Bad Glass

After entering St. James Tower, we plunged from a dark foyer into an even darker stairwell. We found both doors—the door to the stairwell and the door to the street—propped open with stacks of books, volumes from a timeworn set of the Oxford English Dictionary. Despite a cold breeze from the street, the air inside was thick with the smell of rot; I made an effort to breathe in through my mouth, trying to keep that horrible stench out of my nose. Sabine swung her flashlight across the width of the stairwell, revealing a mound of trash bags stuffed into the space beneath the lowest flight of stairs. Some of them had split open, spilling a litter of apple cores, coffee grounds, animal bones, and soiled paper to the concrete floor.

“Fuck,” Sabine said. “I think it’s time to call the health inspector.”

She started toward the base of the stairs, then stopped abruptly.

There were twin glowing lights up on the second-floor landing, small metallic orbs floating about a foot off the ground. They winked off for a moment, then started moving forward, sliding noiselessly through the air. Sabine jerked the flashlight up and let out a relieved laugh.

The light revealed an orange-striped tabby perched on the edge of the landing. Its bright eyes narrowed under the flashlight’s sudden glare, and it stared down at us for a moment, its tail swishing angrily. Then it resumed its descent. It stayed close to the wall, watching us with suspicious eyes, and when it was about five feet from the ground, it suddenly leaped forward. It bounded down the remaining steps and out the sliver of open door.

Sabine let out another shaky laugh. “There aren’t too many animals left,” she said. “They fled even before the evacuation. I haven’t seen a dog or a cat in months.”

“Yeah?” I grunted. I clenched my bandaged hand as if trying to refute her claim, if only to myself. Already, my wounds felt better. The antibiotics were doing their job.

“Hell, they’re smarter than we are,” she said with a laugh. “They took the hint. They left when it was time to leave.” Then she started up the stairs.

There was light creeping from beneath the door on the third-floor landing. A hand-lettered sign had been duct taped over the doorknob. It read, in giant block letters: FUCK OFF!!!

Sabine gave me a quizzical look and cocked an eyebrow. I shrugged, then stepped forward and knocked.

A man pulled the door open before I could even drop my hand. At first, he seemed nothing but wild hair and wilder eyes. “Did you see a cat?” he asked. “A fucking cat, clawing at the fucking door?” His eyes darted back and forth between Sabine and me. He was shorter than both of us and at least three decades older. His shoulder-length hair was reddish-brown, and it jutted from his scalp like strings from an unused mop head. Despite the cold weather, his shirt hung open, revealing pale pockmarked flesh.

“It’s always here, that fucking cat. I try to lock it out, but somehow it manages to get back in. And then it’s trapped, and that’s a million times worse. It howls like an injured baby. A fucking baby! The bloody thing’s driving me insane!”

“It left,” Sabine said, taking a cautious step back. “When we came in. It ran out the door.”

“Good,” the man said. “It’s a motherfucking miracle.” He leaned forward and cast a skeptical look down the dark stairwell. When no cat came screaming out of the shadows, he let out a satisfied “harrumph” and pulled back into the doorway.

He stood there motionless for a time. The look on his face morphed from one of frantic mania into a sudden guarded skepticism, as if he had just now noticed us standing on his doorstep and, seeing us there, remembered an intense fear and distrust of strangers. He crossed his arms in front of his chest and started scratching at his forearms; the flesh there was red and dry, flaking away beneath his yellowing nails.

“Do I know you?” he finally asked, sounding genuinely perplexed. “What do I want—?” He closed his eyes and shook his head violently. “I got that wrong. I mean, I mean … what do you want?”

“Mama Cass sent us,” I said. “I’ve got a package for you.”

At this, the man’s tensions abruptly eased. The lines on his forehead and beneath his eyes disappeared, and his shoulders dropped, muscles falling slack.

“Well, why didn’t you say so?” he said. He took a step back and ushered us inside.

