THE LONELY, A NEW ANTAGONIST FOR DELTA GREEN BY JOHN TYNES

Perhaps loneliness secretes a pheromone. Maybe that’s how you know, how we all know. The poorly dressed man on the bus who stares at a spot just over your head. The monologist in the coffee shop who tells you every detail of how he secured his laptop against surveillance until you hurriedly get up and leave. The woman with the soiled Live Aid t-shirt who walks from the bus stop to the food bank every day at four o’clock. That guy three cubicles over who processes routing requests and has a blank coffee mug and a plastic flower and never makes eye contact with women. We know them and we avoid them, recoil even, out of a sort of existential distaste for a human being who is suffering in a way we cannot, dare not, connect with. We know they are the Lonely.

Some stay among the Lonely for a lifetime. Some become the Grim: tight-lipped avatars of suffering who grip the steering wheel and stalk the ones whom they most resent. And a few of the Grim become the Furious and for a few news cycles we all know their names and what they did.

What happened to them? Why do we hurriedly look back down at our phones and keep walking? What do we know about them that they do not?

We know they need someone to reach out. Someone to welcome them, to give them a sense of belonging. But our self-protective instincts kick in and we think: Just not us.

And then the book in their pocket warms a little. The book no bookstore or library has ever seen. The book that told them yes, you will always be alone. The book that is unique in all the world, except that all the lonely people have equally unique books in their pockets, too. And all those books have different covers and different titles and different words on different pages and they all tell different stories but they’re all the same tale: a powerful family, a mysterious stranger, a night of horror and revelation, and a twisting and mysterious Yellow Sign.

She’s right over there. You see her every day. You could say hello. You could even just smile. But you hurriedly look back down at your phone and keep walking.

And then the book in her pocket warms a little.