We Are All Completely Fine (4 page)

“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.”

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.

After 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
?”

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.”