Bad Glass

“Then take the fucking pills, Dean,” she said. “And hope he’s right. Okay? You don’t have to believe—you don’t have to believe in any of this—but you can hope. You can hope we can end this without the fucking death of the universe!”

I met her eyes for a half dozen heartbeats. Then I nodded.

I downed the pills with a swallow of gin.

I had too much shit in my system. My blood was thick with it, a sludge of Vicodin and Zoloft and alcohol. And hallucinogenic spores, I thought. I can’t forget about those.

This struck me as funny. As I said, I had too much shit in my system.

After he finished telling us about the army’s mushroom-eradication offensive—men in full-body containment suits wielding bulldozers and blowtorches—Taylor grabbed Danny’s arm and pulled him out into the entryway. They talked. Her voice started out soft, inaudible, but it grew louder as the conversation progressed.

“—following me?” she said. Her face was animated. I could see her profile—mouth pulled wide, showing off her teeth—as she confronted Danny. “And telling Dean?” She glanced my way, saw me watching, and pulled Danny out of sight. Her voice fell back into an inaudible whisper.

I crossed to the fireplace, where Floyd was arranging kindling into a neat tepee. He took time out to pass me the bottle of bourbon. I hesitated for a moment—I couldn’t be too far from sloppy drunk—then took a swallow.

“This does feel a bit like an acid trip,” Floyd said. His voice sounded calm, thoughtful. He struck a long match and held it to the kindling. In a matter of seconds, he had the whole thing burning. “Usually, back when I did acid, I could feel it in my balls. It was almost a pain, but not quite—like someone was giving me a bit of a squeeze. I’m not getting that now. This is mellower. I wonder if we could find this shit, bag it up, and sell it. We could probably make a killing.”

“So you believe?” I asked. “You believe it’s mushrooms?”

“If that’s what they say.” He nodded toward the entryway. Danny was still partially visible, shoulder and buttock and leg poking out from behind the entryway wall. “I don’t think they’d lie about this. Not after so long.”

“But they could be wrong. They’re desperate for an answer. They want an answer just as much as we do.”

He gave me a skeptical look. I’m sure he was remembering Taylor’s words, her harsh assessment of me and my motives. Maybe I didn’t want to believe. Maybe I didn’t want to believe just as much as he wanted to believe. And in that case, whose judgment could we trust?

“We can wait. We can wait and see,” he said.

I gave him a nod and retreated back to the sofa. Charlie was back in the dining room, sitting in front of his computer. I had no idea how he was taking Danny’s news.

He probably saw it as a good thing, these mushrooms. It proved Devon a liar.

If any of that was real, I thought. If any of it actually happened. Maybe that building down there, south of I-90, is completely empty. Maybe we built the whole thing—the laser, Devon, Charlie’s parents’ hypothesis—all on our own, out of whole cloth and spit and words. Some type of mass delusion, built on suggestion and reformed, restitched memory.

Did I actually see that man dangling from the ceiling on my first day in the city? Did I see the spiders and the face in the wall? Did I see Taylor’s father and Weasel’s fingers? Or is it all just hallucination, my own inner warped mind projected out into the world? Was I complicit? Was I responsible?

And those photographs. Did I do that in Photoshop?

I was scared to look. I was scared to open the images and study them pixel by pixel, looking for cut-and-paste seams, strange gradients, and out-of-place elements.

If I found it, if I found proof that those images had been altered, what would that say? About the situation? About me?

Do I really want to kill the world?

“Just stay the fuck away!” Taylor growled out in the entryway. Danny stumbled back as she pushed her way past. She darted through the living room and up the stairs. She had a hand up over her face, covering her eyes and nose and cheeks, and she bumped into the sofa and bounced off without losing a single step. I heard her door slam shut as soon as she got upstairs.