25 Jun Don’t Worry

The funeral was more sparsely attended than Martin had expected. He had a vague feeling that he should be offended on Hannah’s behalf. She’d always been one of the popular kids in college. Less than five years had passed since graduation, and barely any of those people who’d called her a friend had bothered to show up.

That wasn’t quite true, he supposed. The core group was there, the ones left from the original eight who’d always hung out. Down to four now. Hannah’s body was here, lying still and pale in the coffin at the front of the pews, but she wasn’t with them in any real sense. She never would be again.

Funerals always gave Martin a creeping sense of unease. He wasn’t sure what you were supposed to be thinking about during them. The eulogies all sounded basically the same: the deceased was thoughtful and kind-hearted, always looking out for others, was taken too soon and would be sorely missed. There were usually some prayers and then some awkward standing around while everyone tried to figure out the right time to leave.

Or maybe not. Perhaps everyone else was lost in deep emotional contemplation, considering how their life would be different going forward. A little voice in the back of Martin’s head insisted that this was the case, that everyone else was having an extremely meaningful moment, and that none of them were thinking about the project due next Friday at work. They were all present and achieving closure, and he was not.

Dwelling on this didn’t help anything, of course. It simply added one more layer to what he was thinking about, instead of listening to the service.

Eventually, the service ended. It turned out that Hannah had been both kind-hearted and thoughtful, the sort of woman who was always looking out for others. The heart attack at twenty-six had taken her far too soon, and she would forever be missed. It was all true, but it just felt hollow. It could have been anyone up there instead of his good friend Hannah. It didn’t feel real.

Afterward, in the awkward standing-around portion, Martin found himself talking to Enos, one of the college crew who had come out to say his final goodbyes. They hadn’t kept in close touch since college, but Martin still considered him a good friend.

“Rough year, huh?” said Enos.

Martin was a little taken aback. Obviously, the current circumstances weren’t great, but on the whole, it had been a year like any other, hadn’t it?

Enos saw his confusion and hurried to follow up. “The deaths, I mean. It seems like the only time I see the gang is at funerals now, and there are less and less of us every time.”

It struck Martin that Enos was right. The last time he’d seen him had been five months earlier, at Aiden’s funeral. And three months before that had been Courtney’s, and the month before that was Ryleigh’s. This was the fourth one he’d been to this year, yet the frequency hadn’t registered.

“You okay?” asked Enos. “You just went kind of white.”

“Yeah, I just—I don’t know. Like you said, it’s been a rough year. I guess it all just kind of hit me all at once.”

“I get it. This stuff takes you in funny ways sometimes.”

“Definitely,” agreed Martin. Privately, though, he was horrified. This wasn’t grief playing with his emotions or anything like that. He simply hadn’t remembered that he’d been to all of those other funerals already this year. Or rather, it was actually slightly worse than that: they just hadn’t mattered.

He hadn’t really forgotten the funerals, any more than he forgot his daily drives to and from the office. Like Enos had just said, he’d seen his college crew—or what remained of them—at each one. He could distinctly remember talking to them each time. He could even summon up bits of the conversations they had had, if he really thought about it. He recalled the eulogies, the services, the murmured well-wishes to the family afterward. It was just that somehow none of it had meant anything to him. Just like his commute, it had somehow been filed away as meaningless. Background.

It was an impossible idea. These had been his closest, best friends for four years, ever since the freshman roommate lottery had put them into two quads across the hall from each other. Jammed in with strangers like that, they were all going to either love or hate each other by the end of the year. Their personalities turned out to mesh well, and even after they moved on to other dorms, apartments and frat houses, they stayed extremely close. Someone once dubbed them the Octopod, and the term stuck. They were inseparable.

Only now half of them had died, and Martin evidently hadn’t cared. Even now, aghast at his own lack of emotional involvement, he only felt surprise at his callousness. They had been important to him. They were dead. These were facts he knew, just like he knew the times table or the capital of his home state. Like those other facts, they carried no emotional significance whatsoever.

“So…” said Enos, jolting Martin out of his private reverie. “Uh, funerals aside, how’ve you been?”

Martin grabbed for the lifeline that was small talk. “Oh, you know. Good. Work’s going along, nothing much to report there. Takes up most of my day, though. You?”

