Bad Glass (35 page)

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 attention. 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:

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.