Bad Glass

I spent several hours tweaking the images, trying to make them perfect. Then I composed a couple of sentences for the top of the post. I tried to keep my preface simple; I wanted to let the photographs speak for themselves.

Greetings from Spokane! Here are some pictures from my first week in the city. I came here to document the conditions and, perhaps, find the truth behind the stories we’ve all been hearing. I’ll try to post more as events and pictures happen, but my Internet connection is pretty much nonexistent (I had to sneak this post out of the city, passing it hand to hand across the border).

I added the “hand to hand” thing to take heat off of Danny, in case this post ever caught the attention of the authorities.

After I finished the preface, I read it over a couple of times, trying to imagine the impression it would make. I found it lacking. It felt cold, clinical. There was no emotion, no hint it had been written by a real human being, someone capable of being moved by the things on the other side of the camera’s viewfinder. Tentatively, I typed out another line:

It’s strange here. It feels like a different world.

I stared at the post for a long time, reading over that sparse handful of sentences, studying each and every aspect of the photographs. It still felt insufficient somehow, incomplete. It is incomplete, I told myself. There is no end here, no conclusion … not yet.

But it is a beginning.

Floyd stuck his head into my room just as I was finishing up my post.

“Come here, man,” he said, stifling a yawn. “There’s something I want you to see.”

I saved my work and followed him into his room.

At one time, this had been a child’s bedroom. There were alternating rows of clowns and balloons peering out from the wallpaper, bright cartoon shapes turned bleak and gray beneath a layer of dingy smoke residue. Across from Floyd’s child-size bed, some of the clowns had been gouged out of the wall, as if attacked with a potato peeler. All the balloons remained intact. In the corner, a black sweatshirt shrouded the shape of a hobbyhorse.

The room smelled of pot and stale sweat.

Floyd was still half asleep. He stopped in the middle of the room and stretched his hands up over his head, letting out a loud yawn.

“What’s up?” I asked, and I smiled. “Did you have a bad dream? Do you need me to tuck you back in? Maybe sing you a lullaby?”

Floyd let out a fake laugh. “Fuck, man, you’re funny,” he said. “I didn’t realize you were so fucking funny.”

He grabbed my elbow and pulled me over to the window. He had his blinds drawn almost all the way to the bottom, and I had to crouch down in order to peer through the gap. “Check it out. Across the street.”

The view was the same as I’d seen from my window earlier that morning. The street was covered with snow, and there was absolutely no sign of life. Then I noticed the tracks leading from our front door to the house directly across the street.

“Upstairs window,” Floyd said, crouching down at my side.

I focused on the upper story, slowly scanning from one room to the next. All the windows were shuttered save the biggest one, just above the front door. There was movement there, on the other side of the glass. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like somebody pacing back and forth.

“It’s Devon,” Floyd whispered conspiratorially. “I’ve seen him over there before, but I’ve never been able to figure out what he’s doing. Sometimes he’ll go over there and we won’t see him for days.” Floyd let out an annoyed grunt. “And when I ask him about it, he won’t tell me shit.”

I went back to my room and got my camera, then returned to Floyd’s side. I raised the camera to the sill and zoomed in on the window across the street.

I hadn’t noticed the electric-blue light, dwarfed in that world of startling white snow. But now, magnified inside my camera lens, it became obvious. An eerie blue glow illuminating one side of Devon’s face. The light moved across his features as he paced back and forth, striding quickly from one side of the room to the other. Every once in a while, he raised his hands in a gesture of apparent frustration.

I couldn’t tell what he was doing. Did he go over there to vent? I wondered. Is he just storming about in an empty room, blowing off steam?

As he passed in front of the window, Devon paused suddenly and looked our way. There was a strange expression on his face—a look of both fear and annoyance—and for a moment, I thought we’d been caught in the act of spying. But I quickly realized that that was impossible. We were hidden in Floyd’s dark room, staring out through a tiny crack in his blinds. There was no way he could see us here, not from that distance.

Then I noticed Devon’s lips moving in the faint blue glow.

“Is he alone over there?” I asked. “Have you ever seen anyone else in that house?”

“No,” Floyd said, a hint of surprise in his voice. “We’re the only people on this entire block.”

I started taking pictures, snapping off a long series as Devon abruptly looked back over his shoulder toward the far corner of the room. He once again raised his hands in frustration.

He was still talking. Explaining. Arguing.

“What’s he doing?” Floyd asked. “I can’t see shit.”

I turned away from the window, putting my back against the wall and sliding down to the floor. I handed the camera to Floyd, and he raised it to his eye. After a moment of silence, he lowered the camera and took a step back from the window. There was a shocked look on his face.

“What’s going on here, Dean?” he asked, his eyes wide, his voice wavering. “Who’s he talking to? Who’s he meeting? And why there, across the street from our own house?”

And what about that blue light? I recognized that color. It was the same shade I’d seen between the walls of the apartment building on Second Avenue, glowing deep down in the heart of the building. Beneath that horrible disembodied face. The memory of that face—that frantic, pleading eye—set my skin shivering.

“There’s only one person who can answer those questions,” I said. “And he’s waiting for us right across the street.”

It took us a couple of minutes to get ready, to throw on our coats and lace up our shoes. I strapped the camera across my chest and led the way, anxious to find answers, to find the link between this place and the apartment building downtown. And Devon. I needed to know what he was doing over there, what his connection was to this whole thing. To the city. To the face.

Floyd seemed far less eager. “There’s only one set of tracks,” he said, pausing in the middle of the snow- covered street. “Whoever he’s meeting … either they came in another way or they were there before the snow started to fall.”

“Only one way to find out,” I said, glancing up at the house’s now-empty window. “So move your ass.”

The front door was unlocked. I tried to keep it quiet as I eased the door open, but the hinges let out a loud, painful groan. I paused before crossing the threshold, listening for Devon up on the second floor, but couldn’t hear a thing. There were no arguing voices, no pacing footsteps.

We stepped into the foyer, and I shut the door behind us.

The house had been stripped bare. The owners must have moved fast, I thought. From what I’d seen, most of the houses in the area weren’t this clean; most showed signs of life forced to an abrupt stop. The owners must have hired moving trucks and fled the city as soon as the weirdness started, back in July or August, before the mad rush of evacuations had forced people to flee with whatever they could fit in their cars. I started sticking my head in through open doorways. I found an empty living room, an empty dining room. The house had nice hardwood floors. It reminded me of the place my father had bought with his third wife, down in southern California.

As I surveyed the empty rooms, Floyd moved deeper into the house. “Dean,” he hissed after a handful of seconds. “Come here!” I followed him into a bright yellow kitchen.

“Look,” he said, pointing toward a pair of sliding glass doors. He kept his voice low. “There’s nothing in the backyard. Not a single footprint.”

Floyd was right. There was nothing but pristine white snow out there, stretching across the entire yard.