Bad Glass

by Richard E. Gropp

  Her mother continued to struggle with the blanket, trying desperately to throw it up and over the clothesline. She worked one-handed, refusing to release her grip on her husband. “Help,” she said, turning to look back at Taylor. “Please, Taylor, for the love of God, help!” Her words came out frantic and disjointed. There were tears running down her cheeks.

  Finally, Taylor stepped forward and put the blanket back in place, carefully draping it over the clothesline. Once it was back up—and her parents hidden from view—Taylor pointed at me and gestured me away from the window. It was an angry, dismissive shooing gesture. And at that moment, I swear, there was genuine hate in her eyes. At that moment, I think she couldn’t fucking stand me.

  I backed away, horrified.

  What had I done?

  I sat down in the dirt and waited for Taylor to appear. There was a frigid wind blowing down from the north, and the clouds were getting darker overhead, a dense slate-gray weight perched above the city. It felt like snow.

  I didn’t know what was going to happen with Taylor. I’d looked in on something private here, a secret, and didn’t know how she was going to react.

  Her parents. Her father, melted into the floor, consumed by the city.

  I thought it was unheard of—this phenomenon—I thought it was something that I alone had been carrying around. I thought it was mine. But Taylor had seen Weasel; she’d seen his fingers. She was a part of it now. I’d infected her.

  Maybe it would be for the best if she pushed me away. Maybe I was a cancer that needed to be excised from her life.

  “What the fuck are you doing here?” she asked, rounding the corner of the house. She stopped on the other side of the yard, crossing her arms and leaning back against the wall. “Did you follow me? Did you fucking follow me?”

  “Danny told me about the house, your parents’ house. I was worried about you. You ran away … after Weasel. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  “And how the fuck did Danny know? I didn’t tell him. Has he been following me?” These words brought a sour look to her face, a look of wounded betrayal. “Are there no fucking secrets around here? No privacy?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know, but I didn’t mean—” I struggled for a moment, trying to figure out what I did mean, what I’d been hoping—or expecting—to find on the other side of her parents’ window. Finally, I managed: “I didn’t mean to scare your mom. I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’m sorry.” Taylor’s face remained impassive, set in stone. “And I’m sorry about your father.”

  There was a hint of emotion then, a slight twisting at the corner of her lips. Taylor remained still for a while. Then she pushed herself away from the wall and let out a loud sigh, her anger transitioning into a desolate sadness.

  “She won’t leave him,” she said. “My mother. She thinks he’s still in there. The sounds he makes; she thinks he’s communicating, thinks he’s saying her name. Miriam, fucking Miriam. But he’s not. It’s just stupid, senseless noise.” She clenched her arms tighter across her chest, like maybe she was just now starting to feel the cold October air. “She’s set up camp right there, next to him, and she won’t leave … Yet she won’t let me stay in the house! She wants me out of the city. She wants me gone.”

  “She loves you. She wants you to be safe.”

  Taylor clenched her body even tighter. I could see her shivering now. “I don’t see why,” she said quietly, a bitter hint of self-loathing in her voice. “She should hate me. I ruin everything I touch.”

  “That’s not true,” I said, shaking my head. “That’s just not true. I don’t know … maybe it’s me. You remember what Danny said? There were no reports of anything like this before I showed up. Nothing. Nowhere. It’s just around me—people falling through walls, losing cohesion. It’s something I brought into the city, something the city brought out of me. You just got too close … And I’m sorry for that. I’m just so, so sorry.”

  “No, Dean,” she said, her voice calm, suddenly devoid of energy. She was stating fact now; there was no room for emotion. “It’s not you; it’s not even the city. It’s me. I’m doing this. Everything around me.” Then, more quietly: “It’s what I do. People get close to me and they fall apart.”

  “That’s just not true.”

  “This happened a month ago, Dean,” she said, gesturing frantically toward the house, toward her father trapped inside. “Before you got here. We were fighting. I was yelling at him—fucking yelling—and he stepped through the fucking floor. He put his foot down, and it just didn’t stop going. And it’s not just him, Dean. I see this a lot. It’s happening all around me … You saw Weasel!”

