Bad Glass

by Richard E. Gropp

  He nodded toward the cellar door. “And then we had to go down there,” he repeated. He closed his eyes and heaved a brief sob. “Why’d you take me, Dean? Why’d I have to follow? And should I curse you for that, or should I thank you?” After a moment, he looked up and managed a tortured little smile. “Right now, I’m thinking I should just shank you in the fucking face.”

  His eyes held mine for several seconds, and then his shoulders collapsed. I could see all of that animation, all of that emotion, draining away, leaving behind an empty vessel. I moved closer and put my hand on his shoulder. This time he didn’t push me away.

  “Maybe you shouldn’t be here,” I said, keeping my voice low, trying to radiate calm. “Maybe you should leave, get out of the city. It’s not good for you here.” And after a prolonged beat, I added, “It’s not good for any of us.”

  “But he’s down there.”

  “He’s dead.”

  He shook his head. “But he’s down there. And I’ll find him this time. I won’t run away.”

  He turned away from me and reached through the living room door on his far side. “Look,” he said, pulling something back into the entryway. “I found this. He wasn’t there this time, but I found this, down in the tunnels.” He handed me a skateboard. It was cracked in the middle and covered with mud. “It’s his, the one he loved. See—” He brushed aside some of the drying dirt, revealing a picture on the bottom of the board. “—it’s him. See? He’s flying.”

  The board felt surprisingly heavy in my hands.

  “We didn’t find it in the woods. We didn’t even know it was gone, not until later, not until after his funeral. I went to look for it, but it wasn’t in his room, it wasn’t on his dresser.” I looked up from the board and saw Floyd smiling. It was a different smile now. It was reflected in his eyes, in the subtle lift of his shoulders. It no longer looked out of place on his face. “It means he’s here, Dean, he’s real. Just like the board. It’s here. It’s real.”

  I looked back down at the board and remained silent. No matter how much I wanted to tell him otherwise—tell him that he was wrong, that the city was just messing with his head, that his brother was gone, and that he should flee as far and as fast as possible—I couldn’t.

  The board was here. The board was real.

  And I had no idea what that might mean.

  News clipping. “A Hole in the Map: Spokane, and What They Aren’t Telling Us,” the Seattle Times, November 7, pages 7A and 12A:

  The article has been clipped from a daily newspaper—aged, yellowing newsprint with sharp, scissor-cut edges. It is in two pieces: a narrow lead column stapled to a wider three-column continuation. It has been well handled. The ink is smeared, and words have been lost beneath smudged fingerprints. The paper is a webwork of creases; it looks like it has been crumpled into a ball and then smoothed back out.

  The article describes the quarantine, several months in, and revisits official press releases. It quotes government officials, and there are several “No comments” scattered throughout the text.

  There are two pictures incorporated into the final column of type, stacked one on top of the other—large blocks of ink reduced to abstract blurs by excessive handling. The topmost picture is nothing but a dark morass of ink, with the barest hint of a face lurking in the bottom corner. The bottom picture is easier to parse but still difficult to understand. Underneath the maze of creases and beneath the smudged ink, where a sweaty fingertip has traced body and limb, it looks like a spider. A giant spider, perched atop seven spindly legs and one outstretched human finger.

  I put Floyd to bed. Then I watched him sleep.

  I don’t know how much oxycodone he actually took, but his breathing was shallow and he lay perfectly still. He didn’t toss and turn or fidget and mumble. In fact, there was very little motion in his body, very little life. I’m not sure what I would have done if his breathing had actually stopped—CPR, I guess, even though I didn’t have any training or knowledge on the subject—but I didn’t want to leave him alone. I wanted to be there in case he needed me. In case he needed me to—I don’t know—to do something, anything to keep him safe.

  I just … I had the feeling that if I turned my back, if I shut my eyes, he would disappear. He would just … be gone. As if it were my attention, my concern that was keeping him rooted to the world, and without that he’d just fade into the ether.

  And that would be that. One fewer person in Taylor’s house.

  And I didn’t want that. I really didn’t want that. I liked Floyd. I liked his relaxed skater charm, his playful smile, the way he laughed so easily and with such an inviting warmth. I didn’t want to see the house without that. I wanted the chance to once again sit out in the backyard, listening happily as he played his guitar.

  At least Charlie isn’t here, I told myself. That—the two of them together—would have been too much for me to handle.

  As far as I knew, Charlie was still in the house across the street. When I’d tried to tell him what was going on, when I’d tried to get his help with Floyd, he’d just grunted distractedly, barely even acknowledging my presence. I ended up leaving him behind. Now, sitting on the edge of Floyd’s bed, I could see the blue glow of the radio in the second-story window across the street, and I could imagine Charlie sitting there in the growing dark, frozen like a statue, his mind stuck inside some faulty programming loop. Waiting—just waiting—for something to break him free.

  And it was my fault.

  Taking Floyd down into the tunnels, showing Charlie the radio—I was certainly doing some powerful work here. I was destroying people left and right.

