Four pills. Small green circles, light and insubstantial in my uninjured hand. “OC” etched on one side, “80” on the other.
“Oxycodone,” Floyd said. “They’ll help with the pain.”
“No shit, they’ll help with the pain.” I stared at the pills for a couple of seconds. I’d had oxy once, after oral surgery, and I remembered the fuzzy-headed warmth of the stuff. I’d lost three days under its sway, camped out in front of the television, barely able to flip the channels.
But there hadn’t been any pain.
“My knee still aches,” Floyd explained, “especially when it’s cold. And my doctor is … well, let’s just say he’s generous. He keeps me well stocked.”
I hesitated for a moment, staring down at the pills. Then I flexed my left hand. The pain was immediate, enough to make me wince. The way I saw it, I didn’t really have much of a choice: on the one hand, I had pain and discomfort; on the other—resting neatly on the other—I had fuzzy-headed oblivion. I grunted and tossed one of the pills to the back of my throat. It was bitter going down, a chalky floral taste.
It’s just a temporary thing, I told myself, putting the other pills in my pocket. Just until I’m healed.
Floyd smiled. “Cheers,” he said, raising the pill bottle in a toast. And: “Down the hatch.” He bolted the rest of the bottle like it was a shot of whiskey.
I was pretty fucked up. After dinner, we smoked a shitload of pot, and on top of the oxycodone, it left me feeling numb, floating free from reality.
And that was a good place to be.
Here, in this place, I wasn’t feeling my hand. I wasn’t worrying about the shit I’d seen: the body in the ceiling, the face in the wall, the spider with the human finger. I wasn’t thinking about the soldier and his fall from the hospital window, the way his limp body had spun in the air, so eerie and silent. Instead, I was just sitting there, at peace, watching Taylor from across the backyard.
And despite the evening’s frigid cold, I felt warm. I felt comfortable. I felt good.
Floyd and I were sitting on a bench in the garden, surrounded by dormant rosebushes. He was playing his bright red guitar—moving from Pearl Jam, to Bowie, to the Pixies—and everyone else was on the back porch, watching by the light of a single gas-powered lantern.
Amanda, Mac, and Devon were sitting on the steps. Amanda was leaning back against Mac’s chest, resting her head in the crook of his neck. She looked sedate, at ease, her dogs a million miles away. Taylor and Sabine shared an old wicker bench beneath the eaves. Sabine had her feet tucked into a lotus position on her lap. Her eyes were closed, and there was a peaceful smile on her lips.
Even Charlie was there, sitting on the floor at Taylor’s feet. He’d emerged from his room right after dinner, surprising us all with his upbeat, almost cheerful attitude. Somehow, locked up in his room, he’d managed to make peace with that photo of his mother. In fact, he seemed downright ashamed of the whole melodramatic episode. And he didn’t want to talk about it. Not at all.
And then there was Taylor. I couldn’t keep my eyes off Taylor.
I looked down and noticed my camera sitting in my lap. I turned on the LCD display and scrolled through a dozen pictures: Charlie, on the ground, resting his head against Taylor’s knee; Mac, kissing the side of Amanda’s head; Devon, taking a huge hit off his bong; Sabine, flipping me the bird. And then there were a dozen pictures of Floyd playing his guitar, his forehead wrinkled in concentration, utterly focused on the instrument in his hands.
As I scrolled through the memory card, Floyd cleared his throat and started in on a new song. I recognized it immediately: “The John B. Sails.”
It was an old song—a traditional folk tune—and I knew it because the Beach Boys had recorded a cover of it back in the sixties. When I was a kid, my father had played that CD a lot. Sitting in his den with a tumbler of Scotch dangling from his hand, he’d play it, and then he’d get sad. I think it reminded him of something, something painful. I never thought to ask what.
So hoist up the John B. sails,
See how the mainsail set,
Send for the captain ashore, let us go home,
Let me go home.
Floyd played the song with a surprising amount of emotion, his voice a crooning moan, rooted deep in his chest. I put my camera down and focused on his performance. There was no carefree, surfer lilt to this version of the song, just pained longing.
He sounded so hurt. So bitter.
And I could tell it wasn’t just something he was doing for us, wasn’t just part of his performance. He was digging down into his very core, and after a couple of lines, I don’t even think he realized we were still there, watching.
I noticed blood on his hand. Floyd was playing so hard that he’d cut his fingers on the strings. But that didn’t stop him. He remained completely oblivious, eyes closed, heartache twisting at his lips.
So hoist up the John B. sails,
See how the mainsail set,
Send for the doctors now, just let me go home,
I wanna go home.
This is the worst trip—
Then, abruptly, he stopped midsentence. His fingers halted on the bright red guitar, and his open mouth snapped shut. The sudden silence was a shock, a jarring slap at our comfortable, intimate gathering.
And for a brief moment, there wasn’t a sound in the world.
“Wait, man,” Floyd said, turning toward me. There was a perplexed look on his face, like he’d just suddenly come awake to find this guitar in his hands. “What the fuck was I singing?” There was no pain in his voice. Not anymore. Just confusion.
And that was when I noticed the snow—big, lazy flakes tumbling from the pitch-black sky.
