We Are All Completely Fine

by Darryl Gregory

  The first time he’d met her, at the pre-group interview, that smile had struck a chime in his heart. It was not lust (though he was not above those feelings, despite lacking the ability to act on them), but something finer, almost familial. In another life she could have been his daughter. Her wide green eyes were steady and accepting. She always looked at him directly, without revulsion. Seeing all of him.

  “Early is on-time,” Stan said. Before she could walk into the room, he asked her about Martin’s glasses. Did she realize that no one had mentioned them since the first meeting? It had been weeks and weeks. “Everyone’s so nervous about conflict they don’t want to bring ’em up again,” he said.

  “That’s a perceptive insight,” Dr. Sayer said. Stan felt the warmth of her approval. True, it was Barbara who’d suggested to him that conflict avoidance was a reason for the silence, but Stan had been thinking much the same thing, so it was his idea too.

  “I think you should bring that up in group,” the doctor said.

  “Martin will just say that you let him keep the glasses on,” Stan said. Which is what Stan had told Barbara.

  “Maybe,” the doctor said. “But that’s something we can talk about, too.”

  That was her thing: Everything had to happen in the group. And maybe he should share this insight.

  “I’ll think about it,” Stan said. He waved an arm to get the driver’s attention. “Wheel me.”

  The kid didn’t move.

  “Please take me into the room,” Stan said evenly.

  The kid sighed. Stan knew he was rolling his eyes, trying to look like a big man in front of the doctor. Well, to hell with you, kid.

  Stan directed the driver to his regular spot, between the chairs that Harrison and Barbara always went to. He liked Barbara almost as much as he did Dr. Sayer. He was so happy the woman had sat beside him on the first day, and happier still that they’d stuck to their seats as if they’d been assigned. Dr. Sayer, thank God, had not inflicted any teambuilding exercise on them and forced them to shuffle their positions.

  Barbara arrived a few minutes later. Stan lowered his mask and said hello. She smelled like a proper woman; just a touch of expensive perfume, nothing cloying. He liked to breathe her in. Sometimes, if he shared something awful or sad, she’d pat his arm. Dr. Sayer, despite her obvious affection for him, never touched him.

  “How are you doing, Stan?” Barbara asked warmly.

  “Oh, can’t complain,” he said. He told her about his eye doctor, who wanted to do cataract surgery on him. His vision wasn’t as good as it used to be, but he wasn’t blind, not yet. “A dozen other things will kill me before I need to fix my eyes,” he said. Martin and Harrison came into the room. “I don’t need any more people coming at me with scalpels.”

  “I think they use lasers now,” Harrison said. He was dressed in a suit jacket and T-shirt, which Stan thought was a ridiculous combination. Make up your damn mind; either wear the whole suit with a man’s shirt and tie, or go play basketball.

  “Just another kind of knife,” Stan said.

  “Lightsaber,” Martin said.

  Greta took her seat next to Harrison. Stan had never gotten close enough to Greta to sniff her, but he wouldn’t be surprised if she wore men’s deodorant. She was almost certainly homeless, or a lesbian, or a homeless lesbian. Definitely didn’t like men. Every week she sat across the circle from him, glowering. Hardly ever spoke. What the hell was she doing here, if she wasn’t even going to talk? Also, he was pretty sure she wasn’t wearing a bra.

  “Who’d like to start?” Dr. Sayer asked.

  No one said anything. Dr. Sayer turned her eyes to Stan.

  He lifted his eyes from Greta’s chest. What was the doctor wanting? Oh right. “I want to talk about the glasses again,” Stan said.

  Martin looked up, wary.

  “No one’s asking you to take them off,” Barbara said to Martin. Then to Stan: “Are you, Stan?”

  “No.” But he thought, Not yet.

  “Good,” Martin said. “Because I’m not.”

  “I’m not telling you to,” Stan said.

  “Here’s what I want to know,” Harrison said. “If you’re not recording anything right now—”

  “I’m not,” Martin said.

  “Then why can’t you take them off, just for this meeting?”

