Bad Glass

mom was smart. She’d seen it all before—it was the exact same thing that happened to me—and she didn’t want that for him. She didn’t want him dropping out of school and wasting every last cell inside that thick teenage skull of his. So she grounded him. He bitched and moaned and kicked and screamed, and really, like I said, it was all your typical whiny teenage bullshit. But he knew I was going out with my friends, so he snuck out and tried to join us. But … he never made it there.”

Floyd paused. The mask cracked a bit, and there was a flicker of movement in the corner of that horrible grin. His eyes were glassy and brimming with tears.

“Have you ever heard a mountain lion scream?” he asked. I had a hard time parsing the question. It seemed like such a non sequitur, just random words strung together. “It’s a type of mating call that the females make—a shrill, yowling sound. And in the dark, it can sound like a human scream or a baby crying. Well, I heard some that night, out by the fire, and it was like an omen. It set my teeth on edge and had my arm hair standing up straight. I turned and mentioned it to one of the girls we were with—how creepy it was, how scary—and she just laughed and called me a pussy. But there was another scream right then, shrill and labored, and that shut her up real fast. It was a very, very creepy sound, just this loud yodeling howl out there in the woods, all pain and horror. After a while, though, we managed to laugh it off, and we went back to our drinking and bullshitting. Mountain lions are pretty common in Santa Cruz, after all, and we knew that as long as we stayed by the fire, we’d be fine … no matter how scary they might sound, screaming out there in the dark.

“Byron didn’t show up that night, and I had no reason to think there was anything wrong. The world felt the same to me, even though it had changed, even though it had become something fundamentally different. There was no thunder in the sky, no proclamations, no buildings crashing down around my head. But things had changed. I just didn’t know it yet; I couldn’t know it. Not then. I just went back home and crashed. I didn’t even know he was gone until the next morning, when my mom woke me up. She was pissed off, and she started calling around to all of his friends. She grilled me—like I might have something to do with it—she tried to pump me for information. She thought—we both thought—that he’d just run away, that he was hiding somewhere with his friends, that he’d make his way back home any minute now.

“We didn’t report him missing for three days. Jesus! Three fucking days! What kind of monsters are we?” he asked. Then, without skipping a beat, he went on with his story. “It was raining pretty hard by then, and we were both getting nervous. His friends hadn’t seen him. Nobody had seen him.”

Floyd paused. His mouth opened and closed, and it looked like he was having trouble picking out the right words.

“I … I …” He paused again and then changed tack. “The police released information, and there were blurbs on the local news. Someone reported seeing a kid hiking along the shoulder of 17, and the police organized a search of the woods. We found him almost immediately. I was in the dragnet. I heard the yells and came running. He was right near the clearing, right near the fire pit—this place that I’d fucking shown him, this place where he knew I would be!” The edge of Floyd’s mouth was quivering now, and emotion was starting to leak through. “He was maybe a dozen feet off the path, at the bottom of the hill. He’d fallen in the dark, and he must have hit the ground just horribly wrong, just the worst possible way. His arm was shattered, and when I got there, I could see the bone sticking out—the fucking thing had torn through his long-sleeved shirt. His leg was bent backward, and there was a massive hole in his chest. The cloth around it had dried into a rain-washed red … He was dead, of course. He’d been dead for days. A fucking stick had punctured his abdomen. After the fall, he managed to pull it out—it was still there, clenched in his hand—but he’d bled to death in less than an hour.”

“The medical examiner … he timed it, he placed the time at …” Floyd’s mouth once again began to quiver, and then, finally, it collapsed into convulsions and he was sobbing. I moved to put my hand on his shoulder, but he batted me away. His hand stung against my chin, and I dropped back onto my heels.

