Through Shattered Glass

by David B. Silva

  "What's that?"

  "I was wondering what you thought of the IMPs."

  "For Timescape?"

  She nodded, a little less comfortably now.

  "What about 'em?" He looked past her, down the tunnel beyond the long line of tracks leading off into the darkness, and was struck by the myriad of images they had put together for the ad, each one flashing on then off again, as if its afterimage were burned permanently into his retinas.

  "I'm feeling a little uneasy with the pacing."

  "Too slow?"

  "No, too fast."

  He looked at her now, surprised. "We've got to quick-cut it. There isn't a fifteen-second run in the whole damn film we can bring up. What else are we supposed to do with it?"

  "No, I understand that. It's just that we've got ... what? better than forty cuts in the thirty-second lead?"

  "Forty-seven."

  "It's too fast, Ray."

  "Not if you're targeting the MTV crowd. The world's a faster place than when we were kids. People don't have the patience anymore to sit back and wait for us to make our point. They want everything to be a roller coaster ride."

  "You know that's not true."

  "Truer than you think." He checked his watch again. 12:06 a.m. Except for their conversation, the platform area had fallen into an even deeper hush. But now, approaching by way of the South Tunnel, the sound of the next train came clicking along at a reassuring rhythm.

  "About time," Bev said with a smile.

  Ray looked at her, thinking how lovely she looked, even under the weak fluorescent lights of a late Friday night. Her outfit was all business: the gray jacket, single-breasted with padded shoulders and dropped-notch lapels; the skirt pleated in the front with angled pockets and a wide waist-band. All business at a glance. But you couldn't look at her without seeing the woman. She was thin, elegant lines and small breasts. She could smile at you, reflect serious, or throw a tantrum without ever making you feel uneasy about her. And her eyes---they could stare mysteriously in your direction with never a hint of...

  (CUT TO)

  ... what was going on behind them.

  "Don't work too hard this weekend," she was saying.

  Ray closed his eyes, then looked again.

  The train had arrived. He had closed his eyes and opened them, and the train had arrived out of the black midnight of the tunnel. Bev was standing just inside the doorway now, holding on to a stainless steel rail with one hand, looking tired from the long day's work but hiding most of the exhaustion behind a polite smile.

  "Bev?"

  "See you Monday, Ray." She brushed the hair back from her eyes, waved, and the doors closed, like a wall coming down between them.

  The subway train began to roll forward, lurching a time or two before it finally found its stride. It skimmed down the short span of rails, making a sound something like the wind swirling around the tops of the skyscrapers, then sailed off into the mouth of the North Tunnel.

  Mystified, Ray watched it disappear. Something strange had just happened. He wasn't sure exactly what it was, but for a moment it had felt as if time had somehow skipped a beat. He checked his watch again. 12:08 a.m. A full two minutes had passed. The train had pulled into the station, the doors had opened, Bev had climbed aboard. All that had somehow happened without him.

  He stood there a moment or two longer, feeling strangely out of place, and finally, after the platform had fallen back into its uneasy silence, he climbed the stairs again. On the street, there was a chill in the late-night air. The rain had stopped. The sky had opened to a spattering of dim stars. He tucked his briefcase under one arm, and walked with both hands jammed into his pants pockets to keep them warm. It seemed unusually peaceful beneath the sparse patches of night sky. He crossed Washington against a red light, only distantly aware of what he was doing.

  By the time he arrived at his apartment on Sixty-Second Street, his thoughts – which had never been far from that picture of Bev standing inside the subway train – had drifted back to the night before, when he had suddenly found himself in the bathroom, confused and feeling as if he had just come out of anesthesia.

  The lock clicked into place, and he leaned heavily against the inside of the apartment door. The cast of a streetlight seeped through the living room curtains and cut a path across the floor toward the end table next to the La-Z-Boy. The plate was still sitting there, with its fork and its crumpled napkin. The chicken burrito was missing, though.

  Because you ate it, don't you remember?

  No, he didn't.

  And that was the problem, wasn't it?

  It seemed lately he had begun to forget a number of things.

  4.

  Bev beat him to the office Monday morning. After checking his messages – there was only one, a panic call from the B. M. Myers folks who were having second thoughts about their new dog food campaign – Ray wandered into the editing room and found her sitting in the dark, running through the Timescape ad.

  "Morning."

  She waved, back-handed, without looking up from the projector. "Just a sec."

  "No hurry." He closed the door, and as the room settled instantly back into its comfortable darkness, he was taken back to Friday night again. It was something he had nearly put out of his mind over the weekend, but suddenly he was there again, on the platform, looking down the long dark tunnel, wondering when the train would come in. He had been haunted all that night by a strange, unexplainable sense of detachment, and finally on the edge of sleep, had decided that something precious had begun to slip through his fingers. He had wondered – quite legitimately at the time, he thought – if maybe he hadn't begun to lose a little piece of his mind.

  Which piece would that be, Ray old boy? A couple million neurons, perhaps?

  Perhaps, he thought now, solemnly.

