Bad Glass

by Richard E. Gropp

  “We’ll find our way out, get back to the house.”

  “I mean Spokane,” she replied, her voice flat, lifeless. “I can’t do this.” She nodded toward the window. “I can’t do that anymore.”

  I nodded. And I didn’t ask any questions. I didn’t ask about her father, her mother, her obligations; I didn’t ask about the things that had been keeping her here. I didn’t want to change her mind.

  “We’ll go,” I said. “We’ll go to California … or Seattle, or Olympia, if you like. We can find Terry, maybe help him with his book.”

  She nodded.

  “You, too, Floyd,” I added. “We’ll get out of here. It’ll get better. We’ll go far, far away.”

  He turned his head and stared at me. There was a distance there, in his eyes. It seemed like he was already far, far away. And looking back at me through a veil.

  Photograph. Undated. Spokane from above:

  The city is in ruins beneath a bloodred sky.

  The roof curves in an arc at the bottom of the frame, the wide angle distorting the foreground. Down below, there are no neat, rectangular blocks, no hint of city planning, no remnant of order. Buildings have collapsed across streets, and streets have collapsed into rubble.

  The city has lost its shape.

  The view is from at least ten stories up, peering northeast across the remains of I-90. There are vehicles in the ruins, where an army checkpoint has been—far to the left, at the edge of the city. A park to the north is smoldering in the distance, sending up plumes of dark smoke—ethereal fingers, trying to puncture the liquid red sky. There isn’t even a hint of vegetation there, just charred black coal.

  Two blocks north of the interstate, a wide valley of destruction has been gouged into the gray landscape, revealing a long trough of darkened earth. At the end of this valley, on the right-hand side of the frame, is a downed jetliner, dented, its wings torn free and left littered in its wake. The crash is old. It doesn’t smolder, and there are no signs of life—no emergency vehicles, nothing but rubble. Its nosepiece is angled up toward the heavens.

  There are no signs of life anywhere in the photograph. Nothing but a shapeless city and a bloodred sky.

  Floyd led the way up to the roof. I wanted to find a different stairwell on the fifth floor, a different route to the street, but he was insistent. He had an energy that surprised me; it seemed out of keeping with his earlier mood.

  “I want to see the city,” he said, “from up high.” Then he smiled. It was an odd smile. Delirious. It didn’t touch his eyes. “You can take pictures.”

  Taylor looked reluctant.

  “There’ll probably be another stairwell up there,” I offered, “on the other side of the building. Or maybe a fire escape. You saw the graffiti. Up is out.”

  Taylor still looked reluctant, but she nodded. And I got the sense that this was a big deal for her. She was putting herself in my hands. She was counting on me to get her out.

  Back in the stairwell, we passed the doorways to the sixth, seventh, eighth, ninth, tenth, and eleventh floors. It kept getting brighter as we climbed higher and higher. Up at the top, the door to the roof was chocked open with a cinder block brick. A simple iconic eye had been spray-painted on the door’s surface.

  The view from the roof was amazing.

  “When did that happen?” Taylor asked as we approached the northern edge of the building. There was a jetliner down in the middle of the city. A big one. The blocks immediately north of I-90 had been reduced to rubble.

  “It didn’t,” I said. “It never happened.”

  Riverfront Park was smoldering on the horizon. It looked like it had been burning for quite some time. Taylor followed my eyes. “We were just there,” she said, her voice hushed in reverent wonder.

  I shook my head. “Not there. Someplace else.” Sometime else, I thought.

  I raised the camera to my eye, cranked the lens as wide as it would go, and took a handful of pictures, rotating between shots to catch the full panoramic view. When I was done, I lowered the camera and we just stood there, staring out across the horrible landscape.

  “Hey, guys. Check it out.”

  We turned and saw Floyd standing twenty feet back, next to the stairwell door. He rocked back on his heels and flashed us a brilliant smile. Then he stuck out his tongue, raised forked fingers to the sky, and started running toward the eastern edge of the building.