  I stood up and started toward her, wanting to give her some type of comfort, but she held up her hands and took a step back, shaking her head violently. “Jesus Christ, Dean. No! Just stay back.” Her voice hitched, and tears started to pool in her eyes.

  “What must she think?” she whispered forlornly, staring back toward the house, toward her mother. “She knows, right? She’s got to know. But what must she think … of me?”

  I tried to give her a warm, reassuring smile. “You’ve got it wrong, Taylor. It isn’t you. I’m not sure what it is, but it isn’t you. Your mother understands that. It’s the city … it’s just the city.”

  “But how can you know that? You can’t know that. No one knows that!”

  “I do,” I said. “I just do.” I paused, remembering the man dangling from the ceiling back on my first day in the city. “I saw something like that—” I gestured toward her father. “—when you weren’t around, when Weasel stole my backpack. So it can’t be you … Hell, I thought it was me.”

  Taylor stayed silent for a handful of seconds, staring at me like she was trying to figure me out. “You’re lying,” she finally said. “You’re a lying bag of shit, and you’re just telling me what I want to hear.”

  “I may be a bag of shit,” I said. “But I’m not lying.” I took a single step forward, and this time she didn’t retreat. “I’m close to you, right? We’ve slept in the same bed. You’ve been happy with me, you’ve been mad at me. Well, I’m still here, aren’t I? I’m fine. And Danny’s fine. And Floyd and Charlie and Sabine—they’re fucked up, but they’re still fine. They’re not falling apart.” I shook my head once again. “It’s something else, Taylor, some other process. It’s got to be. And whatever you think you know, you don’t. You really don’t.”

  Taylor watched me for a moment, her face impassive, absorbing my words. Then she shook her head, refusing to believe.

  “You aren’t saying anything here, Dean. Your mouth is open, but there’s nothing coming out.”

  She turned abruptly and started back around the side of the house, heading toward Second Avenue. “Now get the fuck out of my mom’s yard, before she finds her shotgun shells.”

  I followed Taylor through the city streets. She stayed about ten feet ahead of me. Each time I tried to catch up, she put on a burst of speed, leaving me behind. She was pissed off. I couldn’t reach her.

  Her father had fallen through the floor over a month ago. She’d been living with that, bearing that responsibility. How could I prove that it wasn’t her fault?

  I can’t, I realized. Unless I somehow managed to figure out this whole thing, there was absolutely nothing I could do to convince her otherwise.

  And then—

  There was a great tearing sound in the sky just as we reached the middle of the 290 bridge. It was loud and violent, and it shook me so deeply that I nearly fell over. At first, I thought it was an earthquake, but the ground wasn’t moving. It was just a sound, so loud that it confused my senses, a physical pounding in my eardrums.

  I covered my ears with my hands and turned toward Taylor. She was doing the same thing; her hands were pressed against the sides of her head, and there was a pained, confused grimace on her face. She was looking up at the sky.

  The clouds above our heads were coming apart, like eddies of water spilling
downhill. It couldn’t have been a wind in the upper atmosphere; it was moving too fast, fleeing a point in the sky somewhere over the middle of the city. Massive dark gray thunderclouds gathering, clumping, and spilling away, all in a matter of seconds. And the sky they left behind—

  I felt my breath hitching in my throat. For a dozen seconds, I couldn’t remember how to breathe. I couldn’t remember anything but that sky. My God, that sky!

  The sky was red. Varying shades of red—a vast field of shifting density—from neon pink all the way to dark oxblood crimson. It was an unnatural paint box of color.

  The clouds were gone in a matter of seconds, leaving behind nothing but that depthless red plane. The earth-shattering sound disappeared with the clouds. It was the sound of a massive vacuum cleaner, I thought absurdly as I stared up into the crimson void. The sound of the clouds being sucked away, like a bucket of spilled sand.

  “What’s going on?” Taylor yelled, partially deafened.

  I shook my head.

  A corner of the sky lit with an electric spark of light, followed by a loud momentary crack. The sound of artillery fire or a dead tree snapping in two. It was nowhere near as loud as the original rending noise that had shaken me to my very core. This was followed by another burst of light and another crack, lighting up a different portion of the sky.

