Bad Glass (26 page)

The left half of the frame was taken up with a single photo: an Iraqi soldier walking toward the camera. The soldier’s arms were raised, and a white scarf fluttered from his left hand. There was an automatic rifle lying in the sand at his feet. The soldier was smiling, and there were tears running down his face. He looked positively jubilant. The entire scene was bathed in warm, golden sunlight, a slice of the world dipped in amber.

Next to the picture, mounted on the right side of the frame, was an oversized gold medallion.

“This … this is a Pulitzer Prize,” I said. I wasn’t asking a question or voicing surprise. The words just fell out of my mouth, without emotion or real understanding.

Cob Gilles grunted. “Yeah, well, the photo’s a fucking joke. The guy pretty much collapsed right after I took that shot. He had a fever of 103 and a wound on his leg that was going gangrenous. He was mewling in pain as he walked—just, just fucking mewling, like a pistol-whipped kitten. And that expression in the
picture? I swear to God, it was never there. It must have been a freak twist of the mouth in between sobs of pain.”

He grabbed the photo from my hands and tossed it to the floor, spinning it back toward the other framed photographs. There was a loud
crash
as it hit the wall.

“I was so proud of that shot. So fucking proud! And it wasn’t even real.” He gestured toward the shattered frame. “That’s not what was going on over there, in the desert. It was a fluke. Nothing more.”

“Does it matter?” I asked. “You got the shot. You were in the right place at the right time. The soldier’s expression was there, and you caught it. And the emotion … it resonates. So what if it was a fluke?”

“You
are
a reminder,” Cob Gilles said with a smile. “You’re a fucking blast from my past. I thought the exact same thing back then.” He stuck out his thumb, once again gesturing toward the broken frame. “I thought: if you click the shutter enough, if you burn through enough film, you’ll eventually get a shot. Not
the
shot, mind you, just
a
shot. And that’s photography: a fluke occurrence, something absolutely unforeseen. The collision between chance, preparation, and time. And it doesn’t even matter what it is as long as it looks good.

“But it’s not true. It’s just not true. There are lies to every image. And the things you choose to show, the things you keep … they do much more than just illustrate. They change things. They alter opinion and mood. They change
minds
. And not in an objective, reasoned way, but deep down, on a powerful, instinctive level.” He let out a tired little chuckle, very cold, very bitter. “And you lie with pictures just like you lie with words. You can’t help it, you can’t control it.

“And I’m not just talking about news photography, about subjects steeped in politics and scandal. I’m talking about a sly smile on your lover’s lips. I’m talking about the expression on your child’s face.” He closed his eyes, and his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, making it look like he was trying to swallow something,
like he was choking down a rough ball of emotion. “All of that stuff turns dark. Through bad glass, it all gets tainted.”

Cob Gilles finished his beer and crushed the can against the edge of his desk, letting the crumpled shape fall to the floor. “You’ll see,” he said. “You’re young. You’ll learn.”

I nodded, not quite sure how to take this exceedingly bleak view of photography. If there were lies to photography, I figured, there was truth, too, truths we’d never see if not through the dispassionate glass eye of a camera.
How’d he lose sight of that?
I wondered.
How’d he get so bitter?

“And what are you working on now?” I asked. “Who sent you here?
Newsweek
?
TIME
?
Rolling Stone
?”

He shook his head. “No. That’s not me. Not anymore. No fucking way.” His face contorted into tight pale lines, as if even the thought of work gave him pain. “I mean, I still take pictures—I guess, I guess it’s a compulsion with me, something I have to do—but I delete them now. Immediately. Especially if they’re … weird. If it’s the city.” He forced a tense laugh. “
Fuck!
Most of the time now, if you see me taking pictures, I’m working without a memory card. It’s just, just—fucking
click
and consigning it all to the ether.”

“Why?” I asked. “What happened?”

He shrugged. “I just stopped trusting. I stopped trusting all of this.” He gestured vaguely at the photography gear laid out before him. “It’s no good. The images it shows … it’s all lies now, Dean. It’s all bad glass. And I just don’t want to spread it anymore.”

