We hated The Center for Positive Perspectives. And on some level, we knew it hated us back.
Because we were therapists fresh out of grad school, or idealistic social workers determined to save the world, or had been fired from every other mental health gig in town, we worked cheap and were accustomed to disappointment. So we should’ve seen this coming.
Instead we slumped on orange plastic chairs, deadened by the harsh fluorescent lights and our manager’s latest announcement.
“I told you already.” Leona glowered over her round wire-rimmed glasses. “The City ordered budget cuts, and our contract is next on the chopping block.”
She hadn’t told us already. We despised Leona. She nodded off in meetings and snapped at whoever woke her up, then assigned extra paperwork to distract from her encroaching cognitive decline. We often grumbled that it was time for her to retire. Or that she’d already died, but stuck around to torment us.
One of our crew, Gail, went pale beneath her smattering of freckles. “Why us? Didn’t the Mayor declare the Negative Space epidemic a public health emergency?” We’d watched clips of wealthy tech bros livestreaming about downtown’s doom-loop, of condo owners yelling at their representatives to arrest all those spooky-eyed freaks.
“Sure, during an election year.” As usual, Dominic looked as if he’d been on hold with customer service for an hour. “But they don’t need us for their dog-and-pony show anymore.” Given the chance, he’d go on indefinitely, a scraggly terrier worrying the same bone over and over: the failed War on Drugs, the Department of Corporate Welfare and its monthly shopping mandates. We’d heard his conspiracy theories in exquisite detail before, which never stopped him from repeating them.
Marta’s voice was high and tight like her ponytail, wobbly as a tightrope-walker. “Is our program getting cut?” Those were either tears in her eyes or her sick-building-syndrome sniffles. Maybe both.
“What do they expect our clients to do?” Gail said, the fluorescents flickering overhead. “No other facilities will take them.”
“Hey, slow down.” Leona held up wrinkled palms, revealing mystery stains on one jacket sleeve. “Like I said, The Center’s funding is conditional on meeting certain contract objectives.”
Bernie, the biggest slacker amongst us, groaned. “Don’t like the sound of that.”
Probably because it sounded like work. Some were still heated about Bernie wearing his pot leaf T-shirt while facilitating the Staying Focused group—not exactly a good look for modeling sobriety—but no one would tell him . Mostly we resented that Leona hadn’t reprimanded him, and probably hadn’t even noticed.
“The auditors will review client charts at the site visit next week,” Leona said.
Bernie lowered his head onto his notebook, mop of chestnut curls obscuring his doodles. No way he’d done any documentation in weeks. Marta patted his shoulder, murmuring reassurances.
“And they’ll be judging us based on our Client Success Survey 2259a scores,” Leona continued, “so let’s hope you have those done.”
Silence fell, interrupted only by the pipes gurgling and clanking behind the walls. Hot air blew from overhead vents, circulating the stink of leftovers from the last potluck rotting in the staff fridge.
We hadn’t forced our clients to do those pointless surveys. Unlike other new designer drugs—like Rock God or Viking Warrior—that opened portals into bespoke fantasy realms, Negative Space reversed all perceptions, revealing the unseen emptiness around objects. Anyone who’d been using it long enough to end up in this specialized day treatment program couldn’t follow the confusing survey language, let alone check a single box for each question. And half of them were still unhoused. So was this how we were supposed to spend sessions, filling out forms in triplicate? Please.
“And if not, then that’s priority.” Leona plunked a stack of 2259a blanks on the table. “Clear your schedule. Everything else can get canceled.”
“But we have groups to run.” Marta nodded at the weekly calendar tacked up on the bulletin board.
The lights blinked on and off again, prompting Dominic to rehash his litany of complaints, damp half-moons of sweat marring his button-down. What about the busted thermostat blasting this infernal heat at us, randomly triggering the fire alarm? Or that week the power went out because copper thieves stripped the electrical wiring out back? No one from maintenance ever read the incident log, either. Maybe OSHA should be notified about our working conditions. The rest of us fiddled with the security badges on our lanyards, wondering if he’d consulted his lawyer again.
“That’s not the point,” Gail finally interrupted. We knew what she meant. At the inevitable happy hour where we’ll process this meeting, she’ll rant about how constantly prioritizing paperwork was unethical, unfair to the clients.