  I didn’t move. Taylor didn’t move. We just watched.

  Floyd took off a couple of feet from the roof’s edge. He reached down, grabbed an invisible skateboard, and ollied into the void, lifting his feet to the side as he dropped out of sight.

  He didn’t make a sound. He just disappeared beneath the ledge. And was gone.

  After a stunned moment, I managed to break my paralysis and follow him to the edge. He’d already finished falling by the time I got there. I could barely make out his remains down in the rubbled street.

  A rag doll, twisted and broken.

  Not Floyd—not anymore. Just ravaged meat. Nothing but an insensate piece of the landscape.

  Photograph. Undated. Taylor in the boardroom:

  A young woman. Her face is center frame, bright and luminous, tinted pale red. Her eyes are dark and focused elsewhere, on some point far behind the camera. Her skin is on the dark side of Caucasian, vaguely Indian.

  She is frozen in place about ten feet away, next to an empty chair in the middle of a deserted boardroom. The chair is magnificent—a cushioned black leather throne, empty. There are three other chairs in view, all empty, including one that’s been spilled onto its back. She is striding forward, caught with her arm swinging out, toward the camera.

  There is a table on the right-hand side of the frame. It is smooth, black, and polished to a gleam. It stretches to the far end of the room, where a window dominates the background. The window is filled with red—the shape of clouds caught in various shades of crimson, pink, and dark, dark oxblood.

  The woman is dirty, but beautiful.

  The room is abandoned, but beautiful.

  Then it was just the two of us.

  Taylor didn’t look over the edge. She remained where she stood, her eyes wide, staring off into space. When I looked back at her, her lips parted slightly and she shook her head. A violent denial: No, that didn’t happen. No, Floyd’s fine, just fine.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “Let’s get out of here.”

  I wanted to move before the horror of what we’d just seen could really sink in, before it became real. For both of us. If I paused, if I gave us time to think, I was afraid we’d never be able to move again, afraid it would send us gibbering into complete surrender. And they’d find us—who, I don’t know—sitting here cross-legged in the middle of the roof. Skeletons, Taylor and me, eons dead and gone, frozen in place by the horror, the loss, the confusion.

  Mourning the death of the universe. A universe broken, like Floyd, eleven floors down.

  “We should have stopped him,” Taylor said. “We should have seen it coming … just like with Charlie.”

  I reached for her, and she reached for me. She grasped my hand tightly, and I led her across the roof in a quick trot.

  We found a second staircase on the far side of the building. The door was propped open with another cinder block brick, and there was another eye painted on its metal surface. But this eye was different from the first: this eye was closed, eyelashes hanging down from the shut lid like a line of commas.

  I pulled Taylor through the door and started scrambling down the stairs. We got a single floor down before we found our way blocked. The concrete steps beneath the top-floor landing had fallen away, clogging the shaft ten feet down. I was in such a rush, I would have fallen into the gap if Taylor hadn’t grabbed my shoulder and pulled me to a stop. The space was illuminated by light from the open doorway above our heads, but there was absolutely no indication of what had caused the collapse. Time, maybe. Or poor construction.

  �
��What now?” Taylor asked in a trembling whisper.

  I shook my head and pushed my way through the door at our side.

  I had to find another way down.

  Back to the other stairwell, maybe. A bedsheet rope through a window on the fifth floor. Anything to get us out of here, anything to get us back down to the street and back home.

  I was expecting more hospital rooms up here on the top floor—gurneys and crash carts, wheelchairs and nurses’ stations—but the hallway on the other side of the door was something different. Skylights illuminated its length. It was long and carpeted—speckled gray—and it no longer smelled anything like a hospital. It was in good repair. The walls were paneled wood, decorated with respectfully spaced pieces of framed art. Abstract paintings in red and gray and black, violent slashes and speckles of pigment.

