Bad Glass

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.

And she wears a mask because she has no face.

She hides the end of the world inside.

The poem ends to the right of the gash in the wall. With just that single word: inside.

After she finishes writing, the woman moves the ladder a couple more feet to the right. She drops the can of green spray paint to the sidewalk and digs a new one from her bag. This one is bright red. She draws a giant arrow around the right-hand side of the poem, arcing up from the word inside and ending at the window above.

She’s pointing up toward the Poet. Pointing into her home.

When she finishes, the woman pulls back her arm and hurls the can of spray paint far into the distance; after a moment of hang time, there’s a loud clatter offscreen as the can skips across the pavement and collides with something solid—something metal and hollow that rings like a bell. The woman jumps down to the sidewalk, violently grabs hold of the ladder, and sends it crashing flat against the ground. Then she takes a couple of abrupt steps back, and—still facing the wall, still facing her poem and the Poet’s window—she raises her hands and gives the building a double-fisted two-finger salute.

SABINE: Just one more thing. One more thing and my work is done. (She glances back over her shoulder at the camera. The sly smile is once again there, twisting her face, somehow wedded to her anger and not at all incongruous.)

She grabs the top of the ladder and pulls it offscreen. When she returns a couple of seconds later, she is carrying a sledgehammer. Actually, she is dragging a sledgehammer; its massive head trails behind her, filling the air with a loud grating/grinding sound.

Laboring under its weight, the woman lifts the hammer from the ground and squares off in front of the gash in the wall. She swings, and the hammer crashes into the brick with a dull thunk. The left-hand edge of the gash caves in slightly, but the damage is rather unimpressive—just a dent, not a melodramatic burst of destruction. She lifts and swings again. This time a single brick topples through the gash, into the darkness beyond—half a spray-paint spider, disappearing into the void. She pauses and takes a deep breath. Already the effort seems to be taking its toll.

But she doesn’t stop. Over the next five minutes, the woman relentlessly assaults the wall, breaking bricks from the facade, usually one by one but occasionally triggering a miniature avalanche, sending a half dozen or more tumbling down into the darkness, or down to the sidewalk around her feet. By the time the gash is about four feet high and three feet wide, she has slowed down quite a bit. Her arms tremble visibly each time she lifts the hammer.

She hits the wall one final time—weakly, to absolutely no effect—and the sledgehammer drops from her hands, nearly crushing her feet. She collapses back against the wall. Her chest is heaving. Her arms dangle limply.

SABINE, IN A WEAK, BREATHLESS WHISPER: Fuck me, this is harder than I thought. (She smiles at the camera and lets out a single exhausted laugh.)