“Yeah, career’s going well.” Enos paused. It felt like he was fishing for a specific answer. “You seeing…” There was another odd pause, a slight hitch in the sentence as if Enos had pivoted to a different word than he’d originally intended. “…anyone?”

“Nah, living the single life. I figure the right person will come along soon enough. I’m still young. I’m not worried about it yet.”

“I think you should, though,” said Enos.

“What?”

“I think you should be worried.”

“Uh. About what?”

“About life. About living. About anything.” Enos’s gaze was suddenly intense. Martin took a small step backward, and Enos grabbed him by the shoulders—not hard, but firmly. “Listen to me. I don’t think any of us has as much time as we expected. What’s the last thing you cared about, Marty? When’s the last time anything mattered to you?”

“Stuff matters! I care about my job.”

Enos made a disgusted noise. “No one actually cares about their job, not one in a million. You’re not seeing anyone, not planning for anything, not picking up new hobbies—what do you care about, man? There’s got to be something!”

He was physically shaking Martin now. Martin blinked, confused by his friend’s vehemence. A thought swam to the surface.

“I cared about Hannah. I’m here, aren’t I? I came to support the Pod.”

Enos shook his head and released his grip on Martin. “Look at you, though. I’m literally trying to shake you out of it, and you’re not even worried about that. You’re too chill. You all are.”

“I mean, what do you want me to say? That it was weird behavior? Everyone’s a little off-kilter at a funeral. Like you said, it takes you in funny ways sometimes.”

“You’re all like this. The whole Pod. We’re all dropping dead, and not one of you is worried. Not about that, not about anything.”

“Enos—”

“Nah. Never mind, man. I’ll see you at the next funeral.”

Martin watched him walk away. He wondered if he should do something. After a minute, he decided that Enos probably just needed to be alone. He was clearly caught up in something inside his own head. It was nothing that Martin could help with.

He chatted a bit with Josh and Olivia, the other two remaining members of the Pod, catching up on how they were doing. Not much had changed for either of them since the last funeral. They were both in the same sort of life lull as Martin: low-level jobs, between relationships, living in starter apartments. Neither of them was worried about it like Enos had been, which just affirmed Martin’s belief that there was nothing wrong with it. No one jumped straight into adulthood. This was a transitional period. They’d be fine. There was nothing to worry about.

Martin thought no more about it for a while after the funeral. His days were full of the minutiae of life. Work ate the largest chunk of his day, and after he was done shopping, cooking and cleaning up, there was barely time to relax with a videogame before bedtime. The days slid by, formless and indiscernible from each other. It was the nature of life.

By the time Martin was looking over the photos he’d taken after the funeral, it had been almost a month. Enos’s strange insistence that there was a problem with their lives had almost fully fallen out of Martin’s mind. Something about the intensity of his speech had stuck with Martin, though. He wasn’t quite certain why, but he’d made a point of remembering the look on Enos’s face, the fervor in his voice. It had been a striking counterpoint to the subdued calm of the rest of the funeral goers. It was important somehow, and until Martin could put his finger on why, he didn’t want to let it go.

The memory seemed to be fighting him on this. He was having to make a point each day of noting how odd Enos’s behavior had been, how out of line with the surroundings. The memory wriggled like a freshly-caught fish, trying to squirm free and disappear back into the depths. It was why Martin was looking over the photos on his phone, in fact. He was beginning to have trouble picturing the determined, almost desperate look on Enos’s face. He wanted to see if he’d caught it in a picture, to refresh his memory.

He had not. Although he had pictures with Olivia and Josh, both selfies and candids of them with others, there had been no point in his conversation with Enos where it had seemed reasonable to pull out the camera and capture the moment. As he looked at the photos, though, he noticed something else odd. There was another figure in many of them, a person he did not know. He could not even tell if it was a man or a woman. Their hair was in their face, possibly, or they were blurred from movement. It was a bit bizarre not to be able to tell what was wrong with the person in the photo, but Martin shrugged it off. He was more curious about who they were and why he didn’t remember them from the funeral, in any case.

The stranger was not simply in the background of the photos. They routinely had their arm around the shoulders or their hand on the wrists of members of the Pod, showing a deep and comfortable familiarity. They were smiling into the camera for the selfies, just as though they were intended to be in the photograph. It was a complex smile, cruel and self-assured—yet also strangely calming.

