Bad Glass

Taylor, Charlie, and Floyd followed.

After a moment, I heard Taylor’s voice behind me, tentative and quiet. “Is this the research building?” she asked. “It … it seems familiar.” Her voice sounded tortured and confused, as if she were drunk and straining to make sense of something just outside her realm of comprehension.

I pulled to a stop. The hallway swam around me for a moment.

“No,” Charlie said. Then, confused: “Or … fuck.”

I turned. Charlie was standing in the middle of the hallway, spinning, confused, on his heel. He no longer had his shovel; he must have discarded it in the tunnel. “I mean, it was different, right?” he asked. “A different color? A different sound?” He raised his hand to his forehead and crinkled his brow, thinking, but struggling at it.

I looked at the doors to my right: B24, B22. And on my left: B23, B21.

“I don’t know, Charlie,” I said. “This place does look familiar, but I … I just don’t know.”

I tried to remember that other place: the building, Devon, Charlie’s parents’ lab, the laser apparatus. It seemed so indistinct, like someone else’s photograph, viewed a long time ago, or maybe a video I’d seen on the Web, seen and then forgotten. And here, all we had was … what? I looked up—nothing but buzzing fluorescents above our heads—then back down the way we had come, toward the tunnel’s empty mouth. And still there was that single set of footprints on the floor behind us, just one, despite the passage of our muddy feet. Nothing had changed. The world remained static.

Moving through this world without leaving footprints—that’s what we are, I thought. Nothing we do makes even the slightest impression. There’s nothing important we can ever really change.

I couldn’t think, and it wasn’t just the drugs or my injured head. It was the world. It was this place.

Charlie dropped his hand from his forehead, and his face widened with sudden surprise—a dawning moment of clarity—then he sprinted past me, down the corridor. After a moment, I got my feet unstuck from the floor and hurried to follow.

At that point, I don’t know. In that place …

There was a sound now at the far end of the corridor. Maybe it had been there all along and I just hadn’t noticed. But that seemed unlikely.

Footsteps, echoing. A whir and a hum.

Taylor caught up to me and grabbed my arm. I looked back at her worried face, but I didn’t stop running. “Don’t let him go,” she said as we continued to chase Charlie down the hallway. Her voice was pleading but confused. She was just as lost as I was, bogged down in this sea of incoherence, this maze of overwhelming impressions. Bright lights overhead. Hard and shiny floor. And the feeling that something was wrong, the feeling that we were completely, irrevocably lost.

I shook my head. I don’t know why. I don’t know if I was trying to shake the cobwebs from my mind or if it was a response to Taylor’s request. And if so, what was I trying to say? No, I won’t let him go? No, I don’t understand? Or no, he’s gone and I can’t do a goddamned thing about it?

Charlie reached B13 and, without slowing down, twisted the doorknob and bolted inside. Taylor and I reached the door a couple of seconds later. We nearly ran into Devon’s outstretched hand.

Devon. He was standing there, just inside the threshold, blocking our way. There was a smile on his face; it was a self-righteous, victorious smile, and it filled me with dread. He knew too much. Here, in this city, no one knew enough to wear that kind of smile. His palm was up, keeping us out of the room, and he shook his head: No.

I was about to press my way through, but Taylor let out a loud gasp, and her hand tightened on my forearm. I glanced down and saw her peering deeper into the room. I followed her eyes.

Charlie was standing fifteen feet away, next to the laser apparatus. There were two other people in the room with him. I recognized his mother from the emailed picture. In that picture, she’d been scared and confused, peering back over her shoulder; there was absolutely none of that now. The man must have been his father. Charlie’s back was to us, but his parents were smiling. His father had a good grip on his son’s biceps, holding him at arm’s length and beaming with pride.

As we watched, Charlie’s mother moved in and encompassed him in a tight hug. A second later, his father’s arms collapsed and they all pulled near. They stood like that for a time, clenched in a three-way embrace. Then Charlie’s shoulders began to shake gently.

There was no sound in the room. Even the hum of the laser—still spitting out its bursts of bright green light —had gone silent.

I once again moved to push Devon aside, but Taylor held me back. I glanced back down at her face. There was a smile on her lips, warm and heartfelt. “Give him this,” she whispered. “For a moment, at least.”

So I grunted and rocked back on my heels. After a moment, watching this heartfelt reunion, I lifted the camera from my chest and started taking pictures. I felt like a voyeur—more so than usual—but I didn’t stop.

Photograph. Undated. Charlie and his parents:

Through the top half of an open door: three people huddled together in the middle of a brightly lit room.

It is a man, a woman, and a teenager nearing the end of his adolescence. All three are black—the man a lighter shade than the woman and the teen. The man and woman are dressed in light professional clothing. The teenager is decked out in a ragged ski jacket, dirty pants, and mud-spattered boots.

The man’s face is the only one we can see—the teenager has his back to the camera; the woman’s face is buried against his shoulder. The man’s eyes are closed, and he is smiling warmly.

They are standing next to an elaborate piece of lab equipment mounted atop a sawhorse. There’s speckled linoleum beneath their feet and a pair of computer monitors on a table at their side.

A blurred figure stands in the foreground, just inside the door. On the left-hand side of the frame: a single eye—barely visible—and the corner of a smile. At the bottom of the frame: an arm, spanning the width of the threshold.

The blurred figure is set firmly between the camera and the huddled group. It is an obstacle, separating the viewer from the subject.

Finally, after standing in his parents’ embrace for nearly a minute, Charlie looked back at the door. There were tears on his face as he gave us a smile. But the smile didn’t last long. It quivered and broke, and his eyes slowly drew wide.

Then Devon blocked our view. This infiltrator—government agent, demon, whatever—once again flashed that victorious grin. Then he stepped back into the room and slammed the door shut in our faces.

Taylor jumped, startled at the sudden violent gesture. Her eyes sprang wide, and her hands bolted to the doorknob. She worked at it violently, but to no avail. It didn’t even rattle. She let out a horrified squawk, completely incoherent. I stepped up to her side and started pounding at the door. It was like hitting the side of a building; it didn’t even shake in its frame.

“Charlie!” Taylor called. No answer. “Charlie!”

After nearly half a minute, she let out a devastated sob and gave the knob one last upward heave. It didn’t move. Her hands slipped from the knob and flailed in the air for a moment, then she pressed them flat against the door’s surface. Dejected, burned through all of her determination and anger, she lowered her forehead against the immovable panel and let out a pathetic sob.

“I let him go,” she said, her voice choked. She pressed her face up against the door, hiding it from sight. “I … we could have stopped him, but I let him go.”