Bad Glass

by Richard E. Gropp

  When asked about a class-action lawsuit filed by cancer victims and surviving family members, the commander general replied, “No comment.”

  Up until this point, the article seemed like a standard-issue snow job—the government shoveling out the shit and the media repeating it ad nauseam. But in the last paragraphs, the writer gave voice to several of the conspiracy theories that had been floating around since day one. Was Spokane the site of a bio-weapon experiment gone awry? Was it ground zero for a terror attack, something the government felt compelled to hide?

  Or was it something stranger?

  Perhaps hoping to stoke controversy or, more likely, trying to end on a note of humor, the newspaper went on to print two of my photographs: the face between the wall and the spider with the human finger. The low-res black-and-white reproductions were almost incomprehensible, but the writer went on to describe them: “… what appears to be a disembodied human face and a spider with a human finger in place of one of its legs. Purported to have been smuggled out of Spokane, these pictures recently appeared on the-missing-city.com, an Internet message board devoted to Spokane-related speculation. The photographer is currently unknown.”

  There wasn’t any commentary on the photos, but the writer’s message, in including them, seemed clear to me. It was a threat, a warning.

  Without official word from the government—without comprehensive explanation and media oversight—the public would go about creating its own crazy theories, filling the giant vacuum left by the government’s bloodless and insincere “no comment”s. Including my pictures in the article … this was just a taste of things to come. Without the truth, the media would be stuck publishing more and more ridiculous speculation—and there was some truly strange speculation floating around out there, some downright sinister and paranoid stuff. With my pictures, it seemed like the writer was trying to force the government’s hand, trying to force it—in the face of panic and confusion—to respond with information and truth.

  But, I wondered when I first read that article, what happens when the truth rivals even the craziest Internet rambling? In that case, what could the government actually share?

  And what does it take to drive a country insane?

  Photograph. October 23, 08:45 A.M. Entryway:

  The house has been abandoned. The front door stands open. There are signs of forced entry here—cracked wood around a canted doorknob. The photo frames the gaping maw, a large rectangle around a smaller nested frame. The welcome mat is cut in two by the image’s edge. “WELCOME.”

  A wedge of sunlight illuminates a Persian rug on the other side of the doorway—an indistinguishable black and red scene spread across the white tile floor. Windblown leaves and pieces of junk mail form patterns on the tile and on the rug, describing eddies and gusts, describing neglect and desolation. It is a language punctuated by streaks and blobs of mud.

  In the background, the house disappears into depthless gloom, hidden away from the sun’s feeble reach. There’s a portico back there, leading toward the rear of the house, and the dim outline of a staircase—graduated shades of gray reaching up toward the top of the frame.

  There’s a landing at the top of the stairs. And in the corner, away from the ledge: two pinpricks of light, hidden in the dark shadows. Lidded slits, reflecting a glimmer of electric red. A shiny metallic pink.

  Eyes. Animal eyes. Peering down at the camera. Peering down at the photographer.

  There was light coming through the window when Danny woke me up.

  “Rise and shine,” he said. “The world can’t turn without you.” He had a box of doughnuts in one hand and a thermos of coffee in the other.

  “What the hell happened?” he asked, smiling, bemused. He crouched down next to me and handed me the thermos. “Charlie’s downstairs on the sofa, you and Floyd are up here having a sleepover, and no one else is home. Taylor’s gone.”

  I ignored the question for a moment, instead focusing on the thermos. As soon as I got the cap off, my stomach started to growl, the smell of the coffee hitting me hard. When was the last time I ate? I wondered. Yesterday morning? I poured steaming coffee into the thermos lid, bolted it down, and then turned my attention to the doughnuts.

  “What happened?” I finally said, echoing Danny’s question as I fumbled with the box. I had a hard time forming the words. I was tired, and the muscles in my jaw were tense and cramped. “Fuck if I know. The city happened. Weasel happened … I happened.”

  Danny nodded and didn’t press me for details. He’d been in the city long enough to understand; there was no point in explaining the unexplainable. He watched as I bolted down a couple of doughnuts.

  “How’s your hand?” he asked as soon as I started to slow down.

  I paused, my eyes darting down to my bandaged palm. My hand! It had completely slipped my mind.

  When was the last time I’d taken the antibiotics? I felt a rush of panic and immediately grabbed for my backpack. I found Mama Cass’s pills and swallowed a double dose. Then I started to unwrap the dirty gauze. I took it slow, my fingers shaking. I was afraid of what I might find.

  What I found, however, was a pleasant surprise. The infection was gone. Completely gone. Underneath the bandage, which was stained a disgusting phlegmy yellow, there was nothing but a hardened scab. The surrounding skin was pale white, without even a hint of red. And even the gamy, rotten smell was gone.

  I held up the hand, and Danny nodded his approval.

  “And how’s he doing?” Danny asked, turning his attention to Floyd. I turned toward the bed, and, as if feeling the weight of our eyes, Floyd let out a pathetic groan and rolled toward the window. His hand crept up and covered his eyes. “Did our boy have a rough night?”