A fleeting thought crossed Martin’s mind. If he couldn’t make out the stranger’s face—or clothing, or anything about them—how could he see the smile in such detail? He looked over the photos again, but the dichotomous nature refused to resolve itself. It was probably just one of those things, he told himself. A quirk of the camera or lighting or something. Nothing worth worrying about.

Regardless, the question of who they were remained. Martin picked a selfie showing him, Josh and the stranger and sent it to the Pod group chat, captioning it “Who is this?”

Josh wrote back almost immediately. “You and me, doofus.”

“Yeah, but who’s in between us?”

“Just some guy. I don’t know him.”

Martin circled the stranger’s hands on their shoulders. It was an easy, casual gesture, showing great comfort in being in their personal space. He sent the edited photo to the chat.

“Looks like they were supposed to be in the photo, like they know us.  You really don’t remember them either?”

“Dude, it’s just some guy. You getting weird on us like Enos did?”

Before Martin could respond to that, Josh sent a second message.

“Just asked Olivia. She doesn’t know him either.”

“You two hanging out?”

“Yeah, she says hi. When are you free again? We ought to all get together some weekend.”

The conversation rambled on for a bit, discussing vague plans for a beach rental and a weekend getaway. It was not until later that night, when Martin was trying to remind himself of the intensity of Enos’s behavior at the wedding, that two oddities occurred to him.

One: it was unusual how little Josh had cared about the man or woman who had inserted themselves literally into the middle of their photograph. For that matter, it was also odd how easily Martin had allowed himself to become distracted from the topic of the stranger. He’d expected Josh to also be confused about who the person was, but when Josh had displayed only apathy, Martin had just accepted it and moved on. None of that was normal. Enos would have said that it was insane that they hadn’t cared.

And that was the second oddity: Enos hadn’t said anything at all. Not during the conversation, not hours later, not ever. The messages still showed as unread on his end.

Maybe everything was fine. Maybe he was busy, or his phone was low on battery, or a thousand other innocuous explanations. Martin knew that Josh and Olivia would tell him not to worry about it. Probably they were right.

He called Enos. Then again, and again. There was no answer.

Martin checked his watch. It was just over an hour to Enos’s place.

Before he could talk himself out of it, he got into his car and drove.

On the way, Martin questioned himself about his plan. What would he do if Enos didn’t answer the door to his apartment? Could he call the police just because a friend hadn’t answered a text? Maybe he could persuade the apartment manager to check.

As it turned out, none of that was necessary. When Martin got there, he could see Enos slumped up against the foot of his couch. Martin brushed past the person holding the door open and rushed inside.

Enos’s body was cold. His eyes were half-open, staring listlessly into nothing. His phone lay on the floor nearby. When Martin turned it on, the lock screen was showing a prompt: “Are you sure you want to make an emergency call?”

Martin hit “OK.” When the police dispatcher picked up, he dispassionately reported that his friend was dead. He gave them Enos’s address, agreed not to leave, and hung up.

He told himself that he was feeling numb, but that wasn’t quite right. He could remember having been emotionally numb at traumatic events in his past. There was always a sense of emotions just below the surface, screaming to get out. He felt none of that here. One of his best friends was dead—the fifth one this year—and he was having trouble summoning up the ability to care.

Martin looked over the body. There were no signs of a struggle. Enos’s face looked drawn and brittle. He had lost a fair amount of weight since the funeral.

When Martin examined the apartment, he found no food in the fridge and no plates in the sink or dishwasher. He wondered if Enos had been eating and drinking at all.

Eventually, the police arrived. They escorted Martin out into the hallway while they collected the body. As he passed through the open doorway, Martin suddenly remembered that it had been open as he came in, too. There had been someone holding it, but he hadn’t seemed important. Or she; Martin really couldn’t picture the person holding the door at all. Could it have been the same person from the photos at the funeral? It seemed possible, though somewhat unimportant. Enos was dead, after all. What did it matter if someone had held a door open?

No! Martin pounced on that idea, refusing to let it squirm away. It was hugely relevant if someone else had been in his dead friend’s apartment. They could be involved. The police needed to know.

Martin flagged down one of the officers.

“I saw someone earlier when I first got here. They were holding the door open. That’s how I got in to find Enos.”

The officer looked a bit bored. “Okay. Can you describe this person?”