  Someone had left a conference chair next to the door. Ray pulled it away from the wall and sat down. He stared vacantly at the soft green light emitted by the projector. He found it, along with the rhythmic clicking of the sprockets and the Monday morning chill that had collected in the room over the weekend, momentarily meditative, and allowed his mind to wander off again.

  Sherrie had called from Florida Sunday night. They were having a good time, she said. Though Robin was a little cranky from a long day at Epcot. Everything else was doing fine, even the business part of the trip. They still intended to be back the afternoon of the 25th as planned, she said. Then she had put Robin on the line. "Hi, Daddy! We're on the other side of the country. We went to Epcot today and on Tuesday we're spending the whole day at Disney World, and there's a swimming pool where we're staying!"

  "Sounds like you're having a pretty good time."

  "Yeah. It'd be better if you were here, though," she said matter-of-factly. "But I understand. Most of the time, you and Mommy don't like it when you're around each other."

  That's not true, he thought. At least not entirely. Sometimes we just forget what it was like a long, long time ago.

  Now, as he was sitting in the chair silently watching Bev run through the thirty-second tape, four, maybe five times altogether, he realized he had forgotten most of the bad times. The happiest times – when they had first met and started dating, and in the early years of their marriage – those were the times he recalled most clearly now. How had he ever lost sight of those?

  The rat-tat-tat of the sprockets ended abruptly and the silence brought Ray back from his thoughts. He looked across the room at Bev as she swung her chair around. In the faint green light her face was half-hidden in shadow, but it appeared as if she were lost in thoughts of her own.

  "Okay, no secrets between co-workers," Ray said. "What's eating you about this thing?"

  "It's too fast," she said evenly. She sounded every bit the woman who had won a Clio, though the degree of concern in her voice surprised him somewhat.

  "That's still bothering you?"

  "It's still bothering me."

  "You're worrying
needlessly," he said. He leaned back on the legs of his chair and flipped on the light switch next to the door. The room brightened immediately, and for a reason he could not explain, it seemed as if something nearby had suddenly stopped moving.

  "I don't think so. This one is going to crater on us if we're not careful."

  "If it craters, it won't be because of the IPMs," he said. He had come across a black-and-white, quick cut Nike spot during a Bears/49ers game over the weekend and that ad had convinced him that they had made the right decision for the Timescape campaign. It was a gritty, emotional series of shots that had left him feeling pumped up and powerful, the same kinds of feelings they had set out to convey for Timescape.

  She turned back to the projector, staring silently at the white screen. "I'm not so sure, Ray."

  "It's the perfect vehicle for this movie. We take the thrills and all the action, splice them together in a thirty-second run ... and as long as we leave viewers feeling excited, it doesn't matter how much of it they absorb. It's the feeling we're trying to convey here. That's what'll get them in the theater on Friday night."

  "I suppose," she said with a degree of resignation.

  "But?"

  "But ... don't you ever feel it?"

  "Feel what?"

  "How fast everything seems to be moving?"

  He leaned forward, staring at her, thinking: You feel it, too? That sense that a tight spring has suddenly let loose and everything's becoming unraveled? You feel that? But that wasn't what she was talking about. She was talking about the rat race and how fast the days sometimes go and how confusing the world can be with all its changes. And he was talking about something much more personal than that. He was talking about closing your eyes while watching Nightline and opening them again and finding yourself somewhere else, doing something else.

  "I guess I do," he said.

  "Doesn't it ever scare you?"

  "I don't think about it much."

  She turned back to the projector again, and Ray felt the muscles in his neck relax, as if the air had been let out of them. She seemed momentarily occupied by the screen, then...

  (CUT TO)

  ... placed the menu down on the table and looked up at him. "Sorry I was late," Bev said.

  He heard a clinking sound and followed it across the room to a middle-aged man who was touching wine glasses with a much-younger, and appreciably more attractive woman. They were sitting at a small table in the corner, with a flowered trellis behind them. The woman giggled.

  "Chet dropped by. He said you were busy on the phone but he wanted us to know that the company got the Timex account. It's ours for the asking, Ray."

  A waiter brushed past him like a breeze, kicking up a swirl of hair on the back of his head. He combed it back, and looked up at the man, who was carrying a silver tray on the palm of one hand. There were three or four other tables in the area, covered in white-laced cloths, centered with candles and fresh bouquets of flowers. Through a latticed divider, he could see the soft glow of sunlight slipping in past a curtained window. It was still daylight out.

  "Ray?"

  He looked down at the menu in his hands, feeling as if he had just opened his eyes after an accident and was still shaking the cobwebs out of his mind. They were at Fitzgerald's. It said so across the top of the menu. And they were having lunch, he supposed. They often lunched at Fitzgerald's.

  "Are you okay?"

  "Huh?"

  "You look pale."

  "No, I'm fine," he lied. Across the room, another waiter appeared from behind a pair of swinging doors. He weaved his way through the maze of tables, half of which were empty, and disappeared through an archway into another room of the restaurant. "What time is it?"

  "One-fifteen," Bev said. "We've still got forty-five minutes."

  One-fifteen.

  My God.