  “Yeah. He overdid it on the oxycodone.”

  “Fucking lightweight,” Danny said with a smile. The smile didn’t last long. He turned back toward me, and his expression collapsed into serious lines. “And what about Taylor?” he asked, his voice hushed, concerned. “She’s usually here this early. I brought her some breakfast.”

  I shrugged, dejected. “I don’t know. Yesterday … she just ran away from me. We found Weasel—” I didn’t want to describe it. I didn’t want to tell Danny about the fingers in the floor. “It’s just … Weasel’s gone, and she freaked out. She ran away. And I don’t know where she went.”

  “Did you try her parents’ house?”

  “What?”

  “Did you try her parents’ house?” he repeated, more slowly this time, as if my incomprehension were the result of poor enunciation. “She goes there a lot. She visits them almost every morning.”

  “Her parents are here? In Spokane?” I was shocked. This information … it seemed ridiculous to me, utterly strange and unlikely.

  Danny nodded, his eyes suddenly going wide. “I guess she doesn’t talk about them too much, but I assumed …” He paused. “I’m just surprised she didn’t tell you. She likes you, man. She likes you a lot.”

  What had she told me about her parents? I tried to remember.

  She’d said that they had disappeared. She’d said that they were gone.

  “Where do they live?” I asked. “How do I get there?”

  Danny watched me for a second. He was wearing an expression of concern, and for a moment I didn’t think he was going to talk. Why? Is it something he sees? I wondered. Something written across my face? Something that scares him?

  Then Danny pulled out a small pad of paper and started drawing me a map.

  It was gray out on the streets—still early morning, but you really couldn’t tell. Under that low, gray ceiling, it could have been morning, noon, or almost night. The clouds could have been ready to spit out rain or snow or just break apart and let the sun shine in.

  It was waiting-room weather. Purgatory weather.

  I left Danny behind with Floyd and my computer. Charlie had shown him how to transfer outgoing information onto his thumb drive, and he agreed to upload my latest pos
t. He wasn’t too happy about it, though. He had a couple of hours away from the courthouse and didn’t want to spend them baby-sitting Floyd and mucking around with my computer. He wanted to go with me to find Taylor. He wanted to make sure she was okay.

  But I didn’t want that. I didn’t want him coming along.

  And I couldn’t even give him a valid reason why. I just told him no. Sorry—really, I’m sorry—but no.

  Danny’s map took me east on Mission, then south toward I-90. I stayed off the main road as I rounded the university, instead crossing to the residential street one block to the east. I probably didn’t need to bother. There wasn’t a soul around. The only sound in the still air was the rasp of my breath and the sharp echoes of my footsteps.

  I took pictures of the abandoned houses as I walked. Most still looked pretty good—it hadn’t been that long, after all—but they all showed signs of neglect and abuse. In the first month after the evacuation, the yards had sprouted out of control, crowding sidewalks and invading lawns, and then they’d died. The streets and sidewalks were plastered with wet leaves, and there were broken windows up and down the street. A couple of the front doors hung wide open.

  I approached one of the houses and took a picture of its shattered door; there was a splintered dent to the left of the knob where a boot had staved it in. Looters, scavenging for food or money, or maybe just looking for a warm place to stay. Since that act of violence—maybe a month ago, maybe more—the world had slowly started to make its way into the house. I crouched just outside the door and took pictures of the entryway. Dead leaves and dirt littered a nice Persian rug. Lumps of wet, shapeless paper—once-glossy magazines, a stamped handwritten letter—adhered to the tiled floor. There was a whiff of mold in the air and hard-water stains on the dingy beige walls.

  I took a half dozen photos before I noticed the line of muddy paw prints stretching from the front door to the rear of the house. The prints were large, and as soon as I noticed them, I thought I caught a hint of animal musk in the air. It was the barest tickle at the back of my nose—probably just my imagination, really, nothing more—but it was enough to transport me back to the tunnel in the park. And once again I was there, following Mac down into the dark, searching for him as he faded away, as he found entry into Amanda’s world. A world of dogs and wolves. A world of savage eyes and teeth and blood and flesh.

  I recoiled from the entryway and retreated back to the middle of the road.

  After that, I didn’t linger. I stopped taking pictures and instead just concentrated on covering ground.

  There was graffiti on a building near the 290 bridge, clearly visible from the middle of its span: overlapping green and black lines scrawled across white stucco.

  It was the Poet’s work. I recognized the writing.

  Just one sentence, but it left me feeling perplexed and just a little dizzy:

  I THOUGHT WE WERE FALLING, NOT FLYING.

  I took a couple of pictures and moved on.

  Danny’s map was surprisingly precise. It ended in a neat series of squares sketched out along Second Avenue, filling the space between Pittsburg and Magnolia Streets. There was a circle around the middle square and an arrow pointing to a phrase at the edge of the piece of paper: “blue tarp on roof.”

