Bad Glass

next time it fired, it bounced high off the far mirror and shot up into the ceiling. I glanced at the tracking monitor and saw the word ERROR repeated a half dozen times on the topmost line. “This whole thing is bullshit. Complete and utter bullshit. The universe doesn’t work that way … my parents, they don’t work that way!”

He started toward Devon, taking hard, violent strides, and then his legs did collapse, sending him sprawling to the floor. At first he braced himself on the heels of his hands, then he moved his palms up to his face, hiding his emotions in a hunched-up little ball.

“But we were listening on the radio,” I explained. “You were talking to somebody about plugging up leaks, about the information we were sending out. And what he said … whoever it was, it sounded like Charlie’s father.”

“I don’t know what you heard, but it wasn’t Charlie’s father.” Devon shook his head, a single shallow shake. If he was lying, he was doing a good job of it; he wasn’t overselling anything, merely stating facts. “At first, we were trying to keep the more troublesome aspects of the situation contained—my bosses had no idea what would happen to their business interests if some of this stuff leaked out—but that was a while ago. Now it’s just the military, with their communications freeze and their quarantine. When Charlie appeared, I was assigned to watch him, to make sure he didn’t get too close to his parents’ research. I still send out my reports, through the radio, but I don’t get anything back, not anymore. It’s just silence now. Just me—my voice—and nothing else.”

“You lie.” Suddenly Charlie’s hands fell away from his face, and the grief written there—in gleaming eyes and on tear-streaked cheeks—was gone. There was nothing but anger now, cold, hard anger. He stood up, slowly, and the way he was holding himself—fairly quivering with mute energy—I was afraid he was going to attack Devon. “This is all an elaborate lie,” he continued, his voice level, barely restrained. “You’re trying to keep me away from my parents. You’re trying to shake me off their trail. That was my father on the radio, I’m sure of it, and that was my mother in that picture. They’re here, in the city, and for some reason you don’t want me to find them.”

“Why? Why would I do that?”

Charlie stood silent for a moment, his face screwed up in thought. Then he had his answer: “Because they know what you did—you and your dirty little organization! You did this. All of this. And you’re afraid … you’re afraid because they can fix it!” He swept his hand across the room, indicating the monitors, the laser apparatus, the city itself. “They can fix it all … if I can just find them. If I can save them.”

Devon laughed. “I wish that were true, Charlie, I really do. But we’re beyond that now. There’s no fixing the universe.” He shook his head. “Get out of the city. Go home. Go see your grandparents before it’s too late.”

At that, Charlie’s restraint disappeared, and he bolted forward—a scrawny seventeen-year-old computer geek, itching to stop Devon, itching to find answers … with his fists and blood and Devon’s broken bones.

Floyd barked a loud “Stop!” and stepped between the two combatants. He grabbed Charlie’s collar and pushed him back, holding on until the teen stopped squirming.

“Get the fuck out, Devon!” Floyd growled, whipping around to face the man in the doorway. “And stay away from us. Stay away from the house. You’ve done enough harm, you manipulative, spying piece of shit! So just go back to your tunnels and stay … the fuck … away!”

Devon nodded and made to leave; he started to turn, but then stopped suddenly. “Those aren’t our tunnels, by the way,” he said. “We used them, yeah, but we didn’t dig them, and they most certainly aren’t ours. But you know that, don’t you, Floyd? You know what types of things are down there, lurking, waiting in the dark. For you. For me. For all of us.”

He paused thoughtfully, and a bitter, melancholy smile formed on his lips. “I hate to say it, boys—and girl— but our time has come. As a species, we’re finished. Maybe Charlie’s parents had the right idea.”

Then he turned and left.

Video clip. October 24, 02:35 P.M. Sabine’s graffiti:

The camera sits a couple of feet off the ground, staring across a city street at the side of a brick building. The view is skewed slightly, tilted a few degrees to the left. It is day out—midmorning or noon or early afternoon—but the street is deserted, and the scene is not very bright; the color is all washed away, lost beneath a ceiling of clouds. In this light, the red brick wall has faded to a pinkish gray.

The camera jostles as the recording starts, and at first the view is nothing but the building wall, standing about twenty feet away. There is paint on the wall—dark lines forming squiggly shapes—but it is not visible for long. A young woman circles around from the camera’s rear, and the wall blurs, the lens focusing in on this new subject. She stops in the middle of the street and turns to face the camera.

Really, she’s not much more than a girl—small and delicate, barely five feet tall. Her skin is white porcelain, smeared with dirt. Her hair is charcoal black, pulled away from her face.

THE WOMAN—SABINE: My name is Sabine Pearl-Grey, and this is my statement.

She smiles slyly.

SABINE: There are some slights I can’t tolerate, some things that are just beggin’ for my response. And this … this is something I can’t turn away from. (Long beat.) I will not be ignored. If you turn your back on me, I’ll turn my fists on you. (She raises her hands into a fighter’s pose and holds it, serious, for a second. Then she lets out a tiny girlish giggle.)

The woman turns and darts offscreen, camera right. She is offscreen for only a handful of seconds, but it is long enough for the camera’s focus to readjust, for the paint on the wall to come clearly into view. It is a swarm of spray-painted spiders, surrounding a two-foot gash that starts about a foot off the ground. It looks like they are crawling out of that dark crevice, each one frozen in a mute acrylic pose.

When the woman returns, she is carrying a ladder twice her height, and there is a sagging messenger bag slung across her back. She carries the ladder to the wall and sets it carefully against the brick. Then she climbs all the way up to its penultimate rung. There is a window frame just about level with the top of her head, a couple of inches below the video’s topmost edge.

She reaches down and back, fumbles with her messenger bag for a moment, and comes up with a can of spray paint. She shakes the can for a couple of seconds, pops off the top, and starts to paint. It is a long and labored process: writing words on the wall—lines of text, starting with the left-hand side of each line—carefully leaning out over the sidewalk, inching down the ladder, rail by rail. She leans out too far at one point, and the ladder shifts beneath her weight, the right-hand foot lifting off the ground for a nerve-racking moment before once again settling back into place. When she is done with the left-hand side of the graffiti, she climbs down, moves the ladder eight feet to the right, and climbs back up to fill in the right-hand side. The entire process takes about five minutes.

The paint is a dark green. Olive and drab. It is a poem, drawn in bold, accusatory letters:

The Poet Inside

She hides because there’s no one there, inside.

The heart is empty and the head is hollow.

Her world is filled with corridors and echoes and shadows.

But it is all empty space.