chemical state that imbued your visions with a sense of importance, with spiritual clarity.” As I talked, memories of Psych 101 came flooding back in. “That’s what religion is: epiphanies and euphoria. Just neurons misfiring.”
Cob Gilles smiled and shook his head. “I saw through the veil, Dean. During that trip, the scales—as they say—they fell from my eyes.”
He once again reached for the bottle of Scotch, this time almost knocking it over. Instead of refilling his glass—a task I don’t think he could have managed—he drank straight from the bottle. “And what I saw … that was the reality. And this world—this whole fucking world—is the delusion, nothing but a fever dream spinning away inside a dying mind.”
He paused for a moment, then continued: “And what happens, Dean? What happens when that mind dies? What happens when there’s no one left to hold it all together?”
Sabine’s voice was shrill and frantic, and it sounded a long way away.
At the sound of her cry, Cob Gilles started in his chair. He’d been so focused on me—and his booze and his story—I think he’d forgotten all about Sabine, left to wander through his apartment as we talked, as he let the drugs and alcohol work their magic on his body and nerves.
I spun around and started toward the confusion of bookcases, then decided to bypass that maze altogether. Instead, I stayed near the wall, passing a small, garbage-strewn kitchenette before finally reaching the front door and picking up Sabine’s trail.
“Dean!” She was closer now, and her voice sounded more frantic, more desperate.
“Sabine!” I called back, but she didn’t respond.
I collided with a bookcase and sent a shelf of notebooks cascading to the floor. A binder popped open, and the air filled with photographs.
I turned a corner and found Sabine standing in the narrow space between the wall and a row of bookcases. Her face was contorted with confusion and anxiety, but she looked healthy, unharmed.
After a moment of tense silence, she turned and faced me. “It’s the Poet,” she said, her voice congested, breaking into a breathless sob. “It’s the Poet … and she won’t speak to me!”
I followed her gaze back down the narrow space. There was a woman sitting on a stool about a dozen feet away. She sat perfectly still, facing away from us. Her back was ramrod stiff, and her whole body looked tense, ready to spring.
She was wearing a hood. It was a black leather fetish hood, and it covered almost her entire head, leaving just her eyes, mouth, and jaw visible. A spill of dark brown hair cascaded out from beneath the back of the hood, falling over the collar of a gray, paint-spattered peacoat. I could see her face in profile. Her pale lips trembled with suppressed energy, and her bright blue eyes—framed in cut-out ovals—quivered as she looked pointedly away.
“Sharon said she wore a mask,” Sabine gasped, her voice harsh and breathy. “That’s why she sent me here —so I could find her! But she won’t say a word!”
Unleashing a sudden burst of anger, Sabine turned back toward the masked woman.
The Poet remained still. I thought I could see her eyes widen at Sabine’s outburst.
A hand grabbed my arm and jerked me back. My foot slipped on a loose photograph, and I almost fell to the floor. “It’s time for you to go,” Cob Gilles growled. He was drunk and unsteady, but that didn’t diminish the force of his hand, or his words, as he pulled me toward the front door. He launched me in that direction with an abrupt shove, then went after Sabine.
“You better fucking leave her alone!” he yelled. “She’s my angel
He grabbed Sabine’s coat and pulled her back, but unlike me, Sabine
He collapsed to the ground and buried his face in his hands. “You aren’t welcome,” he continued to sob, losing energy and volume.
Sabine jumped to her feet and started toward him. Her jaw was clenched, and there was dark venom in her eyes. I stopped her. I grabbed her in a tight bear hug and rotated her away from the photographer, putting my body in between the two of them.
After a handful of seconds Sabine stopped struggling, and I let her go. She took a step back, then adjusted her jacket across her shoulders. “Fuck this shit,” she muttered, and fled the apartment, violently ripping the front door open and letting it bounce off the wall.
I turned back toward the photographer and gave him one last look before following her out. He was still sobbing in his hands.
And as I watched, he toppled over.
That’s how I left him, the great Cob Gilles, Pulitzer Prize—winning photographer: sobbing, curled into a fetal ball on his apartment floor.
Photograph. October 22, 01:31 P.M. Fingers in concrete:
The picture is lit with a flash.
And set in the middle of the photograph: fingers, protruding from the concrete floor. They sprout out of the ground like thick-stemmed plants, only different—not pushing out displaced dirt, instead reaching up from a perfectly smooth unblemished surface. The surface cuts below the knuckle on all the fingers save the pinkie; the pinkie’s knuckle is bisected neatly in two. And only the tip of the thumb is visible, little more than a thumbnail, sending up a glimmer of reflected light.
The angle is low; the camera is perched about a foot off the ground. And even though it is not a macro shot, the image is close and clear—razor-sharp details, blown up larger than life. The flesh on the fingers looks ghostly pale in the glare of the flash, and the ragged, dirty edges of the fingernails are all visible. The knuckles have been scraped raw, dotted with tiny tags of gray-white skin, ripped up to reveal a glimpse of rosy pink beneath. It is not a bad scrape, just the result of unintended friction, the kind of wound you’d get wrestling an unwieldy box through a narrow doorway.
It is a desolate shot. Gray and lonely.
“What the fuck was that?” Sabine barked as soon as I caught up to her out in front of the photographer’s apartment. She let out a feral growl and kicked at a bloated paper bag lying on the sidewalk; it burst against her boot, sending fast-food wrappers and a crumpled-up cup skittering across the concrete. “I had plans. I wanted to