And we’ll agree. Binge-drink while pointing fingers at the bloated bureaucracy that fed off the less fortunate, creating an oppressed class to justify its own existence; then slink back into work the next morning, hungover hypocrites.
“You have one week.” Leona clicked her ballpoint pen twice. “Get your shit together, or this program is sunsetting.”
The lights went out as sweat pooled behind our knees. The fire alarm began shrieking at us to evacuate, drowning out the clattering behind the walls.
***
By the time they let us back into the office, our simmering resentments were boiling over.
Wandering through the sprawling cubicle-farm, we bickered about whose turn it was to run Staying Focused. The Center was on the sixth floor of a decrepit public health building, stationed deep within social-services territory, so it was demoralizing in here even when the basic amenities functioned. The whole place smelled faintly of formaldehyde and municipal neglect, which triggered Marta’s respiratory distress. The lighting scheme should have been outlawed under the Geneva Convention. Dominic declared this building was the living embodiment of how little The City cared about our clients—and, by extension, us.
We’d never admit when Dominic had a point, so the rest of us ignored him, crowding into the chart room. Our files were nowhere to be found, even the ones we’d returned right before staff meeting. Bernie ambled off to check basement storage—nicknamed “the morgue”—and we whispered that he was just going down there to hotbox the supply closet. Grow up, Marta snapped. She always jumped to her Work Spouse’s rescue, proclaiming he’d had a hard time as a kid. (Who hadn’t, though? We’d heard about harder things on the bus ride here this morning.) We silently diagnosed her porous boundaries.
Turned out it was Gail’s day to run group. We tried to convince her to cancel, or at least make the clients fill out that stupid 2259a during session.
“Absolutely not,” she said, grabbing her clipboard. “It’s hard enough for them to make it here as it is.”
As she marched towards the waiting room, Marta called out, “If any of mine show up, have them see me when you’re done.”
We all had shadowy motives lurking behind their career trajectories. We’d learned as kids to co-regulate our anxious mothers, or to seek positions of authority to compensate for dominating older brothers. Maybe we imagined showers of praise, a gold medal for solving The City’s biggest problem. Or believed this broken world would shatter into pieces if we didn’t show up to work each day. We all needed to be the Good Object, the Helper, the Hero.
And because Gail had been foolish enough to confide in Marta, everyone had heard how Gail’s brother disappeared into designer-drug chaos when she was seventeen. We speculated about which of her clients was playing his role in her current Savior narrative.
Gail called the group attendees from the lobby. The ones who’d used recently—clockable by the telltale eyes, those darkened sclera and white irises—trailed behind their less-intoxicated peers like ducklings down the hallway.
One black-clad client stumbled. Apparently the optical illusions made by Negative Space’s figure-ground reversals were spectacular, worth the scary come-up, but navigating an M.C. Escher-like landscape was often hazardous. Some wore earplugs, since background noise became oppressively close. Gail ushered them into the meeting room and shut the door.
We knew the clients liked it best when she ran Staying Focused. She let them stretch red yarn between pins on a cork board while she taught risk-reduction tips, and didn’t scold them for speaking in unison. They trusted her. Told her how once you’ve seen the infinite multiplicity of perspectives, it was impossible to unsee—that all perceptions remained ultimately reversible.
The rest of us stuck to the assigned curriculum about the harms of long-term use. Since tracking a conversation was nearly impossible, many were misdiagnosed with ADHD by overworked nurse practitioners. Music lost meaning without the silence between the notes. Clutter was painfully intolerable, so some went full minimalist, Marie-Kondo-ing all their worldly possessions. And they tended to monologue about death at social gatherings, ignoring small talk about babies and house renovations while gazing into the abyss. (Needless to say, they stopped getting invited to parties.)
After they’d assembled on the steps of City Hall, chanting with one voice about the connective tissues of wealth and power, local news featured crowd shots of their unfocused stares as they wandered into traffic, unable to react to sirens or warning lights. So The City paid lip service to public safety as the rationale for mandating people to treatment, authorizing emergency funding for our contract.
Dominic, of course, claimed that the Department of Corporate Welfare, with its monthly spending quotas, was pulling the puppet strings. That since Negative Space made them immune to advertising, they were being scapegoated for the recent shopping boycotts. We humored him, tolerated his constant vigilance. This was just how Dominic’s nervous system was shaped: forever shadowboxing with invisible bullies.
