Bad Glass

by Richard E. Gropp

  He started toward Devon, taking hard, violent strides, and then his legs did collapse, sending him sprawling to the floor. At first he braced himself on the heels of his hands, then he moved his palms up to his face, hiding his emotions in a hunched-up little ball.

  “But we were listening on the radio,” I explained. “You were talking to somebody about plugging up leaks, about the information we were sending out. And what he said … whoever it was, it sounded like Charlie’s father.”

  “I don’t know what you heard, but it wasn’t Charlie’s father.” Devon shook his head, a single shallow shake. If he was lying, he was doing a good job of it; he wasn’t overselling anything, merely stating facts. “At first, we were trying to keep the more troublesome aspects of the situation contained—my bosses had no idea what would happen to their business interests if some of this stuff leaked out—but that was a while ago. Now it’s just the military, with their communications freeze and their quarantine. When Charlie appeared, I was assigned to watch him, to make sure he didn’t get too close to his parents’ research. I still send out my reports, through the radio, but I don’t get anything back, not anymore. It’s just silence now. Just me—my voice—and nothing else.”

  “You lie.” Suddenly Charlie’s hands fell away from his face, and the grief written there—in gleaming eyes and on tear-streaked cheeks—was gone. There was nothing but anger now, cold, hard anger. He stood up, slowly, and the way he was holding himself—fairly quivering with mute energy—I was afraid he was going to attack Devon. “This is all an elaborate lie,” he continued, his voice level, barely restrained. “You’re trying to keep me away from my parents. You’re trying to shake me off their trail. That was my father on the radio, I’m sure of it, and that was my mother in that picture. They’re here, in the city, and for some reason you don’t want me to find them.”

  “Why? Why would I do that?”

  Charlie stood silent for a moment, his face screwed up in thought. Then he had his answer: “Because they know what you did—you and your dirty little organization! You did this. All of this. And you’re afraid … you’re afraid because they can fix it!” He swept his hand across the room, indicating the monitors, the laser apparatus, the city itself. “They can fix it all … if I can just find them. If I can save them.”

  Devon laughed. “I wish that were true, Charlie, I really do. But we’re beyond that now. There’s no fixing the universe.” He shook his head. “Get out of the city. Go home. Go see your grandparents before it’s too late.”

  At that, Charlie’s restraint disappeared, and he bolted forward—a scrawny seventeen-year-old computer geek, itching to stop Devon, itching to find answers … with his fists and blood and Devon’s broken bones.

  Floyd barked a loud “Stop!” and stepped between the two combatants. He grabbed Charlie’s collar and pushed him back, holding on until the teen stopped squirming.

  “Get the fuck out, Devon!” Floyd growled, whipping around to face the man in the doorway. “And stay away from us. Stay away from the house. You’ve done enough harm, you manipulative, spying piece of shit! So just go back to your tunnels and stay … the fuck … away!”

  Devon nodded and made to leave; he started to turn, but then stopped suddenly. “Those aren’t our tunnels, by the way,” he said. “We used them, yeah, but we didn’t dig them, and they most certainly aren’t ours. But you know that, don’t you, Floyd? You know what types of things are down there, lurking, waiting in the dark. For you. For me. For all of us.”

  He paused thoughtfully, and a bitter, melancholy smile formed on his lips. “I hate to say it, boys—and girl—but our time has come. As a species, we’re finished. Maybe Charlie’s parents had the right idea.”

  Then he turned and left.

  Video clip. October 24, 02:35 P.M. Sabine’s graffiti:

  The camera sits a couple of feet off the ground, staring across a city street at the side of a brick building. The view is skewed slightly, tilted a few degrees to the left. It is day out—midmorning or noon or early afternoon—but the street is deserted, and the scene is not very bright; the color is all washed away, lost beneath a ceiling of clouds. In this light, the red brick wall has faded to a pinkish gray.