  “Is that lightning?” Taylor asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  She grabbed my hand and started pulling me down the street, west, toward the center of town. It seemed like her anger was gone. For the moment at least, it had been preempted.

  People were emerging from the buildings up and down the street. Dirty, ragged refugees, some rubbing their eyes as if just awakened from a solid sleep. They were all staring up at the sky. Mute. In shock. If they weren’t in shock, I thought, if they were capable of reacting in an appropriate, rational way, there’d be screaming and panic. Chaos and prayers and violence. The sky was bleeding, after all. Up above our heads, the sky had fallen. And this …

  This was its bloody corpse.

  “Dean!” Taylor called into my ear, startling my eyes back down to the street. She was pulling at my arm violently. I’d stopped without realizing it. “We’ve got to find out what happened. We’ve got to find somebody who knows!” I got my legs moving once again, and we continued west. Toward the courthouse, I realized, toward Danny and the military.

  We found Mama Cass at Post Street. She was sitting in a lawn chair in the middle of the road, directly in front of her restaurant. Her customers stayed back on the sidewalk, but her old Jewish cook—Hershel, I thought, remembering his name—stood at her side, his hands tucked beneath a tomato-stained apron. She had a bottle of beer dangling from one hand as she stared up at the sky. There was a bemused look on her face.

  Taylor was going to run straight past, but Mama Cass stopped us. “Where do you think you’re going?” she asked in an amused voice. “Running to the military, maybe?” Taylor pulled to a stop and turned back toward Mama Cass, pure hatred burning in her eyes. Mama Cass was watching us with a sly grin. “That won’t get you very far, darling.” She sounded drunk. Or high. Or out of her fucking mind.

  Taylor dropped my hand and looked down the length of the street, in the direction of the courthouse. For a moment, I thought she was going to sprint off without me.

  “Your friends in the military have been driving, pell-mell, up and down the street.” She pointed along the cross street, first toward the hospital, then toward the courthouse. “Their fucking Hummers—they almost ran me over. They don’t know what’s going on. They have no fucking clue. They think we’re under attack. They think that that—” She waited for a handful of heartbeats until a fresh crack rang out in the sky. “—is artillery fire. They think somebody’s lobbing shells at us.”

  “It’s got to be atmospheric,” Hershel said. For someone so old, his voice was surprisingly strong. “Vapor in the air. Colliding fronts. The red—it’s got to be refracted light bouncing off of something in the atmosphere.”

  “Red sky at night,” Mama Cass recited, nodding, but the smile on her lips suggested that she thought Hershel’s explanation was complete bullshit. “Sailor’s delight.” She raised her beer bottle to the sky, toasting the chaos, and took a long swallow.

  Taylor looked back down the street.

  “They’re not going to help you,” Mama Cass said, not even looking in Taylor’s direction. “They don’t know what’s going on. They don’t have any fucking idea. You might as well just sit back and enjoy the fireworks.”

  She gestured toward my backpack. “And you … you might want to take some pictures,” she said. “I’m sure your Internet fans would love to see what’s going on.”

  I spent a moment staring up at the bloodred sky, that violent, roiling sea above our heads. Then I shrugged off my backpack and followed her suggestion.

  A piece of paper torn from a lined notebook. Undated. Hand-printed words:

  (The piece of paper has been crumpled repeatedly. The left-hand side is a ragged tear, torn from a notebook binding. Large, shaky words cover the top part of the page—smeared pencil, inscribed by a palsied hand.

  The paper is aged and well handled. It is no longer crisp; instead, it has been transformed into a fragile cloth, by folding and refolding, by damp and greasy fingertips.

  Dingy and gray; smeared graphite. Sprinkled, dipped in water, then dried once again.

  The words are barely legible. But they are legible.)

  —there’s nothing left in me, Taylor. Not anymore.

  I’m sorry.

  I failed you. I couldn’t stop failing you.

  The sky stayed red for about twenty minutes.

