Bad Glass

“What did Sharon say?” Sabine asked. “What does she want me to do?”

“I don’t know. She gave me a package and asked me to deliver it to St. James Tower on Maple Street.”

“That’s near Homestead territory.”

She was quiet for a moment. I think she was waiting for me to respond, to react, but I didn’t know the Homestead, and I didn’t know how I was supposed to react. Was she expecting fear, maybe, or amusement, or annoyance? The Homestead was some sort of commune, I gathered—Weasel had mentioned it during his quick prelarceny tour—but that was about all I knew.

“Maybe Taylor should have come,” Sabine continued. “She’s the Homestead expert. She worked with them for quite a while.”

I nodded but didn’t say a word. Sabine was probing, pushing buttons, trying to figure out what was going on between Taylor and me. But that was my personal business, and I didn’t feel much in the mood to share.

After crossing the bridge, I let Sabine take the lead. She knew the city well and didn’t hesitate as we moved from one street to the next, first heading south, then west.

The buildings grew in height the farther we got from the river. Here, on this side of the water, there were actual signs of life scattered across the cityscape. Laughter came from a tower to our east, followed by dueling jovial voices. I could see dim flickering lights in a couple of the windows above our heads, and the tinny sound of a portable stereo echoed down, losing its coherence and becoming a monotonous whisper inside the vast canyonlike street. A loud, jangling crash sounded in the distance, followed by a muted yell—angry and confrontational.

Suddenly, Sabine broke into a trot. She ran halfway up the block, her flashlight bobbing up and down in the darkness. Then she pulled to a stop on a vacant stretch of sidewalk.

“Here, check this out,” she said when I finally caught up. I couldn’t see her face behind the flashlight’s glare, but I could hear the smile in her voice. She raised the flashlight beam from the sidewalk, revealing words spray- painted across a concrete wall.

It was a simple phrase, painted in crimson red: THEY’RE BEHIND YOU NOW.

I turned around.

“This is one of my favorites.”

Sabine panned her light to a brick wall on the far side of the street. There were black shapes covering its surface, and at first, I couldn’t tell what they were. Burn marks? Mud? But they were far too intricate, too regular … too planned. And, as my flashlight beam joined Sabine’s, the marks seemed to move.

A cold chill rocketed up my spine. Spiders. There were spiders all over the wall, climbing out of a hole in its center.

I took an involuntary step back, remembering the feel of spider legs crawling up my thigh. Feeling it again, this time on my back, on my shoulders, on my neck. I dropped my flashlight and started to brush at my clothing. For a moment, I lost myself, transported back to that empty apartment building, to the feel of those spindly legs, to the fear of being trapped and vastly outnumbered.

“Relax, Dean,” Sabine said, a note of perplexed amusement in her voice. “It’s just spray paint. Just fucking art!”

I forced myself to stop, clenching my hands down at my sides. My fingers ached, shaking as I fought the urge to brush at my neck and face. I closed my eyes for a brief moment and took a deep breath. There are no spiders. Not here, not now.

But the painting was so close to my memory. Spiders swarming out of a hole in the wall. It was like the mural had been plucked straight from my head, a moment from my past, sketched out line for line.

I moved forward, crossing to the middle of the street. Then I stopped. I wanted to study the image up close, to look for a single stubby-jointed spider leg amid all of those crudely drawn figures—something that might represent a human finger—but I didn’t want to get too close.

I took the camera out of my bag. It was a comfort, moving through these well-choreographed motions— setting my backpack down, unzipping the topmost compartment, lifting my camera out, popping off the lens cap, raising it to my eye—and it settled me into a calmer state of mind. I had a task to perform, and it was a task I enjoyed, a task I wanted to do well.

“Fix the flashlight beams, one on either side of the hole.”

Sabine complied. She grabbed my flashlight from where I’d dropped it to the street and moved the two beams into place.

I took a couple of shots with the flash on, but I was afraid all the subtle colors would be lost in that artificial glare, and I had no idea how the glossy paint would react to the light. I played with the camera’s settings— switching the flash off, increasing the ISO, cranking the aperture as wide as it would go—then took a couple more shots. Even with the adjustments, I had to use a fairly slow shutter speed, and I fought to hold the camera steady.

They don’t have to be perfect, I reassured myself. Mostly, I wanted to compare these images with the ones I’d taken back in the abandoned apartment building. I wanted to compare the two sets of spiders.

What would I see, I wondered, when I held these fake spiders up against the real ones? Would they match up? Would the number and placement be the same?

Impossible.

“How long has this been here?” I asked, lowering the camera.

“At least two weeks,” Sabine said. “Probably longer.”

I grunted and continued to stare.

Sabine moved the flashlight beams back and forth across the wall, finally focusing on the deep, dark gash in the middle of the mural. It was the focal point of the entire piece: the nexus, the birth canal, from which all those spray-paint spiders emerged. The flashlight beams failed to illuminate anything inside. Nothing but inky black.

If I stuck my head in there, what would I see? A dim blue light? A face, staring back at me, fixing me with accusing eyes? Maybe a spray-painted face—a bright yellow smiley face, mocking me.

“Let’s get out of here,” I said, once again storing my camera. “This place gives me the creeps.”

“And go where?” Sabine replied. The smile was back in her voice; I could hear it playing at her lips. “We’re already here.”

She raised her twin flashlight beams, casting the spider-infested wall back into darkness. Three floors up, I could see a square of light trickling out around the edges of a boarded-up window.

“Welcome to St. James Tower,” she said. She laughed and started toward the front door.

Photograph, 1990. Joyous Iraqi soldier:

A brilliant sun, beating down on hardscrabble desert. Sand-colored grass sprouting out of sand-colored earth. And a soldier, walking toward the camera.

The soldier’s dark Middle Eastern features are contorted in a joyous smile—radiant, beaming—and there are tears spilling from his eyes, etching dark rivulets all the way down to his jaw. He is dressed in military brown, but his shirt hangs open, and there’s a sweaty red cloth wrapped around the top of his head, protecting him from the brilliant sun. There is an automatic rifle lying on the ground behind him, abandoned in the sandy dirt.

The soldier’s arms are raised. A white cloth dangles from his left fist.

He is surrendering. Joyfully.