We Are All Completely Fine

by Darryl Gregory

  Jan hesitated, and Martin said, “Unless you think I’m making all this up.”

  Jan shook her head. “I believe you’re sincere when you tell us what you see through the glasses. But Greta is also—”

  “Let me try ’em on,” Stan said. “I’ll look.”

  “Let her finish,” Harrison said.

  “She knows she’s a danger,” Martin said to the doctor. “So let’s stop talking and do something.” He looked at Harrison. “You’re the big monster hunter. You’re going to just sit there?”

  “Greta is not your problem,” Harrison said.

  Jan said, “Martin, you saw Greta on the first day. Was she a monster then?”

  “Can we please stop using that word?” Barbara said.

  “Jesus,” Martin said under his breath. Then to Jan he said, “Yes. She was.”

  “But you didn’t leave,” Jan said. “Every week you came back. You sat in the room with her, six feet from her. I’m curious about that. Would you like to talk about that?”

  He understood now; no one wanted to talk about the truth, with the possible exception of Stan. The old man seemed ready to believe him, but all Barbara wanted was for conflict to go away. Harrison was allied with Greta, trying to get in her pants. And Dr. Sayer would rather make this Martin’s problem than deal with the actual fucking monster in the room. It was no different in group than anywhere else.

  Martin stood. “If she won’t talk,” he said sarcastically, “then there’s nothing to talk about.”

  It felt good to be the one to march out this time. When he reached the front door of the building he paused. No one had called out to him. No one was running after him.

  Fuck them.

  He’d walked a dozen feet down the sidewalk before he realized that he had not scanned for lizards—scratch that—dwellers. He stopped, turned. It was near dusk, and there was no one close by, and no otherworldy creatures that he could detect. However, the marks of their passage were everywhere: Streaks of blue-black (streaks that after sundown would change to a pulsing silver in his display; he could control the graphics settings) painted the sidewalks and streets. So many here, way more than in other parts of the city. The Elms, he’d realized on the first day he’d come here, was interesting to them. He’d even briefly entertained the idea that this Dr. Sayer must be a Deadtown player, but then he met her and no, she’d never seen a pair of frames.

  Martin’s bus was scheduled to arrive in ten minutes at a stop two blocks away. His CTA app—which as far as he could tell had not been haunted, spiritualized, or otherwise corrupted by Deadtown—told him that the bus was running on time. But still he didn’t leave. He walked a little way down the street, where he could watch the front doors of the Elms, and waited.

  Harrison and Greta were first out, and they exited together. Martin watched as they walked, heads low in conversation. The air seemed to shimmer in Greta’s wake, like heat above a highway. Harrison stopped beside his car, a gleaming BMW coupe that was more expensive than anything Martin could afford. They exchanged a few words. Greta shrugged. Then they continued down the sidewalk.

  So, Martin thought. A date.

  Jan had not prohibited them from meeting outside the group. She said it usually happened, so why make a rule? She did ask that when members did meet outside that they tell the group about it. Anything that happened to members of the group was fuel for the group’s work. Secret alliances, the doctor said, could divide them.

  Martin watched them walk away, the air trembling behind them, twisting the light like beach glass. Even after they turned the corner, the effect did not dissipate. He stood there for several minutes, not caring about his bus now, and after ten minutes the warp remained. He wondered how long it would last—hours? Days? What was she? She cut through the world like a knife, and the scars she left behind were deeper than any made by the dwellers.

  Police tape still crisscrossed the front door of his apartment. He’d wondered if the landlord had changed the locks, and so was relieved to find that his key still worked. And why not? The rent was paid a month in advance. He was not a criminal. Not even a suspect. He pushed open the door, then slipped under the tape. He closed the door quietly behind him.

  The living room was dark. He was happy to not see whatever stains marked the carpet.