  The camera jostles as the recording starts, and at first the view is nothing but the building wall, standing about twenty feet away. There is paint on the wall—dark lines forming squiggly shapes—but it is not visible for long. A young woman circles around from the camera’s rear, and the wall blurs, the lens focusing in on this new subject. She stops in the middle of the street and turns to face the camera.

  Really, she’s not much more than a girl—small and delicate, barely five feet tall. Her skin is white porcelain, smeared with dirt. Her hair is charcoal black, pulled away from her face.

  THE WOMAN—SABINE: My name is Sabine Pearl-Grey, and this is my statement.

  She smiles slyly.

  SABINE: There are some slights I can’t tolerate, some things that are just beggin’ for my response. And this … this is something I can’t turn away from. (Long beat.) I will not be ignored. If you turn your back on me, I’ll turn my fists on you. (She raises her hands into a fighter’s pose and holds it, serious, for a second. Then she lets out a tiny girlish giggle.)

  The woman turns and darts offscreen, camera right. She is offscreen for only a handful of seconds, but it is long enough for the camera’s focus to readjust, for the paint on the wall to come clearly into view. It is a swarm of spray-painted spiders, surrounding a two-foot gash that starts about a foot off the ground. It looks like they are crawling out of that dark crevice, each one frozen in a mute acrylic pose.

  When the woman returns, she is carrying a ladder twice her height, and there is a sagging messenger bag slung across her back. She carries the ladder to the wall and sets it carefully against the brick. Then she climbs all the way up to its penultimate rung. There is a window frame just about level with the top of her head, a couple of inches below the video’s topmost edge.

  She reaches down and back, fumbles with her messenger bag for a moment, and comes up with a can of spray paint. She shakes the can for a couple of seconds, pops off the top, and starts to paint. It is a long and labored process: writing words on the wall—lines of text, starting with the left-hand side of each line—carefully leaning out over the sidewalk, inching down the ladder, rail by rail. She leans out too far at one point, and the ladder shifts beneath her weight, the right-hand foot lifting off the ground for a nerve-racking moment before once again settling back into place. When she is done with the left-hand side of the graffiti, she climbs down, moves the ladder eight feet to the right, and climbs back up to fill in the right-hand side. The entire process takes about five minutes.

  The paint is a dark green. Olive and drab. It is a poem, drawn in bold, accusatory letters:

  The Poet Inside

  She hides because there’s no one there, inside.

  The heart is empty and the head is hollow.

  Her world is filled with corridors and echoes and shadows.

  But it is all empty space.

  And she wears a mask because she has no face.

  She hides the end of the world inside.

  The poem ends to the right of the gash in the wall. With just that single word: inside.

  After she finishes writing, the woman moves the ladder a couple more feet to the right. She drops the can of green spray paint to the sidewalk and digs a new one from her bag. This one is bright red. She draws a giant arrow around the right-hand side of the poem, arcing up from the word inside and ending at the window above.

  She’s pointing up toward the Poet. Pointing into her home.

  When she finishes, the woman pulls back her arm and hurls the can of spray paint far into the distance; after a moment of hang time, there’s a loud clatter offscreen as the can skips across the pavement and collides with something solid—something metal and hollow that rings like a bell. The woman jumps down to the sidewalk, violently
grabs hold of the ladder, and sends it crashing flat against the ground. Then she takes a couple of abrupt steps back, and—still facing the wall, still facing her poem and the Poet’s window—she raises her hands and gives the building a double-fisted two-finger salute.

  SABINE: Just one more thing. One more thing and my work is done. (She glances back over her shoulder at the camera. The sly smile is once again there, twisting her face, somehow wedded to her anger and not at all incongruous.)

  She grabs the top of the ladder and pulls it offscreen. When she returns a couple of seconds later, she is carrying a sledgehammer. Actually, she is dragging a sledgehammer; its massive head trails behind her, filling the air with a loud grating/grinding sound.

