Jeff Strand - Dweller

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.