A few of us hustled off to call clients, but the rest hunkered down in the cube-farm to eat office-supplied Cheez-its and watch baby-raccoon videos. Shift stacks of paper from one side of our desks to the other; lecture each other about self-care, fantasizing about the vat of whiskey we’d climb into after work.
Security guards made their rounds and peeked into Gail’s group room, where the clients drew spider-web diagrams on the chalkboard. The heating and lights worked again, but the low rumbling behind the walls deepened; something else was sure to malfunction by day’s end.
Peering closer at the all-important 2259a, this survey with illegibly tiny font and endless checkboxes, we struggled to understand the questions, the words now like scrambled runes. What language was this? Had it always been six pages long? Someone swore it used to be two. Another joked that it was growing, that it would achieve sentience soon. We scrolled through job listings, double-checked our student loan balances before resigning ourselves to this new absurdity.
The group room opened and people streamed out. Marta’s head swiveled around in search of her clients as she asked Gail how it went.
“Pretty wild. Well, more than usual. They seem to know something’s up.” She held an envelope in her hand. “Might be a thank-you card? It sounded like they weren’t coming back.”
At that, Marta sprang out of her chair, hunting down her clients before they left. She ushered the first into a small treatment room filled with yellowing overwatered spider plants, while the rest waited in the lobby. She’d be damned if she didn’t rack up Brownie points by getting those Byzantine surveys done tonight, no matter how late she had to stay.
Gail looked around with scrunched eyebrows. “Is Bernie still not back?” It’s 4:20, we joked, probably snuck out to his drum circle in the park.
Leona had also disappeared—after sticking a note on her office door and nagging us again to get back to work—so we bolted for the exits at 5:00. This garbage fire could wait till tomorrow.
Marta was still meeting with a client, her strident tone audible through the flimsy particle board walls, even with the white noise machine cranked. Because apparently confidentiality didn’t matter in places like these.
***
We returned to work the next morning, limbs heavy and heads pounding.
The rickety elevator screeched and shuddered up the shaft. Something pungent singed our nostrils as the doors creaked open to the sixth floor. The card reader flashed an error code when we tapped for entry, but our suite’s steel door swung open with a tug.
A thick wall of stench hit us as we rounded the corner. Nauseatingly sweet, charcoal and copper. A smell so thick it became a taste, its putrid essence lodged in our gagging throats, a smell none of us would ever forget.
The small treatment room radiated heat, the doorknob melted into a molten lump. Even from a distance, two bodies were visible through the room’s window, their crisp skin sizzling like roasted chickens. Scorching air blasted onto blackened spider plants. Marta’s singed ponytail emanated waves of sulfur. The other charred husk was probably her unluckiest client.
Some of us froze in place. A few shrieked and ran for the exit, or sprang into action, barking orders and dialing 911. The most hungover one retched in a nearby recycling bin, adding hints of coffee and scrambled eggs to the repellent atmosphere.
Dominic gestured at the carnage. “See? She shouldn’t always stay so late after-hours.” Those nearest gaped at him, aghast.
Gail glared at him through her tears. “Dude. Seriously?”
Nobody could get a phone signal. The note posted on Leona’s door read: OFF-SITE WITH MANAGEMENT – L
“Fuck, where’s Bernie?” Gail said. “Did he stay home today? Or did he ever come back from looking for his charts in the morgue? We gotta find him.”
Forget Bernie, we yelled as she sprinted down the hallway, we have to get out of here. But our badges no longer opened the steel door. Panic sprayed everywhere like soda from a shaken can.
Until a squishing, sucking sound behind the walls stopped us in our tracks. Something approached.
“I checked the other exits.” Gail returned, her freckled face dusted with ash. “The basement is the only one open.”
“So now we’ll get to the bottom of this.” Dominic’s bull-terrier face betrayed his exhilaration over this bona fide crisis, a true hardship to document for his future litigation. Or a chance to confirm his theories about the malevolent forces aligned against us.
It was awful when Dominic was right. He’d never let us forget, should we survive.
“There’s an emergency exit down there,” Gail said. “And we should look for Bernie.”
None of us were stupid. We’d seen enough horror movies to know better. But we needed to get far, far away from this infernal stink, from that hungry mouth lurking behind the walls.
Gail shot a final glance back at the scorched bodies before yanking the basement door open.