  Laboring under its weight, the woman lifts the hammer from the ground and squares off in front of the gash in the wall. She swings, and the hammer crashes into the brick with a dull thunk. The left-hand edge of the gash caves in slightly, but the damage is rather unimpressive—just a dent, not a melodramatic burst of destruction. She lifts and swings again. This time a single brick topples through the gash, into the darkness beyond—half a spray-paint spider, disappearing into the void. She pauses and takes a deep breath. Already the effort seems to be taking its toll.

  But she doesn’t stop. Over the next five minutes, the woman relentlessly assaults the wall, breaking bricks from the facade, usually one by one but occasionally triggering a miniature avalanche, sending a half dozen or more tumbling down into the darkness, or down to the sidewalk around her feet. By the time the gash is about four feet high and three feet wide, she has slowed down quite a bit. Her arms tremble visibly each time she lifts the hammer.

  She hits the wall one final time—weakly, to absolutely no effect—and the sledgehammer drops from her hands, nearly crushing her feet. She collapses back against the wall. Her chest is heaving. Her arms dangle limply.

  SABINE, IN A WEAK, BREATHLESS WHISPER: Fuck me, this is harder than I thought. (She smiles at the camera and lets out a single exhausted laugh.)

  After about a half minute of rest, she pushes herself off the wall and turns to face the hole. Then she leans forward and peers inside. Her hands are motionless against the wall as she tilts her head down and pauses, her face pressed into the darkness, peering down at … at something. There must be something down there to catch her attention, something hidden away in the dark. She stays perfectly still for another half minute.

  Then her right hand starts to move, darting frantically—crawling like a spider—to the messenger bag at her back. Without taking her face from the hole, she manages to dig a pen-size flashlight from her bag. She whips it forward, into the hole next to her face, and immediately points it down into the gap behind the wall.

  And she freezes. The scene remains still for nearly a minute. It is a frozen tableau, a static picture stretched across the screen: a woman—a girl—standing, crouched, on the sidewalk, surrounded by bricks from a damaged wall. Spray-paint spiders and words swarming up and out while she peers down and in, into the darkness.

  Then she moves. Her left hand slides to the edge of the hole, quivering slightly. She grabs hold, braces herself, and lifts her leg over the litter of bricks, through the gap, and into the wall. She tests her weight on the other side—her foothold isn’t visible, but it looks to be about six inches below street level—then she crouches down and slides all the way in. Her messenger bag catches on the right-hand edge of the gash, and she has to reach back to pull it through. Her hands are moving slowly now, and they are definitely quivering—maybe from all that exertion with the sledgehammer. Or maybe it’s excitement. Maybe fear.

  Once inside the hole, she pauses briefly, her back filling up the diamond-shaped gap. Then she starts to inch away, into the space behind the wall. She is moving to the right but also down. Descending beneath the city streets.

  Her left shoulder is the last thing we see. It is only about a foot above street level when it disappears from view.

  Then she is gone. And there is no one on-screen for a very long time.

  The sky turned red not long after we left the research facility, and it stayed red the entire way home.

  Again the color changed with a roar. It was a great rending in the sky, and when I looked up, it felt like I was staring into a widening wound.

  Again I got the impression of blood, and I was half expecting it to come raining down over the city. It would be a horrible thing, I thought, a horrific squall filled with gristle and teeth, and we’d have to run the last couple of blocks absolutely drenched in gore. But it didn’t happen. It was the same as before: a twirling liquid red sky, suspended above our heads.

  Floyd hadn’t seen it the first time around, and he greeted it with stunned, wide-eyed terror.

  “Oh, my God,” he muttered. “Oh, my fucking God.”

  Taylor and I tried to calm him down. We tried to convince him that everything was fine, that the red sky would pass and the world would return to normal, but nothing seemed to work. He remained transfixed by the color above his head, his face going pale, his shoulders drooping, as if pressed down by that massive sky. And there were honest-to-God tears in his eyes.

