Bad Glass

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