We Are All Completely Fine (3 page)

But Stephen was the man who stayed. When she told him she’d lied about the car accident, he did not blink. When she told him some of the things the Scrimshander had done to her (no one knew the whole story), he did not run.

For fifteen years, they were content. He stopped painting but discovered a talent for data analysis, making other kinds of pictures from vast streams of data. There was no financial need for her to work, though she did, taking a series of uninspiring jobs. Finally he said, Why don’t you just paint? He knew she needed it, just as he knew, and accepted, her need for privacy, for multiple locks on the door, for sleeping with the bathroom light on. He never asked her why she couldn’t say “I love you.” They made a life. Sometimes an entire day went by when she didn’t think of the Scrimshander.

Then, in their late thirties, a surprise. Not an unwanted pregnancy, but an unwanted desire for a child that appeared without warning and took up residence in her body. She felt ridiculous, as if she were reneging on a contract she’d made with Stephen. But when she finally admitted it to him—“Stephen, I have some news”—he responded with an enthusiasm that frightened her. Had this desire for fatherhood always been in him, but hidden from her because of her craziness? Or was it possible that they could both be so unknown to themselves?

They pursued pregnancy with scientific rigor and religious fervor. They read
What to Expect When You’re Expecting
until they were sick with fear. It was the worst kind of horror story, a child endangered on every page, but they absorbed the moral in every chapter.

And it worked. The babies were born with a minimum of drugs and drama. The infants escaped SIDS and survived croup. The adults weathered sleep dep and stress. They were determined to become what Stephen called The World’s Greatest Parenting Team, Non-Asian Division.

When the show ended and the pizza was consumed, Barbara and Stephen expertly separated and funneled the boys into phase 1 of the nighttime routine: homework, dishes, tomorrow’s lunches, the charging of devices. They did not have to speak. An hour and a half later, her husband was shooing the boys upstairs to showers and bed. He stopped at the turn of the stairs.

“You’re going out?” he asked. He did not add,
again?
Good, polite Stephen.

“I need to get some work done,” she said. “I’ll be back before breakfast, don’t worry.”

He started to say something, then changed his mind. A long time ago he’d stopped asking what she was working on, whether it was a new piece or something she’d been painting for weeks. He’d stopped asking when she would show them to him.

“Drive safe,” he said.

Drive safe, dress safe, live safe. Retreat to the safest place of all.

She opened the two locks on the apartment door, slipped inside, and immediately flipped the light switch. She stood there for a moment, breathing in the familiar tang of paint thinner, reassuring herself that she was alone.

Every inch of the apartment was visible from this spot at the front door. The main room was just over fifteen feet square with a tiny kitchenette set into the corner. The bathroom was open to her left; she’d removed the door and set it across two metal filing cabinets, making a work table. There were only a few other pieces of furniture: a pair of floor lamps, a wooden easel, a metal folding chair, and a futon with its blue mattress opened flat. A long, wood-framed mirror leaned in the corner. Nothing was wide or high enough to hide an intruder.

The pair of skinny windows at the end of the room were draped, but behind them were sturdy bars. She could feel that the windows had not been opened; the air was as warm and still as when she’d left. She twisted the locks shut behind her, then clacked home the deadbolt like a horizontal exclamation mark.

Safe.

A half-dozen canvases leaned against the walls, stretched and primed. They’d been waiting for months. On the easel was the work in progress, if one could say that an ongoing failure could progress. She walked past it without looking at it. She drew aside the drapes of one window, then pushed it up a few inches, allowing a feeble draft of cool air. She was on the second floor, so there was little chance someone could see through the window.

The painting on the easel waited for her. She sat on the futon and looked up at it. As she’d done many times before, she’d painted a set of double doors, pale as her skin, and a seam between them glowing with golden light.

I left you a message.

She had not touched the canvas in weeks. There was nothing wrong
with
the painting, except that it was the wrong painting entirely. The doors should be open, revealing . . . something. A person, an object, a promised land. Or perhaps an abstract design, too difficult to translate into words. She would know it when she saw it, but she could not paint it until she saw it. Every time she’d attempted to force her way past those doors—and she’d tried a dozen times—she created a lie. An offense. The results were good only for burning.

She stood and removed her jacket, then blouse and skirt and underwear, and set them on the bed. How scandalized would Dr. Sayer have been if she’d gone this far during the meeting? She might have stopped Stan’s heart.

She went into the bathroom. The apartment’s open layout and clear sightlines were requirements, but what decided her on this place was the giant prewar bathtub. It was a cast-iron clawfoot tub, high-backed and swooping, that took up most of the narrow bathroom like a plump aristocrat. The porcelain interior shone like cold milk.