***
The rest of us trailed behind Gail and Dominic, quietly weeping about poor Marta and her unidentified client. Our little tribe had grown and shrank over the years, but Marta had been here since the beginning, part of our core. It was like losing a limb. A limb with a constantly running nose and that clipped, deliberate enunciation that made us occasionally want to strangle her, but still. She couldn’t possibly be gone.
Wait, were we in shock? We often informed others that they were in shock. But this felt…strangely hollow and plastic, the insides of our mouths dry and metallic.
The atmosphere shifted from muggy to chill as we descended the stairs, passing through a wall of dank, musty air when entering the morgue. We held each other’s hands for guidance while our eyes adjusted to the dim grayness. Ambiguous shapes resolved into heaps of broken furniture corpses. Dominic used his phone’s flashlight to illuminate the illegible text scrawled on the walls above.
Our low murmurs echoed off the concrete floors. We startled at a rustling sound behind us, turning back towards the elevator shaft.
There lay Bernie, crumpled at the bottom of the shaft. His body was bound in loops of red tape, twisting his shattered limbs into unnatural angles. Dominic’s spotlight swept over Bernie’s swollen, purple face, his mouth stuffed with wads of tape.
We screamed in tandem and dragged each other away, tripping over piles of rubble as we fled from the sight of Bernie’s leaking eyeballs. We sprinted down corridors of office debris, then crouched behind a stack of busted ergonomic chairs, trembling like baby birds. One of us was hyperventilating and needed to be coached through box breathing. The text on the walls writhed, animated with an esoteric language of flowcharts and graphs, checkboxes from the 2259a.
That metallic taste in our mouths confirmed our suspicions: this place hated us. It had hated us with poor ventilation and formaldehyde fumes, with industrial carpet and open floor plans. It hated us with endless spreadsheets and overflowing caseloads. And now it wanted to destroy us.
“Look!” Dominic pointed at something up ahead.
The fuzzy outlines of a file cabinet glowed in the dark. A phosphorescent stack of manila folders swayed above, tethered to the cabinet by an anglerfish-like tentacle.
Dominic edged closer, peering into the gloom. “Our charts!” He aimed his flashlight at the client names on the folders, then turned back to us, eyes glittering. “See, I told you they were hiding those from us. None of you ever listen to me, but I knew it all—”
–BOOM! The cabinet exploded.
Flurries of paperwork filled the air, a cumulonimbus of forms surrounding Dominic’s head. The rest of us jumped back as the bottom drawer of the cabinet erupted, narrowly escaping the torrent of 2259a copies that wallpapered Dominic’s entire body. Suffocating surveys muffled his last desperate gasps.
The charts burst into smithereens, raining paper confetti onto our heads. We ran from Dominic’s mummified form, the file cabinets on either side growing taller and taller till we were lost within a maze, red tape slithering beneath our feet.
There were only a handful of us left now. We picked paper scraps out of our hair, minds churning with denial. This couldn’t be how our story ended.
The maze wound alongside concrete walls, and we ran our hands over their surfaces, covering ourselves in black grime and ancient dust. A pale door appeared in one wall, but when we reached for the knob, it shifted left and multiplied, till doors stretched to infinity, taunting us.
The creaking and clunking behind the walls returned. Circling around us, growing closer. Something on the other side of each door pounded, then howled our names.
We crumpled to the ground, or moaned that we were utterly fucked. All those times we let calls go to voice mail or ignored texts because we had nothing left to give. Because we couldn’t tolerate one more person dumping problems on us. All those friends and family we’d avoided, and now we were going to die.
“Wait,” Gail said.
She removed an envelope from her jacket pocket. The rest of us stared blankly. What did that have to do with our impending demise?
She opened the envelope and took out the card. Taped inside was a tiny baggie of powder that looked like shiny salt-and-pepper.
Holy shit, we said. We’d never seen it before in real life.
Gail dug out her house key, then scooped up a bump for each nostril and snorted. Even in the low light, we saw her eyes switch like a photo-negative.
She slowly turned, looking at each wall.
“There,” she finally said, pointing to something the rest of us couldn’t see, in what appeared to be a solid wall. Told us that between the beams was an entrance to a tunnel out of this hellhole. That beneath the clanking and growling of the building, she could hear the din of the street above.
Gail stood on the threshold of the entrance. “Let’s go.”
