Bad Glass

I sat up and saw Taylor standing at the crest of the hill. She had her back toward me, looking out over the city. The city had once again reverted to its normal state, abandoned but not destroyed, neglected but not yet rubble.

It was just the two of us. Everyone else was gone.

“Taylor,” I said. She didn’t respond.

I stood up and started toward her. I rounded her side and saw her hands up against her face. She had wide, shell-shocked eyes. She glimpsed me from behind her fingers, then shook her head and once again turned away. She was remembering, I knew, the horror of our faces crushed together. The horror of that dissolution.

I stood there for a time, watching her—Taylor, in the early-morning light—watching as she tried to hide behind her hands.

Then I raised my fingers to my face and touched my lips.

Nothing.

I’m sitting at a desk in a fifth-floor apartment, just south of the river. Near the Homestead. Near the Homestead’s abandoned husk.

I can see the freeway from my window. From this distance, it’s just a sliver, a line etched across the buildings to the south. The army’s cordon is out there somewhere, not too far west.

We moved here a couple of days after our trip into the tunnels.

Empty, the house was just too big.

And the rooms—Floyd’s, Charlie’s, Devon’s, Sabine’s, Amanda and Mac’s—were filled with too many ownerless possessions.

I left a note on the front door and another on the dining-room table, beneath a half-empty bottle of gin. Saying where we were going. In case anyone came looking, in case anyone came back. That was over a month ago.

Taylor isn’t doing well. She isn’t talking. She won’t let me come near, won’t even look at me. She doesn’t even want our eyes to make contact.

The fear is there, filling her up, where everything else had been. Taylor, her heart, her humor—it’s all gone. I can see it: the belief that if we touch, if we get close, she’s going to lose herself again.

And that’s all she is now. That fear.

Sometimes I open the door to her room—it used to be a den, complete with sofa and leather-cushioned Eames chair, bookcases and hardwood desk—and I find her crouched there, alone in the dark. She’s boarded up the room’s only window, but a gap remains at its bottom-most edge, and I find her sitting there with her face pressed right up against the wood, staring out at the street. Quiet. Completely absorbed in that narrow view of the city.

I bring her food. I talk to her.

But she doesn’t listen. I don’t think she even hears.

And we’re not going to leave.

I know that now.

It was just a dream, that thought. A fantasy. Something to keep me going down there in the tunnels. But I don’t think Taylor would follow me out of the city. Not now. Not in her current state. And I can’t imagine leaving her here all alone. Not anymore.

She wouldn’t survive. She’d dissolve. She’d sink into the ground as soon as I turned my back.

So I stay. And she stays. And nothing ever changes.

And I’m writing now.

I don’t know why. I don’t know why I’m putting these words on page after page after page, crippling my hand, but I’m afraid it’s the only thing holding back the darkness. And when I’m done, when I run out of history to record, I’ll be all alone. And that moment’s coming. Soon.

And then I’ll be just like Taylor, hidden away in her little cave. Alone with the city, alone with its thoughts.

And what will that do to me? I don’t know. Will there be peace, or screams echoing in a midnight-black void? Will it be painful, or will I go down nice and easy? Just close my eyes and sink.

And what does the end of the world look like, anyway? What does it sound like?

Should I keep my eyes open or hold them shut?

Should I sing along?

Danny stops by on occasion.

He showed up the morning after our trip into the tunnels. At the house. He said he never made it underground. He got to the tunnel in the park with a half dozen soldiers but found the way forward blocked. Nothing but dead ends to the left and right.

I don’t believe him. I can’t believe him.

I saw him down there in that basement. And I never doubted that it was him. This person, now … I just can’t trust him.

I don’t know who he is.

He says that there are other places like Spokane now, popping up all over the world. A neighborhood in Kobe, Japan. A town in Iowa. A building—a single building!—in Washington, D.C. A valley in the Ukraine.

It isn’t mushrooms, obviously. It isn’t hallucinogenic spores in the air. The army burned all of that from the ground, and still, nothing has changed.

People still disappear. I still see spiders on occasion. The sky still turns red.

Danny tells me that the UN has assembled a task force. Peacekeepers, to help in the affected areas. He mentioned something about a telethon airing on all the major networks. I can’t even imagine what that must have been like. Celebrities and phone banks. Did it have its own song? “We Are the World”?

“We Are Spokane”?

He says my photographs have made a difference, in the effort. Raising awareness. Some shit like that.

I don’t know.