He once again reached beneath his desk, this time coming up with a half-empty bottle of Scotch and a pair of glasses. I wondered briefly what else he had squirreled away down there, around his feet.

I watched him fill the glasses. His hands were steady but slow.

“What do you think’s happening here?” I asked.

He stared at me for a second, then turned the question back around. “What do
you
think, Dean?” He handed me my drink.
“You’re new here, right? You haven’t been tainted yet … at least not much. What do you think’s happening here?”

I paused for a moment, thinking. I didn’t have an answer, and I didn’t really want to venture a guess. “Mama Cass thinks it’s some type of hallucinogen, something in the environment that’s making us all crazy.”

Cob Gilles nodded. “Yeah. That sounds like her. We’re all broken, hallucinating, and she’s the only one taking it in stride. At least that’s what she’d like to believe … the only one strong enough to ride it all out—this strange and dangerous trip—and walk out the other side with money busting her every seam.”

“You don’t agree?”

“No.” He smiled. “No, we’re not insane. It’s deeper than that. It’s the
world
that’s gone insane, not us. It’s the world.” He bolted a swallow of Scotch and leaned forward in his chair, swaying slightly before his hands found the edge of the desk. “It’s a tumor,” he continued in a confidential whisper. “It’s a cancer—
brain cancer
—somewhere deep in the core of the city. Growing, distorting the shape of reality. Spreading. Metastasized. Terminal. It’s eating us hollow. We’re eating
ourselves
hollow.”

I glanced down at my glass, focusing on the beautiful glowing liquid. It was easier to look at, easier to comprehend. When I glanced back up, I found him watching me, his eyes suddenly bright and jovial. Those eyes told me his entire story. He knew how crazy this all sounded, but he no longer cared.

He had his booze. He had his pills. He’d made himself ready for the end of the world.

“I saw it, Dean. I actually saw the tumor.”

For a moment, I thought he was kidding, or at last speaking in glib abstractions. But those eyes were not the eyes of a jokester; they were the eyes of a man who really didn’t give a fuck what I believed or how I reacted. He was speaking in order to speak, in order to hear his own words. Nothing else mattered.

“It was in the hospital, I think, though I’m not quite sure. We started way out east, in the industrial district, but where we
ended up …” He smiled widely and shrugged. “Jesus Christ, it was fucked! We were underground for … I don’t know. A long time? And I don’t remember most of it—moving in a drunken trance, like snatches of memory from a weeklong bender. I remember it was cold at times. And sometimes we were in earthen tunnels, sometimes in basements and corridors.

“There were six of us at the start, but only two of us made it to the room. I really don’t know what happened to the others. I remember glancing around and seeing fewer and fewer people, but it didn’t really register. It was like my higher brain functions had been shut off. I was dizzy, and I think I threw up a couple of times.”

He raised his glass back to his lips. His hand was shaking now, and I heard the glass
clink
against his teeth as he finished off his drink. He lowered the glass and refilled it quickly, spilling another tumbler’s worth across the surface of the desk.

“We must have climbed back out of the underground at some point, but I don’t remember any stairs. Just the room. It was halfway down a carpeted corridor—the entire expanse gray with predawn light, all the color stripped out of the world. And then there was this … room—” As he said these words, Cob Gilles’s voice swelled with awe. “There was this room,” he continued, “with
golden
light spilling out, onto the floor of the hallway. And we were there, at the threshold, looking inside. We
must
have been aboveground, because there was an entire wall of picture windows on the far side of the room, blinding us with the most beautiful golden light. We were at least ten floors up, and the city outside was gorgeous and new—I don’t even think it was Spokane. And there was a big table stretching down the middle of the room, with people sitting all around. It was some type of boardroom, and everyone was dressed in business attire, sitting motionless, staring at us. Staring at us with unblinking eyes. At least twenty of them, both men and women.

“I don’t know what they wanted, but their eyes were absolutely huge, expectant. Like they knew something was going to
happen—and that something, whatever it might be, was going to be absolutely terrible. And then—” The photographer’s eyes scrunched up as if he were trying to riddle out some complex problem or trying to remember something that desperately did not want to be remembered. “—and then they stood up, all at once, in freakish unison. And then …” Cob Gilles shrugged and once again raised his glass to his lips. Before drinking, he mumbled around the glass: “And then … I just don’t remember.”