  Shit, I’m a fucking tsunami, I thought, a wave of destruction rolling through the house! First Amanda and Mac, then Sabine, and Weasel, and Taylor, and Floyd, and Charlie. I wondered how I was fucking up Danny’s life. I probably gave him some mutant STD or something. He probably has spiders burrowing deep into his brain.

  Jesus! I was like a motherfucking plague.

  On this house. On the people in it.

  When Floyd’s breathing started to sound a little bit stronger, I darted into my room and grabbed my camera and notebook computer. I set up my gear on the floor next to his bed and started to work on my second post, pausing every couple of minutes to check on his breathing.

  First I transferred pictures from my camera, then I spent a couple of minutes checking up on my hardware. The camera batteries were still half full; the computer was down to 45 percent. I tilted the surface of the zoom lens back and forth in the wash from my computer screen, and then I tried to clean the dirty glass, carefully brushing aside dirt and dust, using an alcohol spray to wash away a pair of errant fingerprints. When it was suitably clean, I capped the lens and put the camera back into its bag.

  Then I stared at the computer for a while.

  I didn’t want to go on. I felt an incredible sense of dread at the thought of those pictures lurking on my hard drive.

  My enthusiasm was waning … and fast. Whatever I’d come to the city to find, to see and to document, I was starting to think it just wasn’t worth it. No matter how great the images were.

  This was not a good way to get a reputation, I realized. This was a good way to die, to disappear.

  Then leave, an urgent voice cried inside my head. It was a distant voice, and I got the sense that it had been screaming for a long time now. That one word, over and over again: leaveleaveleaveleaveleave. I just hadn’t heard it.

  But I couldn’t leave. I couldn’t leave Floyd. I couldn’t leave Charlie. I couldn’t leave Taylor.

  And frankly, I couldn’t leave the dream. My dream.

  No matter how disillusioned I got—how stupid and myopic the urge became—I still wanted to take those beautiful photographs. I wanted to create something amazing. Art that would change the world! Even if it wasn’t smart. Even if—my life on the line—it wasn’t objectively worth it.

  So I sat there, listening to Floyd’s breath—it was
stronger now, I was sure of that—and I popped another couple of Mama Cass’s Vicodins, trying to gather up the strength to go on. And when I felt the warm roil of the drug start to surge inside my head, I leaned forward and launched my image viewer.

  I tried not to think about what I was doing, tried to get lost in the simple step-by-step process: select several days’ worth of photographs, right click, “open all,” and then page through each individual frame. It was easier if I didn’t think about it too much.

  Just images without context. Just blocks of color on my screen.

  There were over two hundred photographs, and my computer slowed to a crawl as it opened window after window after window. I started closing them one by one, picking out the best of each set and tossing away the ones that were out of focus and boring. A street scene, poorly framed; the tunnel in the park—without context, these didn’t look like anything special. It was a pretty random process. Very intuitive. If I had stopped to think about what I was doing, if I’d been perfectly sober and unemotional, I would have spent a much longer time on each picture. I would have considered framing, the quality of the light on the subject, the oh too clever game of analogy and meaning, and the way the viewer’s eye traveled across the image—whether the lines pulled you in, toward the subject, or pushed you away. Instead, I went with my gut reaction.

  Did the image move me? Did it provoke emotion?

  In the end, the ones I discarded were the ones I could discard. And the remaining seven were the ones I just couldn’t close, the ones I had to keep looking at.

  The first one was a technical mess. It was off center and poorly lit. And I hadn’t even taken it. Sabine had, at my first dinner in the city, playing with my camera, holding it up above her head. I remembered sitting at the dining-room table—stoned out of my mind, relaxed and very, very warm—the whole room bathed in candlelight. I was actually in the photograph, sitting at the table, smiling vaguely at Sabine and the camera. And I was surrounded by the entire household.

  When I looked at it, I was once again flooded with that feeling, that warmth, the belief that I had actually found something here, inside the city. The good old days, I thought. They sure didn’t last long.

  The next picture was something completely different. It was the face between the walls, and it was cold and terrifying and alien. I’d already worked on the photo some, making the face easier to see inside that narrow space, and I didn’t spend long looking at it now. Seeing the pale flesh—remembering the way it had trembled, the way its eye had rolled blindly—made me feel sick to my stomach. I considered closing it—just trashing the image and hoping my memory of that horrible specter could somehow disappear with it—but ultimately I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t let it go. So I paged on to the next image.

  It was the spiders, crawling from the hole in the wall. Goose-flesh erupted across my back. I didn’t spend long staring at the image; instead, I shrunk it down into a small window and brought up the picture the Poet had sprayed on the front of Cob Gilles’s building. It was the same scene. Or close enough. The two holes were a similar shape, and the spiders were about the right size. And while the placement of each animal wasn’t quite the same, the similarity was uncanny. My photograph and the Poet’s painting … these were two different representations of the same event. But how? According to Sabine, the painting predated my photo by at least a week.

  Maybe it’s a common occurrence, I thought. Massive spiders. Complete with human fingers. Swarming like a tide, pushing out of gaps in the city, trying to engulf and consume everything they can reach. Maybe it happens once a month. Or once a week. Or every other day.