The man’s apartment was absolute chaos. It was a studio apartment, and the ceiling, fifteen feet above our heads, was a maze of naked ductwork. Rows of bookcases crisscrossed the room from one end to the other, laid out in disjointed, meandering lines; it was like something designed and jotted down by a drunken architect, without the aid of a ruler or steady hands. The shelving was packed full of notebooks and sheets of loose paper. The clutter was so dense, it filled every open space, spilling from bookcases, across the surface of card tables and down to the floor below.

There was a truly extravagant amount of light in the room; at least a dozen battery-powered lanterns— perched on tabletops, bookcases, and hanging from the walls—kept it lit as bright as day. And that can’t be cheap, I thought. There can’t be that many batteries left in the city anymore.

“Do you want anything?” the man asked, nervously fidgeting from one foot to the other. “I think I’ve got some beers in back if you’re thirsty.”

I shook my head no, and Sabine didn’t respond. I don’t even think she heard the offer; her eyes were too busy roaming about the room, lost in the chaos.

“Okay, then,” the man prompted. “You have something for me?”

I opened my backpack and retrieved Mama Cass’s package. It was about the size of a football, wrapped in canvas and taped shut. The bundle was heavy for its size, and it rattled like a maraca. When I handed it over, I noticed that the man’s eyes had become fixed on my open backpack; the lens of my camera was visible, protruding out of the opening like a headless neck. When I zipped it shut, the man’s eyes jolted back up, exploring my face for a couple of seconds before darting abruptly away.

“I, I—” he said. Then his mouth snapped shut, and he retreated to the far side of the room, disappearing behind a wall of bookcases.

“Look at this place,” Sabine said in a hushed whisper. “This is more than two months’ worth of junk … he was a shut-in long before this weirdness started.”

I made my way over to the nearest table and ran my hand across the mess of paper on its surface. The feel of the paper surprised me; it was a thick, glossy stock, a very familiar weight. I flipped a sheet over, revealing the front of a photograph. It was a picture of the Spokane River at sunset, seen from Riverfront Park. The sun was so bright, the world over the river was nothing but a radiant shade of yellow. And the ripples on its surface formed stretched-out geometric shapes, etched across the water like art carved into a slab of black marble.

I grabbed a handful of paper and flipped it all over, setting off an avalanche of brightly colored photographs. Dozens of glossy images slid across the surface of the table, some reaching its edge and tumbling down to the floor. The cascading motion unearthed a three-ring binder buried near the center of the mess.

Moving slowly, as if in a trance, I flipped open the notebook and found page after page of celluloid negatives. Each line of film had been slotted into a translucent sleeve: dozens and dozens of perfectly preserved images, each its own captured moment, crammed into a tiny, unreadable rectangle. I lifted a page and squinted through the colored plastic. I could see buildings hidden inside the plastic. I could see people.

“From before I went digital.” I turned and found the man standing on an overturned bucket in the middle of the room. He kept his back to me as he grabbed a dark lantern from the top of the nearest bookcase. “I still use film on occasion, but it’s hard to get. At least, it’s hard to get here.” He cracked open the lantern and replaced the battery inside. The lantern lit up in his hands, but the effect on the room was negligible. The room was already so bright.

“Who are you?” I asked, suddenly apprehensive. The number of photographs—if in fact all these bookcases and tables were filled with photographs—left me positively awestruck. In fact, it scared the crap out of me … the sheer magnitude of this place—thousands and thousands of images, each a potential gem, hidden away inside this chaos. It made me feel claustrophobic.

The man smiled. It was a relaxed smile, and it made him look completely different. He was no longer the erratic, crazy man who’d answered the door. “My name is Cob Gilles. I was a photographer … once.”

The name was familiar. I’d seen it in my photography books back in school. Unfortunately, I couldn’t remember the images it had been attached to. “You’re famous,” I said with a note of awe. “You’ve got a reputation.”

He nodded and stepped down from the bucket. He continued to avoid meeting my eyes. “Yeah,” he said. His voice was quiet, not much more than a whisper. “I had a reputation.” Then, with a bitter smile, he picked up the