Bad Glass

“Our fifth category is a little more difficult.” I glanced up at the board and saw the phrase “mental problems.” “We’re not quite sure if it’s a phenomenon in its own right or a result of everything else. It’s just … people going crazy. Acting odd, unusual. Losing memories. Going schizophrenic or catatonic. It might be a result of all this stress, or it might be something else. Another symptom of this … disease.” Danny shook his head and managed a sad little smile. “In my time here I’ve had two commanding officers fall apart. One was struck dumb by complete amnesia. The other attacked three of his men with a knife … before turning it on his own genitalia.”

I made an involuntary wince.

“And the final category?” I asked.

Danny gestured back toward the whiteboard. “Miscellaneous,” he said, offering up a pathetic shrug. “The last of our all-encompassing groups. Just … everything else.”

I stared at the board for a long time, waiting for a pattern to emerge, waiting for some type of connective thread to surface and tie it all together. But there was no thread. There was no pattern. The categories remained disparate, unconnected things—except for visitors and disappearances, which could have been flip sides of the same coin.

And miscellaneous? It seemed like these people, these experts, were stumbling around in the dark here. They had no idea what was going on, and their categories did nothing to illuminate the situation.

The hotel room—that frightening tableau, now burned into my memory—remained just as strange, just as alien.

I walked over and tapped the board. “In this … in this miscellaneous category, have you heard anything … like …” I groped for words, trying to figure out how to explain the body in the ceiling. “Has anybody seen somebody melted—a human body, just kind of merged with a ceiling or a wall? Limbs and body parts disappearing into solid objects?”

Danny shook his head. “No. Nothing like that. Not that I know of.”

“Is that what you saw yesterday?” Taylor asked. I turned and found a concerned look on her face. Not just concerned, but startled, going pale. “You saw a body? In a floor?”

“Well, I …” I shook my head. Pinned beneath that intense stare, I felt flustered. I felt a blush rising up beneath my collar. “No, not really. I’m just …” I composed myself a bit. “I’m not sure what I saw.” I shook my head, trying to dismiss her concern, trying to escape the sharp look in her eyes. “Just forget it.”

They both continued to stare at me, Danny curious and Taylor … well, there was something strange—something hungry—about Taylor’s expression.

“So what have you figured out?” I asked, trying to redirect the conversation. “After one, no, two months on the job, what have your experts deduced?”

Danny shrugged. “Nothing much. The doctors and scientists say there’s some type of chemical imbalance in the population here. Neurotransmitters. In the brain. They don’t know what’s causing it. They’ve been giving antidepressants to anybody who wants them, to boost serotonin and dopamine levels. It seems to help. Some.”

“Help with what?”

“With everything.” He nodded toward the list on the board: visitors, disappearances, sounds, creatures, mental, and miscellaneous.

“But it isn’t all mental, is it? There’s genuine physical phenomenon here.” I gestured toward his computer screen, where the mayor’s video file—09–07-pressconf.mpeg—remained highlighted. “Are you saying that a liberal dose of Prozac would have stopped the mayor from disappearing? That something physical—and impossible—was caused by errant brain chemicals?”

“All we know is that people on the drugs are involved in fewer unexplained incidents. The correlation is there, small but statistically significant. And believe me, that’s killing our scientists. It’s something they just don’t want to hear.” Danny double clicked his mouse and restarted the press conference video. “So yeah, maybe if the mayor had been on Prozac, it would have been different. Or maybe it wasn’t the mayor. Maybe if everyone else in the room had been on Prozac …”

Danny trailed off. On his screen, the mayor once again popped out of existence.

“At least it doesn’t follow you out,” he said, his voice hushed, suddenly sedate. “Once you’re outside the perimeter, the neurotransmitter levels even back out. The weirdness stops. Things return to normal.”

“It just doesn’t make any sense,” I said, shaking my head in disbelief.

“Yeah,” Danny agreed. “Welcome to Spokane.”

“We’ve got to go,” Taylor said. She gestured toward the door with a little sideways motion of her head. “The captain should be back any time now.”

Danny got up from his seat and gave Taylor a kiss on the cheek. “Day after tomorrow?” he asked.

Taylor smiled. At his touch, all the gloom and concern dropped away from her face. “It’s a date.”