She turned the taps (which were not the original hardware, but stubby, characterless replacements), and waited while the water warmed. She was and was not thinking about the mirror. Months ago she’d driven screws into the bathroom wall and strung long loops of hanging wire. She’d hung the big frame there, then, embarrassed, took it down, even though no one ever came into the apartment.

After a long moment she went into the other room and brought back the mirror. It did not feel like a decision. It was something her body was doing, an action she was merely failing to veto. Perhaps, she thought—in the part of her brain that was noticing what was happening—this is the absence the recovering alcoholic feels as the glass fills. The blankness of the compulsive gambler as the next twenty slides into the slot machine.

She attached the mirror to the wall. The top wire was much longer than the bottom, so that the mirror leaned out across the tub. She got into the water, concentrating to make her nerve-damaged limbs move correctly, and when she looked up it was at a second tub, a second Barbara, suspended from above. The woman’s skin gleamed, and the scars were like silver trails.

The Scrimshander first made a filet of her limbs. He peeled back the skin of her arms to get at each humerus, keeping her half-sedated with strong alcohol as he worked. He moved carefully around the major arteries, preventing her from bleeding out. Over the course of a day and night he moved on to each femur, then finally the long crease at her sternum. He told her she had beautiful bones, and that he had made her even more beautiful.

I left you a message.

She never got to see what he had drawn. The police found her, unconscious, and by the time she awoke the doctors had stitched her closed.

Greta was so lucky, Barbara thought. What had been done to her was right there, written where anyone could see.

We were all surprised every time Stan made it to another meeting. If he wasn’t yet knocking at death’s door, he seemed to be rolling up the access ramp to it, huffing into his mask, hauling his collection of failing organs with him. After several months we were all deeply knowledgeable about his ailments and injuries, his medicines and their side effects, his ongoing battle with incompetent doctors and heartless nurses and corrupt insurance clerks. The medical industrial complex, he said, was a God damn mess, and it was a miracle he was still kicking.

And yet, not only did he make it to the Elms every week, he arrived early.

Stan bragged to the group how he’d lied to the van service, told them the meeting was a half hour earlier than it was. The same smart-ass kid picked him up every week. Knocked on the door, wouldn’t use the bell, walked right in if Stan didn’t get there fast enough. The kid would stand there making faces behind that God damn lumberjack beard, wrinkling his nose at the house that Stan had spent four decades in. “How the hell can a man with no hands be a hoarder?” the kid said once. He’d shove stuff out of the way, kicking Stan’s belongings like they were garbage, or worse, picking them up like he was appraising their value.

“Why do you have a pistol?” the kid asked. It was a .357 police swing-out revolver, brand new and still in its case. Stan had found it on eBay.

“None of your damn business,” Stan said. There was a lot more than the .357 in the house, but the kid didn’t need to know that.

“How do you fire it?”

“Shut up,” Stan said. “We’re late.”

Somewhere in the house were his prosthetics. He’d gone through a dozen of them before giving up on them twenty years ago. They weren’t anything like the high-tech robot parts the soldiers had now; these were old-fashioned hooks and flesh-toned mannequin hands and strap-on shoes—original pirate material. Uncomfortable as hell.

These days he rented hands, day nurses and Merry Maids and Meals-on-Wheels volunteers. The new ones always suggested he move into assisted living. They didn’t suggest it twice.
I survived on scraps!
he told them.
For months! You think you can put me in a God damn prison?

Oh, he could still crank up a good rant. The young ones quit the first time he reduced them to tears, and good riddance. He couldn’t stand wimps. He could instantly spot every variety of bad egg: the thief, the layabout, the cell phone watcher, the idiot. It usually didn’t take more than a phone call to get them transferred, and if that failed he could get them to quit soon enough. They thought he was old and helpless.

He could see it in the eyes of the group, too. Well, most of their eyes. The youngest one, Martin, still wouldn’t take off the sunglasses. He decided to bring it up with Dr. Sayer before the meeting started.

As the eldest member of the group, he thought it a good idea to confer with the doctor before the meetings and share thoughts about how therapy was going. Often she came downstairs right as the meeting was scheduled to start, leaving them no time to talk, but some weeks he could get a couple of minutes of one-on-one time with her.

Today he was lucky. He’d commanded the driver to wait with him outside the conference room, and Dr. Sayer came down the stairs a few minutes before six.

Her smile was bright and unforced. “Early again, Stan?”

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,
gun
shots. 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.

“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.”