  Stan was annoyed that Harrison had stolen his thunder. “Yeah,” Stan said. “Why?”

  Martin mumbled something.

  “What was that?” Stan asked.

  “I said, I can’t turn off the game.”

  Before anyone else could jump in, Stan asked the obvious question: “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “It’s called Deadtown,” Martin said. “It’s an augmented reality RPG.”

  Stan said, “Augmented . . .”

  “It’s a video game,” Martin said. “But you play it in the real world. The game turns people on the street into zombies, and you actually see their faces transformed through the camera. The filters are wicked cool, completely dynamic.”

  Stan still had no idea what he was talking about. But it was certainly the most animated Martin had ever been in group.

  “You get points by killing the zombies,” Martin said. “You can pick up weapons that the game world drops for you, or buy them online. You just make your hand into a gun shape, and—” The fingers of his right hand curled. “There. A pistol.” He made another shape. “Or a knife. Or a sword.”

  “You walk around pointing your finger at people?” Stan said.

  “It’s not that easy,” Martin said. “You have to shoot them in the head to kill them. Or get close enough to chop their heads off.” He made a flicking gesture with his hand. “If they touch you, they turn you into a zombie.”

  “You do this in public,” Stan said disbelievingly.

  “Nobody knows what I’m doing,” Martin said. “I played for months and nobody noticed. And they don’t know they’re zombies. I just—” He pointed his hand. “Bang. Splat. The sound effects are awesome. The glasses use bone conduction speakers, so you actually feel the back blast.”

  “That’s . . . awful,” Barbara said.

  “The entire sound design’s incredible. Sirens in the distance, people screaming, gunshots. The game could actually get you to duck. Totally insane. And the gameplay. You don’t level up like in other games, you don’t get more hit points or better weapons. It just gets more and more intense. The apocalypse keeps snowballing. I mean, I kept playing, and more and more zombies appeared on the streets. Even the buildings started to change. Like, crumbling. Cars burning, corpses on the sidewalk. I’d walk into the 7-Eleven and there’d be a headless corpse slumped against the beverage cooler. The guy at the register would have bullet wounds in his face.

  “And the zombies kept coming. Some days—some days the streets were filled with the dead. Gray faces on everybody. Way too dangerous to leave my apartment. I’d snipe from my window, or go down to the front door and try to clear a path . . . but sometimes there were too many of them. Impossible. Some days I’d have to wait for hours for a lull, just so I could get to work.”

  Stan said, “Why didn’t you just stop?”

  Martin shook his head at the stupidity of the question. “There’s no—how do I explain this? There’s no break, no pause between levels. You don’t even have to save progress. They’ve removed all reasons for stopping. You can go all day, all night.”

  “Until you starve to death,” Harrison said.

  “So what?” Stan asked. “Just take off the damn glasses. Why is that so hard?”

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” Martin said. “To be immersed like that.” He looked up. “Every other game, there’s this wall. The screen that keeps you out, and you can’t get to the other side, no matter how hard you try. But this—I was inside. All the time. And it was amazing.”

  Martin looked down at his hands. Or rather, the eyeglasses were aimed at his hands.

&n
bsp; “And then I started seeing things.”

  “Right,” Harrison said. “Then you started seeing things.”

  “No. Things that weren’t supposed to be in the game.” Martin shook his head. “It wasn’t just the standard monsters anymore. I saw this thing. It wasn’t a zombie, it was . . . I don’t know. White, slippery skin. Too many arms, too many fingers. Like a lizard, but . . . weirder.”

  “Ah,” Harrison said knowingly. Which annoyed Stan immensely. Ah what?

  “I could barely look at it,” Martin said. “It wasn’t just one thing. Well, it was one thing, but overlaid on itself. All lizards.”

  “Like seeing it from all angles at once,” Greta said.

  Martin looked up. “Yes! Like that! But not just space—like I was seeing it over time.”

  “Nude Descending a Staircase,” Dr. Sayer said.

  “What?” Stan asked.

