for being a dumb-ass and disrupting your meeting. I’m a dumb-ass a lot, but not usually at quite this level.”

  Don’t talk about being a dumb-ass!

  “It’s okay.”

  “Good.”

  “I need to get going. Best of luck with your art.”

  “Thanks.”

  There was no possible way to justify continuing the conversation further, and so Toby let her go.

  “Philosophical question,” said Toby, reclining in the beanbag he’d dragged out to Owen’s shack. Owen had made a big slit down the side, but it was still usable for now. “What do you think is a worse way to die? Cancer, or being devoured by somebody like you?”

  He broke his Slim Jim in half and tossed a piece to Owen, who caught it in his mouth.

  “I’m going to go with cancer. In fact, I would say any kind of cancer. No offense, I’m sure your jaws hurt like hell, but it can’t possibly compare to a slow, lingering death.”

  Owen did not seem to have taken offense.

  “It’s hard for me to even conceive of what she went through. I mean, I haven’t seen pictures of the guy, I never got to meet him, I don’t even know what color his hair is, but it just seems like an unimaginably awful way to go. How do you deal with somebody you love dying that way? With you, it’s just gobble, gobble, gobble and it’s over.”

  He nibbled the Slim Jim and then tossed the rest of it to Owen.

  “And it’s not the whole ‘her husband died of cancer’ thing that fascinates me about her. The whole room was filled with people whose husbands and wives died like that. I dunno, I just looked at her and…it’s hard to explain, but you know what I mean, right? Are you getting tired of hearing me talk about her?”

  The next Saturday at 1:00 P.M., Toby sat at home in his living room, extremely aware that the meeting had just started. The support meeting was weekly. The artists’ meeting was monthly. He had no legitimate reason to be in that building.

  Showing up there made him the creepy stalker guy.

  He didn’t want to be the creepy stalker guy.

  There was no rule saying that he couldn’t be at that meeting just to offer moral support for their personal tragedies, but he didn’t want to come off like a—actually,
maybe there was a rule about that. It would make sense. You wouldn’t want a bunch of people like him causing disruptions. So if he showed up, the leader would most likely look a bit uncomfortable for a moment, clear his throat, and politely but firmly inform Toby that this was really meant to be a support group for people who’d lost loved ones to cancer, and that while he appreciated Toby’s presence, he was going to have to ask him to leave.

  And as he wandered out of the room, Sarah would think: creepy stalker guy and ask somebody to walk her to her car after the meeting ended.

  So he stayed home.

  He worked on a new cartoon, sort of, while checking his watch every few minutes. At least he tried to pretend that it was only every few minutes. He hadn’t even finished drawing the rabbit he was working on when he noted that the meeting was down to its last five minutes.

  They’d be wrapping things up at this point, and then Sarah might be gathering her purse. Would she have even showed up? She didn’t much look like she wanted to be there the first time. Maybe last week was the only time she’d ever attend this particular support group, or any support group. Maybe it had helped. Maybe she’d cry less.

  He checked his watch. The meeting was over.

  Good. Now he could finally focus on this cartoon.

  He’d heard a rule that if you thought you had Alzheimer’s disease, you didn’t really have it, because those suffering from it were never aware. Was the same true of being a creepy stalker guy? If he was sitting on his living room couch, thinking, “Wow, I’m being kind of obsessive here,” then that by definition meant that he wasn’t a stalker. A genuinely creepy stalker would be unaware of the impact he was having on others. He would walk up to her with a bouquet of flowers and say, “Here, I got these for you. They match your soul.”

  And, most importantly, he’d successfully kept himself from actually hanging around the support group meeting. So even if he was a stalker, he was a stalker with restraint.

  She was so beautiful, though.

  The next Saturday was quite a bit easier. He was still very much aware that he knew (probably) where she was at that moment, but he didn’t obsess over it. At least he didn’t think he did. When asked, Owen answered no to the question of whether all of this talk about Sarah was making him want to rip Toby’s head right off his shoulders and gargle the geyser of blood, so Toby figured that he wasn’t overdoing it.

  At the meeting of local artists, Toby was the celebrity cartoonist superstar. He didn’t consider this a good thing, since the sum total of his professional accomplishments was that one cartoon he sold to The Blender, for which he had not yet received his five dollars.

  He was about twenty years older than the average person in the room. Most of them had yet to send their work out to a single market. Granted, Toby was forty and he hadn’t really done crap with his drawing “career” until he was in his thirties, but he’d hoped to use this group to acquire knowledge and make valuable industry contacts, not have kids say, “Wow! The old guy sold something!”

  Most of the meeting was spent listening to them bitch about how much art sucked these days.

  Finally, the torment ended, and they cleared out of the room. Toby wasn’t going to seek out Sarah. Absolutely not. He wasn’t going to do it. No way.

  Instead, she found him.

  “Hi!” she said, tapping him on the shoulder just as he opened the door to walk out of the building and making him flinch in surprise. “Oh, sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “No, no, it’s okay, you don’t scare me. I mean didn’t scare me. I mean you just startled me. How are you?”

  “It’s me, from the support meeting last month.”

  “Yep, I remember you,” said Toby. “I was the dumb-ass.”

  “Did you find your artists’ group this time?”

  “Yep, I sure did.”