  I don’t know if Charlie had seen the sky the first time around, but either way, he wasn’t terrified. In fact, the sky didn’t seem to affect him at all. He remained lost inside his own head. Battling demons and memory. Chasing his parents. Are they gone? Are they really dead? He walked like a zombie, his eyes barely flickering up toward the sky before once again fixing on his boots.

  I, for my part, was surprised at how calm I remained. The sky was terrifying—objectively, it was a terrifying sight—but I couldn’t find the energy to care. My reserves of horror had run bone dry. I was trying to comfort Floyd, but his confusion and fear seemed downright ridiculous to me. I’d seen all this before, and frankly, after one time, it felt old hat. Almost mundane.

  I wanted to get back to the house. I wanted coffee. I wanted to wash my face and check the pantry for food.

  After all, I thought with a bitter smile, it’s not like it’s the end of the world.

  The four of us stayed together in the kitchen when we got home. Even terrified and confused, Floyd and Charlie wanted our company. I think they wanted the reassurance of having us nearby. This seemed like a big change to me. I was getting used to people freaking out and running away whenever something bad happened.

  When we entered, Taylor immediately headed to the camp stove and started making coffee. Floyd collapsed into a chair next to the sliding glass door, where he could stare, transfixed, up at the roiling red sky. His eyes grew wide, and I watched as he bolted down another couple of pills.

  “I must have missed something,” Charlie said as he sat down at the kitchen table and popped open his notebook computer. “There’s got to be something here, something that’ll tell us what really happened to my parents. I just need to pay attention. I just need to see what’s staring me in the face—in the emails, in the files they sent.” His voice was loud, but I think he was just talking to himself, trying to convince himself that there was still hope. Taylor and Floyd didn’t even glance up at the sound of his voice.

  And then there was silence in the room.

  I stood in the doorway for nearly a minute, watching my three friends. They were lost in their own little worlds, sharing the same space but completely isolated, completely alone. It made me sad. The thing that had struck me most when I had first found this house, when Taylor had first dragged me through the door, was the sense of community here, the sense of family hidden away inside these generic suburban walls. It had been such a warm place, full of laughter, full of life. But that was gone now. It had disappeared, along with Amanda and Mac and Weasel (and Devon, too, I thought).

  “I’m going to go check on Sabine,” I said.

  There was no reply.

  Upstairs, I found Sabine’s door standing wide open, but she wasn’t there. Out working on her project, I guessed. I peeked in through the door. Her
room was still a mess, blanketed in well-used sheets of paper. I was tempted to sneak in and try to figure out what she was working on but decided against it. That would be a pretty big violation, I figured, considering her earlier reaction. Besides, whatever her project was, I guessed that it was just some manic whim of hers, a distraction, a way for her to channel her energy and pain.

  I shut the door and headed back downstairs.

  At the bottom of the staircase, I glanced up and saw a dark figure standing just outside the living-room window, outlined against the dark red afternoon. The figure didn’t have a face.

  I jumped at the sight and almost cried out, barely managing to stifle my voice as the figure backed away from the window, quickly raising its hands in the universal gesture of surrender. My fright passed as soon as I recognized who it was.

  It was the Poet, her face hidden behind her dark leather hood.

  She continued backing away from the window, keeping her hands raised high. As I watched, she retreated across the lawn and out onto the sidewalk. She stopped there and stood, waiting. Waiting for me?

  I was confused. Why would she come here, to the house? What could she possibly want? The last I’d seen, she’d been sitting huddled in the corner of Cob Gilles’s apartment, completely terrified, unable to talk. Did she come here for Sabine? I wondered. Is this an apology? A meeting of the artistic minds?

  I moved into the entryway and opened the door, trying to keep it quiet. The way the Poet had retreated to the sidewalk instead of coming straight to the front door, I figured she didn’t want an audience. In fact, as soon as I stepped out onto the porch, she took a nervous step back, and I was afraid she was going to flee. Then she planted her feet and stood firm.