Photograph. October 20, 01:25 P.M. A window in the snow:
A surveillance photo, set slightly askew. Peering in through a window at a man frozen in action.
It is a second-story window, perched directly above a protected front door. The eaves above and below are coated in several inches of snow. On the other side of the glass, a young man is glancing back over his shoulder into the unseen depths of the room. He is wearing a black knit cap and a thick winter jacket. His mouth is open, and his arms are raised at his side, caught in midgesture. He is talking. Or arguing. The lines on his face convey a look of pure frustration.
It is a moment of candid emotion, caught and frozen in time.
There are no furnishings visible in the room behind him, nothing but a small swatch of wall. A blue light glows somewhere out of view, coloring the wall a vibrant shade and tinting the man’s pale complexion. It is a subtle light, but it stands out inside that frame within a frame—a touch of color inside an otherwise monochrome image. It makes it look like the man is trapped under tropical water or frozen inside a cube of polar-blue ice.
We can’t see who he’s talking to.
The snow was thick on the ground by the time I got out of bed. Almost five inches. Practically a blizzard by my sunny-California standards. The snow was still falling, but it was now just a tiny flurry, nothing but dust and smoke particles floating in the air.
It felt like my head had been stuffed full of foam and string sometime during the night. And my hand had resumed its loud complaints.
My jeans lay draped over the back of the folding chair, and as soon as I got out of bed, I dug through its pockets, coming up with the remaining oxycodone. There were three left and I considered taking them all, but I ended up just popping a single pill. The night before was a real blur—a slide show of motion snapping past inside my head—and I didn’t want to fall back into that haze. I wanted to stay sharp. I had work to do.
Besides, I told myself, my hand doesn’t feel that bad.
Unfortunately, this reassurance didn’t really help, as the thought of unwinding my bandages and checking on my damaged flesh still filled me with a sense of dread. It was something I didn’t want to think about, something I didn’t want to deal with. Not yet.
I got
dressed, adding an extra flannel shirt to my layers of clothing. Then I stood at the window for a while, staring out at the snow-shrouded street. It was a still, pristine tableau. There were no cars or pedestrians, no hint of animal life. The entire world had been hidden beneath a thick alabaster blanket. I looked for tracks in the snow, but there was nothing there. Not a single footprint.
Not a single paw print, either, I thought, remembering the surge of wolves flowing down this very street.
On the way downstairs, I paused for a moment outside Floyd’s open door. He lay passed out atop his covers, fully clothed. His guitar case sat propped against the wall near his head, and his hands were smeared with dried blood. He was snoring.
The rest of the bedroom doors were all closed. The only sound in the upstairs hallway was the low, regular drone of Floyd’s breath.
Downstairs, I once again found Charlie sitting at the kitchen table, typing away at his notebook computer. When I entered, he glanced up briefly, and then nodded toward a French Press sitting on the kitchen counter. “I made coffee,” he said. “Help yourself.” Before I could thank him—before I could say a single word—he looked back down at his computer, once again losing himself in the glowing screen. I could practically hear the gears clicking away inside his head. In those brief moments, my presence had been noted, analyzed, and filed away. His thoughts had moved on. I poured myself a cup of coffee and sat down at his side.
“When are you sending stuff out next?” I asked, idly rapping a knuckle against the back of his screen. “When does your thumb drive go back out into the world?”
“Taylor said tonight,” Charlie replied, not looking up. “She’s giving it to her friend tonight.”
“If I wanted to post something—to a forum, a message board—could I do that? Could you program something to do that?”
Charlie’s fingers fell silent on the keyboard, and he glanced up. I watched as his forehead scrunched up in lines of concentration, his unfixed stare drifting up toward the ceiling. I’d managed to capture his attention.
“Is it a public message board? What type of security are we talking about?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. You log into an account, then type stuff into a box.”
Charlie laughed and shook his head, then fell silent. His stare remained fixed on an imaginary spot above my shoulder. After a handful of seconds, his eyes refocused. “You have your computer here, right? Did you browse the site recently?”
I nodded. “Probably the last thing I read.”
He smiled. “Then bring it to me. I bet you ten bucks—if it’s still in the cache, I can do it. I can post whatever you want.”
“Thanks,” I said. “That’s incredible.” Charlie’s eyes flickered back toward his computer, and I could tell I was about to lose him again.
“Are you scared?” I asked, seizing the moment. “About what might come back? On the drive? In your email?”
He stopped, hands frozen over the keyboard. For a moment, I thought I’d pushed him too far. Then he smiled.
“No,” he said. “It’s them, my parents. I figured it out. They’re trying to get to me, trying to tell me something. And that’s what I want … to find them, to contact them.
“And when it’s time, it’ll all become clear. They’ll reach me, or I’ll reach them.” Charlie once again had that distant look in his eyes, like he was grappling with some technical problem, trying to figure out how to make something work. “It’s the message, you see, not the form it takes. I just have to figure out what they’re trying to say.”
He turned back toward his computer, dismissing me abruptly. I could see two windows open on his screen. One was filled with code, and the other showed his mother on the corner of Second Avenue and Sherman Street. Charlie had zoomed the picture in on her haunted expression.