  He had not been close friends with his roommates. The four of them were at most business partners: They’d been brought together by the online Mix-Master of Craigslist to share rent, that was all. In the frames he’d tagged them all as “Dave.” The fact that one of them was white and two of them were East Asian made less difference than their tastes in gaming systems. One Dave was a console drone; another liked handhelds and played ancient DS games; the third preferred indie board games with names like Push Fight and Zug un Zug. Martin was the only one with experimental bent. Oh they tried on his frames, but one of the Daves got motion-sick from them, and they’d called them “immature tech.”

  He’d tried to tell them about Deadtown but they weren’t interested. So, when the other creatures began to invade the game, he kept that information to himself. When he locked himself in his room and didn’t talk to them for days, they didn’t mind. As long as he paid his share of the rent he could do what he wanted.

  And when he ran out of the apartment, and told Dog Man to take what he wanted, he didn’t give the Daves a second thought.

  Martin did not turn on the lights, though he knew from the glow of charging devices that the power was still on. He did not want to alert the landlord. He made his way back to his bedroom, opened the door, and turned on the flashlight app on his phone.

  He slowly exhaled. Dog Man, it seemed, had not entered the room.

  He opened his backpack and began to fill it. He stuffed in clothes, his external hard drives, the Sony PSP, the box of Arduino chips. Then he knelt and popped the case of the custom-built PC and yanked the hard drive, motherboard, and graphics card. These last two were the most expensive components, and he hoped he could sell them. There might have been financial support for the victims of crimes, but as it turned out there was no financial support for the crime adjacent. It didn’t matter to anyone but himself that he was homeless now. His savings were gone, and his credit—never very good—was maxed out. He’d have to sell everything he could and try to buy back what he needed later. He’d learned that he was afraid of the homeless shelters, and terrified of living in the streets.

  He looked around one more time. His backpack was already overflowing, but perhaps, if the landlord didn’t find a renter, he could sneak back in again later.

  As for tonight . . .

  He didn’t want to sleep in this place. But he didn’t know where else to go. He shut the door, and moved his desk chair so that the chair back was wedged under the knob. He didn’t have to be afraid of Dog Man. The man had been arrested while still in the apartment. Hadn’t even tried to run. But there were other people out there, people listening to the whispers.

  Martin shouldn’t have told the dwellers that this was their place now. He shouldn’t have invited them in. He lay on his back, watching the room’s single window, and hoped that they hadn’t noticed that he’d returned.

  At the next meeting, Martin sat in his usual spot, waiting. Stan complained about nurses creeping around on the second floor of his house where he didn’t go anymore, going through his things, looking for valuables. Then Barbara talked about an apartment where she went at night to do photography or painting or something. These people had houses on top of houses. Harrison probably kept summer homes on each coast.

  Greta, once again, sat there saying nothing.

  “I know it doesn’t make any sense,” Barbara was saying. “I know I’d be safer at home with my husband. We have an excellent alarm system. But it’s only in the studio that I feel safe.”

  “Safe from what?” Jan asked.

  “The Scrimshander,” Barbara said.

  “But he’s dead,” Greta said. She looked at Harrison. “It
’s in the books. Lub stabbed him through the heart with a harpoon.”

  Barbara looked shaken. “Is that true?”

  “You can’t trust what’s in the books,” Harrison said.

  “Amen,” Stan said.

  “But in this case,” Harrison said. “Yes, he’s dead. I saw it myself. And it wasn’t a harpoon through the heart—that’s the kiddie version. We cut off his head and burned it.”

  “But he’s not human,” Barbara said. “He could come back.”

  Stan said, “You want him to come back.”

  “Of course not!” Barbara said.

  “Not really come back,” the old man said. “But just to end the waiting. I’m always waiting. Sometimes I think I’m still up there in the nets, the boy running his fingers through my hair, waiting for the Weavers to take me down for the next treatment.”

  “Stan,” Harrison said. “Let Barbara finish.”

  Barbara was staring straight ahead—in Greta’s direction, but Martin thought that she wasn’t seeing anyone in the room. “He carved pictures into me,” Barbara said. “The last thing he said to me was, ‘I left you a message.’” She inhaled shakily and seemed to come to herself. “But if he’s dead, who’s going to tell me what he drew?”

