Has anyone heard of the Green Belt Sanatorium?
I encountered this place three years ago. At least, I think it’s a place. Since then, I’ve never been able to find it again.
And now that Anthony is gone, I’m not sure who to ask.
— three —
Midway Motel —
The light shone like a beacon on the horizon, piercing the darkness between the trees. As I got closer, I could see it was a neon sign above some rinky-dink motel just off the side of the old highway.
— Vacancy.
I hit the blinker and pulled into the driveway, hope rising out the pit of my stomach. I had driven slowly, looking for any sign of Anthony on the side of the road. If he had made it this far, there was a chance he came here.
Parking was a breeze. I was the only one in the lot. I looked at my watch.
It was past 3 AM.
The motel had seen better days, it was clear. When the freeways were built in the 80s, they all but killed places like these. But the front porch was lit, and the door was unlocked. I stepped inside.
“Hello?” I called.
The place was a blast from the past. A dull but patterned carpet, comfy chairs, and a front desk made of wood. The golden age before my time, encapsulated into one place. But it was the smell.
The smell hit me with a wave of nostalgia. A subtle but distinct sharpness that hotels all seemed to have, as if they used the same industrial cleaning product. I remembered it as a kid, going on road trips with my dad, staying at affordable roadside inns with their continental breakfasts. That was back when gas prices were lower.
I hit the reception bell.
Nobody came. After a while I decided I’d had enough of reception counters for a day. I hadn’t eaten in over ten hours, and my bladder was about to burst.
I followed the sign on the wall to the men’s. Had just started releasing into the urinal — letting out a very relieved sigh — when I heard Anthony’s voice behind me.
“Where the fuck have you been?”
“Dude!” I said — I think I dribbled a little on my shoes — “Where did you go? I was looking for you.”
“I was looking for you!” he said. He was standing at the sink, staring at me. His eyes were tired and hooded, but I could tell he was furious. We started talking at the same time. I began to pee all over the place.
“I went inside —”
“I know!”
” — to look for you!”
“You said five minutes!”
“What is that place?”
“You’re asking me!” he said.
“I’m asking you.”
“And I’m asking you!”
“What?”
“Stop fucking saying what.”
“What!” I said.
“I said stop fucking saying what!” he said.
I stopped fucking saying anything.
I concentrated on finishing up my piss and went to the sink to rinse my hands.
Tony sighed.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m worried about you.”
—
This is when the trouble with Anthony started.
Well, I suppose it started a while ago. But this is when it really started affecting our relationship.
Anthony had a bad memory. It wasn’t that he was forgetful — he could remember the tiniest detail in movies that I’d missed. But there were some events that happened to both of us which he said he couldn’t remember. It was never anything of real consequence. Walks in the forest, funny conversations we had as children. The deeper into his childhood, the more holes in his memory.
It was just the stress, he had told me, when I’d mentioned it to him. The stress of a traumatic upbringing. I remembered him being a troubled kid — I mean, who wasn’t troubled as a teen — but I didn’t remember him being especially bad. Then again, I never went over to his place much growing up, so in the end I had to take him at his word.
Until now.
“You’re the one who suggested going there in the first place,” Anthony said.
“What?”
“I’m just saying! We wouldn’t be here if you didn’t want to go inside that place. What is it, anyway?”
“I don’t know, Tony,” I said. “I only went inside to look for you.”
“Ha. That’s funny. That’s very fucking funny.”
“It’s not a joke, man. It was your idea to go in there.”
“Fuck you.”
“Are you serious right now?”
Our argument ping-ponged back and forth like that for hours, from the bathroom to the vending machine to the motel room. He said it was my idea to go inside the Sanatorium — said it reminded me of some obscure web series I used to watch.
I told him the truth. That it was a nostalgia trip out of some shit-fuck game he downloaded off the internet when he was twelve.
He held his ground.
The guy really had the balls to try to gaslight me. What an asshole.
What I couldn’t figure out though, was why he would lie about it. Maybe he was embarrassed about the situation and was in denial. Maybe he was scared of what he saw in the place. Maybe he wasn’t lying — or at least, didn’t know that he was. Maybe he had forgotten what had happened, and his brain was making stuff up to fill in the gaps.
Whatever it was, it pissed me off.
We shared his motel room. It was a double bed. He told me he’d take the floor. I said no, it was his room — I’ll take the floor.
Fine, he said. Sleep wherever the fuck you want.
—
That night, I dreamed I was Anthony.
I just knew I was him. Walking through the library, in the airless corridors of the Sanatorium. The same dull-green bindings, shelved from floor to ceiling. I had pulled a book out of a shelf — there was no title on the cover.
I opened the cover. Flipped through it.
All the pages were blank.
— four —
Tony was at the wheel. We were on hour three of the seven hour ride home. Neither of us had said much, even when we had stopped at a drive-thru. I stuffed the rest of my napkins in the paper bag and decided to try again.