“I was there, at the fire, while he was out in the woods,” he finally managed, rubbing his palms against his wet cheeks. “And the mountain lions … there was absolutely no sign on his body, nothing, nothing trying to … trying to eat his body. There was no fucking … no fucking mountain lion out there in the night.” He paused once again, and after a final heave, the sobbing stopped. His face settled back into an emotionless mask. Thankfully, there was no hint of a smile this time, no eerie grin. “He was there as I was walking out. He was less than a dozen feet from the path. Bleeding. Unconscious. Dying. And I was stupid and oblivious, a little bit drunk, a little bit high. And he was there. Fucking dying. Alone. Alone in the woods. Alone in the dark.”

He shook his head, a slow arthritic shake.

“Jesus fucking Christ, I was probably laughing at the time, as I walked by. I was probably fucking laughing. And those mountain lion screams? Out there in the night?” He closed his eyes and let his head drop forward. “How … how could I be so stupid?”

He was silent for a time, and then he looked up. There was anger on his face as he turned toward me.

“What the fuck, Dean? Things were fine before, in the city. Things were cool. And then we had to go down there. Jesus Christ! Why the fuck did we have to go down there?” He picked the flashlight up off his lap and threw it across the entryway, through the cellar door. I heard it cascade down the flight of wooden stairs, and there was the sound of cracking concrete when it finally hit the bottom. “I was free, right? I was away from it all. Away from that house, away from my mom’s bland words and her distant eyes—it was like they wouldn’t focus anymore, at least not on me. I think she thought she had forgiven me, I think she genuinely believed that, but there was that look in her eyes. And she didn’t know about the screams. I never told her about the screams.” He shook his head angrily. “So I move on to San Diego, New York, motherfucking Brisbane. And then … I’m falling through the air, toward that wooden ramp, and fuck it if that plummet doesn’t feel right. And maybe I don’t turn when I should. Maybe I don’t go limp. And then I come here … and I’m away. Finally. I’m free! And I’m barely thinking about him. This place here—I don’t know—the weight of the air, the quality of the light … it’s not all that easy to think, you know? And I’m free.”

He nodded toward the cellar door. “And then we had to go down there,” he repeated. He closed his eyes and heaved a brief sob. “Why’d you take me, Dean? Why’d I have to follow? And should I curse you for that, or should I thank you?” After a moment, he looked up and managed a tortured little smile. “Right now, I’m thinking I should just shank you in the fucking face.”

His eyes held mine for several seconds, and then his shoulders collapsed. I could see all of that animation, all of that emotion, draining away, leaving behind an empty vessel. I moved closer and put my hand on his shoulder. This time he didn’t push me away.

“Maybe you shouldn’t be here,” I said, keeping my voice low, trying to radiate calm. “Maybe you should leave, get out of the city. It’s not good for you here.” And after a prolonged beat, I added, “It’s not good for any of us.”

“But he’s down there.”

“He’s dead.”

He shook his head. “But he’s down there. And I’ll find him this time. I won’t run away.”

He turned away from me and reached through the living room door on his far side. “Look,” he said, pulling something back into the entryway. “I found this. He wasn’t there this time, but I found this, down in the tunnels.” He handed me a skateboard. It was cracked in the middle and covered with mud. “It’s his, the one he loved. See—” He brushed aside some of the drying dirt, revealing a picture on the bottom of the board. “—it’s him. See? He’s flying.”

The board felt surprisingly heavy in my hands.

“We didn’t find it in the woods. We didn’t even know it was gone, not until later, not until after his funeral. I went to look for it, but it wasn’t in his room, it wasn’t on his dresser.” I looked up from the board and saw Floyd smiling. It was a different smile now. It was reflected in his eyes, in the subtle lift of his shoulders. It no longer looked out of place on his face. “It means he’s here, Dean, he’s real. Just like the board. It’s here. It’s real.”

I looked back down at the board and remained silent. No matter how much I wanted to tell him otherwise— tell him that he was wrong, that the city was just messing with his head, that his brother was gone, and that he should flee as far and as fast as possible—I couldn’t.

The board was here. The board was real.

And I had no idea what that might mean.