  There were doors on the right-hand side of the corridor. All of them were closed except for one, far down its length. Light spilled from this distant portal, tinting the carpet a pinkish gray. I tried the nearest door and found it locked.

  There was nothing for us here. Nothing but the door in the distance. And the promise of a stairwell, maybe, back on the other side of the building.

  Taylor caught my hand, and I met her eyes. She nodded, urging me on. We started down the corridor, breaking into a quick jog.

  The walls sped past: wood paneling, shut doors, abstract art. I could feel my eyes going wide with adrenaline-fueled frustration. I just wanted this over—the corridor, the hospital, the city. Everything. There was nothing here but confusion and pain. And friends—run through with limbs, consumed by wolves, eaten by ghosts, pushed over the edge by memory and guilt. I wanted none of it. I was done.

  No documenting. No shutter flash in the dark. No eye. No unblinking “truth.”

  I would have kept running, but Taylor pulled me to a stop. I was panting loudly. She was crying, tears streaming down her cheeks as she doubled over, trying to catch her breath in the middle of the carpeted hallway.

  The open door was at our side.

  We were here. We’d reached the boardroom.

  It was a long room, and it ended in a wall of picture windows. There was a table stretching nearly its entire length—sturdy hard wood, black as night. In the ways of corporate excess, I’m sure the table had cost more than my entire education.

  The light was pink, but the view beyond the window was red.

  There were large chairs along both sides of the table, but they were all empty. Twenty chairs. I counted them. One of the chairs had been overturned, as if someone had stood up too fast, knocking it to the floor. There were pieces of paper scattered across the table, stacks in front of each skewed chair. I stepped up to the table and passed my hand over the nearest pile. There was nothing printed there. Just blank sheets of paper: white, expressionless.

  Is this Cob Gilles’s boardroom? I wondered. Is this what he found when he and the Poet climbed up from the underworld? He’d described a bright golden light and people seated at every chair … waiting. Waiting for something to happen.

  Gone now. The room was empty, abandoned.

  I glanced back at Taylor. She was standing in the doorway. She looked confused.

  “I thought …” she said, trailing off for a long moment. “I thought I heard …” And then nothing. Just more confusion on her face.

  She stepped into the room and started toward the window, trailing her hand along the back of the empty chairs.

  I turned and noticed graffiti on the wall, just inside the door:

  I was here

  all alone.

  The Poet. Her words, skewed diagonally across the wall. I couldn’t tell if it was one thought or two unrelated statements. For some reason, it didn’t seem right here, her words. The sentiment seemed unutterably depressing, and I wanted to erase it. I looked around for something to gouge it from the wall, but there was nothing. Just an empty boardroom.

  Taylor was standing at the window now. Her hands were raised up at her sides, pressed flat against the glass. She was resting her head there, her forehead pressed against its surface. As I watched, her shoulders dropped, and her entire frame suddenly slumped down.

  It was a pose of pure exhaustion. Sudden surrender, spelled out in a single moment.

  Without thought, I lifted the camera to my eye and took a picture.

  I was a hypocrite. And I knew it. No matter what I told myself, no matter how many times I tried to give it up, the instinct would always be there—the instinct to raise the camera and take the shot.

  “There’s nothing out there,” Taylor said, still facing the city on the other side of the window. “I can’t see a thing.”

  She was silent for a time. I took another picture of her back, her slumped shoulders.

  “Nothing,” she repeated, “and there’s nothing in here. Just red destruction every way we look. And it’ll be the same, eventually, outside the city. There’s no running from this. No escape.” She paused. “How do I know that?” she asked, sounding genuinely confused.

  Then she turned and started toward me. Through the camera’s viewfinder, she looked tiny, impossibly far away. I took one more picture and lowered the camera to my chest.

  And she kept coming.

  “Hold me, Dean,” she said. She stepped right up against my body, lowering her head against my shoulder.