  “How about x-rays?” Harrison asked. “MRIs?”

  “X-rays don’t show the surface of the bone,” Barbara said. “MRIs don’t work either. Ultrasound gets close, but it won’t show the fine marks.”

  No one had any more ideas. Greta said nothing—of course.

  Then Jan said, “Tell us more about the apartment, Barbara. Why do you think you feel safer there?”

  Barbara started talking about some kind of bathtub. Martin watched the clock on his frames, wondering how long it would take them to finally talk about Greta. She glowed in his peripheral vision. He thought he was going to scream. Then he took off his frames.

  Barbara stopped talking. He’d jerked in his seat, and the legs had loudly scraped the floor.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. He put the glasses back on.

  “What is it?” Jan asked.

  When he’d taken off the frames, he’d glanced at Greta, and she was still glowing. He could still see the fire behind her eyes. That should have been impossible.

  Jan said, “I’ve been getting the feeling that you had something to say, Martin. Did you want to say something to Barbara?”

  Not to Barbara, he thought. “Please. Go on,” he said.

  “It’s okay,” Barbara said. “Say what’s on your mind.”

  That flash of Greta’s true nature, without the filter of the software, had thrown him off. It took him a moment to realize that this was the moment to speak he’d been waiting for.

  “I feel like we’re being judged,” Martin said. He’d thought about this sentence for a while. That “we” was strategically placed. This wasn’t about him, he was saying; this was about the group being attacked.

  “By me?” Jan asked. Her tone made the question sound sincere, not at all defensive.

  He nodded in Greta’s direction.

  “Me?” Greta asked.

  “You can’t come week after week and not talk,” Martin said. “You listen to us, but you don’t share anything of yourself.”

  “You’re still mad about last week,” Harrison said.

  Martin started to deny it, then said, “Yes! Yes I am. Everybody’s pretending like nothing happened.”

  “She’s not a monster,” Harrison said. “Those scars—”

  “Then let her prove it,” Martin said. “She should share something. Anything. Put some cards on the table.”

  “I’m right here,” Greta said softly. “Please stop talking about me in third person.”

  Martin still could not look at her directly. The monster burned in her, heat spilling from her mouth and eyes. A basilisk.

  “I’d prefer not to,” Greta said.

  “You can’t keep hiding from us,” Martin said.

  “I won’t. I just . . . I can’t. Not right now.”

  “That’s what you keep saying.” He looked at Harrison. “But you talk to him, don’t you?”

  “Excuse me?” Harrison said.

  Jan said, “Does anyone else have thoughts on Greta’s participation in the group?”

  No one spoke. The silence dragged.

  “Cowards,” Martin said.

  Harrison and Greta again left the building together. They did not pause at Harrison’s car this time, but strolled on down the sidewalk, walking side by side, almost touching shoulders. Intimate.

  Martin watched from across the street, but he did not move until they turned the corner. He did not need to follow closely. He’d tuned the frames to Greta’s frequency, and her trail hung in the air, clear as the lightpath of a Tron bike.

  He followed the monster’s shimmering wake down two blocks, then across a parklet. The pair was far ahead of him. They crossed the street and entered an Irish pub with a wide front window. Harrison held the door for her.

  Night was falling, and the streetlamps were humming to life. Martin stepped into a doorway of a closed stationery store that was kitty-corner from the bar window, about thirty feet away. He waited, thinking of stealth games like Gunpoint and Metal Gear Solid. If only the frames would throw up a red exclamation mark over his head if he was detected.

  After a few minutes he was rewarded. Harrison and Greta took a table near the window, lit up as if on screen. They learned toward each other, talking earnestly. There didn’t seem to be any other customers in the pub.

  Greta burned, and he could barely look at her. He studied Harrison’s face instead, trying to squeeze meaning out of every expression. That smile; was he flirting with her? Laughing? Then Harrison hopped up and returned with their drinks. When he sat down again he was facing slightly away from the window.

