Bad Glass

by Richard E. Gropp

  “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!”

  The Poet remained still. I thought I could see her eyes widen at Sabine’s outburst.

  A hand grabbed my arm and jerked me back. My foot slipped on a loose photograph, and I almost fell to the floor. “It’s time for you to go,” Cob Gilles growled. He was drunk and unsteady, but that didn’t diminish the force of his hand, or his words, as he pulled me toward the front door. He launched me in that direction with an abrupt shove, then went after Sabine.

  “You better fucking leave her alone!” he yelled. “She’s my angel—my angel!—and she’s been through enough shit without some crazy bitch yelling at her!”

  He grabbed Sabine’s coat and pulled her back, but unlike me, Sabine did fall. The photographer didn’t wait for her to regain her feet. He just kept pulling, dragging her across the hardwood floor. Sabine kicked out, knocking stacks of books across the floor and setting one bookcase tottering precariously. Finally, one of her flailing arms struck Cob Gilles’s shin, and he lost his grip on her coat.

  “Get out!” he roared, falling back against the wall, overwhelmed with emotion. There were tears streaming down his cheeks. “Get the fuck out of our home! You aren’t welcome here. You aren’t welcome!”

  He collapsed to the ground and buried his face in his hands. “You aren’t welcome,” he continued to sob, losing energy and volume. “You aren’t welcome.”

  Sabine jumped to her feet and started toward him. Her jaw was clenched, and there was dark venom in her eyes. I stopped her. I grabbed her in a tight bear hug and rotated her away from the photographer, putting my body in between the two of them. “Shhhhh,” I said, trying to make a comforting noise in her ear. “Shhhhh. He’s done. It’s all over.”

  After a handful of seconds Sabine stopped struggling, and I let her go. She took a step back, then adjusted her jacket across her shoulders. “Fuck this shit,” she muttered, and fled the apartment, violently ripping the front door open and letting it bounce off the wall.

  I turned back toward the photographer and gave him one last look before following her out. He was still sobbing in his hands.

  And as I watched, he toppled over.

  That’s how I left him, the great Cob Gilles, Pulitzer Prize—winning photographer: sobbing, curled into a fetal ball on his apartment floor.

  Photograph. October 22, 01:31 P.M. Fingers in concrete:

  The picture is lit with a flash. Washed-out gray concrete. Sharp shadows pointing to the left. The toe of a single out-of-place boot is visible on the right side of the frame—a stray object intruding on an otherwise stark scene.

  And set in the middle of the photograph: fingers, protruding from the concrete floor. They sprout out of the ground like thick-stemmed plants, only different—not pushing out displaced dirt, instead reaching up from a perfectly smooth unblemished surface. The surface cuts below the knuckle on all the fingers save the pinkie; the pinkie’s knuckle is bisected neatly in two. And only the tip of the thumb is visible, little more than a thumbnail, sending up a glimmer of reflected light.

  The angle is low; the camera is perched about a foot off the ground. And even though it is not a macro shot, the image is close and clear—razor-sharp details, blown up larger than life. The flesh on the fingers looks ghostly pale in the glare of the flash, and the ragged, dirty edges of the fingernails are all visible. The knuckles have been scraped raw, dotted with tiny tags of gray-white skin, ripped up to reveal a glimpse of rosy pink beneath. It is not a bad scrape, just the result of unintended friction, the kind of wound you’d get wrestling an unwieldy
box through a narrow doorway.

  It is a desolate shot. Gray and lonely.

  “What the fuck was that?” Sabine barked as soon as I caught up to her out in front of the photographer’s apartment. She let out a feral growl and kicked at a bloated paper bag lying on the sidewalk; it burst against her boot, sending fast-food wrappers and a crumpled-up cup skittering across the concrete. “I had plans. I wanted to help her, for God’s sake! I wanted to help her with her art! But she wouldn’t even listen.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t think she wants your help,” I said. “And whatever your plans are, I don’t think she’s in any condition to lend a hand.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I gathered that.”

  Sabine let out a loud sigh; it was an exhausted rush of air, and in it I could hear her anger deflating. When she continued, her voice was imploring, and it sounded like she was asking me to do her some abstract favor, maybe change the very nature of the world around us. “I just … I was expecting something different, you know? Magic, not silence.”

  I nodded and tried to give her a reassuring smile. It felt weird on my lips, and I thought I might be doing it wrong. “I know,” I said. “It’s disappointing. But maybe we shouldn’t be putting so much faith in other people.”

  Sabine gave me a questioning look, and we passed a couple of moments in silence.

  “He was a photographer?” she asked in a gentle voice. “Just like you?”

  “Yeah,” I said, flashing a wry smile. “Just like me.” I shook my head and walked away, moving out into the middle of the street.

  Sabine caught up to me as I started to retrace our path back through the dark city.

  Even more than before, the streets of downtown Spokane seemed deserted. It was late, approaching midnight, and there were no lights in the surrounding buildings. There was no laughter, no screams echoing in the distance. Just silence. Silence and the sound of our feet on wet pavement.