  Surprised, I closed my arms around her back. She moved even closer, as close to me as she could get, with the camera still between us. I stepped away for a moment and spun the Canon around my neck, so that it was resting against my back and there was nothing at all separating our bodies. And I pulled her tight. I could feel her shivering against me, and she grasped me even harder, seeking comfort, seeking warmth. Seeking me.

  She tilted her head back, offering me her lips.

  And I kissed her.

  This was the closest we ever got—this moment—our lips locked, our bodies pressed together—or no, no, it wasn’t. And for a time everything was right. I forgot about the city. I forgot about Weasel and Sabine and Amanda and Mac and Danny and Charlie and Floyd. I forgot about the world crumbling down around us, the slowing speed of light, the mushrooms and the spores—everything. It was just the two of us. And nothing else existed. We formed our own universe, and here, in our universe, everything made sense.

  Then she tried to pull back.

  And she couldn’t.

  She made a sound deep in her throat, and I felt pressure pulling my lips away from my teeth. And then she was closer, getting closer. Pressure against my chin, then she was pulling back again; I could feel it in the bones of my jaw. Her hands pulled away from my back, and she gripped my shoulders, her fingers digging in, hard, scared. And this time she didn’t pull away. I opened my eyes and stared deep into hers.

  They were wide with terror.

  I lifted my hands to the sides of our kiss. The flesh there was joined, merged together. Our lips were gone. My stubbled cheeks ended flush against her smooth flesh. And her eyes were close to mine, getting closer. I grabbed her hips and tried to push her away, but we didn’t part. There was pressure against my jaw. And now my nose, next to hers, against—then inside—her cheekbone. I tried to move my hands up, but they stayed at her hips, through her clothes. And then she was closer. And I couldn’t see. My eyes. Her eyes.

  And then even closer.

  I had an itch behind my eyes, inside my brain. And then a taste, but I couldn’t move my tongue. Copper wool and blood.

  And then

  Taylor. Breast, chest, and I was … I was … Taylor’s fear, pushing back, shivering, claustrophobic, pulling back. Taylor’s fear. Mine. God, pulling back, please, please, God, where, my, please, please, my, Taylor, my head …

  And then down to the floor.

  And my head.

  And the floor

  And the city

  And me

  And Taylor

  Together. And together. And together.

  There was darkness.
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br />   And then we were back.

  We woke up in Riverfront Park, on the side of a hill, above the mouth of the wolves’ tunnel. It was a bright morning out—chilly, but the whole world was bathed in golden sunlight. The grass around us sparkled. My face was damp with dew.

  I sat up and saw Taylor standing at the crest of the hill. She had her back toward me, looking out over the city. The city had once again reverted to its normal state, abandoned but not destroyed, neglected but not yet rubble.

  It was just the two of us. Everyone else was gone.

  “Taylor,” I said. She didn’t respond.

  I stood up and started toward her. I rounded her side and saw her hands up against her face. She had wide, shell-shocked eyes. She glimpsed me from behind her fingers, then shook her head and once again turned away. She was remembering, I knew, the horror of our faces crushed together. The horror of that dissolution.

  I stood there for a time, watching her—Taylor, in the early-morning light—watching as she tried to hide behind her hands.

  Then I raised my fingers to my face and touched my lips.

  Nothing.

  I’m sitting at a desk in a fifth-floor apartment, just south of the river. Near the Homestead. Near the Homestead’s abandoned husk.

  I can see the freeway from my window. From this distance, it’s just a sliver, a line etched across the buildings to the south. The army’s cordon is out there somewhere, not too far west.

  We moved here a couple of days after our trip into the tunnels.

  Empty, the house was just too big.

  And the rooms—Floyd’s, Charlie’s, Devon’s, Sabine’s, Amanda and Mac’s—were filled with too many ownerless possessions.

  I left a note on the front door and another on the dining-room table, beneath a half-empty bottle of gin. Saying where we were going. In case anyone came looking, in case anyone came back. That was over a month ago.