We followed her.
The tunnel was barely wide enough for our shoulders. At times we turned sideways to slide through or stooped as the ceiling lowered. Our path wound left. Right. Left again. Till we lost track of the twists and turns. Some of us panicked, panting hard, eyes streaming with tears. Would this take us to freedom, or dump us into a sewer? Were we spiraling to the center of the earth? What if the building was luring us into another trap?
But we followed Gail, her voice echoing in the dark.
“I get it now,” she told us. “It’s just like the clients said.” They saw the gaps and cracks in everything, all the dark and liminal spaces between. And now she saw, too. What animated this bureaucratic beast, symbiotically feeding off our collective misery. And how it had transformed into a human garbage disposal, once the Mayor no longer needed us for election optics.
Fucking Leona. This program is sunsetting. Had she known she’d cursed us?
“And guess who benefits from disposing of The City’s unwanted.” We sensed her tracing those spider-web diagrams in the dark, illustrating the connective tissue of wealth and power drawn on her group room chalkboard.
Fine, we said, so it hates the clients. But why us?
Water trickled down the tunnel walls around us as Gail felt into her newfound perceptions. “We’re…tainted by our connection to them, our attempts to understand. Our failure to convert them back into good consumers.”
That made some sense, we supposed. No good deed went unpunished.
“But we’ve got it all backwards,” she whispered, “we needed them more than they needed us.”
We reflected on the echoes of her words. Had we heard right? That didn’t sound right.
But then she went on about her brother, the one who’d disappeared all those years ago.
“I don’t know how I could have missed it,” she said. “I was so focused on my own grief, on keeping my parents from falling apart. But now I understand.”
***
The tunnels spiraled upwards. Beams of light and gusts of fresh air beckoned us forward.
Gail led us through a latched gate, up a set of stairs to the surface. We straggled out into the alley west of our building, parched and disoriented. Sunlight bleached our retinas; we could barely make out the garbage below or the billboards blinking above.
When our eyes finally adjusted, we spotted Leona and instinctively cringed behind a parked minivan. She approached the front entrance, shadowed by a pack of gray-faced suits with briefcases. Was this the site visit? It probably didn’t matter anymore that we hadn’t finished those stupid surveys. But how long had we been in there, then?
Maybe the suits were here to clean up the mess left behind by their sunsetting procedure. We shuddered, haunted by Dominic’s final gasps, that charred stench, the red tape, all replaying on a loop. Flashbacks.
Before we could decide what to do next, our ordeals were already solidifying into a narrative. We mentally rehearsed how we’d tell friends, the media, our future therapists.
But who’d believe us? We barely believed ourselves. Those insights from the tunnel were evaporating in the daylight, Gail’s stories fading under the sway of the animated Civic Commerce Celebration billboards competing for our attention.
Totally a traumatic experience, we declared to each other. No doubt we’ll have PTSD. Which meant we could try out EMDR, or another of those hot new modalities. One of us had a referral to a top-notch practitioner. Who knows, maybe afterwards we could rebrand, specialize in trauma survivors. Get a book deal, go on the podcast circuit. Because we’d definitely need a new gig.
We huddled behind the minivan as Leona and the bureaucrats passed. Kitty-corner from our building stood a crowd of people, diverse but for those photo-negative eyes and dark clothing. We knew who they were waiting for.
Gail turned to us with those same eyes. Please, we begged her, we have to stick together. We had no idea what to do now. We needed her.
She shook her head. “I know where my brother is. And I gotta find him.”
She crossed the street, weaving through traffic, around the block-long food bank lines, till she reached our former clients. They reached out in unison, welcoming her into their fold.
This part, too, would enter our canon. The tales we’ll recite back to each other over beers, after bitching about our new jobs: how fucked up was that? Totally surreal. Nobody gets it but you guys.
But we were pretty sure we’d be gathering without Gail. We slumped on the corner beneath flashing billboards, our bruised and scraped arms around each other, watching her abandon us, leaving this hateful place and profession behind.
This story previously appeared in Cosmic Horror Monthly.
Edited by Marie Ginga
Joelle Killian is a queer Canadian living in San Francisco whose fiction has appeared in Fusion Fragment, Mythaxis, and Cosmic Horror Monthly. One of her doppelgängers is a psychologist writing about psychedelic therapy. Another was once in an undead dance troupe.