Martin floundered. “Uh…not really. I guess I didn’t really get a good look.”

“At the person holding the door for you.” The cop was clearly skeptical.

“I could see Enos inside! I was focused on him. I’m just saying that someone was here. So you can look into that.”

“All right. Well, thank you for bringing it up.” The officer had not written anything down. “We’ll definitely keep that in mind for the investigation.”

It was clear that there was not going to be any investigation. They barely had any questions for Martin, who had to admit that from an external viewpoint, his actions and behavior looked suspicious at best. It didn’t matter. The police simply marked down that Enos had died of dehydration and thought no more about it.

Enos had been right. They needed to care. Something was casting a blanket of apathy over everything, and they had to fight it. Enos had tried to warn Martin, but he hadn’t been able to get through, and now he was dead. It was up to Martin to save the others.

He’d been unable to get through to them over the group chat. He hadn’t even been able to maintain his own focus on the topic. How could he make this work?

It came to him in a flash: the eulogy. Everyone from Enos’s life would be listening. Surely he could make some of them hear. Even if it was just one person, that would be something.

Enos’s parents were touched to hear that he wanted to deliver a eulogy. They agreed with no further questions.

By the day of the funeral, Martin had carefully honed his speech. He had printed it out and practiced it in front of the mirror. He could feel the importance of it, the passion, burning inside him like a small coal of motivation. He cared about this. He knew he would be able to share this with others at the service. He could reveal what was happening.

His confidence persisted as he climbed the few steps up to the front of the hall, placed his notes on the lectern, and began to speak. He launched into the opening words, the praise Enos deserved, and was pleased to see all eyes attentively on him. He scanned the crowd, making sure that everyone was paying attention—and that was when he saw the stranger.

It was not male or female. It was not even human. Its face had no eyes, or too many. Somehow, even looking directly at it, it was impossible to say which was true. All that was certain was that it did not resemble anything human. Its hair swayed gently around it, bobbing slowly through the air like a corpse drifting at the top of a lake. Its skin hung in tatters and drapes, shifting curtains that concealed its edges and true shape.

Its smile was clear as day, though. Martin’s voice faltered as he looked upon that mocking grin, and in turn, it grew wider at his hesitation. It was a smile that said, ‘You cannot stop this.’ It said: ‘You can change nothing.’ It said, ‘It does not matter.’

As the figure stood from its seat, Martin realized that it had in fact said that last one out loud, a whisper that somehow carried over the words of his speech to reach his ears.

It stepped into the aisle and began to walk slowly toward him. Its dangling skin rustled and whispered, a soft background to its low recitation:

It does not matter.
Everything is fine.
This will pass in time.
You do not need to worry.
Let it go. Let it be.
Let go.

No one else noticed its progression. With every word, it took another soft step forward until it was standing directly in front of Martin, whispering its soporific beatification directly to him even as he continued to deliver the eulogy. His eyes skimmed the pages before him, his voice robotically reciting the words. He did not know how to stop.

The stranger, still smiling, folded Martin’s notes into a small square and slid them into the hidden folds of its body. It slipped around behind until he could no longer see it. He could only hear its calming voice in his ear.

Relax.
Nothing needs to be fixed.
Nothing is wrong.
Things are as they should be.
Don’t worry.
This will all be over soon.

The words Martin was saying were no longer the ones he had written. He had intended to speak about the warning Enos had tried to issue, the exhortation to do, to be, to care. Instead, he heard himself speaking about Enos’s kind heart and thoughtful nature.

“He was taken too soon,” Martin told the crowd. “I’m really going to miss him.”

They murmured assent as the thing behind him helped him back to his seat.

Josh leaned over to him. “That was a nice speech.”

Martin knew he should warn Josh. He might not have noticed the stranger yet, but his time would come soon. There were only three of them left now. He, Martin, still had a chance to save his last two friends. If he could stir them to action now, then maybe they could still do something. Maybe they could still save themselves.

With a heroic effort, he opened his mouth—only to feel soft, dry skin cover it as the creature gently wrapped its hand around his face. He could feel the thin flaps of skin from its palm brushing against his lips and tongue. It felt like peace.

Martin closed his mouth and relaxed. He didn’t even know why Enos had fought so hard, really.

There was nothing to worry about after all.