I felt bad for him. The only message I could read there, in that close-up, was a message of fear: Charlie’s mother looking back over her shoulder with that frightened look on her face, like she wasn’t alone on that abandoned street, like there was something else there, chasing her. Something horrible.
Amanda and Mac were playing in the backyard when I finished up my coffee. They were having a snowball fight. Amanda was hiding behind a row of rosebushes while Mac lobbed projectiles high into the air, sending them raining down like artillery shots. After a round of sorties, Amanda popped up over the line of bushes and whipped a snowball directly at his head, sending him toppling over.
Their laughter was high and bright, a counterpoint to Charlie’s insistent tap-tap-tap.
Amanda stuck her head in through the back door. “Me against you three,” she panted. “Mac needs the help. He’s getting his ass kicked out here!” A snowball hit the window at her side, and she turned, laughing, to once again join the fray.
Charlie’s fingers didn’t even pause on the keyboard. After Amanda disappeared, he started sucking at his teeth absently, filling the room with a wet, slurping sound. I set my empty coffee cup in the kitchen sink, then headed upstairs to start work on my forum post.
Taylor’s door was right across from the stairwell, and I paused when I reached it. I listened for a moment, then knocked tentatively. There was no response. I pushed, and the door swung open. The room was empty, her bed neatly made. Early riser, I thought. Already out in the world, doing whatever it is she does in the morning.
I continued on to my room.
I spent the rest of the morning staring at my computer screen, trying to assemble a forum post. It was a stressful task. The way I looked at it, this was the most important thing in my life. It was the next step in my journey, putting my pictures out there for the whole world to see.
These were my dreams and aspirations. In pieces on my computer screen.
More than anything, I wanted to make the right first impression. I wanted to capture people’s attention and establish credibility right off the bat. I wanted people to look at these pictures—really look at them—and take me seriously. I wanted them to recognize my passion, my skill, my art.
No wonder I was anxious. I had the weight of my entire future sitting right there on my shoulders.
I decided to start with some of my more mundane images. If I started with the insane stuff, I reasoned, no one would believe me. I could hear the arguments now: Yeah, he just Photoshopped a finger onto that spider; and that face in the wall, it doesn’t even look real—it’s just a mask, a mannequin.
No, I decided, it was better to start off with the stuff no one would dispute.
First up: the soldier in front of the ENTERING SPOKANE sign. Then an empty city street. Then Riverfront Park. And finally, a pair of pictures from Mama Cass’s: one showing the crowd of refugees gathered around the storefront, the other showing a handful of dirty faces watching me suspiciously. I liked this final picture; I thought it ended things on the right note. It put some human faces—ragged and tired, haunted and angry—amid all the desolation.
I was laying groundwork. Setting the scene.
I’d get to the insanity later.
I spent several hours tweaking the images, trying to make them perfect. Then I composed a couple of sentences for the top of the post. I tried to keep my preface simple; I wanted to let the photographs speak for themselves.
Greetings from Spokane! Here are some pictures from my first week in the city. I came here to document the conditions and, perhaps, find the truth behind the stories we’ve all been hearing. I’ll try to post more as events and pictures happen, but my Internet connection is pretty much nonexistent (I had to sneak this post out of the city, passing it hand to hand across the border).
I added the “hand to hand” thing to take heat off of Danny, in case this post ever caught the attention of the authorities.
After I finished the preface, I read it over a couple of times, trying to imagine the impression it would make. I found it lacking. It felt cold, clinical. There was no emotion, no hint it had been written by a real human being, someone capable of bei
ng moved by the things on the other side of the camera’s viewfinder. Tentatively, I typed out another line:
It’s strange here. It feels like a different world.
I stared at the post for a long time, reading over that sparse handful of sentences, studying each and every aspect of the photographs. It still felt insufficient somehow, incomplete. It is incomplete, I told myself. There is no end here, no conclusion … not yet.
But it is a beginning.
Floyd stuck his head into my room just as I was finishing up my post.
“Come here, man,” he said, stifling a yawn. “There’s something I want you to see.”
I saved my work and followed him into his room.
At one time, this had been a child’s bedroom. There were alternating rows of clowns and balloons peering out from the wallpaper, bright cartoon shapes turned bleak and gray beneath a layer of dingy smoke residue. Across from Floyd’s child-size bed, some of the clowns had been gouged out of the wall, as if attacked with a potato peeler. All the balloons remained intact. In the corner, a black sweatshirt shrouded the shape of a hobbyhorse.
The room smelled of pot and stale sweat.
Floyd was still half asleep. He stopped in the middle of the room and stretched his hands up over his head, letting out a loud yawn.
“What’s up?” I asked, and I smiled. “Did you have a bad dream? Do you need me to tuck you back in? Maybe sing you a lullaby?”
Floyd let out a fake laugh. “Fuck, man, you’re funny,” he said. “I didn’t realize you were so fucking funny.”
He grabbed my elbow and pulled me over to the window. He had his blinds drawn almost all the way to the bottom, and I had to crouch down in order to peer through the gap. “Check it out. Across the street.”
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