Bad Glass

“They think it might be the epicenter of what’s happening,” Taylor said. She lay to my right, her palms cupped around her eyes in order to block out the sun. “They’ve tried four—” “Five!” Floyd interjected. “—five times before. But the people they send in keep getting lost and confused, and they stumble out hours—or days—later. And none of them can say what happens.”

“And some of them don’t come out at all,” Floyd added.

“I don’t think that’s true,” Taylor said, adding a dismissive cluck.

“They couldn’t get through on the ground floor,” Floyd said, continuing Taylor’s explanation, “so they’re trying farther up this time.”

“Shhhh!” Sabine hissed. “They’re going in!”

I panned my lens down to the base of the hospital building. There was a cluster of military vehicles parked on the sidewalk: a single open-backed transport and three Jeeps. A tent had been erected in the parking lot thirty feet away, and a massive computer console was visible through its open door. The computer was surrounded by three officers, one of them pacing nervously in and out of view.

At the sound of a loud, hollow thump, I panned to a group of soldiers on the sidewalk. A thin trickle of smoke spun up into the sky above their heads, following the graceful arc of a flying rope. A grappling hook hit the hospital’s roof ten floors up, and I watched as a soldier pulled the rope tight, testing its strength. He strained against the rope for a couple of seconds, then handed it over to a helmeted comrade, giving him a reassuring pat on the back.

The helmeted soldier was wearing a military-green backpack; I could see a brick-shaped radio strapped to one side and a rifle strapped to the other. The cylindrical body of a camera was mounted to the top of his helmet.

After giving the rope a tug of his own, the soldier stepped up to the building and began climbing its side. He moved slowly, hunting for footholds with cautious deliberation. When he got up to the third floor, he stepped onto a window ledge, turned his shoulder against a tall pane of glass, and quickly smashed it in with his elbow.

Then, after a moment’s hesitation, the soldier disappeared inside, trailing behind a length of electric-yellow rope.

For nearly ten minutes, we watched this yellow tether spool through the window frame, moving in fits and starts. It was extremely tedious. As I lay on the rooftop, I could feel my injured left hand stiffening into a useless claw—bruised muscle pulling tight beneath damaged skin—and the camera in my right seemed to get heavier with each passing second. Then the rope stopped moving, and for a handful of minutes there was nothing, nothing at all. Just boredom.

I could hear Floyd fidgeting two berths to my left. “How long—” he started to say, but motion down in the parking lot stopped him short. The three officers had stormed out of their command tent, their eyes turned up toward the building.

I panned back in time to see the soldier fly out of the window.

Not fall. Fly.

Propelled out into empty space. Thrown, perhaps. Or maybe he dived, throwing himself out the window at full sprint.

For a split second, the soldier fell through the air, his body perfectly limp, spinning toward the sky. Then he hit the sidewalk with a loud crack. For a moment, his comrades on the ground stood frozen in place, unsure how to react. In fact, the whole scene stood frozen in time: that motionless body lying still on the ground, those paralyzed clumps of soldiers and officers.

Then the fallen soldier heaved himself up off the ground.

Shedding first his helmet, then his backpack, the soldier—injured and broken—stumbled away from the building, moving in a crazed, drunken gait.

Photograph. October 19, 09:23 P.M. The red guitar:

A close-up of guitar strings. Solid white lines against deep red lacquer.

The shot is far enough back to show the curve of the instrument’s body, a pair of graceful S’s just inside the top and bottom of the frame. The red lacquer is immaculate, smooth as unsmudged glass. Near the central hole it is a dark red verging on burgundy, but it lightens up as it nears the body’s edge, where it glows like a brilliant flame.

There is a hand hovering over the guitar—dirty fingers frozen in motion, caught coaxing the thin nylon strings into indistinct blurs. The index finger has a cracked, ragged nail, and a thin band of blood encircles the dirty cuticle. The pad of the finger-turned partway toward the camera—is coated with blood, matching the guitar’s grisly color.

I had the falling soldier on my mind all the way to Mama Cass’s: his brief flight through the air, his impact, and then that odd drunken stagger. The fall should have killed him. But he got up and continued on, a spring-driven wind-up toy, too damaged to comprehend, too damaged to just lie down.

“Do you think he’ll be all right?” Sabine asked as we crossed under I-90 and approached the restaurant.