  Ray closed his menu, and stared across the table at her. She was wearing a pearl gray, loose-fitting blazer over an attractive silk crepe de chine blouse and a slim, elegant skirt. It was the same day as it had been this morning, he realized. Those were the same clothes she had been wearing in the projection room. Only now...

  "Are you sure you're all right?"

  "Just hungry," he said, looking down at his menu again. "So how much do we get to play with?"

  "Pardon?"

  "The Timex account."

  "Two million for the first go around. If they like what we deliver, five mill a year for a three-year run."

  "Sounds good," he said absently. An empty, gurgling sensation had begun to roil in his stomach. Not, surprisingly, out of hunger, as he would have expected – he hadn't eaten breakfast this morning and last night's dinner had been nothing more than a couple of bites from a reheated tuna casserole – but from a slight sense of nausea. He slipped a hand below the table and loosened his belt a notch. "When do we start?"

  "There's a meeting this afternoon with Chet and Boswick and the production people."

  "What time?"

  "Three," Bev said.

  "Good," he said. "Look, could you excuse me for a moment?"

  "Of course."

  "I'll be right back."

  In the restroom, he leaned heavily over the sink, both hands braced against the porcelain, head bowed. A light sweat had broken out over his forehead, though the sensation of nausea had passed now. He glanced up at his reflection in the mirror, at the man who was quietly becoming a stranger.

  What was happening to him?

  5.

  By the time Ray arrived home that night, the apartment was draped in thick shadow. He dropped his briefcase on the entryway tile, next to the door, and thanked sweet Jesus he had made it through the rest of the day without closing his eyes and suddenly finding himself somewhere else. He moved down the hall, pausing a moment to look at end table next to the La-Z-Boy. It had become an unconscious habit the past several nights, to stop there and reassure himself that the plate and the napkin and the fork had all been put away and everything was in its place now, the way he last remembered it.

  On his way past the phone in the kitchen, he slipped the receiver off its cradle, then pulled a chair out from the table, sat down, and began to dial the push-button with the thumb of one hand. It rang four times before she answered it.

  "Mom?"

  "Raymond," she said delightfully. "What a wonderful surprise."

  "How are you, Mom?"

  "I'm fine, of course."

  "And Dad?"

  "Your father's watching his football game. He's in heaven. You want to talk to him?"

  "No, that's all right. I forgot it was Monday night." He had spent much of the afternoon retracing the last few days of his life, and when they had led him nowhere in particular, he had traced the days back even further, all the way back to his childhood, in fact. Thirty-two years of days, all behind him now, and ... and they were beginning to pass even faster now, he had decided.

  "Mom?"

  "What is it, Raymond?"

  "I know this is going to sound like a strange question, but ... what's it like ... growing old?"

  There was a thoughtful silence on the other end of the line. Then, in that soft voice that someone who didn't know her might mistake for fraility, she said, "It sneaks up on you, Raymond. Like an early winter. One day it's autumn and you're picking wild berries and baking pies, the next day it's snowing and picking berries seems like something you used to do a long, long time ago."

  "Is it true, that old wife's tale about time going by faster the older you get?"

  "It certainly feels like it."

  Yes, he thought unhappily, it certainly does. He ran a hand through his hair, and by the time he hung up the phone, the words on the other end had become distant and unimportant. He had heard what he had called to hear. However distasteful it felt.

  It was getting late.

  Later than you think, my friend.

  He glanced down the hallway again, at the pale-gray light slipping in through the curtains, and
thought about trying to reach Sherrie in Florida. He wasn't even sure where she was staying, but she had given him a number, he thought, and he had written it down somewhere.

  But then what was he going to say?

  You better hurry back if you ever want to see me again. I'm not sure I'll be here much longer.

  No. Not that. This: Stay where you are, Sherrie. You and Robin stay right there in Florida. I won't be able to see you, but as long as you're there and not here, I'll know I haven't lost anything more than week. I'll know that much.

  No. Better not to call at all, he decided, burying his head...

  (CUT TO)

  ... in his hands.

  "A hard night?"

  He heard her voice, and knew immediately it was a voice that shouldn't be there, not in his apartment at this time of night, uninvited. It was almost more than he could do, but he forced his hands away from his face. Bev was sitting across from him on the other side of the ... desk. They were sitting in his office at Baylor & Baylor. She smiled cautiously, with a look of mild concern.

  "Ray?"

  "What time is it?" he asked, though the exact time didn't matter, did it? There was sunlight pouring in through the window behind him, and that was all he needed to know. It was daylight out.

  "A quarter to ten."

  Twelve hours, or nearly that much.

  My God.

  He stared down at the coat sleeves of his business suit, and realized he had changed clothes since a moment ago – or last night, or a week ago, or however long it had been. And he had shaved and washed up, spent a night alone in bed and climbed out of that bed early, had breakfast and hurried into the office, all of that, and maybe not just once, maybe half-a-dozen times by now.

  "What day is it?"

  "Tuesday."

  "Thank God."

  "Are you all right?"

  "I don't know. I've been ..."

  "What?"

  Losing time, he was tempted to say, but it was an easier thing to think than speak. Therefore, instead, he asked a question he thought might lead into something he had been kicking around recently: "Did you ever see the movie Sybil?"