Bad Glass

When I looked at it, I was once again flooded with that feeling, that warmth, the belief that I had actually found something here, inside the city. The good old days, I thought. They sure didn’t last long.

The next picture was something completely different. It was the face between the walls, and it was cold and terrifying and alien. I’d already worked on the photo some, making the face easier to see inside that narrow space, and I didn’t spend long looking at it now. Seeing the pale flesh—remembering the way it had trembled, the way its eye had rolled blindly—made me feel sick to my stomach. I considered closing it—just trashing the image and hoping my memory of that horrible specter could somehow disappear with it—but ultimately I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t let it go. So I paged on to the next image.

It was the spiders, crawling from the hole in the wall. Goose-flesh erupted across my back. I didn’t spend long staring at the image; instead, I shrunk it down into a small window and brought up the picture the Poet had sprayed on the front of Cob Gilles’s building. It was the same scene. Or close enough. The two holes were a similar shape, and the spiders were about the right size. And while the placement of each animal wasn’t quite the same, the similarity was uncanny. My photograph and the Poet’s painting … these were two different representations of the same event. But how? According to Sabine, the painting predated my photo by at least a week.

Maybe it’s a common occurrence, I thought. Massive spiders. Complete with human fingers. Swarming like a tide, pushing out of gaps in the city, trying to engulf and consume everything they can reach. Maybe it happens once a month. Or once a week. Or every other day.

I grunted and paged on to the next image. It was a close-up of the spider with the human finger. It was a truly awful image—just bad photography—grainy and poorly framed. But I couldn’t ignore it, couldn’t discard it. I’ve got to post this, I told myself. If nothing else, I’ve got to give my public the finger.

It was a bad joke, I know, but it made me smile—a goofy, half-drugged smile. But the smile died as soon as the next photograph popped into view. And suddenly the joke didn’t seem funny anymore. It seemed cruel and sinister.

Weasel’s fingers, embedded in concrete.

It was actually the best photograph of the bunch. It was a close-up shot, not at all cryptic or confusing, and the focus was tight. Despite the horrific nature of the subject, there was absolutely no missing what it was. It was a set of fingers trapped in solid concrete. Period. End of paragraph. And I liked the lighting. I liked the look of Weasel’s flesh against the gray concrete. The background was bright, lit by the camera’s flash, but shadows sprouted from the base of each finger, traveling across the floor and landing on the wall. The foreground was dark and desolate; the toe of Taylor’s boot was visible frame right. Looking at it now, I was surprised I was able to get such perfect focus in such a dark environment. It’s a fast lens, I thought. Good glass.

I closed my eyes and paged forward to the last image.

It was the picture Taylor had taken, the two of us in bed with Danny. How did it get here, at the end? I wondered. I must have been rearranging during my first pass through the photographs. I must have put it here. But was it random chance, or was I trying to tell myself something? Was I trying to end on a high note, trying to remind myself of the good that still remained here inside the city?

The picture was out of focus and pretty much incomprehensible. Danny’s head in my lap, but you really couldn’t make that out. It was just a blur of blue denim, dark hair, and warm skin.

I didn’t know how to feel about the picture. Conflicted, I guess. Certainly, there was a warmth and comfort in it. This was the closest I’d ever come to Taylor, but reaching up and feeling her breast, it was also the moment that the line between us had been drawn. I could come this close, maybe, but not an inch closer. And looking back, it was proof that she had feelings for me, genuine feelings, just like the ones I had for her. No matter how damaged those feelings were, how damaged she was.

I saved the seven images to an empty folder, then created a new text document and put together my post. It was a very simple post, just html tags for each picture, one after another: dinner table, face between the walls, real spiders, spray-paint spiders, close-up of spider, and then, in closing, Weasel’s fingers. I considered including the picture of Danny and me but decided against it; even blurred and almost incomprehensible, it was too revealing.

My hands hovered over the keyboard for a couple of minutes as I considered captions. But what could I say, really? This is true, this is real, this is what the city is? It wouldn’t do any good. They would believe me or they wouldn’t. And I don’t think I really cared anymore.

I’d been in the city for just under a week now, but I was already having a hard time imagining the world outside its borders. Were there people out there, still going about their daily lives? Were they sitting in front of their computer screens, looking at my pictures and daydreaming about Spokane, about the strange and the forbidden and the horribly, horribly romantic? Were there college classes going on right now? Was there nightly television and pizza delivery? Was there bus service and traffic jams and drive-through windows? Was there a government out there, looking out for the public good?

And was there a physics? Was there a reality? Was there comfort and warmth and happiness?

I didn’t know. I couldn’t tell. It just didn’t seem real anymore.

I saved my work and shut down the computer. Then I curled up on the floor, rested my head on my backpack, and let the steady in and out of Floyd’s breath lull me to sleep.

My second post on the Spokane message board was the one that started attracting media attention. I’m not sure I would have launched it out into the world if I could have foreseen the response, or, more accurately, if I could have foreseen my reaction to the response.

When I first got into the city, of course, I wouldn’t have hesitated. Not for a moment. That was the whole point, after all: getting attention. Attention for me and my photography. But by the time I heard—by late November, when Danny brought me that first article from the Seattle Times—I doubt I would have bothered.

The person who had taken those photographs, who had composed that post, had in the intervening weeks become someone completely different. He’d packed up his cameras and gone to ground. And he just didn’t give a shit anymore.

The article was mostly speculation. It recounted the standard government lines—about environmental contamination and tainted topsoil, carcinogenic buildings and ongoing threats to the public’s health and well-being, and, as always, the need for further study—but it did ask some important questions.

What exactly is the threat, and why is cleanup taking so long?

Is the river tainted, and do the towns downstream need to worry?

Is it in the air?

And where exactly did this threat come from, and why is there such a need for secrecy and security?

In response, the article quoted an unnamed army general:

“First and foremost, we need to assure the people that there is absolutely no need for panic or distress. We have the Spokane situation well in hand. And while we can’t go into the specifics of the threat for fear of jeopardizing ongoing investigations and research, we can tell you that we know exactly what’s going on. We are still testing—under the purview of the EPA and with the assistance of some of the nation’s greatest environmental scientists—in order to ensure that every last molecule of contamination has been removed from this great city. The safety of the good people of Spokane is our primary concern, and we are not going to rush our efforts, not when we have the health and happiness of our citizens on the line. Only when every last one of our concerns has been addressed—only then, and not one second sooner—will we consider reopening the city to residents. In the meantime, the good people of Spokane have been well compensated for their inconvenience.”

When asked about a class-action lawsuit filed by cancer victims and surviving family members, the commander general replied, “No comment.”

Up until this point, the article seemed like a standard-issue snow job—the government shoveling out the shit and the media repeating it ad nauseam. But in the last paragraphs, the writer gave voice to several of the conspiracy theories that had been floating around since day one. Was Spokane the site of a bio-weapon experiment gone awry? Was it ground zero for a terror attack, something the government felt compelled to hide?