  I grunted and paged on to the next image. It was a close-up of the spider with the human finger. It was a truly awful image—just bad photography—grainy and poorly framed. But I couldn’t ignore it, couldn’t discard it. I’ve got to post this, I told myself. If nothing else, I’ve got to give my public the finger.

  It was a bad joke, I know, but it made me smile—a goofy, half-drugged smile. But the smile died as soon as the next photograph popped into view. And suddenly the joke didn’t seem funny anymore. It seemed cruel and sinister.

  Weasel’s fingers, embedded in concrete.

  It was actually the best photograph of the bunch. It was a close-up shot, not at all cryptic or confusing, and the focus was tight. Despite the horrific nature of the subject, there was absolutely no missing what it was. It was a set of fingers trapped in solid concrete. Period. End of paragraph. And I liked the lighting. I liked the look of Weasel’s flesh against the gray concrete. The background was bright, lit by the camera’s flash, but shadows sprouted from the base of each finger, traveling across the floor and landing on the wall. The foreground was dark and desolate; the toe of Taylor’s boot was visible frame right. Looking at it now, I was surprised I was able to get such perfect focus in such a dark environment. It’s a fast lens, I thought. Good glass.

  I closed my eyes and paged forward to the last image.

  It was the picture Taylor had taken, the two of us in bed with Danny. How did it get here, at the end? I wondered. I must have been rearranging during my first pass through the photographs. I must have put it here. But was it random chance, or was I trying to tell myself something? Was I trying to end on a high note, trying to remind myself of the good that still remained here inside the city?

  The picture was out of focus and pretty much incomprehensible. Danny’s head in my lap, but you really couldn’t make that out. It was just a blur of blue denim, dark hair, and warm skin.

  I didn’t know how to feel about the picture. Conflicted, I guess. Certainly, there was a warmth and comfort in it. This was the closest I’d ever come to Taylor, but reaching up and feeling her breast, it was also the moment that the line between us had been drawn. I could come this close, maybe, but not an inch closer. And looking back, it was proof that she had feelings for me, genuine feelings, just like the ones I had for her. No matter how damaged those feelings were, how damaged she was.

  I saved the seven images to an empty folder, then created a new text document and put together my post. It was a very simple post, just html tags for each picture, one after another: dinner table, face between the walls, real spiders, spray-paint spiders, close-up of spider, and then, in closing, Weasel’s fingers. I considered including the picture of Danny and me but decided against it; even blurred and almost incomprehensible, it was too revealing.

  My hands hovered over the keyboard for a couple of minutes as I considered captions. But what could I say, really? This is true, this is real, this is what the city is? It wouldn’t do any good. They would believe me or they wouldn’t. And I don’t think I really cared anymore.

  I’d been in the city for just under a week now, but I was already having a hard time imagining the world outside its borders. Were there people out there, still going about their daily lives? Were they sitting in front of their computer screens, looking at my pictures and daydreaming about Spokane, about the strange and the forbidden and the horribly, horribly romantic? Were there college classes going on right now? Was there nightly television and pizza delivery? Was there bus service and traffic jams and drive-through windows? Was there a government out there, looking out for the public good?

  And was there a physics? Was there a reality? Was there comfort and warmth and happiness?

  I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell. It just didn’t seem real anymore.

  I saved my work and shut down the computer. Then I curled up on the floor, rested my head on my backpack, and let the steady in and out of Floyd’s breath lull me to sleep.

  My second post on the Spokane message board was the one that started attracting media attention. I’m not sure I would have launched it out into the world if I could have foreseen the response, or, more accurately, if I could have foreseen my reaction to the response.

  When I first got into the city, of course, I wouldn’t have hesitated. Not for a moment. That was the whole point, after all: getting a
ttention. Attention for me and my photography. But by the time I heard—by late November, when Danny brought me that first article from the Seattle Times—I doubt I would have bothered.

  The person who had taken those photographs, who had composed that post, had in the intervening weeks become someone completely different. He’d packed up his cameras and gone to ground. And he just didn’t give a shit anymore.

  The article was mostly speculation. It recounted the standard government lines—about environmental contamination and tainted topsoil, carcinogenic buildings and ongoing threats to the public’s health and well-being, and, as always, the need for further study—but it did ask some important questions.

  What exactly is the threat, and why is cleanup taking so long?

  Is the river tainted, and do the towns downstream need to worry?

  Is it in the air?

  And where exactly did this threat come from, and why is there such a need for secrecy and security?

  In response, the article quoted an unnamed army general:

  “First and foremost, we need to assure the people that there is absolutely no need for panic or distress. We have the Spokane situation well in hand. And while we can’t go into the specifics of the threat for fear of jeopardizing ongoing investigations and research, we can tell you that we know exactly what’s going on. We are still testing—under the purview of the EPA and with the assistance of some of the nation’s greatest environmental scientists—in order to ensure that every last molecule of contamination has been removed from this great city. The safety of the good people of Spokane is our primary concern, and we are not going to rush our efforts, not when we have the health and happiness of our citizens on the line. Only when every last one of our concerns has been addressed—only then, and not one second sooner—will we consider reopening the city to residents. In the meantime, the good people of Spokane have been well compensated for their inconvenience.”