We Are All Completely Fine (5 page)

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.

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.

“PTSD?” Jan asked.

“That’s part of it,” the other therapist said. “But I meant, uh, the other alley.”

Word had also gotten around about Jan’s interest in the paranormal, or rather, in patients who blamed the paranormal for their presenting problem, but exhibited no other symptoms of schizophrenia. Sometimes they were
also
torture victims, witnesses to the murder of loved ones, or murderers—and who’d killed for reasons that no one would believe.

No one except Dr. Jan Sayer.

“She told me she murdered over fifty people,” the other therapist said. “But that’s not what the police report said. There was a fire, and she escaped—the only one to get out alive. At first I figured her problem to be survivor’s guilt.”

Jan said, “At first?”

“By the end of the session she told me that some kind of angel had killed them—but that she was still responsible.”

“An angel,” Jan said flatly.

The other therapist laughed. “Or something. So you’ll take her?”

“I’ll talk to her,” Jan said. “She might be right for a small group I’ve been thinking about.”

Speaking the idea aloud seemed to act like a summoning. Within days of that call, Jan received referrals for two more locals, one of them semi-famous, the other a fragile young man whose roommates had been murdered by a homeless man.

She had her five.

Then, after she got them into the same room, she wondered what the hell she’d been thinking. Every small group was a chemistry experiment, and the procedure was always the same: bring together a group of volatile elements, put them in a tightly enclosed space, and stir. The result was never a stable compound, but sometimes you arrived at something capable of doing hard work, like a poison that killed cancer cells. And sometimes you got a bomb.

She wasn’t sure what she’d created. In the first dozen meetings it was hard work just to keep everyone coming back. Stan was an expert at driving people away (he’d told her this himself). Harrison had already declared his intention to jump ship. What the members needed most was hope: hope that they could change; that they were not alone; that their suffering would ease.

With this group she was expecting a crisis call at any time. It was a miracle that it took several months for the first one to come.

She’d been dreaming, and somehow the ringing of the phone upstairs became part of the dream. Jan was a child again, and her mother was ringing the bell that she kept beside her. Jan was terrified; she did not want to go in her mother’s room. She hid in the dark, waiting for it to stop, but the ringing went on and on.

Then Jan awoke, and the dream shredded. She was in her basement. She slept down here when she had trouble falling asleep, and that had happened more and more often lately. She untangled herself from the special bed and slipped down to the cold basement floor. She made it upstairs before the phone stopped ringing.

The time and the telephone number were both a surprise: 2:20 A.M. and Mercy Hospital. The nurse told her that a patient of hers had been admitted to the ER.

“Who is it?” Jan asked, thinking:
Barbara
.

“His name is Martin Treece,” the nurse said.

“Has he hurt himself?” Jan asked. Of course she thought of suicide. It was a common joke among psychotherapists that you never received crisis calls from men; you only heard from their widows.

“It’s not like that,” the nurse said. “He’s been mugged.”

Martin’s glasses were gone but he still seemed to be wearing a mask. Bulging red bruises made each eye into a fist. A clear tube snaked under his swollen nose. A clamshell of bandages covered one ear. But it was his stiffness on the hospital bed—lying on his back, face pointed straight up, his bandaged left hand dead at his side atop the covers—that hinted at serious damage.

She thought he was unconscious, but then his mouth opened and he said, “Hi.” The word was remarkably clear.

She moved a seat closer to the bed, being careful of the tubes and wires that sprouted from him. Martin was in a curtained-off area that was part of the ER. He hadn’t been admitted to a room, and with his lack of insurance he probably wouldn’t be.

“Can I get you anything?” she asked.

“The frames,” he said. His hand opened. She frowned. “My
glasses
.” Each “s” turned to slush. His vocal cords may have been okay, but the damage to his lips and jaw would make some consonants difficult.

She looked around the bed, then under it and the chair. Usually the hospital staff put all clothes and belongings in a clear plastic tote bag. “I don’t see them,” she said. “I can ask the nurses.”

“I need the glasses,” he said.

“I know, Martin. But I can’t—”

“Buy some.”

“What?”

“I’ll pay you back. Or you can take them back to the store after I get mine back.”

Jan sat down again. “You’re going to be all right. I know you can get through this.”

Without moving, Martin seemed to sink further into the bed. In his pre-group interviews, Martin insisted that his main goal for therapy was not to deal with the trauma of the murders (he could barely acknowledge that he was traumatized), but to break his dependence on the frames. He wanted to live in the world like a normal person, to stop being afraid. But losing the frames this way, Jan thought, had to be the harshest way to go cold turkey.

“Can you tell me what happened?” she asked.