  “It’s a painting by Duchamp,” Barbara said.

  “Why don’t you google it?” Harrison asked Martin. “We’ll wait.”

  “I know what she’s talking about,” Martin said. “These things are like the woman in the painting, but . . . worse. They move. I get nauseous looking at them. And the people have no idea that these things are right next to them. But I could see them. They left afterimages, like trails. Wakes. So even when they weren’t in front of me, I could tell where they’d been. There were tracks everywhere through the city. We were overrun.

  “At first I thought I’d leveled up,” Martin said. “But that wasn’t it. These things weren’t part of the game. I checked the forums—nobody was seeing this. Nobody had heard of anything like this. It didn’t make game sense, either. I couldn’t do anything to them. I couldn’t shoot them, or knife them. They’d just leer at me.”

  “They could see you?” Dr. Sayer asked.

  “Oh yeah.”

  “Did they talk to you?” It was Greta.

  “Not to me, but—” He shook his head. He didn’t look at her. Hadn’t ever looked at the girl since the group began. “They whispered to people on the street. I could hear them, making this sound . . . but it wasn’t words. I don’t think it was words.

  “There was this guy who hung around our block. My roommates called him Dog Man, because he was always sniffing the air. Wrinkling his nose like something stank. Talking to himself. They thought he was schizophrenic, but I could see the thing with him. Speaking to him. And Dog Man was listening. And sometimes it would be whispering to him, and he’d look at me like he knew me.

  “I stopped going out. It wasn’t just Dog Man. The streets were full all the time now. My apartment was the last safe place. At least I thought so.” His smile was a surprised twitch.

  “I was lying in my bed. It was late, maybe two or three in the morning. The sirens were dying down. A building was on fire across the street, and the flames were flickering in my window, making this weird light in the room. Which is impossible, I know that. Glasses can add pixels, they can’t add light, but still, I could see everything in the room, lit up by the firelight, and everything seemed to be in motion. No, like it was about to move. Quivering, like . . . I don’t know. Something under pressure, deep under the ocean. I remember looking at my desk, and my shirt was draped across the back of the chair, like a man hunched up in the dark. Waiting. Everything in the room was vibrating, on the edge of bursting open, like a jack-in-the-box. You’re turning, turning, and you can feel the lid trembling. You can’t help yourself, you’ve got to turn the crank a little more, just daring yourself . . .”

  Martin ran a hand through his hair. “At the end of the bed is the door to my closet. It’s a heavy wooden thing, not a regular closet door, more like a door to another apartment. Maybe it was, once. The building’s old, the apartments are all too small. Anyway, the door sticks all the time. I usually have to yank to get it open. But that night, I’m on my back, looking straight at it. And it starts to open.

  “And there was nothing there. My closet was gone. Where it used to be was a tunnel. The walls were rock. Damp, shining, like, I dunno, wet coal. It went back a long ways.

  “Then I saw the hand. I yelled and pushed myself backward. It had come up from the floor and grabbed the footboard. It wasn’t human, it was one of theirs—gray, webbed, fingertips like knives. Then a second hand came up. And the creature pulled itself onto the bed. Smiling.

  “I scrambled off the bed and ran for the door to the hallway. Later I realized the thing must have come out of the tunnel and crawled across the floor, out of my line of sight. Maybe I could have shut the door. But all I was thinking then was that it was in the room with me, and I had to get out.

  “So I ran. I grabbed my backpack and bugged out. My roommates were in their bedrooms asleep, but I knew they couldn’t help me. Wouldn’t help me. I ran into the hallway, downstairs. I’m standing there in the street like a crazy person. And I realized I’d yanked off the frames. I was holding them in my hand, and now the sirens were gone. The fires. For the first time in weeks everything was normal. Everything looked totally normal.

  “Even Dog Man.

  “He was standing there on the sidewalk looking at me, a weird smile on his face. He was alone. I knew that the lizard thing he’d been talking to, his partner, was up there in my room. I started screaming at him. Take it! It’s yours! I decided I was never coming back. If the creatures wanted the place, they could have it.”