  I rounded the corner and immediately spotted the house with the tarp. It wasn’t a very nice neighborhood, sitting right there at the edge of I-90, but the blue-topped house looked well cared for. It was boxy and small: two stories tall, but the second floor couldn’t have been much more than a single slant-ceilinged room. None of the windows were broken, and the hedges at the yard’s perimeter looked as if they’d been trimmed recently. The tarp on the roof looked fairly new as well, bright blue and still perfectly placed, despite the weeks of wind and rain and snow. There was absolutely no way it predated the evacuation.

  I paused and turned a full circle before approaching the house. The street was still and silent. There were no people, no animals. The nearby stretch of I-90 was deserted as well, the western roadblock miles away, the military occupied elsewhere.

  I was alone here, near the center of the city, and it was all very … calming.

  This was a feeling I’d been having for a while now, something I’d been circling around, narrowing in on, as I walked the empty streets and thought about the empty city. Away from the eyes of people, I could do anything and it really wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t change the world. It wouldn’t change a single mind.

  And that was very liberating. For so long, I’d been trying to impress others. I’d been trying to impress my father, my peers, the girls in my life, the professors at school. And then there was the whole photography thing, nothing but a desperate attempt to impress the whole world.

  But here I’d found something different, something new. I’d found comfort in not making an impression, jumping into the ocean and not making a splash, not leaving a single ripple.

  I can’t imagine that this was a very healthy thought—it was the height of solipsism, after all—but it was calming. And there was still Taylor. I still wanted to make an impression with her. With her, I wanted to make a big-ass splash.

  I stayed to the side of the house as I approached, rounding a chest-high hedge and ducking beneath the nearest window. I raised my head and looked in through the slats of a venetian blind. The front living room was empty. There was a sofa and an armchair arrayed around an unlit fireplace, and an end table supported a stack of magazines at its side. I continued toward the back of the house, stopping in front of a kitchen window. Someone left the room just as I raised my head to look in. I only caught a brief moment of dark-clad back as he or she turned the corner into a hallway on its far side. The person was nothing more than a blur of motion in the doorway; I couldn’t tell if it was Taylor or one of her parents.

  I continued on. There was a screen door at the rear of the house, hidden inside a tiny garden. The garden was well maintained but not very lush. Slumbering for the winter. I carefully picked my way through the garden and glanced in through the back door window.

  There was a narrow hallway on the other side of the door, leading all the way to the front of the house. Taylor was standing in its center, facing away from me. There was a blanket strung across the corridor at about breast height—a makeshift clothesline barrier, partitioning the hallway into a number of smaller spaces—and she was peering over its edge, down toward the floor on the far side. She was talking to somebody, somebody hidden out of sight, and gesturing with both hands. I couldn’t make out most of what she was saying. Only a couple of her words, raised loud, made it through the doorway: “not staying,” “not safe,” and a single, pleading “please.”

  There was an answering voice from the person on the other side of the blanket, but it was low and calm, and I couldn’t make out a single word.

  It was strange, this scene, and I couldn’t tell what was going on. Who was she talking to? One of her parents? And why here, in the middle of the hallway? And what was up with the partition?

  I held my breath and tried to concentrate on the muffled sound of Taylor’s voice, trying to pick meaning out of that muted cadence. But there was nothing there, just the dull rumble of argumentative voices, or, rather, the rumble of one argumentative voice set against the reassuring calm of a patient and soothing one. This didn’t go on for too long. After a couple of minutes, the conversation ceased, and Taylor was left standing there, vibrating with mute energy. Then, in a gesture of complete frustration, she pulled the blanket aside and stormed toward the front of the house.

  As she made her way to the front door, pushing aside a second barrier, the blanket closest to me slipped from its clothesline and fell to the floor, spilling with a quick, fluid motion. And what it revealed … well, I actually jumped at the sight, and my hands, pressed flat against the screen door, bounced wildly off the metal barrier.

  It was a man, merged with the hardwood floor. The top half of his body looked perfectly normal: a Midd
le Eastern man dressed in a white button-down shirt. But the shirt stopped midbelly, at the floor, and the bottom half of his body was gone. His hands moved against the floor and walls, slow, languid, and completely insensate. His head lolled, and a line of spittle spilled from his lower lip. I couldn’t see his eyes—his head was moving, and he was over a dozen feet away—but I could imagine them rolled back inside his skull.

  There was a woman seated next to the man’s stunted body, a white woman in her fifties, propped up in a comfortable nest of pillows. Taylor’s mother? She jumped at the sound of my hands bouncing off the screen door, and a startled cry escaped her throat. Her eyes widened when she saw me standing at the window, looking in. With one hand, she reached out and grabbed the man’s shoulder comfortingly; the other started scrambling toward the blanket on the floor, trying to reassemble her makeshift blind.

  “Taylor!” she cried. “Taylor!” Now the woman’s voice was loud enough for me to hear, frantic and shrill and filled with a primal, instinctual fear. “What is this? What’s going on?”

  I looked up and saw Taylor towering over her parents. Her eyes were locked on me, narrowed and filled with a cold, biting anger. She wasn’t moving. My presence here had frozen her solid.