  Martin stepped out of the doorway and moved closer to the bar, staying close to the brick wall of the building. He took up a new position at the mouth of a narrow alley. The couple wouldn’t be able to see past their reflection in the window; if he stayed in the shadows, he should be invisible to them. He watched them for ten, fifteen minutes, recording every second for later analysis. Unfortunately there was no app he knew of that could lip-read from video. HAL 9000, already way past due, was still in the future.

  Harrison reached across the table and laid his hand on hers. Martin nearly laughed when Greta pulled away.

  “Hey,” a voice behind him said. “Pervert.”

  He turned, and a fist caught him in the throat. He went down to his knees, gagging. A boot caught him under the ribs and drove the air out of him. His brain flared in panic. Dwellers, he thought. Finally.

  But no. These weren’t the lizards; they were humans in sharp-toed boots and dark clothes, though he couldn’t figure out how many of them there were. Two, three? He lifted his head, and something hard smashed into his face. Pain blinded him.

  “Don’t even look at her,” a voice said. A woman’s voice.

  He lay on the sidewalk, trying to curl into a ball. They were kicking him, and there seemed to be dozens of them now, coming from all angles. He could not defend himself. He couldn’t breathe. And the frames—oh God, the frames had been torn from his face. He was defenseless.

  Then the blows stopped. He tried to speak, but his mouth would not work correctly. Maybe they were finished with him?

  He turned his head and saw a dark-haired girl watching them. She was ten or eleven years old, dressed in jeans and a pink cotton jacket. She did not seem scared by what was happening to him. She seemed . . . interested. If he’d been wearing the frames, he might have thought she’d been rendered by the game software.

  Then his arms were seized, and they dragged him backward across the pavement. He caught a glimpse of faces rendered hawkish by streetlight and shadow. Then they pulled him further into the alley, out of even that light.

  They weren’t finished with him, he realized. Not at all.

  Chapter 5
>
  We were not yet a fully functioning group. Early on, Dr. Sayer had outlined the typical stages—forming, storming, norming, and perhaps, someday, performing—but cautioned us against thinking that these stages were clearly defined, or that progress was going to be linear. There was no ladder. The work of the group was to follow wherever the work of the group led. Sometimes that meant we doubled back to the same issues again and again.

  Often it came down to trust. The patients among us did not trust each other, and some of them did not trust the doctor. Did she really believe these outrageous stories? And how, exactly, were they supposed to “get better”? What possible treatment plan could there be for people who’d seen the truth? Because most of all what we didn’t trust was the world.

  Dr. Sayer understood this, better than the others could know. She knew—knew—that the universe was full of malevolent creatures, and that there was no protection from them. All the group members, Jan included, were certain to die, almost certainly alone. What the patients didn’t understand was that this was the human condition. The group members’ horrific experiences had not exempted them from existential crises, only exaggerated them.

  One-on-one therapy was sometimes not the best tool to bring this point home. Jan had been Barbara’s personal therapist for three years now, and the woman would not take the news from her. Barbara’s torture had, in her mind, transformed her into a separate class of person. She could impersonate the perfect mother, she believed, but never be her. She could pass. But no citizen of the normal, she believed, could possibly understand what she’d experienced. What she’d become.

  What Barbara needed were peers. Others like her, who also lived close enough to meet with her. Jan knew all about Stan; she had followed his status even before she started her practice, and in some ways, had started it because of him. But she had never approached him. She could reach out to his therapist, but that wasn’t enough; two members could not make a group. She needed five at a bare minimum.

  Then a psychotherapist in the suburbs, a woman Jan knew only in passing, called to say, “I’ve got someone who might be up your alley.” Jan had authored a chapter in a book about treating clients who’d experienced extreme trauma: torture victims, witnesses to the murders of loved ones, those who’d murdered loved ones for no reason they understood. She often got referrals for these types of patients.