“You really don’t — even remotely — remember playing a game called — or set in a place called — Green Belt Sanatorium,” I said.
He heaved a sigh and said, “Don’t fucking start again.”
“I’m serious. Specifically a shitty free to play game.”
“No I do not.”
“But you have been known to play these shitty freeware games.”
“Yes, I have been known to play these shitty freeware games,” he said. “But that was before I got my Xbox.”
“You had an Xbox?”
“Yeah,” he said. “Three-sixty. I got it used. Saved up like crazy, remember?”
“When was that?”
“Dude. Like, tenth grade.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. I borrowed some of your games. You don’t remember?”
A vague recollection was forming in my mind. But I wasn’t sure enough, or in the mood, to concede the point.
He looked at me.
“You really don’t remember.”
“So you still maintain it was my idea to go inside.”
He returned his eyes to the road. Didn’t answer.
“But you went inside there, right?”
“Yes,” he said. “I went inside.”
“And what was it?” I asked. “What did you see in there?”
He drove silently for a while.
I persisted. “Tony, what did you see in there?”
“What do you want me to say?” he snapped. “It’s a care center. Where they send old people to die. What do you want me to say about it?”
As we drove the rest of the way in silence, I couldn’t shake the feeling that something had changed. When we crossed the state line, I couldn’t find any feeling of familiarity in the passing landmarks, even when we got close to the city we both lived in.
We had switched drivers for the last stretch, and I had wordlessly dropped him off at home before returning the car to the rental company. Looking out the windows on the bus ride home, I felt like a tourist, some invader from another world. Even when I had showered and woken from a fitful sleep, I couldn’t recognize the place around me as one I’d lived in for years.
It was as if I was watching the world through a mirror — or I had been my whole life, but now the mirror had fallen away, to reveal the true nature beyond.
—
Anthony moved away not long after that. Found some job in a bigger city, made a lot more money. We lost contact. I buried myself in my work and all but forgot about the incident.
Then the pandemic hit, and the startup I worked at crashed. I tried to make it freelance, but the clients were too few and miserly. I ended up losing my apartment, and soon after contracted the virus. As I was recuperating in my mother’s basement, the Green Belt Sanatorium had the time to return to my mind. Unanswered questions, swirling in the dark as I paced the confines of the basement.
What was that place? Why did Tony lie about it?
And most alarmingly: Had I misremembered the whole thing?
My old PC was still there, hooked up to the internet. I tried to retrace my steps on Google Maps, using the satellite view. I couldn’t find any sign of the place, but it was hard to remember the route I had taken through those country roads.
My search term, ‘green belt sanitarium’ turned up zero direct hits — only information on urban zoning policies, where development was prohibited on designated land. There were some results about hospitals and psychiatric wards being built on these so-called ‘green belts’, but there was nothing with the same name in the continental US.
Besides, that building we entered was nowhere near a city.
I tried adding, ‘freeware’, ‘game’, ‘.exe’ to my query. Then I tried, ‘webseries’, ‘watch online’, ‘show’. Still got nothing — just some stuff about healthcare training. There was a game on Steam about an asylum called Green Hills, but after watching some playthroughs on Youtube I categorized it as irrelevant.
That was when the dreams started — or maybe continued. I was back in those windowless halls, wandering around looking for Anthony. I smelled the acrid smoke and followed it, went through those subway turnstiles to where the silent readers sat.
And when I called out Anthony’s name, they would all look up, and all of them had his face.
— five —
Three years had passed after our visit to the Sanatorium. I began to learn how to live in this mirror-world of masks and isolation. Life slowly progressed: I recovered from COVID and then, months later, caught it a second time. My father texted me out of the blue, telling me that his heart surgery had gone well. I gave him my congratulations. It had been scheduled years ago, but somehow, I had forgotten all about it.
There was no new development in my search for the Sanatorium — except one. I had been trawling internet archive sites, figuring if Anthony found his game on a freeware site long ago, the host must have since died.
I now alternated my searches between the words ‘sanitarium’ and ‘sanatorium’. In my hours of searching, I finally found a file called GBSanatorium.exe. There was no information, only a file directory and a download link.
I pressed the button.
The file was only 32 megabytes, a single executable. I clicked on it, and clicked away the blue Windows Smartscreen warning.
My computer screen flickered black, then went back to the Downloads folder, where the .exe was housed. I waited and tried to run it again.
Again, nothing happened. Only the black flicker of the screen.
The app must have crashed. It was an old file, so I tried every compatibility mode, tried running it on other machines.
To this day, I’ve made no progress.
—
So if anyone has played this game, or has been to the Green Belt Sanatorium, or has even heard anything about it — Please, let me know.
I’m going crazy here.
Because night after night, I have those dreams where I’m not myself, wandering the halls of a place that shouldn’t be, reading page after page of blank paper, and waking up not knowing who I am, where I was, or who I am about to become.
[ — ]