“I don’t remember. Not all of it.”

“Then just what you can.”

“I was walking home after the meeting.” He spoke slowly, trying to make the words clear. “I stopped because I saw someone, then . . .” He moved slightly, signifying a shrug. “That’s when they grabbed me.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. They’re just . . . one was in a hoodie.”

She wanted to ask if they were white or black. Instead she said, “Can you describe them better?”

“They dragged me into an alley,” Martin said. “It was dark. The next thing . . .” His unbandaged hand moved. “Woke up here.”

“Did they rob you? Have the police made a report?” Jan asked him.

“No. I don’t know. I haven’t seen anyone.”

“Okay, I’ll contact the police and see if there’s a report,” Jan said. “Maybe someone saw something. In the meantime, is there anyone I can call for you? Your parents, maybe?” In the pre-group paperwork, Martin had given only one emergency number, for his parents in Minnesota.

“Please,” Martin said. “Don’t.”

She expected that. There’d been some kind of break with his family that he’d not wanted to talk about.

“Then is there someone local we can call?”

He did not move. Perhaps he was staring at her in disbelief; it was difficult to tell.

“Okay,” she said, getting frustrated. “How about your employer?”

He moved his hand again, this time in dismissal. It looked like he was trying to decide what to say.

“You can tell me,” Jan said.

“Do you believe me?” he asked.

“Of course I believe you.”

“No. About the frames. What I see. Do you believe what I see?”

At their first one-on-one meeting, he had told her that his greatest fear was that he was going insane. Jan said, “I’ve told you, Martin—I believe you.”

“But
why
?” His voice was anguished. “I mean, Harrison I get. He’s seen this stuff before. But you never have. You never even asked.”

“I don’t have to,” Jan said. Later, she would regret not telling him why she did not question his “hallucinations,” but at the time she thought it would interfere with the therapy. “Others have reported seeing the dwellers,” she said. “I know you’re not making it up.”

“Good,” he said. Then: “Do you know what a boss fight is?”

Jan shook her head.

“It’s a gaming thing,” he said. “Every game has a boss you have to fight at the end. But before you get there, you have to get through all these . . . minions.”

“Okay . . .”

“I’m talking about Greta.”

Jan winced inwardly. Even from his hospital bed, Martin wanted to turn Jan against her.

“The people who attacked me weren’t muggers,” he said. “They did this on her orders.”

“
Greta’s
orders?”

“She was there. In the bar where they attacked me. Meeting with Harrison. Holding hands.”

“Martin, did you
follow
them?”

“One of them said, ‘Don’t look at her.’”

“One of the attackers? And you think they were talking about Greta?”

“They’re her minions,” Martin said. “Protecting her. And now they’re going to come finish me.”

“You don’t know that.”

“See?” It came out
shee?
“You don’t believe me.”

“You called me here to ask for my help,” Jan said. “I’ll do whatever I can.”

“Kill the boss monster,” he said.

She sat back in her seat. “I’m not going to do that.”

“Didn’t think so,” he said. He seemed suddenly exhausted. “Just bring me my frames. I want to see them coming for me.”

Jan strapped on her doctor balls and forced the staff to hunt for Martin’s belongings until they turned up. The plastic bag contained Martin’s clothes (bloody, torn), shoes (fine), and backpack (full of cords and batteries and a tablet computer, as well as an inside zipper pocket containing $19—she was not too bashful to check)—but the frames were not with them.

The staff ’s information on the police was more of a mystery; the cops were supposed to arrive “any minute now.” Jan took a seat in the corridor to wait until they arrived or Martin was released; she was afraid that if Martin spoke to the cops alone, they’d soon be calling his psychologist anyway.

She knew that he was not crazy. She didn’t doubt for a second the reality of his experiences. But she did doubt his conclusions.

Jan had entered all the group members’ contact info into her phone. Greta had given her only one number, a cell phone. She clicked to call, then fought the urge to hang up with every chirping ring. What could she ask Greta—if she had “henchmen”?

After thirty seconds of ringing, an automated system announced that no one had set up this number for voicemail. It may not have even been Greta’s real number; Jan had never had to dial it before.

She stared at the phone’s screen for a while, then found another contact. After three rings a voice said, “Dr. Sayer?”

“Harrison,” Jan said. “I apologize for calling so late.”

“No, no, it’s fine.” He sounded surprisingly awake. She’d often wondered what he did with his time. On his intake form, under employment he had made a joke about being a professional “nightmarist.” Then he told her he was retired. She asked him what that meant, considering he was thirty-six years old. Was he an internet millionaire? He said, “It means I stopped doing what I used to do, and haven’t decided if I’m going to do anything else.”