  I had a hard time taking pictures of that sky. Without anything in the foreground, it looked like nothing but a red, fluid pattern, an abstract collage of crimson and pink and electric blood. Finally, I went wide-angle and focused on the eastern skyline, down the length of the street. It was a view of the city from the floor of a concrete valley, with the walls on either side reaching up (and bending out) before opening onto the wide red sky. I set the camera to burst mode and shot five frames a second until I caught a couple of frames with the lightning—or the artillery fire or whatever it was—above the left-hand line of buildings.

  After I captured that shot, I sat down on the asphalt and pretended to stare up at the sky, taking my place alongside Taylor, Mama Cass, and Hershel. But really, I had the camera down in my lap, angled up at Mama Cass as she watched the heavens. There was a childlike wonder spread across her face, and I tried to capture that expression, that joyful, rapturous euphoria, with the bright sky shining behind her. I was shooting blind, though, so I couldn’t be sure if the autofocus was locked on her or on the buildings in the background. I didn’t bother to check on the LCD screen, and after a minute, I just shut down the camera and tucked it back into my backpack.

  The street was still eerily quiet. I knew that there were people on the sidewalk behind us—I’d seen them as Taylor and I had approached—but they didn’t make a single sound.

  I reached out and took Taylor’s hand, gently, trying not to startle her. She looked down from the sky, first glancing at our joined hands and then looking up at my face. She was perplexed and overwhelmed; I could see that in her glazed eyes. I gave her a reassuring smile, and she turned back toward the heavens.

  She didn’t drop my hand, at least. For that I was grateful.

  The sky turned back to gray. The change from red to gray was slower than the change from gray to red. There was no earth-rending roar, no quick unnatural movement up in the atmosphere. The red just darkened gradually, and a new cloud front blew in from up north. It took a couple of minutes for the last of the red to disappear. Then it was just your typical overcast early-winter sky.

  The reaction to this event, this return to normality, was surprisingly subdued. Mama Cass stood up and stretched lazily. She handed her empty beer bottle to Hershel, then folded up the lawn cha
ir and tucked it under her arm. Back on the sidewalk, people looked down from the sky. They exchanged muted words and then walked away. I even saw one man yawn as if just getting up from a midafternoon nap.

  It was over. Life—this parody of life here inside the city—could resume.

  “Come back to the restaurant with me,” Mama Cass said, using her free hand to gesture toward the open storefront. She was smiling, relaxed. “I’m thinking you two can help me out with something. A delivery.”

  “What?” Taylor asked. She sounded genuinely offended. How could Mama Cass confuse their relationship so thoroughly? Why would she for one second think that Taylor would do anything to help her out?

  “Don’t play it that way, girl,” Mama Cass said. “We’re in this together, right?” She smiled. It was a staged, artificial smile, and it put the lie to her words. “Besides,” she continued, “if it bugs you so much, you can think of it as giving Terry a hand.”

  “Terry?”

  “Yeah … Terry. Your mentor. I’m running some errands for him. I’m doing him a favor.” She spit out this last word—favor—giving it barbs. Suddenly, her drugged euphoria was gone, and she was wielding nothing but venom. “I’m acting like an adult here, Taylor, and if you can’t do the same, if you can’t ditch that holier-than-thou bullshit, maybe you should just keep on running. Maybe you should get out of the way and leave the adult interactions to people who aren’t complete fucking pussies.”

  Taylor’s eyes widened with surprise, and her mouth fell open in a wordless gape. She didn’t have a reply.

  After a moment of silence, Mama Cass turned back toward me and smiled, once again picking up that relaxed, mellow attitude. “C’mon, Dean,” she said. “I’ll show you what I was thinking.” Then she headed toward her restaurant.

  It was as if the red sky hadn’t even happened.

  There was laughter in Mama Cass’s dining room. People had drifted back to their tables; they’d picked up their abandoned forks and resumed their interrupted meals. The laughter, the mindless chatter—it made me think that perhaps they’d picked up the same conversations, too. Hershel went on ahead, disappearing into the kitchen, while Mama Cass paused at a couple of tables to chat with her customers. Taylor and I stayed a couple of paces back. Taylor was stewing. Her arms were crossed, and her head was turned, refusing to even look in Mama Cass’s direction.