Session 47

A Postcard from The Shift.

SESSION NOTES — DR. JOHN VASQUEZ, PHD

Patient: Nathaniel Verone — Session #47

The office smelled like bleach and old paper. Verone came in ten minutes late, as usual, wearing the same ChaosPunk hoodie he'd worn to the last six sessions.

His mohawk was freshly cut, stark white, standing at attention like it had somewhere to be.

The goatee was new — or new-ish, a few weeks grown in — white like the mohawk but for a single dark streak running through it, a seam of shadow that split his chin.

Barefoot, as always. Janice at the front desk had stopped mentioning the shoes thing months ago.

He settled onto the couch like he owned it. Crossed his ankles. Folded his hands over his chest. Stared at the ceiling.

"You're late," I said.

"I was in Phoenix."

"It's 3 PM in Nashville."

"Yeah." He didn't elaborate. He never did.

I clicked my pen. "You want to tell me about Phoenix?"

"Not really."

"Then why bring it up?"

He turned his head toward me. One blue eye, one green — the heterochromia always unsettled me, but today there was something else. The white hair was one thing. Pale eyebrows. Pale goatee with its dark slash. He looked like a man who'd been drained of color by something that had tried to drain him of everything else. The eyes were what was left.

"Because it's why I'm late," he said. "Figured you deserved an explanation."

"That's unusually considerate of you."

"I'm a considerate person."

"You told me last week that empathy was a vestigial reflex."

"I was having a bad day." A pause. "Also, I was correct."

I wrote nothing on my pad. Writing things down during Verone's sessions had stopped being useful months ago. The notes never made sense when I read them back. They looked like the ravings of a man who believed his patient was something other than severely delusional. Which I wasn't. Which he wasn't. I was almost sure.

"What happened in Phoenix?"

Verone closed his eyes. When he spoke, his voice dropped into that slow Tennessee drawl, like molasses pouring off a spoon.

"There's a bus station on 24th Street. Greyhound. The kind of place where the vending machine's been broken since the Clinton administration and the fluorescent lights hum at a frequency that makes your back teeth ache. You know the frequency?"

"I don't."

"You do, actually. You just don't know you do. Sixty hertz. Standard AC. But at the Phoenix Greyhound, it's sixty-point-three. That extra fraction of a hertz? It's because there's a thing living in the walls that feeds on restlessness. It tweaks the current. Just enough to make people feel like they need to leave. They don't know why. They just buy a ticket and go."

I wrote auditory hallucinations on my pad and immediately crossed it out.

"You went to Phoenix to investigate a bus station's electrical wiring?"

"I went to Phoenix because a woman named Alice told me her son had been at that station for six months and couldn't leave. He'd bought seventeen tickets. Walked to the gate each time. Sat down. Got up. Walked back to the vending machine. The thing in the walls was eating his willingness to depart."

"Alice."

"Yes."

"Your friend Alice. The one who died last year."

Verone opened his eyes. Both colors steady on me. He didn't answer.

"Alice has been dead for fourteen months," I said. "You told me about the funeral. The rain. You said you didn't cry."

"I didn't."

"Then how did she tell you about her son?"

Silence. The longest silence I'd ever sat through. The clock on my desk ticked. The fluorescent lights hummed. At sixty hertz. I checked later.

"Time's not a line, doc," Verone said finally. "It's a room. I walk through it. Alice told me about her son in 2019, before he got stuck, before she died. She just didn't know she was telling me. She was talking about something else — his grades, I think — and I heard what she was actually saying. What she would be saying. What she'd already said in a timeline where she lived long enough to say it."

"That doesn't make any sense."

"It makes perfect sense. You just don't like it."

I set my pen down. "What happened at the bus station?"

"Went in. Found the thing in the walls. Little bastard. Nasty, but not dangerous. More like a tick than a predator. It was just hungry and the Greyhound had a buffet."

"How do you kill something living in a wall?"

Verone smiled. That crooked half-smirk that always made me feel like I was the patient and he was the professional, patiently waiting for me to catch up.

"You don't kill it. You adjust the frequency. Everything resonates, doc. Everything. The lights. The walls. The tick-thing. Your fillings. My tattoos." He held up one arm. The sigils were still. They usually were during sessions. "You find the right frequency, you can do just about anything. Make a man leave a bus station. Make a room feel cold. Make the air taste like copper. Make someone's heart stop."

"I assume you didn't make anyone's heart stop."

"I moved the tick. Opened a door to the Shift and nudged it through. Let someone else deal with it. Some realities specialize in parasites. They've got whole dimensions that are basically tick hotels. The one I sent it to was grateful. Said the little guy would fit right in."

"The reality was grateful."

"It sent me a postcard." He pulled a scrap of paper from his pocket. The writing on it wasn't in any alphabet I recognized. The paper was warm. "Translates roughly to 'thanks for the snack.'"

I stared at the postcard. I stared at Verone. I wrote confabulation on my pad and crossed it out too.

"The son," I said. "Alice's son. Did he get out?"

"Yeah. Bought ticket number eighteen. Got on the bus. Went to Tucson." Verone's voice went quiet. "Alice was there. At the station. Standing by the vending machine. He couldn't see her. Nobody could. But I could. She waved at me."

"Alice was dead."

"Alice is always dead. That's the thing about rooms, doc. You can stand in the corner where she's alive and the corner where she's not at the same time. It's just a matter of which way your eyes are pointed."

I didn't write anything. There was nothing to write. The clinical part of my brain — the part with the degree and the license and the framed certificates — was screaming complicated grief reaction, magical thinking, dissociative episodes. But the other part. The part that had been sitting across from this man for forty-seven sessions. The part that had watched his tattoos crawl across his skin like living things and seen the fluorescent lights change frequency when he focused on them and once — just once — followed him outside after a session and watched him cross the street without looking and somehow the cars just... weren't there. That part didn't say anything at all.

"Our time is up," I said.

"I know." He stood. That wrong-fluid movement of his. Joints like bearings. Spine like something other than vertebrae. "Same time next week?"

"The slot is yours."

He walked to the door. Paused with his hand on the frame. Didn't turn around.

"You should call your son, doc. The one in Chicago. He's going to ask you for money. Don't give it to him. He needs to hear no from you. It's going to save his marriage."

"My son isn't—"

"He will be. In about four months. He meets someone. A woman named Claire. She's good for him. But he's got some growing to do first and that growing starts with hearing his father tell him no."

I stared at his back. At the ChaosPunk logo. At the sigils on his arms that were definitely — definitely — in different positions than they'd been when he sat down.

"How do you know that?"

Verone looked over his shoulder. One blue eye. One green. "I've already been there."

He left. The door clicked shut. The fluorescent lights returned to their normal hum. The postcard on my desk had stopped being warm and was now just a scrap of paper with marks on it that could have been anything.

I sat alone for a long time. I did not write anything on my pad. There was nothing useful to write.Then I picked up my phone. Called my son. He didn't ask me for money. He didn't mention a woman named Claire. He sounded confused about why I was calling.

"That's okay," I said. "Just wanted to hear your voice."

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Nathaniel Verone appears in Hyperstitions, coming soon from J.D. Forrest. Also, yes, the irony of the number 47 is noted and also intended.

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