  “Was it worthwhile?”

  “Well, have you heard that Groucho Marx quote about how he wouldn’t want to belong to any club that would have him for a member? It was kind of like that. I’m all in favor of people appreciating my accomplishments, but they pretty much suck.”

  Great job, Toby! Sell yourself! Refer to yourself as a dumb-ass again! Impress her!

  “What do you draw?”

  “Cartoons.”

  “You mean like Bugs Bunny?”

  “No, not animated. Comic strips. Like Garfield.”

  “Oh, that’s great! Are you in newspapers?”

  “Not yet.”

  “Well, you’ll get there someday. Are you on your mom’s refrigerator?”

  “Uhhhh, no. She died. She killed herself.”

  Way to keep the mood light, dumb-ass.

  “Oh my God, I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything. That was really thoughtless.”

  Toby shook his head. “No, no, that’s totally fine. It’s not like you asked me that while we were in a support group for orphans whose parents killed themselves. That would’ve been bad. I would’ve judged you for that.”

  “Well, I’m sorry anyway. It must’ve been hard.”

  “Yeah…it had its downside.”

  “Is your father still alive?”

  “Uh, no, actually he died right before she did. Stroke. So you can sort of see the foundation for my mom’s suicide.”

  “Wow, I’m really digging myself in deep here, aren’t I?”

  “You’re fine. We’ll just say that the awkward dead-parents thing evens out the dumb-ass wrong-room thing, and now we’ve both got perfect records.”

  Sarah ran her fingers through her hair. “Well, my perfect record is going to last for maybe another thirty seconds. I’m such a spaz. I barely have any foot left from always having it in my mouth.”

  “Hey, some people are into that.”

  Seriously? You’re going to make a foot-fetish joke this early in the conversation? Are you trying to make her slowly back away from you? Why don’t you just punch yourself in the brain, huh?

  Sarah laughed. “Yeah, I guess so. So what do you do when you’re not drawing the next Garfield?”

  I hang out with a monster in the woods. His name is Owen. He’s eaten the corpses of a couple of bullies I murdered, and he also killed my first and only girlfriend, but I forgave him because I’m one seriously screwed-up individual. Hey, we should date!

  “I work for the Orange Leaf Times. Some layout, some proofreading. I’ve been getting into doing some local ad design, which is a lot of fun.”

  “Graphic design’s a good career to be in.”

  “Yeah. I wish I’d known that twenty years ago.”

  She shrugged. “It’s never too late. I’m going back to school part-time.”

  “Really? To study what?”

  “Music.”

  “That’s great! You mean playing music or teaching it or what?”

  “This sounds so lame, but I’m not sure yet. I can’t sing—if you believe nothing else I tell you, believe me when I say that I can’t sing. And I can sort of play the saxophone.”

  “Saxophone? Seriously?”

  “Yeah. I’m not professional level by any means, but it’s fun. And I just—I wanted to learn more about it. My regular job is a waitress, and that’s fine, I’m not miserable, but I never really did anything creative. I wanted to change direction. I haven’t decided on the direction yet, but I want to change it. That sounds really stupid, doesn’t it?”

  “No. Not at all.”

  “It sounds a little stupid. You can say it.”

  “No, it doesn’t, really.” They stood there for a moment. Sarah giggled at the awkward silence. “How old are you?” Toby asked.

  “Are you trying to start the faux pas count again?”

  “You’re right. That was dumb. Sorry.”

  “No, I’m kidding. I’m thirty-six.”

  “I’m forty.”

  “Damn, you’re old.”

  “And decrepit. And I talk about my medical problems all the time. The ache in my knee means it’s getti
ng ready to rain.”

  “You’re a very goofy man, Toby.”

  “Thank you.” Holy shit! She remembered his name! “Usually I’m awful at carrying on conversations.”

  “Me, too. I just babble and forget words and stuff.”

  “Did you already have lunch?”

  “I did. But I didn’t have a hot fudge sundae.”

  “Do you want to get a hot fudge sundae?”

  “Yes, I think I do.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  It occurred to Toby that if he had talked and behaved this way in all of his social interactions, he might not have a life where his best friend had fur. Oh, sure, he wasn’t a brilliant conversationalist or a sparkling wit or a charismatic force of nature, but he was comfortable, reasonably charming, and Sarah seemed to genuinely like him.

  Toby told her that he didn’t have children. She explained that she and Tom had never had kids, either—they’d wanted to, but the time never seemed right. Tom had one daughter from a previous marriage who had never really warmed up to Sarah and who she hadn’t seen since the funeral.

  He talked about the deaths of his parents. He did not talk about the death of Melissa.

  She talked about the death of her husband. And then the death of her cat, Rexford, who got hit by a car. Then they joked about the fact that they were eating hot fudge sundaes and talking about death, and decided to move on to more lighthearted subjects.

  They were both always the “weird kids” in school.

  Her grades were usually C’s and D’s, because it took until the tenth grade to discover that she was dyslexic. Now she loved to read, but she was slow and had to really concentrate—no distractions. So school was taking up almost all of her free time, but it would be worth it in the end. If she figured out what she wanted to do by the time she graduated, of course.

  Toby told her about how much he loved to spend time in the woods. He did not tell her about Owen.