  “They can’t do that,” Harrison said.

  The attention of the group turned toward him.

  “They can’t take a place, because they can’t cross over.”

  “And you know this,” Martin said skeptically.

  “They’re called dwellers,” Harrison said. Greta made a noise and Harrison said, “They’re not like the dwellers in the books. They’re more vicious. And if they could get you, they would, glasses or not.”

  “But they can’t?” Barbara asked.

  “They’re not here. What he’s seeing—he’s peeking through to the other side. That’s where they live. They’re always there, watching us. Looking for a way to get through.”

  “You don’t understand,” Martin said.

  “Oh, I think I do,” Harrison said. “Nobody knows as much as I do about the dwellers.”

  “You don’t know what they can do!” Martin yelled. The boy was flushed, breathing hard. He might have been crying, but the glasses made it difficult to tell. “They’re here, whispering.”

  “Do you see any monsters now?” Barbara asked.

  Martin stared at his hands. Finally he nodded.

  “Where are they, Martin?”

  “There,” he said. He lifted his head and nodded at Greta.

  “You see a monster next to her?” Dr. Sayer asked.

  “No,” Martin said. “She is the monster.”

  Chapter 4

  We had been so careful with her, in meeting after meeting, because we believed her to be the most vulnerable of us. Her silence we took to be a great wound that could close only with time and our support. So in the first months of the group the rest of us talked and talked, telling our stories, working on our “issues,” while we circled around the void that was Greta. We tacitly agreed that we would wait for her. Let her come to trust us. And make no sudden moves.

  We didn’t realize that by questioning Martin, we would make the most sudden move of all. In the space of a few minutes we outed her. Finally, we thought, we’ll hear the story of her scars.

  Then she stood up and walked out of the room.

  Jan went after her but failed to convince her to come back inside. The meeting ended awkwardly, with all of us retreating into silence. Martin was obviously still angry, but he refused to say anymore.

  The next week he was still angry. How could he explain to the others what he saw in Greta? She burned, radiating heat. Yet she came into the room and took her seat as usual. Then the meeting started and she sat there as if she were just like them. As if nothing he’d said had mattered.

  Aft
er ten minutes he could stand it no longer.

  “Tell us,” Martin said. “Tell us what you are.”

  Greta said nothing.

  “You can’t just sit there!” he said.

  Jan leaned forward. “Each of us gets to decide how much to reveal, and when,” she said. He took that as a veiled reference to what he hadn’t shared yet with the group, but that was unfair; what Greta was hiding was so much worse. “That’s the only way the group can work.”

  Greta looked as if she were about to speak, then she shook her head. “I will tell you. I promise. But not now.”

  “We have seventy-eight minutes,” Martin said. The frames’ clock glowed in the upper right of his vision.

  “It’s not about the time remaining,” Harrison said. His voice was dismissive as always. Martin knew that the man had never liked him. “Take off the glasses. If you’re seeing her as a monster, you’re not seeing her as a person.”

  “Wow, that is so profound,” Martin said.

  Barbara said, “Martin, we’re not attacking you.”

  “No, he is. Trying to put this back on me.” Martin sat down and crossed his arms to steady his hands. “Is that the way the group works, Jan?”

  Dr. Sayer regarded him with that distant, professional gaze. Watching them from the other side of the glass, analyzing them. Not for the first time Martin wondered why she’d assembled these freaks. Did she enjoy making them tell their ghost stories? No normal psychiatrist could believe the crazy shit they were telling her, so she was doing something else. Writing a book about them probably. Or collecting evidence for the next new diagnosis for the DSM: Supernatural Victim Delusion. She should be paying them. (Not that he was totally up to date on his payments. He’d been forced to delay the last couple of checks.)

  Martin said to her, “So. Are you going to take a stand here?”

  “I’m not sure what you’re asking,” Jan said.

  “It’s simple,” Martin said. “You’re the doctor. You’re supposed to do what’s best for your patients. So now you have to take a stand. Are you going to protect us, or . . . her?”