I joined him as he drank deeply. My head was swimming, and the sharp bite of Scotch did little to straighten things out.

What the photographer was saying was absolute insanity—boardrooms and businessmen! If anything, it supported Mama Cass’s theory. What he was describing was a drug trip, a hallucinogenic break from reality.

The photographer let out a bracing hiss and set his glass back down. “When we came to, we were sitting on a bench downtown, and it was just the two of us. The others were gone. And they stayed gone. We never saw them again.”

“And that’s the tumor?” I asked. “A boardroom filled with stuffed suits?”

The photographer shook his head. He didn’t seem put off by my abrupt summation. He just seemed very, very tired. “There was a sickness there, Dean; I could feel it. There’s something horribly wrong with the very nature of the universe, and it was centered right there, in that room, at that meeting. Like suddenly physics had gone awry. Stars had collapsed, and atoms had split. And it was tearing everything apart. And this—” He gestured about the room, but it was clear he meant the city and not the chaos of his apartment. “—this is a symptom. This place. This feeling.”

I shrugged and lifted my palms into the air, a gesture of pure frustration. “It could have been a delusion, a chemical state that imbued your visions with a sense of importance, with spiritual clarity.” As I talked, memories of Psych 101 came flooding back in. “That’s what religion is: epiphanies and euphoria. Just neurons misfiring.”

Cob Gilles smiled and shook his head. “I saw through the veil, Dean. During that trip, the scales—as they say—they fell from my eyes.”

He once again reached for the bottle of Scotch, this time almost knocking it over. Instead of refilling his glass—a task I don’t think he could have managed—he drank straight from the bottle. “And what I saw … that was the reality. And this world—this whole fucking world—is the delusion, nothing but a fever dream spinning away inside a dying mind.”

He paused for a moment, then continued: “And what happens, Dean? What happens when that mind dies? What happens when there’s no one left to hold it all together?”

“Dean!”

Sabine’s voice was shrill and frantic, and it sounded a long way away.

At the sound of her cry, Cob Gilles started in his chair. He’d been so focused on me—and his booze and his story—I think he’d forgotten all about Sabine, left to wander through his apartment as we talked, as he let the drugs and alcohol work their magic on his body and nerves.

I spun around and started toward the confusion of bookcases, then decided to bypass that maze altogether. Instead, I stayed near the wall, passing a small, garbage-strewn kitchenette before finally reaching the front door and picking up Sabine’s trail.

“Dean!” She was closer now, and her voice sounded more frantic, more desperate.

“Sabine!” I called back, but she didn’t respond.

What will I find?
I wondered.
Her body, sunk into the floor? Her eyes, pleading for help?

I collided with a bookcase and sent a shelf of notebooks cascading to the floor. A binder popped open, and the air filled with photographs.

I turned a corner and found Sabine standing in the narrow space between the wall and a row of bookcases. Her face was contorted
with confusion and anxiety, but she looked healthy, unharmed.

After a moment of tense silence, she turned and faced me. “It’s the Poet,” she said, her voice congested, breaking into a breathless sob. “It’s the Poet … and she won’t speak to me!”

I followed her gaze back down the narrow space. There was a woman sitting on a stool about a dozen feet away. She sat perfectly still, facing away from us. Her back was ramrod stiff, and her whole body looked tense, ready to spring.

She was wearing a hood. It was a black leather fetish hood, and it covered almost her entire head, leaving just her eyes, mouth, and jaw visible. A spill of dark brown hair cascaded out from beneath the back of the hood, falling over the collar of a gray, paint-spattered peacoat. I could see her face in profile. Her pale lips trembled with suppressed energy, and her bright blue eyes—framed in cut-out ovals—quivered as she looked pointedly away.

“Sharon said she wore a mask,” Sabine gasped, her voice harsh and breathy. “That’s why she sent me here—so I could find her! But she won’t say a word!”

Unleashing a sudden burst of anger, Sabine turned back toward the masked woman.
“Fucking say something! Fucking talk to me!”